The sea, the sea, the sea, the slowly swelling sea. She looked up from her book to see if his boat was coming in yet. They should have been back in port by now. Evening light was lingering slowly grey across the risen waves as they pounded the harbour wall. From her viewpoint halfway up the hill, warm and dry in her sea facing room, she could see no boats coming in, just the churning feathered and unrelenting waves.

Startled and cricking her neck as she came too suddenly awake, the thumping on the door chorused in sync with the booming wind hitting the house and calling a warning. On the doorstep stood her lover, wet and weeping. “What’s happened, what’s the matter? Come in come in out of the wet and tell me what the matter is, what’s happened. You’re crying. What’s happened?”

He was a small man, Jason, and he moved with a strange sideways gait, thanks to a legacy hurt, a childhood injury that didn’t heal right, something to do with a slide as she recalled. She always noticed this movement and its curious irregular swing. It never changed. A constant, a strange sort of comfort. But the tears, the tears were not a constant, nor a comfort. She watched as he dumped rain slickers, boots and hat on the hall floor, splashing sea and rainwater onto the narrow walls where the water droplets slowly dribbled into corners and wept away into the carpet.

“Come in by the fire and tell me what’s wrong.” She pictured a run over dog, damage to the boat or a landslip that might’ve overcome her beehives. She was a little alarmed to see him go straight to the booze cupboard and pour himself a stiff one. Then he stood, staring out at the darkness and watching the rain hurl itself against the windows. Sparks as she threw another log on the woodburner before closing the door swift and tight against the surging heat. “Jason, what is it? Please.” She was starting to feel urgent, a more than anxious foreboding rising up inside, almost to nauseousness. She watched him sip his drink through the tears and choking gasps. The choking gasps might’ve been the whiskey: Jason didn’t drink. Even more cause for alarm as he contiued to sip and wheeze.

By now the storm had overwhelmed ocean, sky, hillside and all the rooftops, pathways and trees. Nothing was beyond its reach. Everything the storm touched was held in a tight and noisy and deadly embrace. Everything was teased with its terror, with rising fears that this time the weather might win and somehow take them all. She often told herself this, that it would one day take them all, that the weather would be the ultimate winner. But this was a silliness and she focused again on Jason. As Fiona leaned in close to him she felt fear tighten its grip and she knew it wasn’t the boat or the bees. “What happened?” she whispered, her round face tight and drawn of colour despite the woodburner’s warmth stretching throughout the room. “I was watching for your boat, but I must’ve nodded off so I didn’t see you come in.” Jason swallowed the last of his whiskey and slowly reached out with great deliberation to put the empty glass on the little table beside him. His face was very red and his tears were slowly falling. His eyes downcast and he picked at random bobbles of wool on his jumper. Then he took her hand and tried to look at her through the tears. Her eyes were wide with anticipation and her face pale with unsaid understanding, despite the warmth of the room. She knew. She was calm. But she needed the words. “It’s Callum isn’t it? It’s Cal. Where is he?” “Gone.” Jason sobbed and put his free hand over his face, clutching Fiona’s hand tighter and trying to keep his shoulders from rising with his buried sobs. “He went overboard with a huge swell we didn’t see coming and we got him out but by the time we did, in fading light and with the ring and the boathook and even a net we got him out, we didn’t lose him but it was too slow, we were too slow; he was too long under the water, he was too long without air, he drowned in front of us and the sea just kept pulling and pulling at him and we kept trying to get him in close to the boat and he fought and struggled and reached out for us but the sea kept burying him under, kept on and on and on until there was nothing but the bulk of him, dead and us still hanging on to the net. We lost the boathook and the ring. Nothing worked, nothing worked to keep him above the water. But we got him back. The sea couldn’t take him, but it was too late for Callum. Too late.” An overwhelming torrent and Jason fell sobbing into Fiona’s lap, buried under waves of sorrow and the horror of his last few hours.

Fiona sat very still stroking her lover’s wet hair and damp back. She noticed he was sodden through and that a soft mist rose from his crumpled body as the spirit of the sea drifted up now to claim her in a steamy caress. Her heart seemed to have stopped in her chest and her breathing was blocked. As night and storm slowly faded across the hours, the lovers were still stiff and still and silent as the morning light stretched into the room and eventually roused them.

Then to face the horrors of police, inquest, funeral, and all the ancillary processes of death. And then six months later what Fiona and Jason did next. What they and Callum would have forever, together. A window. A stained glass window in the village church that would memorialise Callum and all the other sailors the sea had claimed. 

She said loud “I want the window to be blue. I want it to be of sea and sky, of dawn and dusk, of what is beneath and above the surface, of truth and of turmoil. I want it to be modern and old, a luminous link between what is and what was, something ancient.” A little confused Jason nodded his agreement as the artist took notes and smiled a gentle understanding. “What was he like, Callum?” she said looking from one to the other. That neither of them could answer straightaway was at once a little puzzling and somehow encouraging. The artist tried a different tack. “You want this window to memorialise Callum, yes?” Jason this time with a sudden blurt, “no, no, not a memorial, a celebration of the sea and those it has claimed. A celebration of glory, of wonder and of life.” Fiona squeezed his hand. “Yes” she said, “that’s it, a celebration so that every scrap of light that shines through your work will be like a new light, a new life.”

The window took some time to complete, but it was finally installed one sharp winter morning, with a ceremony and blessings and the trappings of holiness. The watching sea glittered proud and beautiful whispering to a gleaming sky and the light of life. The small gathering stood back to hear the whispers and watch life’s glow reach into the church, illuminating all that it touched. Life. Immutable. Endless.