The Night of the Flood Page 2

  The farmhouse stood on a headland, or what passed for one here. It was on slightly raised land, above the farmland below. She could see it now, dark even in the sunshine, through the poplar trees that lined the field from the eastern approach. It was a lonely house, stuck out here on its own, away from the town, separated by fields and marsh. The days of nannies and parties and visitors arriving in motor cars along Leafy Lane were all gone. She couldn’t identify the exact moment it had ended but it had not been with her mother’s death. The rot had set in before that.

  The farm had been her mother’s dowry on her marriage. Her mother had been used to life on a much larger scale of course. The Felford estate had once owned great tracts of land in Norfolk, though it had all been sold off now. Although Verity had barely been aware of it, there had long been the murmurs of money worries, as far back as she could remember: her father absent for long periods and the farm run mostly by land girls long after the war. When the parties stopped, the house echoed with emptiness. The only visitor was the man from the dairy coming to collect the milk churns. Her mother had stayed more and more in her room. An awkward adolescent, Verity used to creep sometimes into the darkened room to lie next to her mother’s tiny, sleeping form. More than anything, she’d yearned for her to wake up and put her arms around her, to tell her it would all be all right. But her mother never woke, and Verity had tiptoed back out again.

  Verity stood now trying to remember when the end had begun as if, in pinpointing the moment of decline, she could understand why it had happened. But however hard she tried, she could not, in the end, remember.

  She reached the kitchen door and her fingers automatically felt along the groove etched into the brick at the top of her hip. It marked the high tide from the 1930 flood.

  ‘Home!’ she called, letting herself into the kitchen at the side of the house. No sign of anyone. It was cold in the dim, echoing room, but the kettle still hissed on the range: the tea must be made already. No one was in the dining room but she poked her head around the drawing room door and saw that Mrs Timms had laid it all out there on the occasional table, by the window. Father was in his chair with a pipe and Peter was tucking into a bun with his feet up on the table. They had held the funeral tea in this room, with the doors open to the garden and its verdant green spilling in. No one had mentioned the manner of her mother’s death, but people didn’t, did they? Everyone knew she’d drowned but no one said how or why.

  ‘You’re late,’ said Peter, his mouth full. ‘Where’ve you been? You look like you’ve sat in a hedge.’

  ‘That’s because I have,’ she said, amused by the ease of lying. Or rather, the use of little truths to hide the larger lies.

  Her father blew out a plume of smoke. ‘Whatever gallivanting you’ve been up to, the least you could do is be here for Mrs Timms. After all she does for you.’

  Verity bit her lip. ‘Shall I get the tea then?’

  Outside, the light glittered like broken glass but the drawing room faced east and none penetrated inside at this time of day.

  ‘I saw a plane,’ she said, to break the silence. They had an unspoken agreement not to mention the significance of the day and it occurred to Verity again that Mrs Timms was very clever in planning the tea for this particular afternoon. It was not usual to have a good-luck tea, and certainly not on the anniversary of a death. But they were all deliberately averting their gaze, determined to keep her mother and her shocking death submerged. ‘Not like the RAF, not one of ours.’

  ‘Americans,’ said Peter, who had helped himself to another bun. No amount of gorging ever made any difference to him. He remained gangly whatever he ate. It was so unfair. He had inherited their father’s height but their mother’s slenderness, whereas she had only received the height. Too tall and ungainly for a woman, her father said once.

  ‘What?’ her father said. ‘Haven’t we had enough of them? Not got enough to do meddling in Korea?’

  ‘I heard they’re taking over the RAF base at Holkham. Rumours all round the town.’

  ‘How do you know this, Peter?’ she asked, passing him a cup of tea.

  He tapped the side of his nose and grinned at her.

  ‘Bloody all we need. An invasion. Already had one in the war.’ Their father puffed a jet of smoke from the side of his mouth, as if he could blow it into the invaders’ faces.

  ‘Mother threw a party for them once, I seem to remember,’ said Peter.

  Her father paid no attention, as if he hadn’t heard. ‘I suppose they think we’re overrun with spies, after those bloody Reds shipped to Russia last year. He was an Old Boy at your school for God’s sake – Maclean. Humiliating.’

  ‘He was there years before me, Father…’ began Peter. ‘Look, about the milk parlour. Everyone’s going over to mechanisation. I know we’ve got the bucket milkers but we could get so much more milk out of the cows if we had a new system. And we could buy more cows. I really think now would be a good time.’

  ‘Sad state of affairs. School seems to produce a lot of effeminates and traitors these days. It was a fine school in my day. I can’t fathom it – an Old Greshamian publicly exposed like that.’

  ‘You mean people like Benjamin Britten, Father?’ Verity said facetiously. He looked at her blankly.

  ‘Leave it, Ver. Father, please. The cows.’ Peter’s neck was flushed at the collar.

  ‘Peter,’ she said, warning. She saw how their father’s face had drooped – dismayed, even angered by her brother’s insistence. They were in danger of blowing up at each other.

  Mrs Timms bustled in and cut up the cake. They all stopped talking, glad of the interruption. ‘Don’t stop on account of me,’ she said, but they always did.

  No one mentioned the memory of that terrible tea Mrs Timms had made for everyone nearly a year before, another one of stored-up rations scraped together. There had been a coffee cake, made with Camp, and rock cakes, which suited their name; tiny sandwiches with edges that had dried up and lots of sherry that Father had found from somewhere. Conversation had steered determinedly away from the reason for the gathering in the first place. That had been the rule since Mother died. They were used to the atmosphere of silent grief for what was lost.

  The drawing room was filled with relics from her mother’s past – clocks that had stopped ticking, heavy, dark tables and a grand piano that no one played. On top of it stood a series of photographs in gilt frames memorialising her mother’s family. The central picture was of the old hall itself with her mother as a young girl in an Edwardian-style white dress, flanked by her two older brothers. All the people in the photograph were now dead, both brothers lost in the war.

  Verity watched as her father topped up his tea with something from a decanter and his heavy-lidded eyes grew heavier, his face sagged and his long body collapsed in his chair. Finally, she heard the raspy sound of his snoring. She sighed, impatient. The exams were starting next week. She had her first one – Classics – on Tuesday and she should be cramming rather than sipping tea.

  ‘I met one, you know,’ said Peter into the deathly quiet of the drawing room.

  ‘Met one what?’

  ‘An American. Jolly sort.’

  That piqued her attention. She did not want to give Peter the satisfaction of too much interest but she was curious. Since the war, there was so much talk of the Americans and yet one hardly ever saw one. Most of the local boys would loathe them. English boys hated Americans. Everyone knew that. But it didn’t entirely surprise her that Peter would be chummy with the newcomers. Since that sticky fix at his school a few years ago, he often took up with unusual chaps. The incident had all been covered up and the next thing Verity knew was that Peter had failed his final year. Nothing was ever said, but it made her wonder.

  ‘Met him at the Shipwright’s in town.’ Mother would have been horrified to know that her beloved son was hanging around at a pub in the East End of Wells. ‘Flies B-45s, he told me. It’s their new bomber. Amusing fellow, like
s horses apparently. I said he can ride here and we’ll take him shooting in the season. He seems rather keen on getting involved in local life.’

  She yawned and stretched. ‘They might not be here by the shooting season.’

  ‘They will. He told me. They’re going to be stationed here for a few years. All very hush-hush. And they’re having a party, a big bash up at the Hall in June. We’re invited.’ He said it as if this was a great honour.

  ‘Not that hush-hush then, is it?’ she teased, but in truth, she was rather pleased by the arrival of the Americans. She imagined that any chum of Peter’s would be a bore, harping on about blood sports, playing bloody golf, but God she was sick of the farm, Wells, the whole of Norfolk, stuck out here, away from the real world. Oxford – if she even got in – was still ages away and it would be fun to have something to distract her while waiting for the results of the exams. If nothing else, they could surely cadge some cigarettes and nylons off them. Maybe even chocolate. She smiled to herself, tasting the rich, creamy sweetness on her tongue. She couldn’t wait to tell Arthur. They could laugh about the newcomers, put on accents, parade around pretending to be film stars. But she stopped abruptly in her daydreams, remembering the grip of his hands on her that day. It made her feel afraid of what he wanted from her.

  Silence settled on the room. A shaft of light fell on the photograph of her mother.

  ‘You know what day it is, don’t you?’

  Peter had his mouth full. ‘I know,’ he said when he finally swallowed.

  After the tea, she walked to the churchyard and laid a clutch of bluebells she’d found at the end of the garden. There was a small clump of cuckooflowers, narcissi and bluebells already placed next to the headstone. Her brother had been. Her mother had liked irises and always had a vase of them on her dressing table but Verity hated them: the sickly honey-sweet smell reminded her of her mother and now they would always make her think of death.

  A throbbing sound overhead. Another plane, like the one before. It shone in the afternoon sun and even from here on the ground she could see it had a star on its tail. Peter’s Americans, whose purpose, no one knew. She lay full-length on the grass next to the grave like she used to do years ago on her mother’s bed and watched the vapour trail etch a parabola in the sky until it faded. When she looked back, it was this – not her mother’s death, not the crash, not even the flood, but lying on her back by her mother’s grave, a silver plane crossing the sky – that she remembered as the beginning of the future.

  2.

  Arthur emerged from the woods onto the dunes. The tide was out, leaving shiny tracks of water inlets on the vast expanse of sand. In the wide blue sky a plane was chugging west. It wasn’t strange to see planes – there’d been planes stationed at Holkham from the middle of the war – but this one was different. It wasn’t the RAF for one thing. It was a fat, sleek shining beast. An intruder on their peace. But what had Orwell said? – ‘the peace that is no peace’. Whatever it was, it felt as if he had no part in it. He imagined himself in the pilot’s seat high up in the air, looking down on his lonely figure on the beach. He remembered his brief sorties in the air – the feeling of power, the brilliance of being quite separate from the rest of the world and its petty cares down below. But it had been fleeting and it was over now.

  He had dreamed of coming back, every single night of National Service. Dreamed of these woods and the sound of the sea and, above all, of Verity. And now he’d been demobbed and was actually here, but his first thought, on getting off the train the day before, was that this was the end of the line. It wasn’t absolutely true – the branch line continued to King’s Lynn – but from here, there was nowhere else to go but the sea. And the sea made Arthur nervous. There had been an awful incident early on during the evacuation. He’d never been in the sea before. It often came back to him, that panicked feeling of putting his foot down, and finding there was nothing there. It turned out there was a shelf and a sudden drop so you could quickly get out of your depth. Peter saved him. He hadn’t wanted to admit he couldn’t swim. He never wanted to go back in after that. They’d tried to teach him and he learned the basics but he could never love it. It was yet another thing that the Frosts had, that he didn’t. He and Peter never spoke of it but it was there between them, a bond of indebtedness.

  He kicked at a tuft of dune grass. It couldn’t be the end. He’d swapped one set of stifling rules for another, from the military to the rural. It wasn’t possible that the pointless ritual and play-fighting of National Service could be as close as he got to the outside world. He wouldn’t let it.

  For a clever person Verity was remarkably blind. She never asked what he wanted, just assumed, like all her class, that he was happy with his lot. No university for him. She’d mentioned in her letters that she was applying to Oxford to read History, her father’s subject. He had an image of her, a black gown flying out behind her, late for a class, clattering on cobbled streets, among high spires. He thought of Jude the Obscure, which he had read at the grammar. He could see her there, toasting crumpets on a fire in an ancient room, a foppish youth fawning at her, she with an open book reclining on a sofa. There was a stubborn determination about her that could make it happen, as unlikely as it seemed, and he admired it; it was what he’d always loved about her. But him? No, not now, he’d had to give that up. National Service had been his university. And a funny kind of education that had been. She never seemed to see that he had once shared her dream.

  *

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ His mother was drying her hands on a tea towel by the little kitchen window, silhouetted in the late afternoon light. Since he had been home he had noticed how small she was. She seemed to have shrunk. He didn’t remember towering over her as he did now, and he was not a particularly tall man. Compared to the Frosts of Howe Farm, all tall and tree-like, rooted to the land, he and his mother were the last shrunken remnants of an old family, washed up in this quiet seaside town on the edge of a county, not even their own.

  ‘Just went for a walk.’

  She gave him a long look of distrust. ‘You smell of beer,’ she said. He couldn’t tell her he had seen Verity, not because she wouldn’t approve but because she would approve too much.

  It had not always been like this. Long ago when he was a boy, a half-Jewish evacuee, standing under the sign for WELLS-ON-SEA, Mrs Frost had appeared, looked down at him, taken his hand and driven him – the first car he’d ever been in – to her home. It hadn’t mattered that Mr Frost barely saw him, or that the children initially thought him alien, or that Mrs Timms gave him less food than she gave Verity and Peter (he was used to far less). All that mattered was that this magical woman found a space for him and loved him. And in return, he had loved them all.

  Once, Mrs Frost in a diaphanous white dress had been waiting on the lawn when he and Verity had careered back to the house, laughing and sandy, and Peter was sulkily throwing balls at the dog. She’d insisted on taking their photograph with the tiny aluminium camera she carried around with her. Verity and Peter had grumbled but she had a way of getting them to do as she asked and, with her quiet, terse little smile, they lined up dutifully underneath the oak tree. He remembered the photograph clearly. For a while it hung in a silver frame in the front room – the drawing room – and he would catch sight of it every day. In the picture, Verity was staring straight ahead defiantly. Peter had a sarcastic, silly smile on his face. Arthur, though, looked as if he’d been shot. His mouth was open, vaguely smiling, and rather than looking at the camera, he was gazing at Verity and if you looked really closely, you could see that the tips of their fingers were touching.

  But Mrs Frost was dead now. And with her death, some wire that had bound him to Howe Farm and the Frosts had been cut. They were still there but he wasn’t part of them any more. So much was obvious from the awful tea embarrassment. He guessed they were having a tea in her memory but no one had invited him – neither Peter nor Verity. He understood. A grocer’s
son – and a Jew – it just wouldn’t do. He was fine as a childhood playmate but Mr Frost had made it quite clear that Arthur could no more consider himself a suitor to Verity than a fisherman could. Since Mrs Frost’s death, no one at Howe Farm considered him family. It had been immediately apparent at the excruciating wake in the aftermath of her drowning. None of them knew what to do about him without her there.

  He set the kitchen table for tea, in silence. From the wireless came the irritating rum-de-dum of a big band. His mother cut the bread, humming along to the music. He felt her lack of comment, waited for the judgement to come. Each morsel of bread, a mere scraping of margarine and jam to wet it, was dry in his mouth.

  ‘I’m glad you’re back,’ she said finally.

  His shoulders felt heavy with the weight of her need. It was a miracle, the way she’d uprooted herself to this rural backwater after living her entire life in the East End of London. When she’d stepped off the train in Wells during the war, her face was open in wonder. She hadn’t come with him when he was evacuated. Couldn’t leave the tailor’s, she said, but she’d visited, just that one time. He remembered the telephone call from his mother telling him his father was MIA, shot down over Germany. Mr Frost’s large hand on his shoulder and Mrs Frost, gasping, rushing to him, crying, ‘Poor boy!’ He never went back to London. It had been his mother’s idea to come to Norfolk herself. A fresh start, she said. But he hadn’t foreseen how much she would rely on him, how much her expectations for him were a load on his back.