How pitiful I make myself sound, how passive and lovelorn. A woman waiting. But still, my hopefulness would hang in the air, as potent as the scent of you on my pillow. It was a hopefulness that always had something sickening and desolate about it, because I knew it was false. Even as you sat on the edge of the bed to tie your shoes, you had already left me. Your mind was already on the journey ahead, the journey home. Home. Strange how that one small word, spoken by you, always held the power to turn me queasy with loss. It was a word that slammed a door in my face.

Long ago in Holland, in homes where there had been a death, it was customary for all paintings depicting landscapes or people or the fruits of the field to be covered. This was so that the soul, as it left the body, would not be distracted by a last glimpse of the world it was leaving forever and refuse to depart. The ambush of longing. The stubbornness of desire. Sometimes I think that we never stop wanting what we can’t have. Did you glance back, Max? Did you want to stay? Even for a moment, did you want to stay with me?

The legends here in Dunwich are all of grand losses and epic disappearances. A whole city swallowed by the sea. A merchant town, a trading town, second only to London in the Middle Ages, full of churches, convents, monasteries. Slowly, year after year, the city slipped into the sea. The storm tides, the crumbling cliff face, the relentless incursions of the ocean. Every kind of defence was built; stones and sand shovelled away furiously, elaborate sea walls constructed and reinforced. But none of it was any good and the townspeople were forced to retreat inland, their city sleeping under the water like a lost Atlantis. Now the town is just a placid seaside village; a handful of shops, tea rooms, a gloomy pub. There is a little museum on the main street with detailed maps of all that has been lost, tales of tempests and floods, careful inventories of what the sea has taken. And the many ghoulish legends; graveyards sliding into the ocean along with the churches, fragments of bone scattered among the smooth stones of the shingle beach. And the old story about the sound of church bells pealing beneath the waves on stormy nights. I wonder if that’s what drew you here, the sense of living in a place only precariously lodged. Where everything important is hidden below the surface.