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sat in the ticking silence and stared dully through the w i n d o w . B e y o n d the littered tracks of the up-line there was an enormous, high, yellow field, and in the distance a range of blue mountains that at first I took for clouds. T h e sun shone. A tired crow flapped past. S o m e o n e coughed. I thought h o w o d d it was to be there, I mean just there and not somewhere else. N o t that being somewhere else w o u l d have seemed any less odd. I mean — oh, I don't k n o w what I mean. T h e air in the compartment was thick.
    T h e seats g a v e o f f their dusty, sat-upon smell. A small, swarthy, l o w - b r o w e d man opposite me caught my eye and did not look away. At that instant it came to me that I was on my w a y to do something very bad, something really appalling, something for which there would be no forgiveness. It was not a premonition, that is too tentative a word. I knew. I cannot explain h o w , but I knew. I was shocked at myself, my breathing quickened, my face 24

    p o u n d e d as if f r o m embarrassment, but as well as shock there was a sort of antic glee, it surged in my throat and m a d e me choke. T h a t peasant was still watching me. He sat canted f o r w a r d a little, hands resting calmly on his knees, his b r o w lowered, at once intent and remote. T h e y stare like that, these people, they have so little sense of themselves they seem to i m a g i n e their actions will not register on others. T h e y m i g h t ' be looking in f r o m a different world.
    I k n e w very well, of course, that I was running a w a y .

    1 HAD expected to arrive in rain, and at Holyhead, indeed, a fine, warm drizzle was falling, but when we got out on the channel the sun broke through again. It was evening.
    The sea was calm, an oiled, taut meniscus, mauve-tinted and curiously high and curved. From the forward lounge where I sat the prow seemed to rise and rise, as if the whole ship were straining to take to the air. The sky before us was a smear of crimson on the palest of pale blue and silvery green. I held my face up to the calm sea-light, entranced, expectant, grinning like a loon. I confess I was not entirely sober, I had already broken into my allowance of duty-free booze, and the skin at my temples and around my eyes was tightening alarmingly. It was not just the drink, though, that was making me happy, but the tenderness of things, the simple goodness of the world.
    This sunset, for instance, how lavishly it was laid on, the clouds, the light on the sea, that heartbreaking, blue-green distance, laid on, all of it, as if to console some lost, suffering wayfarer. I have never really got used to being on this earth. Sometimes I think our presence here is due to a cosmic blunder, that we were meant for another planet altogether, with other arrangements, and other laws, and 26

    other, g r i m m e r skies. I try to imagine it, our true place, o f f on the far side of the galaxy, whirling and whirling. A n d the ones w h o were meant for here, are they out there, baffled and homesick, like us? N o , they would have b e c o m e extinct long ago. H o w could they survive, these gentle earthlings, in a world that was m a d e to contain us?
    T h e voices, that w a s what startled, me first of all. I thought they must be putting on this accent, it sounded so like a caricature. T w o raw-faced dockers with fags in their mouths, a customs man in a cap: my fellow countrymen. 1
    walked through a vast, corrugated-iron shed and out into the tired g o l d of the s u m m e r evening. A bus went past, and a w o r k m a n on a bike. T h e ciocktower, its addled clock still showing the w r o n g time. It was all so affecting, I was surprised. I liked it here when I was a child, the pier, the promenade, that green bandstand. There was always a sweet sense of melancholy, of mild regret, as if s o m e quaint, g a y music, the last of the season, had just faded on the air. My father never referred to the place as anything