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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

He left the cows chewing on the grass and ran down to the gate that led to the beach. She was standing on the dune, in only a grey silvery-looking nightdress and wellingtons, her hair down and a blank look on her face.

‘Mother?’ he said. ‘What are you doing down here? You must be freezing.’

‘Peter,’ she said, and took his hand. ‘It’s so beautiful in the morning.’ She gestured to the sea – a dark line behind her – and the fields and pine trees wreathed in mist.

He put his jacket round her shoulders and they walked back to the house, hand in hand.

On the day she died, he’d been down the bottom field. It was the same time of day. He’d already done the feed and was about to go back in for breakfast but decided instead to inspect the fence that separated the end fields from the woodland. So he was there when it happened. He could have saved her. Just a gate and a few yards of dune and beach to the sea. Dawn breaking, lightening the sky and colouring the fields, and there had been a cold, cutting eastern wind. He remembered the cold for some reason but he couldn’t remember hearing anything out of the ordinary. Birds, wind, the sea. Nothing else. He’d fixed the hole in the fence and was returning to the house and Verity had come running at him in her dressing gown. His first thought was Father. He didn’t remember what she said but it was something about Mother and the sea. He thought she must have got something wrong. Mother didn’t have a habit of swimming in the sea. But his sister was insistent. He told her to go back to the house, that he would go to the beach.

Later, when he’d returned again to the house and called the police and the ambulance and they’d all arrived – Arthur on his bike as always, Mrs Timms, tear-streaked, his father, his face a block of stone and his hands shaking, and Ver completely white – only then, he had left them and gone to the pasture to feed the horses because he didn’t know what else to do. She had gone from him by then. It was only her body down there on the beach. She belonged to all of them now. But before that, it had been just him and her on the wet sand, her body impossibly still and him shaking and shaking her and trying to breathe air back into her lungs and holding her, limp, and thinking she would wake, she must. She had to. She had loved him, above all others. But her eyes were like those of a stillborn calf.

7.