After Me Comes the Flood Read online

  It was there he first saw Walker, smoking in the courtyard on a memorial bench (It Is a Far, Far Better Rest I Go To, Than I Have Ever Known: Eleanor Mary, 1920–2005). He had known at once that the grey-haired man who frowned in the shadow of an upturned collar was nothing to do with either the staff or the patients – he kept apart from them all as effectively as if he were sheltered behind panes of glass. Months later, as the two men shared wine with Hester in the blue-lit dining room the other side of the forest, they’d laughed and shaken their heads: ‘To think,’ Elijah had said, ‘there we were, all silently watching, and not a word once passed between us…’

  At the beginning of his second week in St Jude’s, long before Walker took up his post in the small offices choked with paper, Elijah had been woken in the night by a young man crying. The cries were pitched high and unbroken then deepened suddenly – What are you doing? Everything would be all right if you would let me… you don’t need to and anyway I have to get back – and were silenced as the boy was calmed or sedated. The hopeless echo along the corridor had been unusual enough in that decorous retreat to have kept the residents awake till morning, and at breakfast they ate sombrely, watching the door for the newcomer. Elijah had been shocked at the boy’s face – ‘Like an empty paper mask,’ he said that evening to one of the staff, ‘like it would crumple if you touched it.’ She’d fretfully touched the rosary beads in the pocket of her cardigan and said the young man had almost broken his shoulder, throwing himself against the stanchions of a bridge near his home – possessed with fear that its narrow concrete pillars couldn’t bear the weight of traffic, he’d tried to bring it down one night when the roads were quiet.

  The consultant, coaxed from his practice on a Thursday, prescribed medicine that dulled the boy’s eyes until they looked as though they were covered in a film of dust. But he ate, at least, and did no harm to himself or others. With startling speed either the tablets they gave him in pleated paper cups or the calm of the place returned him to himself, and it wasn’t long before Elijah found himself waking to the prospect of a sunny face at his door and a hand beneath his elbow in the hall. He discovered that Alex had that trick of the very beautiful, of persuading others beauty must be a symptom of goodness and could be caught by standing close by. And there was general agreement, in the room where the staff drank quarts of tea and out on the allotments where they were planting out broccoli for spring, that in Alex it wasn’t a trick after all. When the first month had passed, the dullness in his eyes cleared and his good nature looked out at them all – he managed somehow to exist exactly halfway between the patients and the staff, treating them all with instant affection as if he’d known them for years, and couldn’t think why he hadn’t come sooner. He’d stand beside Elijah at the window with his hand resting lightly on the older man’s shoulder and say: ‘I’m not clever like you and I know I don’t understand, not really – but don’t you think tomorrow you and I could take one step into the garden, only one, and see how you are?’ It was a little like being comforted by a wise child, and never failed to make Elijah think that the next day – or the next, or perhaps the one after – he’d follow the boy out into the courtyard, where the man whose name he didn’t know was smoking the last of several cigarettes.

  Creaking in his cane chair, watching Walker pat the pocket of his trousers with a sharp decisive gesture and withdraw a steel lighter, Elijah said, ‘I remember the day you arrived. You looked more miserable than any of us. I remember thinking it looked as if you’d had a headache for years.’

  Walker laughed: ‘You were always by the window. I’d’ve thought the place was haunted only I saw your breath on the glass.’

  ‘But I don’t remember the women coming – why’s that, I wonder? – only that suddenly there they were, and no-one was ever quite sure whether they were one of us or visitors…’

  Walker could remember very clearly the day the women came and the dust-sheet was dragged from the piano in the hall. But he would not admit it, and turning away from the preacher reached out with his foot to nudge a beetle fretting at the dirt between the tiles.

  The three women had come at the end of the second month. Clare with her brother’s eyes and hair and her forehead creased with anxiety, clinging to Hester’s arm. The older woman – whom Elijah would have taken for their mother had her face not seemed to be that almost of another species – had come wearing such authority that at least three of the staff thought her some director or trustee come to peer over Walker’s shoulder as he sat perplexed at the books. Eve, following a few paces behind, unsure whether her old friend would welcome a face he mightn’t remember, had knelt on the grass beside the bench where Alex sat, covered her face with her hair (‘It was down to her waist then – do you remember?’ said Elijah. ‘And she’d put it tight like a noose round her neck and scare us half to death…’) and wept all afternoon. When she’d done with crying, she dried her eyes and went to the room where residents dozed in their deep-winged armchairs. Pulling the dust-sheet from the piano she played so quietly that no-one woke, though the nurses on duty came along the corridors and leant in the doorway to listen, inclining their white-capped heads.

  All that autumn other visitors could never tell whether the three women had come for the day, or would return that night to small locked rooms in a quiet corridor. Hester would sit with Elijah at the window, saying little but conveying such steadiness and comfort he’d forget to glance overhead and see if the sky had come loose and was bearing down on them. She made herself useful kneeling between rows of winter crops, pulling at weeds and making even the most melancholy laugh out loud. Eve taught some of them to play, and though the staff grew tired of hearing the same childish duets played over and over, no-one had the heart to lock up the piano and hide it again under the heavy grey cloth.

  Walker would watch from the courtyard corner, making his careful audit of them all. He watched Clare without desire, for the dreadful beauty of her face and her child’s smile, and would have liked to sit beside Hester, buttressed by her weight and warmth, and simply hear her speak. Eve he disliked at once for her black sheet of hair and eyes that never missed a trick, and for the music that made him restive and uneasy. He saw the quick light steps that carried her body restlessly from room to room (she took thirty-two paces across the courtyard), and overheard her coaxing laugh, or murmuring in corners with patients who put their hands in hers. Knowing she demanded to be seen and admired, he refused to do so. ‘He doesn’t even know we’re here!’ she said once, watching him turn away from them one afternoon, his collar turned up against the wind.

  In the end it was the piano that sent him over the border into their territory. The sound of it – especially dissonant that day, since some patients were attempting a duet – reached Walker in his airless room. Driven distracted by his hopeless task, he wrenched open the door to the hall, where a dozen or more residents sat quietly waiting for a meal. He’d crossed the courtyard to reach them and his grey hair glittered with drops of rain that fell on his coat as if he’d brought the storm indoors. He slammed the piano-lid shut, and the two women playing – easily startled at the best of times – only just managed to pull their fingers free. They stared at him for a moment, then snatching up bags from beneath the broad low stool left the room squabbling with indignation.

  Eve had been sitting cross-legged at Elijah’s feet, inspecting a torn nail, her long hair matted at the crown from an afternoon asleep. The buzz of the disturbed piano strings reached her as acutely as if it had been the voice of someone she knew well – she started, leaning on the preacher to tug herself upright: ‘What is it – is something wrong?’ Then, seeing who stood at the door, she said: ‘Who are you, anyway? What are you doing here – what do you want?’ Elijah had looked at her then, her tall fine body tense with anger, and thought she’d run to the piano and raise the lid and play something so insistent Walker would hear its echo all that day, and later too when he tried to sleep. But she stood where she was
, parting her hair with her hands; the other man seemed fixed in place, one hand resting on the piano still and his mouth half-open as if he’d forgotten the art of speech. The preacher, whose years in the pulpit and out of it had made him wise, murmured ‘Oh no…’ then shook his head and looked away. Beside him Hester turned the pages of her book, and Clare put the final pieces to a jigsaw puzzle someone else had left unfinished. When he looked up again Walker had gone, and Eve was standing with her hands half-raised. When she turned towards him it seemed to Elijah that her face had altered, and in her eyes there was an avid look that troubled him.

  In the glasshouse Elijah stood and joined Walker at the window, watching him dig with the steel tack at the soil beneath his nails. The tack slipped in his fingers and slid a little too far between the nail and the flesh; the younger man winced, and sucked at a sluggish bead of blood.

  ‘Give it to me, it’s rusted – you’ll make yourself unwell.’ Elijah tossed the nail beneath the bench, and putting a hand on Walker’s forearm said: ‘I know what you have been thinking. I can see it. But I won’t believe Alex did anything wrong, and nor should you. You think the worst because you feel responsible, because we brought him here. It was always my job to think the worst of us all – original sin, you know: it makes a man a pessimist. But I think for now we’ll believe the best… Oh! Here comes Eve, and she’s brought us water and ice.’

  At the end of his second month at St Jude’s Alex forgot what had brought him there. He was young and resilient – his bruised shoulder healed and he couldn’t remember what caused the slight ache remaining. Each day he took the tablets they offered, thankful they dulled the elation and misery that had worn him out by turns. He became exhaustingly full of life and went through the wards like an electric charge, helping the residents deck their narrow rooms with dusty boughs of holly weeks before Christmas, insisting on a tree (‘I’ll fell it myself if I have to!’), helping Eve teach carols which they sang in ragged harmony to the staff.

  But early one evening, sitting beside Elijah as they waited for Orion to appear over the courtyard wall (‘I tried to teach him the constellations,’ said Elijah, ‘but the only one that stuck was the Pole Star…’), Alex sat counting the green and white pills he held in his palm and said: ‘I’m not quite myself at the moment, you know. I’m half of me, maybe not even that. Hester says at least it’s the better half, but I don’t know if it’s enough…’ He tried to explain to the preacher how it had been before: how he’d felt each crack in the pavements and pebble in the grass through the soles of his shoes, and the blood coursing through each separate artery and vein. The tablets he took with his morning tea blunted not only the edges of his misery, but also muted each of his senses. Sometimes he sat stroking the back of his hand, feeling the slide of skin on skin and wondering if his touch had always been so slight and so brief – surely he’d once felt each ridge and groove in the whorls of his fingertips? He fell to wondering if he were really there at all – here was his hand on the door, here his feet taking turns on the carpet – but what if his place in the world was not secure, like a tooth loosening in its socket?

  No-one realised he’d begun to fill his pillowcase with the capsules he pretended to swallow, nor that in time he’d begun to persuade others to do the same. ‘Just like a kind of game,’ he’d whisper in the corridors, his arms linked through those of other patients as the white-capped nurses passed on the other side: ‘It can’t hurt, just for a day or two…’ He taught them sleights of hand and tricks to deceive the staff at breakfast and supper, and collected their pills, green and white and yellowish, in the pockets of his jeans. Hester, never easily fooled, saw the merry glint in his eyes harden to a constant glitter, but said nothing, biding her time.

  By New Year there was a change of air. Residents grew mistrustful and easily vexed, preferring to sit alone in their rooms and leaving their meals uneaten. No-one came to listen when Eve played the piano, and a woman took a sudden and violent dislike to Clare and accused her of stealing her clothes. A young man who had a compulsion to wash scrubbed himself raw with a wire pad he found in the kitchens and was treated by doctors for the wounds on his hands. It was Hester, watching all the while, who finally put an end to it. The force of her character had given her a status she neither sought nor earned, so that when she asked to see the senior nurse she did so with such an imperious lift of her chin that he followed her into the courtyard in a worried hurry. Wringing his hands and hers in turn he conceded that the fault had been theirs – there should have been better procedures in place; they’d failed in their duty of care.

  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.