The room was lit by twenty-three candles — all Sally had been able to find — and two flashlights. Dark drapes hid the windows and even the stalled elevator, and especially the French doors to the patio.
Silence was seeping in through the dark drapes, freezing the candle flames, pressing on their throats and hearts. But then Jake’s fingers came down on the keyboard and drove the silence back with the rippling burst of an introduction. Sally stood up, weaving a little, and sang loudly and quite clearly:
Oh, I am the Girl in Noah’s Ark And you are my old Flood King. Our love’s not just big as the ocean free, As Mount Ararat or a beanstalk tree — You found me a penthouse in the sea! Our love is a very big thing.
As Jake played the vamp with his left hand, he reached over and handed Sally a sheet of paper.
“Try the second stanza,” he said.
She scanned it owlishly. “Gee, it’s got some crazy words. And how do I sing inkblots?”
“I found what you call crazy words in a fancy ‘list of outstanding celestial objects,’ in one of your intellectual boy friend’s big books. We got to keep up the astronomical motif to go with the new planet.”
“Planet-shplanet. If it weren’t for Hugo, you’d be in the drink. I wonder where Hugo is now? Okay, Jake, play it” And she sang, with the sheet to her nose:
Oh, I am the Girl in Noah’s Ark And you are my old Storm King. Our love is not merely as big as the sun, Orion or Messier-31 — You launched me a private skyscraper, Hon! Our love is a very big thing.
Jake beamed at her. “We got us a hit, baby! A real blazer!”
“That’s very good,” Sally told him, thrusting a hand out for her glass, “Because the chances are we’ll be putting it on in a very damp theater.”
Richard Hillary felt a weird exhilaration as he tramped along springily beside a salt-reeking road leading west a distance south of Islip. Stranded on the mud-filmed, tide-combed grass within his view of the moment were two silvery fish and a small green lobster feebly crawling across a long sodden twist of black cloth that might well be a college gown. Looking south, he could see some of the gray towers of Oxford and clearly distinguish the brown tide-mark halfway up them. He held his breath, his hands moved upward, and his next step was almost turned to a leap as in imagination he frantically swam up through the waters of the North or Irish Sea that had been here some five or six hours ago.
He turned his leap back to a step with a snickering laugh, maintaining his exhilaration. Sometimes, of course, the weirdness of the contrasts constantly presented by the stranded flotsam got a bit too much, especially when they involved sodden human bodies, or even the bodies of horses and dogs. Here his rule, and apparently that of the people tramping with him, was, “If they don’t stir, look away from them quickly.” He’d had to invoke that rule several times in the past mile. Thus far, none of the sprawled wet forms had stirred.
Richard had been lucky in that he had got a lift almost all the way from the field where he’d slept on the far edge of the Chiltern Hills. He had set out at night, immediately after seeing the flooded east behind him, and had been picked up by a couple in a Bentley, come from Letchworth in the East Anglian Heights. They’d been nervously intent on picking up their son at Oxford. They hadn’t seen much of the flood and were inclined to minimize it. They’d given him a sandwich. After a bit, a good many other cars had turned up, and the going had got slow, and when they had finally driven slippingly down after dawn onto the sodden Oxford plain into the midst of a muddy traffic tie-up, Richard had thanked them and left. The tie-up looked like a lasting one, and he couldn’t bear the stunned, hurt, planless expressions on their faces.
One must have a plan, he told himself now, as he marched along quickly among a pack of fellow marchers, beside another double file of spattered cars slowly moving west. They crossed the Cherwell by a crowded bridge hardly two feet above a foaming flood. He wondered how salt the water was, but didn’t stop to taste.
He wondered, too, whether last night’s flooding here had come up from the Thames Estuary, or a hundred miles down from the Wash across the fenlands, roaring over the height of land between Daventry and Bicester, or even striking through gaps in the Cotswolds from the west coast, where the normal tides have a range of thirty feet. But such speculation wasn’t bringing him any closer to a plan. The sun was getting hot on his back.
There was a low, heavy drumming, and the crowd around him pressed closer to the road as a small helicopter settled to a landing fifty yards away. The pilot, a young woman in muddied nurse’s whites, sprang out and ran to the one live figure that hadn’t run away from the noise and down-draft: another young woman sitting in the mud with a baby in her arms. She took the baby from her, dragged her to her feet, and hurriedly led her to the ’copter and put her aboard. Then, making no answer to the diverse shouted questions that now began to come from the crowd, she quickly climbed aboard herself and took off.
Richard shook his head self-angrily and strode on. Watching such things made him feel horribly lonely, and got him no nearer to a plan, either.
After a bit, though, he had one formulated. He would reach the Cotswolds before the next high tide, harbor upon them during it, cross the Severn plain by way of Tewkesbury to the Malvern Hills during the next low, and finally make his way by the same stepping-stone process to the Black Mountains of Wales, which should be proof against the highest tides that might come. His ebbing exhilaration returned a bit.
Of course it might be wisest to return to the Chilterns or seek the moderate heights just east of Islip, but he told himself one ought to leave room there for the hordes that must still be pressing west, somehow, from London. Besides, he hated the thought of stopping anywhere, even on a safe-seeming height, and waiting and thinking. That was intolerable — one must keep moving, keep moving. And one feels loyalty toward a course of action one has just hammered out.
He finally told his Cotswolds-Malvern Hills-Black Mountains plan to two older men beside whom he walked for a space. The first said it was utterly impractical, a mad fool’s vaporings; the second said it would save half of England and should be communicated at once to responsible authorities (this man waved his cane wildly at a cruising helicopter).
Richard became disgusted with both of them, particularly the second, and tramped swiftly ahead, leaving them arguing loudly and angrily with each other. Suddenly all his exhilaration was gone, and he felt that both his plan and his reasonings were the purest rationalizations for an urge to rush west that had no more sense to it than the crowded scamper of the lemmings across Scandinavia to the Atlantic and death. Indeed, he asked himself, mightn’t shock and disorientation, in himself and all those around him, have stripped away civilized thought-layers and laid bare some primeval brain-node that responded only to the same call that the lemmings hear?
He continued to hurry, however, moving closer to the road and watching for an empty place or clinging-spot on one of the faster-moving vehicles. After all, lemming or no, his silly plan was all he had, and he had just remembered the most cogent objection to it made by the first man: that it was a good twenty-five miles to the Cotswolds.
As the morning tide flooded up the Bristol Channel, up the Severn, bringing wrecked ships and shredded hayricks, and buoys burst from their anchors, and telegraph poles trailing wires below, and torn houses, and the dead, flooding higher than last night, Dai Davies returned with it, past Glamorgan and Monmouth, twisting and turning like T. S. Eliot’s drowned Phoenician sailor, a fond Welshman poetic to the end, forty feet down.