In Germany, as the end draws upon us, the incessant walls read WAS TUST DU FÜR DIE FRONT, FÜR DEN SIEG? WAS HAST DU HEUTE FÜR DEUTSCHLAND GETAN? At “The White Visitation” the walls read ice. Graffiti of ice the sunless day, glazing the darkening blood brick and terra cotta as if the house is to be preserved weatherless in some skin of clear museum plastic, an architectural document, an old-fashioned apparatus whose use is forgotten. Ice of varying thickness, wavy, blurred, a legend to be deciphered by lords of the winter, Glacists of the region, and argued over in their journals. Uphill, toward the sea, snow gathers like light at all windward edges of the ancient Abbey, its roof long ago taken at the manic whim of Henry VIII, its walls left to stand and mitigate with saintless window-hollows the salt wind, blowing as the seasons replay the grass floor in great cowlicks, green to blonde, to snow. From the Palladian house down in its resentful and twilit hollow this is the only view: the Abbey or else gentle, broadly mottled swoops of upland. View of the sea denied, though certain days and tides you can smell it, all your vile ancestry. In 1925 Reg Le Froyd, an inmate at “The White Visitation,” escaped—rushed through the upper town to stand teetering at the edge of the cliff, hair and hospital garment flickering in the wind, the swaying miles of south coast, pallid chalk, jetties and promenades fading right and left into brine haze. After him came a Constable Stuggles, at the head of a curious crowd. “Don’t jump!” cries the constable.

“I never thought of that,” Le Froyd continuing to stare out to sea.

“Then what are you doing here. Eh?”

“Wanted to look at the sea,” Le Froyd explains. “I’ve never seen it. I am, you know, related, by blood, to the sea.”

“Oh aye,” sly Stuggles edging up on him all the while, “visiting your relatives are you, how nice.”

“I can hear the Lord of the Sea,” cries Le Froyd, in wonder.

“Dear me, and what’s his name?” Both of them wetfaced, shouting for the wind.

“Oh, I don’t know,” yells Le Froyd, “what would be a good name?”

“Bert,” suggests the constable, trying to remember if it’s right hand grasps left arm above elbow or left hand grasps…

Le Froyd turns, and for the first time sees the man, and the crowd. His eyes grow round and mild. “Bert is fine,” he says, and steps back into the void.

That’s all the townsfolk of Ick Regis had from “The White Visitation” in the way of relief—from summers of staring at the pink or sun-freckled overflow from Brighton, Flotsam and Jetsam casting each day of wireless history into song, sunsets on the promenade, lens openings forever changing for the sea light, blown now brisk, now sedate about the sky, aspirins for sleep—only Le Froyd’s leap, that single entertainment, up till the outbreak of this war.

At the defeat of Poland, ministerial motorcades were suddenly observed at all hours of the night, putting in at “The White Visitation,” silent as sloops, exhausts well muffled—chromeless black machinery that shone if there were starlight, and otherwise enjoyed the camouflage of a face about to be remembered, but through the act of memory fading too far… . Then at the fall of Paris, a radio transmitting station was set up on the cliff, antennas aimed at the Continent, themselves heavily guarded and their landlines back mysteriously over the downs to the house patrolled night and day by dogs specially betrayed, belted, starved into reflex leaps to kill, at any human approach. Had one of the Very High gone higher—that is, dotty? Was Our Side seeking to demoralize the German Beast by broadcasting to him random thoughts of the mad, naming for him, also in the tradition of Constable Stuggles that famous day, the deep, the scarcely seen? The answer is yes, all of the above, and more.