grabbed Gary’s hand, and he squeezed back.
7
The next day George Camden phoned Lily early at her hotel. Camden was the smooth ex-military oppo who had retrieved them from Barcelona. Camden said that the summons to lunch with Nathan Lammockson that day was confirmed. Lammockson’s “hydrometropole,” as Camden put it, was in Southend, some fifty kilometers east of central London at the mouth of the Thames Estuary. A chopper would pick up Lily and Gary from London City Airport at eleven that morning.
Gary met Lily outside the hotel, in the rain. He was gazing into his handheld.“You followed the news? Remember that North Sea storm on the car radio? Well, it’s on its way south.”
The rain was already lashing down, and now a storm was on the way. “Great.”
“Overnight flooding all down the east coast…”
He showed her the handheld. The BBC news was all about the weather, with images of the Tyne breaking its banks and forcing its way into the fancy restaurants along Newcastle’s Quayside. The island of Lindisfarne, only ever connected to the mainland by a tidal causeway, was cut off, stranding pissed-off holidaymakers. Beaches in Lincolnshire had been damaged. There were flood alerts out for East Anglia, for Boston and King’s Lynn, where the sea was challenging new flood barriers around the Wash. And so on. The weather girl’s animated map showed the storm as a milky swirl of cloud that was still heading south.
Lily asked,“Is this unusually bad? If it keeps coming south, is London threatened?”
“They haven’t said so. I don’t think this is even a particularly powerful storm. If it combines with all the fluvial runoff or a high tide it could become a difficult event. But I don’t know. Things seem to have changed.”
“Kristie, my niece, you know, said sea levels have risen by a meter.”
His eyebrows rose. “A meter? Where the hell did that come from? A meter rise wasn’t in the old climate- change forecast models until the end of the century, even in the worst case.”
“I wouldn’t believe everything Kristie says. She’s quite liable to have mixed up her meters with her centimeters.”
“Well, if she’s right it would make a mess of everything… I just don’t know, Lily. I’m three years out of the loop, and Britain’s not my area anyhow.” He glanced at her. “Kind of stressy, your sis.”
“Always was. She’s not dumb, though. She took a law degree. But she ended up in events, handling people rather than dealing with cases. She has that kind of personality, I guess. Bright, bubbly, engaging. A bit fragile. But on the other hand, neither you or I are raising two kids.”
“That’s true enough,” he conceded.
After their years together he knew the rest: that Lily had never married, and it was many years since she had had a relationship that lasted much beyond six months. At one point she had sworn off men entirely. A base commander had hit on her, and when she didn’t come over he threatened to put her on sentry duty: a pilot qualified on three different birds, stuck on the wire. The guy was later drummed out of the service for “command rape,” in the jargon. But the damage to Lily’s capacity for relationships was permanent. She’d never meant to end up alone at age forty, but that was the way it worked out.
The handheld flashed up a new projection by the BBC, showing how the storm might curve into the Thames estuary later in the day.
And then the news channel cut away to a breaking story from Sydney, Australia. Picture-postcard images of the landmarks, the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, were interspersed with scenes of rising waters in Darling Harbour and Sydney Cove and Farm Cove. The water was already splashing over the bank walls around the Opera House and spilling onto the curving cobbled pedestrian footway. For now it was a novelty; tourists filmed the incident with their phones and leapt back squealing from the water, an adventure that made their holiday memorable. But in the Royal Botanic Gardens to the south of the Opera House water was gushing from broken drains and ponding over the grass. And out of town at Bondi, would-be surfers looked down on a beach entirely hidden by breaking waves.
Lily found it hard to take in this news, as if it was crowded out by the images she’d seen of Britain. Flooding in Sydney? How was that possible?
Gary looked thoughtful, puzzled.
Another headline flashed for their attention. The Test match at the Oval, between England and India, had been abandoned for another day.
The car arrived.
8
City Airport was east of Greenwich and the Isle of Dogs. They endured another slow jerking ride, driving north of the river along the A13. They peered out at the towers around Canary Wharf, glimpsed through the rain. By the time they reached the airport, according to the news on Gary’s handheld, people had died in the flooding at King’s Lynn and Hunstanton, around the Wash, and the storm had pushed down the east coast as far as Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft.
The airport was small, the runways sheeted by rainwater and battered by winds, but planes were taking off and landing, leaping up like salmon from alarmingly short runs.
The AxysCorp chopper was the same lightweight new model that had picked them up from Barcelona. They boarded quickly and the chopper soared into the air. The pilot seemed to have total confidence in his machine, despite the buffeting wind. Lily felt confident, too, now that she was in the bird, more so than in a car squeezing its way through the crammed and troubled streets of London, for here she was in her element.
East London opened up beneath her. The Thames was a band of ugly gray. The neat line of the Thames Barrier, just a kilometer from the airport, was stitched across the water, its steel cowls shining in the rain. Gary pointed out that the Barrier was closed, the massive yellow rocking beams lifted beside each pier, and foam was thrown up as white-crested waves slammed against the raised gates.
The bird rose higher, dipped its nose, and soared east down the Thames estuary and over lorry parks and storage sites and defunct factories, the gray-brown industrial zone that surrounded London. Lily was struck by how heavily developed the flood plain was, with new housing estates and shopping precincts in Barking, Woolwich and Thamesmead sparkling in the rain like architects’ models. She made out the soaring bridge at Dartford where the M25 orbital motorway crossed the river, the last crossing before the sea. Streams of cars and freight from the docks at Tilbury and Grays queued at the toll gates for the bridge and the tunnels. A little further east both riverbanks were more or less walled with glass, huge retail developments summoned into existence by the motorway.
Further east yet, as the estuary slowly widened, she saw the sprawling docks of Tilbury to the north, and to the south the matching development of Gravesend, beyond river-lashed mud flats. All this was downstream of the Barrier, outside its putative protection. The Barrier was designed to protect central London from tidal surges heading upstream. Further on and the river swung around to the north, widening rapidly. Even out here there was extensive development, with acres of refineries and oil stores and gas tanks at Coryton and Canvey Island, an ugly industrial sprawl. And then the estuary opened out to embrace the sea.
Southend-on-Sea was a tangled old town that hugged the coast inside the line of an A-road to the north, a trace across the landscape. Lily made out a remarkably long pier, a narrow, delicate-looking line scratched across the surface of the sea. Waves broke against the town’s sea wall, sending up silent sprays of white, and water pooled on the promenades.
The chopper took them over Southend itself to a small helipad a little further to the east, close to Shoeburyness. A pier roofed by Plexiglas led off over a stretch of sandy beach to what looked like a small marina, a row of blocky buildings with boats tethered alongside. But the “buildings” were afloat, Lily saw, sitting on fat pontoons.
Despite the gathering wind, the pilot dropped them down with scarcely a bump. A couple of AxysCorp
