The First Cut

She knew nothing of the tides and currents, but hoped the body would wash up soon somewhere nearby. It would be too much to expect it to land back on Whitby Sands, but it might drift only a short way up the coast to Redcar, Saltburn, Runswick Bay or Staithes, or even further down to Robin Hood’s Bay, Scarborough, Flamborough Head or Bridlington. Wherever it turned up, she hoped it wouldn’t take long.

She finished her coffee and stubbed out her cigarette. It was eleven o’clock already. Now that she had fulfilled the main part of her purpose here, time was begi

To kill time until lunch, she found herself again mounting the 199 steps to St. Mary’s and the abbey ruins. There were even more people about this time: children racing one another to the top, counting out loud as they did so-“Eighty-four, eighty-five, eighty-six…”-old folk in elastic stockings, wheezing as they went, dogs with their tongues hanging out ru

Martha climbed steadily, counting under her breath. Again, it came to 199, though legend said it was hard to get the same figure twice. At the top stood Caedmon’s Cross, a thin twenty-foot upright length of stone, tapering toward the top, where a small cross was mounted. The length of it was carved with medieval figures-David, Hilda and Caedmon himself-like some sort of stone totem pole, and at the bottom was the inscription, “To the glory of God and in memory of Caedmon the father of English sacred song fell asleep hard by 680.” Martha knew it wasn’t that old, though; it had been carved and erected in 1898, not in the real Caedmon’s time. But it still had power. She particularly loved the understated simplicity of “fell asleep hard by.” When she had to die, that was the way she would like to go. Again, she thought of Jack Grimley and shivered as if someone had just walked across her grave.

Getting her breath back after the long climb-it came less easily since she had started smoking-she paused in the graveyard and looked at the town spread out beyond and below the cross. She could easily pick out the dark, monolithic tower of St. Hilda ’s at the top of her street, and the stately row of white four-story hotels at the cliff-side end of East Terrace. She could see the whale’s jawbone, too, that entry to another world. The rough, sandy gravestones, with their burnt-looking knobbly tops, stood in the foreground; the trick of perspective made them look even bigger than the houses over the harbor.

Martha turned and wandered into the church again. A recorded lecture was in progress in the vestry. It sounded ti

24 Kirsten

Kirsten lay in bed late the next morning. Outside her window the birds sang and twittered in the trees and the village went about its business. Not that there was much of that. Occasionally, she could hear the whirr of bicycle wheels passing by, and once in a while the thrum of a delivery van’s engine.

She put the empty coffee cup back on the tray-breakfast in bed, her mother’s idea-and went to open the curtains. Sunlight burst through, catching the cloud of dust motes that swirled in the air. It’s all dead skin, Kirsten thought, wondering where on earth she’d heard that. Probably one of those educational television programs, science for the masses. She opened the window and warm air rushed to greet her, carrying the heavy scent of honeysuckle. A fat bee droned around the opening, then seemed to decide there was nothing for him in there and meandered down to the garden instead.

Kirsten’s room reflected just about every stage of her transition from child to worldly student of language and literature. Even her teddy bear sat on the dressing table, propped against the wall. Stretching, she wandered around touching things, her feet sinking deep into the wall-to-wall carpet. The walls and ceiling were painted a kind of sea green, or was it blue? It really depended on the light, Kirsten decided. Those greeny blue colors often looked much the same to her: turquoise, cerulean, azure, ultramarine. But today, with the light shimmering on it as on ripples in the ocean, it was definitely the color of the Mediterranean she remembered from family visits to the Riviera. The walls seemed to swirl and eddy like the water in a Hockney swimming-pool painting. When Kirsten stood in the middle of the room, she felt as if she were floating in a cave of water, or frozen at its center like a flower in a glass paperweight.

It was two rooms, really. The bed itself, with a three-quarter-size mattress far too soft for Kirsten’s taste, was set in a little recess up a stair from the large main room, just below the small window. Also tucked away in there were the dresser and wall cupboards for her clothes. Down the step was the spacious study-cum-sitting-room. Her desk stood at a right angle to the picture window, so that she could simply turn her head and look out at the round, green Mendips as she worked. There, she had written essays during her summer vacations and made notes as she read ahead for the following term.

Above the desk, her father had fixed a few bookshelves to the wall on brackets. Apart from some old childhood favorites, like Black Beauty, The Secret Garden, Grimm’s Fairy Tales and a few Enid Blytons-Famous Five, Secret Seven-most of the books were to do with her university courses. They were either for subjects she had studied over the past three years, brought home to save space in her bedsit, or books she had bought secondhand, usually in Bath, for courses she had intended to take in the future. Like the ones on medieval history and literature-including Bede’s An Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love and the anonymous The Cloud of Unknowing. But Kirsten had never taken that course. Instead, she had chosen at the last moment special tutorials on Coleridge with a visiting world expert in the field, an American academic who had turned out to be a crashing bore far more interested in trying to look up the front-row women’s skirts than in the wisdom of Biographia Literaria.

By the side of the shelves was a corkboard, still spiked with old postcards from friends visiting Kenya, Nepal or Finland, photos of her with Sarah and Galen, and poems she had clipped from the TLS. There were no posters of pop stars in the room. She had taken them all down last year, thinking herself far too mature for such things. The only work of art that enhanced her wall was a superb Monet print, which looked wonderfully alive in the sunlight that rippled over it.

She also had an armchair with a footrest, for reading in, and the expensive stereo system. Her records were mostly a mixture of popular classics-Beethoven’s Ninth, Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique (which she had bought after seeing Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers at the University Film Society) and the soundtrack of Amadeus-and a few dated pop albums: Rolling Stones, Wham!, U2, David Bowie, Kate Bush, Tom Waits. She wasn’t interested in any of these now, and had a hard time choosing the music she wanted to listen to. Finally, she settled for the Pathétique, and dressed as the music swelled and surged from its slow and quiet begi