Chapter Two

The storms continued through October and into November, driv­ing bigger and bigger tides ashore. The waves forced over the fields; they tore up the hedges, broke down the walls and left the grass whitened by salt and the scouring of sand. All day and all night, at high or low water, the wind hurtled off the sea. It was very cold. The sky was grey, boiling with black cloud.

Harry’s efforts to barricade the house proved futile. The front door burst open as soon as the sea leaned on it, and the waves poured into the hallway. Again and again, all the rooms were flooded. The water came higher and the gales grew stronger, until the shut­ters blew in, the windows exploded in splinters of flying glass and the storm roared into the house more fiercely than ever before. The tide slopped up to the third step on the handsome staircase; another night it slopped at the fourth; then the fifth. The cellar boomed, filling with water which forced up the floorboards so hard that the trap door would open and shut with a sudden, startling report. It was no good trying to keep the sea outside or clearing the debris once the tide had gone down. So Harry surrendered the ground floor of the house completely.

The rooms filled up with deeper sand and bigger banks of pebbles, forming pools which didn’t drain when the sea receded. Soon, the living room, the drawing room and the dining room were part of the foreshore, bizarrely furnished with tables, chairs, grandfather clock and piano. Furthermore, the sea began a systematic removal job, the better to occupy the house with the things it wanted . . .

Coming downstairs after another night of huddling under the bedcovers, Harry found that most of the furniture had been carried outside. Tables and chairs had been lifted up, swirled about, floated through the hallway and sucked out of the front door by the falling tide. They were dumped in the fields. His books were scattered in the hedges. Seeing that the grandfather clock was miss­ing, he waded through the mud and the debris until he found it floating in a deep ditch, a hundred yards from the house. Even the piano was shifted, a foot here, a foot there, out of the living room and into the hall, until it stuck in the front door.

Harry didn’t care. Like the Daimler, these things were relics of a different life. It had been a fine grandfather clock, a longcase in oak banded with mahogany, made by James Berry in Pontefract in 1774; a solemn moon and a smiling sun rotated above the clock face; its chiming, every fifteen minutes of every hour of every day, had marked the progress of Harry’s gentle convalescence once Helen had settled him into her home. For him, the sound had been part of the house, as much as the scent of polish and cut flowers. The piano was a Bechstein baby grand, which, along with the flute, Helen had been learning to play. The trompe l’oeil painting of a blazing fire, executed with such depth of perspective on the oak panelling that it cast a glow right across the living room, was by Rex Whistler, done at the same time as the artist was working at Plas Newydd for the Marquis of Anglesey. Now it was ruined. All these things were ruined.

No matter, Harry thought: let the sea smash everything, drag out the contents of the house and replace them with the sand and stones and weed it brought in. No matter, he mumbled to himself as he stared at the wreckage. Ynys Elyrch was a trompe l’oeil. From a distance it looked like a fine, handsome house: in reality, it was a piece of the beach, for the sea to requisition and rearrange as it liked. And Harry Clewe was a trompe l’oeil as well, he thought bitterly: he looked like a man, but he was a fossil, stiff and cold, with all the life crushed out of him . . . as dead as the ammonite on the mantelpiece.

He waded from room to room. As well as the dead birds en­tangled in the weed and branches, Harry found some of them still alive: a gull, its wings broken or its legs wrapped up in plastic string, sculling around the hallway like an overwound clockwork toy; a curlew, lying in the wreckage and panting as though its waterlogged body would burst; a duck, garrotting itself with a length of fishing line. He knocked them dead with the ammonite he fetched from the living room mantelpiece and slung them to the dogs, which crunched them in their heavy jaws and swallowed them whole, beaks and feet and feathers and all.

After the wildest of storms, the house was loud with hundreds of starlings which had blown inside for shelter. Carrion crows worked through the shattered rooms for all the wounded and dying things they could find.

Another morning, there was a sheep in the flooded drawing room, matted and heaving, staring with wild, yellow eyes. Its front legs were broken. Harry slugged it with the ammonite. Replacing the fossil on the mantelpiece, he floated the sheep into the hall, manoeuvred it past the Bechstein jammed in the doorway, into the yard, where he gutted it with a very sharp knife. He fetched the axe from the Daimler and dismembered the carcase. The dogs watched and waited, and then they fell on the pieces, devouring them entirely. Soon, only the fleece and the head remained, which Harry dropped into the cellar.

Such was the power of the sea. Such was the ferocity of the storm. Night after night, Harry Clewe lay in his bed, buried with Gog and Magog under the blankets, and felt the house shaking.

Harry made himself comfortable upstairs. He carried sacks of potatoes up to the landing and all the tinned and dried food he could find in the kitchen. He cooked on a little gas stove. He had boxes of candles. The spare bedroom he’d used since Helen had gone, with its narrow bed and single armchair, had an open fireplace; now, working through the blustery hours of daylight, he gathered armfuls of driftwood, sawed it and split it in the yard and carried it up to the bathroom, where he stacked it in the deep, rusty bath. He would never run out of fuel, as long as the tides brought him more and more wood to cut and store, and there was plenty of kindling in the furniture that the sea had smashed. One evening, giggling at the irony of it, he prised the remains of the Whistler from the living room wall and took it upstairs, where, for the first and only time, the trompe l’oeil was a real fire, casting a warm glow on his face.

All day and all night, the flames flickered in the spare bedroom. Harry and the dogs were snug up there, however the storm might roar, however the tide might drive into the house, however the rain might lash his window. He rescued a few books from the drawing room. He had his radio. He battened himself into the little room while the house trembled around him, while the sea swelled and surged at the foot of the stairs.

Furthermore, Harry had a double-barrelled shotgun and boxes of cartridges. Squelching across the fields, he would pot at the wildfowl on the shore. And then the dogs, which could still swim strongly although they were old and arthritic, would retrieve whatever he’d hit. He gutted the birds in his ruined hallway and fed the entrails to Gog and Magog. In the evening, as the tide rolled over the fields and filled the house to a depth of four or five feet, Harry and the dogs were shut in the candle-lit bedroom. A fire blazed in the hearth; a teal turned golden brown on a spit across the flames; a pan of vegetables bubbled on the gas stove.

Sometimes, when the tide was up in the daylight and Harry was in his room with dogs and fire and radio, he shot from the landing window. And then Gog and Magog would tumble downstairs, dive headlong into the water sloshing in the hallway and swim powerfully through the front door to retrieve the prize. For this reason, Harry left the gun loaded, leaning on the landing, ready for the rafts of duck which floated around the house.

Thus he was self-sufficient. For him, the flooding wasn’t so terrible. He’d been alone for years, a recluse, avoiding other people as much as possible; now the floods made it easier to avoid them. He was rude to the coastguards when they came back in their Land-Rover. When the yellow rescue helicopter from Anglesey hovered overhead, churning the water and lashing the fields, he would flap his hand and gesture with his hook as though the huge, deafening machine were no more than an irritating insect, a gigantic horsefly or a hornet, until it swerved away without bothering to try and land.

Harry had everything he wanted. He didn’t want people. The floods kept them away.