The Night of the Flood

by Zoe Somerville

  ‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said. ‘Close your eyes.’

  She glanced at the wardrobe, wondering if he’d hidden something in there for her, then did as he asked. Perhaps he would kiss her, give her some earrings, something romantic, sentimental but innocuous. Instead, he put a rectangle of card into her hand. She opened her eyes. It was a postcard of a Turner painting. At first, she was disappointed. Turner was last century. It was history and she was sick of history.

  ‘It’s called Snow Storm. It reminded me of here. I know you said you liked modern painting but I couldn’t find anything. Anyway, look at it, it’s crazy, wild.’

  She did look. It was a snow storm at sea, a dark whoosh of paint above a floundering smudge of a boat. The sky was filled with dark and light. She turned it over. To V love J was written in black ink sprawled over the back.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, strangely embarrassed.

  ‘That’s not all,’ he said, like a magician, his hand behind his back. ‘I thought you’d like this too.’ It was a yellowed, crumpled exhibition guide from a Rothko show in New York the year before. The main picture was of a strange painting, with a creamy, sand-coloured background and two figures – for she was sure that’s what they were – in geometric lines and curves, of red, green, blue and white.

  ‘That one’s called Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea. I liked the title.’

  ‘How on earth did you find this?’

  He smiled at her and touched his nose with his finger. ‘You don’t need to know none of that.’

  She glared at him and he smiled disarmingly. ‘Okay. I give in. I’m from near New York and a friend in the city found it for me.’

  ‘Where near New York?’ She wanted a place, a name.

  ‘Schenectady. It’s Nowheresville, USA.’

  ‘It can’t be worse than here,’ she said.

  ‘Ah, it is. It’s industrial, ugly.’

  She took his face in her hands and kissed his scarred cheek and twisted mouth. ‘I don’t understand anything about you,’ she said. She had so many questions. This tiny crumb of truth was unsatisfying but it tasted sweet.

  ‘You asked me what I do up there.’ He gestured out of the window at the dark sky above the marsh. ‘Imagine floating in the night sky, high above the world, up in the stars. Imagine it could suddenly end. Bang. Gone. That’s how it is.’ He clicked his fingers and she flinched.

  He put his mouth near her ear and, breathing softly into it, reached behind her and unclasped her mother’s pearls from around her neck.

  In the dark of their isolation, with the sun gone down and the flickering of wisps on the marsh, they lay back down on the bed. There was something about how easy it was to lie down. Although the bed was cold and dusty like everything else, it was better than the floor. On a bed it somehow made it all right. Almost respectable. She shut her eyes and gripped his back while his embraces pressed into her. Even then, until the last moment she thought she might stop. But it all happened so quickly. He’d pulled down her knickers and himself on top of her before she knew the danger and by then it was too late, she was consumed. There was a sharp pain inside her and she cried out.

  Afterwards, he slept, his pale eyelashes flickering, the tautness in his body slackened in sleep and his metal oval identification tags hung over his collarbone. Gingerly, she picked one up and held it in her hand. Punched in and set out in lines, she read:

  DOHERTY, JOHN H.

  20899970 AF

  A NEG

  CATHOLIC

  It was for if he died, she knew. There was another chain too, with a tiny key attached and a small metal pendant shaped like a thin finger. She wondered what they were for but was afraid to touch them in case he woke.

  She pulled up her knickers, put her vest back on and drew the old blanket up around her. Dazed and sore, her limbs were still burning. It was not romantic, it was a kind of glorious, awful violence. Even with him. That’s what it felt like: something taken away from her and something given too. She wanted to dismiss it, to make it nothing, but she couldn’t. It wasn’t nothing. Her body was not the same, she was not the same, everything she touched, everything she looked at was left with a kind of mark. Before, she thought he was marking her body. Now it was inside her too. He was inside her. This girl is no longer a virgin. While he slept next to her she cried hot tears quietly into the pillow with the shame of allowing it to happen, that she had betrayed Arthur so thoroughly. But after a few minutes, she sniffed and wiped her eyes. Something had changed. And there was triumph in that, whatever other discomfort and doubt she might feel.

  In the newspaper reports of the atom bomb test it said the heat was scorching and the power of the blast created a blinding light. If Russia bombed them, then all of Norfolk would be effaced, wiped out in a white-hot flash. Nothing else would matter then but that she and he had been here, in a damp marsh shack on the edge of the sea. It wasn’t nothing.

  8.

  January 1953

  ‘You’re late.’

  Arthur stood on the threshold of Howe Farm and stared at Verity. ‘But I’m so glad you’re here. I can’t bear all the rigmarole. You can keep me company while I sort out the breakfast.’ She seemed hopped up on something, all twitchy and her words running on. Her face was flushed and shiny. She barely let him take off his coat before she dragged him by the sleeve through the hall towards the kitchen.

  ‘I can’t. I’ve got to go with them. I’d rather stay here.’

  She stopped at the kitchen door, swung round and looked at him accusingly. ‘What? Why? What on earth possessed you? You hate hunting.’

  He shrugged. He didn’t see why he should explain himself to her. And there was no easy way to explain the lust for destruction he was feeling. ‘Peter asked,’ he said. Something about the way her face creased in disgust made him want to hurt her. He thought about telling her about the man in the café and the metal case Jack had handed over. But it seemed like a scene from a thriller with no bearing on their lives.

  ‘He took Peter to a prostitute in Norwich, you know.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’ She sounded bruised. He had a moment’s doubt. What if he was wrong about her interest in Jack? But he’d started now. And he’d not forgotten her hesitancy when he asked her if she wanted to go to London with him.

  ‘Because like everyone else he’s got you fooled. You, Peter, the whole bloody town thinks he’s so great. He’s not what you think he is. If you knew what he was really like, you wouldn’t hang onto his every word.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said. Her voice was brittle and hard.

  ‘Yes you do. You must see it. He’s like it with all the girls, Verity. Not just you. You’re not special.’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.’ She had withdrawn, shrunk into the shadow of the wall.

  ‘He’s not a gentleman,’ he said.

  ‘And how would you know?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I have no idea.’ He turned away from her.

  ‘And what do I think he is?’

  ‘A bloody hero.’

  ‘Oh hardly,’ she said, but her face was red. ‘Go on then, tell me what horrors you’ve discovered.’

  ‘He lied to us about where he’s from,’ he said. ‘All that rot about deserts and horses and canyons. All rubbish. I’ve always thought it sounded too clichéd, like from a cowboy film. And his accent’s all wrong. Well, I found out. He’s from New York State.’ Each word came out like a globule of spit that he wanted to get out of his mouth and he could feel his hatred bubbling up.

  ‘I know about that,’ she said, but he heard her voice catch. It served her right.

  ‘We don’t even know how old he is,’ he went on.

  ‘He’s our age,’ she said, but she didn’t sound convinced. It hardly added up, couldn’t she see? Jack had slipped out something about Korea and Germany to Peter, and although he’d backtracked, Arthur thought that if he’d seen that much service then he mu
st be older than them.

  He turned away from her and was going to leave when he stopped.

  ‘I’m worried about you, Ver,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t need you to look after me, Arthur.’

  ‘Maybe you do. I mean, your mother needed help, didn’t she, and no one helped her? I’m trying—’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He frowned. He lowered his voice. ‘You know it wasn’t an accident, Ver,’ he said, puncturing the bubble of pretence surrounding Mrs Frost’s death.

  She said nothing, just stood there trembling. He wanted to go to her and put his arms around her but her face was distorted in rage and horror. ‘Ver—’ he began again, but she recoiled from him.

  ‘Please leave,’ she said.

  ‘I loved her too,’ he said. Like a second mother. But Verity just stared at him more aghast. The kitchen door slammed behind him.

  Outside, the cold air blasted his face. The sun hadn’t yet risen and a low mist clung to the ground.

  ‘There you are,’ said Peter. ‘Bloody glad you made it. Here, drink some of this.’ He whacked Arthur on the back and handed him a tiny glass of something viscous and amber-coloured. Arthur downed the drink, the sweetness sliding into his throat. ‘Nice little sherry,’ said Peter. ‘A fine pre-hunt tradition.’ He seemed slightly drunk already, as if he was drowning out some frustration. He’d been increasingly reckless and maudlin since the awful trip to Norwich.

  ‘Any chance of another?’ Arthur asked. ‘It’ll shake off the cold.’

  Peter filled up his glass and helped himself to another one too.

  ‘No Jack?’ Arthur said.

  Peter’s forehead creased in a frown. ‘He was going to come but no sign so far. Probably something at the base.’ He knocked back his sherry. ‘Though I’m surprised he didn’t come to see her.’ He jerked his head to the house.

  ‘Why would he?’ Arthur said, his heart thumping painfully.

  Peter rolled his eyes. Then he looked quizzically at Arthur. ‘Come on, let’s leave them to it and catch the beast.’

  By the time they began to ride, Arthur was pleasingly drunk from three sherries in quick succession on an empty stomach. And Jack had not turned up. He was glad to be gone from the farmhouse, away from the awfulness of what he’d said. ‘Don’t let Ver see the body,’ Peter had hissed urgently into his ear as Arthur had run down to the beach. He understood why when he saw her body. Mrs Frost was lying on the beach barely sheathed in a grey silk nightdress.

  When they caught the fox, on a slight incline miles away from Howe Farm, the sun was rising behind them over the sea. Arthur held back at first, his hands stroking the horse’s flank. But he couldn’t keep away. He edged forward, a horrible curiosity propelling him. The animal was in the throes of death, clamped in the jaws of two hounds. A gash in its neck was open and bloody, the blood clotting its thick red fur. Its teeth were bared, black lips pulled back in a clown-like frown but its eyes were not yet dead. They shone, amber-coloured, jewel-like, gazing at him. He felt in his body a shiver of cold, and yet his hands, when he removed his gloves, were covered in a film of sweat.

  Through the rest of the day, he couldn’t rid himself of the image of the dying fox. He cycled furiously back home, barely seeing anything, and dumped his bike behind the shop. He aimed a vicious kick at the back wall of the yard. It was the way the fox had looked at him. Accusatory, as if it had seen something rotten in his heart. He had wanted to hurt Verity for putting up a barrier against him; and with a sick certainty he knew that he wanted to hurt Jack too.

  *

  Lying on her bed, with her mother’s sampler above her – Home Sweet Home stitched in green – Verity felt again the cold, slow dribble of it down her thigh, Jack pulling back as if he had been burned. ‘Jesus,’ he would say. She turned away so as not to see it, the swollen, unnatural thing she tried not to look at, and pushed her face into the pillow until he drew near again and pressed against her back.

  There must be something wrong with her, something immoral, and she imagined that it could be seen by other people, not like a giant red mark on her forehead like they used to give adulterers, but a stink, a reek, like a warning.

  She told herself it was only once, it wouldn’t happen again. It couldn’t. It had been shocking, painful, and so reckless. But once the breach (that was how she thought of it) was made, it was easier for it to happen again. Her body started to respond to it and then to crave it. She began to think of her body as a different thing, something separate from the rest of her, something she had not known before and had not thought was possible. Now they went straight to bed, and only later she or he would make the bitter coffee. They would sit on the bed with their mugs and look at the changing light on the fields. Sometimes she would draw him, charcoal portraits with thick black lines, among the crumpled sheets and their bodies still smelling of each other. Sometimes he would take photographs of her lying in the bed and then he’d put the camera down and kiss her neck, his hands would be on her and it would start all over again.

  *

  On her side in bed, her body cooling, Verity watched the perfect curve of his sleeping back. The chains around his neck had fallen behind him. The tags, the tiny key and the cylinder dangled in front of her eyes. Tentatively, she reached out and felt the small metal ampoule between her fingers. She unscrewed it gently and tipped it up. Into her palm fell a creamy-white pill. She took a sharp intake of breath and almost dropped it. Jack breathed out and twisted slightly so he was further away from her. In a quick movement, she put the pill back in its case and screwed it shut tight.

  On her back, hands shaking, it was as though she could feel the machinery of armies and governments whirring and moving through her. Of the world turning and her, helplessly caught up in a tide of change she didn’t understand. Their lives – hers, Peter’s, Arthur’s – small and insignificant and disposable. And Jack – carrying a drug that could end it, from one heartbeat to the next.

  When he woke, she would ask him finally. What are you doing when you leave me and fly east? Do you stop at the Baltic Sea, or do you fly over Moscow to Siberia? Through the Iron Curtain and beyond. Why? And in her heart the real question: Will you always come back?

  But when he did wake he turned over and brought his face close to hers, and she said nothing because she didn’t want it to stop.

  Afterwards he stood above her, the black rectangle of the camera in front of his face, just a lick of flame-coloured hair above. She pulled the blanket over her head. It was both flattering and disquieting that she was being watched and studied. She wondered what the pictures would show of her, what iniquity looked like.

  9.

  Friday, 30th January 1953

  The day before the flood

  Low Z depression, centre moving north-east

  Further considerable deepening expected in LZ

  in the next twenty-four hours

  The old moon reflected bulbous and white on the East Fleet marsh. Muriel could hear the geese honking up a racket in the fields west of Beach Road. Every night in the winter, flocks of pink-footed geese returned to the west marshes to roost. But tonight they were still in the fields. They knew something was coming.

  Down by the harbourmaster’s house on the quay, Muriel took the weight off her feet. On the wall it marked the heights of the last ruinously high tides. 1930. 1912.

  She’d come the long way back from the Buttlands, past the Pilchard on the Holkham Road, to drop off some laundry, when Verity Frost had ridden past her on her horse and off towards Harborough Hall. It occurred to Muriel that she was meeting the American. Muriel had been watching him. Yesterday she’d seen him leave the post office. Mrs Colman, the postmistress, was happy to tell her he sent a letter every week to an address in America. Arizona, she thought it was. He was very chatty, she said. Made her laugh, he did.

  He was a right rummen, thought Muriel. She might ask him about who he was writing to when she next saw him.

 
10.

  Afternoon

  North-westerly winds north of Scotland, driving

  water from the Atlantic towards the North Sea

  Gusts of up to 80 mph (Force 12: hurricane) in the Hebrides

  Jack was late, so late that soon it would be dark and her absence from home would be noticed. Verity had been waiting an hour. She smoked by the window of the shack, looking out over the empty, brown marsh. Dark grey clouds scudded across the sky, far away the pine trees shook and on the horizon the sea was churning. Tomorrow they were supposed to be going to a dance together, in the village hall. It was just a winter dance that the WI had organised, and all the servicemen from the airbase had been invited. They would be together, in public. But she kept thinking about what Arthur had said about other girls. She had been stupid, naïve. She had told Arthur she knew that Jack had lied about his upbringing, but she knew virtually nothing. Schenectady. She rolled the unfamiliar, foreign word around her mouth. Perhaps Arthur was just saying all of this out of jealousy, but what did he know? Why would Jack have concealed his origins anyway? It made no sense. A sharp pang of doubt stabbed her chest. Jack could be lying about all of it.

  It was nearly three o’clock. She would have to go. She stood up and stubbed her cigarette out in the cup they used for an ashtray, but then she heard the creak of the damp, crooked front door and sat down again and lit up another cigarette as if nothing was wrong at all.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, standing in the doorway of the bedroom.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I wondered where you’d got to.’

  He just shook his head. She was expecting jokes, apologies, something. ‘Come here,’ he said, and she went to him, out of habit. He put his hand up her leg and unhooked the garter and they had sex quickly, without speaking.