The Night of the Flood

by Zoe Somerville

  Arthur watched him re-emerge and continue on. Past a church on their right, Jack took a sudden right turn and, holding fast to the church wall, Arthur saw him go into a coffee shop in a medieval-looking building at the top of the road. He quickly stepped back and into the churchyard where he could position himself behind a tall headstone and see, unseen, into the café. It glowed invitingly with electric yellow light. Jack was sitting down at an empty table by the window. Condensation dripped down the windows and his back was facing the street, but Arthur could see it was him clear enough. On Jack’s left, two women in furry hats were talking animatedly. On the right, Arthur could just see an older man, with a brown cap and a lean, shaven face, reading a newspaper. Nothing seemed to happen. He stamped his feet on the hard earth beneath him and pulled his greatcoat tighter around him. A waitress brought over a tray with a pot and a small china cup. Jack poured coffee and spooned sugar into his cup and drank. Then he pulled something from his pocket. Arthur strained forward to see what it was and his shoulders dropped, disappointed. It was a cigarette case, square and metal, which he laid on the table. Arthur waited. His legs ached from having to half crouch behind the headstone and his back was cold. Jack took something from the front pocket of his jacket. He lit up a cigarette, offered one to the man diagonally opposite him. The metal case Jack had lain on the table couldn’t be a cigarette case.

  Arthur’s heart beat faster. Why didn’t he have a camera or binoculars? He almost laughed. He was acting like he was in one of the boy’s own adventures he’d read as a child. But he had no time to think about anything because Jack was already pushing back his chair. In a minute, he would be out of the coffee shop, and Arthur would have to be out of sight and ahead of him.

  *

  Back in the station café, breathing through his nose and affecting nonchalance, Arthur ordered a fresh pot of tea. Peter was fast asleep, his head on the table, his spittle pooling on the Formica. The shilling was gone, but otherwise no one seemed to be much bothered about him. When Jack sauntered in, minutes later, he didn’t tell them where he had been other than to say, ‘Got some Christmas gifts.’

  Arthur nudged Peter, who woke with a start and, blinking, began tearing off bits of the crushed tea cake and chewing them slowly, like one of his cows.

  ‘Get yourself a girl in the end, Art?’ Jack said, helping himself to tea from the newly ordered pot. Arthur didn’t bother replying. He would let Jack think what he liked. There was no need to tell him he’d gone to the library. It had been a waste of time anyway. He’d been trying to read up old newspapers, to see if he could find any clues, buried beneath a wave of copy, about the use of the Holkham airbase. But it was hopeless. He’d found nothing. A girl had sidled up to him on Lower Goat Lane, a red-haired one, surprisingly pretty. He’d imagined his hand under skirts, emptying himself into her. Like he had in Yorkshire, on service, that one time. He remembered the way she stood to take off her stockings, putting them carefully over a chair. He couldn’t not look. The girl’s hipbones stuck out sharply. He looked down at the dark between her legs and felt bilious and excited, in shock at the reality, the dreamt-of foreignness of it. But he couldn’t leave, couldn’t stop looking at the darkness. The girl had turned a bedside lamp on afterwards and it lit up the lines on her face, the creases round her eyes. He realised she was far older than him, almost as old as his mother. He was sick with himself, with the way he had cried out inside her, with the joy of the release. In the light there was nothing of Verity in her, nothing. He hadn’t done it again. It was Verity he wanted. He made himself turn away from the red-haired girl, hovering on the corner he knew led to the library.

  Into his head came an image of Jack, watching Verity, and he had to grip the table for support.

  ‘You’re a dark horse. I didn’t think you were interested in that sort of thing.’

  Arthur drank his tea and feigned disinterest. ‘Why did you think that?’

  ‘I had an idea you were courting Pete’s little sister,’ indicating the ravaged figure of Peter, who was slurping tea as if it was an elixir of health.

  ‘You asked me that before,’ said Arthur.

  Peter, his mouth half full of tea cake, spat it out. ‘For God’s sake! Don’t be vile.’

  Arthur reddened. ‘We’re friends,’ he said, ‘that’s all.’ The lie hurt him, as if in the telling he had made it true.

  ‘I should hope so,’ said Peter, ‘he’s like our brother,’ and smacked Arthur on the back. Then he groaned, bent forwards and vomited all over the table.

  On the train, Peter slept again, or pretended to, his face squashed against the window. As they travelled north, the fog cleared and the flat landscape reappeared. Their carriage smelled of stale sick.

  ‘What exactly happened to him? What did he do?’ Arthur asked Jack.

  ‘You should ask him that,’ said Jack. ‘Though I don’t think he’ll want to remember. He seemed to turn against her. Poor thing ran screaming through to me, saying he pushed her. And I find him like that.’ He pointed at their stricken friend.

  ‘Did he hurt her?’ he asked, dreading the answer.

  ‘She was going on as if he did. I got out of her that he shoved her and she tripped and fell against the bed post but I have no idea why he did it.’

  Let’s leave it like that, Arthur thought. ‘Probably just too tight,’ he said, lighting up a cigarette.

  ‘He sure was,’ said Jack, with an air of someone who has more to tell. Something else had happened. He thought of Peter making moon-eyes at Jack on the train, laughing at everything he said, and he wished he could protect his friend.

  ‘What errand did you have to run, then?’ He wanted to see how Jack would react, but there was nothing in his friendly, relaxed demeanour that gave anything away.

  ‘A gift for a girl I’m seeing.’

  ‘What did you get her? Is this girl here or in America?’

  ‘Why do you want to know so much?’

  ‘Why’d you lie about being from Arizona?’

  Jack stared at him, his neck twitching, and for a second, Arthur thought he was going to punch him in the face. Then he opened his mouth wide, bared his teeth and laughed.

  ‘Are you saying I’m not a hillbilly redneck now?’ Jack took out his packet of Camels and offered one to Arthur.

  *

  He and Peter sat in the Shipwright’s two weeks later.

  Arthur wondered if Jack knew he’d followed him. If he did, what would he do about it? Peter maintained he had a blackout about the brothel. Arthur was afraid to ask his friend about it, afraid of things about him that were unsaid. He suspected it was something to do with Jack. They hadn’t seen him recently and it was a relief to be rid of him. He had a wild thought that he should tell someone (who? The police?) about Jack handing over the metal case in the café, but as soon as he thought it, he dismissed it. He had no proof of anything.

  ‘Ver didn’t get in, you know. To Oxford. I heard her crying behind her bedroom door. There’ve been scenes at home,’ Peter said, sipping his pint. ‘Father’s threatening her with the dreaded De Vere fellow again. To be honest, I can’t see what choice she’s got. We need their money.’

  ‘What happened about that misunderstanding with your father about the farm finances?’

  ‘Misunderstanding!’ Peter snorted. ‘There’s a gaping hole in them but he pleads ignorance. Horses probably. It’s dire. He’d already splurged on the bloody combine and, frankly, we need actual workers on the farm. He can’t afford Ver to be knocking about at the farm any more, not pulling her weight.’

  A flare of something like happiness went through Arthur and he felt immediately guilty. But this changed everything. She’d need him now. He wouldn’t let her be sold off to some toff who didn’t love her. It was like a reprieve. It wasn’t fair, but her misfortune would be good for them both in the end.

  6.

  December

  When Verity first went back to the saltmarsh shack she told herself it was from c
uriosity. On the back of Jack’s bike, gripping onto his waist, she was another person, someone she only recognised from the glimpses she had in magazines, like the ones in Picturegoer. She wore her mother’s red lipstick and tied a scarf round her head and imagined herself in Rome or Cannes or Paris. Or New York.

  The wind scoured her legs and pulled back the skin on her face so it felt like it was coming off. The speed was intoxicating. As was the sense that she shouldn’t do this and be this. Most exhilarating of all was the physical presence of the man she was holding onto – the buttery feel of the leather jacket, the slight scent of his cologne, even in the wind, and her legs, jammed up close to him. The idea of the two of them speeding through time and space to something completely new.

  Hiding out in what she imagined was a dead man’s house was like a secret door onto another life. It was the home of a poacher or a crabber, judging by the rusted traps and dusty nets – alone on an empty marsh away from the eyes of others. She was amazed at herself, at her ability to shut off her doubts and disgust to create a kind of glamour out of such grime. It was funny how easy it was to put Arthur into a little box in the back of her mind, how when she saw Jack she could forget everything else.

  On the bike, she didn’t think about what would happen when they got to the shack, but when they were inside it was all there was. A secret, hidden world that had no meaning beyond the damp, misshapen walls. They sat and talked in the little kitchen, drinking his coffee laced with bourbon and smoking. The entire time she was waiting – waiting for him to pounce, willing it and yet afraid of it. When she said she had to go they stood by the door. She was wearing her coat, ready to leave, but she didn’t move. He came up so close to her that she could see each freckle on his twisted nose and each silvery scale of the snake-like scar. He reached for the back of her head and she jerked hers to the side as he leaned forward, so he ended up kissing the end of her nose. She heard him breathe out in a laugh and then his mouth touched hers again. His tongue pushed her lips open and his mouth tasted of coffee and smoke. He stroked her back with one hand and the other was on her skirt. It crept up to her waist and towards her chest. Her whole body shivered. She knew she’d better stop it now or she was done for.

  ‘Stop,’ she said, but he kept kissing her as if he hadn’t heard. His hand touched her left breast and in a rush of panic she pushed him away. He stumbled and almost fell back onto the kitchen floor.

  ‘Hey, what is it?’

  ‘You can’t. I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  She didn’t answer him, just shook her head, resisting the overwhelming temptation to give in.

  *

  After that, Verity brought her sketchbook as he suggested. She told her brother that she was sketching al fresco and he snorted as if he thought she was mad. She sat on a kitchen chair and drew what she saw out of the window: the rushes, the clumps of seablite, the geese and the waders, the spikes of grass and the line of the sea. Jack sat watching her, smoking. Slowly, he began to talk. He told her about the stars he’d seen from the desert, the cacti and the brutal heat. And cities with tall, shining buildings that reflected the sun. She allowed the words to cast their spell, watching his lips move while he talked, the flash of his teeth and the pale hairs on his arms, golden where the light caught them. He began to bring a camera to the cabin. It was a black rectangular shape with a plate that stuck out the bottom. Scratched on the side was a number and she assumed he’d somehow got it from the army surplus. Sometimes, he would get out the camera and take photographs from the window, sometimes turning it towards her. She found it embarrassing and flinched at first but then she began sketching him – the lines of his nose and jaw and cheekbones, filling page after page with bold, dark line drawings of his face and neck as he took photographs of her. It was a mutual gaze of recreation. She had never been looked at so much before in her life and it would have been unbearable except that she was also the looker. The way he focused on her as if every part of her was worth recording, was reciprocated in the way she drew every line and every crease and curve of his face. Sometimes her gaze snagged on his and she couldn’t look away. It was like he was photographing inside her, as if he already knew what was in there.

  Once she was making coffee in the kitchen and saw a newspaper, folded on the floor. It must have fallen from his pocket. She picked it up. It was the New York Times dated 17th November, eighteen days old. On the front there was a picture of an officer of some kind and then, on the left, the headline said:

  Experiments for Hydrogen Bomb Held Successfully at Eniwetok.

  Where was Eniwetok?

  ‘Jack,’ she said, holding the paper when he came in from the bedroom, where he’d set up his camera. His hair looked askew from where he’d been distractedly putting his hand through it. When she saw him, she almost didn’t say anything. But it came out.

  ‘Do you know anything about this? I haven’t heard anything.’

  ‘It was classified,’ he said, not showing any sign of surprise. ‘Nobody was supposed to know at first, but I guess they decided to leak some information to the public. Let them know we’re ahead of the Soviets.’

  ‘You make it sound like a game.’

  ‘Pretty high stakes game,’ he said, lighting up a Camel.

  ‘It says it was the 1st of November. That’s over a month ago, but there’s been nothing in the British papers.’

  Jack shrugged and took a slug of coffee.

  Arthur’s voice was in her head: his warnings about them sleepwalking into apocalypse. She only dimly remembered Hiroshima and the relief most people felt that the war in the East would end too. But a couple of years ago she’d seen newsreel of the city. The pictures of the children parading in their shorts and black bobbed hair made it seem as if all was well now, but at the end there was a scene of the people of Hiroshima’s ‘new city’ bowing their heads in remembrance. It seemed to Verity as if no one else was remembering. Everyone was desperate to protect themselves from the devastation inflicted on Japan but how could they do that if these bombs were so prevalent, so common that they were sitting up the road in Holkham, waiting to be dropped over Siberia?

  ‘Is this something to do with what you’re up to at the base?’ She held up the newspaper.

  ‘That’s classified too,’ he said again, then laughed. ‘Don’t look so serious! Of course it’s got nothing to do with it. This place is thousands of miles away in the Pacific. I’m here. But I guess it’s all connected.’ He paused. ‘Look – what I do is preparation. Information. I can’t say any more, you know that.’ He put his hands up in helpless supplication.

  ‘You could,’ she said.

  ‘But I’d have to kill you.’ He had an irritating smirk on his face. It felt like he was playing a part. The American Rogue.

  ‘Don’t treat me like an idiot, Jack.’

  ‘Vee, I’d tell you if I could but, really, it ain’t so very exciting. I’m just doing what I’m good at. It’s just a job, and a pretty boring one at that, stuck in a plane for ten hours at a time.’

  ‘You’re being disingenuous,’ she said.

  He sighed. ‘It’s hard to describe it, Vee.’

  ‘You’re not from Arizona, are you? All that chatter about horses, it’s not true. I can tell you don’t know anything about horses.’

  He gazed at her, not smiling for once, and she suddenly felt afraid that he would snap and reveal himself to be something completely different. He drew his teeth over his bottom lip and then the cloud lifted and he brightened. ‘I knew you were clever. I was trying to impress you. God, you make this so hard.’

  ‘Make what hard? What’s the matter?’

  ‘You,’ he said. He was leaning back against the table, cigarette half smoked and dangling in his hand. She was hot under his stare but neither of them looked away.

  ‘Let me take your photograph,’ he said.

  She sat on the windowsill and he began the ritual. Open the shutter, turn the wind-up key, compose the shot
, look through the viewfinder, drop in the film holder, pull the dark slide, pop the shutter, return the dark slide, remove the film holder. Repeat. Bored, her eyelids drooped and closed, then she felt his hands and woke up. He was gentle, but insistent. It was hard to keep saying no.

  In their little wooden world they became just bodies. The kisses became more urgent. The two of them slid down to the kitchen floor, his hands roamed under her skirt, caressing the line of her thighs, the tender skin at the top, which made her shudder. She stopped it at lying on the floor, his weight on her, his hands on her, the dust and grime of the old cabin beneath her clothes. No, she said, again and again no.

  Prone, she looked up at the chipped enamel on the yellow stove-top kettle. She saw herself and could not believe it was her. What would Miss Gardiner, her old school friends, her family, think if they saw her now? She heard her own little moans and they were the sounds of someone else. They were the whimpers of an animal. At the last moment, she pushed him away and he relented. He didn’t try to make her carry on and later she knew it was because he didn’t need to. It was a game he was going to win.

  But the line was crucial. She told herself that if she did not cross the line she had not sinned, she had not let herself fall.

  At home, she stopped looking at the dressing table mirror for fear of what she would see. Her mother’s face seemed to shimmer on the glass, watching her. She heard unidentified female voices. Poor motherless child. Look at her. What would her poor, dead mother think? She wandered into her mother’s bedroom, kept pristine by Mrs Timms. She opened the wardrobe door. The empty white folds of her mother’s wedding dress, hanging. Her fingers reached out and touched the silk but she took her hand away quickly as if stung. She closed the door and sat with her back to the wardrobe. Marriage. Babies. This was what her mother had wanted for her. Verity was no longer sure if it was true. In Verity’s memory, her mother left an impression of gliding, of perfect, gilded beauty. She had not been the kind of mother you talked to. And now she was gone and she could never ask, Were you happy? What did it all mean to you? Her parents’ marriage had been arranged, as marriages used to be. She’d been offered up, like a prize heifer, with farm attached, her father the lucky one, back from the Great War, in a country of few young men. The silky folds of the wedding dress, as creamy as the raw milk from the cows, hung as a warning of a life planned out and enclosed. It was meant to be every girl’s dream – like the debs in their white gowns lined up for plucking by some suitable aristocrat. But it was not her dream. Her father said it was what her mother had wanted for her but that stultifying life had destroyed her. The photographs were the only signs of herself she’d left behind. Had they been her mother’s attempt at some kind of autonomous life? Once, lying next to her mother on top of the quilt as she slept her dreamless, drugged sleep, Verity had taken hold of her thin, white, jewelled hand. ‘Wake up,’ she’d said, and had fervently wished that her mother would wake up, hold her and the two of them would tell each other their secrets.