Instead, she went straight to the kitchen, where Mrs Timms was whacking some meat with a rolling pin and dropped the pin with a clatter when Verity came in.
‘You startled me there, creeping in like a ghost! What are you doing up? You should be in bed.’
But Verity smiled. ‘I feel much better. And I’m starving, Mrs Timms. Is there anything I can eat?’
Grumbling about people who miss breakfast, Mrs Timms made Verity a luncheon meat and pickle sandwich. There was a faint smell of damp in the kitchen but it had been masked by the scents of cooked meat and she noticed that the housekeeper had put up sprigs of lavender all around the kitchen.
‘Any sign of my father? Or Peter?’
‘Oh they’re both out all hours, Miss. There’s so much to do. All the poor animals and the mending and what not.’ She paused and looked doubtfully at Verity.
‘How much of the herd is left?’
Mrs Timms paused and pursed her lips. ‘I can’t rightly say,’ she said.
‘It’s all right,’ Verity said, seated at the big wooden table. ‘I know how bad it’s been. Peter hinted. I’m fine now, really. I just want to know about what’s happened in town.’ She cast around for a better way of getting information out of the housekeeper. ‘Town’ was too vague. ‘Did the Americans come and help?’
Mrs Timms nodded grimly. ‘Oh they were heroes, Miss, real heroes. They lost so much. Say what you like about them and I wasn’t keen myself when they first came, I don’t mind admitting it, but they were there for us in our time of need.’
‘Yes, I’m sure. But what did they lose exactly?’
‘Didn’t you know? Some of their lodgings, where the families were, was completely destroyed. Like the prefabs. Oh that was terrible, that was. All them homes, smashed like dolls’ houses. All them people, still with nowhere to go.’
‘Yes. That’s awful. What happened – to the Americans?’
‘Some of them died in the flood and some lost all their possessions. Same as the people in town. Thank the Lord we was spared.’ She raised her eyes to the ceiling at that point, as if God himself were looking down from the drying racks.
‘Some of them – died?’
‘Whole families. Terrible.’ Mrs Timms shook her head, then turned and whacked the meat with such force that it jumped off the table.
‘Where were they though, Mrs Timms? I didn’t think the Air Force families were lodged near here.’
‘Over in Hunstanton. But some of them came down here to help too. Oh, did you hear about the train?’
Verity picked at her sandwich, chewing slowly, and only half listened to Mrs Timms telling her about the bungalow that had crashed into the train causing it to come off the tracks. ‘Went right into the bungalows of the American families,’ she said. Families, not single men. Jack bunked at the base. And Hunstanton was too far away. Jack wouldn’t have gone there. Instead, she pictured him at the marsh shack, trying to save his camera. The shack would be defiled, like everything else. No, he didn’t keep the camera there. He must have helped the Air Force like all the others. He’d have been in Wells, she was certain. He’d been there already, at the dance, and the flood was coming then. He wouldn’t have had time to get back to the base. She had a sudden thought: what would have happened if the flood had reached the airbase with its deadly cargo? But it hadn’t happened. She would ask Jack about it when she saw him, though. She would ask him straight out. No more evasions. It felt like the flood was a warning.
She fetched a coat, hat and scarf and ventured out into the sodden garden. Dark clouds blew across the sky and the day was bleak. The apple trees were torn and bare, the grass grubby with the same streaking of salt and sand as the fields. She swayed, slightly dizzy. The meat and pickle were sour in her mouth. ‘Come,’ she said to the empty sky. ‘Please come.’ In reply, a magpie squawked in a tree. She walked down to the end of the garden, across the stile and onto the first field. There were Gypsy and Heather as if nothing had happened, blithely chewing hay in the paddock. And to think she’d gone out in the middle of a flood for that horse! She stroked Gypsy’s mane and nuzzled into him. It didn’t matter. The horse was alive. She stayed like that for a long time, feeling the animal’s warm flank move beneath her, until she heard the crunch of steps behind her and swung round, heart in her throat, imagining Jack. It was Peter.
‘Funny, isn’t it? You nearly killing yourself and your horse is absolutely fine the whole time.’ He looked ravaged, she could see it now in natural light, his face hollowed out from physical exhaustion and worry. She felt guilty for wishing he was Jack but she still did.
‘I know,’ she said, ‘but I forgive him. It was stupid of me. I was worried about you too, you know.’ She looked down. It was more than either of them had said before.
He snorted. ‘I told you to stay in the house.’ But he didn’t sound angry with her, more weary, embarrassed.
‘Sorry,’ she said. There was a pause while they looked at the horses. She knew it was selfish to ask him but she had to. ‘Peter, I don’t want to ask but… do you know where Jack is? I thought he might have come to see me – you – us.’ She could feel the heat rising up her neck and she continued to stroke Gypsy’s coarse, thick mane with an insistent rhythm.
Without answering, Peter came into the paddock and brought some hay to Heather who already had enough. ‘I haven’t seen him. He’s probably at the base but the lines are down. Arthur’s been but Mrs Timms keeps turning him away. Bit rotten really. He found you, after all.’
Her hand stopped stroking and gripped onto the horse’s mane as if she needed something to hold onto. She faltered and her vision clouded. The horse whinnied and pushed his head at her. His glassy black eyes came into focus and she leaned her head against his muzzle.
‘But why hasn’t Jack come too?’
‘God, I don’t know. There could be lots of reasons, Ver.’ He paused and she watched him feed his horse. ‘I’ve been thinking the same thing. But I have enough to worry about burying half of our cattle. And Father is no help. He comes out here every day supposedly to help, but he can’t face it. He’s back in the study by lunch time, drinking himself into a stupor. The whole herd might have to go, Ver, the Friesians, all of them. The grazing fields are still under water. If it stays submerged for much longer, it’ll be worthless, sterile like the other fields, and there’ll be nothing for them to graze on in the summer.’
They were silent. There was nothing to say. It would break their father to lose the herd he’d built up since the Thirties, and Peter too. All his plans for expansion had been sunk.
Stupidly, tears pricked at her eyes and fell silently onto Gypsy’s mane, trickling into the hair. She could feel Peter tense but she didn’t care.
‘Don’t do that, Ver. Look, he’s probably helping with the relief effort. Everyone’s flat out with it. Anyway,’ he said with a deep breath, ‘I don’t know what you got yourself mixed up in but it’s not worth it.’
‘You know absolutely nothing,’ she said, and turned her back on him.
‘Nor do you!’ Peter shouted at her back. But she kept walking, determined not to turn round.
Against her reason, she imagined Jack standing at the rear of the house, casually leaning against the brick wall. She walked slowly back to the house to keep the possibility alive. It had happened so quickly. In the village hall, that night, he had been there, his back to her, his copper hair bright in the electric light, his arm around Peter, and he’d turned and winked at her. That was it. She couldn’t even remember the last thing he’d said to her. Why hadn’t she gone back? She should have found him and held onto him.
Arriving at the farmhouse, there was a light on in the kitchen and her heart jumped in hope, but of course it was Mrs Timms.
*
Light-headed with lack of sleep, Arthur surveyed the shop. Everything up to four feet had been covered in a layer of mud and sand, and the marks remained despite his mother’s efforts to remove them. There was a mu
sty, rotten smell in the air that pervaded the whole town and made his head reel with nausea. But the smell was so much stronger in here, a sour odour of decay like that of a decomposing animal.
The first day after the flood, he’d limped through the reeking town – wrapped in a blanket someone had given him – to the wreck of the shop and to his mother, who clung to him. His limbs were aching and his right hand was throbbing and sore. All he could think about was Jack in the boat, his face indistinct but brightly lit, singing. Don’t let the stars get in your eyes. He couldn’t remember how he had got to Verity or the moment when he had lost Jack. He supposed he was in shock, like the men from the war who had hallucinations and facial ticks. But he was so tired, he didn’t want to think. In the state of half consciousness before sleep, Jack was singing, his eyes turned to stars. Then welcome oblivion.
In the morning, he had woken with an image of a dark figure slumped against the end of his bed. He blinked and it was gone. It was a dream. In the dream it had been Jack at the end of the boat, collapsed, like a discarded toy.
In a state of disorientation, Arthur had stumbled downstairs to a scene of devastation. Over the days that followed there was little opportunity to do anything apart from trying to clear up the shop. His mother developed a mania for cleaning that verged on the hysterical, so determined was she to get the shop open again. From morning to night she scrubbed and cleaned, wiping the surfaces over and over with vinegar. What supplies they had left had been moved upstairs to the flat and were now stacked in the kitchen so they had to squeeze round them to get a cup of tea. She wouldn’t let the goods into the parlour for anything. They didn’t talk about the damage or the money lost. There was no insurance, he knew, but when he asked his mother how they would replace the stock she glared at him as if he had blasphemed.
‘Not now, Arthur, there’s too much to do,’ she said, and shooed him away with her cloth.
He persuaded her to make up some emergency packages for the people with nothing and it gave him an excuse to get out of the dank, claustrophobic shop. They, like many other people in the town, had received gift packages from the airbase in Lakenheath – two bedsheets and two pillowcases – and the Canadians had sent food for schoolchildren – sardines, cod liver oil and malt, that kind of thing – but Arthur knew that the flood relief was going to be slow in arriving and most people had very little. As soon as he left the flat he felt as if he could breathe again. Although a faint odour of decay clung to the whole town, it was nothing compared to the smell in the shop. That stench travelled up the stairs and invaded their rooms: a persistent, overpowering tang of damp and sewage that got into your nostrils and tainted everything. He could barely eat in there any more. Everything tasted rotten. All the food and drink, even the boiled water they’d been told to drink, was infected with the reek of stinking mud and decaying carcasses. Despite his mother’s constant scrubbing and polishing, the shop itself felt permanently scarred and fouled. She rubbed and rubbed at it, but she couldn’t quite remove the dirty tide mark along the wall.
Out in the town, he delivered the small packages of tins and dried goods, salvaged from the wreckage. A policeman had brought his old bike back and, apart from signs of rust, it still worked fine. He looked at it as an artefact from a different time – a symbol of his demeaning job working for his mother even though it allowed him to get out. But the town was not the balm he hoped for when enveloped in the foul odour of the shop and flat. Cold grey skies pressed down on the broken town, littered with the filth and debris of the flood. There were still people camping out at the village hall, mostly those from the prefabs. He scanned the faces, wondering if any were those he had saved the night of the flood. But when they looked at him he was quick to shift his gaze because what had happened after that was too appalling to contemplate.
Afterwards, he wandered over to the beginning of Beach Road and the bank, reluctant to return home. From there you could see where the road ended abruptly and a great gash had been torn in the embankment by the raging sea. In all his dreams, he and Jack were in the boat and Jack was unmoving, his red hair hanging down, his face slack.
On the third day, he walked to the village hall again. The sky was low and thick with snow. He pulled his coat tighter around him against the biting wind coming off the North Sea. Lists of the dead were placed on an inside wall. The telephone lines were back up and he thought the base must have been in touch with the police about the numbers of missing or dead. He tried to imagine seeing the name in someone’s black scrawl in order to face it, to see it off, but it merely produced a queasy wash of unease.
At first, he couldn’t see it. He scanned down the names: Patricia Blackfoot, 72; Maurice Blackfoot, 78. It was all old people. Frederick Gittings, 15 months. He swallowed. Muriel’s baby brother, it must be. But then underneath, he saw that someone had tacked up another list with tape. This one listed people from the neighbouring parishes and included the Holkham airbase. Whole families were listed, and the names rolled over his vision like newsreel. The name he was looking for. He couldn’t see it. It wasn’t there. He felt like laughing but held it in. But what exactly did that mean? Had Jack survived by some miracle and was back at the base? Why, in that case, wasn’t he here? He looked at the names again and his eyes snagged on one name on the list from the base: John Henry Doherty, 27. His first thought was Jack had told them he was twenty-two. Why would he lie about that? Then: Missing. For a few seconds he breathed heavily but slowly. Different scenarios crowded his brain. If Jack was still missing, he could be far away from here, perhaps he would never be found, perhaps they would forget, in the turmoil of the flood and its aftermath. They would assume he’d been in Hunstanton. He could tell the police, he could tell them Jack had been with him but then had disappeared, he could tell them… But the thought of speaking to the police made him falter and stagger back from the wall. The names merged and bled.
He half ran, half stumbled out of the hall. Grabbing his bike, he cycled down Staithe Street to the quay and kept going until he reached Beach Road. He had no real idea of what he was doing.
The Army and other volunteers were repairing the breach in the flood wall. Watching them, he couldn’t help but remember the journey in the rowing boat out to the farm but it was hard to fully imagine now. The bank seemed so familiar in daylight, the sea choppy but not out of the ordinary, the floodwater almost completely receded. The marks of damage were everywhere and yet to remember himself within the storm felt impossible. It was like trying to capture the feeling of being on a motorbike after you had got off it. And there it was again – the shadow of Jack. He felt a rush of dizziness and leaned his bike against the harbourmaster’s house and crouched down next to it. No one had asked him about Jack. No one. Then he wanted someone to ask so he could get it over with, burn the wound, cauterise it. The US Air Force must have noticed he was gone. Yes it had been chaos, but why weren’t they even asking about him? He didn’t understand. And surely Peter would be in touch. It was as if everything was normal. He almost expected Jack to appear along Freeman Street with his motorbike. But he wouldn’t be doing that, would he?
‘You aright down there, boy?’ A grizzled old man was peering down at him. Arthur recognised him as the man he had seen at this spot on the afternoon of the flood. His face was puckered with deep creases and he was chewing on the end of a pipe.
Arthur blinked up at the old man and tried to smile but his mouth wouldn’t do it and he felt the muscles twist into a grimace.
The man nodded as if he understood. The nod turned into a shake. ‘Terrible what happened. You lost someone?’
Arthur hesitated then nodded. He had sunk to a crouch on the edge of the bank.
‘Right sorry to hear that, boy. We all have one way or another, ent we?’
Arthur stood up straight now, embarrassed to have been caught in a pose of such craven self-pity. The man didn’t offer any more information and Arthur didn’t ask. The man gestured to the mending of the breach.
Arthur thought how bitter these words would sound to anyone who had really lost a loved one in the flood, or their livelihood: their fields, their livestock. He wished the man would go away and leave him alone. He had been wrong to say he had lost someone. He should be more careful. It occurred to him that he should go at once to the farm to see Verity and Peter to find out what they knew. He could no longer avoid it. He stood up and made to fetch his bike.
‘I seen you,’ said the man, ‘the night of the flood.’
‘What?’
‘You was with another fella. Uniform he had on, carrying a boat you was, the two of you. Past that torpedo what come up on the quay.’ He gestured towards the Terra Nova, all 160 tons of it, still perched improbably on the quayside, and carried on nodding to himself, chewing his pipe.
Arthur’s insides collapsed and he felt unsteady and gripped onto his bike for support. His mouth was thick with saliva. He swallowed painfully. ‘Did you? I don’t remember.’ Then with a flush of relief, he thought – but it was all right! He’d taken the boat past the torpedo when they went to help the prefabs. He was sure of it. And so what if the man had seen him with Jack? Anything could have happened after that. He smiled with giddy relief. ‘Oh yes!’ he said, far too loudly. ‘We took it out to help people.’
The man nodded again. Arthur had begun to think that was his response to anything. ‘Right you are,’ he said.
Arthur began to gabble. He must get home, help his mother, things to do. The man just nodded and as Arthur got on his bike he again felt like laughing. But the laughter died on his face and caught him with his lips curled up in a sneer. His sanity was slipping away in the mist.
He turned to look back and the man had gone.
The Night of the Flood Page 21