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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

At the partridge shoot lunch the other week, Jack had sat next to her telling stories of hunting jackals in the desert. They sounded outlandish, unreal. But she liked listening to his stories anyway. Arthur had been sulky and she found herself wanting to punish him for his downturned mouth and the deep, ingrained ridge between his thick eyebrows. She wanted to make Arthur jealous, to say: I’m not yours. I can do anything.

She decided that she would tell Jack, the next time he asked if she’d meet him, that she’d go on the bike again.

3.

November

Verity sat at her mother’s dressing table and played with the glittering treasures inside her mother’s make-up box. She tried on a Chanel lipstick, a slick of deep red, the colour of glamour. Her lips startled her. Pouting in the glass, she marvelled at how much thicker they appeared, how very bright in her pale face. Joan Crawford in Sudden Fear. She didn’t look like herself. In the mirror, as she tilted her head slightly to the side, there was a glimmer of her mother. She had grown up thinking they were nothing alike and she could never live up to her mother’s delicate beauty. She smiled and it was gone, but it was still not her old self looking back in the glass. What exactly had changed? Perhaps it was failure. Hidden beneath her underwear was the letter from the college. At some point she would have to tell everyone but her shame wouldn’t allow it, not yet. Her reflection scowled back. I shall just have to be beautiful, she thought, and that at least made her laugh. But the laugh turned to a sob and she had to gulp back tears. She had put everything into being clever and now she had nothing – no friends, no mother, no one to talk to. Grief came on her quickly. It would hit her on the back of the head and she was powerless to stop it gutting her from the inside out. But she was practised at fighting it back. There was nowhere for the grief to go – she might as well push it down. She soaked the tears up with her handkerchief, wiped her face and reapplied a dab of rouge to hide the blotchy pink patches on her cheeks. She had to get out.