It was as if the day had been folded over upon itself, grey and seamless.

Down at the water’s edge, where the granite drops into the cold green slide of the trough, there was no beginning and no end to the motion. The sea came up with a long, sighing hiss, wetting the dry weed, then drew back with a sound like silk tearing, leaving the ribbed sand bare for the space of a heartbeat before the next stroke erased it.

One stroke; then another. It went on whether anyone watched or not, yet it seemed to require an eye.

Standing on the rock, she felt the smallness of the self against that unhurried rhythm. Thoughts did not travel in straight lines here; they pooled and eddied like foam in a rock-basin. For a moment, fifty years of ledgers and books seemed no more substantial than the vanishing crest; then she remembered a page she had never answered.

Still the stroke continued. The wave gathered itself out in the deep water, lifted its dark shoulder against the horizon, and fell, grinding the shell-grit to powder and leaving shell-grit in the hollows as the trough drained.

Against that wall of water the house stood like a shell left high on the drift-line.

The wind came off the paddocks, carrying the smell of eucalyptus and dry gum-leaves, and rattled the iron roof with a thin, percussive chatter. Inside, the rooms held a green, subaqueous light filtered through the low banksias.

Things remained where they had been left: on the deal table, the abandoned cup had dried to a pale ring within. The boards shrank under the sun; salt bit into the iron latches until one stiff casement would no longer close; the furniture creaked in the dark as if remembering the forest where the timber had grown.

Outside, the light shifted from the pale gold of morning to the hard silver of noon, then to the long purple shadow that creeps across the sand-spits when the southerly begins to gather off the cape.

Nothing stayed quite the same. A leaf fell. A spider drew its geometry across the glass. A gannet dropped like a weight into the green swell beyond the reef, while the waves resumed their measure, never quite repeating the interval of the break before.

As the sky turned the colour of bruised slate and the first stars pricked through the dusk, the eye on the headland awoke.

It did not hurry. With slow, measured turns the beam swept the dark contour of the bight—a long finger of light that rested for an instant on the white foam of the bar, touched the hollows of the dunes, and passed on into the empty night.

To those sitting in the dark room, listening to the muffled thunder of the surf, each flash was a punctuation in an unreadable sentence. It said now. It said here.

Then the beam crossed the window. The white rim of the abandoned cup flashed out against the dark table; then the room was black again, and the next wave broke against the stone.