Part Four: Ammonite

Chapter One

At last the sea came into the house.

It slithered under the door. Then it burst the door wide open. There was nothing Harry Clewe could do, as wave after wave of brown water, heavy with sand and mud, broke into the downstairs rooms.

All afternoon, the storm had driven the tide inland, over the foreshore, through the hedges, filling the ditches until the fields were flooded. Harry watched from an upstairs window as the sea came closer and closer. The day grew dark at three o’clock, a twi­light of howling wind and lashing rain. He saw the waves pour into the drainage ditches and fill the dew pond. He felt the wind grow stronger and stronger, rattling the slates of the roof and making the chimneys shudder. Still the tide kept rising. At four o’clock, seeing in the whirling gloom that the fields were entirely sub­merged, he went down the staircase and into the hallway in time to see the tide force its way under the front door and surge towards him. The door splintered and burst open. A few minutes later, all the downstairs rooms were slopping with deepening water.

Harry was tired. His hips were hurting. But he splashed from room to room to watch what the sea was doing inside his house. The lights had gone out. He took a torch and trod through the darkened hallway and into the living room, flashing the beam around him. There was a shrieking din of wind and rain, as though, not satisfied with driving the tide this far inland for the first time in living memory, the storm was trying to shake the house to pieces. The living room shutters, which he’d closed and bolted at midday, rattled so hard at the tall windows that he thought they would shatter and fly open. The gale howled into the house, once the front door was broken by the weight of the sea, tearing pictures from the walls and books from their shelves. The water was up to his knees, a sucking current which rammed his legs with pieces of driftwood and entangled him with weed.

He waded to the fireplace and beamed the torch from wall to wall, at the chop of the waves which tugged at the grandfather clock and slopped at the legs of the piano. To balance himself, he grabbed at the mantelpiece; on it, he felt the photograph of Helen and the cold, smooth contours of an ammonite she’d found on their honeymoon, years ago. With difficulty, afraid that he might stumble and fall, he waded back to the hallway and into the dining room, where the water was rough enough to start moving the chairs around the table; then to the drawing room, where the books had been blown from his desk and scattered across the surface of the flood.

There was nothing he could do about it. He stepped onto the staircase and switched the torch off. The wind came straight off the sea, over the fields, through the front door and into his face. He was drenched and very cold, but he sat in the roaring darkness, hearing the smash of the waves on the walls of the house, enduring the sting of salt on his cheeks.

Harry sat on the stairs all night. The tide showed no sign of turning and falling. His house was in the sea. The sea was in his house. At last he went up to the landing, where his dogs were bristling like a pair of great black bears, shut himself in his room and climbed into bed.

From there, even with the blankets pulled over his head and the heavy, warm weight of the dogs beside him, he could still hear the sea downstairs: as though a huge, drunken, furious thief was ran­sacking the rooms, slamming doors, flinging furniture, smashing and looting and wrecking.

At dawn, when the storm abated and the noises stopped, Harry slept a little.

The flood tides had been forecast for a long time. Harry had heard all about them on his radio. However, unlike hundreds of people along the coast of Wales who’d left their homes in the towns and villages most threatened by high water, he’d decided not to move. Already, that autumn, the tide had come over the beach and into his fields, drowning the ditches, bleaching the grass, tangling the hedges with driftwood and seaweed. Day by day, he’d seen the water come closer and closer. The radio had told him that soon the biggest of all tides would be blown inland. Now the storm had driven the sea into his house.

Harry Clewe was fifty-three years old. He’d become stout and red-faced; his gingery hair had turned peppery grey, grown wild and bushy. Where his left hand had been, he had a black iron hook. He was hard of hearing, short-sighted, short of breath, and, as the pain in his hips got worse, increasingly bad-tempered. His dogs were bad-tempered as well: Gog and Magog were enormous, shaggy, coal-black mongrels, as massive-headed as Great Danes and as thickset as Rottweilers. Harry had lived alone with them for ten years, through the 1980s and into the 1990s, since they were gluttonous puppies. Since Helen had gone.

In the meantime he’d done nothing to maintain the house. Long before the storm, there were slates off the roof and cracks in the chimneys wide enough for the jackdaws to nest in; he’d closed the living room, the drawing room and the dining room, each with their corniced ceilings, their exquisite oak panelling and marble fireplaces, leaving them chill and dark; he’d shut the biggest of the bedrooms, too. He and the dogs had retreated to the kitchen, kept warm by a wood-burning stove, and to a spare bedroom upstairs with a driftwood fire and a view across the flat, bare fields to the sea.

The house, called Ynys Elyrch, was the one that Helen had bought when she’d come to Wales after her divorce. It was a fine, big house. But the name, meaning ‘the island of swans’, was in­accu­rate. It wasn’t built on an island: it stood on a spit on the edge of the estuary, only a few miles from where the Ozymandias had been moored, isolated from the rising ground inland. There were no swans: they never came to the shore or the fields, although a flock of them roosted in the salt marsh on the other side of the estuary.

Harry had moved in with Helen as soon as he’d come out of hospital. She’d insisted on it, and he’d been glad to submit to her. Without consulting him, indeed while he was still in intensive care, she’d taken it upon herself to get all his belongings out of the boat and into her house, spending hours on her own at the Ozymandias, shifting his books and pictures and bedding into the boot of the Daimler and driving them to Ynys Elyrch. Once he was home with her, she’d nursed him back to health. She grew to love him; he was fond of her. Indeed, they’d married, Helen insisting on the white wedding that her first husband had denied her. For a year they’d lived together in her fine, big house.

But then, Helen was gone. Harry Clewe was alone with the dogs.

Bit by bit, year by year, he’d sold acres of land and a number of barns, until all he had left was the neglected house, a few dilap­idated stables round a cobbled yard, and the rank, treeless fields which separated the property from the beach. Harry had no disposable money; Helen had spent most of her settlement on Ynys Elyrch, but the threat of flood tides had made it a poor investment. There were no other houses for miles around. For the last ten years, Harry had lived in decaying isolation . . . ever since Helen had gone.

Now, the morning after the storm, he came downstairs to find a state of chaotic disorder. The floors of every room were deep in silted sand and oozing brown mud. A scree of pebbles had been left behind, banked into corners, raked and swirled by the falling tide. There was seaweed everywhere, the knotted black clumps of bladder­wrack and the salad leaves of kelp; dead birds, tangled and broken and sodden; the huge, translucent, rubbery remains of jellyfish; all kinds of plastic, polythene and rotten driftwood. The skirtings were buckled and the panelling had split. Some of the furniture had been turned over. Pictures and photographs lay in the pools of water which hadn’t drained out of the house as the tide went down. Books were strewn about. The rain had stopped and the wind had decreased, but the shutters banged and the doors dangled on broken hinges.

Harry spent the day trying to tidy up, although he knew that the sea would come into the house again; he’d heard on his radio that, further along the coast, at Rhyl and Towyn, the storm had breached the sea walls and flooded the towns. The coast­guards from Caernarfon came to see him, churning across the water­logged fields in a Land Rover and driving into the cobbled yard; but they soon gave up trying to persuade him to leave his house and go with them to emergency accommodation inland. He was a stubborn old fool; he was rude and ungrateful. The coastguards had plenty of work elsewhere, with people who wanted to be helped. Glancing warily at his glinting iron hook, they warned him to expect worse storms, jumped back into their Land-Rover as the dogs lunged towards them, and they drove away.

When the coastguards had gone, Harry stomped across the yard to the shed where the Daimler stood. The big, silver car hadn’t moved for years. It was riddled with rust. The tyres were punc­tured and perished. But when he opened the driver’s door, the interior smelled dry and strangely warm. He climbed in, pulling the door shut with a gentle thud, and he sat at the wheel for a few minutes. It was a quiet, still place. He blew the dust off the clock and the speedometer; he stroked the walnut dashboard; he inhaled the scent of the soft, red leather upholstery. It reminded him of a car he’d had, long ago, when he’d first come to Wales; more than that, it reminded him of Helen and the short time they’d spent together. He though he could smell her perfume.

At last, blinking himself out of his daydream, he remembered why he’d gone to the car: he leaned into the back seat and rum­maged for the spade, the rake and the pitchfork among the other tools he kept there, and he climbed out of the car with them. That was all the Daimler was good for nowadays, as a kind of tool shed, because it was dry inside. He carried the tools back to the house.

Gog and Magog climbed the stairs to the landing and flopped down. They watched as Harry shovelled the mud and sand through the front door, as he raked out the seaweed and the litter of dead birds, as he speared the jellyfish with the pitchfork and lifted them outside. He’d adapted to his disability; indeed, he used the hook as a versatile tool. He hammered boards across the broken front door and nailed the shutters into the window frames. Resting from time to time, he splashed through the living room and leaned at the fireplace, where he stared at Helen’s photograph on the mantelpiece. He’d taken the picture himself, on their honeymoon in Lyme Regis. Dark and sleek and beautiful, she was clutching an ammonite she’d found on the beach, although the fossil was so heavy she could hardly hold it for more than a few seconds. Next to the photograph was the ammonite itself. Sometimes Harry would take it from the mantelpiece, heft it in his hand and try to imagine the warmth of the woman in the dead, cold stone.

Back to work. He had an idea to make the job easier. He pulled up the carpet, which was heavy with sand, and rolled it aside, thinking to open the trap door in the floorboards and simply shovel the rest of the debris into the cellar. The cellar was very deep; it was years since he’d looked into it. Now he knelt and peered into the blackness under the living room floor. He flashed his torch. The cellar had filled with water. Holding his breath, he strained his eyes and ears at the glistening darkness. He gagged at the blast of dead, cold air which came up and slapped him in the face, a clammy, rotten smell which seemed to suck the breath from him. He shivered so hard that he almost dropped the torch. Something was moving down there . . . he thought he could hear it, he thought he could see it.

Suddenly so frightened that his scalp prickled and his heart began to thump, he recoiled from the hole, slammed the trap door shut, scrambled to his feet, threw down the torch, grabbed the shovel and flung sand and shingle on top of the trap door as fast as he could . . . to keep it closed.

At last he stopped, breathing very hard, staring wildly around at the disordered room. When the blood had stopped pounding in his ears, he listened again, cocking his head at the floor. He thought he heard something knocking down there. But it was only the slopping of deep, black water.