If he went outside, Tom knew exactly how the moorland would look under the onslaught of rain, knew how the grasses would be blown flat, how the sea would be turbulent and grey, half hidden by the dense mist. He knew too how the landscape would transform once the weather cleared, the dark clouds swept away with disconcerting suddenness and the sun coming through, everywhere the colour changing, the grassland turning green again and the sea and sky a bright blue. When the weather changed here, it changed fast. But while it was like this, you couldn’t imagine it ever being another way. The storm was as much a fact of the landscape as the sea was.

Tom began to feel the weather closing in on him. There were gusts of anxiety moving through his body, but he was only tired, he told himself. His sleep had been fitful. He tried lying down on his bed to rest, but couldn’t relax as the wind howled and rumbled outside. It was making the windows rattle in their frames. Even the cottage walls seemed to shake with it, though Tom knew this must be in his head.

Abruptly, he pushed himself up off the bed and went downstairs again. Keep moving, he thought. But there was nowhere to go. In front of the living-room window, he pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. He wished Malcolm would come back. His thoughts were moving beyond his control. The laundry, the dislocated shoulder, his mother’s red hair—he’d lost her face again.

The whole cottage creaked and groaned as the wind surged around its walls. Tom could almost picture the wind itself, bank after bank of taut, violent air rushing against the walls. He had forgotten it could be like this, how you could feel that all the elements were raging against you. He imagined the cottage collapsing on him, Malcolm coming home to a pile of rubble, finding Tom bloodied and broken beneath it.

The danger of this kind of storm: it took you out of time. Tom leaned his forehead against the window to feel the shock of the cold glass. He tried to take careful, deep breaths. Closer and closer the weather came, until he felt the storm around his face, in his ears, in his body and his brain.