December 1986

It’s a cold clear afternoon in Keldy Forest where Ben is lighting a wood-burning stove in an A-frame chalet he’s hired for a long weekend away with his newly pregnant wife, Frankie. Ben wants the chalet to be toasty when he returns from Malton railway station with her. Wife and husband are elated about the coming birth of their first child. Suddenly he’s overcome with emotion; choking back his tears, he makes a vow: Frankie, whatever comes to pass I will always love you. He laughs at himself for being so maudlin. 

It’s All Hallows’ Eve. The moon is new and the stars are bright on a cold clear night. Trick and Treaters are long asleep in bed. For a bet, Lucien, slightly drunk, is spending the night alone at the end of the pier. He’s not superstitious, but the stories of the haunted pier on this night of nights have left him on edge. He drinks from a whisky flask.

The tide is out and a vast expanse of glistening mud stretches beyond the end of the Victorian pier to the mouth of the estuary. For the first time, Lucien sees that the mud flats are not flat but full of ridges, hummocks and rills running with streaming water into gullies deep in the mud. He’s astounded that the moonlight is so bright and the mud is beautiful.

David, in his early seventies, is finally preparing his mother’s home for sale. It’s a great sadness to him that he never managed to persuade her to move to a smaller property rather than her large Victorian house. She’d been alone in it for fifty years since his father’s death until her own recent death in her nineties. Her loss still feels raw. No matter how hard David tried, she refused to move; there was always a good reason or an excuse that allowed a further postponement. David finds it ironic that he’s now in the same situation; his children are pressing him and their mother to downsize. He wonders if they know that the familiar makes life more comfortable.