‘Is it gone?’ my sister asked and my mother kissed her on the head and told her it was.

‘Praise God,’ my father said but only my mother said amen.

I wanted to be out of the basement, with its acrid, dust-filled air, but my father imposed caution on us and went first. He was gone a few minutes before returning and telling us that we could come out but we were to stay close to him. We had survived but the world we knew had physically changed. A long section of our roof had gone, leaving a gaping tear where my bedroom was, my map of the world somehow still clinging defiantly to a remaining gable and all the house front windows smashed by flying objects. A surf tide of assorted debris had washed up against our walls and yard fencing simply vanished. The house seemed to lean in on itself as if hugging the open wound of the ripped roof. Our neighbours stumbled into the street, some of them rubbing their eyes as if awakened from a deep sleep or because they couldn’t trust what they were seeing. Mr Yabowski’s car was flipped on its back and their front-yard tree had fallen across the garage, with timber and cladding melding in a broken mess. Down the street a snapped power cable showered blue sparks in a startled quivering fit and everywhere smelt strange as if an electric current had surged through it. My father said ‘Praise God’ for the second time and urged us to join with him because we were safe.

But I wasn’t safe – never throughout the rest of my life was I ever to feel wholly safe. And as I looked up at my father and then at our torn home, I wanted to ask him why he hadn’t painted blood on our side posts and on the lintel, why he hadn’t done this so God would know we were his and the destroying angel might pass over us.

The years pass, if not with the blink of an eye then certainly with an increasing sense of indecent haste, but the need for a house with strong walls is embedded deep inside me and, when in retirement we came east to live by the coast, I resisted Julia’s desire to buy one of the older houses fronting the Atlantic, pointing out all the work that would be required, but not telling her my reluctance was also prompted by my apprehensions about nature unleashed, of rising tides and storms fermenting out at sea before they barrelled towards land. So in the end we bought a place a couple of streets back but close enough to feel the ocean’s incessant restlessness sift through the lineaments of our lives, walk the morning shore and, when we watched wind-tossed gulls, know we had the comfort of somewhere solid to which we could return.

But a house now with too many empty rooms, and all of them tainted with the slow seep of loneliness. A house that gradually feels as if it’s no longer shutting things out so much as shutting them in. Even the furniture that accompanied us in our many different homes, and which we eventually brought from the old world to the new, is marked by the deep patina of memory – a chair found in Portobello Road, a small table bought in a Madrid antique shop, crystal bedside lights Julia discovered in a flea market in Amsterdam. Sometimes, in passing, I let my hand touch them, as if through that brush of my fingers I might be able to rejuvenate the memories I hold of her and our life together.