His cousins crept on slippered feet; clocks ticked. His uncle sat at his desk, making up accounts; his aunt slid her knitting down the cushion of her chair. She sat and stared at him, a bloodless woman the image of his mother; her pale lips moved. ‘You should get out, Ralph. Go on the bus. Go up the coast a bit. A boy needs fresh air.’
Ralph left the house. He took the first bus he saw out of the town. It was a normal, hostile east coast day; no one else was on a pleasure jaunt. There were points where the road hugged the coast; a few isolated houses tumbled away towards a sea less glimpsed than felt, towards an impression of sliding subsiding rocks, of coal boats and fishing boats, of salt and chill.
He got off the bus. The place was nowhere he knew. The weather now was overcast but blustery; chinks of blue sky showed here and there, like cracks in a thick white basin. He fastened his coat, as his aunt, if she had seen him, would have enjoined him; and he wrapped his despised muffler around his throat. He descended a hill, one-in-four, and saw before him the cold sweep of a bay.
The tide was going out. A solitary walker picked his way along the cliffs. In the middle distance were other figures, with rucksacks and boots; their heads were down, their eyes searching the sands. Ralph, too, lowered his eyes to his shoes, and threaded his way among the seaweed and rock pools.
Ralph had gone twenty yards towards the ocean. Its sound was subdued, congruous, a rustle not a roar. He bent down and plucked from the sand at his feet what he took to be some muddy stone. A sharp pang of delight took hold of him, a feeling that was for a moment indistinguishable from fear. He had picked up a fossil: a ridged, grey-green curl, glassy and damp like a descending wave. It lay in his palm: two inches across, an inch and a half at its crest.
He stood still, examining it and turning it over. Inside it was a gentle hollow; he saw that it was a kind of shell, smoothness concealed beneath grit and silt. He looked up across the beach. The melancholy and windblown figures wheeled towards him, and came within hailing distance. They closed in on him, with their ribbed stockings and their cold-weather complexions.
There was a woman among them, her sharp nose scarlet above a swaddling of scarves. She stared at the fossil in his hand; she pulled off her gloves, hauled them off with her teeth. He dropped the fossil into her hand. She turned it over and back again, ran her forefinger down its mottled curve, feeling the ridges. She laid it against her face; she tasted it with her tongue. ‘Gryphaea,’ she said. ‘Don’t you know?’
He shook his head; stood before her, like the dumb unconverted heathen. ‘It’s a bivalve – like an oyster, you know?’
‘Oh, yes.’ He was disappointed; something so ordinary after all.
She said, ‘It’s a hundred and fifty million years old.’ He stared at her. ‘You know how an oyster lives in its shell? This is the ancestor of oysters.’ He nodded. ‘It lived here when the sea was warm – if you can imagine that. Here was its soft body, inside this shell, with its heart and blood vessels and gills. When it died all those soft parts rotted, and the sand filled up the cavity. And then the sand compacted and turned into rock.’
There was a circle of people around them, their breath streaming on the air, eyes fixed on her hand; they were coveting what he had found, as if it were a jewel. ‘The sea moved,’ a man said. His face was a raw ham beneath a bobble hat. ‘I mean to say, what had been sea became land. But now the sea’s eating away the land again – all this east coast,’ he waved his arm, gesturing towards the Wash – ‘you can see it going in your lifetime.’
A man in a balaclava – green, ex-army – said, ‘I served with a bloke from Suffolk whose grandfather had a smallholding, and it’s in the sea now. Whole churchyards have gone down the cliff. Whole graveyards, and the bones washed out.’
The woman said, ‘You’ve stopped this little creature, my dear. On its way back to the sea where it came from.’
‘When it was alive – ’
‘Yes?’
‘What did it eat?’
‘It cemented itself on the sea-bed, and sucked in water. It got its nourishment from that, from the larvae in the water, you see. It had a stomach, kidneys, intestines, everything you have.’
‘Could it think?’
‘Well, can an oyster think these days? What would an oyster have to think about?’
He blushed. Stupid question. What he had meant to say was, are you sure it was alive? Can you truly swear to me that it was? ‘Are these rare?’ he asked.
‘Not if you want a smashed-up one. Not if you’re content with fragments.’
The woman held his find for a moment, clenched and concealed in her fist; then put it into his outstretched palm, and worked her fingers back painfully into her gloves. She wanted the fossil so much that he almost gave it to her; but then, he wanted it himself. Bobble-hat said, ‘I’ve been coming here man and boy, and never got anything as good as that. Two-a-penny brachiopods, that’s what I get. Sometimes I think we’re looking so hard we can’t see.’
‘Beginner’s luck,’ the balaclava said. He stabbed a woolly finger at the object he craved. ‘Do you know what they call them? Devil’s toenails.’ He chuckled. ‘I reckon you can see why.’
Ralph looked down at the fossil and almost dropped it. Saw the thick, ridged, ogreish curve, that greenish, sinister sheen…All the way home in the bus he forced himself to hold the object in his hand, his feelings seesawing between attraction and repulsion; wondering how he could have found it, when he was not looking at all.
When he arrived at the house he was very cold and slightly nauseated. He smiled at the cousin who let him in and said he had better go upstairs right away and wash his hands. ‘Did you enjoy yourself, love?’ his aunt asked; he gave a monosyllabic reply, a polite mutter which translated to nothing. The ticking of the parlour clock was oppressive, insistent; he could imagine it buried in the earth, ticking away for a hundred and fifty million years. He took his place on one of the leather chairs, and wondered about the animal whose back the leather had adorned: what skin, what hair, what blood through living veins? His aunt quibbled about how the table had been laid, twitching the fish knives about with her forefinger. Smoked haddock came, with its thin-cut bread and butter, a pale juice oozing across the plate. He ate a flake or two, then put down his fork. His aunt said, ‘No appetite?’ He thought of the bones spilled down the cliff, into the salty whispering of the tides; Gryphaea sucking in its nourishment, the aeons rolling by, the devil walking abroad.
His mother made Satan into the likeness of some strict schoolmaster: ‘The devil finds work for idle hands to do.’
The toenail was upstairs, locked in his suitcase.
When Ralph came home from Yorkshire, he and Emma played their Bible games. They always played them when they had some decision to make. Now Emma said, ‘I want to decide whether when I grow up I’m going to be a doctor or a lawyer, or just a broody hen who stays at home like my mama.’
You were supposed to pick a verse at random, and it would give you guidance; but you needed a keen imagination to make anything of the verses they turned up. ‘Try this one,’ Emma said. “‘And thou shalt anoint the laver and his foot, and sanctify it.” Exodus 40:11. Very helpful, I’m sure.’ She began to sing a hymn of her own composition: ‘How daft the name of Jesus sounds…’
Ralph took out the fossil from his coat pocket, where he was keeping it for the while. ‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘It’s the devil’s toenail.’
Emma gave a startled wail. ‘It’s