The Flood (11 page)

And she was worried that Elroy was having an affair. What did he do when he was out so late?

And her little garden, which she loved and cared for, had been impossible to walk in for weeks.

She lay in bed, thinking about her snowdrops. They must have rotted. She would have to start again. All through February, she had kept hoping. She saw them vanishing, her hopes for this year, the small bells of white, so exquisite in close-up with their little clapper and frill of pale green and tiny gold stamens like matches burning, drowned stars now in the sludge of darkness.

The year rolled onwards, bringing only chaos. Dirty bombs might be dropped on the city. Elroy would leave her; he would take the boys. She would fail her studies and never become a teacher.

She lay there listening for the sound of the rain, only slowly registering that she heard nothing. (Yet part of her that was deeply tired longed for the kindness of a black wall of water, so she could go under and sleep for ever.)

Just at that moment, Elroy came in. ‘Brought you a cup of tea,’ he said, sitting on the bed, rubbing her shoulder. ‘Guess what, it’s a beautiful morning.’

The morning stopped, and became beautiful.

He opened the curtains, and let the light in, and they lay there together on the big new bed which had long ago replaced the one from her first marriage, looking out at the sun on the cherry trees. Pink petals broke from the black elbows of the branches. Her cherries, up to their knees in water, were still exhaling great clouds of pale blossom.

‘You’d think their roots would have rotted,’ Shirley said to him, laying her head against his shoulder. She suddenly thought about her dead father; he was a park keeper; how he loved spring. She wished he could somehow see her blossom. Perhaps he could, perhaps he was there.

‘It’s all right, Shirley. Everything’s all right,’ Elroy kept repeating, and kissing her hands, pressing her warm palm against his full lips.

The boys were in the sitting-room, watching television. Cautiously, tenderly, with infinite excitement, looking deep into each other’s eyes, Elroy and Shirley made love.

Harold and Lottie walked to the subway station hand in hand, chattering like birds. At first Harold tried to talk about his book, but Lottie said, ‘It’s a beautiful day, don’t feel you
have
to talk about it darling. I absolutely know your book’s wonderful. You don’t have to prove a thing to me … And if not, your next one certainly will be.’

After that, Harold shut up about the book. He was used to Lottie. He didn’t much mind. He had put six copies of the finished book into the post to publishers yesterday: he’d wanted to impress her with his drive and ambition, but after twenty years, it was too much to hope for. Instead, as so often, they talked about Lola. The Giant Baby, as they called her.

‘I try to remember if Davey was like that,’ Lottie said. ‘It was years ago, of course. But I think he wasn’t. He always seemed quite grown up. I think he used to tell me off about things.’

‘Boys are different,’ said Harold, absently. ‘I don’t really know any, but I was one once. There weren’t any teenagers then, of course. Now they’re a tribe, especially the girls.’

‘Oh God,’ said Lottie, ‘there aren’t any trains.’

The track was flooded between Central and Gardens.

They decided to drive. The route was circuitous, bringing them round to the Bridge of Flowers through parts of the city they didn’t know. The water did not come above their axles, and Lottie drove as fast as she could; there wasn’t much traffic, considering. She had never been a patient driver, and she wanted to get there while the sun lasted. More rain was forecast for later that day.

The diversion led through a council estate. In the distance, though, they caught a glimpse of the river; it was one of the parts of the city where rich and poor lived packed together. Lottie came slightly too fast round a corner and found herself braking furiously, surrounded by a mob of yelling people, frightened faces, placards, banners, waving hands, black open mouths, all of them spattered with the spray of muddy water that Lottie’s speeding tyres had thrown up. Their shouts were loud enough to pierce the car windows.

‘Stop,’ said Harold.

‘Are you kidding?’ asked Lottie, thrusting the bonnet of the car forwards in a series of furious, powerful jerks. Now there was someone on the bonnet. A large pale face briefly stared through the window, tipped sideways, clutching at the glass with big hands, but Lottie, dauntless, accelerated. The figure clung on briefly, then slid to the ground; the voices grew louder and then died away as Lottie roared, aqua-planing, down to the bridge.

‘For God’s sake, Lottie, you can’t do that.’

‘Shut up, Harold. If I’d stopped, they’d have killed me. They were just a rabble. A mob of thieves.’ Lottie was still driving much too fast, but a glance at her white face told him she’d been frightened.

‘But it was a girl. Maybe younger than Lola.’

‘Fuck off, Harold, or I’ll drive into the river.’

Outside the window, the water extended, gleaming metal, over half the landscape. The bridge just skimmed the top of the flood. Near the edges of the new, powerful river were shallow-looking houses, a row of roofs, only their top storeys clearing the water, the windows like eyes above a shining scarf that had suddenly engulfed their past. Most of them must have been abandoned, Harold thought. And this wasn’t the Towers, where things always went wrong, where people expected things to break down. The Bridge of Flowers was a showpiece area. Rich people lived here, especially politicians, because fast river launches could whip them down to Government Palace, bypassing the subway and the morning traffic.

So now even politicians couldn’t protect themselves.

‘It was some kind of religious group, in point of fact,’ Harold resumed, still disapproving. Lottie was a force of nature, but sometimes you had to stand up to nature. ‘What if you’ve hurt her, Lottie, honestly?’

‘Why aren’t you on my side, Harold? It wasn’t my fault. They were all over the road. I wasn’t to know they were religious. I don’t expect they were. I expect they were rioters. They would have taken everything we had.’

‘You splashed them,’ he said. ‘They got angry. They were carrying placards about the Last Days. I think they must have been that One Way lot who have been all over the papers recently. All over the walls as well. Copies of their posters seem to be everywhere.’

Lottie saw a parking space on slightly higher ground. She screeched to a halt and sat there for a moment clutching the wheel before she relaxed. There was a film of sweat on her small, neat features. That girl on the bonnet had reminded her of someone.

‘Harold. Cuddle me. I’m upset. I should have gone to college. This is meant to be fun. It was you who suggested we came here in the first place.’

Harold had a choice; yield, or suffer. Were there any choices, really, in life? He put his arm around her. After all, he loved her. There was only one Lottie. Yielding, he suffered.

The Gardens, thought Harold, would cheer them up. They had hills, and temples, and landscaped walks which at this time of year should be lighting up with colour. But at the gates, where they showed their card, the uniformed man said, ‘You’ll be needing a boat.’ Both of them laughed, automatically. For months all the jokes had been about flooding.

‘We do have boats,’ the man repeated, unsmiling. ‘Just wait where it’s dry. They’ll be along in a minute. Here are some headphones. We’re asking our visitors to listen to the commentary.’

He gave them leaflets headed ‘PLEASE GIVE GENEROUSLY’. Harold read it; Lottie ignored it (it was dreadful the way people picked on the rich, always expecting her to give money, even if she’d been burgled, or had a bad day. They couldn’t have a clue what Lola cost her. Or Harold. He was the costliest of all, if you added on what he wasn’t earning, what she might once have reasonably expected him to earn. Or Faith, who cost thousands of dollars per year).

Lottie suddenly remembered the big white face of the girl who had fallen off the bonnet of her car. Kilda, Faith’s daughter. That was who she looked like. But of course it couldn’t possibly be her.

A group of people were waiting for the boat, standing in a row whose straightness was explained when Harold and Lottie waded across and found they were all standing on a low brick wall. The two newcomers inspected them, subdued and nervous. Things seemed to have gone further than they’d realized.

Later, as they were rowed through the drowned kingdom, they saw the beauty and the havoc. The river stretched out like a golden flood-plain. Only a scattering of birds traced lines on its surface. Where a great throng of specimen oaks once stood, every one of them different, from all over the world – Turko, Malai, Anaturia – the water now shone, inscrutable. Not a twig, not an acorn, waved above. A magpie flared across the bronze. ‘One for sorrow,’ said a small man with glasses, winking at Lottie in a way she disliked. The water was dazzling, but desolate.

While they stared at nothingness, two magnificent swans came powering across and led them on. It was like following a cloud, Lottie thought; a full-blown, snow-white, cumulus of feathers. Above the water, above the boat, some wisps of real cloud were thickening, greying, but rain shouldn’t come till the afternoon.

She looked to her left, and life came back. A hill of daffodils rose out of the dark waters, brilliant, saturated with sun, joyfully yellow, glorious. On top was the white shape of the small temple of remembrance where Lottie and Harold once had lunch, over a year ago when the Gardens were green. Names of the gardeners who had died in the wars were engraved in gilt inside the portico; she remembered Harold reading some aloud.

‘Timeless, isn’t it?’ asked the man with glasses who, like Lottie, wasn’t listening to the audio commentary. Lottie didn’t want to study on her day out, and in any case, she would look awful in earphones. The little man kept staring at her. He was thin, quite old, not a suitable admirer, and didn’t seem to realize that she was with Harold. ‘Sort of keeping all the memories safe,’ he continued. ‘My son’s name’s written there, you know. He died in Germania. My son George. Did a year here as a trainee gardener, and I’m happy to say they honoured his memory. If only he’d stayed, but he had to join the army … My name’s Henry. How do you do?’

He’s trying to make me unhappy, thought Lottie, nodding repressively, and pointedly not extending her hand to shake his thin veined one. As if I hadn’t got enough on my plate. (She couldn’t bear to think of Davey dying in a war, but the government were talking about conscription. Just after he had met this nice girl, when she’d started to think about grandchildren …) Besides, the old creep was being smug about the temple. ‘I’m afraid it was full of graffiti last year,’ she said, rudely, turning up her coat collar. ‘And if the floods get worse, it could be swept away. Nothing’s safe. Not me,
not you
.’

That ‘you’ sounded distinctly personal. Henry looked down at his boots, offended.

For some reason, Lottie’s thoughts turned to college and her essay on conservation. The Institute was on high ground, like the zoo. But what if the waters kept coming? What if they overwhelmed the flood defences, so that instead of being diverted to outlying regions, as at present, the waters swept into the centre? What if the flood breached the library?

Lottie had the neophyte’s reverence for books (it didn’t extend to her husband’s, of course, because it wasn’t an object with a jacket, just a sprouting, burgeoning forest of paper). She had actually taken some home, and read them. She was careful not to spill her wine on the pages, or else wiped it off almost straightaway. Harold teased her, of course, because he’d always been a reader. She looked at his face now, grave and absorbed, listening to his headphones as they swept along, with some black and white coots bobbing beside them, their feet a frantic blur of orange on the dark as they tried to keep up with the big wooden boat.

The bespectacled man chucked a white bread sandwich. ‘No feeding, sir,’ said the oarsman sharply. ‘Your commentary will help you with the regulations.’

But what if the whole Institute were flooded? There would surely have to be a plan to save things. Rare things, precious things, her tutor would know. Paul had once been a head teacher, so he must be practical. If he could deal with kids like Lola, he’d certainly know about disaster management. Lottie had just handed in her first two assignments. It would be a real tragedy if those got wet.

Harold had taken off his headphones. ‘Look,’ he said, smiling, touching her knee. ‘Look over there. Isn’t that fantastic?’

Though clouds had covered half of the sky already, creeping back, thickening, towards the sun, it still blazed down on a stand of black monkey-puzzle trees which stuck up proudly, cartoon-like, surreal, their broad up-curved fingers as simplified as cactus, and then she saw what Harold was pointing at, for the half-drowned trees seemed to bend and shift, every sturdy black branch was swelling and shrinking, and then she realized they were covered with crows, a crawling black congregation of crows, hopping over each other, jostling, cawing, a deafening chorus of harsh raw sound. Some of them flew up like a storm of black ash and hovered, squawking, above the boat. They looked large, and old. They had heads like hammers.

‘Scary,’ she said, shivering. ‘I think I need a coffee, Harold.’

But the cafés were closed, submerged, gone. A white painted sign was afloat on its back; ‘Open For Lunch’, it told the sky. ‘Lunch’ had been crossed out and replaced by ‘Tea’. As Lottie read it out, and the passengers laughed, a gun-shot sounded, and the sun went in.

‘Er, was that a shot?’ Harold asked their oarsman.

‘Sounded like it.’ His face was expressionless.

‘Are they shooting at us?’ A big red-faced woman panicked. ‘Is it rioters?’

‘I doubt it, madam.’ He decided to explain, as the muttering spread the length of the boat. ‘It’s the birds, you see. Sitting ducks, so to speak. There are more of them than usual because of all the water. So a small minority of troublemakers come and shoot stuff for their dinners. We simply haven’t got the manpower to catch them.’