Isvik by Hammond; Innes Page B

said as I slashed my knife through a beautifully crisped sausage. She always was a perfectionist in whatever miserable object she was cooking. ‘Something on your mind?’
    â€˜You know my mind, Mum. Empty as a returned beer keg.’
    â€˜I don’t drink.’ She stared at me uncomprehendingly. She was solid Saxon-and-Dutch East Anglian. Loyal as anybody could possibly be, but completely devoid of humour. My father’s little jokes had just bounced off her like hailstones off a swan’s back. Perhaps that’s what had made them such a good match. Dad’s wit sparked on half a dozen cylinders at least. He was an East Ender, pure Cockney. His father had emigrated from Stepney to Norfolk after the First World War when land was cheap. He’d sold his winkle stall in Aldgato Market and bought a few acres at Cley. I hadn’t known him, only my grandmother, who had been born in Eastcheap and had a cackling laugh. She and my father were very close, and when she was gone, he had turned his attention to me. We had had a lot of fun together for we were on the same wavelength you might say.
    And then he’d had that stroke. Odd, the human brain. It’s everything – the personality, the bright intelligence, the humour, everything. And in a flash it’s gone, a blood clot sealing off blood vessels, starving the brain cells. Suddenly they’re dead. And brain cells are the one and only part of the human body that cannot repair themselves. He had never been the same again, all the fun we’d had gone. God, how I had loved that man!
    I loved my mother too, of course. But not in the same way. Fred Kettil had had that something, a different sort of It to Marilyn Monroe, but still an It. The times we’d had, the laughter. And then suddenly, nothing. Just a blank stare. Why? Why take a man like that in his prime? What the hell is God up to? ‘You used to laugh at Dad’s jokes, Mum,’ I said. ‘Why not at mine?’
    â€˜You know very well I didn’t understand them. I just laughed because he expected it. But not at the rude ones,’ she added archly. ‘You remember a lot of them were very Clacton Pier. But he was fun. He was always great fun.’ And her eyes glimmered in a very personal way so that I was afraid she was going to burst into tears. She cried very easily.
    I suppose it’s a question of imagination, and I sat there silent for a moment thinking about imagination and what exactly it was, as I tried to spear another of her crisp little sausages. Why should one person have it and another not? What goes on inside that skull of ours, what makes it tick? And when we die …?
    I was still thinking about that, and what I might be letting myself in for, when I went up to bed. And in the morning the courier arrived almost ten minutes ahead of time, a Polish kid, thin as a lath, on a big BMW motorcycle strapped round with panniers. He glanced at the envelope I handed him. ‘J. Crick Esq.’ And he read off the address. ‘I know where. Soho.’ He stuffed my passport into a pannier already bulging with packages. ‘Good day, I think.’ He had turned his helmeted head to stare at the distant line of shingle, bright yellow in the sunlight.
    It was the sun that had woken me, slanting in through the north-east-facing side window of my bedroom and shining full on my face. ‘Yes, it will be another lovely day.’
    He nodded, still staring out across the saltings. ‘Same where I come. Too much flat. I like flat.’ He smiled at me, and added, ‘London no good. A12 no good. Better here.’ He pulled his visor down, gunned the big engine and with a wave of his hand roared off in the direction of Cromer and the road to Norwich.
    I took a walk then, out as far as the first hide. There were curlews piping, several waders – sandpipers, a godwit, but whether black-tailed or bar-tailed I couldn’t be sure, and I