After Me Comes the Flood Read online

  I asked her if the woman would carry out her threat to call the police, and she said, ‘I doubt it. What would she say? That she left her child alone and wasn’t there when he fell? That this man saved him and she thanked him with violence?’ She nodded at Alex. The wound on his lip was closing but the flesh was swollen and he darted out his tongue to moisten it. ‘I imagine she’s ashamed of herself. She should be.’

  Hester took a sandy blanket out of the bag and shook it, then folded it against her breast, and as she did she sent one of her long bright looks over to the corner where Alex was sitting. I saw something then that I couldn’t believe – something so peculiar that I blinked my eyes to clear them and looked again to be certain of it. Alex had pulled his knees up under his chin, and was pressing himself against the kitchen wall as if he wanted to seep into the bricks and plaster. But Hester didn’t look angry that he’d been accused of something so unthinkable, or afraid the woman had seen something in him that had passed the rest of us by. I didn’t find in her face the confused pity I was feeling, or even the most straightforward things – tiredness and hunger and anxiety. What I found instead was a long slow look of satisfaction, like a woman who’d come to the end of a day’s work sooner than expected. Then she smiled, and it wasn’t the sudden unfeigned smile that comes when you least expect it, but a kind of smirk.

  It shocked me more than anything else that day, and made everything I’d seen up to that moment shift and sharpen. I fumbled for a chair and knocked a knife to the floor. They all turned to stare at me, except Alex, who scratched over and over at the graze on the back of his hand. Hester turned very slowly away from him and said, ‘All right there, John?’ and smiled at me. It was the same warm, steady gaze that had greeted me when I arrived, in the same kindly ugly face, and everything shifted again and settled into its old patterns.

  Soon after that I came upstairs, and set it all down. These words on the page are problems I can’t solve, but I’ll keep at it – and sooner or later I’ll work them all out…

  SUNDAY

  I

  It had always been Walker’s habit to get up early and steal a march on the day. It had annoyed his mother, braced for a teenage son tangled in his sheets at noon; and it annoyed his wife, who wanted to be alone in the mornings when there was a chance of finding a jay on the lawn. But there it was: he found himself alert the moment his eyes opened; smoked before he drank or ate; and was never seen to be weary. Once – early on, before the days took on their pattern – Hester thought she’d beaten him to the kitchen, and had laughing laid out plates with a ringing of china on wood fit to quicken the dead, but he’d appeared a moment later, his grey hair bath-damp, smelling a little of cedar and on his second cigarette.

  On the morning of John’s fifth day, which Elijah would once have called the Lord’s Day (and still did, sometimes, when he forgot to mind his language), Walker stood in the glass-house watching the sun come up. The pitched roof with its lapping glass tiles filtered the early light through a rime of lichen and moss, so that it cast a greenish pall upon the floor. Already the air was thick with moisture, and Walker pushed open a window and watched the reflected garden slide across the pane. He stood a while with his face turned to the opening, feeling a slight chill that would be gone within the hour. The sun had reached the high grass verge that bounded the reservoir, and he wondered where Alex had slept that night, if he’d slept at all – once they’d found him lying at the foot of the embankment, as if he’d climbed from the reservoir, and falling exhausted down the incline slept like a child where he lay.

  The events of the day before were so vivid still that Walker wouldn’t have been surprised to find the woman at the window with the child in her arms. He hadn’t seen her, or the wound on the boy’s forehead, but overnight conjured up a lesion that opened to the bone, and eyes upturned to show their whites. Was it possible that Alex had hurt the boy? After all he was not well… He stooped to pick up a snail’s shell cleaned of its meat, and tossed it from palm to palm. It was weightless, and when he closed his fist it turned almost to dust. No – he could not believe that, or wouldn’t, at least. He opened his hand and let the fragments fall to the unswept floor.

  Before Walker had come, the glasshouse had been locked for a decade or more. He’d had no interest in it at first, with its sour damp smell of neglect, though he and Eve had idly tried the key one night and found the swollen door could not be moved. It was Elijah who’d finally forced his way in, setting his shoulder to the door and leaving a dent in the rotten wood. Walker had found him that same day in a cane armchair that listed on a broken leg. He’d mislaid the half-frown that gave him a constant grave sad look and smiling said: ‘It’s the nearest I can bear to going outside. I can see the sky – I almost feel the wind!’

  Together they’d unwound the lengths of cord that fastened the windows, and flung them open. Stale air crossed the painted wooden windowsills and left behind a very faint scent of peat and even – though only Walker claimed to have smelt it – of pollen and green leaves.

  The glasshouse had been built hastily on a whim, and in high winds the window frames creaked at their joints and shed thick fragments of paint. The floor was paved in terracotta, and the bodies of ants clotted in the seams where the tiles were joined. At night it took on the appearance of a small shadowed grove – the remains of vines and roses would seem to bloom in the quarter-light, and it was possible to imagine, above the dust and damp, the shocking scent of jasmine opening at night. In the corner a vase that belonged elsewhere held a bunch of purple sea lavender, its colours bright as the morning it was cut.

  Walker, who knew what work could be found for idle hands, took to spending mornings counting out seeds in their paper packets and pinning faded botanical prints to the walls. One morning he found under a bench a cactus in a mossy pot that had survived its long drought. It was greyish, like the skin of someone kept from daylight, and covered in spines that caught in the fabric of his shirt and irritated him later that night. Kneeling on the hard floor, he’d rocked back on his heels, holding the pot between his palms and raising it to the window – how had it clung on, there in the dark, with the soil at its roots shrinking as it dried? He raised it and drew in its scent, which was not of sap or leaves unfolding but something more earthy and enduring. When Eve came in a moment later she saw him in a new and unexpected light, revelling in something ugly and small with the uncomplicated pleasure of a child. It had pained her for reasons she didn’t understand, and later she found ways to be unkind.

  One afternoon Alex squeezed the seeds from a tomato he was eating, and rinsing them free from their flesh gave them to Walker in a square of white paper. ‘See what you can make of these,’ he’d said, and watched disbelieving as under Walker’s ignorant care a small vine surged up its wooden cane, and all summer put out dark fruit pointed at the tip like quails’ eggs.

  When he was thirty Walker had married a woman he’d found in the garden of someone else’s house, wrapped in a blue coat though summer had set in a week or so before. She was rather like a mouse, with pale brown hair cut close to her head so that it lay flat and gleaming, and very dark large eyes that darted about and never missed a movement anywhere. Her friends called her delicate but said it laughingly, because although she seemed frail, with her small slender limbs and long neck, there was something steely about her. Walker had teased her into removing the coat, and liked the way she leaned back in her chair with her arms hanging by her sides; he’d liked her clever wry commentary on the party as it unfolded in the darker corners of the garden, and liked buttoning her to the chin when the night grew chill.

  He soon discovered that her delicacy was a skill cultivated with some care – she managed never to suffer from anything likely to dull her eyes, but instead developed headaches and fits of breathless anxiety in car parks and long dull parties, and spent her wages on a man who cleansed her spleen through the soles of her small high-arched feet. There’d been some surprise when they marr
ied – those who knew him best suspected him of doing it out of mischief. But Walker inhabited his marriage as if it had been a cell he’d bought and furnished for himself. It required self-discipline and restraint; it left no time for mind or eye to wander; it occupied him with so many small tasks of care and attentiveness that it held in check the restlessness he’d always thought would see him alone at fifty. It required him to be needed, and always to feel that he required nothing in return.

  When his firm passed him files for a private clinic whose debts were so heavy the patients were in immediate danger of being turfed out of their beds, he’d flicked through the disordered paperwork with a prick of irritation – nothing was simpler, he’d always felt, than the neat ordering of incomings against outgoings, and the tidy accumulation of capital. The clinic had put its faith in God, and in an accountant of dedicated and patient corruption who over the course of forty years had drained its funding streams into many small channels of his own making.

  ‘You might find it easier,’ the chairman of the trustees had said, in an apologetic phone call early one morning, ‘to come and stay a day or so; no more than a week, certainly – we have room after all! – it’s the papers, you see – going back years – and to think how well we all liked him! He came to my daughter’s christening, you know – I can hardly believe it, and who knows how much of it all is false…’

  ‘They don’t really need you,’ his wife had said, her breath smelling bitterly of herbal tea. ‘Not half as much as me’ – but he went all the same.

  He’d imagined with pleasure a sinister red-brick place, three-storeyed and deep-shadowed, with gargoyles spitting from the gutters, but St Jude’s was a modern building set around a neat small courtyard, with windows that let in light from the east and an acre of garden. The staff came mostly from the convent and were trained in medicine and prayer – they wore modest wimples so stiff they looked as though they were made of paper and their voices were implacably kind. Inside, the retreat (no-one ever said ‘hospital’) resembled a suburban home, with pale floral wallpaper and sofas with tapestry cushions, and a vast television in what the staff called the ‘lounge’. A piano huddled in the corner of the room under a grey canvas cover, every now and then showing a pair of scratched wooden feet, and in the courtyard benches bore brass plaques in memory of benefactors or residents moved on to better things. The patients were largely wealthy and devout, under the care of a consultant who came each week in a cab paid for by the authorities, who had an eye to the scarcity of hospital beds and were kindly disposed to St Jude’s programme of gardening and devotions.

  Walker was greeted by a pair of trustees who talked in whispers, afraid the patients might overhear and become anxious for their future. He was given a room tactfully distant from the wards, with a pine cross above the bed and a view of the courtyard. He ate small plain meals alone. The task absorbed him, as he’d known it would, and late in the afternoons, content with his work, he’d go out to the courtyard to smoke. Curious, he kept close to the corners, watching staff move in patient circles between the gardens and the long dim corridors hung with watercolours of bluish hills and never meeting their eyes.

  It didn’t occur to him to wonder why he felt no regret that the work was time-consuming and circuitous, and that he took no pleasure in his wife’s occasional calls. Nor did he notice that he timed his courtyard walks by the movements of certain patients, pushing away his work and patting the pocket of his shirt for his cigarettes when he thought he might catch them on their way outdoors. He liked to watch the man who’d stand for an hour or more at the window, tugging fretfully at his beard as though summoning the courage to go out; and the boy with the long eyelashes and amber hair who surely couldn’t have been unwell – he was too quick to laugh, and would stand beside the older man lightly touching his elbow and talking quietly as if encouraging him to step out into the autumn rain. Then the women came and brought a change of air – Hester in a coat that smelt of cats and woodsmoke, and Clare, so like her brother; and Eve, who drew a black fringe like a wing across her eyes when he passed her in the courtyard, and was always at the old upright piano. Remembering that music, and how he heard it first through the open window of his room, Walker paused at the wooden bench in front of him, looking out over the dying lawn where Clare dragged her shadow across grass. It had been nothing but an annoyance, that incessant repeating of childish patterns as she disciplined her hands, and the melodies he thought he recognised – he shook his head: he ought to have fastened the window against the sound, and turned back to his papers and the task he’d been set.

  Behind him, Elijah opened the glasshouse door. His damp hair was combed into ridges against his skull, and he wore a dark tie printed with swallows. He paused on the step and looked up to the sloping glass ceiling; it was, he’d said more than once, the nearest he came these days to a chapel. He said, ‘Have you seen him?’, and picked a small fruit from the tomato vine. It had been left too long to ripen on its stem, and had split open; the lips of the broken skin were whitish with the beginnings of mildew, and between them showed the translucent flesh inside. He put it in his mouth and burst it against his palate with his tongue.

  Walker took a steel tack from the windowsill and began to pick at the black soil beneath his fingernails. ‘Alex? Not since last night.’

  ‘Our new friend John told me all about it, then let me win at chess…’ He smoothed his tie, and lowered himself into the chair. The cane creaked and shed a flake of paint. ‘A terrible business – I heard Clare crying this morning, though Hester said there was no need. I would like to see him. I’d like to see for myself how he is… they say he doesn’t remember it, you know. You don’t think he might have…’

  ‘I don’t.’

  Elijah smiled, and with his thumb tapped the arm of the chair. ‘No more do I. But still – he’s our responsibility, wouldn’t you say?’

  Walker unrolled his shirt sleeves, and buttoned them at the wrist. He shrugged the question away. ‘You look tired.’

  ‘I am. Saturdays tire me – they were always the burden, you see, not the day after. I’d sit up all night waiting for morning, reading and praying until I was hungry. Hard habit to break, after all those years…’ He tilted back to look at the roof, but closed his eyes against the sun, and tried instead to recall a church he’d seen once stranded on a fen, its roof borne up by angels with cobwebs in their mouths. ‘And what d’you make of our John?’ he said, remembering with a smile how the other man’s pale brown eyes had widened with shock under their heavy lids: we all just assumed you were mad.

  ‘Oh – John. I don’t need to make anything of him. There he is – nothing we can do about it now.’ Walker shrugged, and Elijah, turning away, smiled and said nothing.

  Not long after his last Sunday as a believer, Elijah had held a meeting in the study where he prepared his sermons late into the quiet nights. On his desk Strong’s Concordance was open at persevere, and above it a framed print of Bunyan’s Christian making his way to the Celestial City shone behind polished glass. Two of the church elders, arriving in dark suits and black ties as though the very worst had happened, listened with disbelieving sadness; the third and oldest had offered a series of kindly rebukes, but finding them met with silent agreement suggested instead that they pray. Elijah dazedly followed the familiar cadences – Amen Lord: let it be so, to the glory of Thy name – and noticed for the first time that his brother in Christ had taken to dyeing his hair.

  He’d known it would be painful to remove himself from the pulpit, with its high wooden rails stained darker where his hands had rested those past twenty years, but confronting his wife had been worse. He’d married her for her soft rich voice and her piety, and her faith in him almost matched that in her God. She hadn’t believed him at first, and nor had their daughters, though he suspected them of revelling in so unexpected a turn of events – later that night he heard the youngest laughing on a long high note cut off suddenly as though she’d pressed
a hand to her mouth. He was being tempted, she said, like Christ in the wilderness: would he give in so easily? He discovered that it was not merely a betrayal of a god too remote to notice or mourn his loss, but of something nearer and more easily hurt. They tried to find common ground; there was none. The best he could offer was a promise to think it over and to pray, if only he could: ‘I can but try,’ he said, finding that the loss of faith did not gain him freedom to deceive. He took the bag she packed him, and later found a Bible in the folds of his shirts.

  It was a priest who’d recommended St Jude’s to the bewildered preacher, who was unsuited to being alone but had no desire to talk to the faithless (he felt they had the advantage over him, having lost nothing). By the time he’d unpacked his bag in the large low-ceilinged room overlooking a courtyard where leaves spun against the wall, the cavity left when he lost his faith was filled with a weight of fear that grew heavier as the days passed. When asked what frightened him, what always occurred to him first was that he wasn’t sure how the sky was being held up; this he knew he couldn’t say, and instead took to shrugging and smiling, and gesturing vaguely out of doors. On the second Wednesday in November the visiting consultant, himself a lapsed atheist with a vice for prayer, diagnosed an anxiety disorder and recommended he stay as long as funds would permit. Elijah’s wife, patiently waiting for the backslider to return, took their daughters home to Scotland and wrote loving letters every week, in cards showing Bible texts so heavily wreathed in flowers he could never make them out.

  Elijah’s world dwindled around him. For the first time in his life, no-one ever sought his wisdom or advice, or measured everything he did against a Divine standard he couldn’t hope to achieve. Life pared down: he slept a little, ate a little, and watched autumn harden the earth. He avoided his fellow patients, not out of distaste but in case the sadness in him would prove contagious, and instead took command of a deep-seated chair set between two windows, where he sat for hours reciting silently the hymns he’d once sung, beating out their melodies with restless hands.