I went out to the rocks this morning, before sunrise. It is not as dark as you might imagine, when your eyes are accustomed and the moon is past waxing gibbous. But I do realise that a fall could kill me and I am not ready to die, not just yet, so I wore my head torch and carried a hand-held beam strapped tight to my wrist. The path out to the black coast is muddied and frozen this time of year. Covered in thin sheets of ice that crack under my feet and puddles that trap my ankles, sinking me shin-deep into half-hearted bog.

I call it the black coast for the rocks, fractured and pitted as they are. Deep like charcoal but sharp as etched glass. Sheets of them stretch out when the sea is away, lives upon lives of sediment. This morning, though, the sea was close in, and the waves were thrashing against the dark sandstone. I wondered if they were trying to claw their way right up into my lighthouse.

I feel alive, standing at the coast, my feet planted – like this – on the rock and my body braced against the wind. It believes I am not a challenge, that wind. It sees only an old woman but it has not blown me over yet. It stings my eyes with grit-salt until they’re raw in the corners and weeping but it does not blow me over. It is hard to imagine anywhere else when you’re facing those waves, standing on those rocks. But even there – even now – there are times when I am in two places at once. When I am living in two times. I am an old woman standing alone with her scowl and I am a young woman sitting among the dark wood and towering bookshelves of that basement room in King’s. The feel of all that cold stone underfoot, the echo of it, the smell of the professor’s tobacco mixing with a hint of stale chlorine that could have come from the lab or from the clean floor in the corridor. That room is as still and timeless, in its way, as the ever-changing black rocks of the peninsula.

‘You can have the post,’ he says to me. His beard doesn’t move as he talks and it obscures his lips – I only see the flash of teeth. ‘Fixed term,’ he says. ‘Three years. You will be expected to publish.’

‘Of course,’ I say, not wanting my excitement to show.

‘I see you have a reference from our Dark Lady.’

He chuckles. His eyes are amused. He seems to find himself amusing.

‘Though Rosy’s not working on cell fertilisation, is she?’