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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

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.