‘We’ll see about them, you’ve done enough,’ said the man. Then he turned his boat around, sending spray over them and their little boat, and chugged off for the town.
‘We can’t stop now,’ Jack said. He was in darkness, with the torch held low, but Arthur could hear the urgency in his voice.
‘No,’ he said. They were far past the point of stopping. He didn’t think either of them wanted to – they were swept up by the tide themselves.
They tried to return to the prefabs but it was impossible to row. Each time Arthur tried to move the oars, the force of the wind and waves drove the little boat back towards the town. He knew there must have been multiple breaches of the embankment.
‘We’ve got to walk,’ he shouted to Jack.
This time, they each took a side of the boat and started to wade westwards. The water was up to their shoulders now, the bike light had disappeared, but Jack still held onto his torch. Now there was debris everywhere: when the moon broke through they could see pieces of wood, a fence post and the edge of a balcony floating past them. Once, the torch struck the snout and trotters of a dead pig sticking up. They heard the rescue boat come chugging behind them but it must have been parallel to them, for its light never came but swung past and beyond them. They were still wading, trudging doggedly on, when he saw the other boat strike something and get stuck. One of their men lassoed a rope to the balcony.
Without speaking, Arthur and Jack pulled their little boat towards the stranded rescuers. Underneath them, the bungalow was falling apart, hunks of wood tearing off and floating away. The rescue vessel had sprung a leak and been abandoned. On the roof of the collapsing bungalow huddled a family, two girls and their father. One of the little girls was crying, the man’s face was blank. Jack lifted the younger girl into the boat and Arthur held out his hand to the older one.
‘Mother and Terence have gone,’ she said, her face interested, curious. ‘Drowned,’ she told him.
Arthur didn’t ask questions, but set the girl down in the boat. He couldn’t look at the man and the sunken hollowness of his face again.
*
Verity could still see the house but she didn’t know how to get back to it. The water was so much stronger than she’d thought. It was not coming in waves and was oddly calm. The greatest rush of the water must be elsewhere. Yet it was moving steadily away from the house, back out to the sea, pulling her with it. It was irresistible. She could imagine her mother being taken out with the current and not seeing the point of fighting it. But she wasn’t her mother.
She crossed the garden and the first field, each step tentative. The moon flickered in and out from behind the clouds, throwing silver flashes across the watery field and lighting up the black stick outlines of the pine trees ahead. She thought she was at the bottom of the first field, but it was hard to tell. All the winter-sown crops would be completely ruined. Please God, let Peter be all right. Let the cowshed hold. The floodwater was coming over her boots. Freezing cold water sloshed down inside the rubber to her bare feet. What a fool she’d been. The wellingtons were dragging her down. She pulled them off and sacrificed them to the water, and watched them float away.
She hesitated, unsure whether to go on. She strained to listen. Just the whine of the wind, the whoosh of the water. Then, very faint, the distressed bleating of cows. And there – the neigh of a horse. She was sure of it. Gyps? She focused all her energy on the sound of the horse, trying to work out where it was coming from and if there was a human sound too. But the rush of the flood was too loud.
Ahead, the torch picked out the glint of barbed wire. As she waded towards it, her left foot dropped into something. A fox hole? A badger sett? She fell forward, lunging for something, anything, and grabbed the fence. Her heart and stomach lurched. The wire cut into her and she screamed out, pain jarring through her hand and arm. She dropped down, pitching forward into the freezing water. Spluttering, she came up. Leaning gingerly on the wire, she inspected her hand by the light of the moon. A small tear, beads of blood. It was nothing much but, God, how it stung. Tears sprung to her eyes. How she wished, then, that she hadn’t come out here. She could be with Jack now. Oh God, why had she ever left the dance? Her stomach was still fluttering as if there was a bird inside, flapping to get out.
‘Peter!’ she cried, her voice breaking on the word. There was no answer. Without logic or thought a word tore from her throat: ‘Jack!’
*
Arthur sucked in the smoke and held it in his throat, feeling its warmth before blowing it out, slowly so as not to lose it too fast. They were smoking two of Jack’s last Camels under the porch of the Golden Fleece at the top of Station Road, dirty water still up to their ankles. They’d taken an old woman who’d lost sight of her husband to the rescue centre, and had left the rowing boat down near the quayside. He knew it was past midnight as a policeman had told him. The worst must be over, surely. The tide had long since turned and the flood must be beyond the highest point. But there was no hope of going home. His bones ached and his feet and hands were numb. He glanced at the figure next to him. He was ashamed of the pettiness of his rivalry, standing with Jack now. Jack would leave, go back to America. There was no proof that anything had happened between him and Verity. They would forget about him. He thought of her, that morning, her cold skin against his. For all of the awkwardness of it, she had done it for him.
Jack breathed out a plume of smoke and said, ‘We need to get out to the farm. Pete loves the farm. You saw that pig. He’d be devastated if they all go and die on him.’
‘They don’t have pigs, Jack. They have cattle. Arable. Can’t do anything about that, it’s too late.’
‘Art.’
‘Don’t call me that.’
It seemed impossible. An act of madness. Yet, rowing out along the Beach Road embankment to the prefabs had made him realise where the breach – or breaches? – had happened. The farm would be cut off from the town. Even if they could row out to the farm, surely the force of the outgoing tide would be impossible to control, and would sweep them out to sea? But he couldn’t leave her out there. He couldn’t let Jack go alone. His marrow and soul were aching. Peter was his friend and Verity’s brother. With a pierce of pain, the dance came back to him. She could have seen Jack at the dance. He opened his mouth to ask then closed it again. A chink of doubt had crept back in and he didn’t want to give in to it. But now the image had lodged in his brain he couldn’t cut it out. He saw her dancing at the village hall; he saw Jack holding her. Whatever happened, he had to find her. Not Jack.
‘All right, but we better get on with it.’ He didn’t say, because I’m frozen and tired and I can’t go on for much longer.
He was right about the high point: the flood was definitely receding. There was only dirty, lapping water on Staithe Street now.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Arthur looked to where Jack was pointing. Down to their right, looming up on the quayside, the huge bulk of a boat on the dockside, clearly lifted there by the rising waters. He recognised it: it was the Sea Scouts’ torpedo boat, the Terra Nova. Its sheets dangled, useless. A group of men was gathered around it, shaking their heads. But they dragged their boat past the men, on towards Beach Road, which was still underwater. He glanced at the shop as they passed, saw the windows broken and the night air streaming into the dark inside. There was no point worrying about that now.
Down on Beach Road, they climbed back into the boat. The water was still high out there, too high to wade. He wondered if anyone was left down in the prefabs but he couldn’t hear anything apart from the wind. They rowed out towards the farm. Jack’s torch provided a thin light to guide them. He hoped the batteries would last.
He was wrong, though; the worst wasn’t over. When they reached about halfway along the road they were rowing down he saw water up to the telegraph wires and, as he’d guessed, rushing through a breach in what had been the embankment, towards the harbour.
‘Jesus,’ said Jack and they star
ted to pull hard against the current.
But they couldn’t stop it. The little boat was picked up by the gush of the torrent and pushed up to a bank of something, he didn’t know what. Like a cork bobbing in the sea, round and round it went. Arthur thought they were bound to capsize and he gripped the sides. He braced himself, waiting to be upended into the dark, freezing water. But the boat kept upright and instead was swept up over the mud banks nearer to the beach, beyond the breach.
‘Stop!’ he called to Jack and they used the oars to drag the boat to a halt. He thought they could get out here. It would be safer to wade than to row with the mad uncertainty of the current. With the flood receding, he was afraid of the little boat being taken out to the open water. Arthur stepped over the gunwale. But instantly, sand and grit swirled round his legs and sucked him down. It swooshed over and into his boots and pulled him down. He felt himself falling, dragged down to the bottomless sea. The light of Jack’s torch was in his eyes but he didn’t know if he could reach him. He threw himself at the side of the boat.
‘I’m sinking! Sand’s bloody alive!’
Jack leaned out and grabbed his hand. Arthur felt his boots dragging him back to the water. He held on. A sucking sound and a sensation of release and he was hauled back in. He lay on the bottom of the boat breathing in great heaves.
‘Got to keep rowing,’ he panted. ‘Ground’s not safe.’
He grabbed the oars and pulled as hard as he could, away from the harbour and towards where he thought the farm must be.
7.
Before dawn, Sunday, 1st February
Tide abated
Much of the land still submerged
Soaking wet, and in pain, Verity squeezed her eyes shut and thought of her bed and home and safety. But the pull of the water was away from the farm, towards the pines and the trees. Another neigh from somewhere. To the east? Where was her Gyps? And where was Peter? He must be out here. If he’d got back to the house, he’d be wondering where she was.
In desperation, she swung her torch in an arc around her. There was something there, she could swear it. A dark mass. The figure of a horse above the water on a rise by the woods. It was Gypsy, it must be. Someone must have let him go. It had to be Peter.
‘Gyps!’ she shouted. ‘Gypsy!’ and the horse whinnied. Elation swept over her.
She tried to move towards the sound, using the barbed wire fence as a guide, gingerly holding onto it with her left, unhurt hand and her right arm held out for balance. The torchlight jumped and trembled in her outstretched hand. The bone-cold floodwater came up to her waist and the bottom half of her body was numb. When the fence came to an end, ahead was what looked like a copse of trees on a small rise. In the dark it was hard to tell the distance. If she could make it to those trees, she would be with Gyps. And she could climb up and see where they were. She might be able to see Peter. Anyone.
She let go of the fence, then tried to put her feet out to wade but there was nothing there. The ground fell away. Her legs thrashed and whirled on nothing. She tried to swim back to the fence, but the water took her in the other direction, away from the wire, away from safe ground. She tried to swim, but her swimming had never been as strong as Peter’s. Flailing, the movement of the water was tugging her towards the sea, but she was too heavy. She could feel herself being dragged down. Above her, a black shadow, the branch of a tree. She was afraid to reach up in case she missed and the effort sent her under. But she flung her arm up and felt the hardness of the bark against her cut. Her scream resounded. Her fingers clung on. The branch bent into the water. It was thin, it could snap. But it was holding her back from the tidal sweep to the sea. She took a deep lungful of cold air and lurched with her left, unhurt hand to the thicker base of the branch and this time she got a firm hold. For long seconds she was suspended, arms hanging onto the branch, her body in the water. She imagined letting go and floating away to the sea. She saw her mother, sinking down, down to the seabed, her blonde hair flying out behind her. But her face in the picture was a twisted scream. A surge of horror propelled Verity back to the tree. She flexed her fingers. Inch by inch, she moved her hands along the branch to the trunk. Stopped, breathed. And finally, she pulled herself up, out of the water, and clambered up to a branch she hoped was strong enough to sit on. A cradle in the centre of the tree.
*
He had no way of telling what time it was beyond what the policeman had said. But that felt like hours ago. The wind had dropped and the water was no longer coming in waves. The moon fell on the shining surface illuminating the great glass sheet of submerged marshland and grazing fields, flooded between the town and the sea. He was at the stern, Jack rowing. Looking back at the lights pricking here and there in the town, he was sure that they must be near the farm. Ahead, the tops of trees sticking up in the water that must be the pine woods. Their woods. His and Verity’s. Drowned.
‘You cold?’ Jack’s voice sounded far away.
‘Yeah.’
‘Jesus, buddy, I can feel nothing down here. Goddamn, I’d kill for a smoke.’
A plaintive sound drifted back to him. It was Jack.
‘What the hell are you doing?’
‘Singing to keep myself warm. You should join in.’
But he couldn’t. He listened as Jack’s voice lifted out of the boat, singing about the moon breaking his heart and love blooming in the night, over the flood and out to the sea. It was a very strange thing to hear him. Then he couldn’t bear it any more.
‘Shut up!’
When Jack stopped singing, the quiet was disturbing. Sound had been dampened by the flood, like everything else. Just the shush shush of the water.
‘I saw you in Norwich,’ he blurted out. ‘I saw you in a café with a man. You left a metal case on the table. At first I thought it was a cigarette case, but then I realised it couldn’t have been.’
Jack was an outline at the other end of the boat. A dark shadow silhouetted by the full moon. He didn’t say anything.
‘What was it, Jack? What were you doing? Do your superiors in the Air Force know?’
From Jack’s end of the boat came a burst of derisive laughter. ‘You’re imagining things, Art. What do you think this is, a kid’s game, playing at spies?’ He began to sing again.
‘I did see you,’ Arthur shouted in a blare of rage.
‘All right. What did you see? Did you follow me?’ He didn’t sound angry, just tired. ‘That’s funny. Okay – so you saw me in a café. That’s it. Nothing else. You’ve got this wrong, my friend. It ain’t what you think. I ain’t what you think I am.’
‘What are you then? Because as far as I can see, you’re not honourable, or honest, and none of us know a thing about you.’
But he was interrupted by a piercing cry. A fox? A trapped animal?
‘What was that?’ said Jack.
‘God, I hope Verity’s all right.’ It came out without thought.
‘Yeah, so do I.’
Arthur had a strange vision of Verity in many places all at once: with him in the woods, at the dance, in her house above the floods, safe, holding onto her horse in the flood. ‘Yeah, so do I.’ So do I. Jack’s voice played in his head. He sounded hesitant. Or was he imagining it? In the dark it was hard to tell. If he asked, then it would be over.
In the dark, surrounded by seawater, the emptiness was overwhelming.
‘Did you see her? At the dance.’ He exhaled.
There was a pause.
‘I did see her, yeah. She was there.’
‘Who was she with?’ As he said it, he heard the suspicion and knew there was never going to be a good ending to this. He could stop it right now.
‘She was… say, do you think we’re near their place yet?’
‘Yes. We must be. Who was she with? At the dance.’ He had gone too far. He had to know.
There was a pause. ‘Listen, Art, I was going to tell you.’
‘What do you mean?’ He wanted to blot out the sheepish to
ne of Jack’s voice.
‘She was with me.’
‘But she’s…’ The words came out slowly, each one hurting his throat. He couldn’t say what she was.
‘Look, Art, I don’t know what she’s told you—’
‘Stop calling me that!’ As he shouted, the sound came again. Thin and high. Arthur felt a thickness in his head. Keep calm.
Jack was speaking again. ‘I like her. She’s smart.’
‘But Pete—’ He didn’t know why he said it, he was clutching desperately at something. It couldn’t be true.
‘Yeah, don’t tell him, not yet. He’s gonna blow a fuse.’
‘But the others, it’s not just her, is it?’ Behind his eyes, Arthur’s head throbbed. They had stopped rowing, and were drifting towards open water.
‘There aren’t any others. Not now.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘You aren’t still sweet on her, are you?’ Jack’s voice was falsely innocent. He knew.
Arthur breathed out an incoherent, rasping noise. He wanted to disappear, to sink into the darkness and never come back. He felt as if he might already have disappeared, he was so light, so weightless.
No one spoke. Jack made a kind of low whistle through his teeth but said nothing. Jack must know, from his silence, and that was almost worse than the treachery: the pity. Then he remembered her, out here somewhere in this endless night, and he shivered back into himself, felt the blood returning to his limbs, the anger simmering, and the pain sank into him like a stone.
It was funny, that this was the end of everything. That he could know it and yet keep on breathing.
*
In the tree, Verity took stock of herself: a cut, throbbing hand, blood trickling down her arm; jodhpurs ripped by the bark; her clothes, heavy and sodden with seawater. That was all. It could be worse. Next, she checked her pockets. She made the miraculous discovery of the hip flask, Jack’s Zippo and two crumpled, slightly damp cigarettes, protected by the case. It was a small comfort to still have these things, these touchstones – little signs of normality, as if her mother and Peter were there in the tree with her. Jack too. She felt again in her pockets but they were empty. The torch had gone. The dark seemed to close in on her and smother her. She could no longer see her horse, stranded by the far trees. How would anyone know she was there?
The Night of the Flood Page 19