Salt by Jeremy Page

inexplicably started on the marshes and finished here, on the lawn. Or perhaps she thought about the strange unwelcome farmhouse that was to be her home. How it smelled of a man’s smell, how damp and unloved it seemed. Did she look up at the window of the bedroom and think of Shrimp Langore in there, exhausted, nervous, feeling his own private sense of dislocation? Was he asleep or was he spending the first night afraid to put the light on, sitting in a chair perhaps, smoking a cigarette, looking at the wild geometric print on the curtains and waiting for dawn to shine through them?
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    They’d explored the house by candlelight. It was a dreary place which had been rented to a single man for many years. The air was heavy and depressing and full of the man’s idleness. A bucket had been knocked over in the hall, leaving a long dry stain covering the carpet like blood. There were empty miniatures of Bell’s Whisky and Grand Marnier in one of the rooms, stored in cardboard boxes. Some empty gun cartridges in the bedroom. And on the kitchen table, a mug of cold tea stood next to a pile of crumbs and mice shit.
    Stretched out on the bed, exhausted, they’d listened to the candle guttering in the corner and foxes barking in the distance. The candle flickered a nervous unsettling light across the walls as they lay on the damp mattress, and when the candle had finally burned out in the early hours, my mother had woken up outside on the back lawn.
    Low, brooding outbuildings with impenetrably dark doorways faced the cottage from across the yard. Spilling out of one of these was a pile of poaching traps, left there like discarded jawbones. She stared at them for a while, and at the greater darkness beyond them, then felt her way round the sides of the house, and as she touched the walls she tensed, realizing she’d been expecting the soothing contours of flints, not the damp, foreign texture of bricks.
    I see her there clearly, on the lawn with a car blanket round her shoulders, quietly singing ‘The Foggy, Foggy Dew’:
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    â€˜. . . of the winter time, and of the summer too, And of the many, many times that I held her in my arms, Just to keep her from the foggy, foggy dew.’
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    And as dawn approaches she sees a damp, misty landscape in front of her. At first the mist looks like the pea-souper banks of a North Norfolk sea-fret. Then, lifting through the mist, the solid mast of a ship turns out to be a tall brick chimney, several miles away. It’s leaning. Soon, more chimneys appear on low huddled houses, dotted across the land. She sees water, not in the labyrinthine pattern of the creeks on the Morston saltmarshes, but water in straight unnatural lines as far as she can see. And the last thing to lift from the mist is at the bottom of the slope beyond the house, perhaps two miles away; the long curling shape of a huge brown river, the one she’d felt moving in the night. The land is absolutely flat, relentless, mud brown and dull green; not the soft level of the marshes, but a rigid, carved geometry of lines, furrows, paths and roads. It is the Fens.
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    As the pale globe of the sun rises over her shoulder, she hears the tap of Shrimp’s finger on the upstairs window. When he’s rubbed the condensation away with a squeak, she sees his grinning face in the cold morning light. Brave, now it’s the new day. She sees his long shadow approaching hers over the lawn, and then feels a mischievous poke in her ribs.
    â€˜You sleep?’ he says
    â€˜Not sure.’
    â€˜Hear the foxes? Going for it, weren’t they? Han’t heard foxes like that for ages.’
    Lil’ looks vaguely where she thought the foxes had been calling from, looks back, looks directly at Shrimp to gauge his mood.
    â€˜Are we still in Norfolk?’
    Shrimp laughs at her and, because the sun’s rising higher now, he points out the Fens to her.
    â€˜That’s