The stones of the wall are still warm from a sun that left an hour ago. You walk slowly along the seaward edge, the granite blocks fitted close beneath your feet, each one worn at its upper corners to a dull shine. To your right, the harbor has drawn back to its lowest point; the boats sit tilted on the mud, keels resting in channels they have made over years of settling. The air smells of salt and cut kelp and, faintly, of woodsmoke from the village behind you. Somewhere beyond the sea wall a buoy strikes once, a low bronze note, and the sound travels inland and is gathered up by the hills.
The fog is still far out, a pale line laid across the horizon, and it comes on so gently that you only know it is closer by what it has erased. The far headland is gone. A rock that stood plainly above the water ten minutes ago is now a grey suggestion. You pass the first of the quay lamps as it wakes, an iron post with a hooded bulb that warms from orange to a clean yellow. The light falls in a circle at your feet, catching the crushed shell and the lichen that has taken hold between the paving stones. Beyond the circle the world is darker than it was a moment before, which is the way of lamps.
A gull works along the tideline below you, stepping without hurry through the glossy weed, turning a small stone with its beak and leaving it. The mud holds the tracks of birds that came before — three-toed prints laid in lines and curves, the softer impressions of wading feet, the drag-marks of a crab crossing some hours ago and now gone under. Water pools in the deeper hollows and gives back the last colour of the sky, a thin green that will be gone when the fog arrives. A rope ladder hangs from the wall, its lowest rungs crusted with barnacles, the upper rungs pale where hands have worn them. Green weed sways in the channel below, though you cannot feel the wind that moves it.
You stop at the second lamp and rest a hand on the wall. The granite is cool here, on the landward face, where the day did not reach. Under your palm the stone is pitted and grained, and your fingers find a groove worn smooth — a channel perhaps where a mooring rope has drawn across the edge a hundred thousand times, each pass taking a thread of stone with it. An iron ring is set into the block, its paint long gone, the metal matte and red-brown, and the wood of the bollard beside it is soft at the top from weather, hard at the heart. The wall is put together from stones of many sizes, fitted by some mason who is no longer here, and whatever he knew is still holding. You walk on.
The smell changes as you move. Nearer the slipway the kelp is thick and heavy, a deep mineral scent with something sweet inside it, like old apples in a shed. Further along, past the fisherman's store, there is tar and hemp and a thread of diesel. Then the smoke again from a cottage chimney up the lane, peat or a soft wood, carrying over the slate rooftops. A window is open somewhere, and the smell of a supper — onions, perhaps butter — drifts out and is taken quickly by the seaward air. The fog arrives at your shoulder before you see it has arrived, and the smells close in with it, held low by the damp. Your coat begins to bead at the cuffs.
The buoy sounds again, further off this time, or seeming further, the fog taking the edges from the note and leaving only the middle of it. Nearer to you, under the wall, water moves in the slack channel with a sound like cloth being folded. A rope creaks where a boat shifts against its fender. From the open door of the net-loft comes the soft tick of something cooling — a stove perhaps, banked for the night — and the low murmur of a radio too quiet to be words. A sheep calls once from the hill behind the village and is not answered. The third lamp comes on with a small electrical sigh, and for a moment you hear the filament settle.
The harbor curves here, and you follow it. The wall narrows to a path of flagstones, each one cupped at its centre by the feet of those who walked this way to the end of the pier and back, morning and evening, for longer than anyone kept count. A coil of new rope lies beside an older one, the new pale gold, the old bleached almost white, both laid in the same clockwise turn. A wooden crate holds glass floats, the green kind, netted in twine; the netting has greyed and softened but the glass is still clear where the evening gets to it. A cat sits on a barrel further along, watching the water, its tail folded around its feet. It does not turn as you pass, only blinks once, slowly, and returns to the watching.
At the end of the pier the last lamp stands over a short flight of stone steps that go down into the dark. The lowest steps are below the usual water and green with weed, but tonight they are bare, and you can see how each one has been carved hollow in the middle by generations of boots and boat-hooks and the dragging of creels. The iron handrail is smooth under your hand, warmed by its own slow conduction from somewhere within the stone. You look out and there is nothing now beyond the edge of the pier but grey — a soft, close grey that lifts and settles without a wind behind it. Somewhere inside it the water is still there, and the boats, and the channel markers winking red and green at their patient intervals, but the fog has taken all that for itself for now and you stand at the edge of what you can see.
You turn and walk back the way you came. The village is a line of warm windows through the thinning fog, and the lamps that were lit for you before are lit for you again, in reverse, the fourth and the third and the second and the first. The tide has not yet turned, though it will soon; there is that held quality to the water, a stillness that is a pause and not a stopping, the sea gathering itself below the line of the wall. Down in the channel, where the rope ladder disappears into dark, a small fish rises and takes something from the surface and is gone with a ring of water that widens and widens and meets the stone.
Back at the slipway you sit for a moment on a stone bench set into the wall. The seat is cold through your coat, and the back of the bench holds a little of the day's warmth still. A moth comes to the lamp above and makes its soft circles, touches the glass, drifts off, returns. The fog has thickened enough now that the far end of the pier, where you stood only minutes ago, is gone, and the last lamp is a pale bloom in the grey. The buoy sounds once more, softer, a sound that seems to come through water rather than air. A boat shifts. A rope creaks. Somewhere up the lane a door is opened and closed again, and then the village settles back into its own quiet.
You rise and walk the last short stretch towards the harbor gate. The gulls have gone to their ledges on the cliff. The kelp smell is mixed now with the colder smell that comes off the sea at night, a smell like wet iron. The flagstones give under your feet with the small sounds they have always given, and the lamps hold their circles of yellow against the closing grey. At the gate the hinge is heavy and slow, and you draw it to behind you with a hand that knows by now how much pressure the old latch wants. The iron drops into its keep with a quiet fall.
Beyond the gate the lane rises gently between stone walls furred with moss and the hanging threads of old ivy. The fog is thinner here, inland, and you can see a first star somewhere above the slate roofs, pale and uncertain. The sound of the water grows faint behind you, not gone, only lowered, as if someone had turned a dial by a small degree. Your footsteps soften on the damp grit of the lane. A lamp burns in a cottage window; another, further up, goes out. The harbor keeps on with what it does in the dark — the slow return of water to the channels, the lifting of keels from the mud, the small steady breath of a place that has been doing this for a very long time — and the fog folds in behind you, quietly, and the lane goes on