‘Strike me, Bill. Strike me. That is damn generous of you.’ George’s thin face was alight with embarrassed pleasure. ‘I’ll be sure to think of you, if you was ever to be laid up.’
‘Thank the schoolmisses.’ William took off his hat and shook it, wiped his gleaming temples with a handkerchief. ‘Lucy Horne, I could do justice to a cup of tea.’ He turned to me. ‘I got a lift with your Colin Bowyer. He was leaving the mill, and kind enough to stop.’ He bent to plug the television into the yellowed socket in the corner of the room.
‘You mean you set off from Upton Hall,’ I began, ‘with the intention of carrying a television all the way along the lanes—’
‘Stand off, Ellen.’ George held up a long finger. ‘We men like work.’
William turned on the television, conjuring a buzzing warped grain of variegated greys onto the screen. ‘That we do.’ He fiddled with the aerial. ‘I wouldn’t have gone along the lanes anyway. I’d have cut up through Pipehouse.’
I choked on the last of my tea.
William and I made our way down through the beech wood in the dusk. I turned my face to the wind, sniffed the damp air. It had been raining hard to the west, in the higher hills, and that water too would come down to us. William walked beside me, a light band on his hat glowing in the half-light, sniffing the air along with me. ‘There’ll be a bump in your channel tonight,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if we were awash, up at the Hall.’
‘What on earth will you do with all those girls?’
‘The pupils have got their October furlough. They’re not due back till tomorrow. There’s only half a dozen in the school, poor creatures with no one to go to. Mrs Dennis will stow them in the village, I expect.’
The wind blew in the branches. ‘You know,’ I went on, ‘I’ve slept to the rush of a millstream for many years now, but I could nod off just as well to the sough of beech branches, if I were ever to move from the mill.’
‘Do you think you might?’
‘I hadn’t given it a second’s thought, until this moment.’
‘I was wondering if you needed a change,’ he said. ‘You look careworn, Ellen. What is it?’
‘Nothing at all. Really.’
‘If you say so, my dear.’
We travelled down over the mounds and dips of the path, the spoil heaps and sinkholes of generations of badgers and rabbits who tunnelled there. You had to know where to put your feet, but we did, William and I, even in the dusk. We asked each other questions like this from time to time; always softly, in situations where we didn’t have to look each other in the eye, and I had never strayed from the truth before. ‘Really,’ I repeated, when we reached the bottom of the wood, ‘it’s just a little thing, too small to mention. I’ve let it upset me. Stupidly.’
He nodded gravely, and ushered me ahead over the stile, his extended arm pole-like in the heavy coat. Both Lucy and I gave him supper once a week, piling his plate with mashed potatoes, pork chops. Other than that we relied on the school cook to keep him fed, and she was a busy woman. ‘I’ll have a shepherd’s pie ready tomorrow evening, William. I hope you’ll join me as usual.’
‘I would be very glad.’
*
The flood came during the night, heavy and incompressible, loading and overloading the river bed and the mill channel until the water stopped falling, being the same height everywhere. The special silence woke me at three in the morning, and I got up and went to the window. A blackness was conquering the fields on either side of the embanked track, a panther moving into the woods beyond. My mill cottage, on its rise of land, was as safe as ever. But I thought of Selwyn, his calm in the face of these deep waters, and I wished all the same that he was here to watch it with me.
I went back to bed and dozed until six-fifteen, when the telephone began ringing.
It was William.
‘Water’s in at Upton Hall. Basements and kitchen flooded and no electricity. Mrs Dennis has called the fire brigade and now she’s driving her girls to The Place. Colonel Daventry has got Marcy to open up the back of the house for them.’
Marcy Corey was Daniel’s widow, housekeeper to the Colonel.
‘What a good idea.’
‘Meantime the teachers are ringing round, telling everyone to stay away till the water’s pumped out and the electrics are back on.’
‘I’ll go and see if Marcy needs any help.’
‘You do that, Ellen. I’m going down to have a look at Lady B.’
‘Remember I can bring her here if needs be. What about your rooms?’
‘Dry,’ he said. ‘I’ll sit it out.’
‘You can’t stay there, with no power and no hot food!’
‘I will so. I’m the caretaker, and I have a gas lamp and a stove. Someone must supervise the fire brigade. The laying of the pump hoses.’
‘At least let me fetch you for supper, as we arranged.’
He agreed and we said goodbye. The telephone rang again almost immediately. It was Lucy, as I thought it would be, needing a lift to the kennels.
I got dressed and ate a hasty piece of bread and butter. Pulling on Selwyn’s waders, I left the house. In the lane I met high water but the Land Rover cleared it. I reached the village to find the high street a fast-running stream. In the half-light I saw the flash of a torch at the top of the bank at Lucy’s cottage. She nipped down the steps and opened the passenger door.
‘I’ve got the Suttons up there, every single one of ’em including old Ivy. They’ve been in my parlour since two o’clock this morning. They didn’t sandbag, did they.’
‘Oh, no!’ The Suttons were low down near the ford. ‘What are they going to do?’
‘Clear off to their cousins in Barrow End, is what. As soon as I can make ’em. Shall we do a run of the village first? I want to see if anyone’s got water in.’ She swung herself into the passenger seat. ‘This will be down by ten o’clock, I bet you. Look at the sky. Those ain’t rainclouds.’
The first light was coming in the east. I cast a doubtful look at the lowering sky. ‘I hope you’re right.’
We drove through Upton at a crawl, with the window open. Neighbours were gathered upstairs where torches flickered in the dark rooms behind them. They were all sandbagged, expecting the worst, but I wasn’t sure the flood would come to them. The main street was a trough worn down by centuries of cattle herds and heavy drays, and nearly all the garden paths climbed to their front doors. It was the lack of power that would chill them. We called back and forth, and they insisted they needed nothing. We crossed the green and reached the turning to the church, where we came to a halt and looked over the wall at the submerged meadows beyond. Our little river was, just now and just here, the width of the Rhine. Lucy whistled between her teeth.
‘I’m going to The Place later,’ I told her. ‘Colonel Daventry’s taking in the Upton Hall girls.’
Lucy gazed unseeing over the river. ‘I wish he was out and about.’
Suddenly I knew she was thinking of the war and the day Southampton was bombed, when the crowds came to Upton and Colonel Daventry drove cartloads of them to village houses and surrounding farms. This was what happened when you knew a woman for over forty years. You knew her thoughts, the way they ran, almost as well as you knew your own.
I let my mind dwell for a few bright seconds on that long-ago day. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He was indispensable, wasn’t he.’
I put the Land Rover into gear and moved off. We’d only travelled twenty yards when I heard the hoot of a horn. A small lorry carrying sandbags was coming up behind us. I reversed alongside. The window wound down to reveal the driver, a black-haired man with a black beard.
‘Morning, Vicar,’ Lucy said. ‘Bloomin heck.’
Belatedly I recognized the Reverend James Acton, new to the parish and hardly known to me. ‘I wonder if you could assist?’ he said. ‘Church Walk is nearly under.’
‘We’ll follow you, Reverend,’ I said.