The Flood (16 page)

There had been no rain now for forty-eight hours, the longest intermission for over two months. Government meteorological experts ‘confidently expected’ drier weather to continue. ‘The message is, we are on top of things.’ Long-term restoration works would soon be underway, and the clean-up campaign had already started. ‘It’s very good news,’ said a government spokesman. ‘Especially today, with the City Gala.’

This Gala had been planned for a decade. It marked the twenty-fifth year since the city’s docks had been turned into a pleasure zone for international tourists (and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the dockers’ riots, in which ten people had been killed, though no one was keen to remember that). In the drubbing rain, rumours had redoubled that the government meant to call the Gala off: the rioters had demanded it, celebrities swore they would not attend, firemen and ambulancemen threatened a boycott, media pundits said it was tasteless with war boiling up in the lands around Loya, safety experts said it was pointless, the city was sinking into the flood.

But underneath it all, the city had been hoping that the giant party would go on. They had been oppressed, by the rains, by the shortages, the winter that seemed to have eaten the spring. Almost no one had been going out, as the buses and subways grew erratic and lawless; a bus had been swept away down river, fifty-three passengers had been drowned, the taxi drivers were demanding double money … Now suddenly the worst was over, and at once, the city needed its Gala. The government would take charge of things. They were drafting an edict capping taxi rates, they were clearing debris from roads in the centre, they promised to lay on ‘special river-buses’, ‘whatever it takes to get our people to their Gala’ – though most of ‘their people’ weren’t invited, of course.

The Gala was of pressing concern to Davey, since he was one of its star presenters. The biggest event of a quarter century, televised all over the world. Lottie and Lola were fizzing with pride, and even Delorice got quite excited, Delorice whose head wasn’t easily turned and who was so rude about television. Delorice would be there, looking beautiful. Once his stint was over, they could dance all night, and then stay in bed and make love all morning, since the day after the Gala was a public holiday.

Suddenly now he heard his own name, and flushed with pleasure – ‘Davey Lucas’ – instantly followed by a shiver of shame as the voice continued ‘the well-known astrologer’. He would be derided throughout the profession! But part of him knew he deserved to be. Part of him knew he was over-promoted, and some of the hype was his own fault. When TV had dubbed him ‘Mr Astronomy’, he’d asked them not to, but half-heartedly, and unsurprisingly, the name had stuck.

He suspected that the savagery of the response from within the academic establishment on his ‘planetary lineup’ spectacular partly derived from spleen at his title. Professor Sharp, for example, had called him ‘a childishly unsophisticated thinker’, though most of the thinking hadn’t been Davey’s. Sharp was almost certainly jealous.

And how could Davey help being flattered when Kylie Spheare, of Extreme Events, who was at every party, with her tiger-striped hair, called him and purred, into his surprised silence, ‘Davey Lucas, you’re the man we need. Frankly, at the moment, only you could do it. The kids love you, but you’re, like, an intellectual, so you’ll be able to remember all those foreign names. Bliss will be delighted to go on with you, it will help him, like, get cred with the youth –’

‘
Bliss
go on with me?’ Davey interrupted, trying not to sound too excited.

‘Yeah, well I know he’s a bore,’ Kylie said, ‘but we have to have the politicians on. But you, Davey, you’re gorgeous, and you’re, like,
serious.
The city is willing to pay for the best. Tell me you’re not going to turn me down.’ Her voice had become very low and sexy. Naturally Davey had to say ‘Yes’, though part of him was panicking. Why was all this happening to him? Had he ever asked for any of it?

Still, Davey had never been a purist. Lottie had taught him to enjoy what came.

Listening to the good news about the floods, Davey started to feel positively cheerful. Even the radio presenter, a sceptical countryman who usually savaged politicians from the city, sounded more optimistic today.

(However, CTV had really blown it, since the
Star-Lite End of the World Spectacular
was scheduled for the evening after the Gala. They’d had lots of tabloid coverage at the weekend, with everyone in apocalyptic mood, but now the sun was shining, people had lost interest. The floods were going down; of course the world couldn’t end!)

Besides, for the first time in what seemed like months, there had been a completely clear night sky. Davey had OD-ed on the telescope, playing with some of his ideas for
Star Trips.
He wanted to explore, for teenagers, some of the wider questions in astronomy: one expanding universe, or many? Plural universes linked by worm-holes? One amazing structure, an infinite foam? Would the universe expand for ever, swimming endlessly outwards into the dark until its messages grew faint and were lost, or was there enough concealed matter to make it, at the last, turn back towards home? White distant swimmers, at the last, homing … When he was a boy, he had loved that idea, that the universe was cyclical, expanding and contracting like a heart. The idea of perpetual repetition soothed him. At last, one day, the cards would fall out right. Davey could be the man he longed to be; the swimmer would home at the perfect angle.

How strange it was, how beautiful. One day he’d bring Delorice along to see. They would climb up into the sky hand in hand, and look together at the ends of time. Go on a trip across the wide star-fields, the hidden galaxies above the black waters –

– Which had started to smell, in recent days, as the city began to warm up into spring. Davey pressed a button, and rolled up the window. He reminded himself that nothing lasted. The floods had been bad, but they too would pass.

Moira rose to her feet, sighing, bleeding, and picked up her Bible, and found peace. Morning had come, a third day. Maybe her Master was in his morning. Maybe she was not unvisited.

God said, ‘Let there be lights in the vault of heaven to separate day from night, and let them serve as signs for both festivals and years.’ God put these lights in the vault of heaven to give light on earth, to govern day and night, and to separate light from darkness … Evening came, and morning came. God saw that it was good.

She looked down for a second from the page of her Bible where the sunlight lay across her knee, the blue and yellow of her bruised knee, and Fool sat against it, his head on her flesh, she could feel the quick faint beat of his heart, the bridge of bone as light as egg-shell, and the sun painted a patch of his fur, lit part of it to such unbearable richness, such red fierce warmth, such a glow of red love, that her tears sprang towards it, the one good thing, of which Moira could never have enough.

May woke up from a dream of Alfred. He lay beside her: they were together; they were old, but they were curled like spoons, his dear hands joined beneath her bosoms, and he was whispering, ‘I love you, May. I’ll always love you, you know that May.’ She woke on a crest of unbelieving joy that only slowly ebbed away.

She knew he was there; they had been together. Somewhere, not far, he must still be with her. (She wished so fiercely that he could see the children; when she’d left them yesterday, they’d hugged her to death, and Franklin had so much a look of Alfred, his Roman nose, and his grandpa’s spirit; he was shy, like Alfred, but stubborn as a mule; and Winston had told her a fairy-tale, a rather muddled version of
The Snow Queen
.)

On the bedside table she kept her Tennyson, her other Alfred, who had not died. She picked it up and read, shortsightedly, drifting through the house to her little kitchen. She tripped on the carpet, and nearly fell. She heard him, impatient: ‘What are you playing at? For heaven’s sake, woman, look where you’re going!’

She read ‘Mariana’ as the kettle boiled. May had always enjoyed her mornings.

‘All day within the dreamy house,/ The doors upon their hinges creaked;/ The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse/ Behind the mouldering wainscot shrieked,/ Or from the crevice peered about, …/ Old voices called her from without./ She only said, “My life is dreary, He cometh not,” she said;/ She said, “I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!”’

May liked the idea of the bluebottle singing. She’d always thought they were lovely things, with their hard, bright, blue-green, petrol-y sheen.

But all that ‘weary, dreary’ business …

If you were loved enough, it lasted.

I miss him, but I don’t want to be dead.

‘She’s not at her best in the morning,’ Lorna muttered to Henry, in the secretive, hissing tone she habitually used when talking of their daughter, who had sharp ears and a habit of silently appearing, barefoot, and getting annoyed.

Angela certainly wasn’t at her best. Angela didn’t need to be. Her mother and father got Gerda up, took her to school, then made breakfast for Angela, and brought it in, with the mail, on a tray. They were proud of their daughter, the famous author. Naturally she had to work late at night; naturally she couldn’t get up in the morning. Since the two boys died, there had only been Angela.

After the sorrow of George’s death, they had moved away to a flat on the coast, a new beginning, away from disaster. When Angela gave birth to their first grandchild, the baby became the apple of their eye, and they came up to the city whenever they could. But the father of the baby didn’t want to know, and Angela started sounding down all the time, so they started to phone her every day. In the end there was only one decision they could make, though part of them wanted to be young again, get up without worries, walk on the beach …

Now they lived with her, and she paid for everything.

A world away from their life before, when treats were few, and they had to be careful. Now they could take mini-cabs if they went out; they didn’t need to cook, they got takeaways; they never bought clothes from charity shops. Angela had money for everything, since she had won the Iceland Prize. But sometimes they wondered if they’d done the right thing. Angela had meant them to be glorified housekeepers, running the household while she cared for Gerda and wrote her novels as before. Quite soon, though, it had somehow come about that Lorna and Henry took charge of Gerda.

Sometimes Gerda would peek in on her mother in the morning to say goodbye before she left, but Angela was usually half asleep. ‘Mummy’s tired,’ Angela would whisper, eyes still closed. ‘Kiss me, darling, then off you go. Mummy was working late last night.’ Sometimes this was true, sometimes not.

An hour or so later, Lorna would bring her her mail. There were armfuls of it, since she had won the Iceland. Angela would scan it, and make two piles, one for her secretary to deal with, one for her to linger over: fan letters, free books, invitations. Not everyone admired her novels, but most of the dissenters were mentally ill, making critical remarks about her style or carping obsessively about small errors; after reading a few sentences, she would discard them. Then she’d leave her bedroom, so her mother could clean and take the breakfast tray away, and go up to her office at the top of the house, which had a whole wall of books by Angela, all six of them, in fifty-seven languages. Sometimes, when Angela was very bored, she would read a few pages of her books aloud in languages she didn’t know. She sounded good in Finnish; more obscure in Basque. She wished she had a new book to read from.

In theory, Angela was spending her days writing her new novel, a follow-up to her Iceland winner, eagerly awaited by her publishers. Actually Angela was stuck, and spent most of her time reading old letters, and making, then forgetting, cups of herbal tea, which slowly cooled around her study, until her mother took them away. Sometimes she would pick up proofs publishers had sent, asking her for a quote for the jacket, but the writers were never as good as she was, so she tended to fling them down unfinished.

Still she believed she was busy, or ought to be busy, and when Gerda came home (picked up by Lorna or Henry) she knew she mustn’t disturb her mummy till the latter stopped work, between six and seven. Then Angela might read Gerda a book, or briefly look at what her daughter called homework, though it didn’t seem to be quite as advanced as what Angela herself was doing at that age. She might even put her daughter to bed, but Lorna or Henry usually did that. Gerda was so attached to them, and Angela was naturally tired by bedtime.

Gerda was a credit to Angela, though. Angela sometimes ignored Gerda’s bedtime so she could take her to literary parties, beautifully dressed, with shining hair. Gerda would walk about, staring at people, and didn’t interrupt her mother’s grown-up conversations, though occasionally she would run up to Angela and hang, touchingly, upon her hand. Everyone asked about the striking child, and Angela modestly said, ‘She’s my daughter.’ The last time this happened hadn’t quite worked out – a literary editor with kids at the same school had asked,
en passant
, the name of Gerda’s teacher, and Angela’s mind had gone blank. He looked at her a trifle oddly.

Thanks to the live-in grandparents, it hadn’t been onerous, having a child. Interviewers always raised the motherhood question, and Angela always had an up-beat answer.

‘Don’t you find having a child has slowed you up?’ Nadia Samuels had asked, only last week. She herself was nearly forty, and anxious about not having one. The rumours in the book trade were that Angela was blocked. Some wanted her punished for winning the Iceland. ‘People might ask you, well – five years have gone past; where is your follow-up novel?’

‘I’m writing it,’ Angela smiled, annoyingly. ‘I think it will be worth the wait.’

‘Are you putting motherhood before your career?’

‘Some people make a great fuss about motherhood. I tend to take it in my stride. Of course I’m fortunate, Gerda’s very bright. Precocious is the word the teachers use. And yet she’s easy. She has a sweet nature.’