I had reached that stage of panic where I was not yet wholly convinced that I was marked out to suffer terribly, and yet all the familiar physical details of my life were beginning to take on the slow motion magnification and the high colour of catastrophe. My own voice was strange to me; the harbour master spoke as someone that I’d already met with in a dream. Try as I might, I cannot now re-assemble his arguments for not calling out the lifeboats or sending for the RAF helicopters. I simply know that I found them compelling at the time. I, too, didn’t want to trouble anyone. Nor can I remember leaving his cottage with him, clambering into his motor launch, and setting out, just the two of us, in the direction of the louring black rock. But that was what we did. What I do remember is my insistence that that was the only place to look for her. I don’t know what I expected to find. Camilla sitting up on its highest peak, combing out her hair? Why not? Nothing else that was happening bore any relation to likelihood or reality. Only my remorse was recognizable to me. That, it seemed, like cockroaches and certain kinds of weed, could survive anything.

Nor was our search fruitless. Floating in the foam that encircled the Mazzard like a frilled collar we found one of a pair of flippers. The harbour master fished it aboard for me to examine. I didn’t know one flipper from another – I don’t think it had ever even occurred to me that they came in sizes; nonetheless, I knew this flipper to be Camilla’s. I held it in both my hands and put it, still running with spumy water, to my chest. I threw my head back. A twitching sparrow-hawk looked me over. A guillemot rode the water like a duck. Two images, two tableaux of the mind, each superimposed upon the other, fought for the attention of my inner eye; one was of me, bent like a hunchback beneath the cruel burden of guilt that was Camilla’s legacy, the other was of Camilla, lying on her back on the sea-bed of the harbour, her body stripped by the receding tides, her breasts still full but deadly white, her hair indistinguishable from that mess of vegetation, the shredded lettuce and stewed spinach. Then darkness came into my eyes and I went down, face forward, into the bottom of the boat.

[4]