woke with a start, sitting bolt upright in the strange bed with his body covered in sweat. It was not a knocking on the door that had woken him but the crash of the old leaded window against the casement. It had broken free of its catch and was swinging madly to and fro in the great storm that had burst over the house while he was asleep. A grey light showed that it was past dawn, although no sunlight penetrated the cloudy sky.
As Peter watched, the window crashed against the casement again and two of its leaded panes broke. The sill was awash with rain and shattered glass. Peter leapt from the bed and tugged at the window, forcing it back on to its latch but catching his elbow as he did so on a shard of broken glass. Blood dripped on his feet and on the apple-green carpet. Looking down, Peter saw that his penis was only now beginning to wilt. He stood still for a moment regarding himself with disgust tinged with a sense of ridicule before he crossed to the bed and wrapped the sweat-soaked pillowcase around his arm.
Outside, the previously statuesque yews were being blown in all directions by a screaming wind while the great rain beat against the House of the Four Winds with an unappeased fury. Beyond the yews the black gates stood open and Peter could see a small figure struggling up the drive toward the house.
Peter pulled on his clothes as fast as he could and ran down the wide curving staircase to the front door. Dropping the pillowcase tourniquet from his arm, he turned the key in the lock and opened the door. Mrs Marsh from the cottage across the road was dimly recognizable beneath her raincoat as she struggled to make her way up the steep steps to the yew tree terrace. Sir Peter hurried forward and pulled her into the house.
‘What is it, Grace? You look white as a sheet. Has something happened?’
‘No, it’s all right, Sir Peter. It’s just that my Christopher’s a volunteer on the lifeboat and they got called out just before midnight. He usually keeps in touch with the shore by radio when the boat’s out and so I can phone them to see that everything’s all right, but our telephone line’s gone down and so—’
‘You can’t. And so you need to use ours. Come into my study, and you can take your coat off.’
‘Thank you, Sir Peter. I’m sorry if I got you up.’
‘You didn’t. The storm woke me. Broke the window upstairs. It seems like quite a gale.’
‘It is. I haven’t felt the wind like this since the storm we had here ten years ago. I just hope that Christopher’s all right. I don’t know what I’d do—’
‘It’s all right, Grace, everything’s going to be fine,’ said Sir Peter with a conviction that he did not feel as he picked up the telephone on his desk. He had heard the underlying panic in her voice.
‘Damn. It’s dead too. Look, Grace, I’ll drive you down to the harbour. It won’t take a moment.’
Mrs Marsh weakly protested, but Peter remained firm. There was nothing in fact that he wanted more at that moment than to get out of the house and put a space between himself and the events of the night. The trouble with Anne; the debauchery of his dream; the blood on the floor.
‘There, I’ve written a note telling Anne where we’ve gone. I’ll just get my coat, Grace. I won’t be a minute.’
When Peter came back, he found that Grace Marsh was no longer alone. Greta had put a coat over her nightdress and was sitting beside Grace on the old black bench in the hall, the one with the four evangelists on the front. As she turned towards him with a look of concern Peter felt himself plunged back into his dream and it was only with a supreme effort of will that he fought down a sudden, almost overwhelming urge to take her in his arms.
‘What? You’re up as well.’ Peter blurted out the first words that came into his head.
‘Yes, I want to come too. Please let me.’ Greta’s green eyes glittered.
‘All right. But mind yourself on the steps. That wind’ll blow you into the road if you let it. Grace, you hold on to me. I’ll have you down at the harbour in less than ten minutes.’
Peter held the steering wheel of the Range Rover almost in his lap as he craned forward on to the dashboard in order to pick out the turns in the narrow road that wound down to the harbour. He was conscious of Grace Marsh straining forward just like him, as if willing herself closer to the harbour and news of her husband.
Going out to sea now would be like signing one’s own death warrant, thought Peter to himself as he glanced out at the foaming mass of furious high waves beating against the shore.
‘I’m sure everything’s going to be all right,’ he said, summoning as much conviction into his voice as he could. ‘Everyone on the lifeboat is very experienced.’ The harbour came into view through a sloping wall of rain.
‘I know. Thank you, Sir Peter. It’s just that there’s not been a storm like this one since 1989. And that was when …’
Grace’s voice trailed away. Peter knew why. The storm of ’89 had not only uprooted the great chestnut tree in Flyte churchyard planted in honour of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee; it had also ended the lives of two Flyte fathers swept from the deck of the lifeboat as it went to rescue a sinking fishing boat out in the bay.
In the back of the Range Rover Greta gazed out at the sea. She felt electrified by the storm. Never had she seen such violence. She heard nothing of the anxious conversation being carried on in the front.
Peter parked beside the Harbour Inn and walked down the unmade road to the harbour master’s hut in search of news.
‘They had them on the radio about half an hour ago,’ he told the others when he returned to the car. ‘They’re expected back at the harbour mouth in the next ten minutes.’
‘But what about my Christopher?’ asked Grace Marsh. ‘Did they say anything about him?’
Peter sensed the rising hysteria in her quavering voice and tried to inject a note of reassurance into his answer.
‘Nothing one way or the other, Grace. But that’s good, I think. They’d have said something on the radio if anything was wrong.’
Peter did not mention the atmosphere of gloom and foreboding that he’d found in the hut. More than a dozen men in there, and no one saying anything except in brief answer to his enquiry. The radio communication that he had told Grace about had been cut off halfway through.
The minutes passed without any sign of the lifeboat, and the storm began to die away. On the opposite bank of the Flyte River the landscape took shape. Tethered boats rode high on the churning water and, beyond the harbour, fields of waving reeds and grasses rose toward Coyne church. Several trees stood twisted at crazy angles.
Like men broken on the rack, thought Greta, now standing beside Peter and Grace Marsh at the back of a small group at the water’s edge. Everyone had their eyes fastened on the mouth of the harbour where the Flyte River begins and the North Sea ends.
It was just after the bells of the two churches, Flyte and Coyne, had finished tolling the hour of seven that a boat came into view, ploughing its way slowly downstream.
Soon everyone could see the bright yellow caps and raincoats of the crew moving about on the deck. They tied up at the end of a long wooden jetty and came ashore almost immediately.
It was easy to distinguish
