After Me Comes the Flood (12 page)

Alex could not stay, nor did he want to – what else could he do but go with Hester to her empty house the other side of the forest. It seemed obvious too that Elijah should come, and when he’d paused at the door and flinched at the low winter clouds Alex had taken his arm, and it was hard to say who leaned on whom. Walker – his work long done – watched them go, and staff on the morning shift found all their files ordered and annexed, and the cross taken down from the wall.

The uneventful patterns they’d established at St Jude’s were repeated in the house without any particular effort or thought. Letters for Elijah were forwarded and became scarce; Alex ranged through the house painting shabby windowsills and replacing handles on the doors, or sleeping for hours in the kitchen alcove while Hester made the air thick with steam as pans simmered on the stove and too many loaves of bread proved under white cloths.

Eve – who’d returned to her London flat and despised its steel stairs and view of a slow canal – arrived one afternoon with no forewarning, her hair cut short as a pelt and a sheaf of music under her arm. She said to Hester: ‘I never did find a piano that suited me better than yours,’ and chose a room from which she could see the long path that led to their door. One afternoon Elijah found her bent over fallen sheets of music, and stooping beside her to pick up a page saw a woodcut of an ape in slippers and a bonnet huddled in an armchair.

‘“Messalina’s Monkey”,’ said Eve, vaguely. ‘Just some old song.’

‘Is it quite all right? It looks sick.’

‘Dead, I think – music and monkey both.’ She took the score from him. ‘Did you sleep? I didn’t… that light from the reservoir comes in like yellow water – I dream that it’s rising round my bed and the sheets are wet and I’m cold…’ She shivered.

Elijah laughed. ‘Can’t you just close your curtains, child? Let me take these – I’ll walk with you.’ He went ahead of her down the hall, pushing open the door to the music room and standing back to let her pass. It was winter then, and dark by half past four; Hester had turned on all the lamps and they threw circles of brighter red on the papered walls. Elijah helped Eve raise the piano lid, and pulled out the tapestry stool so she could sit. She bowed and laughed, and bending her head played a swift high run that made an ornament somewhere buzz in sympathy.

‘I’ll leave you,’ said Elijah, then, turning at the door, he said on impulse, ‘Do you ever hear from him? Walker, I mean – I thought you might talk again, you and he…’ He regretted it at once – her narrow back stiffened, and she lifted her hands from the keys. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t…’

‘Oh! No, no… I did wonder whether anyone knew, or saw – no-one says anything here, do they? We’d all rather be in the dark…’ She played a low chord that put notes where they ought not to be, and Elijah felt it in his stomach. Then she said, ‘I wish I could explain how it felt, when I saw him that day – it was impossible, I never thought it could happen – he was just a stranger and nothing to me but it was as though I looked up and recognised him… Do you understand how troubling that is? And after that what else could I have done, it would be like finding a door half-open and hearing a voice you know on the other side and never going in.’ The chord hung and died in the air. Then she said, very quietly, as though she were ashamed of herself, ‘Sometimes I stand at the window and imagine him there on the lawn and my throat
aches
, and I lift up my arms as if I could reach him through the glass.’ Then she laughed, and turned in her seat to look at him. ‘Sometimes I think I don’t even like him, not really; he told me once that he doesn’t much care for music – can you imagine! – and that he only wanted me because he knew I could never want him. And I wonder if that’s why he’s angry with me sometimes, because it wasn’t a choice, or something reasonable… but I was only ever glad. How could I not be?’ She looked down at her hands, and plucked at a shred of skin beside a nail. It tore, and she winced and flicked it to the carpet. ‘He knows where we are. He knows he can come when he likes. But he won’t – he hasn’t got the courage.’ She shrugged, dismissed him with a nod and turned away, then began to dash at the piano with her hands. When, not more than a week later, Walker joined them in the blue-lit dining room one night as though he’d always been there, Eve looked at the preacher across the table and arched her black eyebrows:
Well! Who’d’ve thought?

The glasshouse door swung open, and seeing Eve at the threshold with a glass in each hand Elijah stood, watching Walker make a movement with his shoulders that might have been a shrug or a flinch. The preacher smiled behind his beard, and loosening his tie he bowed a greeting to Eve and said, ‘I am going to find Alex.’ Behind him Walker knocked a jar from its bench and scattered shards of glass across the tiled floor. ‘
Gird thy loins up, Christian soldier
!’ whispered Elijah. He bent to pick up the largest piece, and went out laughing.

Eve watched him go, then said: ‘I couldn’t find Alex this morning, though I looked everywhere I could think of. Hester says he’s all right, and that he slept the whole night through, but how would she know?’ She shrugged. ‘There’s nothing we can do but go on like we always have. Oh, Walker – how can you be so clumsy, with such wonderful hands? Let me help you…’

II

That same morning John had woken late, the joint of his middle finger tender where he’d gripped the pen as he sat writing until dawn. In the kitchen downstairs Hester had passed him strong tea and toast with honey, then gone out to the garden with a pair of shears, snapping their blades as she went. He thought perhaps she’d avoided his gaze, as though she knew he’d caught her out in something secret the night before, but the idea was troubling and he shrugged it away. He had no appetite, and chewed wearily at the crust for a few minutes, then carried his plate to the sink and rinsed it under hot water. On the windowsill above the sink a housefly washed its hands, and John watched a while then frightened it away. Then he took his plate to the shabby dresser in the corner, where a soft white bundle was fastened by cobwebs to the corner of a shelf. He imagined it seething with small spiders waiting to hatch, and shuddering turned away to sit alone at the long oak table, tracing the name
EADWACER
cut into the wood. Not since arriving at the house had he seen the table empty – on any other morning he’d have found Alex leaning on his elbows and tearing at new loaves of bread, or Clare caressing the spiteful cat. Perhaps I really am alone, he thought – perhaps everything that happened yesterday has broken us up for good, and they’ve all gone back to whatever’s waiting the other side of the forest. He strained to hear footsteps rapping on the bare wooden floors above, or Eve at her piano, but there was nothing. Having prized solitude for years he discovered it made him uneasy; he stood so suddenly that he knocked his chair to the floor, and went out to the garden to see who he could find.

Up on the raised verge beside the reservoir Clare sat cross-legged, patting at something in the long grass. Between the girl and where he stood the lawn was empty but for a herring gull in the shade of the diseased elm, so white and rigid he thought at first it was cast in plastic or glass. The gull screamed once then turned its head and regarded John, frowning, and shifted its splayed yellow feet.

‘
You
again,’ he muttered fondly, remembering the gull out on the marshes. In the still air of the garden it was the nearest he had to a companion, and he edged forward with a hand outstretched, feeling foolish but determined to reach it if he could: ‘Should you be here? Were you invited? I don’t remember asking you to come…’ Its tail was blackened as if it had been burned or dipped in ink; the bird switched it from side to side and retreated deeper into the shade. The company of birds had been so rare since summer set in that John would have liked to say ‘Look! Look at its eye, just like a drop of custard!’ but no-one was there. Then from somewhere in the house behind him he heard someone laugh; he raised an arm to shield his eyes from the sun and saw movement in the glasshouse. He could just make out, through the green-stained panes above the low brick wall, Eve’s black curls above her thin neck, and Walker’s greying head. They stood side by side at the window making slow definite movements at something out of sight, and there was a stillness and contentment in their bodies at odds with everything he’d seen before.

He began to move towards them across the lawn, thinking he’d rap at the window and gesture to the gull, which opened and closed its beak as though laughing silently at something just out of sight. He wanted to say, ‘I think it followed us here, all the way from the marshes,’ and see if Eve would smile, or even Walker with the reluctant curl of his mouth that he already knew well. But as he came within the shadow of the glasshouse he heard the woman laugh again, not as she often did like an actress obeying her script, but quietly as if it had been a private remark. If John had forgotten by then that he was nothing more than an intruder, the feeling returned with its full force of loneliness and shame. He fell back, and finding himself exposed and vulnerable on the bright empty lawn walked swiftly to a pair of copper beeches that grew against the garden wall. Their black glossy leaves sheltered him as deeply as a curtain might, and pressing into the shade he found he could draw near the glasshouse without being seen. After a brief silence, in which John made out Eve’s raised hand pouring soil into a pot that Walker held, he heard her voice carry clearly through the dead air: ‘He went swimming again last night, you know. I’m afraid he’ll knock himself out in the dark, and no-one will be there to find him…’ She turned her back to the window, and John saw plainly through her shirt the sharp bones of her shoulder blades, and between them a darkening blot of sweat. Then she put her hand up to Walker’s shoulder, and brushed something from his clothes. ‘He’s taken to John, anyway – I saw them together by the reservoir two nights ago. I followed them down, I don’t know why. Perhaps I shouldn’t have, but we don’t know anything about him, not really, only that he came from there… when they came back they were laughing, and John was saying the dam couldn’t possibly break – but we knew that all along, didn’t we?’ John, fastened to the ground by the sound of his name in her mouth, strained towards her. Then she said, ‘He’s very like you, you know,’ and smiling turned back to the window, making deft movements with her hands at something out of sight. The ease between them fractured and for a while there was silence.

The gull padded scowling towards him and screamed again. The sound startled the pair inside the glasshouse – another of the windows flew open and a small white pebble was flung out. It startled the gull, which gave a weary thrust of its wings, shot John an aggrieved glare, and wheeled away towards the reservoir where Alex and Clare lay unmoving on the bright grass of the embankment. It found a rising current of hot air, and rode it out of sight.

‘D’you remember being a child and drawing birds so they made the letter
M
?’ said Eve, watching it go and bringing her tilted head to rest against Walker’s shoulder. ‘And every house had a chimney, and the sky was a blue stripe with nothing between it and the green earth.’

‘They say that’s how the Greeks got their alphabet,’ said Walker. ‘Cranes flew over and made all the letters with their wings and legs. When the last crane in England was shot, it was the end of the great poets.’ Inclining his head so that it almost rested on hers, he arrested the movement and said, with a return to his usual careless voice, ‘All nonsense obviously. Give me water – my mouth is dry.’ John, beech leaves pricking him through his shirt, felt a curious surge of envy:
I’d’ve told her all of this
, he thought,
if only she had asked
.

‘The glasses are empty and there’s no more ice. I don’t think I ever knew what thirst was like till now – that your tongue could be sore with it, and your lips crack. On the radio this morning they said it would rain tomorrow or the next day or the next, but I can’t imagine it, can you? It would be like a miracle.’

Walker laughed and said: ‘
Western wind, when wilt thou blow, the small rain down can rain
…’ and the words were so unlike him that it was like watching him hand her a gift of something stolen. After that there was silence again, and no movement from the windows. John waited, his bent back aching, thinking of his notebook and all its empty pages. Surely it was his duty now to watch and wait and listen? What else might be said – might she say his name again, with that particular inflexion that leant on the sound as though she were trying not to laugh? Then Eve began to speak in a slow soft murmur, pointing down towards the reservoir at something John couldn’t make out. It delighted the man at her side, who, with an impulsiveness at odds with his usual careful gestures, kissed her forehead where her hair parted. She subsided again into the circle of his arm.

For a while John watched them – so still and quiet he thought he could see their bodies fall and rise on same breath – then shame and loneliness overwhelmed his curiosity and he turned to go. He might have made his way unseen back to the house and the safety of his dark narrow room if the gull had not returned, bearing a grievance. It settled between John and the glasshouse, shook its white haunches, threw back its head and let fly a volley of cries that rang across the empty lawn. Walker straightened, and leaning forward peered through the murky pane of glass. His gaze scanned past John and rested for a moment on the bird, which had begun to dig with its yellow beak at something hidden in the scorched grass, then slowly returned and rested without surprise on the watching man. John began to raise his hand in cautious greeting, but Walker’s gunmetal eyes were levelled at him in amusement and challenge. John fell back a step or two and felt the blood gather in his cheeks: he’d been found out after all – he was nothing more than a lonely peeping Tom. He waited for the mockery that surely was coming – for the glasshouse door to fly back on its hinges; for Walker’s scorn and Eve’s half-pitying contempt. But while he waited, wondering if he would ever be able to exhale the breath straining in his lungs, Walker turned back to the girl at his side and pushing aside the neck of her T-shirt kissed her again in the hollow behind her collarbone with as much deliberation as if he were writing something down. Then he raised his head again, half-turned towards the window, and slid a look at their watcher from the corner of his eye.

Something started then in John, which ought to have started long before, when he was young and might have borne it better. A surge of envy rose in his throat as he watched, and he put a hand to his mouth as if he’d taste not his own palm but the damp white skin at the nape of her neck. All at once, without warning or effort of memory, he saw each small detail of a woman who hours before had been a stranger. The bitten nails at her fingertips and the dry earth ingrained in the soles of her feet were secret and prized – he’d have liked to conceal each part of her from any eyes but his. He could not have despised Walker more if it had been he and not John who’d lied his way to their table. A pain set up very low in his stomach – or not quite a pain but an insistent tugging – gentle at first but which would sharpen later when he lay in the narrow iron frame of his bed, and later still when he expected it least, as if hooks had been pushed through his flesh and were sometimes forgotten, sometimes pulled at steadily or with bursts of malice. That his mind and body together would conspire to such treachery made him gasp aloud; he pressed a hand to his belly as though he could suppress the ache, and turning his back swiftly crossed the lawn with blood beating painfully in his ears. When he reached the long shadow of the house he looked up and saw Hester there at the door with a wine-stained cloth thrown over her shoulder, eating a green apple.

‘Dear John,’ she said, ‘you really ought not to stand in the sun. Are you feeling sick? I think I have tablets for indigestion somewhere, or a bottle of milk of magnesia: come inside, won’t you, and we’ll see what we can do. That sort of thing never lasts long.’