The town after the season leaves

The season does not end here on a date. It ends on a sound, or rather the loss of one. One morning the machine behind the front counter is silent before nine, and you understand the town has quietly changed hands again, back to the people who actually live in it. I have been keeping a list this week of the things a place does when the visitors go. I recommend it as a habit. You learn more about a town in its off weeks than in all of a loud August.

The gulls move inland. They know before we do that the chip papers have stopped coming, and they stand about on the church roof looking unemployed and faintly aggrieved, a workforce laid off for the winter with no notice given.

The sea gets louder. Nothing has changed about the water. It is only that the arcade has pulled its shutter and the pier has switched off its tinny little song, and into that new quiet the tide comes up the shingle at night sounding enormous, the way it must have sounded to everyone here before there was anything built to drown it out.

The last ferry keeps a different, sulkier timetable. In July it leaves when it is full. In September it leaves when the board says it will, half empty, and the man who takes the fares has time to talk and chooses not to, which I have always respected in a person.

The greengrocer starts saying your name again. All summer he is efficient and blank, a man moving strangers through a queue. Now he leans on the crates and asks after your mother, and you realise he has known who you are the entire time and simply put it away for three months, the way you might store the good chairs.

One house on the harbour road stays lit later than it should. I will not tell you which. I only mention it because the light was not on all summer, and it is on now, at hours when the rest of the road has gone dark, and a person whose whole living is made from noticing the wrong small thing cannot help but notice it.

That is the trouble with an off season. The town gets quiet enough to hear itself, and once a place is that quiet you start to catch the one note in it that does not fit. Probably it is nothing. A relative come to stay. A late reader who cannot sleep. I have written enough books to know that the light is almost always nothing.

Almost is a word I have never fully trusted. I will keep the list going, and I will let you know if the nothing turns into something. In a town this size it usually does, eventually, and never on a date you could have marked.

Off-season places keep the best secrets. In The Winter Guest Book, a family's old seaside inn gives up a guest book from the winter of 1994, hidden beneath the boards of Room Four, with one page carefully torn out.