Something flashed in the corner of her eye. On the bedside table, the light had caught something silver. She reached over and picked it up. It was Jack’s Zippo. Idly, she tried to light it but it was water damaged and couldn’t spark. Still, she kept it in her hand, feeling the cool of the smooth metal in her palm. She wondered if Jack had also called to the house. Her body remembered him and she imagined him here in her bed, pulling up the white cotton of her nightdress and she shivered with an uneasy pleasure.

Mrs Timms had been feeding her titbits of information about the devastation wrought on the town but it was obvious she was keeping most of it back. The torpedo boat perched on the quayside, pigs found squealing in garden trees, even the gruesome discovery of the body of a poor child dangling from a bush. All these were told with hushed relish but nothing about the farm itself and the losses here. Her father had only peered in from the door, nodded and left. Sometimes she would wake and Peter would be slumped in a chair by the window, his eyes closed. When he felt her gaze on him he would open his eyes and the look they exchanged told her not to ask too much. What she’d gleaned was that the bottom half of the land was still inundated by corrosive seawater, while the top section nearest the house was left wrecked by debris and salt. The cowshed had been ripped open by the force of the surge and Peter couldn’t save about half – twenty of the herd – from drowning. Many of his beloved Friesians were dead. Some of the hens had been found floating on a haystack. And over by the beach, the pine trees had been battered and the Jubilee Café had been swept away completely. She took all this in, passed on in hurried fragments, as if he was a long way away in another world. Far more urgently, she wanted to ask him about Jack and about Arthur but it was impossible. She hadn’t forgotten the morning with Arthur – so long ago now it felt like an age. That day was a maelstrom of contradictions that she couldn’t bear to examine.

Sometimes she heard whispers outside her door.