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Back The Night of the Flood Save as PDF
Chapters (51)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. 1954
  7. PART 1
  8. 1.
  9. 2.
  10. 3.
  11. 4.
  12. 5.
  13. 6.
  14. 7.
  15. 8.
  16. 9.
  17. PART 2
  18. 1.
  19. 2.
  20. 3.
  21. 4.
  22. 5.
  23. 6.
  24. 7.
  25. 8.
  26. 9.
  27. 10.
  28. PART 3
  29. 1.
  30. 2.
  31. 3.
  32. 4.
  33. 5.
  34. 6.
  35. 7.
  36. PART 4
  37. 1.
  38. 2.
  39. 3.
  40. 4.
  41. 5.
  42. 6.
  43. 7.
  44. 8.
  45. 9.
  46. 10.
  47. 11.
  48. 1954
  49. Acknowledgements
  50. About the author
  51. An Invitation from the Publisher

Arthur woke in a sweat, trembling and cold, his sheets in a twisted pile on the floor. The room was dark; it felt like the middle of the night. He shivered. He clung to the side of his bed, as if it was the boat, afraid he would fall out. He closed his eyes. If he slept, he would wake up and it wouldn’t have happened. It can’t have happened. It did happen, a voice said. Shut up, he said to the voice and turned his head into his pillow, praying that he would sleep properly. The deep, dark sleep of the dead. Jack is dead, said the voice in his head and he knew he would not sleep.

4.

Verity sat at her dressing table. Her washed-out, pinched face glared back at her. It was intolerable. She let out a groan and swept her hand across the trinkets and fripperies on the table, flinging them onto the floor. For a while she sat and stared at her own destruction. A twisted tumble of necklaces and brooches were scattered across the floor. Her mother’s bottle of L’Air du Temps was on its side; the stopper rolled over by the bed and a dark wet patch of scent seeped into the rug. The room smelt violently of flowers. Jack’s Turner postcard was still upright against the looking-glass, impassively taunting her.

The telephone lines from the farm to the town remained down so every day she had tried to call the airbase for news, trudging into the town to use the public phone box but there was no news. A kind-sounding local woman answered the line on the exchange but wouldn’t put her through. She told her to go and ask at the village hall but there was never any news there either. Verity walked along the marshes, sloshing in her brother’s thigh-level waders. She was not searching for a body, she told herself, just clues. But there was nothing and everything. Hundreds, thousands of pieces of debris that came back and forth on the tide. She barely ate, everything turned her stomach, even cake. She drank endless cups of tea for warmth, but the cold of the flood had got into her bones and she couldn’t get rid of it. She smoked the Camel cigarettes Jack had brought her from the base, rationing them to eke them out, and kept the ruined Zippo in her pocket.