He spent as much time as possible out the back in the storeroom spinning his own dreams, jotting down ideas for the article that was forming in his mind about the atomic world, about the nuclear threat and war between the Soviets and America. It was sitting on his own doorstep – the story that would get him out of here. If he could get a couple of pieces published in the local rag, he could take them to the national papers. If he’d learned one thing from service, it was that what was coming would be worse than anything they could imagine – worse than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The RAF and the rest of the British military were desperate to keep up with the Yanks who, if anything, were even keener on retaliation. But this sinister new war was nothing like the last. It was being fought under a cloak of secrecy and lies. He wanted to tear it down and reveal it for what it was – a deadly game of decimation. His working title: What Nuclear War Means for Us. He should be grateful rather than resentful that he’d dodged military action, but this war wouldn’t be like the last. The enemy was their own government as much as the Soviets. He was scribbling when he heard the bell tingle and then a girl’s voice:
‘Hello? Anyone here?’
In the orange half light of the shop, reflected from the translucent plastic they put in the windows, he blinked at a vision: a girl was standing with a basket in the hazy glow. Muriel. When he thought of Muriel, he still thought of her as the girl on the beach. A scrap of a thing, fair hair blowing about her face, gathering clams in her old net in the shallows, running wild on the mussel beds at low tide. Not much to laugh about, you’d have thought, but she always did.
Mother was nowhere to be seen. Her position was usually at the cash register, where she sat on a stool with her knitting all day long, interrogating the customers, weaving their complaints and stories into her endless scarves for one of her ‘causes’. In an effort to overcome the twin negatives of her married name and the obscure shame of his missing father, she joined everything. Church, WI, parish committee, she did them all.
‘Hello, Arthur, what you gawping at? Never seen a girl afore?’ Curling out from under a green headscarf, Muriel’s hair shone gold, her pouting lips were bright red and her narrow eyes were laughing at him.
He looked down immediately. ‘Sorry.’
‘Are you going to just stand there like a great lummox or are you going to serve me?’
He took her list and her ration book. Close up, he could smell the seasalt on her hair.
Up on the ladder, fetching tins, he felt her sharp gaze on his back and his neck burned.
‘I heard you’d come home. She told me, your Verity.’
He stiffened, half turned to face her, aware of the heat on his neck. ‘She’s not mine. I didn’t know you were still friends.’
Muriel’s smile was large in her face. Her lips were very red. ‘We’re not. I bumped into her down Askey’s milk bar a couple of weeks ago. Where’s your mother then?’
She is mine. She’s mine. She’s mine.
‘Right here, young lady.’
Arthur jerked round and nearly fell off the ladder. Mother’s eyes were like daggers.
‘Let me have that, Arthur, I’ll put it through the till. How’s your mother and the baby, Miss Gittings? Any more on the way?’ It was his mother’s acid-polite voice, the one she used with people she thought below her.
Muriel’s mother was constantly either pregnant or nursing. Her father was always out at sea, preferring the waves and the fish to the cries and the grime of the eight children crammed into their ramshackle old cottage down the East End.
‘Good morning, Mrs Silver,’ said Muriel. There was a hint of mockery in her voice.
Arthur, up the ladder, with his back to them both, tensed.
‘Freddie’s seven months now, got a mind to start crawling, I reckon. Mother don’t want any more, that’s for sure, but that hint exactly her choice.’
His mother tsked. Privately and often publicly too, she aired her opinions on the breeding of the poor and felt it was an affront to everyone else that they couldn’t ‘find a way’ of stopping. She was in her early forties and her time had come and gone. He heard her whispering the names of the babies she’d lost at her bedtime prayers through the wall, but neither of them ever mentioned the ones that had gone before. Nor his vanished father. She only had him now, him and the shop.
She sometimes slipped in something for the little ones, a twist of sugar, an egg, to other families that she felt deserved it. But not for Muriel’s family, breeding like rabbits and only the dwindling fish stocks to support them. Arthur wrapped up the meagre portion of flour and weighed the pathetic handful of greens Muriel had picked and tried to signal with his eyes his regret, his shame.
‘What do you think about the Americans then, Arthur?’ said Muriel, eyes glittering.
‘What do you mean?’ he said.
His mother made a sound in her throat like a squawk. He knew exactly how she felt.
‘Well, I think it’s fantastic,’ said Muriel. ‘Bring a bit of life to this dull old town. Mind how you go, Arthur,’ she called, as she tied her scarf tighter round her hair. Mother had settled back to her knitting. He hoped she didn’t see Muriel winking at him as she turned and left, holding the door open for old Mrs Hatchet.
‘I like your hair like that,’ she called as she disappeared out of the door.
‘She’s trouble that girl,’ said his mother.
Arthur saw his mother’s pinched mouth and grabbed a paper twist of sugar.
‘She’s forgotten something,’ he called and disappeared out of the door, before his mother or Mrs Hatchet could say anything.
Muriel was still on the quay, one hand holding onto her scarf in the gusty wind. She turned at his voice and waited. He handed her the paper twist.
‘I… She should have…’
‘Thanks, Arthur,’ she said, and put it in her basket. The wind was flapping at the furled sails of the boats behind her in the harbour. He noticed she had a large cloth bag as well as her basket. She saw him looking. ‘Just on my way back from the Buttlands. Collecting laundry. Mum does some of them posh ones’ washing. She’s got me slaving for her as usual.’ There was resentment but no embarrassment.
A wash of grief fell over him for what they had once been. It was strange now, to think of the four of them together as they used to be. He, Muriel and the Frost children. It had all gone, their childhood: he had been cast out and so had she. Since he had been away he could see it more clearly.
Blinking, he tried to think of something to say. ‘I’ve not seen you for an age.’
‘You’ve been away,’ she said. He’d been back from National Service for a week now but he’d hardly seen Muriel since he’d gone to the grammar. ‘How was it then?’
‘Dull, like you wouldn’t believe. Didn’t see any fighting.’ He wondered why he always did that, incapable of putting a positive spin on anything.
‘I never saw you as the fighting type anyway. You looked dapper in your uniform, though. Your mother showed everyone a picture of you next to a plane. She kept saying how much you looked like your father when he was in the RAF. You were flying, weren’t you?’ She squeezed his arm.
He felt heat rise again up his neck. She’d always been direct and it had always caught him out. He had an image of Muriel, hair flying, jumping over the ditches that criss-crossed the grazing marsh with her bucket full of wriggling creatures.
‘Only once,’ he said, remembering the vertiginous feeling of rising through the air and the smell of the fuel at the back of the plane. ‘I was a clerk.’ It was only the public school boys who got commissions and went on to become airmen, while people like him, grammar school boys who could type and file – they were given desk jobs. He moved a step back.
She stayed where she was. ‘You going to the dance the Americans are putting on?’
‘I don’t know anything about it.’
‘It’s going to be at the Hall. Everyone’s going.’
‘I’m a terrible danc
er, Muriel.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ she said, and he heard the chime of laughter in her voice. ‘See you there, Arthur!’
She turned to go and he listened to the click of her heels on the pavement as she went down past the Shipwright’s pub towards the warren of little cottages down the east. He watched her skirt swishing as she walked. He had no intention of going to Harborough Hall. The last thing he wanted to do was go to some dance with a lot of arrogant Americans.
*
Arthur and Peter cycled out to the golf course, south of the town, passing the body of a dead badger and what looked like the red pelt of a fox. In the shadow of the scrub under the hedge, the animals’ bodies appeared as if they were sleeping.
As they rode, another of the planes he’d seen at the beginning of May flew overhead. It was an American jet bomber, everyone knew that now, but no one knew why they were here. It was like a futuristic rocket, incongruous in the flat Norfolk countryside. With its deep rumble and flashy brilliance, it seemed to say that whatever the British had done in the war was not enough in this new, atomic world. Arthur wondered why more of the town weren’t resentful of their presence.
The golfing was a write-off. On the ninth, he got stuck in a bunker, sweating, while Peter leaned on his clubs above him offering unhelpful instructions. Peter was in the full regalia: plus fours, shirt and tie, but he didn’t seem bothered by the heat. Arthur loathed golf but he did it for his friend’s sake.
After the tenth, there was a long walk to the next hole. A funny pair they must look – he stocky and dark, Peter tall and fair. Peter offered him a cigarette. Camels.
‘Where did you get those from?’ he said, taking one.
‘Ah, that reminds me. Fellow’s joining us in a tick. One of the Americans. Said he’d be late so I didn’t expect him at the first. Reckon he’ll be here soon, though.’
‘What American? Why didn’t you mention it earlier?’ He sounded piqued but it was odd. No one else ever joined them on their golfing days.
Peter looked surprised. ‘I should have, old man. Just clear forgot about it to be honest. Been up to my ears in farm business. The accounts aren’t squaring. Ver doesn’t know this, so keep it under your hat, but I think Father’s been off on one of his jaunts again and I can only think he’s gambled some of the profits. Feed costs are going up all the time and we have less and less to cover it. I don’t know what to do.’
‘Have you confronted him about it?’
‘How can I? You know what he’s like. It’d push him over the edge.’
Arthur did know. Mr Frost had always been a drinker but since Mrs Frost had died, Peter seemed to be taking on more and more of the farm business and putting off making any decisions.
‘Look, there he is. Lucky I remembered, otherwise I’d have looked like quite a fool.’ Peter looked away, tugging at his collar, and, for once, appeared uncomfortable. Arthur realised that he was actually embarrassed about introducing someone new to him.
Away across the fairway, a speck in the distance, a figure was walking towards them. When the figure was close enough, Arthur saw he was strolling, relaxed, in pale yellow trousers and a dark navy polo shirt, his golf bag slung over his shoulder.
‘Jack!’ Peter walked forward towards the newcomer with his hand held out in greeting. Arthur stayed back and surveyed the interloper. He was medium height, probably about as tall as he was, but with a litheness and a swagger that spoke of complete confidence. His face was slim and with a pointed chin and eyes that creased with his wide grin. But the most obvious thing about him was the strange red-gold of his hair. It shone like a beacon against the green of the range and the pale blue of the sky – a flash of deep orange, drawing attention to itself, demanding that they all look. He felt a shiver of something close to dislike and, aware of it, he consciously readied his own face to brighten into welcome.
‘You must be the famous Art,’ said the American and Arthur wondered where the man had got that nickname from. No one called him that. Arthur wasn’t the sort of person to give others nicknames and was irked if anyone shortened his, with the exception of Verity and Peter. Even in the service where everyone had a nickname, he was still known as Arthur. He extended his hand and Jack took it. The hand was small and cool but with an insistent grip and he felt the American’s almond eyes focus on him until he had to look away.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said.
‘Let battle commence,’ declared the American.
For the rest of the course, Arthur became more and more frustrated and with each duff shot his irritation grew and he became careless. Jack would shout encouragement, which only put him off. He let more shots go until he was so far over par he felt like giving the whole thing up. But he couldn’t do that. Instead he had to watch Peter, with his long, slow arm and his careful, hunter’s eye, find the hole more times than not. Worse still was the American with his easy, casual swing that hid, Arthur suspected, as keen an eye as Peter’s. Thoroughly discouraged, his shirt stuck to his back with sweat, his entirely wrong, badly fitting shoes dug into his feet and he dreamt of swinging the club into the American’s satisfied face.
Finally, they arrived at the eighteenth. With the relief of the ordeal nearly over, he relaxed. Peter was up first and hit straight to the green.
‘Magnificent shot, Pete!’ Jack was leaning on his club, with a cigarette in his fingers, his large mouth beaming. Arthur had a vision of a Hollywood star in some sunshine-drenched film from the last decade and it made the American unreal, even ridiculous, which was rather comforting.
On his turn, he no longer cared whether the ball ended up anywhere near the damn hole. He took a wild swing.
‘Watch it go!’ blared the American twang behind him, and he looked up to see the ball carving a beautiful, soaring arc along the range heading magically straight for the flag. He watched in bemused awe as the white ball plummeted to earth, falling straight for the hole. He thought, I’ve done it. But in a blink it had bounced off the edge of the green and into a bunker.
Behind him, the old windows of the clubhouse gleamed mockingly in the afternoon sunshine.
In the shady, faded bar, deserted apart from a couple of old gents and the barman himself, Jack bought a round of beers. They took their drinks back out into the light and stood on the terrace overlooking the course, toasting Peter’s triumph.
‘Jack’s at the base,’ said Peter, smiling at the American with pride as if he was showing off a prize.
‘Just trying out some new planes,’ said Jack.
‘What kind of planes?’ He might as well show him that he wouldn’t be diverted.
‘B-45 Tornado,’ Peter answered for him, like a kid collecting cigarette cards.
‘What exactly are you here for?’ He loathed this pretence, the easy sham of it all.
‘Art, old boy, they can’t divulge—’ Peter’s hand was on his shoulder, as if to restrain him.
But Jack’s smile seemed to take them both in. ‘Pete’s right, I’m afraid, I can’t really say, but it’s joint operations with the RAF, and I’m sure you realise that this part of the world is a strategic base.’
‘Yes, you’re using England as a convenient spot – from which to do what exactly?’
‘Art fancies himself as a roving reporter, Jack. Not much going on around here usually.’ Arthur winced. He wished Peter hadn’t exposed him like that.
Jack slightly raised an eyebrow but kept smiling. ‘The Brits want us here as far as I know.’
‘More’s the pity,’ said Arthur.
He wanted to ask more because Jack’s answer was no answer at all, but he realised two things simultaneously: that this wasn’t the whole story and that Jack would only tell them what he wanted to and no more. Well, he would do his damnedest to find out.
‘What state are you from?’
‘Arizona,’ said Jack, with a slight hesitation.
‘That’s funny, you sound like someone I met on service. He was from the East. Near
New York City.’ This wasn’t quite true – the visiting GI had been from Pennsylvania – but Jack’s voice was odd. He’d seen enough Westerns at the flicks, and Jack sounded nothing like those cowboys.
Jack shrugged and smiled as if it meant nothing. ‘Pete told me you’re a flying man.’
‘Not really. I was just with the RAF for National Service. Demobbed now.’ His guts tightened and he couldn’t bear to tell this interloper that he was his mother’s delivery boy. ‘I’m thinking of going to London, after the summer.’
‘Are you?’ said Peter, his eyebrows raised.
‘Can’t stay here forever,’ Arthur said.
‘I suppose not,’ said Peter, truculent. ‘Though I don’t seem to have a choice over that.’
Jack was looking from one to the other, a slight smile curling up from one side of his mouth. ‘Is it so awful here?’
‘Oh no,’ said Peter. ‘Best place in the world really. Best shooting and birding in the country. You’ll see. We complain about it but we love it truly, don’t we, Arty?’
It was easy to reply yes, because if he thought of her, it was true.
*
He’d been enthralled by her, right from the beginning. When Arthur first saw them they were in the garden. The boy was practising cricket and throwing a ball, a game of toss at the dog. The girl was sitting reading on the swing they had back then, strung up between two towering sycamores. She looked up from the book when her mother called her name and stared at him from under a dark fringe as if he had arisen from the sea carrying a trident. The swing slowed and stopped and the little girl jumped off, revealing herself to be his height even though she was only six and he was eight. She thrust her hand out and peered at him. When he said, ‘How do you do,’ as he had been taught by his mother, the girl let out a blast of laughter before shutting her mouth firmly. But it was still in her eyes, sparkling.
A ball flew at him, which, blessed miracle, he caught. ‘Come and play,’ demanded Peter, and with deep gratitude Arthur turned his back on the priggish little sister.
The Night of the Flood Page 4