After Me Comes the Flood (9 page)

‘Children adore Alex – they climb all over him like he’s a friendly dog.’ She watched the two with such pride and gentleness, it transformed her face: her fine eyes seemed to broaden and spread, pushing at the lines and furrows that coarsened her features, making her, for a brief moment, handsome as a healthy girl. Catching John’s eye, she flushed, and the effect fractured; she looked, he thought, rather astonished, guilty, as if she’d been caught out in a secret vice. ‘Here comes Clare,’ she said, rearing up on her knees and waving the bunch of drying sea lavender over her head: ‘Move along a little, John – the shadows are getting longer now, there’s plenty of room.’

II

Things have changed – I can feel it from here. My mother used to go out on to the doorstep at the end of summer and scent the air like a dog and say, ‘Change of season coming,’ and go back inside and put the kettle on as if she felt a chill. It was always hard to believe she could be right, but it would never be long before the leaves turned. I saw it happen yesterday: not just the end of the heatwave – though thank God, I think it’s coming – but one complete and final change, as if the tide’s going out and won’t ever come back again.

In the house where I grew up, there was a painting in the dining room. I always took the same seat at the table (even now I’ll sit with my back to the window and with the wall to my right, if I can – anything else makes me uneasy), and I could see it as I ate. Years later I found a copy and meant to hang it in the shop, although I never did. The picture shows a woman in a black dress with a pale anxious face, sitting at a dinner table. You can just see a man sitting almost out of the frame, and he’s talking to her, but she isn’t listening – she’s looking straight out of the canvas. She has a small mouth, and it’s half-open, as if she’s waiting for someone and has just seen them coming. She has a glass of red wine in her hands, and on the table in front of her there’s a jug of wine so dark it looks black. There are lamps with red shades, and the flowers on the table are red, and red catches the silver candlesticks and the ice bucket on the white tablecloth. The whole painting is saturated with colour and light, and seeing it there was like finding a gap in the drab walls of the house, with something realer and more vivid just the other side. When I was young it used to frighten me – I didn’t think a painting should look at me like that. Sometimes I’d stand directly in front of it, and see my own reflected face laid over hers, and I would wonder which of us was painted, and who was watching whom.

Everything that happened today brought that painting back to me as clearly as if it were hanging on the wall between the windows. I’ve been outside them all looking in, or thought I had; it has been as though I were holding them in my hands between the covers of a book, so that when I grow tired of them I can set them all down and find a better story elsewhere. But I begin to feel myself being drawn against my will – it’s as if one day I passed that painting and from the corner of my eye saw the woman in the black dress reaching out to give me a glass of wine.

After I came back from walking on the salt-marsh I sat with Hester for a long time. The day I saw her first she’d looked at me as if I’d been numbers scribbled on a piece of paper that could be added up, and I felt as if she knew me then as well as anyone ever has, or is likely to. I wish I hadn’t described her as ugly. I’ve seen what happens to that face of hers when she looks at Alex – her bright dark eyes seem to refine and illuminate the rest of her, and make her beautiful.

We sat together watching the emptying beach. I could see the child I’d spoken to, playing with Alex in the shallow pool between the rocks and the sea – I remembered wondering where his mother had gone, but by then it was late in the afternoon and I was tired, and my head had begun to ache. The pieces of rock where we sat soaked up the sun, and sent its heat into my blood and bones. Every time I opened my eyes I’d see Hester still sitting like Buddha with her legs crossed, patiently watching Alex playing with the child, and each time the tall boy with his hair lit amber by the sun and the child in his green T-shirt would be further away until we couldn’t hear them laughing and shrieking in the water any more. When I closed my eyes for the last time it must have been to sleep for a long while, because I was woken by the sound of footsteps thudding into the sand. At first I thought it was my own blood beating in my head but it grew nearer and louder, and when I looked up a woman was running towards us with her arms outspread, shouting. When she reached us she kicked up the sand and it went in my eyes, and for a moment I was blinded. I turned away and cleared them, and recognised her as the woman I’d last seen on the marshes, telling her son to thank the strange man who’d known the sound of a curlew.

She’d been crying, and must have come a long way – sweat dripped from her forehead into her eyes and ran down with the tears and gathered into a stream under her chin. ‘Have you seen him?’ she was saying, ‘my boy – he’s in a green T-shirt – have you seen him? I’ve been looking and I can’t find him. He was with a man with red hair – did you see him?’ All of this came out between deep rasping breaths, and her eyes were so wide I could see the whites of them all around. I tried to get up but my legs had gone to sleep, and I had to brace myself against the rock. Hester took her by the shoulders and said, ‘Calm down sweetheart, calm down, stop and breathe. That’s right, we’ll find him, he won’t be far. That’s right; that’s right.’ She said those last words over and over until it was really just a soft and soothing hiss: ’
ssri, ’ssri
… Then the woman recognised me, and turned her body slightly to catch me in her distress. I felt it reach me – the pulse in my head began to beat harder and faster. The woman’s anguish was horrible – although she was calmer she shivered violently, and the skin was drawn tight across her cheekbones, making her seem to have been starved in the short space since I’d seen her last. Hester remained as she always was, a solid calm presence, still murmuring to the woman so that she too had to lower her voice, although she asked the same question over and over – ‘Have you seen him? Where’s he gone? Did you see him? Where’s he gone?’

Hester questioned her, as if she had authority over her and the whole beach and everyone on it: the poor woman had fallen asleep, beaten into the shade by the sun and worn out by the wind. She’d watched her son from the corner of her eye as he played with a kind young man on a half-empty beach where surely no-one was ever lost or hurt. He was a talkative boy and trusting, but not stupid; sure he’d talk to strangers but not go anywhere with them; he knew better than that. She berated herself for having fallen asleep – ‘But he seemed so nice, just a young man, not much more than a boy himself really; they were just over there and I was so tired…’ While she was still talking, pleading partly for help and partly for forgiveness, Hester – still gripping the woman’s hands – turned to me and said, very calmly and quietly, ‘Can you see Alex?’

My eyes were still sore from the sand and my vision was blurred, but I shaded them from the sun and scanned the beach back and forth two or three times. The light coming back from the hard-packed white sand was so dazzling I felt it pierce through to my already aching head, and it was hard to tell what was heat-haze pooling on the beach, and where the sea began. I could see Clare crouching by her collected shells nearby, making spirals out of cockle shells and not noticing the tension that had suddenly bound us tightly to a stranger. Our three shadows reached her red plastic bucket and made it dark, but she didn’t look up. Further off a tall pair made thin and fragile by the distance walked slowly at the water’s edge. ‘I can’t see him.’ I said. ‘I don’t think he’s there.’ My words went further and did more than I meant them to. The woman had given in to Hester’s soothing, but when she heard me she stiffened, became combative. ‘That man he was with, the young man with the red hair, he’s with you?’

‘He’s with me,’ said Hester.

The other woman had been holding Hester’s hands, or letting her own be held, but when she heard this she pulled them out, and her eyes, which hadn’t left the other woman’s face, narrowed with sudden distrust. I felt the air change slightly as her anxiety flared into anger. She’d been angry before, but it had been turned inward and made into guilt. What I’d said gave her liberty to fling it at other targets. Hester stepped away from her and held up her hands like someone fending off a blow. The woman said ‘What…’ and shook her head violently. ‘What? He’s with you? Then…’ Stumbling on the sand, which must have burnt her bare feet, she moved quickly round the blankets and books and empty water bottles that staked our claim to the beach. ‘Ben?’ She pushed past me, not maliciously but because she couldn’t really see either of us any more. ‘Ben, are you here, can you hear me?’ She slid behind the black rocks we’d been leaning against and raised her voice. It was compressed by the rocks and I thought: He wouldn’t hear you, even if he was nearby, even if we were keeping him out of sight. ‘Answer me, darling. Mummy isn’t cross with you. Ben? Can you hear me?’

I saw Hester standing with her hands on her hips watching the woman. She was less impassive now, biting hard on her bottom lip. I said, ‘I saw them together earlier. The boy wanted to see inside one of the boats on the marshes – maybe Alex took him there?’ Hester took this in on a low breath, then said, ‘Right,’ and gripped my shoulder. She shook her hair back from her forehead. ‘Look, be quiet – she’s coming back.’ Then she called out: ‘Sweetheart?’ It was an endearment she used without discrimination, but now it had changed; it wasn’t mollifying but condescending, as if she could use it to put an opponent in her place. The woman had appeared again from between the rocks; her flash of anger had gone, and she was wringing her hands. ‘He isn’t there, he’s not there…’

‘Of course not’ – Hester put an arm across the woman’s shoulders – ‘of course not. We’d’ve seen him, wouldn’t we?’ Turning the woman to face her, she put a hand on either side of her face and said intently, ‘The man he was with is called Alex. Did you speak to him?’

The woman nodded eagerly – her mistrust of Hester had gone, dissolved by the stronger woman’s gaze, and she was looking at her again with a desperate pleading face: ‘Just a bit, an hour ago I think. Ben wanted someone to play football with and my head ached, and the man was nearby – he was young and he smiled at me… they were there, just over there’ – she flung out her arm – ‘I don’t understand, how could they get so far?’ Her voice ended on a drawn-out wail.

‘You mustn’t panic. You won’t find him by crying, now will you?’ Hester bent awkwardly and picked up a half-empty bottle of water. ‘Have some of this.’ The woman winced as she drank and I thought it would be warm and unpleasant by now. I began to feel agitated by what I knew – the boy had probably begged to be taken back to the boat to spy for faces at the windows, and Alex would have taken him, I was sure of it, not seeing anything to threaten the happy day. I stepped forward and put out my hand thinking I’d tell the woman, but the order of the house had established itself here too, and I deferred to Hester, and stepped back again. Hester waited for the other woman to stop sipping at the bottle, then said, ‘You were out on the marshes, earlier in the day?’ She nodded. ‘Do you think your son might have gone back there?’

‘Not alone. He’s only five years old – he would never get that far alone, he’d get lost, he would never go by himself…’ Then the realisation of what she’d said struck her – he wasn’t alone and lost, he’d been taken away from her – and she threw down the water bottle. It landed beside Clare, on her knees beside a mandala of cowries. She noticed for the first time the three of us standing there and came over, frowning, looking from me to Hester and back again. She came and stood close by me, smelling of salt. I said, ‘She’s lost her little boy,’ and she grimaced.

‘But we’ll find him, John. Won’t we?’ Then she said to the woman, more loudly, ‘We’ll find him for you,’ but the woman wasn’t listening. Without turning to speak to Hester she ran heavily over the sand and I watched her heels sinking into the fine powder. We three looked at each other and followed, Hester moving a little behind me, and Clare running lightly ahead. I remember watching the woman’s bare feet thudding on the concrete of the car park and wincing as if I could feel it too, but she went on running and calling her son’s name, although even if he’d been able to hear her it came out so high and frantic it was like the seagulls crying. Many of the cars were gone by then, as people had tired of being battered by the sun and had gone home to lie in the shade until evening made life bearable. I looked for the boy with his fishing lines but he was gone too, with his white marks like a threat on the tarmac, and the shed selling crabs and cockles had closed its shutters. I remember being surprised that Hester, carrying so much weight on her stomach and thighs, could run so far and so fast. I could hear her breath heaving in and out of her but it didn’t slow her pace, and she reached the edges of the marsh just after us.

By then the tide was coming in fast: fingers of water crept across the cracked mud, and though the woman called and called, and Hester’s breath behind me hissed on the back of my neck, I thought I could hear it trickling up from underneath. Then suddenly I couldn’t hear anything because the woman stopped in her tracks and put her hands up to her head and screamed, not a high woman’s noise but deep and rasping and terrible, and it silenced everything else. I’d never heard anything like it and hope never to again – it dried my tongue and my stomach fell through me. I’d stopped running when I heard it, and Hester ran into me and knocked the breath out of me: I bent double and when I straightened up the woman was silent, which was worse than the screaming, because everything else was silent too, and there was a long empty moment when the water stopped creeping towards us over the mud, and we tried to see what she’d seen. She stood pinned to the ground, her hands still raised to her head, and I thought stupidly that if the wind blew she’d fall where she stood like a toppled statue.

When we moved either side of her on the narrow path and saw what was coming, Hester gasped and I heard a groan that can’t have been from Clare, so I suppose it must have come from me. Coming slowly towards us and with his head bowed and loose so that it swayed a little as he walked was Alex, and he was carrying the child. The bright green T-shirt was muddy and dragged up over his chest. His body sagged between Alex’s arms, and one of his trainers was missing. Alex must have been able to see us on the path but he didn’t lift up his head or call out, only went on walking, and the boy’s dangling limbs swung as he walked.

I marvelled at how slowly and painfully the blood thudded against my ears, and then the woman drew her breath in a gulp and screamed her son’s name. She dashed forward, pushing Hester into the rough grass, and snatching the boy lowered him on to the path. By the time we reached her the child was trying to sit up, and seemed not frightened but dazed. Where the T-shirt was pulled up over his thin torso he had a long fresh graze, and before his mother wrapped him in the cardigan she’d been wearing I saw a few dark splinters in the skin. The woman had become very calm, no more distressed than if her child had caught a cold – she stroked his hair and murmured, ‘We’d better get you in the warm, hadn’t we,’ although the sun was still trying to scald the water on the marshes. There was a bruise on the child’s forehead so recent it was still swelling as I watched, and when I saw it I became aware that Alex was standing a few paces away, wringing his hands and saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry’, over and over. His T-shirt, white when we’d left the house that morning, was covered in patches of mud that were like inkblots, making a pattern like the drab wings of a giant moth. He too was grazed, down the length of his right arm.