He’d been drinking so heavily the flood must have risen around him without him knowing. Was it because of her? Her rational self knew that this was how he’d been since her mother died, but she’d heard the catch in his voice when he said ‘Your mother’. And she’d let the door shut on his face. When she tried to wake him to get him upstairs, he jerked and grouched and called her ‘bloody woman’ and she wondered if he’d spoken to her mother that way. She got him upstairs, with his arm around her neck, holding him up and cajoling him. Her arms ached with the weight of him. He was not an old man, and still strong from the farm, his arms ruddy and thick, but drink weakened him and he stumbled with slow effort up to his bedroom. They didn’t need to retreat to the old servants’ quarters in the attic to be safe from the flood, she decided. The house was strong, and with its position of power, the water could not get up there. She laid him down on the bed that had been his alone for the past year and a half, pulled a cover over him. He turned away from her, without a word, and slept.

For a minute after she shut the door on him she sank down on the landing and had to hold onto the banister to keep herself from lying down. Why couldn’t he look after her? Why did he have to make her feel so guilty?

Back down the stairs, she felt her way through the cold floodwater in the dark to the pantry. Leaning against the cool wall, she was overcome with nauseous hunger and took some bread and cheese in a napkin. Clutching it, she returned upstairs and along the landing to her own room, which overlooked the back fields to the sea. Through the window she could just see the sea above the pine trees, churning and foaming in the moonlight. Out in the fields somewhere was Peter. And somewhere else, Jack. Was he thinking of her? She closed her eyes in a silent prayer. For all that she was a hypocrite, maybe God would listen. Save Peter. Save us. Save the farm. Save Jack. And Arthur too, she added at the end. She sat down in the window seat and picked at her bread, looking down over the flood. A lookout in a crow’s nest, watching a seastorm.

Her heart beat hard. There was a crazed beauty to the storm. It was almost miraculous, the way it took away all the mess of life, sweeping all in its path. A biblical flood. A kind of cleansing. She wondered if her mother had thought that when she’d swum into the sea for the last time.

*

Third breach of the sea wall: close to the town next to the old lifeboat house