When she was younger, a gauche, blundering thing in knee-high socks, her mother had gone away for the weekend. It was not long after the war. No one said where, or why. When she came back, Mrs Timms told her that her mother was sick. She stayed in bed. Verity stood outside the closed door and she could hear her mother crying. If only she’d gone in then, but she was afraid. Once she heard her father talking about neurosis and excessive grief. Eventually, her mother emerged from the bedroom and there were parties, teas, visitors again. But perhaps she had already disappeared. They had not been enough, her and Peter, to keep her from slipping into a state of distraction. And in the end, she’d left them, absolutely. No one knew if she’d meant to drown in the sea, or if it had been an accident, but it would always feel like an abandonment.
*
Their mother’s birthday fell just after Christmas and still deep in winter. There’d been precious little festivities at the farm. As usual, they listened to the Christmas Day broadcast from Sandringham, but it was the new queen this year. She’d sounded so young, not much older than Peter was. ‘Pray for me,’ she’d said, and he thought it sounded like a cry for help. She talked of the Empire as a ‘power for good’ and their father had nodded along emphatically, but it seemed to Peter, with the Americans on their doorstep, that the old order was disintegrating.
Before breakfast and long before dawn, instead of returning to the house after milking the cows, Peter walked down Leafy Lane and across the Holkham Road to the chapel where Mother was buried. He didn’t really know why. They didn’t celebrate her birthday any more, certainly nothing had been said on the first birthday after her death.
On the grave was her name and the dates. Loving wife and mother. But was that true? It’s just what people asked the stonemason to write. There were no flowers, it was the wrong time of year, but it looked so bald and bare. He should have brought something.
The graveyard was deserted. He began to talk, not aloud, there was no need. He spoke to the headstone and the bones six feet down in the cold earth.
At school it was quite normal. One never spoke about it much but it was done, that was all. Once, a sixth former whose fag he’d been took a shine to him, and there had been a boy – Farthing, his name was, like the money. Farthing was a vicar’s son so from a poor, old family like his. Ironic that. Barely a farthing between them. Once, they had sought solace with each other. And there had been some comfort in it – just to know that someone was the same as you. He still thought about the smooth line of Farthing’s back, an image of sad consolation. Even now he couldn’t be angry at Farthing, despite what he had done, the bald fact of his absolute betrayal, the shame. He couldn’t blame him because he understood the shame.
The sad business with Farthing should have prepared him for Jack. There was a moment, early on in their friendship, when he had wondered whether Jack was like him. The American had sought him out in the pub, beckoned him over. He’d looked at him slyly, willing him – or so Peter thought – to do something. There was a promiscuity about him, a look in his eyes that seemed to be always on the edge of something precarious. But Peter hadn’t dared then and he kept on not daring until it was too late. He knew something had happened in Norwich but he didn’t know what he had said or done except that Jack wasn’t the same with him any more. He feared, more than anything, that he’d made some terrible pass at Jack, and the thought of that was worse because from the way that Jack was behaving now he knew that it hadn’t been reciprocated. And now she, his clever little sister, who had always beaten him at everything, including Arthur, had done it again.
They still met in the Shipwright’s sometimes but Jack didn’t come on the shoots or to the golf course any more. Peter saw Verity go off every Sunday afternoon and he wondered if Jack had always meant to do this – to get her through him.
‘Sorry,’ he said, and it was aloud this time, although no one heard. An owl hooted. He wanted to kick the stupid headstone for its unresponsiveness. He wanted to say, You knew, to his mother, you knew and you didn’t help me. But she couldn’t help herself, let alone him. Indulged by her, he’d been naïve and was punished for it. Gresham’s had a liberal reputation yet it also had the Honour System. All the students at the school had to sign an oath swearing ‘Always to avoid impurity’. And if you didn’t own up to your own impure thoughts or actions, other boys were encouraged to report on you. It was a licence to duplicity, to spying, to betrayal. It was no surprise to him that it had produced men like Maclean. But unlike most of the others, Peter hadn’t been adept in the arts of secrecy, and had not learned quickly enough. He remembered the day that they’d sent him home from school after the fit he’d had, the fight with the boy. Someone (a nasty, pretty boy) had called him a fairy and Peter had punched him hard in the face. But in the Headmaster’s office, there had been Farthing, chewing on his nails, telling them that Peter was a queer and that he’d seduced him. Peter remembered Mother (not Father, he was ever grateful for that) coming to collect him in the Jag, and she’d held his hand in the car while he cried and she hadn’t told him to stop. She’d lied to Father for him so he still didn’t know that he’d been expelled for sodomy (that word made him flinch), but his father had dismissed him years ago anyway. But he’d wanted, needed more and she’d not been there. It was never talked of again.
He’d found her once wandering on the beach. It was autumn and soon the cows would be brought into the cowshed but they were still grazing. He and the boy from the village who’d been helping with the cows had milked them and brought them back to the grazing field from the cowshed, their bulky forms grey and shadowy in the pre-dawn. A thin mist held to the ground and curled around their legs, making them seem as if they were half submerged in a sea of mist. He reached up a hand to pat the last heifer on the rump and turn back up the slight incline to the house. But when he did, a ghostly form appeared in the distance. Someone was walking along the beach. No one walked here, it was too remote for dog-walkers. He knew it was Mother by the slightness of the figure.
He left the cows chewing on the grass and ran down to the gate that led to the beach. She was standing on the dune, in only a grey silvery-looking nightdress and wellingtons, her hair down and a blank look on her face.
‘Mother?’ he said. ‘What are you doing down here? You must be freezing.’
‘Peter,’ she said, and took his hand. ‘It’s so beautiful in the morning.’ She gestured to the sea – a dark line behind her – and the fields and pine trees wreathed in mist.
He put his jacket round her shoulders and they walked back to the house, hand in hand.
On the day she died, he’d been down the bottom field. It was the same time of day. He’d already done the feed and was about to go back in for breakfast but decided instead to inspect the fence that separated the end fields from the woodland. So he was there when it happened. He could have saved her. Just a gate and a few yards of dune and beach to the sea. Dawn breaking, lightening the sky and colouring the fields, and there had been a cold, cutting eastern wind. He remembered the cold for some reason but he couldn’t remember hearing anything out of the ordinary. Birds, wind, the sea. Nothing else. He’d fixed the hole in the fence and was returning to the house and Verity had come running at him in her dressing gown. His first thought was Father. He didn’t remember what she said but it was something about Mother and the sea. He thought she must have got something wrong. Mother didn’t have a habit of swimming in the sea. But his sister was insistent. He told her to go back to the house, that he would go to the beach.
Later, when he’d returned again to the house and called the police and the ambulance and they’d all arrived – Arthur on his bike as always, Mrs Timms, tear-streaked, his father, his face a block of stone and his hands shaking, and Ver completely white – only then, he had left them and gone to the pasture to feed the horses because he didn’t know what else to do. She had gone from him by then. It was only her body down there on the beach. She belonged to all of them now. But
before that, it had been just him and her on the wet sand, her body impossibly still and him shaking and shaking her and trying to breathe air back into her lungs and holding her, limp, and thinking she would wake, she must. She had to. She had loved him, above all others. But her eyes were like those of a stillborn calf.
7.
Verity’s head was full of the image of Jack’s tongue licking her arm, when she saw a man on a bicycle in the distance. She knew at once it was Arthur. Instinctively, she slowed Gyps to a canter, then a trot. What light there’d been was already leaching from the sky. Arthur on his bike was a charcoal smudge. As she neared him, she saw he had a pair of binoculars slung over his shoulder.
There was no way she could avoid him. She trotted up behind him and called. As he turned to her and squinted, she saw him in the half light as if for the first time: his old, beloved, kinked hair, the straightness of his nose, the darkness of his eyes, in shades of grey and black. She was so used to him that she rarely saw him but all she could think was how different he was to Jack. How moulded and still, where Jack was always quick and live to the touch even when he wasn’t doing anything at all. She realised that she had never sketched Arthur.
‘What are you doing here? Birdwatching?’
He glanced at the binoculars. ‘Nothing,’ he said.
It was too late to make an excuse. She dismounted Gyps. He lit up a cigarette and passed one to her and they smoked as they walked, she with her horse, he with his bike.
‘Actually, I was watching the planes.’
He seemed tightly sprung, as if he would shoot off suddenly. It was an odd thing to be doing, spying on the Americans, but Arthur had been acting oddly for some time and it didn’t surprise her.
‘What on earth for?’
‘Their planes are carrying atomic bombs,’ he said finally, in a tone of defiance as if he didn’t care if she believed him.
‘Why do you think that?’ she said. It sounded far-fetched, a conspiracy theory, as if he’d been reading too many spy stories, and it would be laughable were it not for the needling suspicion that this was something to do with Jack. When she’d asked Jack if the bomb tests were anything to do with the activities at the base, he’d said they were connected. It could be true.
He took a deep suck on his cigarette and glowered at her. ‘I’ve thought it for months. I got some intelligence from a chap and I just needed proof. I’ve been tracking the types of plane they use and when they go out and I’ve noticed a pattern.’
‘But they’d tell us, wouldn’t they? They’d have to.’
‘That’s what I think. I’m right about this. I know I am. Anyway, I told the Eastern Daily Press about what I’ve found and they’re interested in an article.’ He sounded excited now.
‘And there’s a bomb store, Ver. Think about it. What if there was a crash? Boom!’ His eyes were wild. ‘Do you know how far the radiation zone goes out? Most people have no idea, but I did a day’s training with the Civil Defence Corps – I mean they’re cranks if they think we can defend ourselves against it – but it was illuminating I can tell you – the effects would be monstrous—’
‘Stop.’ She put her hands to her face. ‘It’s terrifying.’
She thought of Jack, dropping bombs over Russia, the mushroom cloud blooming up and engulfing him and the hydrogen bomb billowing out on the other side of the world. She curled her left hand into a tight fist and dug her nails into her palm to stop herself from saying the wrong thing. She should be horrified – and she was – but something like a thrilling fear flushed through her as well. What if he got shot down and never came back? It felt unbelievable.
‘It is terrifying, but that’s why I want to do something useful,’ Arthur was saying. ‘Write about what’s happening right now in Russia, Korea, America. Things far away from here but right here too.’
‘You should do it,’ she said. It was like Arthur to do the right thing and a terrible part of her wished he could be worse so she wouldn’t feel so wretched about her deception.
‘And I think that to do anything useful, I need to go to London. If I can get this article accepted, I’ll have something to take to the papers in the city. There’s a new world coming, Ver, and I want to be a part of it. Not watching. Not on the sidelines.’ He stopped and looked away and she thought he must be embarrassed for blurting out all his dreams. But he spoke again, much more quietly.
‘I’ve been meaning to ask but I’ve not seen you.’ He paused and she wished he wouldn’t go on, aware, in a sudden wave of shivers, what he was going to say. He inhaled. ‘I thought that you could come to London. With me.’
‘Oh.’ She tried to imagine marrying him, having children, at home forever, like her mother. And on the other side of the divide, the musty, damp marsh shack, Jack’s body and hers, and risks she didn’t even know. The silence of unspoken promises stretched.
‘Why not? You’re not going to Oxford and there’s nothing here for you.’
‘No, that’s true,’ she said, and she almost laughed. ‘I don’t know, Arthur.’ Her voice sounded very cold. ‘I have no idea what I’m going to do now.’ This was at least some sort of truth. She felt his figure shrink beside her.
‘I’m going to go anyway,’ he said.
Go then, she wanted to say. But instead she said, ‘Where? Where will you live?’
‘I’ve saved up. I have enough for a month’s rent in digs and I think I can get a job pretty quickly. I’m a decent writer.’
‘You sound like you’ve got it all worked out.’ She wondered how long he’d been planning this. ‘It sounds wonderful,’ she said, hating the sound of her deceit.
Darkness had now clothed them but she’d kept her eye trained on the turning for Leafy Lane. They walked in silence, with only Gyps snorting lightly next to her, and she could feel the words unsaid lying thickly on her tongue and the hurt radiating from him. Eventually, after a long minute without either of them saying another word, she saw the little sign for Howe Farm with a hand pointing up the lane.
‘I’ve got to go,’ she said, ‘I’m late.’ She gave his arm a squeeze and couldn’t help running her hand through his hair. She felt him shiver next to her and, as she must have known he would, he pulled her to him and kissed her on the lips. The kiss felt strangely cool and mechanical. She wondered if he could smell Jack in her hair. She shouldn’t be doing this. Her heart quickened and her groin and legs throbbed, but it was cruel. She pushed him lightly away.
‘I really am going to be late,’ she said, and remounted Gyps.
It was a relief when the lane bent and she could no longer feel his eyes on her back.
*
An RAF plane buzzed above her as she rode home. In school, they had studied the pollination of flowers by bees. The sticky stamen, the blooming petals, was all she could remember. She had a dim idea that as long as none of the white fluid – the pollen – was inside her body it would all be all right. The absolutely essential thing was to keep it out of her.
It was impossible to think about babies. They did not seem connected to the thing she was doing. She could not have a baby. University, she had been going to university, repeating it like a witch’s chant to ward off evil. She was not like the other girls. In the absence of that one key difference she must replace it with something else, some other way of separating herself from her classmates. Unlike them, she was not naïve, like Pam and the others, set on marrying some dolt. When she was younger, she had been certain she would marry Arthur, but that was a long time ago. All of it seemed colourless, vague, someone else’s life. The cabin on the marsh was all there was. Beyond it, she couldn’t think. Even poor Arthur.
I have all these separate boxes inside me, she thought. And in all of them are bits of me but I don’t know in which one is the important bit. I don’t know how to choose the right box.
*
In the deep quiet of winter at the end of the year, Verity met Jack at the usual time. Unusually, he was already at the tumbling down s
hack. When she opened the door to the bedroom, he jumped back from the wardrobe. She was about to ask what he was doing but he said, ‘Look,’ and pointed out of the window.
The entire glass was filled with swirling black dots against a peach sky. It was dusk and pink-footed geese were returning from the inland fields to roost on the creeks and reed beds of the marsh, and the shack filled with the unk-unk of their call. Kneeling at the window ledge, he took photographs, then sat back on the bed next to her and they watched the whirling birds together, his arm around her. The geese wheeled and fell, swooping down to the horizon where they came up against the land and, in a flurry, came to rest. It filled her with a kind of exultation, recalled the waves of mind-obliterating intensity she felt on the floor with Jack.
The Night of the Flood Page 13