News from Norfolk

“Shall we walk back the way we came?”

There had been, as Constance reflected later, no possible argument against Xander’s suggestion — not that she felt disposed to argue with Xander. 

Lunch at the pub — a busy old place in the village next to the one in which they were staying — had been as long, cosy and convivial as either of the two might have wished. Under the shimmering tinsel, leaning in to hear each other amid the cheerful roar of the other diners’ voices and those inevitable, over-familiar Christmas tunes, they had been lost in a little world all their own. Constance loved these moments with Xander, when he was, however briefly, completely hers. She needed that sort of thing at the moment. 

Now, out on the village high street, the cold air felt good on their slightly flushed faces. The time was only half past three on that mid December afternoon — not yet anything like dark, although over to the west, a beautiful little sliver of moon hung low in the sky, as if waiting for something. As the two of them stood by the edge of the coast road, warm and comfortable in their smart-yet-casual cloth, deliberating, they caught sight of a skein of pinkfoot geese making their loud, laborious, noisy way overhead, travelling back off the marshes onto the fallow fields further inland. 

That decided it, then. 

“Yes, why not?” 

Constance slipped her arm into Xander’s, and together, they climbed the steep bank that led up to the path across the marsh. 

The holiday in Norfolk had been Xander’s idea. He’d been busy recently — even more so than usual, which was saying something — but not too busy to notice that Constance had, perhaps not unreasonably under the circumstances, been feeling a bit low.

It also had to be said that Xander loved travel, adventure, anything new or different — and while the north Norfolk coast was hardly an exotic location, it was, at least, new to him. Also, he was sufficiently self-aware to realise that these days, even for those who could afford them, long-haul journeys to glamorous and distant destinations increasingly struck the wrong note. 

As for Constance, as a child she’d spent most of her summer holidays and Christmas holidays in the village, where her uncle — a more reliable figure than either of her much-divorced parents — was rector of the benefice. In some important sense, these were the places in which she’d grown up. So while her uncle, aunt and cousins no longer lived there, for her, the return to Norfolk was less an adventure than something not unlike an overdue homecoming. 

It was Constance who had suggested, earlier that day, that she and Xander might walk from the hotel in Blakeney across the marsh to Cley. 

Constance, invariably sensitive to such things, could see that the marsh puzzled Xander. The hotel, glittering self-consciously under its generous golden strands of Christmas illumination, sat back from the quayside which, even at this time of year, seemed always to be busy with people: half-distracted dog walkers, elderly couples wrapped up against the wind, anxious young parents darting after their toddling errant offspring. 

The quay, for its part, faced not onto the open sea, as Xander had imagined it would do when he’d made the booking, but rather, onto a tidal creek. 

Sometimes the creek was little more than a slim rivulet of silvery water snaking rapidly through wet sand. Only a few hours later, it had mysteriously filled the channel with a churning, slate-grey, rather angry-looking flood that often spilled across the nearby carpark, sometimes even onto the main road. None of the local people seemed remotely surprised by this. From the quayside, the creek led out into the distance, as far as one could see. 

On either side of the creek, also as far as one could see, stretched the marsh. 

What was the marsh? Not much, surely, at least in Xander’s assessment. Nondescript low plants, scrubby and underwhelming, covered the sandy earth in a patchy, erratic little clumps. Here and there, across them, seabirds pursued their obscure yet incessant errands, making their mournful calls. 

The path, too, was puzzling. Set atop a rather steep raised bank, it ran out from the quay directly north, straight into the marsh, as if making for the sea. Yet after about ten minutes, it veered suddenly towards the west. From there it proceeded for quite a while. But just as Cley beach came into view and it looked as if the path was about to lead somewhere after all — because as Constance knew, it was important for Xander that everything had some sort of explanation — suddenly, inexplicably, the turned south again, back towards the land, separated from the beach by yet another one of those deep tidal creeks. 

In doing this, it described three sides of a square — or, as Xander laughingly put it, made a short journey three times longer than it needed to be. 

Constance knew, of course, that the reason the path ran as it did was that the sea wall on which it sat had long protected the large square of land within its embrace — the pasture known as Blakeney Freshes — from encroachment by the sea. But she kept this knowledge to herself. 

She and Xander had been together for almost a year now. In that time, she had come to adore the almost childish joy he took in figuring things out for himself, and telling them to others — so much so that she did not want to spoil what would surely be the eventual delight of this new discovery. Also, though, at the moment she felt very tired. It was easier just to smile, wasn’t it? 

Ahead of them, the sky, which had been clear all day, was darkening just a little. They’d certainly be back at the hotel before it was really dark. And even if they didn’t — well, the path was a well-made path, well-travelled and hard to miss. 

They stopped, as Constance had known they would, so that Xander could photograph the windmill. It was an old tower mill, built at some point in the early 19th century. It still had its fantail and pale skeletal sails, although having been converted to a boutique hotel at some point in the recent past — or was it a restaurant? — the cap had been fixed, so it could no longer turn its face to the wind. On the way to lunch, earlier that day, Xander had already taken about a dozen photos of it. Now, though, with deep shadows etched across the restless reed bank ahead of them, and a few wisps of pink candy-floss cloud just drifting above the horizon, the old mill was altogether transformed, rearing up before the polite pantiled roofs of the houses behind it like some sort of archaic monster. 

“Yes!” said Xander. A flock of birds had the good manners to fly into shot just as he was taking another photo. He looked so happy, turning round the screen of the ‘phone so that she could admire the resulting image, even though already the light was failing enough that the photo was difficult to see. “Sorry, I’m just going to post that right now.” 

Constance was used to having their lives interrupted by Xander’s social media commitments. A couple of years ago, shortly before they’d first first met, he’d ended up as a talking head in a school friend’s television documentary — and then, because he was photogenic and funny and because his genuine curiosity about the world was as attractive to more or less everyone else as it was to Constance, he had been able to supplement a fairly ordinary career as a junior academic with the added pay and prestige — such as it was — of a media don, even a very minor celebrity. 

Often, this was rather nice. This afternoon at lunch, for instance, the woman who served them their lunch recognised Xander by name, insisted on a selfie with him to show her sister who had apparently fallen in love with him, and gave them each a free cocktail by way of celebration. Sometimes it was a bore. Generally, these days, it was simply a fact of life.

Xander put his phone away in the pocket of his jacket, pushed his hair back from his face, kissed Constance by way of a sort of indirect apology, and together they walked out along the path, discussing the windmill.

“What did they grind — corn? Is that what it was for? I’ve never really stopped to think about windmills.”

“Corn. There was one in Blakeney too.”

“Where? I didn’t see it.”

“You wouldn’t. People live in that village for decades without realising there’s a windmill there. It’s in a caravan park, tucked away behind some trees. The sails are off, but it’s still very obviously a mill. It’s smartened up a bit now — I think the National Trust have some sort of office there. When I was growing up, though, it was derelict, boarded up but not very well. It was easy to get in. We used to play there all the time.” 

There was a silence while the two of them contemplated that small word, “we”, and the weight it was bearing. But because Constance didn’t want to hear what she knew Xander was about to say, she started speaking again — inconsequentially, almost at random.

“There was such a sad story about that mill. A true story! You could look it up in the papers. Back in Victorian times — I think it was about 1870 or so — a farmer’s daughter went missing. She was only in her early 20s. Her farmer had been a master mariner, but his ship had been smashed up in a storm off Morocco, so he’d taken to farming instead. He owned the farm that included the mill. His daughter was engaged to marry a sailor. A respectable sailor. 

“Then on one evening in May, the farmer’s daughter vanished. The next day, some men were washing their nets over at Cley, when her body washed ashore. 

“There was an inquest, but no one could ever figure out what happened. She wasn’t injured or anything, and she’d grown up in the village — she knew the creeks and so forth as well as anyone. She had no reason to be unhappy. She loved her respectable sailor. It was just ….” Constance’s voice trailed off a little. “We used to scare each other about it, when we were playing up at the mill.”

Ah, that “we” again. This time Xander was too quick for Constance, who seemed to be looking very hard at the path ahead of her. 

“I hope it’s not too weird being back here after — after Sam.” 

“No, it’s good. It’s all good.”

“No, it must be weird. I — I should have thought that through better.”

“No, really, it’s kind of nice being back, actually.” It really was almost dark now, although the sky behind them still glowed a little, that strange little rind of a moon oddly pale and distinct. Connie was still walking with her arm through Xander’s. She pressed closer to him, looking up to see his handsome profile outlined against what was left of the light. She was trying very hard to put something complicated into words. Everything took such a lot of effort at the moment. “I think I was getting too caught up in all that bleak stuff about how the story ended. It’s kind of good to remember the happier times, too.”

Xander paused to look back over his shoulder.

“What is it?”

“Nothing, just thought someone was coming up behind, that’s all. Yeah, Sam — that’s right. You should tell me about some of those happy memories — if you feel like it, that is.”

Constance’s mind, though, was suddenly filled with exactly the sort of irrelevant memories that could never have been worth sharing with anyone else — the sort of memories that didn’t make a good story, that didn’t lead anywhere. They weren’t shaped the way that Xander liked stories to be shaped. 

She remembered Sam’s bowl-cut blond hair, and that he’d been quite fat as a child. 

She remembered how he used to sing in the choir of his father’s church. He had sung so well, before his voice broke. He used to get to sing the solos in all the Christmas services. With his big blue eyes, he looked angelic. The old ladies would sigh over him, not realising how delightfully mischievous he could be, too — there’s been a sort of antic, unpredictable streak in him even then. 

But she also remembered a time when, up at the derelict windmill, he’d gotten into a fight with another boy from the village — a dark-haired, dark-eyed lad, like so many in his family already well known to the local police. Sam had ended up with a bloody nose, and Constance had lent him her handkerchief to staunch the blood, and walked him back home to the parsonage with her arm around him, while the other boy had laughed at them both. 

She felt guilty, somehow, at the memory. 

“Why do you keep turning around?”

“Sorry, it’s the wind, isn’t it? I just keep thinking I hear footsteps.”

In truth, though, there was no wind whatsoever. It was a clear, still night. 

To the north, the look of the sky had begun to change, and before long, Constance understood what was happening. A sudden mist — what Norfolk people call a sea fret — was coming up. There was nothing very unusual about this, but all the same, out on the marsh, it felt a bit unnerving — not so much because the temperature suddenly dropped, or because the air felt oddly close, but because Constance and Xander could no longer see more than a few feet in front of them.

“It doesn’t matter” said Constance, making an effort. “It’s not exactly some sort of epic trek through the uncharted wilderness, is it? We just follow the path. The path will take us right back to the hotel.”

“It’s a shame that mist doesn’t really photograph when you’re actually in it” said Xander. “This stuff is wild.” His voice sounded happy, excited as ever — but all the same, he placed his arm protectively around Constance’s shoulder. She was trying to work out whether they’d got to the point where the path turned back west. 

They seemed to have been walking quite a long time. She should have been paying more attention. She shouldn’t have been thinking so much about Sam. Again, she felt guilty. 

“Do you think it would be easier if your aunt and uncle could tell you what actually happened?”

“Not really. I mean, if they find it too hard to talk about it, that’s fair enough. Presumably there’s going to be an inquest at some point, so we’ll find out anyway.” There was another little silence, in which the sound of the sea, quite a way distant, seemed too loud. To fill it, Constance spoke again. “He was their only child, too. It must be so hard for them.”

At that point, both Constance and Xander thought they saw a light in front of them — only a small light, and somehow obviously in motion, as if someone were carrying it. But then it vanished just as suddenly as it had appeared. And then the path swung round to the west anyway, so that whatever the light was, it couldn’t have been someone on the path. It would have had to be out on the marsh.

“When were you last in touch with Sam?”

“Oh, a couple of years ago. In fact, around the time you and I met. He’d had a bad patch in his late teens. I could see it was happening again — all of us could. All that strange aggression, needing to be right about everything, quite paranoid really — and then the changes of plan, the amazing new career scheme every few days, breaking up with Gina — it was just so obvious. 

“But we all — all of us — thought it would be like it was the time before. We thought he’d get better somehow. And I feel so bad about it. I should have checked up on him, I should have done more. We all should have done more.”

Xander stopped walking and wrapped both his arms around her, not kissing her this time but just holding her tight. In that moment Constance realised that all the energy, the boundless enthusiasm for life, the questing enthusiasm for anything and everything — what everyone loved about Xander — was briefly focused entire on her — on how much he loved her, on trying to sort out the thing that had gone wrong with her world. 

“Babe. Connie. You are the kindest, sweetest, most loving person ever, and if Sam grew up with you — if he was almost a brother to you, like you said — then he must have known that too. None of us can stop all the bad stuff from happening every single time. You do it more than most. But Sam had to make his own journey in his own way. Sure, you need to mourn him — I totally understand that — but there comes a point, there really does, when you have to let him go.”

This time they didn’t hear the footsteps. Instead, in the same instant the two of them noticed, in their peripheral vision, a face, or something like a face, appearing out of the mist.

She was to the west of them, this woman, about to pass them on the path. Afterward, Connie couldn’t understand how it was that she’d formed such a clear imagine of how the woman looked, given that the light had entirely gone now — given that the mist was so heavy. But all the same, the impression was a vivid one. The woman was slim, very pale, wearing some sort of hooded jacket or garment, looking straight ahead of her. Did she somehow glow? 

Instinctively, both Constance and Xander stepped back to the landward side, off the path, indeed worryingly near to the edge of the steep bank, to get out of her way. 

Standing there alone, their arms no longer around each other, it felt very cold. 

They started walking along the path again — faster now. 

“I do quite like that hotel” said Xander, in voice that would have sounded completely normal to anyone who didn’t know him very well. 

“The breakfast was very good” said Constance. “It’s funny how hotel breakfasts are always the best hotel meals. I wonder why that is?”

But somehow she was thinking, yet again, of Sam, and his blond hair, and his solos at the Christmas services, and about that time when he’d gotten into the fight with the dark-haired boy there on the floor of the derelict windmill. Just before that, she remembered, she’d kissed the dark-haired boy, and Sam had been angry — even though she and Sam, despite being first cousins, were really more like brother and sister than anything else, so it was nothing to do with Sam, nothing at all to do with Sam. 

After walking for what seemed a long time, during which the mist appeared to have cleared just a little, Xander paused again. He began to fish about in the pocket of his coat. 

“What is it?”

“I just want to check what time it is. Are you sure we’re walking the right way? Because it feels as if we’ve been walking an awful lot longer than we did this morning.”

He glanced at his phone and, as Constance had suspected, they’d only been out for about half an hour in total — it just felt like so much longer. But of course, being Xander, he also glanced, just for a moment, at how many “likes” he’s gotten from that windmill post. 

Did this bother Constance? Not really. She, too, had a very junior academic position. She and Xander both existed in a world where miscellaneous bureaucratic initiatives were constantly threatening their two departments. She knew all too well that the whole “media don” thing was less an exercise in self-centred frivolity — however much it might have looked like that to a casual onlooker — than a sort of frantic grasping at a sinking lifeline. 

No, she couldn’t find it in her heart to be annoyed at Xander. He had to be like he was. Also, she needed him so much. Right then, she needed him so much. She needed his calm, his robust common sense — his sanity.

“Hadn’t we better keep going, Xan?”

Xander shrugged, and shot a quick smile at her, and started to put the phone back in his pocket. As he did so, though, the glancing illumination from the screen managed to show them two things.

The first, and more intelligible of these, was that the tide had come up quite a way since the morning, so what had been dry areas of scrub at 11 am were now shot through, at least to the north, with eddies of dark water.

The second thing was that the woman who had passed them before, going eastward, was now there to the north of them, standing some way out in the marsh. Or rather, they both thought they saw her there for a moment — thin, pale and strangely static. But then the light from phone swept past, and by the time that Xander had switched on the phone’s torch and scanned the marsh with it, there was no one visible there at all. 

Connie could see that his hand was shaking.

“Come on, Xan, it can’t be far to the turning now. The path will lead to the turning, and then we’ll be walking back to the hotel. The path will take us to the right place. We just have to follow the path.”

With some difficulty he put his phone back in his pocket and they resumed their walk.

Once or twice, though, he paused again.

“Why do you keep stopping?” Constance was surprised to find that her voice, which seemed to belong to someone else, sounded almost angry. “What are you doing?”

“Can’t you hear?”

“What do you mean?”

“Can’t you hear that sound coming off the marsh? Over, there, on the right?”

Constance listened and listened. All she could hear, at least above the booming of her incredibly loud heartbeat, was the distant sound of the sea, far to the north, worrying away at the shingle on the shore. She did, however, once again see a light, and she knew right away that it wasn’t the light from the wind-farm, or from a passing container ship. Something was carrying that light, something was waving that light.

“I think she needs help.”

“Xan!” She could hear in his voice all his usual bright optimism, his energy and all-encompassing positivity. It terrified her. 

Constance grabbed Xan’s hand and almost dragged him along with her. 

“The path will take us to the right place. Follow the path. Look at the path, Xan.”

“She needs help, though, Connie. Can’t you hear her?” 

They had finally turned the corner, turned left, so that they were headed back towards Blakeney, towards the hotel, towards light and other people and normal, wholesome, decent things. But the tide was coming in very fast now. No wonder all the geese had been so quick to leave the marsh earlier. There must have been a spring tide that night, because the marsh was filled with water almost up to the edge of the path, black but flecked with foam where the current had stirred up the earth. And there, on the other side of the swollen creek, was something pale, thin — something that shouldn’t have been where it was. 

Constance hauled at Xander’s wrist, her feet slipping a bit on the muddy surface of the path, as he strained towards the creek. She dug her nails into his wrist so hard that they broke through his skin. But then she lost her footing and fell — and in doing so, she let go of Xander, who lunged towards the black water, on the other side of which the thin pale thing was visible — except that Constance knew that Xander could hear what she could not, that he was slipping away from her in every sort of way — that she was about to lose him.

And then Constance did something surprising. 

She had no particular religious faith — indeed, other than when she had spent those holidays with her uncle, during which she’d had to join Sam and the rest of the family all those services, she’d rarely darkened the door of a church. Yet in that moment, with few options left to her, she thought that she ought to say a prayer — or, struggling to recall a single prayer, that she ought to sing a hymn. 

She knew no hymns, though, at least not that she could remember. But then she thought of Christmas carols. (Yes, it was only Advent, not Christmas, but this was precisely the sort of detail by which Connie’s essentially secular mind was untroubled.) 

And so it was, lying in the brackish mud, straining hopelessly towards the man she loved as he slipped down the bank, she began to sing the only carol that came to mind, from those church services long past — from those services with Sam. She began to sing Oh Come All Ye Faithful.

There is no glossing over this: Constance sang very badly. She had never been a good singer, and this was not the time to start. She knew very well that what emerged from her gaping mouth was less music than a weird sort of railing against the apparently inevitable — half magical spell, half angry football chant. 

Oh come, all ye faithful

Joyful and triumphant

Oh come, ye 

Oh come, ye

To Be-eth-lehem …

Through the unreliable light she thought she could see that Xander’s progress down the bank had slowed, that he seemed to be holding on to some of that scrubby marsh grass. As she watched, he seemed to wait, hanging between two worlds.

Come and behold him

Born the King of Angels …

And now Xander was pulling himself up the bank, first of all very slowly, then a bit faster. Constance herself rose, not very gracefully, to her feet. Bruised, aching from the fall, she reached over to Xander and tried to help him up onto the path. But she never stopped singing.

Oh come, let us adore him

Oh come, let us adore him … 

And when she finally came to look back across the bank, at first the white thing seemed slightly more distant, and then much more distant.

Oh come let us adore him

Christ the Lord. 

The last time she looked, she didn’t think she could see the thin white thing at all. But still, she didn’t stop singing. And if, on the wind that was rising, the sound of her voice seemed to be accompanied, very faintly, by that of a boy soprano — who, there on that empty marsh, was listening closely enough to notice? 

Her arms wrapped around Xander, but still working her way gappily through what she could remember of the carol, Constance half coaxed him, half dragged him back towards the lights of the village. Arriving, at long last, at the end of the path, the two of them made their way off the edge of the bank, along the still-busy quay, dodging traffic to get across the road. 

Most of the people who saw the two of them pass must surely have assumed that they had simply dined far too well at lunch, as sometimes happens in mid December. 

Up the steps they staggered, past the huge Christmas wreaths, and into the welcoming light of the hotel reception area, with all its clutter of friendly conventional furniture, the framed prints and the maps, the little groups of elderly people discussing dinner plans, the banal tinkling of that unavoidable, over-familiar Christmas music — the general air of efficient, genteel, slightly old-fashioned normality. 

Constance and Xander stopped to look at each other. They were both covered in mud. Xander’s feet and legs were soaked with sea water. They had both got more wet in the mist than they had realised. They stank of the marsh, its wildness and its secrets. Yet at the same time, never before had either of them loved anyone else so much. 

The elderly people were all staring at them, as were the members of the hotel staff — but as people in Blakeney love a minor catastrophe, knowing that it will give them something to talk about for weeks afterwards, none of that mattered much either. 

In any event, once again, Xander threw his arms around Constance and vice versa. In that moment, for both of them this time, the rest of the world simply vanished. 

And even when one of the elderly people started calling his name and pointing him out to her companions — she followed him on Twitter; she had told them he was staying in the area because she’d seen his photo of Cley windmill; when was his new series going to start, because she absolutely couldn’t wait — Xander didn’t even look up, didn’t even notice that anyone else was there. Neither of them did. 

A sort of journey ended there. At least for a moment, he and Constance were complete.