Chapter 1

The gates to the house lay on a blind curve in the road. it was easy to miss it, to go on toward the sea, where the road ended and the water met the sky. Even though she had been coming here since she was a baby, still, sometimes those gates were a surprise .

Beyond the rusted iron gates lay along drive that seemed to lead nowhere. The dark trees obscured everything for a quarter of a mile or so , and then suddenly, there was a clearing, and you could see the house. it was grey stone and symmetrical, the kind child might draw: a front door at the centre, with identical eight paned windows in a row to either side and above, topped by smaller attic windows set into the slate roof. It was a house engraved the inside Kate's head; a house that she walked through when she could not sleep at home in London; a place preserved as the single fixed point in what might otherwise be the blurred landscape of memory; the last house , before the land gave the way to waves.

Nothing seemed to change inside the house, the polished wooden floors; the rust mark where the top had dripped forever. In the nursery enamel bath the clocks that chimed not quite in time with each other; the willow pattern plate hanging on the dining room wall.