I’ve put everything into these notebooks. They contain me and yet I burst out of their academic categories. There is only one subject now, and that’s me. A forty-year-old woman, two thousand miles from the city where I was born. History birthed me; geography gave me a new home to love. Biology broke my heart long ago with Catherine and now I’m at its mercy again, being ill, being drugged once more but still writing, writing. Not to excuse or blame myself, but to bear witness to my life, the gifts I’ve been given, the people I’ve loved, before the light fails. I must go on, I will go on, until the end. And only then will I write FIN.

Bridie was in her garden, digging in a square bed. “This will be for my early spuds. Time to wake up the earth.” She looked ruddier and squarer in the open air. “Philip’s up on Beacon Hill.” She pointed to the high humpback line in the distance. “He told me he’d be back in an hour. You can wait for him, or you can drive to the track and climb up yourself. Go past Pipehouse Wood and turn right.”

“Pipehouse Wood?”

“The high beech wood beside the road. You’ll have the hill in your sight all the time, you won’t miss it.”

She was right, the track up to the hill was easy to find. I parked at the end, just off the road, and started to walk. The track was dry, chalky, wide enough for four people to walk abreast. Then a fence and a stile and beyond that, a steep incline of turf. The slope was rutted with little paths that zigzagged across the face of the hill, but I went straight up.

At the top I found myself standing on a grassy bank that went all the way around the summit. In the middle there were round hillocks and hollows in sun and shadow.

Philip was sitting on the bank on the other side of the summit, facing outward over the land below. He had his back to me and I could tell by the way he was leaning forward, intent, that he was drawing.

My footsteps were noiseless on the grass but I was breathing hard from the climb. He heard me and turned around. Said nothing, simply looked mildly up at me. His notebook was open, the black hatchings of the distant city skyline laid out across two pages under the fire of the declining sun. He put a finger on his sketch and then pointed toward the coast.

“I was thinking of you down by the sea. And yet here you are.”

I sat down beside him. “You don’t seem at all surprised to see me.”

“No.” He glanced behind me at the edge of the rampart. “Did you bring your husband?”