The Silent Tide
Authors: Rachel Hore
The Silent Tide
Also by Rachel Hore
The Dream House
The Memory Garden
The Glass Painter’s Daughter
A Place of Secrets
A Gathering Storm
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2013
A CBS Company.
Copyright © Rachel Hore 2013
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
The right of Rachel Hore to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
HB ISBN 978-0-85720-974-0
Ebook ISBN 978-1-84983-291-5
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI (UK) Ltd, Cr
‘‘Women were wanting to escape the net just as men were climbing back into it.’ Only Halfway to Paradise: Women in Postwar Britain, Elizabeth Wilson
‘Oh, I am nothing without you,’ she said. ‘I should not know what to be. I feel as if you had invented me. I watch you inventing me week after week.’ Elizabeth Taylor, The Sleeping Beauty
Contents
PART I
Part II
Isabel
East Suffolk Coast, 31 January 1953
She couldn’t say at first what woke her.
It was dark, very dark – and cold, a penetrating icy cold. Even under the bedclothes she shivered. Something was different; all her senses told her this. Outside, the wind was up, scuffling about under the eaves of her wooden beach house, shaking the glass in the windows, setting off strange creaks and sighs around her, as though the house was shifting and muttering in its sleep. There was an odd smell, too, of something dank and salty, and a trickling sound like rain in the gutters. She threw back the blankets and swung her feet to the floor – only to snatch them back as they met several inches of water.
She reached for the switch of the bedside lamp and at once lit up a scene of devastation. The whole room was flooded. Water had risen above the level of the skirting boards, opaque, swirling. It seeped in through the windows, dripped down the walls, flowed in under the door.
The lamp flickered urgently, compelling action. She hitched her nightdress up over her knees, drew breath and stepped down into an icy sea. Wading to the door, she turned the handle and had to hang on, gasping, as the door burst inward and a surge of water almost knocked her off her feet. Under her hands, she felt the house give a shudder of complaint. At the same moment, the light gave a final flash and went out.
Alone in the dark, knee-deep in seawater and numb with cold, she cried out in terror. For a moment she couldn’t think what to do. She daren’t try the front door, fearing the full strength of the incoming tide. The back perhaps. She felt her way round the corner into the hall and cloth brushed against her cheek. Her coat was hanging on the hooks there. Quickly she took it down and pushed her arms into the sleeves, wrapped it around her. The act gave her courage.
Now she was used to the darkness she saw that the door to the kitchen stood open. A faint trail of moonlight from the window shimmered on the water. She struck out, her progress assisted by the force of the tide.
She spotted her handbag, standing primly upon the kitchen table where she’d left it when she went to bed, snatched it up, then looked for Penelope’s letter. There, propped on the dresser. She slipped it into the bag.
There was no time to think what else to rescue. She had to get out. But when she unbolted the back door and shoved, it would not move against the weight of the water. The window then. She’d have to climb on the roof.
She seized a floating chair, set it by the sink, stood on it, and after testing her weight, hoisted her bag onto her shoulder and stepped onto the draining board. The window opened with a squeak and she eased herself out onto the sill. There she crouched, looking out in amazement.
A huge moon, veiled in storm cloud, presided over an alien landscape. What yesterday had been a peaceful scene – bleak marshland stretching into the distance, cows grazing, the sail of a distant windmill moving against the sky – was now a rolling sea, the waves crested with foam. Some way to the right, mercifully above the level of the water, lay the silhouette of the town, church towers, a lighthouse, which from time to time bathed the watery scene in a patient yellow beam. Suddenly, the house gave another lurch, like a tooth loosening in its socket, as a great wave swept round it. Water surged up to the edge of the sill.
She straightened, twisting awkwardly, straining to see where she could go next. There was a flat roof over the kitchen. Terror helped her scramble up on to it. There she perched for a moment, feeling with alarm the house rock under her. Gradually, it was being eased from its foundations. The land was becoming the sea and the little wooden house a boat.
She was shivering now, as much from fear as cold. Rain was beginning to fall, huge, heavy drops slapping down on the roof. Another wave smashed against the house, which shrieked at the onslaught. Suddenly she felt it lurch free altogether, and as it bumped along the ground she had to scrabble for handholds. The thing to do, she saw, was to mount the sloping roof and sit astride it. There she’d be further above the rising water. She tried, but the surface was too slippery and she kept falling back. The house bumped along some more, then caught on something and began slowly to revolve. With the roof at a gentler angle she took her chance and crawled up. Just in time, for the house then righted itself. The best thing, she found, was to lie flat with her legs on either side of the ridge and clutch the top of a gable.
The view was better up here, too, but as she looked towards the sea, her courage almost failed. The sand-dunes that once sheltered the house had been wiped out so the full force of the North Sea poured down on the marsh. There was sea where the river used to be, and the boat sheds and fishermen’s huts that lined the bank had been submerged or swept away. There was no sign of life anywhere. She was completely alone.
She tried shouting anyway, but her voice was blown away by the wind. The house bumped a final sickening time and tipped, and now it was afloat, listing as it turned at the mercy of the waves, the nails in the framework screeching as they were torn from their beds. Slowly but surely it was breaking apart. Still she clung to her perch. There was nothing else to be done. She was soaked through now and frozen almost beyond endurance. Shivers rattled her bones, but still she clung.
She was clutching the edge of the roof when first one wooden elevation, then another, parted company from the roof, hanging wide, to catch like sails in the wind. It was odd how warm she was feeling now, warm and drowsy, so drowsy. It would be lovely to let go and sleep, but she told herself to cling on. The rain was slackening, and as she watched the moon began to shine again, making a shimmering pattern across the water. How beautiful it was, that silvery light, how comforting. She must be the only person left in this dark, chaotic world, but she didn’t mind any more. She was thinking of a picture she used to study in a children’s Bible, of a mystical light brooding over the surface of the waters at the Earth’s beginning. She’d always liked that picture. It made her feel safe, knowing the light would overcome the darkness.
This was her last thought as her fingers opened and she slid down into the water.
Emily
London, the present
Berkeley Square, Mayfair. A November evening, twilight fading into darkness. Street lights glowing in the misty air. In the garden at the centre, the branches of great trees formed filigreed shapes of black and silver, from which cries of roosting birds contended with the grind and roar of traffic. At this hour people passed through the square on their way somewhere else, huddled warm in coats and scarves, or shivering in short skirts and too-thin jackets. Those heading for Tube station or bus stop walked purposefully, eyes down, dodging the laughing groups that drifted towards wine bar or pub. It was a Friday night and London’s offices were emptying fast.
On the east side of the square, next door to an art gallery, stood a Georgian building, five or six storeys of dark red brick. If any of the people passing had glanced up they’d have seen the slender figure of a young woman sitting at a second-floor window. The light from her desk lamp picked up fiery glints in her feathery brown hair. She was reading a manuscript and eating an apple. From time to time she glanced out across the square. But she did not see the slumbering garden or the lambent lights or the delicate rain beginning to streak the window. Her thoughts lay in a far country of the imagination.
There was something timeless about this girl, this scene. It might have been the present, or it might have been many years ago, sixty or seventy perhaps, for there was a 1950s feel to the round collar of her ivory blouse, the pretty cardigan and the stylish cut of her high fringe. She finished the apple and turned from the window, and for a moment it was impossible to tell whether she was typing on a computer keyboard or an old manual typewriter. Her small pointed face was grave, full lips parted, kohl-lined blue eyes dreamy, her gaze intent as she concentrated on her work. It was an expressive face: she frowned as she read, shook her head, wrinkled her short straight nose, then leaned back in her chair, hands clasped behind her head as though lost again in a world beyond the confines of office walls.
Emily was actually thinking she was hungry.
Her office at Parchment Press was deserted, she alone still at together.’ like was the her workstation, one of several pens in the square high-ceilinged room. She’d been lucky to be given a desk by the window, especially since she was new. Many of the other editors strained their eyes under artificial light, and only a few, the most senior, had offices to themselves.
Everyone at Parchment was overworked and often stayed late, though rarely on a Friday. Emily, however, was waiting for her boyfriend, Matthew. He had promised to meet her at six-thirty, but it had already gone seven and there was still no sign, which meant they’d have no time for a snack before the poetry book launch. Her mind began to thrum with anxiety. This was not unusual these days where Matthew was concerned.
She reached down for another package from the untidy stack on the floor and glanced at the label. It was her turn this week to deal with the unsolicited scripts. Most aspiring writers sent them by email these days, and she wondered why these few still bothered to send them in the post. Perhaps they sensed it was too easy to delete an email. A parcel was unignorable. This one was addressed uninspiringly to
The Parchment Publisher
in sloppy block capitals, and when she pulled out the manuscript inside, her nose wrinkled at the reek of stale smoke. She scanned the writer’s covering letter with distaste, balked at the trumpeted self-praise picked out in luminous green pen, then turned without hope to the first page, thinking maybe, just maybe, she might catch a voice, some pulse of life in the prose. There was none. She skipped to the middle to confirm that her search was in vain, then laid the script on the desk and began to type. Five minutes later, the offending item was back in its padded bag, readdressed. The author’s own postage stamps appeared to gleam at her accusingly.