10 August 1999

The weather doesn’t break, still it’s baking and the trees begin to creak. The grass is dry, brown, and the earth is cracking. I have a tan without intending it, the scars always whiter than the pigmented skin. I’ve been gardening today, the growing delight of old age. When I lived in the cottage in Noss Mayo all those years ago, I left the garden to fend for itself - just as I did — and the trees grew gnarled, the roses whippy. Looking back I could have done so much with it but I was too busy being what I was.

Hard, now, to remember the phone calls, the soft knocks at my office door, as one man after another came to visit me. Colleagues, husbands, students, men from the village. All wanting the same thing: me. Wanting to pin me down, figuratively and literally. Funny to think of that now: I haven’t been touched with passion — or compassion — for twenty-eight years. The luxury, then, of being able to choose. Of being able to lie in a dark room with a stranger and imagine Dai Davies watching. I remember that I never felt shame because I chose, because I had nothing else, because I never kept them. Any of them. They would write and call, beg me to go with them, go to them. And I laughed. I’m proud of that, proud of that laughter, because it helped them realise how ridiculous they were, to what degree they had misunderstood. Small, Pyrrhic victories, for I realise now that my losses were as great as theirs.

So, the garden is tended, the grass watered, the bushes contained. Thousands of people are flooding into the towns around, awaiting the eclipse. There’s a fever in the air as if something special will happen, maybe something that will change them all. Lord, what fools these mortals be.

11 August 1999

Ellen arrived early this morning, waving newspapers and hooting with laughter. We sat on the deck for hours with coffee and read the breathless accounts of things yet to happen, of impending doom, of small sects burrowing into the earth, of the end of the world as we know it, and we sniggered, reading extracts of the purple prose aloud to each other.

Ellen brought with her the ingredients of brunch and I laid a table on the deck while she cooked. We ate soft scrambled eggs with smoked salmon as we watched the crowds pouring on to the beach and golf course. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them, settling on chairs, preparing tripods and hand-held camcorders, binoculars slung round pink necks. We agreed we could hear, or perhaps imagined we heard, a low rumble. Or, rather, grumble. They looked like sheep down there, penned in by land and sea. The clouds bowled in, as grey and rippled as the sea, and the grumble grew louder.

We finished eating and I lit a cigarette, noticed the flame was unnaturally bright. The light began to fade, the golf course grow dark, the sea retreat, and silence fell as sunlight diminished, then disappeared. Sun and moon passed overhead, unseen behind clouds, waltzing their way from the Isles of Stilly to India. I flicked my lighter again and caught Ellen’s expression of blank awe as she looked around. The darkness and silence seemed to last for ever but then the daylight began to inch back across the sea, shadowing the arch. The sounds of clapping, whistles and cheering came from the beach as if this had been a stellar performance put on for their benefit, a football match of the planets.