‘You’ve been very brave, miss, and you’ve done the right thing, giving us this,’ the policeman said, nodding at her. But it was Arthur he was talking about. Leading them to Arthur.
Under the blanket, her arms cradled her stomach. Oh, what had she done? She thought of him with his hungry face and sticking-up hair as a child. Her right thumb traced the tiny scar on the back of her left hand from when they had crouched in the woods, all those years ago, and rubbed their blood together.
11.
Muriel smoked, tapping her feet to the song on the juke box. She was in Askey’s with her cousin, Rodney. There was a faint smell of rot in the air. The flood had washed away lives but it had stripped back the layers too, revealing the bones beneath. Barely concealing his frustration, Rodney spilled out that they’d been forced to pass the case to the Americans and that they’d decided Arthur was going to be released. Could you believe it? The Americans had thought someone had killed Jack for spying, but it hadn’t been that at all. He’d been selling erotic photographs. It turned out he had a wife and child back in America too.
It all made sense to Muriel. He’d been that kind of man. She could write to them – the wife and the son. She had the address after all. But what would she say? She felt no malice towards Jack – he was dead – or towards poor Verity. Muriel had other priorities.
The flotsam and jetsam from the tide, the debris left on the wrackline were there for the taking. She peered out of the steamed-up window of the milk bar. The music drowned out Rodney’s chatter. At the end of the street, she could just see the hulk of the torpedo boat, which was still resting on the quay. This strange, wild place, neither land nor sea, was in a state of constant flux. They could reclaim the marsh for grazing, they could plant pine trees to stabilise the dunes, but the sea would always come. The tide would rise and fall and rise and fall over and over again. The shore would be reformed after every storm, as they were. That was how it should be. And she was only one tiny part of that ancient, relentless wave.
She lit another fag. No use hurrying home.
15th May 1953
Howe Farm
Dear Ver,
You know how much I hate writing letters but I thought I should give you some news from home. It is a pretty bleak picture I have to paint but at least you are nowhere near. You are better off where you are.
Father stays inside and drinks. I make any excuse to go out on the land but as there are hardly any cattle left there’s little to do. A small portion of the grazing land is usable so the cows are out on that but most of the arable land is ruined by the flood. And we haven’t had enough rain this spring to wash away the devilish salt. I can’t see how we’ll be able to grow anything on it for years. Some of the compensation has come through but it’s a pittance. Desperate times and all that. My little plan is to run bigger public shoots in the autumn. It’s that or the farm goes.
There was a ceremony for Jack. They’ve given him the George Cross. Apparently he’d already been awarded the Air Force Cross. It was all very proper. There was an American flag and a General read out something about his bravery. He’d been in Korea. Did you know that? They didn’t say anything about how he was found or anything like that. Or why he’d received the Air Force Cross. But another airman told me that they give that to men who’ve flown secret reconnaissance missions. ‘Ferret flights’ they call them. Whatever secrets Jack had, they died with him and that’s all that matters to the Yanks. Rodney Blowers told me that the Air Force chaps – Strategic Air Command – took the briefcase you’d found but never discussed a jot about it since. He seemed a bit miffed, though I can’t see why he thought those types would share their secrets with a Norfolk policeman.
I’ve actually bumped into Blowers a few times in the Shipwright’s and he bought me a pint recently, which was decent of him. He said we didn’t need to worry about ‘our friend’ because the Air Force weren’t interested in him at all, though he gave me a look which I rather interpreted as that Blowers himself was interested in what really happened. But I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure.
I suppose Blowers has got his tabs on Arthur anyway, because Muriel is looking after him. Since Arthur came back from hospital, she’s hardly left his side. She’s moved into the flat with his wretched mother and helps her out with the shop. It’s hard to say who’s more hard done by out of this arrangement but I rather fancy Muriel’s chances in a spat with Mrs S. I’ve quite come round to Muriel by the way. She was at the ceremony for Jack, too. Do you remember how we used to pick cockles with her when we were children? I have a horrid feeling we were awful to her.
One more thing – I hesitate to write this but feel I must – they mentioned Jack’s family he’d left back in America. It was a surprise to me too. Muriel’s told me all she knows. It can wait until you come home if you’re up to it.
Father has no idea I have written. He is the same. He asks about you. I know you must hate him after all that was said, but he has no idea how to live after Mother, and, frankly, I don’t think any of us do. You do know that he always loved you far more than me. I’m too dull-headed. Don’t bother arguing, you know it’s true. It’s because he had such high hopes for you as the boffin of the family that he’s so dashed by your predicament. I think, by the way, that he’s sorry about Oxford. He seems to think it’s somehow his fault. The other day he said, ‘She could have gone,’ and I had to tell him that you’d just had some rough luck but he looked at me as if I was mad. So, you can see, he’s feeling awful for not supporting you more. God knows why you wanted to go to bloody university anyway.
It will get better, it has to.
Perhaps you and I can sell the farm and for the pittance we’ll get for it we can run away somewhere warm. What do you say? I rather fancy Greece. I think Mother would approve.
Tell me what it’s like? Is it awful? Are you painting? Are you going to watch the Coronation? Mrs T is cock-a-hoop about it.
Must dash now, I’m famished and it’s Mrs T’s day off so I’ll have to forage in the pantry and force Father to eat something.
Peter
P.S. Mrs T insisted I include some woollen items, hence the vast package.
*
18th May 1953
St Mary’s of Woolnock
Herts.
Dear Peter,
Thank you, thank you, thank you for writing. I do believe it is the longest letter you have ever written! Any news is oxygen.
I, of course, have no news. I expand like swelling fruit. You would find it quite a shock if you could see me. I look like a fat old matron with a voluminous cardigan (it is always cold and draughty, even worse than home) and my hair is shapeless as no one’s cut it for weeks. All I do is knit and take walks around the grounds. No painting, not yet. Just sketches. And sometimes I take photographs, but I have to hide Mother’s camera as we’re not allowed them. Another of the many rules.
I’m glad you went to the ceremony. It sounds as if it was interesting.
Yes to Greece! Now I am completely unmarriageable, that’s one consolation at least.
Please say hello to Father and give Mrs Timms a kiss to say thank you for the things she sent.
All love, V
P.S. Please put some flowers on Mother’s grave for me.
*
18th May 1953
Dear Arthur,
I have written many times and destroyed the letters because I can’t find the right words. I was too angry for a long time. I have heard that you are now with Muriel and hope you will be happy. I mean it sincerely; she is a good person. I have been punished for what I did, I think. I wonder if you know where I am? It feels like a purgatory. I can’t tell Peter how dire it is because he needs me to be strong.
I was going to write that I forgive you but I don’t know if that’s true but I want to because
I remain your friend,
Verity
Multiple versions, unsent.
1954
A year after the flo
od
It is spring again.
In the May after the birth of her baby, Verity takes the train to London from Norwich. The line from Wells has still not been fixed. Peter waves her off, a tall, lonely figure out of place in the bustling station in his country boots and jacket.
‘Look after yourself,’ he says. She thinks she’ll cry but it doesn’t come.
‘Does he know about the—?’ She cannot say the baby. Jack’s baby.
He shakes his head. She knows he rarely sees Arthur any more. Since his mother died, Arthur runs the shop with Muriel.
‘It was the best thing to do,’ he says, as if she had asked.
She nods, although she has no idea if this is true. People keep saying it but she wonders how they’re so certain. Now she knows Jack lied to her so thoroughly, this is how she should feel. All traces of him gone.
‘Have you seen this?’ says Peter.
The headline on the newspaper he hands her reads:
FIRST DETAILS OF ATOM-BOMB BASE
‘Take it,’ he says. ‘Something to read on the train. Arthur was right all along.’
Not about everything.
In March, the Americans detonated a bomb in the Pacific. The newspapers said it was one thousand times as powerful as the bombs they dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki. No one seems to be awfully worried about it. She’s read that scientists in the US have created something called the Doomsday Clock and they’ve set the time as two minutes to midnight. Midnight is the apocalypse. Meanwhile, their own little corner of the world carries on regardless. Peter says the base at Holkham is having an open day and visitors will see the jet planes that carry the atom bombs. Atomic warfare as tourism. But still the public doesn’t know about the secret missions Jack ran over the Baltic States in Russia. Each time he went, unarmed and vulnerable, Jack could have been shot down and there would have been no recovery and no return. Neither the British nor the Americans would have been able to rescue him. She remembers the ampoule from around his neck – the pill inside it must have been cyanide. They would have expected him to have killed himself rather than be captured. And she wonders what Jack found over there, over the mountains and steppe, what it was he saw. What has he left behind? There must be other photographs of missile bases and hidden weapons, developed in a laboratory somewhere, rather than the half-naked pictures of women and the bleak Norfolk marshes that she’d found. And his fatherless child who has a brother he’ll never know. How unbelievably pointless all that risk was when the real danger was waiting for him in the flood.
She takes the paper, knowing she won’t read it. ‘You’ll visit?’ she says and is embarrassed to feel a catch in her throat.
Peter laughs. ‘What would I do in London?’ And it is funny, the idea of him lumbering around the crowded city streets in his tweeds.
She smiles and squeezes his arm. ‘Come anyway. Please.’ She can’t bear the idea of him stuck at the farm with their father. It doesn’t seem fair. It had been his idea to apply to the college; he who visited her in the awful place in Hertfordshire; he who fetched her when the baby had been taken away and she was left, broken and empty; he who broke the news about the baby to their father and stopped him from raging. He bought her the train ticket to London. She thinks now that he hadn’t been joking about Greece.
On the train she can’t read the paper even if she wanted to: her vision is blurred from the pooling, undropped tears and none of the words go in. Out of the window she looks at the flat fields ticking by; each farm building on its own in an empty field reminds her of the cabin. A light drizzle streaks the windows but ahead, a break in the clouds, a thin sliver of light.
On the overhead rack she has put her mother’s old trench coat, and her case. In the handbag beside her on the seat is a letter of recommendation from Miss Cecily Gardiner, schoolmistress. In a large, flat black case next to it is her portfolio: all the paintings and sketches she’s done recently, most of them just from the last lonely months, and in a separate section some of the pictures she’s taken with her mother’s old camera, the one Jack loved. In among the shots of the grounds of the home and the farm, there are some of the girls and their babies. The college probably won’t be interested in those but she’s brought them anyway. It’s a record. In her suitcase, the tiny camera in a case and at the bottom, tucked into the underwear compartment, the broken Zippo lighter, the postcard Jack gave her, and three photographs she will show no one. One is the only photograph of herself she has kept. Many times over the last year she’s taken out the picture and inspected it, trying to find in the gaze of the camera a love that was not there in the pictures of the other women. It was there in the photograph he took of his son. The second is his self-portrait. The wet and the mud have distorted his face but it’s still him. The last of these fragments, these pieces of memory, is a blurry photograph she took of James, the baby she gave away, just a dark smudge of a thing in the awful woollens she knitted.
The train is quiet and in the empty carriage her thoughts are too loud. She applies lipstick as the rows of London terraces come into view.
Her interview is the following day and tonight she’ll stay in digs. The train arrives at four o’clock. Time to wander, to window shop in the streets between Liverpool Street and Soho. But when she emerges into the road above Liverpool Street station, the flutter and cacophony make her change her mind and she drags her case and folio back down the stairs and down again to the tube station and takes the underground to Pimlico. The Thames glimmers in the distance as she walks towards it.
In the gallery, she seeks out Turner’s Snow Storm – Steam-boat off a Harbour’s Mouth. It’s smaller than she’d expected. It’s just a painting. Deflated, she slumps down on the bench in front of it and tears finally fall, streaking down her face. The painting begins to bleed and swim in her tired, bleary eyes and the dark brush strokes detach themselves from the two-dimensional surface and envelop her. She remembers what Jack had said about it. It was wild. She doesn’t know what or who he was but he has given her this.
Back on the Embankment, the sun is low in the sky. Without a watch, she has no idea how long she has sat in front of the painting. The Thames is darkening and she peers down it, listening to the chug of a boat somewhere beyond her sight. She feels the great machinery of the city carrying on beyond her and without her and she wants to stay there on the banks of the Thames forever, and never venture back into the bowels of the throbbing beast of the city. Somehow, she has broken free of her moorings and is now untethered and a feeling of lightness comes over her as she leans on the bank. Across the river, lights come on in a squat building and are reflected in droplets of gold in the eddying water.
This last year has been a series of humiliations and catastrophes one after the other as if her life had been ripped from its moorings and flung out into a storm-wild sea to be bashed senseless on the rocks. Everything has been taken away from her. Perhaps it is her fault they have gone – her mother, Jack, the baby; she did not love enough; she has been careless. She was gazing so hard at her own image that she did not see what she had done to Arthur. On the banks of the Thames, she is so light with grief she could float away, disappear underneath the dancing lights. She could drift away on the ebb tide to the estuary, to the sea, reach oblivion, like her mother did. She sways slightly on the backs of her feet. Everything that has happened, everything she has done, has marked her, the way the flood left behind a tide mark of scum, and the white scouring on the fields. It’s marked but not defeated her.
She lights a cigarette for courage, picks up her things and turns her back on the river and is soon swept with the tide of people into the vivid, gaudy glow of the London evening.
Acknowledgements
The Night of the Flood is a work of fiction but it was inspired by real-life events. The following books were useful in my research:
The Great Tide by Hilda Grieve
1953 Essex Flood Disaster by Patricia Rennoldson Smith
Flood Alert! Norf
olk 1953 by Neil R.Storey
Sculthorpe Secrecy and Stealth by Peter B.Gunn
This novel was begun on the Bath Spa MA and was given a much-needed boost by the insightful critiques and encouragement of Tessa Hadley, Nathan Filer and Kylie Fitzpatrick, to whom I am very grateful. I would also like to thank my lovely, patient supervisor, Beatrice Hitchman.
It took a long time after the MA to draft and re-draft and in that process I owe much to my friends and fellow writers from the course. Thanks go to Deb McCormick and, in particular, to Anna-Marie Crowhurst for being such an inspiration and cheerleader. I would also like to say a huge thank you to one of my greatest supporters and early readers, Harriet Bosnell. Finally, thanks go to Lily Dunn, whose post-MA course in Bristol gave me the final push I needed to complete the novel, and to the brilliant Beryl Readers who all encouraged me in my writing and continue to do so.
Most sincere thanks to my wonderful agent, Laetitia Rutherford, for believing in this novel and making me a much better writer. I am also incredibly grateful to my editor, Madeleine O’Shea, for her unswerving enthusiasm and expert editing, and to Tamsin Shelton for her brilliant copy-editing.
I must also thank family, especially my dad, James ‘Bert’ Bremner, for a book-filled childhood, and my sister, Sophie for driving me around Norfolk for research, and my amazing grandmother, Bessie, for all her love. A special mention must also go to my parents-in-law, Sue and Gordon Somerville, without whom I would never have gone to Bath Spa in the first place.
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