Five Thirty-One

I woke at ten to five because the Herring House was making a noise I had not heard it make all week, a long low shuddering in the sash of the window, and when I got up and looked out there was no creek.

There was no mud, either. There was no quay wall and no slipway and no line between the water and the marsh. The whole of it — creek, saltings, flats, four miles of it out to Scolt — was one flat moving sheet of grey, and it was five in the morning and low water had been at twenty past six the evening before, which meant that what I was looking at was six hours of flood on top of a night of north-easterly, and high water was still seven and three-quarter hours away.

There was a light on in the yard.

I got dressed in four minutes and went down and out, and Elias was standing at the end of the quay with a torch and a printout, and Tomasz was already there, and so was a man I did not know in a dressing gown and waders.

“Morning,” said Elias.

“How bad?”

“Gauge at Wells was running twenty-eight over predicted at four o’clock and it’s still building.” He folded the paper. “So call it five three at the top, twelve fifty-two. Quay goes at twenty to twelve. Granary floor’s six hundred above the quay, so she’ll take about six inches at the worst of it, for about half an hour, and then it’s off.”

“The granary floods?”

“The granary’s flooded nine times since 1953,” said the man in the dressing gown, comfortably. “My father’s marked them all on the doorpost.”

“That’s Derek,” said Elias.

“How do you do,” said Derek.

Here is what a village does.

At twenty past five Bea Nudd opened the Herring House kitchen and put on three hundred rounds of toast over the next four hours and never once asked anybody if they wanted any, she simply put it where people were.

At six, fourteen people I had never met arrived on the quay with squeegees, planks, pallets, two wheelbarrows and a fish crate full of blue rope.

At half six we started on the granary.

Eighty-four chairs, stacked eight high, up the outside steps to the first floor, which is above anything the North Sea has managed since the Romans. Four trestle tables. A PA that weighed more than it had any right to and belonged to a man from Fakenham who was going to be very annoyed. Two hundred glasses in crates. The cake, which went into the back of Susannah’s Yaris and stayed there, on the passenger seat, with a seatbelt on, for six hours.

Jean Pettifer’s paperwork went up in a box, held above her head, by Jean Pettifer.

My mother took charge of the flowers on the grounds that she had once done a course, and organised four people into a chain up the outside steps with a degree of command that caused Tomasz to salute her.

Bea’s dog got into the granary at nine and had to be extracted from under the pallet with the cake tins on it.

At twenty past nine a man arrived from Fakenham with a hired PA in a van, looked at the quay, the water, the steps and the dozen people with squeegees, and said, “You want me to set that up where,” and was handed a bacon roll and assimilated inside four minutes.

Everything else came up onto pallets: the bar, the beer, the flowers, the hundred feet of signal flags, the eighty-four orders of service, and a box of two hundred hand-tied lavender favours that Cleo had been picking up and putting down since Sunday and which were, by common agreement, the single most important object in Norfolk.

It took until twenty past ten, and it was the best four hours of work I have ever been part of.

Somewhere in the middle of it I was at the top of the outside steps taking chairs off Tomasz eight at a time and I looked down and saw Dev Sundaram, in a fleece, carrying one end of a bar with Arun, saying, “This is a terrible idea, and I love it,” and Cleo behind him in a dressing gown, wellingtons and a full face of half-done make-up, holding an umbrella over a florist.

And then, at about half ten, with the water starting to come up the slipway in earnest, Elias went and stood in the granary doorway with his sister.

I was twelve feet away on the steps with a chair in each hand. I could hear all of it and I have never told anybody I heard it until now.

“Three minutes,” he said.

“I’ve got a woman doing my eyebrows at eleven.”

“Three minutes, Cleo.”

She put the umbrella down.

“It’s about Dad,” he said.

“Right.”

“I’m not going to tell you what we’re doing. I’ve been doing that for two years and you were right about it last night and I’m not doing it today.” He had his hands in his pockets. “So I’m going to tell you what I know, and then you’re going to tell me what you want, and whatever you say is what happens. Even if I think it’s wrong. That’s the whole arrangement.”

Cleo said, very quietly, “Go on then.”

“He’s better between eleven and one and he’s worse after four. Half three’s in the middle. Yesterday he was gone for nearly two hours and he came back fine, and this morning at seven he knew where he was and he knew what day it was and he asked Priti if his suit had come.

“What I don’t know is whether at half three he’ll know you. I genuinely don’t. It might be the best twenty minutes he’s had in a year. It might be that he looks at you in a dress and can’t place you and gets upset in front of eighty-four people, and if that happens it will happen in front of eighty-four people, and I can’t make that not be true.

“There’s three ways to do it. He walks you up from the gate — that’s a hundred and ten metres and it’s wet grass and he’ll need an arm, and if it goes wrong it goes wrong in front of everybody. Or he’s sat at the front with Priti and you come up on your own and go to him at the end. Or he doesn’t come up the hill at all, he stops at Bea’s and we bring you down to him after, and it’s quiet, and it’s just us.”

“And which one do you think?”

“No,” said Elias.

“Elias—“

“No. That’s the bit I’m not doing.” He said it gently. “If I tell you which one, you’ll do that one, and in ten years you’ll remember that I chose it. It’s your wedding and he’s your dad. Tell me what you want and I’ll build it.”

There was a long pause, and the water came another foot up the slipway, and somebody dropped a crate of glasses on the quay and there was a cheer.

“I’ll walk up on my own,” said Cleo.

“Right.”

“I’ll walk up on my own from the gate, because if I’ve got him on my arm the whole way I’ll spend a hundred and ten metres watching his face instead of Dev’s.” Her voice was completely steady and I could see her hands. “And I want him at the front with Priti, on that bench, on the seaward side, and I want you to put him where the light is. And when I get to the top I’ll go to him first, before I go to Dev, and I’ll hold his hand, and if he knows me that’ll be the best minute of my life.

“And if he doesn’t—“ she stopped. “If he doesn’t, I’ll say, hello, I’m Cleo, I’m Angela’s girl, and he’ll be pleased, because he’s always pleased. And then I’ll go and get married. In front of everybody. And everybody can think what they like.”

“Right,” said Elias.

“Is that the right one?”

“It’s yours,” he said. “That’s better.”

And then he said, “I’ll have the bench up there by two and I’ll get Tomasz to check the grass by the gate, because if it’s wet you’ll go over in them shoes,” and Cleo said, “You absolute—“ and hit him on the arm, and went off to have her eyebrows done, and that was that.

I stood on a flight of stone steps with a chair in each hand.

Because I had just watched a man stand in a doorway and refuse, on purpose, at cost, to solve his sister.

He had every answer. He knew the times and the odds and the ground and the shoes. He had been carrying it alone for two years precisely because he is the kind of man who would rather carry a thing than hand anybody half of it. And he had stood there this morning, on the worst possible day, and he had asked her what she wanted and then said the words even if I think it’s wrong.

That is the entire thing. That is the whole of what I have wanted from another human being since I was about twenty-three and could not have told you the shape of it.

And I had been in the same square mile as it for six days, and I had spent four of them being right about a tree.

The water came over the quay at eighteen minutes to twelve.

It does not rush. That is the thing nobody expects. It comes up through the slipway and along the wall and it finds the low spots, and then there is a moment where the whole surface of the quay is a film of water an inch deep with the sky in it, and the bollards are standing in it, and the whole village is standing at the top of the steps watching, because you always watch.

It got to two inches over the granary sill at about ten past one and stopped there, and went out.

Priti brought Roy down to the top of the steps at noon in his dressing gown to watch it, because he had asked to, twice.

He stood there with one hand on the rail, looking at the water coming along the wall, and said, “Five three,” to nobody in particular, before a single person had told him anything at all.

Elias, forty feet away with a squeegee, did not look up and did not say anything, and I watched the back of his neck go red.

By twenty past two the quay was steaming in a bit of thin sun and a dozen people were working it with squeegees in a line, like a very slow dance, and Bea had the doors open and the granary floor was drying in stripes.

At twenty-five past two Wilf Chalmers came round the point of the creek with three boats behind his on a line, at about two knots, standing up.

I was sitting on the wall with a mug of tea and my dress over my arm in a bag, filthy to the elbows, forty minutes from having to look like a person.

At the top of the outside steps, in a dressing gown and wellingtons, with her hair done and about half of the rest of her, Cleo Tarrant stood with a bacon roll in one hand looking at a wet quay, a drying floor, four boats, a hill, a tree with a rope in the top of it, and eighty-four chairs coming back down the steps eight at a time.

And she laughed.

Not a small one. The kind that makes you hold on to a doorframe. Her whole wedding had been under a foot of water an hour earlier, and her father was upstairs in a suit, and her best friend had lied to her for four years, and she stood at the top of a flight of steps on the twenty-sixth of September and laughed until Dev had to come and take the roll off her.