A stone gatepost came suddenly out of the fog. She thought she remembered that. Laying her bare hand on it, she felt its cold moisture drench into her flesh. A moment later, the sound of the foghorn from the lightship thumped 12on her hearing. Hee-haw! Hee-haw!—a descent from the minor seventh to the tonic. She remembered that, too. She waited for the loud, listless, booming syllables to recur. One counted ten. Subconsciously, she had begun to count, and at ten, Hee-haw! Hee-haw! struck in. It was as though she had never been out of earshot, as though the thirty years since her departure had been no more than another way of counting ten.

The sea fog, looking so light as it billowed past, so light and so oddly dry, as though it were smoke, had already begun to penetrate her. Her hand on the gatepost shone with moisture; minute drops bloomed her sleeve. Eight, nine—she could not go on!—ten. It was not to be endured. Hee-haw! Hee-haw! This time, there was no reason to endure it. She turned and walked briskly toward the waiting car, determined to tell the driver that she had changed her mind and would return to the station. But he said to her, ‘How’s the cramp? Better?’ And in the moment of answering him she lost her purpose, got into the car, and let herself be driven on.

The ground began to waver downhill. From here, if it were not for the fog, she would see the rooftops of the village, the little bay, the scrolling iron-coloured cliffs beyond. There it would be. The post office, the bakery, the sheds where the nets were mended and the ground where they were hung to dry, the stone church-tower and the red-brick chapel, and the chemist’s shop, no wider than a passage, where she used to buy oil of cloves for her toothache. On the outskirts of the village, lying in wait for 13her, was the bungalow where she had lived for three years with Ludovick. It had been built for a holiday house, flimsy and summerlike—too flimsy even for summer, in this sad seaward climate, so its owner had been glad to close with Ludovick’s offer of twenty pounds a year and a new coat of paint. They had not unpacked before he began laying on his blue paint, dropping paint everywhere and getting painter’s colic; a couple of months later, the blue paint was blotching, curling, scaling and flaking off, for he had used a cheap kind and it could not withstand the heavy charge of salt in the air. But by that time he did not mind. He had begun his first canvas of the series of sea anemones. And on the heels of that, having scorched himself raw with sunbathing, he went down with blood poisoning.

The car slid round a corner and changed gear. She started, and looked out of the window. They were passing the bungalow; she caught a flash of it, perched on its hillock behind the tamarisk hedge. There was a line of washing, so someone was living in it. The fuchsia was gone, and there was a flight of cement-block steps in place of the steep path.