After Me Comes the Flood Read online

  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.’

  III

  Walker left Eve dozing a while, in their place against the wall where the long grass lay like sheaves of wheat. Always she felt blasted apart, and took time to reassemble: she imagined patting blindly about for each piece, fitting part to part, wondering if there was an alteration anyone else might see.

  A cricket hummed against her ear, and she guessed the note it made – something below the middle C, rising and falling, never hitting on a melody. The sun sank mercifully low, and the fringes of the Thetford pines turned black. She wiped at the moisture on her neck, and there was on her hand a scent – thick, sour, urgently sweet – that wasn’t entirely hers.

  She recalled more often than she liked that conversation with the preacher – I looked up – I saw him – I was only ever glad. As a child she’d say: ‘I never lie, not ever’, so often that no-one believed a word of it. But she felt it to be true – it was as if whatever she said, she was afterwards compelled to believe. She had looked up; she had seen him; she was only ever glad. Glad now, or glad enough, drowsy with heat, drunk on it, the bones of her spine aching from long pressure on the hard earth, a little sore elsewhere. Glad later – glad tomorrow – glad when they fell to mocking? Glad when he said, ‘You get away lightly: you’ve done nothing wrong – the price is mine, not yours,’ glad for the company of that grave new stranger half-hidden behind his beard? I never lie, not ever.

  Across the lawn the house crept behind the deepening dusk. It was this image Eve had first seen, coming to it when she was hardly more than a child, she a shadow to Alex and Clare a shadow to her: ‘You won’t believe it, Evie – every year she finds another room, and there’s a piano so big you could lie underneath it and never be seen…’

  Eve, watching her parents in their neat small house and feeling she must be a changeling, envied her friend bitterly. Alex – whom the school forgave long absences on account of his feckless mother, whose sister mirrored him so beautifully, who spent summers in a house as deeply forested as anything built by the brothers Grimm – had the life she knew ought to have been hers. She dutifully studied; Alex cheerfully failed. She could not be absent an afternoon without a worried father; Alex came and went as he pleased. She holidayed in caravans whose upholstery smelt of last summer’s rain; Alex walked barefoot in overgrown gardens and drank wine from the bottle. He once attended double maths in a velvet coat with filthy red braid at the cuffs; she could not pass the doorstep without her tie re-knotted and straightened with a fretful pat. How was it possible to attain greatness when her mother bought a pair of china dogs to flank the fire with its three electric bulbs, and her father was afraid to enter restaurants? She refused the first invitation (‘Go on, you’ll like Hester, and she says the piano’s yours…’) with a lie about the Spanish coast, but accepted each that followed, suspecting rightly that her parents were relieved to be spared her scowl, and her hands that mutely practised Chopin on the plastic tablecloth.

  Over the long summers that followed, Hester’s other visitors, their numbers dwindling, instinctively sought permission from the frowning green-eyed girl before they raised the piano lid. By eighteen – and the last of the summers, as it turned out – Eve no longer thought of her talent (‘Remarkable, actually,’ said her tutor, crossly, finding envy inescapable) as a gift – ‘I am not gifted,’ she said, wilfully absurd: ‘I am cursed.’ It was not that she resented the hours spent on the hard stool, her eyes sore and her back developing its long ache – she’d no more have complained about those than about hours spent drawing breath. What she meant (though she could never explain) was that the music she sank into seemed so frightening, so sublime, so terrible, that on rising again the real day had nothing in it to quicken her pulse. On she lived – a friend here, a lover there, all the ordinary crises of life – feeling everything muted. There seemed such a gulf between her self and the astonishing power of those eighty-eight keys (something that left her visibly shaking, or lying awake feeling it still in her hands), that every note she struck seemed a small lie. ‘I’ve felt nothing, done nothing, seen nothing – I’m a long pause, an empty bar: I make no noise at all…’

  If she’d willingly cast about for means to make herself the music’s proper match, it would certainly never have come. Instead she grew detached from how she played and how she lived, not much caring about either. Then the house and everyone in it receded for a time – Alex moved on (‘We’ll always know each other don’t you think? And I’ll know where to find you…’), the little group dispersed. Calls and postcards grew scarce, and the career promised for a decade or more seemed always imminent and never more than that.

  Alone in her flat a few winters on, the house in summer seeming something she’d once overheard, a rumour reached her: that beautiful boy had broken in pieces; he was locked up, and mad as a March hare. Her first thought – so shameful it was never admitted, even to Walker, with his trick of probing for her worst – was that she envied him plummeting so far and so fast. If only that madness had been mine, think what I could’ve done with it…!

  She never really knew why she’d gone to find him in that curious institution, its residents politely mad. It was love, or curiosity, or both; but love won out
the moment she saw him diminished on a garden bench in winter, with his dull eyes half-closed against the light, and his slow-coming smile.

  And then there was Walker, and he was entirely familiar, and utterly strange, and she couldn’t help it, and she was only ever glad. I never lie, not ever.

  IV

  I’ve come down to the glasshouse. There’s no-one here. I can smell the fruit on the tomato vine left to get too ripe and something’s moving under the bench. All the shadows are thick in the corners and I can almost believe the dead plants are putting out new leaves. The air in here is so moist I can feel it on the pages of the notebook; I’ve opened a window and the tilt of it gives me two moons to write by. I don’t know what the time is.

  Sometimes I remember Elijah leaning across the table in his room with the torn-up Bible all over the walls, saying ‘We all just assumed you were mad!’, and I laugh – it delights me, it’s so absurd. And then I think: here I am in a stranger’s house, writing in a stolen notebook with a pen that isn’t mine, a liar of a man laughing to himself down here alone in the dark – who’d blame them for thinking me mad?

  Then I feel the ache in my side that won’t go, and think: is this the first symptom? Is this the beginning of madness, this pain under my ribs real as anything I’ve ever felt, though no harm’s been done? Perhaps whatever kept my mind and body separate has severed and I’ll never divide them again …

  When I went up to my room after I’d been watching the glasshouse I found this book and wrote down her name, in the margins and on empty pages at the back, and every time I see it I smile though I don’t know how I can with the shame of having been caught out and my heart hurt like a muscle too long out of use …

  Eve