Isvik by Hammond; Innes Page A

standing stiffly like pillboxes, black and white Friesians grazing with their rumps turned to the north-westerly breeze, and far away across the flat expanse of the reclaimed marsh, beyond the pale yellow line of the shingle horizon, the white of a tanker’s bridge was followed by the red funnel of a freighter, their passage so distant they seemed to hang there, immobile.
    My mother called from the kitchen. ‘Who was that, dear?’
    I didn’t answer for the moment. The sound of her familiar voice seemed to accentuate the appalling choice with which I had been presented. I was in the front room of my family’s semi-detached house on the coast road just east of Cley with its white-painted picture-postcard windmill. Since my father’s death it had become my den. Now I called it my office.
    â€˜Anybody I know?’
    â€˜No.’ I went over to the window. ‘Just a client.’
    â€˜Well, supper will be ready in a moment, so don’t do any more work.’
    The tanker and the red funnel had repositioned themselves imperceptibly and I was looking at the view with a sense of hyperawareness. It was a view that I had come to take for granted. But not now, not if I were going to hand my passport, to that Norfolk Flyer chap in the dawn and then go down to London on the Sunday, to Windmill Street and on to Heathrow in time to meet Ward at the flight check-in desk at 13.00. And if I went with him … That view was suddenly very precious to me.
    The Warden came out of his house near the end of our row of neat semis. I watched him as he crossed the road and took the well-worn path out to the first hide. Even in winter with the wind blowing straight down from the Arctic and the marshland all frozen solid, the waterways iced over and a dusting of snow on everything, the crystals driven horizontally against the glass of the window with a sound like the rustle of silk, even in those conditions, this Arctic shore of Norfolk had its charm. And now as I stared, I felt it clutching at my heart.
    Punta Arenas! That was where he was asking me to go and I hadn’t even looked it up in my school atlas. No point, I had thought. Iris Sunderby was dead. And now this Glaswegian planning to run the expedition himself.
    Why?
    I leaned my forehead against the cold of the windowpane. No harm in meeting him. I could always refuse to fly at the last moment. I ticked off in my mind the questions I needed to ask him.
    â€˜Supper’s ready, dear. Bangers and mash, your father’s favourite. Come along. I’m taking it in now.’
    â€˜All right, Mum.’ And I stood there for a moment longer as I thought of my father. He had never been abroad. Incredibly he had never been to London, had barely been outside of Norfolk all his life, and when we had moved to Cley this view had been for him a total fulfilment. And yet, when I said I was going on a Whitbread round-the-worlder, he hadn’t batted an eyelid, hadn’t attempted to dissuade me.
    â€˜It’s on the table, dear.’
    Sometimes I felt the world outside of East Anglia wasn’t real to him.
    â€˜A nice sunset. Your father always liked it best at this time of the evening, so long as the sun was setting in a clear sky.’
    She was standing in the doorway, taking off her apron. ‘Come along now.’ I took the apron from her and tossed it on to the desk, where it lay like a faded flower piece sprawled across the typewriter. I put my arm round her shoulder. ‘I may be going away for a bit,’ I said.
    â€˜Oh, when?’ She always took my movements in her stride. Thank God, she had become accustomed to my coming and going. ‘Where are you going this time?’
    â€˜Punta Arenas,’ I said.
    â€˜Spanish?’
    â€˜Sort of.’ And I left it at that. I didn’t tell her how long I might be gone. And anyway I didn’t know, or even whether I would go at all.
    â€˜You’re very quiet,’ she