The wood of the bench has gone soft-grained under your hands, ridged where the grain has lifted in a hundred winters of salt. You sit at the long end, near the iron arm, and the boards take your weight with a small settling sound. Below the cliff, the sea has flattened to a single dark plate, blue running into slate the further out you look. A breeze comes up the rockface and turns warm against your face before it cools again. It carries salt, and the dry hay smell of the field behind you, and something mineral from the cliff itself, chalk or old turf. You let your shoulders ease back against the rail. The bench holds.
The light is the thing. It has been going for an hour now, by inches, the way it does in October when the sun is far south and the air is dry. The sea takes the change first. What was blue along the horizon is grey-blue now, and what was grey near the shore has begun to dull toward pewter. There is no line where one becomes the other. Far out, perhaps four miles, a tanker moves so slowly it seems not to move at all, only to be in a slightly different place each time you look back at it. Its hull is a long dark mark against the paler water. A small light burns at its bow, orange and steady, though it cannot be needed yet.
Behind you, in the field, the sheep are working through the last of the day's grazing. You hear them more than see them, the soft tear of grass coming up by the root, the occasional shift of a hoof on chalk. One of them coughs, the dry single cough of sheep, and another answers somewhere further off. The fence behind the bench is post-and-wire, the posts leaning slightly inland from years of weather pushing them. A strand of wool is caught on the lowest wire, pale against the rust, lifting and settling as the breeze comes and goes. The field smells of cropped grass and warm wool and the faint ammonia of the flock. It is a smell that has been on this clifftop for a long time.
The bench is the third one on this stretch of path, set back a little further from the edge than the others, in a hollow where the wind drops. Someone chose this hollow. The brass plate screwed to the top rail has gone green at its edges and the lettering on it has worn shallow, the way coins do in a pocket. You do not read it. You run your thumb along its lower edge instead, where a small lip has formed, and the metal is cool and slightly damp. The wood beside it is warm still, holding the afternoon. Where the slats meet the iron arm, a little drift of dust has gathered, fine and grey, blown in from the path and not yet washed out by rain. You leave it where it is.
A sound comes up from below, faint, the slow knock of water against rock at the base of the cliff. It is not the broken sound of a high sea. It is the lower sound of a calm one, a kind of dull tap, with long pauses between, as a swell finds the same hollow in the chalk again and again and lets itself out. You can hear the suck of it pulling back. Above that, nothing. The gulls have gone in. They went earlier, in twos and threes, white over the dark water, sliding inland toward whatever ledges they keep. The air where they were is empty now, and the emptiness has its own quiet, broader than the noise they made. A single jackdaw passes overhead, low, its wings making a soft chuff in the still air, and then it is over the field and gone.
The cold begins to come up out of the ground. You feel it first through the soles of your boots, a slow change, and then along the wood of the bench as it gives up the last of its sun. You pull your sleeves down over your wrists. The cuffs of your jumper smell faintly of the morning, of woodsmoke caught from the stove and not yet aired out. You press one cuff against your face and the smell is there, low and brown, with a thread of something greener under it, perhaps the apple you cut at lunch. Out at sea, the tanker has moved. It is now a third of the way along the horizon from where it was. The orange light at its bow has grown a little brighter against the deepening grey, although the light itself has not changed. Only the water around it has darkened.
You turn your head slowly along the line of the cliff. To the east, the path goes on through gorse and low blackthorn, bent inland by the prevailing wind so that the bushes lean like figures walking against weather. Their leaves have begun to turn, not the bright turn of the inland trees, but a slow rust at the edges, with the dark green holding in the middle. A few late blackberries are still on the brambles by the path, shrunken now, gone almost black. Further along, a stone wall starts up, dry-laid, the stones pale where they catch what light is left, dark in their joints. Beyond the wall, the cliff bends south and the land falls away out of sight. You can hear, very faintly, the same slow knock of water carrying along under it.
The wind shifts a quarter turn and brings the smell of the sea up properly now, the cold iodine smell of weed lifting on a falling tide, and under it the colder smell of deep water. Your hands have grown cool in your lap. You fold them together and the warmth of one palm finds the other. A long way out, almost where the tanker was, the horizon has gone the colour of wet slate, and the sky above it has begun to take on the first faint green of dusk, the green that sits between blue and grey and is gone in twenty minutes. A single star is showing where the green deepens. You think it might be a planet. It does not flicker. It holds its place above the sea while the sea goes on darkening underneath it.
In the field, one of the sheep has moved closer to the fence, and you can hear it breathing, the slow soft breath of a heavy animal at rest. It tears another mouthful of grass. The chewing is unhurried, methodical. Somewhere behind it, the bell on the lead ewe gives one small tin sound and then stops. The sound stays in the air for a moment, and then the field absorbs it. You listen for it again. It does not come. The wind has dropped almost entirely now, and the gorse along the path has gone still, each yellow flower closed for the night, the small black pods on the older stems holding their shape against the dimming air. Far below, the slow knock of water against rock keeps its time.
The tanker has passed the headland and is beginning the long curve into the bay beyond. You can no longer see its hull clearly, only the orange light at its bow and a second light, white, that has come on at its stern. The two lights move together, slowly, across the darker water. The horizon behind them has gone from slate to a deep even grey, and the first faint green of the sky has thickened to a band of blue that is almost black at its upper edge. More stars now, three or four, spaced widely. The sea below the cliff has lost its plate-flatness and become only a darkness with a paler line at the foot of the chalk where the water meets the rock. The knock of the swell has slowed, or the pauses between have grown longer, and the field behind you has gone quiet, the sheep settled into the grass, the wire on the fence no longer lifting the strand of wool, which hangs now, pale and still, against the rust. The cold comes up another inch. The bench gives one small wooden sound, settling. Out beyond the headland, the two lights of the tanker move on together into the dark, and the dark moves with them, and the chalk under the bench holds the last warmth of the day a little longer before it lets it go, slowly, into the air, into the grass, into the long slow falling of the light…