by Rosy Thorton
Wednesday brought a slight alleviation. The rain held off, replaced by a soft, pervasive mist which blanketed the house and dykes and wreathed each tree and telegraph pole, filming everything it touched with fine, clear droplets. Beth’s lungs seemed to relax a little. She ate a better supper, with breath to spare at last for chewing and swallowing; she was coughing less and passed an easier night. Laura breathed more easily herself. It seemed they had turned the corner.
The respite, however, proved only temporary. On Thursday the clouds piled high again and on Friday morning as they left the house, the bloated sky was releasing a steady downpour. The phone call came at lunchtime, just as Laura was peering from her office window and wondering how wet she would get on a dash to the sandwich shop. It was Mrs Warhurst, the receptionist at the village college.
‘Mrs Blackwood? I’ve got Beth here with me.’
‘What’s she forgotten?’ At primary school, she’d always been running back over with something: packed lunch, PE socks, recorder book. But even as she joked, Laura’s pulse quickened. It was what she’d been expecting. The crisis had come.
‘She’s very poorly. We think she ought to go to the doctor’s.’
‘Right. Yes.’ Phone in one hand, she was already gathering up raincoat and car keys in the other as she said, ‘Tell her I’ll be straight there.’
She was lucky with the traffic, which was light for the lunch hour, and in less than twenty minutes she was striding into the reception area and over to her daughter, where she sat by the wall on a solitary stacking chair.
‘It’s all right, now,’ she told her – although it quite obviously wasn’t. Gone was this morning’s loose, musical wheeze. Beth’s breathing, in fact, was now silent for the first time in over a week: silent and almost completely ineffectual. Her chest rose and fell jerkily, accompanied at each inhalation by an involuntary hunch of the shoulders and the appearance of alarming hollows at either side of the base of her neck, just above her collar bone. But, evidently, little air was getting through. Dark smudges flowered beneath her eyes; her lips were open, stretched and blue.
Laura stood up and looked rapidly around.
‘Hi!’ she called to a passing staff member whom she didn’t recognise. ‘Excuse me. Could you help us, please?’
With an arm apiece they half-hoisted Beth through the rain to the waiting car, where she slumped in the passenger seat like a lifeless thing.
The doctor’s surgery was no distance, just along the village high street, and Laura bumped up illegally on the pavement outside. The surgery staff knew Beth well. The practice nurse was summoned and soon had her in a consulting room, face mask on and plugged into the whirring compresser. Laura stood by and filled her own lungs with draughts of calming air. As the drug began to filter through, the colour seeped back into her daughter’s face. Her chest moved in and out more smoothly. The sucked-in hollows at her neck grew less pronounced with each successive breath, and her eyes, which had held that intense, strained, inward-focused look, now sought Laura’s. There was no panic in them, only exhaustion.
‘Back in a minute,’ Laura told Beth, when the chamber of liquid was half empty. ‘I’ve just got to move the car.’ At the door she turned back and forced a grin. ‘Don’t run away, will you?’
After the treatment they sat for a while on the waiting room chairs, Beth leaning up against her mother’s shoulder, until she could have the once over from Dr Harrington.
‘Her air flow seems to have stabilised now. I think we’ve caught her in time. But you’ll need to watch her closely for the next twenty-four hours. Use her peak flow meter. If it drops below ninety, give us a call and someone will come out with the nebuliser. I think it’s Dr Taub on call tonight.’
She’d found a space in the car park not far from the back door, but the walk was still an arduous one. The rain was lashing down; Laura draped her own coat over Beth’s head and shoulders as she bundled her across the tarmac. She wanted to swaddle her round and scoop her close, and never let her out of her sight.
Home. An asthma attack and an afternoon off school gave not just Beth but Laura too the dispensation for idleness. She shelved the work she should have done today in favour of children’s television. Beth was too weak to do more than sniff at the soup that Laura heated for her, but she nursed the mug and inhaled the steam. Air was the only sustenance she wanted.
After that, she dozed for a while on the settee cushions and at nine Laura helped her up to bed. They took it slowly, but the struggle from her clothes and into pyjamas left her gasping, open-mouthed. Laura fetched every pillow in the house and built a padded cave round the head of the bed. Beth crawled in and lay upright, her head tilted sideways.
‘Don’t go.’
Laura stopped, her hand on the door handle, and turned back.
‘Stay with me. I don’t want to go to sleep.’
It was the first whole sentence she had spoken since Laura’s arrival at the school. The effort of it took too much breath; it had her in a spasm of coughing, and Laura back at her side, stroking her hand in useless soothing.
‘Of course I’ll stay, sweetheart, if you want me to. I can stay all night, if you like.’
Beth gave a short nod, satisfied, and shut her eyes.
‘Don’t want to sleep.’
She was regulating it better now, taking a small extra breath and releasing the words in a quick, staccato burst. Laura waited.
‘Dream.’ Breathe. ‘Don’t want the dream.’
‘What dream, love?’
‘Always the same.’ Breathe. ‘Drowning.’
Oh, God. Laura squeezed her daughter’s hand, where it lay limp on the bedclothes.
‘Ditch. I’m in a ditch. Lying down. Head under water.’ She took a longer rest and Laura wondered whether this was it, whether she should respond, or whether there was more to come.
‘Can’t breathe. Stupid. It’s only shallow. Should sit up. Just can’t.’ Another pause; more spacing breaths. ‘Drowning.’
A tear had formed itself at the corner of one of Beth’s closed lids.
‘Don’t cry, love. Please don’t cry.’ It wasn’t a mother’s empty comfort; Laura had always believed in letting her daughter cry. But now, in this condition, it would be disastrous. The extra fluid in her nose and sinuses, the tightening of the throat. She really mustn’t cry.
‘You won’t drown.’ Casting around for what to say, she found as she said it that she knew the answer. ‘Don’t fight it. Don’t try to sit up, just lie still and relax. You won’t drown in the water – the water is safe. Relax, and you’ll find you can breathe the water.’
Beth snorted, swallowed, then opened her eyes. They swam with liquid, but it no longer threatened to fall.
‘Talk to me.’
Laura smiled. ‘What shall I tell you? Or should I read you a book?’
‘Dad and the tree house.’ Breathe. ‘Tell me that.’
It was an old family story. Beth had demanded she recite it at bedtime almost every night, those summers when she was seven, eight, and lived in the tree house from dawn to dusk. She hadn’t mentioned it in years.
‘It was when I was pregnant,’ began Laura. ‘Expecting you. I was still at work, the last week before my maternity leave was due to begin. There was one day when we had a conference on, and I was helping organise. It meant I’d left the house early, before seven, and wasn’t home before nine o’clock at night. I never looked in the garden when I came in. I didn’t even glance that way – why would I? I was tired, I’d been rushing round all day.’
Beth’s lids had closed again, but she was nodding, eased.
‘When I got inside, Dad was there to greet me in the kitchen with a cup of peppermint tea – I had a passion for it when I was pregnant – and he was acting all excited and mysterious. ‘‘Come outside,’’ he kept saying, and I didn’t know what he was on about. I just wanted to sit down with my feet up and drink my peppermint tea. But he wouldn’t let me. He practically dragged me
up and out again, and along the top of the dyke. It was pitch black out there. You were due very soon, so it must have been November. I thought your dad had gone crazy.’ And she’d told him so, in no uncertain terms, as she recalled. ‘I didn’t know what it was at first: just this great, dark bulk in the tree. It looked really peculiar. But then he stood behind me, and put his chin on my shoulder, looking where I was looking and nodding at it. ‘‘It’s a tree house,’’ he said. ‘‘For our baby.’’ ’
For me, Beth used to repeat, when she was small. He built it for me.
‘There were so many other things needing doing, in the house.’ This part of the story she’d never told before. But Beth was twelve now – and more than half asleep. ‘I wanted him to paint the nursery – your bedroom, I mean. And the garden gate was off its hinges. It was a struggle to get through, even without a buggy. But, no: he decided you needed a tree house.’
‘A boy.’
Laura started; she had thought Beth asleep.
‘Dad. D’you think he – ’ breathe ‘ – wanted a boy?’
‘He adored you. Adores you. He was so delighted when you came.’ If Beth could only have seen him, seen them both; if she could remember those first few golden weeks. ‘He was like a little kid on Christmas morning.’
‘Alfie,’ said Beth. ‘Jack. Roly.’ Her eyes were still shut, her breathing steady and even. ‘He hasn’t. Built one. For them.’
Soon afterwards, she slept. The battle to stay awake had worn her out, and she slipped back under the water. Once asleep, her breathing was easier; Laura watched it slow and grow shallower, the struggle for oxygen reduced now her body was in repose. Laura rose, but she wouldn’t go back to her own bed tonight. Watch her closely, Dr Harrington had said, and she took him at his word. She went to fetch her own duvet.
In the silence which settled on the room, her daughter’s slender breaths measured out a lullaby. Huddled by the radiator with the duvet tucked under her chin, she heard it sigh to a soft, insistent drumbeat: the rain on the slates of the roof. Only now, in the quiet, was she conscious of it but, as soon as it registered, she knew it had been there all along. All day and all evening: non-stop rain. The level in the lode must be dangerously high. She didn’t recollect noticing it when they came in; she’d been intent on getting Beth inside. Beth’s window faced the other way, out over the garden to the rear. Even in daylight she would see nothing there but the waterlogged lawn. So instead of looking out she lay back on Beth’s beanbag and listened. The sound was oddly soothing: the regular patter of the rain itself and the heavier, drizzling chute of run-off from the eaves. It lulled her, until she could no longer distinguish the rain, or her daughter’s breathing, or her own.
Sleep claimed her, and she dreamed her daughter’s dream of rising water. It was she, now, beneath the surface of the ditch; she who let herself be gathered into the arms of the flood.
Pale grey daylight wakened her, slanting across her closed lids. She had gone to sleep without drawing the curtains. The first focus of her sluggish mind was the sound of Beth’s breathing. Shallow – she must be still asleep – but looser and with a throaty rattle, which was a definite good sign. The next thing she noticed was the silence beyond the room. The rain had finally stopped.
She dragged apart her eyelids, wincing at the smart of morning. It must be early yet since the light was muted and had an opalescent quality. Where it fell on the paintwork to the side of the window it shimmered and shifted and swam in a way which caused Laura a pinch of unease. Something was different; something wasn’t right.
Still with the duvet drawn round over yesterday’s clothes, she stood and moved to the window. Even then, realisation was not immediate. The sun was barely up so that, although the clouds had finally lifted and parted, the gleam they let in was weak and watery; the garden for the most part still lay deep in shadow. The pumphouse was a featureless bulk, only its chimney sharply outlined against the dawn sky; the lawn was a dark blank. But as her eyes adjusted she knew that something was wrong. The relationships of shape and height were all awry. The pumphouse was too low, too squat; the trees and bushes appeared foreshortened, the earth too high. As she continued to stare at the lawn, the matt black of sodden turf took on a different character: glassy, insolid. Her stomach lurched. Where she should be seeing grass, there was nothing but water.
Willow. With a glance to check Beth’s breathing, and careful not to wake her, she slipped from the room and ran downstairs to the kitchen, grabbing her fleece and raincoat and wellingtons.
The water of the lode was black and angry but its swirling surface lay six inches below the top of the dyke. If it had come over the top last night, the way it had in 1947, then the levels must since have subsided with the abeyance of the rain. More likely, the electric pumps at the station on the main road had failed to cope with the quantities of water that had fallen, which had either forced its way back through the old pipework of the pumphouse, or simply risen up from saturated soil which could no longer absorb its volume.
From the top of the concrete steps she squinted down, counting those still visible above the flood. Sixteen. How many more steps there should be, she wasn’t certain. Three, four? If so, that meant the water was maybe two feet deep – not too deep to negotiate on foot. The sky was lightening all the time, and she could see her way clearly, and see, too, the extent of the flooding, which stretched out beyond the hollow of her garden and across the field beyond, a silver-black parody of solid ground.
She had underestimated, but not enormously so. The water, when she edged her way down from the final submerged step, swept over the top of her boots and flooded her feet in icy liquid; it rose above her knees and up to the middle of her thighs, drenching her jeans and leaving her breathless with the shock of cold. Grey-brown and almost completely opaque, it swallowed her legs from sight. Its smell was not vegetable as she would have expected but faintly mineral, like rust. She took another step forward and almost fell. Balance was difficult even with arms outstretched. As she moved, the rubber of her wellingtons billowed against her shins, heavy with trapped water; she would have been better in trainers. Another step, feeling for the contours of the invisible turf. It would have been easier, she decided, if the water were deeper, if it were up to her waist; that way it would have held her weight, like walking in the shallow end of a swimming pool – except immeasurably colder.
It was perhaps fifteen yards to the pumphouse – little more than the width of a pool – but progress was painfully slow. Half way, she wondered whether, instead, she should have walked further along the dyke and tried to slither down to it that way. The old brick building lay in a slight depression, so that over the final few yards her footing fell away treacherously under the concealing tide. Twice, again, she almost slipped over. By the time she reached the door she was waist-deep in the flood. She tried the latch. It wouldn’t budge; it must be either locked from the inside, or else jammed: swollen and distorted by the soak of water.
‘Willow?’ she called, pounding with her fist against the upper portion of the wood. ‘Are you all right in there? Willow!’
Silence.
Turning cautiously, she edged her way round to the far side of the building, hugging the brickwork with the palm of one hand. The only window to this side was rectangular and small, no more than two feet by eighteen inches. In order to see in, she had to hoist herself half up out of the water by clinging on to the narrow ledge: a precarious operation. The catch was loose, the window resting closed by only its own weight. When she pulled herself up, she saw in clearly, or as clearly as the early morning light allowed. The inside of the pumphouse was awash, as deep in water as the garden outside. The bed was submerged. A chair lay drunkenly sideways in the wash, half grounded and half afloat. The water was thick with flotsam: clothing and magazines and shoes. But of Willow there was no sign.
Letting herself back down as slowly as she could and managing to keep her footing, Laura turned and looked about her. Up to this
point she had acted without much of a conscious plan; her one thought had been to get to the pumphouse, to get to Willow. It made no sense for the place to be empty. She was suddenly quite at a loss.
Fetch help? Set up a search? Get back, first, to check on Beth, then call the emergency services. And say … what? That her lodger was AWOL, missing in the flood?
The door was stuck solid. Willow must have climbed out of the window to escape the rising tide. She must be somewhere safe, somewhere dry. Somewhere on higher ground. She must be, because the alternative was unthinkable. That she was somewhere beneath the sucking blanket of wet.
The cold was beginning to permeate now, soaking right through, it seemed, to her bones. Her hands, she saw with detachment, were shaking convulsively. Her shinbones ached dully and she wasn’t certain she could feel her feet at all. And was it imagined, or was the level higher now than when she entered the flood?
Some place higher, some place out of the water.
‘Willow!’ Her voice surprised her with its loudness but it failed to carry, damping quickly to nothing in the heavy air.
She scanned the top of the dyke, looking for the shape that hadn’t been there before, the shape she knew couldn’t possibly be there now. As her eye ran along it reached a different shape, and her heart missed a beat. The tree house.
Forcing her way through the few yards of water in the shortest time, she half stumbled, half threw herself against the ladder. Be here, be here, be here, drummed her own voice silently in her head; but the mantra was more to soothe her numbness of body than any real anxiety of mind. Somehow, she already knew.
She mounted the ladder, freeing her legs from the pull of the water, and soon her head emerged into the interior of the tree house. There, sitting in one corner of the bare planked floor, was Willow. With hands clasped tight round upraised knees and elbows out at angles, she seemed to be all bones.
