The window is open by the width of a hand, and the air that comes in is warm and salted, with the dry green smell of grass that has been in the sun all day. You are sitting by the window on the seaward side, your bag on the seat beside you, your shoulder leaning lightly into the panelling. The carriage is half-empty. A woman further down has taken her shoes off and tucked her feet under her, reading. The train is moving at the speed of a thing in no hurry, the kind of pace that lets the rails sound out their slow two-beat under the floor. Outside, a hawthorn hedge is going past. Then a gap. Then the sea.
The sea, when it shows itself, is pale blue, milky almost, the colour of the inside of a shell. Far out, three or four long flat lines of darker swell are drawn across it like pencil marks, parallel, patient, moving in toward the cliffs at a rate the eye can barely fix. Closer in, the water is plainer and brighter. A small white boat sits very still on it, far enough out that you cannot see anyone on board, only the upright stroke of its mast. The cliff edge passes between you and the water in long ragged bites of yellow grass and pink thrift and crumbling chalk, and then the hedge closes again and there is only the green tunnel of hawthorn going by, and the warm rush of air, and the rails.
The train slows for no reason you can see, and the sound of it changes. The two-beat gets longer, lazier, almost reluctant. Somewhere ahead a gull is calling, one note repeated, and then another gull joins it from further off, lower in pitch, and the two voices drift around each other above the line of the cliffs. A sheep coughs, very close, in the field on the inland side. You turn your head. The field rises gently away from the track, cropped short, dotted with sheep that have arranged themselves in the shade of a single broad sycamore. One of them lifts its head and looks at the train without much interest and lowers it again. The grass around the tree is paler than the rest of the field, worn by hooves into something almost silver. Beyond the sycamore the land lifts again to a low stone wall, and beyond that the sky.
Then the hedge once more. Hawthorn, blackthorn, a tangle of bramble at the base, the white of cow parsley going to seed. The flowers are mostly past now and the leaves are dusty from the long warm weeks, dark green stippled with pale grey road dust where the lane must run close on the other side. You can see, in the gaps between the trunks, the black-and-white flicker of a magpie hopping along a fencepost, then gone. The carriage smells of the heated upholstery of its seats, a smell like warm biscuit, and underneath that the salt and the cut grass coming through the window. Your hand is resting on the windowsill where the paint is chipped down to the metal in a small oval shape. The metal is warm. The paint, where it remains, is the soft cream of railway carriages, scratched in places by rings, by buckles, by the corners of suitcases set down a long time ago.
Somewhere the line bends, and the sea swings back into view on a wider angle. Now there is more of it, a great open plate of pale water reaching to the horizon, and the horizon itself is hazed, a soft band where the blue of the sea and the blue of the sky cannot quite decide between them. The sun is well over to the west, lower than it was, and the light on the water has begun to take on a different quality, less white, more honey. Below the cliff, where you can just glimpse it, a narrow strip of beach is showing as the tide goes out. The sand is dark and wet near the water and pale and dry higher up, and the line between them is scalloped where the last waves drew themselves back. A black shape that might be a cormorant stands on a rock with its wings half open. The train passes a small disused signal box, its windows boarded, ivy climbing the side of it, and the light flashes once on a piece of glass still left in a frame, and is gone.
A station now, or the approach to one. The brakes draw a long soft note from the rails, a sound that begins almost too low to hear and rises slowly into a steady hush. The carriage rocks gently as the train slows. You see the platform sliding into view, a short concrete platform with two wooden benches and a metal sign and a planted tub of geraniums by the shelter. No one is waiting. The train comes to rest. For a few moments there is only the tick of the cooling engine somewhere underneath, and the gulls again, further off now, and a tractor working in a field beyond the road. Then a door clunks somewhere down the carriage, and a guard's voice says something quiet and unhurried that you cannot quite catch, and the doors hiss closed, and the train begins to move again, taking up its two-beat where it left off, as if it had only paused mid-sentence.
The line runs closer to the cliff edge here, and the hedge thins, and for a long stretch there is nothing between you and the sea but a strip of yellow grass with the wind moving slowly through it. The grass leans inland, leans back, leans inland again, in patches, the way a hand might pass over the nap of velvet. Out on the water, one of the long lines of swell is closer in now, and you can see it lift very slightly as it travels, a pale ridge that catches the late light along its top edge before it lays itself down again. A second white boat has appeared further along the coast, or perhaps it was always there and the angle has changed. It is not moving in any direction you can pick out. The light has gone more golden, and the cliffs ahead, where they curve out into a small headland, are lit on their seaward face in a warm ochre, the shadows on them deep blue.
The carriage is quieter now than it was. The woman further down has put her book face-down on her lap and is looking out at the sea, her chin propped on her hand. Somebody at the far end coughs once, softly, and settles again. The rails keep up their two-beat, slow, slow, and the warm air keeps coming in through the gap at the top of the window, smelling now more strongly of the sea as the train runs out along a stretch where the cliff falls almost sheer. You can hear the waves, faintly, far below — not a crash but a long slow breathing, the sound of water moving in and out of hollows in the rock. Between the breaths there is the dry sound of the grass, and the gulls, and once a skylark, very high, a thin silver thread of song let down out of the sky and drawn slowly back up again.
A hawthorn hedge again. A field with a single horse in it, standing with one back leg cocked, head low. Another hedge, then a glimpse of a stone farmhouse set back from the line, smoke going up thinly from its chimney though the day is warm, the smoke pale grey and almost straight in the still air. The light on the upper windows of the house is pink-gold now. A black-and-white dog is lying on a step, and does not lift its head as the train goes by. The line curves inland a little, and the sea slides out of view behind a rise of gorse, the gorse still flowering in patches, dull yellow against the green. You feel the carriage lean very gently into the curve, then straighten. The sea comes back. The two-beat of the rails goes on and on, and the warm air goes on coming in through the gap, and the long flat lines of swell are still there, unhurried, drawing themselves in toward a shore you cannot see from here.
The light is softening further. The honey on the water has thinned to a paler gold, and the shadows under the cliffs are longer, lying out across the beach in slow blue shapes. The white boat is further off, or the same distance, it is hard to tell. The hedge passes. A sheep field. Another hedge. The sound of the rails is a long quiet word being spoken under the floor, and the gulls are only an occasional note now, somewhere behind. The sea keeps on with its slow breathing below the cliffs, in and out, in and out, and the swell keeps drawing its long lines across the pale water, and the train goes on at its unhurried pace along the coast, and the warm air keeps coming in, smelling of salt, and grass, and the last of the day…