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Back The Night of the Flood
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 buzzing in his ears. Then hands around him and pure air, beautiful air, in his lungs. The cold night embraced him. Snow on his tongue. He inhaled the air in gulps, coughing, choking and spluttering. Someone heaved him into a boat. Mud-blind. A light shone in his eyes and a woman was saying, ‘It’s all right, Arthur, it’s all right.’

‘Ver?’

But the effort of speaking made him gag and he doubled over, disgorging the dirty seawater onto the bottom of the boat.

10.

In the shack on the edge of the marsh, Verity sat on a wooden chair with a blanket round her shoulders that had once lain on the bed she had shared with Jack. It smelled of dust and age and salt but nothing more and she thought how quickly a person fades. The sharp light from the bare bulb in the kitchen made her head ache and her red, watery eyes sting. A young constable had taken her back here after they’d found Arthur – for warmth, he said – but she’d only wanted to bury her face into Gypsy’s pulsing flank. Peter was standing in the doorway, with another policeman she didn’t know and someone tall and severe in the navy-blue uniform of the US Air Force and another man in the brown uniform of the RAF. They were talking in hushed voices. Blowers, the constable, had already taken Arthur, and Muriel had gone with them. Muriel’s arm was around Arthur’s shoulders and Verity remembered how she’d tended to Jack when he had crashed the motorbike back in the summer, a different world.

It was Muriel who had found Arthur, her brother said. Muriel had used an old crabbing boat of her father’s, hauling it out here in a police truck, although how she knew to do this, and where Arthur would be, Verity had no idea. Peter himself had driven in the old Jag. He’d called the police station and taken the car to look for her. When he arrived at the point in the road where the path led down to the marsh shack, the US Air Force were already parked there in one of their jeeps.

Out on the Holkham Road, Arthur had turned to look at Verity in the headlights of the police car. Someone had put a green coat on his shoulders but he was shaking, soaked in mud and seawater, and his dark hair was gleaming wet, so he resembled one of the marsh creatures in stories she’d read as a child. He looked at her with such despair that she had felt impaled by it. He had killed Jack, but she could summon no anger towards him. She was so tired. Her body was aching and she couldn’t get her fingers and teeth to stop their incessant quivering, as if they were palpitating in guilt.