Still Life, With Legs

The crab had a cream-coloured shell with three brown bands and no respect for portraiture. Each time I got the angle of the opening right, it turned round.

I was lying on a dry slab beside a rock pool, with the notebook propped against my forearm. Behind me, steps led directly up to the promenade. The sea was low. I had checked the tide board at the top and chosen somewhere I could leave without crossing a channel, though this precaution had done nothing for the comfort of my ribs.

The pool was about the size of a kitchen sink. A fringe of brown weed leaned into it. Beneath that, the rock fell away into greenish shadow, which the crab visited whenever I began to feel pleased with the drawing.

I had come down for the smell. Warm stone, salt, the dark smell of stranded weed: enough to turn a short walk into a considerable delay. From above, the pools had looked empty. Now I could make out a translucent shrimp, several snails and something under the ledge that might have been another crab. I wrote might beside it. This was also a reasonable description of the drawing.

My principal model emerged backwards, dragging its shell over a little ridge. One claw gripped the rock. The legs found purchase, the shell tilted, and the whole arrangement passed over the obstruction with a delicate scrape.

I could have lifted it across in a second. It would not have improved either of our afternoons.

Instead I shifted the notebook and tried drawing the claw first.

The shell belonged to a different animal's earlier life. A snail had made it; a hermit crab was using it to protect a soft, vulnerable abdomen. The walking apparatus projecting from the opening made the borrowed shape seem briefly improbable. I drew the bands again, then stopped. I had given it the broad, solid body of an ordinary shore crab as well as the shell. Too much crab. I crossed out the extra body and looked properly.

“Have you lost something?”

A man stood on the steps with a square lunch tin under one arm. He wore work trousers and a shirt with the sleeves rolled evenly to the elbow. There was a little white paint on one boot.

“Not yet.”

He looked down into the pool.

“Good place for it.”

He sat on the bottom step, well above the water, and opened the tin. Inside were two sandwiches, a tomato and a teaspoon. He removed the spoon and examined it with no apparent pleasure.

“Yoghurt's in the fridge,” he said.

I made room on the slab, but he shook his head and settled against the railing. The steps were out of the wind. He had thirty minutes before returning to a job further along the front, and wanted to spend as little of them as possible moving.

We watched the crab. It reached a tuft of weed and vanished beneath it.

“Drawing it?”

I showed him.

He chewed thoughtfully.

“Looks fast.”

“That's the crossings-out.”

The sun went behind a cloud. For a moment the pool lost the reflection that had been getting between me and the bottom. There were small things moving everywhere. A speck travelled along a stem; another held still in open water, too small for me to identify. I had been staring so closely at one shell that I had stopped seeing most of the pool.

Beside the weed, a submerged anemone held a ring of fine tentacles open. Above the waterline, another had folded into a dull little lump, with bits of shell adhering to it. Closing up helped it retain moisture while exposed. This small stretch of shore spent its life alternating between immersion and air; even the water left in the hollows could change in temperature, saltiness and oxygen as it waited for the sea.

I put my pen down. The open anemone was doing something at its centre, but the reflected cloud returned before I could tell what. For a little while I moved my head by fractions, trying to find the view again.

The man offered me the second sandwich.

“Cheese.”

“Thank you.”

“There's mustard.”

There was. It arrived some distance ahead of the cheese.

He told me about the door he was painting. Four coats already, counting the ones he had removed. The customer wanted it blue, but not that blue. There were apparently more blues available than he had anticipated when quoting.

I asked which colour he would choose.

“Whatever colour she wants when I'm finished.”

He took the tomato out of his tin and ate it whole, with considerable concentration. I returned to the pool. The crab was climbing the same ridge from the other side. Perhaps it was a different crab. The bands looked right, but I had not watched the weed continuously. I put a small question mark beside the next sketch.

A gull landed on the railing above us. The man closed his tin before it had quite settled. We had both been watching the wrong creature.

After lunch he stood, brushed crumbs from his trousers and said he hoped I found whatever it was. I wished him luck with the blue. He went up the steps carrying his spoon.

I stayed a few minutes longer. Then the wind changed and a cold edge reached my wrists. I packed the notebook and pen, checked the bare place where I had been lying, and went back up to the promenade before the returning tide narrowed the beach.

At a bench above the steps I opened the drawing again. Three shells, several incompatible claws, one reasonably convincing tuft of weed. Across the bottom of the page was a thin smear of mustard.

I let it dry in the sun while I watched a man at a doorway hold two blue cards against the wood.