Devices and Desires Read Online Free Page A

the coastal road onto what was little more than a smoothly macadamed track bordered by water-filled ditches and fringed by a golden haze of reeds, their lumbered heads straining in the wind. And now, for the first time, he thought that he could smell the North Sea, that potent but half-illusory tang evoking nostalgic memories of childhood holidays, of solitary adolescent walks as he struggled with his first poems, of his aunt’s tall figure at his side, binoculars round her neck, striding towards the haunts of her beloved birds. And here, barring the road, was the familiar old farm gate still in place. Its continued presence always surprised him, since it served no purpose that he could see except symbolically to cut off the headland and to give travellers pause to consider whether they really wanted to continue. It swung open at his touch, but closing it, as always, was more difficult, and he lugged and half-lifted it into place and slipped the circle of wire over the gatepost with a familiarsensation of having turned his back on the workaday world and entered country which, no matter how frequent his visits, would always be alien territory.
    He was driving now across the open headland towards the fringe of pine trees which bordered the North Sea. The only house to his left was the old Victorian rectory, a square, red-bricked building, incongruous behind its struggling hedge of rhododendron and laurel. To his right the ground rose gently towards the southern cliffs. He could see the dark mouth of a concrete pillbox, undemolished since the war, and as seemingly indestructible as the great hulks of wave-battered concrete, remnants of the old fortifications which lay half-submerged in the sand along part of the beach. To the north the broken arches and stumps of the ruined Benedictine abbey gleamed golden in the afternoon sun against the crinkled blue of the sea. Breasting a small ridge, he glimpsed for the first time the topsail of Larksoken Mill and beyond it, against the skyline, the great grey bulk of Larksoken Nuclear Power Station. The road he was on, veering left, would lead eventually to the station but was, he knew, seldom used, since normal traffic and all heavy vehicles used the new access road to the north. The headland was empty and almost bare; the few straggling trees, distorted by the wind, struggled to keep their precarious hold in the uncompromising soil. And now he was passing a second and more dilapidated pillbox, and it struck him that the whole headland had the desolate look of an old battlefield, the corpses long since carted away but the air vibrating still with the gunfire of long-lost battles, while the power station loomed over it like a grandiose modern monument to the unknown dead.
    On his previous visits to Larksoken he had seen Martyr’s Cottage spread out beneath him when he and his aunt hadstood surveying the headland from the small top room under the cone of the mill. But he had never been closer to it than the road, and now, driving up to it, it struck him again that the description “cottage” was hardly appropriate. It was a substantial two-storey, L-shaped house standing to the east of the track, with walls partly flint and partly rendered, enclosing at the rear a courtyard of York stone which gave an uninterrupted view over fifty yards of scrub to the grassy dunes and the sea. No one appeared as he drew up and, before lifting his hand to the bell, he paused to read the words of a stone plaque embedded in the flints to the right of the door.
    I N A COTTAGE ON THIS SITE LIVED A GNES P OLEY , P ROTESTANT MARTYR ,
BURNED AT I PSWICH, 15TH A UGUST 1557, AGED 32 YEARS .
E CCLESIASTES C HAPTER 3, V ERSE 15 .
    The plaque was unadorned, the letters deeply carved in an elegant script reminiscent of Eric Gill, and Dalgliesh remembered his aunt telling him that it had been placed there by previous owners in the late 1920s when the cottage was originally extended. One of the advantages of a