I walked through the dunes and came to the shore. There was still a beach here, of sorts, but it sloped sharply away, soon disappearing under the restless sea. The erosion here had been relentless. Even the dunes seemed to have been eaten away. Here and there I saw stretches of a grayer mud, like a stretch of sea-bottom, not a beach at all. Driftwood and scattered bits of plastic garbage littered the shore, and I passed great reefs of dead seaweed, dug out by storms and stranded. The reefs were the source of that salty smell of decay I’d detected earlier. Bugs swarmed everywhere, not just mosquitoes but tiny little bastards that threw themselves at my exposed flesh. Insects, the great winners of the years of the Die-back.

The sea looked beautiful, as it always did, even if, stirred up by the endless storms, it was not quite so blue as it used to be. It was hard to believe the sea had done so much damage.

I found a dune that was resisting the ravages of time with the help of some toughly bound grass. In its shelter the sand was clean and even reasonably dry. I squatted down and began to scoop sand into my sacks. It was late afternoon by now. I was looking into the sun, which was declining to the southwest, to my front right.

That was when I saw her.

It was just something in the corner of my eye, a bit of motion that distracted me. I thought it might be a rare sighting of a seabird, or maybe it was just the sun playing on the lapping water. I stood up to see better. It was a woman. She was a long way down the beach, and the light reflected from the sea behind her was bright and sent dazzling highlights stabbing into my eyes.

Morag?

I was never frightened by these encounters, or visitations. There was no sense of fear, or dread. But there was always ambiguity, muddle, uncertainty. It might have been Morag, my long-dead wife, or it might not.