The Night of the Flood

by Zoe Somerville

  ‘I always liked you, Arthur,’ she said, into his chest.

  *

  There was silence at the kitchen table. Father had taken his breakfast early and was out already. The vet was due to make a visit to see about the disposal of the carcasses of the dead livestock. They’d buried all the drowned chickens but there were cattle they hadn’t yet found. Verity watched Peter drinking his tea. His face was drawn and she saw the shadow of her father in his features. Her toast lay picked at on her plate. Every time she tried to eat she saw Jack’s greenish-grey head, hanging down from the tree, and the purple bruise on his temple, and she felt sick. They said he knocked his head on the boat.

  An image of the window in the cabin swam into her vision. She would never have seen his body if she hadn’t been at the cabin. She had picked up the binoculars that Jack had brought from the base, and put them to her eyes. At first she could see only the marsh. Then she raised them too high and it was only sky. Adjusting down, she came to the pine trees and turned the knob to focus. There was a policeman, quite clearly, framed in the circles. His face was animated, pink as if scrubbed raw. He was saying something. She swung the binoculars to the left and there, impossibly, was Arthur. He was kneeling on the ground and above him was a sack hanging from the tree. No. It was a dead fox. And in the same moment she thought it was a fox, the binoculars fell from her hands, her arms dropping as if someone had taken away all the life in her body, and she knew.

  Death was a constant on a farm – a cow haemorrhaging after a breech birth; their old dog, Baxter, slowly dying of liver cancer; their mother’s horse, mercifully shot when she broke her leg. And her own mother. She thought about what Arthur had said about her mother being found in her nightdress. Goosebumps rippled over her skin. That’s why she’d insisted on looking at Jack’s body. This time she wouldn’t be denied the truth.

  But she could never have foreseen the horror of it, the grotesque dangling of his beautiful body hung like a stuck pig. Her fingers tapped incessantly on the table.

  Peter coughed, clattered his teacup on the saucer. ‘What I don’t understand,’ he said, ‘is how he ended up there, if he was helping people in the town.’

  The orange marmalade glistened on the toast. She could taste bile in her throat and she thought she was going to be sick.

  Peter spoke again. ‘What did Arthur say about where he left Jack?’

  ‘You keep saying the same thing. I have no idea,’ she said.

  ‘I can’t get over how we saw him at the dance—’ Peter stopped and looked down at his hands. ‘Ver, listen, I know you and he had… were…’

  Tears fell onto her plate, soaked into the marmalade. She was not just crying for him but for all he meant. No one would ever know that they had loved each other. And the dreams he’d spun and that she’d almost believed had vanished. No one would ever know that they had ever even existed.

  She heard Peter’s chair scrape and she tensed, sniffed, waiting for the unwanted contact. Peter was standing awkwardly at the table. ‘He was your friend as well,’ she said. He sat down again as if all the air had come out of him.

  He coughed. ‘I suppose the Air Force will find out what happened,’ he said, and opened the newspaper, rustling it loudly. ‘Our new queen is coming to Norfolk,’ he read. Then he added, ‘Eisenhower’s turned down the Rosenbergs’ appeal against the death penalty. Nasty business.’

  Verity didn’t answer. She thought about the briefcase she’d found in the marsh shack, the pill in the ampoule, Jack’s frequent disappearance. All the evasions and shadows.

  They both looked up when the front doorbell rang through the hallway and Mrs Timms came clattering out of the kitchen, puffing, ‘I’m coming. Hold your horses,’ as the bell rang again.

  ‘It’ll be Arthur,’ Peter said, ‘I asked him to come. He’s bound to want to talk it over.’ Something wary and hesitant passed between them wordlessly.

  The room changed when he came in. They were stiff, bristling. He stood half illuminated in the pale light of the east window and he seemed defiant, uncomfortable, as if he didn’t want to be there. She hadn’t really looked at him the day they found Jack, and now she saw that his eyes were sunken in his head, with grey smudges in the hollows. But then he smiled at her and, although it was an awkward smile, there were plenty of reasons for that and she tried to return it.

  ‘How’ve you been, old boy?’ Peter asked, standing up and ushering Arthur into the room. He called for more tea and toast for Arthur, and Mrs Timms went off to get it, grumbling. ‘Have the police spoken to you about Jack?’

  ‘No,’ said Arthur, ‘why would they?’

  ‘Because you helped them find the body and you told them you’d seen him!’ Verity blurted out.

  ‘Leave him alone, Ver,’ said Peter, but Mrs Timms came bustling in with the tea and toast and there was an awkward pause while Verity poured tea. Arthur buttered the toast and spread marmalade and thanked Mrs Timms and them all.

  ‘Hasn’t anyone told you, though, old boy?’ asked Peter finally. ‘Because I’ve heard they’re going to do a post-mortem.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Verity asked, and at the same time, Arthur spat, ‘What?’

  ‘One of the nobs at the police told Father, who let it slip,’ said Peter hotly, as if how he knew a thing was none of their business. ‘The Air Force have been nosing around since the body was found. But funnily enough, it’s the junior chap at Wells who’s asked for an autopsy.’

  Verity tried to block it out but the image of Jack’s sodden, misshapen body hanging down from the tree rose in her mind again. She saw his body on a marble slab being cut. The pale, freckled skin she had touched and kissed, sliced open with a blade like paring the rubbery skin of a fig to reveal the soft pulp inside. A sound came from her and she felt herself the object of both Peter’s and Arthur’s gaze.

  ‘Why do they need to do a post-mortem if he drowned?’ she said, seeing the purple bloom on his forehead.

  ‘Yes, it is rather fishy,’ said Peter. ‘I did have half a thought that he might have been up to something somewhat clandestine. That might explain it. He was always disappearing to God-knows-where. Maybe they suspect murder.’

  A knife jabbed behind her eye sockets. Arthur cleared his throat. ‘Speaking of which, do either of you know anything about a box or a trunk that Jack had? Something with a small lock. He said something about a locked box the night of the flood and he made it sound quite important. I wondered if he’d mentioned anything like that to you, just in case you had any idea where it might be. We could help the Air Force if they’re after it. That is, if it’s important.’

  Verity’s heart was beating hard. The pain in her head intensified. Was there a box? And again, she thought of the briefcase and its secret contents. Of their shack on the marsh and what it had meant to her. She’d thought it had meant the same for him. Their place, just theirs. What were you hiding, Jack?

  ‘No clue whatsoever,’ said Peter, ‘though you might want to mention it to one of the military types. I heard they’d been in touch with the local plod, you know. Ver – are you all right?’

  Her vision blurred and her stomach was retching. ‘Sorry,’ she choked and, clutching her mouth before she was sick on the kitchen floor, she ran to the bathroom and vomited the pathetic amount of tea, toast and marmalade she had managed to keep down, into the sink.

  *

  After she cleaned herself up she told them not to worry, it was probably just a bug. But she excused herself and went to bed. At some point that day, she no longer remembered exactly when, she stared at her reflection in her mother’s dressing room mirror and felt the force of the truth. For she had truly got herself in a mess. The sickness, the tenderness of her breasts, her revulsion at the smells and taste of food, her jags of crying; the undeniable fact that her cycle had stopped. She had known all this but it had been easy to explain away. She had been ill; she was sick with grief. Go and see a doctor, she imagined someone saying. Someone who
cared about her, someone who noticed the changes in her. But there was no one to do that. And she couldn’t go to a doctor – the family doctor was a bald, jowly man who’d reluctantly gone over to the National Health Service – but the thought of him and his fat fingers examining her – no. The shame of it. She couldn’t face it. Oh Mother, she prayed, tell me what to do. But the looking-glass only reflected her own bloated, blotched face swimming in a blurry film. She felt as if she was underwater, trapped, with no access to air. Is this what drowning felt like, Mother? You meant to do it, didn’t you? She, Verity, should have drowned in the flood, along with Jack. Silly girl, she chided. But that was it: she would drown the thing inside her, make it go away, flush it out. She had a dim memory of a girl at school talking about gin and hot baths. Downstairs was quiet. It wasn’t tea yet and the men were out. Mrs Timms was in town shopping for supper. She could do it right now.

  She crept downstairs and turned the immersion heater on for the hot water and went to the drinks cabinet in the parlour. There was a half-empty bottle of gin. She held it in a shaking hand. Maybe it had to be hot too. She warmed a big glassful in a pan on the stove, praying that no one would come in. Then she scrubbed the pan, refilled the bottle with water to the level it had been, returned it to the cabinet and went upstairs with the hot glass wrapped in a tea towel.

  In the bathroom she turned on the taps and waited for the water to heat up and slowly fill the bath. It was such an incredible luxury to be having a bath in the middle of the day she almost laughed. What would Mrs Timms say? Oh how horrified she would be! The housekeeper referred to it as ‘your mother’s bathroom,’ with an implicit disapproval of such louche, unnecessary home comforts. When Verity stripped to her underwear she put her hands on her stomach and felt its egg shape. In the glass she peered at her stomach. Standing sideways it appeared to stick out, distended and ugly, but she breathed in and it flattened. It was hard to tell if there was anything there. She wondered whether if she punched herself she could destroy the thing inside, but that was grotesque. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. Instead, she took a gulp of the hot liquid and gagged and spluttered, spitting much of it out onto the linoleum floor. It was like drinking turps, and a distant image of herself painting in the school art room blinked in her brain. A lifetime gone since then. The bathroom mirror was steamed up and she could no longer see her reflection and that was a good thing. She wanted to efface herself, to float away from the horror of the present. Tightening her throat, she took another gulp of the vile gin and entered the bath. It was scaldingly hot but that was good too. She felt that the heat inside and around her would clean her out, strip off her layers of filth and muck, cleanse her of the fluids sloshing about inside her, the growth sucking the life out of her. She took the glass, only warm to the touch now, wet with steam from the misty room, drained the remaining gin and sank deep into the bath. Her skin prickled and burned hot pink in the scalding water, her head lolled as if loose from her neck and her mind felt as cloudy as the hot, dripping room.

  It was easy to close her eyes and sink under the water, to let the water take her in. It was like sleeping. It wouldn’t be so awful if it ended this way.

  *

  A knocking in her head. She opened her eyes. Everything was white in the steam of the bathroom, just the taps glinting metal through the mist. She wished her head would stop the banging. Then she realised someone was shouting her name.

  ‘Ver! What are you doing? How long have you been in there?’

  It was Peter. She hadn’t died. And she was ashamed for thinking that she might. Remembering, she felt the slight curve of her belly with a detached horror. At the pit of her stomach was a deep ache. Perhaps the thing, the growth, had gone, drowned in the bath, its new, flickering life choked off.

  A banging on the door. ‘Ver, for God’s sake, open up! What’s wrong?’

  ‘All right,’ she said, her voice cracking with lack of use. As she raised herself out of the bath, her back scythed with pain and the ache in her abdomen cut into her and she groaned. She looked down between her legs into the still warm water but there didn’t seem to be anything floating in it, no pink, bloody swirls; she wasn’t even sure what she was looking for.

  With a towel around her, she opened the door.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Peter, ‘it’s like a Turkish bath in here. You look ghastly,’ he added, squinting at her.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, and sat on the edge of the bath, her legs soft and jelly-like. Her fingers were shrivelled and her skin was covered in goosebumps.

  ‘Peter,’ she said, fixing her eyes on the taps at the end of the bath, ‘was Mother wearing clothes when she was found?’

  Peter coughed and shuffled his feet.

  So it was true. It had been there in the whispers and the air of scandal surrounding her death but Verity had never wanted to believe it. She began to cry. Peter’s discomfort and impatience rippled through the fetid air of the bathroom. The only sound was the dropping of her tears into the bath water.

  6.

  All along the coast, men patrolled for the second high spring tide. The streets were sandbagged, sailors had battened down their boats and the police kept vigil. The Snow Moon shone full.

  That was the thing about tides. They came back. Muriel’s grandmother had told her about 1930 and countless storms before. Her own grandfather had drowned at sea. Muriel always wondered what it would be like to drown. Opening your mouth in shock, taking in the seawater. You wouldn’t believe it was happening but the water would already be in your lungs. You couldn’t shout because your throat would be seized up and the cold would have shut down your body. Her grandmother always said it was a silent death. And so it had been for her little brother, disappearing without a murmur into the dark wave.

  But it wasn’t drowning Muriel was worried about, or even the spring tide. She was keeping a mental vigil over Arthur.

  7.

  ‘Arthur, I don’t think it’ll be safe out there today on the bicycle, you’ll have to go on foot. It looks like snow.’

  His mother was peering out of the kitchen window at the lowering yellow sky. It was just after lunch and she was about to reopen the shop for the afternoon custom and he was supposed to do the deliveries.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ he said. He was desperate to be outside, to be doing something. He had to move, to breathe. Thoughts of the dead man and the whispers of the Frosts were like thick smoke clogging his throat. He wondered again about Jack’s key. It looked like a safety deposit box key, or for a safe, perhaps. Or possibly a padlock, but for what? The key was small and quite delicate: about half the length of his little finger. His thumb felt along the ridges of the shaft and he imagined it turning in a lock. It was the only thing he could think of that might save him. He would take the bike out and it would give him the chance to think.

  Out on the quayside, he looked towards Beach Road and the marsh and remembered finding Jack’s body and Verity running at him like a crazed dog. Is that where she had been with Jack? It must be. It was obvious now. They’d been meeting out there, making a fool of him all this time. And how would she have seen them finding the body if she hadn’t been on the marsh itself? There was no way she could have seen him and Blowers from the house. So she must have come from somewhere out on the marsh, somewhere hidden. And he knew what he was going to do.

  He didn’t bother with the delivery basket and mounted his bike, but as he was about to push off, he noticed at the other end of the quay two figures whom he recognised at once. One was small and obviously female with a green hat and coat and was talking to a tall, thin man in a police uniform. It was Muriel and the young policeman, Blowers. Cold ran through his limbs. Their heads were close up and for a second he thought with incredulity that they were kissing, but he knew somehow, by the tilt of their heads, by some stiffness in their bearings, that they were not. As he watched them, Blowers nodded his comically high, helmeted head and patted Muriel on the shoulder and left her. Then, almost
as if she knew he was watching them, Muriel turned in his direction. Behind her, the policeman stopped and also turned. Muriel’s hand went to her mouth and then she raised it in a tentative wave. Arthur waved back, but as quickly as he could, without drawing attention to his actions, he pedalled off hard in the opposite direction, down the Holkham Road towards Leafy Lane and the farm.

  *

  Muriel saw the figure coming out of the shop at the other end of the quay and she felt a sense of déjà vu. She stood, stuck in indecision, her fingers turning purple in the sharp air.

  ‘Muriel?’ A hand touched her shoulder and she jumped. It was cousin Rod. ‘What’s wrong?’ he said. ‘I saw you just standing here and I thought you looked a bit lost, if you don’t mind me saying.’

  She laughed. ‘Don’t be a lummox, Rod, I’m fine.’

  ‘Best get inside,’ he said. ‘Weather’s turning.’

  ‘I know that,’ she said.

  Rod said nothing. Then he indicated the Holkham Road where Arthur’s figure was getting on his bike. ‘He’s a friend of yours, isn’t he? Arthur Silver.’ She opened her mouth to say something but he continued, ‘It’s none of my business, it’s just—’ He stopped.

  ‘Spit it out,’ she said.

  ‘It was him what found the body of the American you was asking about, did you know that? Actually, it was me, but he led us there. I thought it was a bit odd at the time. It was almost like he wanted to tell me something.’

  He had her attention now. She looked at his slightly pinched, acne-scarred face. He was Gert’s son, her mother’s sister, the sister who’d done good, married a railwayman, son a policeman of all things. Lived out of the town in clean new houses with no damp and an inside toilet. They had airs, that side of the family, and her mother was resentful of her snooty sister. But Rodney Blowers was no fool. Muriel remembered Arthur’s body on top of her and she thought perhaps it was she who was a fool. Next to her, Rod was fiddling with his gloves.