The Night of the Flood Read online

  ‘Now you’re here, you can help me with the shop. It’s been hard without you. I had to get a young lad from the prefabs to do the deliveries. I’ll let him go now. He’s been filching I’m sure.’

  His eyes ached. ‘I said I’d see Peter tomorrow, Mother. A round of golf.’

  ‘Golf? I see.’ There was a pause. ‘How’s that poor boy? After the terrible way his mother passed away. They were lucky to get the vicar’s blessing for a Christian funeral.’

  Arthur creased his forehead in pain. How could she be so cruel? ‘Why wouldn’t they? It was just gossip.’

  His mother pursed her lips and stirred her tea vigorously.

  ‘I thought we might check the stock.’ She left a heavy pause, sipped her tea. ‘But that’s fine. You need a day of rest. I’ll go to church.’

  ‘I can help on Monday, Mother. But I should get a job. I can’t stay here forever.’

  ‘Monday. Thank you, Arthur.’

  In the evening they sat in the front room, overlooking the harbour, and listened to the wireless. At least, his mother listened, the click clack of her knitting needles the background music to the evening play: a George Bernard Shaw, which was typical of the radio. There was rarely anything new and the theatre itself wasn’t much better – just farces and sentimental musicals, nothing that reflected real life. He stared out of the window at the twilight. The purple bruising of the sky was silvering, boats turning to black shapes, the sea into mist. He wished he was in one of the planes he’d seen and that he could fly away from here.

  More than ever he felt that this place was a sickness, a sleeping sickness in the head.

  And it had killed Mrs Frost. He could not forgive it for that. He’d been on leave at the time, a few rushed days before returning to the camp. He remembered her body, a collapsed form washed up on the beach below the farm. No one understood how she could have drowned; she’d been a competent swimmer. There were whispers, rumours. He knew it, that this place had drained her of vitality with its endless sky, its slow attrition, the salt that killed everything. It had dragged her out to sea and thrown her back again. He’d known. She’d had on a nightdress when they found her. Grey and clinging to her, indecent. On the train back to the camp, he’d found he couldn’t stop thinking about the way the folds of the material made ripples like the patterns in the wet sand all over her.

  But he wouldn’t let it kill him too. He would get out, he would see the world, report on it, and he would take Verity with him.

  At this moment, looking out over the cold sea, he knew why he’d come back. He was here for her. That was all.

  3.

  Deep into the veins of the east saltmarshes, Muriel sailed her dad’s old crabbing boat. The water was just high enough to manoeuvre it through the creeks to Blakeney Pit but it took skill to navigate. The boat’s underside could easily catch on the mud and marsh grass and if you timed the tide wrong, you’d be stuck and that was that. Like a warning, she passed the rotting skeleton of an old abandoned boat, sacrificed to the sea.

  An eel thrashed in the beak of a cormorant and dozens of tiny terns screamed. Muriel dropped her baited pot into the creek. There wouldn’t be many crabs but she liked it here. Few fishermen came this far into the marshes.

  She’d seen the planes arriving and felt the change in the air. The town was stirring again.

  Muriel pulled up her crab pot. Writhing at the bottom were two green shore crabs and a beautiful brown. She lifted them out, placed them in her saltwater bucket and lowered the pot once more into the muddy creek. She was feeling lucky.

  4.

  A stranger was leaning on the gate to the grazing field. He was wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, revealing tanned forearms covered with golden down. His red hair was sticking up at the front, shining with grease, his mouth too big, his nose at an odd angle. Verity’s first impression was of something altogether too bright and uncomfortable to look at. And at the same time, impossible not to.

  The sun, at its zenith, had burned through the cloud and now shone hot on the back of her neck. She had fed the chickens. She’d groomed her horse, Gypsy, nuzzled and whispered into his hair and left him sheltering in the shade at the edge of the paddock. Gyps had been her mother’s gift to her. He was the only living being with whom she felt fully at ease.

  ‘Hey, you must be Pete’s sister.’ The stranger was smoking. He looked directly at her, with an odd, arrogant smile.

  He was obviously American. Verity lowered her eyes and felt her chest flush hot with something like anger. Boys she knew would never look at you like that.

  ‘Yes, I’ve come to fetch him. Father wants him.’

  ‘He’ll be here any minute now, he’s just over in that field.’ He indicated the field down to the right of the gate, but offered no explanation or apology as to why he might be there, standing so casually on their land.

  ‘You want one?’ He proffered a cigarette and she took it off him, then stood, foolishly holding it between her fingers.

  He laughed and held out a silver lighter. Her hand shook as she tried to light the cigarette. She felt his eyes on her again.

  ‘I gotta tell you, you’re a lot better looking than your brother, Miss Frost.’

  It was a terrible line but its effect on her was physical and immediate. Her throat constricted and she couldn’t breathe. No one had ever spoken to her like this. It was intolerable. She knew she should say something or do something but her throat was caught, she was so unused to the attention. She sucked deeply on the smoke for some relief.

  ‘Hey, sorry, I didn’t mean to alarm you.’ He was still smiling, not in the least sorry. She realised she must have been frowning and tried to relax her face. Say something, she told herself.

  Her laugh came out as a croak. ‘No, not at all, it’s very flattering. I’m just not used to such high praise.’ She sucked on the cigarette again. It rasped against her throat and made her cough. ‘I’m actually engaged anyway.’ Why had she said that? It wasn’t even true. There had been some talk between her father and another gentleman farmer but she was definitely not engaged. Later she realised that she had thought of Arthur when she said that and it had been an unwelcome thought.

  ‘Yeah? Pete didn’t mention it. Shouldn’t you be used to compliments then?’ She must have made a face because he extended his hand, saying, ‘Look, I’m just teasing. I’m Jack by the way, pleased to meet you.’ She hesitated but took it; it was warm and unnervingly strong. He didn’t let go and she found herself holding the stranger’s hand for longer than she wanted. She caught his eye and noticed they were an unusual colour – hazel flecked with gold, framed with flickering pale eyelashes, disconcertingly transfixing, almost vulpine. How long they stood like that she didn’t know. It was enough for the impression of his hand to seep into her skin and remain after he took it away.

  ‘How do you do. Have you just arrived, Mr—?’ she said.

  There was a slight hesitation. ‘Doherty,’ he said. ‘Sure. Just arrived.’

  She thought of the plane she’d seen on the day of the tea and pictured this American sitting in it, seeing her in the barley field. It made her shiver.

  ‘How do you know my brother?’

  ‘He’s taken me under his wing. Said he’d show me the sights.’

  She raised her eyebrows. Whatever Peter was up to, it was certainly not anything to do with acting as a tour guide for this overconfident man.

  ‘Jack! Where the devil are you?’ Peter was calling from beyond the gate, out of sight down the far end of the field. His voice was big and open and full of a joy rarely heard.

  Verity stiffened and took a step back away from him but he took hold of her hand and held onto it. He pulled her towards him, brought his face to her ear and said, ‘Can I see you again?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  His mouth touched her neck just below her ear. ‘Please,’ he breathed out.

  ‘No!’

  In a second he had released her and was
standing back at the gate, lighting up another cigarette. She thrust her hands in the pockets of her dress for something to do with them.

  As Peter came into view, she called out to him, her voice too loud for her own ears, ‘I was sent to tell you – Father wants you at the house!’

  Peter’s expression soured. ‘Oh for God’s sake, what now?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Fine, fine, tell him I’ll be along in a minute. Oh, this is Jack, Ver. He’s an airman at the base. Jack, Verity. My little sister.’

  ‘I introduced myself,’ said Jack, smiling as if they shared a secret. ‘Will you be coming to the dance we’re holding, Miss Frost?’

  ‘I don’t know, I hadn’t thought about it.’

  ‘You said you were dying to go,’ said Peter.

  ‘I might go,’ she said, wishing her brother dead. She began to stalk away from them, trying not to break into a run.

  ‘See you there!’ called the American and she turned and gave an awkward wave and saw him wink at her. At least she thought he did, but it was hard to believe.

  Fleeing back to the house, a blur of images ran through her head: his mouth breathing into her ear, those strange golden eyes and the bright, red hair. What an oddity he was. It was funny now he was gone. Such a presumptuous, rude young man.

  *

  Her father grunted at her knock.

  His study was in shadow, barely any light coming in from the north-facing bay window, which looked out over the fields to the woods. His chair was turned away from the desk, and he was sitting with his pipe. When she entered he turned to look at her.

  ‘Father, I’ve brought you a cup of tea.’

  He nodded his thanks. She hesitated in the doorway. Once, he had encouraged her, ordered her books from London and boasted about her. He used to call her his little bluestocking, but she was a fool to think he cared now. He seemed bemused by her desire to sit the Oxford entrance although he was an Oxford man himself. She wanted to shout at him, You made me think it was possible. He’d stood up for her against her mother’s wishes when Verity had come home from school glowing with her schoolmistresses’ reports. Her mother had always said ‘Well done, dear’ in that way she had of suggesting that it was just a passing phase, but Father had been proud of his clever girl. Verity was destined to be presented as a debutante, as her mother and her grandmother had been, but he’d seemed relieved when she resisted being a deb after Mother died. This March, she’d not been among the girls in their elaborate frocks and hats trotting through the palace gates towards the very new queen. Thank God. There was no money anyway. She hadn’t realised that it would be her only sanctioned rebellion.

  Peter said that when Father first took on the farm he hadn’t any idea what to do – he had no background in it and their farmworkers, especially the ploughman, Billy, used to tell Father, ‘You’ll larn.’ Verity couldn’t imagine anyone speaking to Father like that. She remembered Billy as a kind, red-faced man. Real Norfolk. Deferential but blunt. He’d saved the farm in ’30 according to Father. Then he went off to war and they turned more of the land to arable for the war effort. They’d had land girls to help and money from the Ministry for crops, but since Mother’s death, it had all languished. Verity was just one more worry. She suspected he wanted to get her off his hands and the only way he knew how to do this was through marriage. As if she exhausted him, as everything now did.

  ‘Where’s your brother?’ Her father was staring at her with his disconcerting, pale, heavy-lidded eyes.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, and this was true. She didn’t know exactly where he was. ‘I gave him your message.’

  Her father murmured acknowledgement and she turned to go.

  ‘Verity,’ he said, peering past her at the door. ‘I’ve arranged a visit with the De Veres next week. For you to spend time with Richard.’

  She felt her whole body tense. ‘Please, Daddy, not that again.’

  He gripped the side of his chair and seemed to be about to spring out of it to strike her. But then he sank back into the leather folds and closed his eyes. ‘We don’t have a choice. The farm – the farm cannot keep you.’

  ‘But I’m going to university.’

  He looked at her with a kind of despair. ‘It’s not practical, Verity. And what is the point of all that time and effort if you are going to marry?’ So that was it then. The reality of what she was to him now – chattel he couldn’t afford.

  She looked down at the floor, her head boiling. ‘I’ll pay my way. I’ll work—’

  ‘It’s not just about the money,’ he spat.

  ‘And I’ll work afterwards. They need people like me in – in government or – the arts!’

  He sighed. ‘The arts,’ he said, as if she had told him she was going to the moon. ‘And how will that help with finding a husband?’

  ‘Can’t it wait?’ She was wailing now.

  ‘It’s what your mother wanted for you. I made a mistake, giving you ideas that couldn’t—’ He was cut off by a fit of coughing, wracking his hulking form.

  She ran over to him but he waved her off. ‘Daddy, please,’ she said, not sure what she was asking for. But he raised his hand wearily as if she should leave.

  Away from her father, Verity intended to study as a form of rebellion – that would show him she was serious. She would ace her exams and get in despite him. She had to. But when she was actually out in the garden, instead of studying, she sketched out a furious picture of the house with deep, black strokes in charcoal and a gloomy, lowering sky.

  5.

  The flat was his mother’s world, her kingdom, the repository of years of collected knick-knacks of the Silver family, which she obsessively dusted and polished.

  National Service had been six hellish weeks of basic training – endless square-bashing, being screamed at by the sergeant, lunging bayonets into straw dummies – followed by months of numbing boredom and deprivation, broken only by the odd lurch into thrilling danger. It had been the smell of other men’s sweat and slops in canteens; day after day of card games or reading on your barrack bed; the permanent reek of engine oil; the numbing cold in the freezing barracks. Once, the sudden rush upwards, away from the earth in a Tiger Moth. And early on, the inert body of a boy his age, then eighteen, hanging by a rope from the toilet cistern. He hadn’t written about that to his mother, nor to Verity.

  Hating it, he had yearned for Verity and, by extension, the woods and the sea, but never this flat. Arthur saw the five (six if you included the WC) draughty little rooms above the shop as nothing to do with him. He slipped into the same routines as before: stirred the porridge in the kitchen at the back, which overlooked the rooftops of the cottages on Red Lion Yard, and, breakfast over, set up the shop. But if his mother wasn’t looking, he peered through the nets of the tiny front parlour from where, on a clear day, he could see right across the harbour and the saltmarshes to the line of pine trees in the far distance, and could imagine Verity there.

  His mother expected her tea. Her room was, if anything, even more crammed with gimcracks than the rest of the flat. All he ever snatched sight of confirmed it as a shrine to femininity, all lace and costume jewellery. The scent of floral perfume and lemons pervaded the room. She was already in her work dress, hair pinned and make-up done.

  ‘What have you done to your hair? It’s sticking up,’ she said, taking the cup from him. In her voice, just the trace of the east London accent she’d striven to lose.

  ‘It’s supposed to be like that. It’s the style.’

  He turned, quickly, before she could collar him about anything else, catching only a glimpse of her pursed lips.

  ‘I don’t like it, Arthur,’ she called down the stairs. ‘It’s common. Like a Yankee.’

  Out on the quay he opened up the shop. It was quiet, apart from the odd fisherman and his boat, and the sky was grey, tinged with the pale yellow haze of the coming day.

  It had all seemed clear enough when he was staring at the
bare iron ceiling of the barracks or pointlessly disassembling and reassembling a Bren gun: articles for the local press, a lucky break, London, travel. The world. And yet somehow, now he had returned, the seaside town had sucked him back in. The salt air itself seemed to get in his nose, his eyes and his brain and lull him to inertia. He’d written little. Done little. He was putting off everything because of Verity and it scared him, because each time she left him in the woods, she became less real. They’d only ever been together here, in this cut-off place, and that was why it filled him with dread and pulled him in. They needed to get away from here, both of them together. They needed to get to London where he could write them both free, free from this soul-sapping end of the bloody world.

  Arthur looked up at the shopfront with his usual combination of familiarity and loathing. Above the awning Silver’s Grocers was written in red paint. But it was also a tobacconist’s, a sweet shop, a newsagent’s, even a chemist’s, as they stocked a selection of women’s beauty products and Knight’s Castile soap for men. The tins and boxes of non-perishables were in tall columns on two sides, the produce was arranged outside, and on the floor behind the long counter were the sacks of flour and grains. Even now, when sugar was still on rations, his mother had a way of making the shop feel full. The only thing they didn’t have was meat. For that you had to go to Thurgood’s. Thurgood himself was skinny, which didn’t seem right for a butcher, and Arthur knew for certain he was up to something with the meat rations, selling the choicest cuts on the black market. But he was local. His was a local name and Arthur had the impression that the Thurgoods had been here, on the Norfolk marshes, forever. Silver, though. It was only marginally better than Feinsilver. His grandfather, Ivan Feinsilver, changed his name when he came to London from Warsaw. Now both he and Arthur’s father were gone, but the name remained, with its whiff of foreignness. It still sounded Jewish, Arthur thought, with a twinge of discomfort and then shame at the discomfort. He wasn’t even Jewish officially as Mary Silver, his mother, was from an old East End family of tailors, all dead, but he felt his difference. The half counted.