The Books

The winter my father lost the hearing in one ear, I became the keeper of the Wray Light in everything but name.

Nobody wrote it down. The Board of Lights sent its inspector each spring, a man with a clipped grey moustache and a way of running his glove along the brass as if he expected it to lie to him, and each spring my father met him at the foot of the tower with his good ear turned forward and answered every question himself. The inspector signed the log. The inspector drank his tea. The inspector took the noon boat back to Carrow Point, and I went up the hundred and twelve steps to trim the wicks, because by then my father could not hear the clockwork falter and I could.

I was fourteen. I knew the tide tables the way other girls knew hymns.

It was in the February of that year — the year of the great tide, though of course we did not know to call it that yet — that I found the almanac.

It had come in with the wrack after a three-day blow: a flat parcel wrapped in oilcloth and tied with tarred twine, lodged between two rocks below the landing stage as neatly as if someone had placed it there. The oilcloth had done its work. When I cut the twine in the kitchen, with my father asleep in his chair and the lamp turned low to save the paraffin, the book inside was barely damp.

Tide Tables for the Harrow Coast, the cover said, in gold that had mostly flaked away. With Remarks on Weather, Moon and Sea.

I had seen almanacs before. The harbour master kept a shelf of them, one for every year back to his grandfather’s time, and he let me read them on market days when my father sent me in for oil. This one was the same size, the same dull green, the same thin pages printed in two columns. High water, low water, heights in feet and inches. Sunrise and sunset. The phases of the moon drawn as small black circles filling and emptying down the margin.

It was only when I turned to the title page that I put it down on the table and moved my hand away from it, the way you would from a stove.

The year printed there was next year.

* * *

I told myself it was a printer’s error. I told myself someone in a town far down the coast had ordered their almanacs early, and a crate had gone over the side of a coaster, and this was one copy of many, drifting. That was a sensible story. I liked it. I made myself a cup of tea to go with it.

Then I checked the tables for that week against my father’s, and they matched to the minute. And then — because I was fourteen, and alone, and because the wind had dropped and the kitchen was so quiet I could hear the clock in the lamp room four floors above — I turned to the back of the book, to the page where the harbour master’s almanacs printed their Remarks.

Most years the Remarks were dull. Spring tides expected to run higher than usual in the third week of March. Mariners are advised. That sort of thing.

The Remarks in this book were written in the same small, careful type as everything else. But they were not dull.

On the night of the fourth of November, the book said, a tide will come that is not in any table. The Saltings will go under, and the lower town, and the church of St Brannoc to its weathercock. Those who are warned will not believe it. The keeper’s daughter must.

I read it three times. I read it until the words stopped being words and became a pattern of marks on paper, and then became words again, worse than before.

Outside, the beam went round and round above me, the way it had every night of my life, laying its long white arm across the water and taking it back. Twelve seconds. I counted them without meaning to. I have always counted them.

Twelve seconds, and the light comes back. That was the only promise the sea had ever made me, and I had believed it all my life.

I closed the book and put it under my mattress, and I did not sleep.

The tide went out at Harrow Sands the way a held breath goes out of a body: slowly at first, and then all at once, until there was nothing left but a mile of wet brown ribs and the sky lying face down in every channel.

Tom Wray had been waiting on the seawall since five. He had the theodolite on its tripod, the staff lashed to his pack, the field book buttoned into his coat against the drizzle, and three hours — exactly three hours, if the tables were right, and the tables were always right — before the sea came back to take the ground from under him.

“You’ll want to be off the Middle Bank by half nine,” said Hollis, who had rowed him across and now showed no sign of wanting to leave the boat. “It fills from behind. People don’t expect that.”

“I know how it fills.”

“Your mother knew how it filled,” Hollis said, and then looked as though he wished he hadn’t.

Tom let it go. Everyone in Carrow Point had a sentence about his mother, and most of them had the decency to stop halfway through it.

He walked out.

The Board had asked for a new chart of the approaches. The old one was forty years out of date, and the banks had shifted so far since that two colliers had grounded on them in a single winter. It was dull work, the kind Tom liked best. You set up, you levelled, you sighted, you wrote down a number. You moved forty paces and did it again. A map was only a great many small honest numbers, laid next to one another until they made a shape. Nobody could argue with it.

By eight he had fixed the western edge of the Middle Bank and was working along its spine, where the sand was hardest and ridged like the roof of a mouth. That was where he found the first stone.

It was square. That was what stopped him. Stones on the Sands were rounded, tumbled, the size of fists. This one was the size of a hearth and cut clean along two edges, and when he knelt and brushed the sand away from it with the side of his hand he found that it did not end. It ran on, just under the surface, straight as a ruled line, and met another at a corner.

A wall.

He stood up. He looked along the bank, and now that he knew what to look for he saw them everywhere: low, dark, regular shapes breaking the ripple of the sand, like the letters of a word written too faintly to read. A row of them. A second row behind. A long rectangle, larger than the rest, with a gap in one end where a door had been.

There had been a village here. On the Middle Bank, a mile out from the seawall, under twelve feet of water twice a day.

He knew the name before he let himself think it. Every child in Carrow Point knew it, the way they knew the rhyme about the bell. The Saltings. The lower town. The place the sea took, in the story his mother never told, on the night she was fourteen years old.

Tom opened the field book. His hands were steady; he was glad of that. He wrote the time, and the height of the tide, and the bearing to the church tower on the headland. Then he set up the theodolite over the corner of the first wall and began, as carefully as he had ever done anything, to measure it.

Behind him, a long way off, the sea turned over in its sleep and started for home.

Nell heard the bell at ten minutes to midnight, and afterwards, when people asked her how she could be so sure of the time, she said that she had been looking at the clock because she could not sleep, which was true, and that the clock was right, because her father wound it every Sunday against the pips on the wireless, which was also true.

What she did not say was that she had been waiting for it.

Her grandmother had told her about the bell only once, the summer Nell was seven, on a bench above the harbour with the smell of tar and chips all around them. Old Ada Wray had not been the kind of grandmother who told stories. She had been the kind who mended nets and corrected your arithmetic and sent you back up the stairs to wash your neck properly. So when she had put down her paper of chips and said, in a voice Nell had never heard her use, The bell of St Brannoc’s still rings, you know. Under the water. Only before a big tide, Nell had not laughed. She had listened with her whole body.

Have you heard it, Gran?

Once. Ada had looked out at the water, flat and blue and harmless as a painted plate. I was about your age. Nobody believed me.

What happened?

But her grandmother had picked up the chips again and said the gulls would have them if they weren’t quick, and that was the end of it. She had died the following winter. Nell had not asked anyone else. Some questions, she had understood even then, you only get one chance to ask.

* * *

Now she was twelve, and the wind had been blowing from the north for two days without drawing breath, and the whole house moved around her like a ship.

She got out of bed and went to the window. The glass was cold enough to hurt her forehead. Out past the roofs of the lower street, past the harbour wall, the sea was not the sea she knew. It was higher than she had ever seen it, higher than it should be three hours before high water, heaving against the wall in long grey shoulders that broke white along the top. The lamps on the quay swung on their chains. One of them had gone out.

And under the wind — so faint she thought at first it was the blood in her own ears — a note.

Low. Round. Slow as breathing. It came from somewhere out beyond the harbour mouth, where there was nothing at all but water, and it came again, and again, each stroke arriving a moment after she had braced herself for it.

Nell put her hand flat on the cold glass and counted. Twelve seconds between each one. The same as the light.

Downstairs, her father was asleep in his chair with the wireless murmuring the shipping forecast to nobody. She stood at the top of the stairs in her nightdress and looked down at the back of his head, at the grey coming in above his ears, and tried to find the sentence that would make a sensible man get up at midnight and wake the town because his daughter had heard a bell that had been under the sea for forty-two years.

She could not find it. So in the end she simply went down the stairs, and knelt beside his chair, and took his hand the way she had when she was small.

“Dad,” she said. “It’s ringing.”

The thermometer by the station door said minus eleven, and someone had drawn a small sad face in the frost beside it.

Iris Fenn stood on the platform at Aldermoor Halt with her suitcase at her feet and her hands pushed so far into her coat pockets that she could feel the seams, and watched the only train of the day pull away into the white. It took its noise with it. What was left was a silence so complete that she could hear the snow settling on the brim of her hat.

Nobody had come to meet her.

The letter was in her inside pocket. She did not need to take it out; she had read it enough times on the journey north to know it by heart. Miss Fenn — My late brother’s collection requires immediate and expert attention. The heating in the glasshouse is adequate, the gardener is not available, and I am told you are the best person in the country for Phalaenopsis. Board and lodging will be provided. The fee is as stated. Come at once. C. Hale.

Not the gardener has left. Not the gardener is unwell. The gardener is not available. Iris had turned the phrase over for three hundred miles and still could not decide what shape it was.

She picked up the suitcase and started to walk.

Aldermoor House was a mile and a half from the Halt, up a drive that had been lined with limes when the family still had the money for limes. Now it was lined with snow, and the limes stood up out of it like the black bones of a much larger animal. Iris kept to the middle, where a single set of cart tracks had frozen into ridges, and tried not to think about her feet.

She saw the glasshouse before she saw the house.

It rose out of the white on the far side of the lawn: a long, high, arched hall of iron and glass, far larger than anything she had imagined from the letter, its roof climbing to a lantern at the centre like a small cathedral somebody had set down in the wrong county. The snow had slid from its steep sides and gathered in drifts against the low walls. And the glass was not white, as she would have expected on a morning like this, frosted blind from edge to edge. The glass was clear. It was wet. Inside, blurred by condensation, she could see green — impossible, crowded, living green — and among the green, here and there, a colour so bright it looked like a mistake. Orange. Violet. A red like a struck match.

Someone was keeping it warm.

* * *

Iris stopped on the drive, the suitcase dragging at her arm, and looked at the chimney that rose from the boiler house at the glasshouse’s northern end. A thin grey thread of smoke went straight up from it into the windless air and vanished.

The gardener was not available. But somebody, every night since November, in the coldest winter in living memory, had been getting up in the dark to stoke that fire.

Behind her, up at the house, a door opened. A woman’s voice carried across the snow, clear and unhurried and not at all surprised.

“Miss Fenn. You found us. I’m afraid you’ve come a very long way to look after a great many things that are already dead.”

Iris looked back at the glasshouse, at the red flower burning behind the glass.

“Not all of them,” she said.