The Weathering

They had stopped calling it a road by the time I came back.

On the survey sheet at the county office it was still marked — a thin, confident line running north out of the village to the point, the way a scar goes on being a scar long after you have stopped explaining it to people. But the sea had been at it for eleven winters, and what was left was a suggestion. Two hundred yards of loose metalling. Then air.

I walked it anyway. It was March, and the light was doing the thing the light does here in March, coming in low and sideways off the water so that every ordinary object looked as though it had been recently and very carefully drawn.

My mother's house stood at the end of it. Or rather it stood forty feet back from the end of it, which in 1974 had been forty feet of garden and was now forty feet of nothing at all — a raw brown shelf of clay with the roots of her escallonia hanging out of the cut like wiring pulled from a wall.

I had not been inside for nine years. The key had been in my coat pocket since Edinburgh, and I found, standing at the gate with the wind going through me, that I could not make myself take it out.

A man was watching me from the field above the house. He had the stillness that farmers have, which is not patience but a kind of arithmetic. After a while he came down.

"You'll be the daughter," he said.

"I'll be the daughter."

He looked past me at the house, and then at the place where the garden used to be, and he did the thing everyone here does when the erosion comes into a conversation, which is to look at it for slightly too long and then look away.

"She wouldn't have it surveyed," he said. "We asked her. Three of us went down and asked her."

"I know."

"It's not a criticism."

"It sounded like one."

He accepted that. He had a good face for accepting things. "There's a report," he said. "The council did one anyway, after. It's with the solicitor, I should think."

"It's with the solicitor."

"Have you read it?"

"No."

"No," he agreed, as though I had confirmed something he had bet money on, and he went back up the field.

The report ran to sixty-one pages and I read it that night in the Ferryman with a plate of chips going cold beside me, because the house had no electricity and I was not ready to sleep in it.

It was a beautiful document. I want to be clear about that. I had spent nine years reading other people's assessments of other people's ground and I knew good work when I saw it, and this was good work. A geotechnical firm out of Aberdeen had taken eleven boreholes along the point and logged every one of them, and their logs had the particular music that logs have when the person writing them is enjoying himself: *soft brown silty CLAY, occasional shell fragments; becoming firm; becoming very stiff at 4.20 m; gravel, angular, poorly sorted, matrix-supported.*

On page thirty-four there was a cross-section of the headland drawn at 1:200, and the house was on it. Somebody had inked it in — not the standard rectangle the software would have given them, but the actual house, with the chimney and the porch my father built the year before he left, and the little dormer that had been my room.

And underneath it, in the same hand, a line of dashes running back from the cliff edge, under the porch, under the kitchen, stopping just short of the stairs. The legend called it *predicted retreat, 50 yr.*

Somebody had drawn my mother's house and then drawn the year it stopped.

I sat in the Ferryman with the wind coming off the water and I thought: she read this. Of course she read this. She read it and she put it in a drawer with the guarantee for the boiler, and she went on planting things.

There is a word for what the sea does here and it is not *erosion*. Erosion is what a river does to a bank, patiently, over the length of a human being's attention. What happens at Rannoch Head is a slower and more personal business. The clay takes water all winter until it can hold no more, and then one warm week in February the whole face of it simply loses interest — lets go, sits down, walks out into the tide in a single afternoon — and afterwards the sea comes and tidies up, and by April the cliff looks as though it has always been exactly there.

The word for that is *weathering*. It is a soft word. Geologists use it for the thing that happens to stone before anything moves at all: the frost getting into it, the salt getting into it, the slow chemical argument that takes the strength out of a material without altering its shape by so much as a millimetre. A weathered rock looks like a rock. It stands where it stood. It has simply stopped being able to bear what it used to bear, and nobody can see this, and it does not know it itself, and then one ordinary morning something quite small asks something quite ordinary of it, and it goes.

My mother was weathered for nine years and I did not visit once.

In the morning I let myself in.

The hall smelled of cold plaster and, underneath that, faintly and unforgivably, of her — the particular dry sweetness of the hand cream she had used since 1981, still in the air of a house that had stood empty since October. I stood on the mat with my hand on the door and I made myself breathe it, twice, the way you make yourself look at a wound before you dress it.

The kitchen was as she left it. A cup upside down on the rack. The calendar still on October, with the twenty-second circled and nothing written in it.

And on the table, squared to the edge the way she squared everything, a buff council envelope, opened, with the sixty-one pages inside it and a bookmark at page thirty-four.

Beside it, in her hand, on the back of a seed catalogue, a list.

*Escallonia — move to the wall. Ask J. about the gate. Tell her.*

Not *tell Ailsa*. Not *phone*. Just *tell her*, in the shorthand of a woman who had said the sentence to herself so many times that she no longer needed the whole of it.

I sat down at my mother's table in my coat, in a house with a line drawn under it, and I read the third item on that list until the light came round to the window.