by John Moore
But Lance never heard the rest of the sentence. It was literally and most appropriately blown away; for there came at that moment out of the ochreous-black sky a mighty rushing wind. Thus, surely, while Odysseus slept had the contents of Aeolus’ rifled sack leapt forth with a howl and a hurroosh. The first wild gust twanged as if it / were a violin-string the solitary telephone wire which ran from the street to the Vicarage, and at that signal the whole orchestra started. The trees screamed like fiddles played by maniacs, the thunder rolled, the rain beat a tattoo on the roof-tops. Lance and his father found themselves in the small open shed behind die dovecote; and neither of them was sure whether he had run there for shelter or been blown there by the wind. A lightning flash illuminated them and Lance saw the Vicar struggling with his cassock, which had wrapped itself round the upper part of him like an inside-out umbrella; he looked like a headless man. A second flash showed the big fir-tree on the lawn slowly toppling over, torn up by the roots; it uttered a mandrake’s shriek as it fell and for what seemed to be many minutes afterwards made a noise like a brushwood fire crackling as its branches broke up on the gravel drive. A third flash, which was followed immediately by a tremendous clap of thunder, revealed nothing but the rain, which looked to Lance like a vast army of spearmen advancing remorselessly with their spears at the slope.
The Vicar, free of his enveloping cassock at last, from time to time shouted “Stupendous! Wonderful! Incomparable !” in Lance’s ear.
Lance lit a cigarette and prepared for a long stay.
“I’m not sorry about that fir-tree,” yelled the Vicar. “I was always afraid that it might act as a wind-break so that I wouldn’t get a true reading on the anemometer.”
A number of tiles from the old roof now began to clatter down on the front porch.
“I hope Mother’s all right,” Lance said. “She doesn’t like thunder.”
“Yes. We’d better make a dash for it,” said the Vicar.
So they charged out among the silver spearmen, and the wind seemed to pluck them up like the blown leaves of autumn and deposit them outside the front door. Lance ran upstairs and found his mother on the landing playing what looked like a game of chess with six slop-pails and a chamber-pot; however skilfully she deployed these pieces there was always an eighth leak, worse than all the others, which demanded that the knights or the castles should be moved to intercept it. Lance went downstairs and found three buckets; and with these reinforcements the status quo was restored.
“It’s your father’s fault,” said his mother unreasonably. “That wind-thing! One can’t help feeling he’s brought this upon us. I told him he shouldn’t do it on Sunday. Where is he, anyhow, and why doesn’t he come and help us? For all he cares I might have been drowned in my bed.”
“He came in with me,” said Lance; “but I rather suspect he’s gone out again.”
“In this? He’ll catch his death.”
Just then they heard the Vicar’s heavy tread upon the stairs.
“Lance! Emily!” he called. “I’ve been out to make sure the anemometer hadn’t been blown down. It’s still working. Guess what the recording is for the strongest gust so far.”
He arrived, dripping and breathless, upon the landing.
“You’ll never guess. Eighty-one miles per hour—Force Twelve on the Beaufort Scale. In fact a hurricane!”
Beaming with joy, he stood and watched the dribbles of water falling plop-plop into the assorted receptacles. A new leak had started and his wife moved her Queen, which was the biggest bucket, into position close to the window. The big drops seeping through the ceiling rattled it like a kettledrum.
“And it’s still pouring,” said the Vicar with satisfaction. “I shan’t be at all surprised if I measure an inch of rain in my gauge to-morrow. An inch, Emily! Think of that. A whole inch! One hundred tons to the acre! One hundred and one point three eight to be precise!” Suddenly his face fell.
“Upon my soul, what a selfish old fool I am! I’d forgotten about the Festival.” He shook his head gravely. “I hope very much that we aren’t going to get a flood.”
Part Three
I
Slopping About in his sea-boots and croaking from time to time in protest or complaint, Jim was more than ever reminiscent of a frog. Thus, grumbling and muttering oaths, he had waded out to the little motor-boat beneath the smoky skies at Dunkirk; thus, still grumbling, he had splashed ashore under a spatter of bullets through the cold grey sea at Walcheren. He was therefore truly in his element.
The water had been into the factory before—in March, 1947, when the big snows melted on the hills—and Jim had spent half an hour of his working time marking the highest level on the wall with his carved initials and the date. But some anonymous tanner in 1875 had recorded a still greater flood; and the water now stood exactly halfway between the two marks. Jim, who had a passion for records and could have told you offhand the fastest time for the Derby, the heaviest pike ever caught, and the greatest number of goals ever scored in a soccer match, was naturally ambitious to inscribe a new set of initials above those of his unknown predecessor.
“Four inches to go,” he croaked. “Still rising.”
“So what?” said Mrs. Greening.
“If it comes up another four inches it’s an all-time high”
“If it comes up another four inches,” said Mrs. Greening, “it’ll be over the top of my gumboots and I’m off home.” Edna giggled.
“Isn’t it a lark?”
But Joe, who was temporarily in charge of the oven since the present batch of self-coloured balloons needed no dipping into the paint, said gloomily:
“It only wants about two inches to get into the gas-mains; and then we’re done.”
“Kaput,” said Jim. “And no balloons for the B. Festival; though unless they’re going to turn it into a B. Regatta I can’t see as they’ll want ’em.”
Although the gas continued to function, the electric light had failed, so they had opened wide the double-doors on to the yard. This gave a view across the turbulent brown river to the Bloody Meadow, now a lake dimpled all over with raindrops, in which the grandstand rose gauntly, stripped of most of its wooden seats. Some men in punts were paddling round retrieving these planks, which they secured with ropes and tethered to the main structure. It certainly didn’t look as if a Pageant could be held there in less than a fortnight’s time.
“It makes you almost cry to see it,” said Mrs. Greening, unexpectedly. The catastrophe had brought about a curious change in everybody’s attitude to the Festival. Now that the whole project lay in ruins, many of those who had opposed it decided perversely that it had been their project after all, and became its enthusiastic supporters. When the Mayor put up a notice outside the Town Hall: “Whatever happens we’re going to CARRY ON,” the gesture pleased the townspeople, who went about talking of the Dunkirk spirit and felt themselves for the first time to be participants in a great venture. Only Miss Foulkes remained implacable, because she was a believer in Logic and realised therefore that the trifling accident of a flood couldn’t make any difference to the Party Line.
There was something rather Russian, John Handiman was thinking, even about her get-up to-day. She was wearing a pair of very shiny black gumboots with pointed toes and they fitted, like jackboots, tight round the calf. Her red hair was tucked up under a coloured handkerchief knotted at the nape of her neck. She had the air of one who goes sternly forward to meet a crisis, and under her arm she carried a broom.
John seemed to remember photographs of women snipers in 1942 who wore the same cossack boots and had the same aspect of bleak determination. They kept the tally of their victims nicked upon their rifle-butts, and with faces devoid alike of triumph and humour posed for their pictures as they added the fiftieth notch to their score. In similar circumstances, he thought, Miss Foulkes would have done the same. She now took the broom purposefully in both hands, opened the office door, and began vigorously to sweep out the water
which was just beginning to trickle in over the doorstep and threatened to leave a muddy stain on the carpet.
Regarding her narrow and angular back as she did so, John had a sense of profound and hopeless pity. For this morning he saw her with new eyes and for the first time he realised her complete defencelessness. It so happened that he had got up at six to help Jim and Joe shift the heavy barrels of latex out of flood’s way; and when the job was finished he had decided that it wasn’t worth while going home to breakfast and had gone straight into the office instead. The morning’s letters, which Miss Foulkes generally sorted, were still in the letter-box, and having nothing else to do he opened them himself. He half hoped to find his Agent’s cheque among them; but there was nothing but circulars and bills. He stared at one of these bills for a long time before he understood it.
In account with Noakes and Sons, Florists
At last he looked on the outside of the envelope and saw that it was addressed to “Miss E. Foulkes.”
So there wasn’t a young man after all. There never had been a young man. She had sent herself the flowers.
John was not a very imaginative person, but as he crumpled the bill and put a match to it—for the torn envelope was past repair and she must never suspect that he had seen it—he caught a brief glimpse of the tragedy of the unloved. He had no clear understanding of Miss Foulkes’ motive: was it himself or the girls in the factory whom she wished to impress with this fiction of an attentive lover, or did she, in some vague incomprehensible way, even seek to deceive herself? In any case it seemed to John to be rather silly, and a great waste of money into the bargain. He was contentedly and unadventurously married, to a girl to whom Miss Foulkes’ behaviour would have seemed even sillier than it did to him; two boisterous children fulfilled their marriage. But what do we know, he asked himself, about the unfulfilled, and by what standard can we judge them? He brushed the white ash off his desk—old Noakes would have to send her an Account Rendered—and put the disquieting puzzle out of his mind. But now at the sight of her defiant back as she brushed out the water it came back to trouble him, and it occurred to him that the soul or spirit of Miss Foulkes, wherever that might reside, must be as tender and red and raw as her pale skin became on those first week-ends of summer when she unwisely indulged in sun-bathing because she thought it was healthy.
“Well tried, Canute,” he said.
Still sweeping, she glanced over her shoulder.
“It’ll ruin the carpet and the furniture.”
“So much the worse for the bum-baillie,” he laughed.
“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that. We’re going to pull through.”
He stepped past her, into the flooded factory, and she went on sweeping—sweeping with the inadequate little broom which was more fitted for the destruction of cobwebs than the stemming of a flood. Thus, when facts rose up and challenged her orthodoxy, she would strive gallantly to brush them away. Did the papers say that the Soviet was a police state? That there were concentration camps in Siberia? That North Korea had been the aggressor? And what about those Russian wives?
Lies, lies, lies, because Pravda said so. Brush them away!
But such a cobweb-brush was a frail armament against the world; and to John Handiman this morning she seemed infinitely pitiable and forlorn.
Splashing through eight inches of water, he made his way into the busy shop with its queer mixed smell of ammonia and hot methylated spirits which had formed for the last five years a background to his life. He would miss that sharp tang if, next week or the week after, he sniffed it for the last time; and he would never forget it, he thought, for as long as he lived.
Jim squelched towards him, hunch-shouldered, wide-mouthed, Batrachian, grumbling as he came.
“Busting up the B. floor again,” he said. The flood had done the same thing last time, and it had cost twenty pounds to fill in the holes with concrete. But perhaps that would be somebody else’s headache now.
“And if it gets into the gas we’re finished, and if it gets into the dynamo we’re finished likewise, ’cause there won’t be no B. air for testing.”
“Is it still rising?” John asked.
“I wouldn’t say it was rising and I wouldn’t say it was falling.” Jim was still hankering after his all-time high, because records gave him some obscure spiritual satisfaction. “I’d say it was just B. well hanging fire.” Muttering to himself that there had been more water at Walcheren, he went back to his job.
The factory certainly was a bit of a shambles. The surface of the flood-water was covered with a mixture of oil and rubber paint, an iridescent film, so that it resembled that of some filthy pond. Cardboard boxes, tin canisters, and innumerable cigarette-ends floated about in it, and John noticed that the big latex barrels beside the long bench, into which the girls were supposed to throw the faulty balloons for salvage, had been carried away out of their reach. Consequently the girls were dropping the rejects into the water at their feet, and two or three score of these objects, borne along by a sluggish current, now processed round the shop, looking like the spat-out skins of white grapes.
The row of girls at the bench had their backs to John and their silhouettes made a curious frieze against the open door; and because of the certainty in his mind that the factory couldn’t carry on much longer he stood and stared at this familiar sight, thinking that he would remember it with absurd affection in the years to come: a score or so of backs, some shapeless, some shapely, bent over the long bench like housewives over the wash-tub; handkerchiefs tied round their bobbing heads; sleeves rolled up, french chalk powdering the bare arms; the balloons swelling and collapsing; the hiss of the air going into them, the faint sigh as it went out. How often, on his way through the shop, had he paused at the bottom of the shaky stairs and listened to these women chattering like a flock of starlings! For their perpetual gossip was indeed a sort of murmuration, which from time to time broke out into shrill squeaks and cries when the flock was startled (or pretended to be) by one of Mrs. Greening’s outrageous tales. They were a pretty mixed lot— “his sluts,” as his wife called them. Ruth, at the end of the row, had had two illegitimates and looked as if she were going to have another; Mrs. Hawkes had been bound over to keep the peace with her next-door neighbour; Mrs. Townshend was regularly drunk on Saturday nights; the lame girl, Doris, had been convicted of shop-lifting; the two seventeen-year-olds next to Edna daubed their faces with rouge and their eyes with mascara so that they looked like tarts and set out down the main road each night in search of lorry-drivers.
But these also, like the ammonia smell and the fog of french chalk, had become part of John’s background. They were his people, and he would miss them too when the final bust-up came.
He went up the stairs to the packing-room and at the top he paused again. For the sound which came from the bench now was more rhythmical than the usual bandying of gossip and dirty stories. Raggedly and untunefully the women were singing. Their feet were cold in the leaky cheap gumboots, they were on half-pay, next week they might be out of a job; so they sang. It was the latest silly catch from America, with a trivial tune and moronic words:
I’ll do anything for you,
Anything you ask me to …
but somehow it moved him that they should sing at all in such circumstances and he was reminded of his soldiers singing, in all the wettest, dreariest, darkest moments of the war.
II
On The morning of what Faith called Balloon Monday she saw the mare’s-tails in the sky and, being more weather-wise than the Vicar, knew that her hoped-for blow was on the way. And sure enough in the late afternoon a dry north-easter came tearing out of the streaky blue, giving long manes to the little white horses which pranced over the flooded fields and kicking the spray high over the main road; so that the crowds who were walking out from the town along that narrow causeway said it was “just like the seaside” and felt exhilarated by the sprinkling of spume.
By six o’clock t
here must have been more than two hundred people on the haycock-shaped hill overlooking the town; and at least another hundred were making their way there. “Sound the trumpet, Runcorn, sound the trumpet!” the Mayor had said; and so the Intelligencer on Saturday had carried a leading article in Mr. Runcorn’s most extravagant style calling for volunteers to let off twenty thousand balloons. The composition had presented no difficulty to him, for he had simply looked up “Mont-golfier” in the Encyclopaedia and then referred to the old files of his paper to see if its founder and first editor had had anything to say about the ascent of the first balloon in 1783. It was unthinkable that so significant an event should have escaped the notice of the argus-eyed Intelligencer; nor, indeed, had it done so. “We are told,” wrote Mr. Runcorn, “that a sheep, a cock and a duck were the unwilling and far from intrepid aeronauts, launched into the empyrean in the nacelle of the Messieurs Montgolfier’s revolutionary contraption. But the balloons which our townspeople will cast to the winds from the birch-clad eminence on Monday evening will bear a less ponderable cargo—nothing but our eager hopes for the success of the venture upon which we have set our hearts …” and so on to the tune of nearly two columns.
But perhaps such a highfalutin encouragement had been hardly necessary after all; for as Faith had said, “people love letting off balloons,” and to take part in the release of twenty thousand of them was an experience which was unlikely to befall anybody more than once in a lifetime. Besides, ever since what Mr. Runcorn called the Inundation, popular enthusiasm for the Festival had been gathering momentum; for the difference of opinion between the pros and the antis had been like a neighbours’ quarrel, which brooks no interference from outsiders, and the sudden intervention of the elements had had exactly the same effect as the arrival of the policeman. Both parties had united to meet the new challenge. Mr. Runcorn, coming from church on Sunday morning, had made the unusual gesture of shaking Stephen by the hand. “I have my finger on the pulse of the town. I am gratified to tell you that it is quickening, Mr. Tasker, it is quickening surprisillgly.”