by David Nobbs
‘Would she be interested?’
‘Would she?? She loves you, Ben.’
Ben looked at her in astonishment.
‘Don’t tell her you’ve shown it to me. Tell her she’s the first person you’ve shown it to. You’ve saved it for her.’
‘Are you suggesting I tell her a complete lie?’
‘You bet I am.’
Three days later, shy, shaking and embarrassed, Ben plucked up his courage and asked Lucy out. Men often arouse women by showing them something rather special. It isn’t usually a high street, but on this occasion it was. And it worked. Lucy was very excited, and Ben, seeing Lucy’s excitement, was very proud, and in his pride Ben had no problem. He got it up, up up and beyond.
The following week, armed with photographs of Ben’s High Street, Sally made her summer visit to the great house above Marlow. The sherry was Tio Pepe. Her main course at dinner was poached Thames salmon with lemon mayonnaise. Sir Norman plumped for scrambled eggs. At lunch next day Sally told Sir Norman that she really did think that the parsnips were the best yet.
After their lunch, Sally showed him Ben’s designs for the High Street, and he did something that he had never done before. He walked with her over the gravel towards the Rolls-Royce, and there he kissed her on both cheeks.
On the train home Sally thought of all the men who had kissed her in this her second life. Sir Norman Oldfield, Ben Wardle, Harry Patterson, Arnold Buss, Conrad Eltington, Stanley Willink, Matt Winkle, Eric Sheepshank, Councillor Frank Stratton, The Revd Dominic Otley and Terence Porchester.
Would she ever be kissed by a man whose kisses she could return, and then return again, and then return once more, in secret and in public, with affection and with love?
THIRTY-NINE
Before the deluge
‘It was a long, long drive up the Pan-American Highway. That sounds impressive, doesn’t it? But it was just a two-lane road, with no central reservation, dusty, dry, passing through long, low villages of simple, one-storey cottages, their pastel paintwork made pale by the sun and darkened by the dirt from the road. Night came fast, and now the road’s course was identified by the progress of the lorries – more than ships of the desert, these were cruise liners of the desert, their rigging studded with multicoloured lights, bravely defiant against a colourless world.’
Sally was enjoying herself. She had come to love telling tales of her travels to Ellie, Ali and Oli. She had long ago stopped promising to take them to the places she was describing. She had already promised them Venice, Florence, the Stockholm Archipelago and the Rhine. To promise more would be to render her promises meaningless.
‘At every town, at every stop, schoolchildren hurried on to the bus, selling limes, oranges and pancakes. As the long night wore on, the children ceased to be the ones who were up long past their bedtime and became the ones who had struggled from their beds long before their breakfast time, all to earn a tiny sum of extra money for their families, all to keep starvation at bay.’
Ali, Ellie and Oli forgot the limitations of their own lives and sympathized with these poor children, whose weariness would quite prevent them from taking in the next day’s lessons at school.
‘The rickety old bus turned right, and began to emit a bad-tempered growl as it started its approach to the foothills of the mighty Andes. The bus’s elderly snarl deepened as it began to climb. Now the light tiptoed into the world like a careful burglar intent on stealing the darkness. The bus was passing through paddy fields, shockingly fertile below the rocky hills, and studded with ibis, standing in the shallow water, still as statues, white as ghosts in the milky, misty morning.’
Ali, Ellie and Oli were with Sally in that creaking old bus. They could see the ibis. They envied her this spectacular journey. Little did they know that she had never even been to Peru. She had only learnt of this journey from a very dreary aunt of Barry’s, in letters written in a much less picturesque style. She had entirely run out of inspiring places that she herself had actually seen. These talks were now involving quite a bit of research.
‘The valley narrowed and steepened. Now there was no more room for the rice, no more moisture in a barren world. The ibis gave way to eagles and vultures and even the occasional condor as the bus twisted perilously up the narrow road, round the steep bends, over the wonky bridges.’
Suddenly Sally faltered. The weather forecast suggested that a storm was coming, the first storm of the winter, and that it was going to be huge and destructive. Despite the scepticism of Conrad and Stanley, the thirty-five-year gap was proving significant once again. The Potherthwaite Flood Avoidance Scheme was in place. Conrad seemed calm and confident. Everyone trusted him. Everyone believed in him. But Sally had never had a huge belief in experts, and, much as she admired Conrad, much as she felt that he deserved Marigold and she deserved him, there had to be just a bit of doubt in the judgement of a man who had rejected the opportunity of being loved by her. And Conrad’s judgement and ability were now of huge importance, for Sally had just realized that, if the flood was as catastrophic as the doom-mongers predicted, Ellie might be drowned in her bed.
She must continue her tale. Her three obese friends were looking at her with slight alarm. She must quash that.
‘Up up up went the creaky bus. Up up up went the dusty road. And then it crested the top of the mountain.’ She didn’t think it had actually – Barry’s aunt’s bus had crossed the great range somewhat below the summit – but this was dramatic licence. The trouble was, she didn’t feel dramatic any more.
‘And there was the huge sweep of the valley, stretching all the way to the horizon.’
She knew that the valley, and indeed the horizon, had been distinctly anticlimactic. Her purple passage had become a mauve plain. It was so much more tiring talking of places she hadn’t been to, and having to pretend that she had. It seemed to her that the need for lies never stopped.
She left number 6 Cadwallader Road as soon as she decently could, and walked slowly home. As she crossed the river, she looked down at its slow, peaceful, only slightly dirty water and wondered just what violence it could be capable of. The bipolar mallard looked listless, disillusioned. They were going to have a rude awakening. As she crossed the Market Place she passed Luke Warburton going the other way. He looked listless and disillusioned too. Would he have a rude awakening? She smiled at him warmly, and this confused him so much that he couldn’t summon up any facial expression in reply, so he just walked past blankly, kicked a loose stone angrily and tried valiantly to hide that he had hurt his foot.
She also found Councillor Frank Stratton walking towards her.
‘All set for the storm?’ she asked.
‘Southerners!’ he replied. ‘Wimps! Journalists! Scaremongers! BBC! Poofters!’ He nodded twice, in satisfaction at his intellectual demolition of more than half the British nation.
Sally walked on. His complacency did nothing to calm the unease she felt. Winter had arrived. This was the third winter since she had taken on her great task. They were interruptions. They slowed things down. And they were so long, here among the hills. This had to be a busy and productive one, if they were to meet their target for the festival next year. If it started with destruction, damage … if Ellie … without Ellie everything would collapse. She feared equally for Ellie and for High Street East, at the bottom of which the first twelve shopfronts had already been installed, all the shopkeepers having miraculously been persuaded to sign up for the new frontages.
In the morning she telephoned her doctor and asked if there was any way Ellie could be moved or if facilities could be on hand to move her if the situation demanded it. ‘She is,’ Sally said, ‘a bit of a special case.’
‘She is,’ said her doctor very gently, ‘in that of all the people in my practice who have special needs and serious health problems she more than anyone has brought it on herself. I have people with terminal cancer. I have cripples who can’t walk. Ellie eats too much. It hardly compares.
’
‘Ate too much.’
‘All right. Ate too much. I admire what you’re doing, but I cannot consider any way in which the health service can give her special help. Try the hospital if you like, but I’d be amazed if their attitude was any different.’
Sally didn’t try the hospital. She accepted the doctor’s argument.
Each day, the forecast grew worse. Even Conrad was worried, as he went through every aspect of his plans every evening, checking the calculations of likely water flow down the river and the extent to which this could be relieved by diverting water down the canal. The weather was calm, the wind light, the sky pale with streaky high cloud. It was as if the elements were teasing them.
The high cloud was just thick enough to keep the nights dark. Nobody saw the lone figure who worked every night on his special project, his obsession. His energy was prodigious. The energy of madmen often is. And this man, now, was almost certainly mad. Normality had failed him. Normality had been contemptuous of him. When normality is contemptuous of a person, surely he has the right to lose his sanity? Every evening, towards dusk, this man prepared.
Every evening, towards dusk, in his position closer to the town centre, Conrad checked his plans yet again. And every evening, soon after dusk, the TV channels spoke of the intensification of the storm, the closeness of the isobars, the estimates of the level of that long word for rain, precipitation, which seems to be used as if the pain of the thing can be eased by being spread across so many letters.
Two days before the expected arrival of the storm, Sally was walking through the darkened town, down Cadwallader Road to the Canal Basin and the canal. She was in some of the most vulnerable parts of the town. People don’t usually walk through towns thinking about their likely vulnerability in times of flood. Sally had lived in the town for more than a quarter of a century without realizing that the whole place had, with only minor variations, a tilt to the south and east. If the river overflowed, its waters would run down the High Street to the east and down the streets that led to the canal. The canal had been built at a slightly higher level than the surrounding town, in order to save on the number of locks that were needed when it rose to join the Rackstraw and Sladfield Canal at Pother Junction. It occurred to Sally now that the use of the canal to ease pressure on the river was intrinsically very risky. She telephoned Conrad, prefacing her concern with the words, ‘I know this is a bit late, but …’ He reassured her that he had taken all this into account and it was true that these factors limited the amount of water he could divert. The sluice eased the threat but did not eliminate it. It would all be down to judgement on the day. If the waters exceeded a certain force and volume, they were powerless. She did not feel reassured by this.
Everywhere there were sandbags, unbroken rows of sandbags outside every house and shop, layers of sandbags tightly packed along the banks of the river and canal, spare sandbags stored ready for emergencies. Some people said sandbags were virtually useless, their presence was largely cosmetic, psychological. Sally didn’t know, but she was reassured to see them.
It was a town in waiting. Nobody was about, not a drinker, not a prostitute.
Then she heard footsteps, men’s footsteps. Three tall young men became visible as they passed a dim street light, and Sally recognized them. They were Luke Warburton, Johnny Blackstock and Digger Llewellyn. Three of the Baggit Boys. There was no reason to suspect them of anything in particular at that moment, they just looked like three young men searching for a purpose in life and not finding it in the Canal Basin. But they had a reputation, and they were dressed in black, matching the night, and it’s never reassuring for a woman to be faced with men who dress to match the night, and who have a reputation.
Sally didn’t lack courage but it takes a special kind of courage to face up to men in black and still be able to think calmly, and afterwards, she wasn’t at all certain that she had thought calmly. She had been more disturbed than she would admit by Conrad’s frankness about the danger. She felt terrified for Ellie, for Ben’s High Street, for the whole Transition project. In the dictionary there are two definitions of the word ‘brainwave’ – an electrical impulse of the brain, and a brilliant idea. Down there by the canal on a black cloudy night, Sally had an electrical impulse of the brain, but had she also had a brilliant idea?
She remembered seeing Luke recently in the Market Place, and she felt that she knew the right approach to him.
‘Hello, Luke,’ she said warmly, even enthusiastically.
Again, the surprise stopped him in his tracks.
‘You what?’ he said.
‘This is serendipity,’ she said.
‘You what?’ he said.
‘I wonder if you and your lads could do something for me?’
In the dimness on the edge of the pool of dirty yellow light from the street lamp she couldn’t see whether there was pride in his face at her assumption that he was the leader, but she suspected that there was.
‘Me?’ he said at last.
‘You. All of you.’
She told them of Ellie’s predicament.
‘I want you to help me,’ she said.
‘Us?’
‘You.’
‘Fu— Oh, sorry, Mrs Mottram. What do you want us to do?’
‘I wondered if you and your lads could go round to Ellie’s house when the storm arrives and stand by to move her upstairs if it looks as if it’ll be flooded.’
‘Fu— Oh, sorry, Mrs Mottram, but … you mean you trust us?’
‘Not altogether, Luke. If you came to do odd jobs for me I wouldn’t leave a hundred pounds on the kitchen table. I’d lock up my lawnmower too. But I trust you absolutely and totally to do your best for a fellow human being in an emergency.’
‘Fu— Oh, sorry, Mrs Mottram,’ said Luke Warburton.
FORTY
The deluge
The day of the predicted flood dawned dry. The wind howled. The people who remembered the last flood all remembered it suspiciously well. Some who had lived through the last two floods remembered them equally well, even though almost all of them had been children at the time of the one seventy years ago. Arnie Blenkinsop, safe in the Paradise Old People’s Home in Abattoir Rise, claimed to remember the last three floods, but if he had been five at the time of the third one back he would now be a hundred and ten, so his memories were not taken too seriously. But all these people were suddenly experts, and on the buses and in the cafés and the shops and the post office and the old people’s homes and the benefit office they reassured the younger people. There was too much wind. It hadn’t been windy in any of the great floods. Wind moved the clouds on, swept them to Holland. The weathermen were panicking as usual. The council had been recklessly prodigal with sandbags. ‘One of the councillors has a contract with a sandbag producer, you mark my words.’ And as for the Chronicle – sensationalists to a man. And woman.
The rain began just after a quarter past nine, and it was gentle, piddling little stuff. Old men went out in it without umbrellas, though that might have been at least in part because the wind would have turned their umbrellas inside out within seconds. But hadn’t they told everyone that the threat had been exaggerated? Rain had been rain in the old days.
Down on the Quays, the owners of the three narrowboats stood and waited, boathooks at the ready. All three boats had been tied with extra ropes, all three were riding the gale well. But you don’t take chances with boats. Terence and Felicity Porchester stood at the ready, Eric Sheepshank stood at the ready, Harry and Jill stood at the ready.
Harry and Jill? What were they doing there?
Harry’s idea, late in the long night after he had failed to make love to Jill, had been to buy the third of the narrowboats, the ruined one, the sunken one. Restoration had been a big job. The boat had been raised, lifted out of the water, taken to a boatyard more than fifty miles away; its bodywork had been repaired, and it had been brought back and lowered carefully into its place near the b
ridge. Work had begun on the interior. Before the great day of the canal’s reopening, Harry and Jill planned to be living in their new home, and there, freed from associations with Arnold and Olive, they would become lovers at last.
Very gradually, so gradually that nobody really noticed it, the rain grew heavier. Very gradually, so gradually that nobody really noticed it, the wind dropped lighter. The threat from the gale was so reduced that the five boat-owners, Harry and Jill, Terence and Felicity, and Eric, went for a lunchtime drink at the Potherthwaite Arms. They felt a bit special, drinking with the landlubbers. ‘Look at them,’ commented old Bomber Hartley, who really could remember in detail two of the great floods. ‘Look at them poncing in their waterproofs. You’d think they’d just crossed the Atlantic in a rowing boat, not walked from their narrowboats that never leave the Quays.’
After their quick lunch, the five mariners walked out of the pub into much heavier rain, but even then, the rain was so steady, so uniform, so uneventful that it was difficult to take it too seriously, although Conrad knew that eight hours of this would begin to cause major problems.
All afternoon it rained. The clouds thickened. An eerie premature mauve dusk bathed the town. Dusk comes early in winter, earlier in the north than in the south, and it comes even earlier on cloudy, wet days. By four o’clock it was as dark as sin, and with the darkness came yet heavier rain, as if the storm had been biding its time, hoping people wouldn’t notice, in the dark, that it had raised its game, hoping to catch them unawares, hoping to break through the river banks while they had their tea. But it overdid it. One sudden burst of rain was so strong people took up a last mouthful and rushed out while still chewing to see if the sandbags were holding. They were holding, but all was not well in Conrad’s mind. The river was rising more swiftly than he would have expected, more swiftly than it should be according to his calculations. That meant that the rain was heavier on the inhospitable tops, running off the drenched moors into the feeder streams, crashing from the feeder streams into the swelling, excited river. Thirty-five years of indolence, of waiting, of gathering strength. This was its moment.