Free After the Rain by John Bowen

on a kind of normality again. Only Wesley Otterdale did not lose his haunted hollow look, and Muriel, lying apart from him at night with the rest of the women, worried and pined for him.
    *
    Then the tempest came.

CHAPTER SIX
The Tempest
    The raft had been provided with a set of diaries in octavo, a page to a day; the intention had been that Hunter should keep a log. Most of the pages in the earlier volumes were blank, the occasional entries brief: “Thunder today”, or “Trouble with sharks”. Since Arthur had taken over, these entries had become much more detailed, the log was written up every evening after supper. And the rest of us, although we had lost the sense of time and date before, could now tell Tuesday from Thursday again, and twelve from two.
    It was on the morning of the 26th of June 1966, that the tempest struck. I was fishing. Something had made me remember the season. I sat in the little shelter from which we fished, and remembered June.
    I remembered rainy Junes and sunny Junes. I remembered Sundays by the Serpentine, with the gramophones ’ discordances, and the Teddy Boys snatching self-consciously at each others’ towels. I remembered country cricket matches and river bathing, and punting down the green corridor of the Cherwell from Magdalen Bridge on drowsy afternoons. All those Oxford Junes! I remembered commemoration balls and college gardens, making notes in the sunny spaciousness of the Codrington Library, terrible parties with cucumber cup in the garden of the Perch Inn, and one curiously final morning on which I walked round Radcliffe Square over and over again in the sunlight, sucking at peppermints and waiting for my
Viva
. Then there was that neurotic summer session at the University of Indiana, when I washed cutlery in the canteen of a campus dormitory and wrote papers on the criticism of Eliot and Matthew Arnold. I remembered Junes by the sea—the dreary pier at Bournemouth, the aquarium at Blackpool , beach after beach littered with ice-cream papers, and the English making holiday glumly together in cotton dresses and cloth caps, sitting bolt upright in deck chairs or against the wall of the promenade. I remembered a writing holiday in a stone cottage not far from Blaenau Festiniog, where we had to empty our nightsoil secretly into a mountain stream. I remembered willow trees and midges and mosquitoes, and the Indian June of the monsoon season, though even the monsoon rains, I remembered, were intermittent and heavier when they came than this persistent and for-ever downpour.
June is bustin’ out all over
, I thought; but not this June, not this rainy June, which had followed a rainy May and would give place to a rainy July, a rainy August, month after rainy month, and year by year, while the waters rose, and our children were born with scales and a tail.
    Rain, rain, go away. Come again another day
, I said aloud, for the rain was blowing on my face, not falling in a straight line as it usually did.
It’s raining; it’s pouring. The old man is snoring. He went to bed, and he bumped his head, and he couldn’t get up in the morning
. The rain was blowing on my face, not steadily but as if somebody high in the sky where the rain curtain began were shaking it lazily, so that the curtain undulated. And the swell below the raft, I noticed, was much more pronounced.
    I wound in my fishing line, and went into the cabin. “There’s a wind getting up or something,” I said. Arthur was making up a list. He put his ball-point pen down on the table, and looked up. The table tilted, and the pen rolled off on to the floor. Arthur rose, and began to don his absurd yellow oilskins.
    “I doubt if there’s anything we can do about it,” I said.
    “We can at all events see what is happening.”
    The two of us went on deck together. The swell was stronger now, and, as we looked towards the east, we seemed to be looking up an incline. There was a rail running round the outside of the cabin wall,