After Me Comes the Flood Read online

  Clare bent forward and traced a line or two with her finger. ‘Where is the horse gone,’ she read: ‘Where the rider…’

  ‘… and where the giver of treasure…’ It gave John such pleasure to be back over the border of his own familiar land that he went on, eagerly, as if she’d asked to be taught: ‘Noone knows now – might not have known then! – who was the rider, or where he rode, or even who wrote the poems. Their meaning is mine or yours; they belong to whoever reads them, and no-one can say you are either right or wrong.’

  Eve, black brows drawn together in distaste, took the book. ‘So spoke the wanderer, mindful of hardship.’ She snapped it shut, seeming again the boy he’d first taken her for. He laughed, and said, ‘Not all are so mournful, though most… This one I knew by heart when I was young, though I never knew what it meant: “Wulf and Eadwacer”–’ He stopped abruptly, remembering the notebook upstairs, and seeing in the sulphurous yellow light the name EADWACER, scrawled half a dozen times, and repeated on the deck of cards dealt out the night before. As he said the name the two young women kneeling on the grass paused, and looked up at him. Clare looked stricken, as though he’d said something to wound her, and Eve said sharply, ‘What? What did you say?’

  Her hostility was so sudden and unearned it took great effort for him to say without stammering: ‘It was nothing – just another poem, that’s all.’ He felt them begin to withdraw from him – Clare rocked back on her heels and crossed her arms against her breast, and Eve’s narrow white face had become fixed and hostile.

  ‘It was only the name of the poem. I don’t even know if I’m saying it right…’

  ‘Show me.’ Eve took the book, drawing quickly away from him. ‘Wulf is on one island, I on another.’

  The obscure old riddle became part of everything else that was uncertain and troubling: he was still a stranger in their strange land. She said, ‘Why did you choose it – why did you have to say it out loud?’

  ‘We’ve heard it before you see, John,’ said Clare gravely. She looked, he thought, rather disappointed, and all at once older than her years.

  ‘Yes.’ Eve began to wrap the book roughly, winding the string so tightly John flinched – oh, but careful, you’ll break its spine – ‘Yes – everywhere, all over the house, cut into the table, written in dust on the windowsills. Down there’ – Eve flung out an arm towards the high green bank at the garden’s end.

  ‘Down there?’ John shielded his eyes from the sun at its height.

  ‘Haven’t you seen it yet? The reservoir.’ Oh, but it’s a reservoir, of course, thought John – he’d seen that kind of embankment before on the outskirts of small towns where he and his brother fished without joy for trout and pike.

  ‘We’re going swimming there tomorrow,’ said Clare, forgetting for a moment the book and the hated name. The few tears she’d shed dried on her cheek. ‘We keep saying we’ll go, but we never do.’

  ‘We might, darling,’ said Eve impatiently, not yet finished with John. Her eyes were opaque as smoked glass; then they cleared, suddenly, as though she had reached a favourable verdict on some fresh evidence. She shook her head. ‘Oh, how could you know? There have been’ – she paused, as though selecting a word and finding it distasteful – ‘letters. Anonymous ones.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Well, yes – you’re smiling, and why wouldn’t you. Absurd, isn’t it? I keep thinking Holmes will arrive, with Watson following by train…’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so,’ said John. ‘Miss Marple, perhaps.’

  ‘It is more her line of work, isn’t it?’ The smoke receded, and left her mossy eyes clear and frank. ‘Poison pen letters. That’s what they call them, as if it’s not the person writing that’s at fault but the pen in their hand – they come for Alex, of all people! You can imagine someone wanting to torment Walker, can’t you.’ She said this with a slight secretive smile, which she swiftly shook off. ‘Or Hester, or even me. But Alex’ – she shook her head. ‘Well – you know.’ John, who knew less now than he ever had, nodded.

  ‘There’s always something, with Alex. It was bridges before. This time it’s the reservoir – he’s got it into his head the dam will break, and the reservoir will burst the embankment, and the water will reach us down here. He says he sees it at night – he’s standing on the front lawn and the sky turns black, and black water from the reservoir bursts out of all the windows and doors, taking all of us with it. I tell him every day it would need the Severn or the Thames to flood us here, even if there hadn’t been a drought, even if the dam burst…’ She shook her head, and unfolded a square of stained linen from its paper packet. It was embroidered with the text THOU GOD SEEST ME, and underneath the words a blue eye was coming unstitched. Eve picked at the trailing threads.

  ‘Of course we don’t argue or disagree with him, it would only make things worse, and besides, what do we know, about this dam or any other…’

  John watched her refolding the linen square on her lap and saw, with a prick of anxiety, that the bluish-white skin above her knees was beginning to burn. ‘But surely – a disaster on that scale: it’s unthinkable.’ He looked again at the raised grass bank; it seemed, in the curious brightness of its grass, more permanent than the house itself.

  She shrugged. ‘There’s a crack, he says, although I’ve not seen it. Out he swims, when we’re all in our beds, then comes and wakes me, with his hair dripping on my pillow, to tell me it’s the width of his thumb, then the palm of his hand…’ Kneeling between the scattered drawers, she spread her own hands hopelessly. ‘Then, a few weeks ago, just at the beginning of summer, down we came one morning and there were two letters for Alex, side by side on the doormat. Oh, he was pleased – no-one writes any more, do they? He thought a friend had found him. You know, from before.’ She said this tentatively, and again John had the curious feeling that she did so out of a delicacy for his own feelings, but could not think why. ‘Only they weren’t letters, of course – just newspaper clippings, and all of them showed drownings, or floods. There was one with a terrible picture, from France, of two children who’d been stranded on a sandbank hunting for shells. They were lying on the sand, their hair all mixed up with the seaweed…’ She shuddered. ‘On all the pieces of newspaper was that name again, Eadwacer – oh, how do you say it? Then it started turning up – scratched on the table, or written in pebbles down by the reservoir, or so he says – I’ve never seen it and of course, you never quite know.’

  The whole tale was so absurd, and at the same time so cruel, that John would have liked to laugh. The woman stood wearily. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘What could you say? What can any of us say? It’s so childish. Once I even thought he was doing it, but he was never that way, not even –’ And again she said: ‘You know, John. Not even then.’

  They think I’m in on something! he thought, and unwilling to risk her anger again said carefully, ‘But if the name’s written down by the dam or on the patio then either it’s one of you, or someone who comes here often.’

  ‘I know. And I don’t know which would be worst. Isn’t it odd,’ she said, smiling: ‘You turned up and I never for a minute thought it might be you, though even as strangers go, you’re fairly strange.’ Much later John was to remember that phrase, and wonder why it had felt so like an unexpected touch on the arm. Pressing her hands to the dip in her spine and turning her face to the sun she said, ‘Let’s not talk about it any more.’ Then she ran to peer at the shadow on the broken sundial, swore beneath her breath, and vanished into the cool dark house. Clare stood, examining a bitten-down thumbnail, while the sound of a piano played in intricate swift patterns reached them across the lawn.

  ‘How did she know the time,’ said John, ‘when the sundial’s broken?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, does it? It tells the same wrong time every day.’

  The music sank into a deep murmur felt as much as heard.

  ‘Have you been friends with Eve a very long time?’ John unbuttoned his cuff, and
let the girl stoop to wrap the string of beads around his wrist.

  ‘She’s not my friend, not really. She knew my brother from school. I didn’t see her for years, not for years, then she came to St Jude’s and of course we saw her all the time then, sometimes every day.’

  ‘I see,’ said John. St Jude’s? The image of Eve’s black head bent over folded hands vanished as soon as it came. From across the lawn the patterns of music changed to an insistent motif that made him uneasy. ‘She’s very good,’ he said, though really he couldn’t tell.

  ‘See, they suit you – yes, they say she is, and if she makes a mistake she slams the lid so hard you’d think she’d smash it in pieces. Did you know it was Eve who found the piano at St Jude’s – it was old and damp and none of the notes would come out right – but she paid to have it fixed. Alex liked to hear it.’ She gave him a curious look that was, he thought, half-pitying: ‘Of course everyone did.’

  Did she feel pity for him, then – for the man that should’ve been there, kneeling on the lawn with his wrist in her hands? The idea baffled him, and he put it away to examine later by a better light. Then she fastened the beads and said, ‘You know, sometimes she plays so long her fingers bleed. You can’t go near her now, not until she’s done.’

  ‘I promise I’ll never disturb her,’ said John, remembering how quickly her mossy eyes had darkened. ‘I wouldn’t like to make her angry. Listen: isn’t someone calling for you?’

  At the kitchen window, almost hidden by the half-closed blind, Hester beckoned the girl indoors, and dropping the blue beads in the grass she dashed away, forgetting him as easily as a child might.

  He retreated into the strip of shade thrown by the high walls that divided the garden from the road, imagining an iron gate set within the bricks, its lock and hinges choked with ivy. I’ve wondered enough at what I have done, he thought, but what have they done; what keeps them here, pleasure or punishment… ‘Still no birds, then?’ Alex had come quietly on bare feet and stood smiling at him, his hands deep in his pockets, nothing like the frightened boy crouching by the door he’d seen that morning. His skin had tanned so darkly the long-fringed eyes appeared pale.

  ‘No, none; it’s like this in London – just as I left I saw one dying in the gutter – I thought here it would be different.’

  ‘London, eh?’ The younger man looked surprised. Then he shrugged, and said: ‘Makes you wonder where they’ve all gone, doesn’t it? But it can’t last – nothing ever does… John, I want to say something.’ He flushed, as though he thought he might be speaking out of turn and, forestalling a response, went on: ‘I know what it takes just to leave everything, not to do what they tell you to do, but you’re not on your own. And I’ll help you, if I can – oh, you don’t want to talk about it, I understand.’

  John, wretched with confusion and guilt, said, ‘You’re very kind.’ Casting about for a means of moving the subject to firmer ground, he gestured to the packets scattered on the lawn. ‘Ought we to take these in?’ He took up the book and concealed it beneath his arm. The young man stooped obediently and began to gather up what remained, now and then exclaiming, ‘What is all his, anyway? And where did she find them? Let’s take them to the red room, and find a home for them there.’

  Singing under his breath something that echoed by chance or design the melody that reached them across the lawn, he led John towards the house and a glass door which stood open at the edge of the stone terrace. Pausing at the threshold John saw a piano with its lid raised and a dark head bent low over the keys; remembering his resolve not to trouble Eve he slipped quietly inside.

  It was a larger room than any he’d seen in the house before. It ran the length of the east wing so that all along the outer wall eight windows faced south to the grey-paved terrace, then to the parched lawn and the dark pines beyond. The light that came in ought to have blazed in every corner, but instead was absorbed by red-papered walls and Turkish carpets scattered unevenly across the wooden floor. The ceiling seemed lower than in the other rooms, and had been recently painted with illogical pairings of spring flowers and roses, and all around the light fittings, from which hung broken chandeliers trailing chipped strings of glass drops, were painted yellow-beaked blackbirds caught in a briar thicket. The furniture was set around the piano, which was by far the largest John had ever seen, and bore no resemblance to the comfortably scuffed wooden instrument his brother’s children played. It seemed newly made, lacquered to so black and lucid a shine that he saw in its raised lid a perfect dark reflection of himself at midnight. The keys were not ebony and bone but plastic, with a fine strip of scarlet felt running behind them. The harsh colours in the dim and shabby room reminded John of false teeth bared in a grin. Scattered all around the piano were piles of sheet music, some of it torn and foxed with illuminated title pages, others on clean white paper. Elsewhere the furniture was desperately shabby: a velvet-upholstered couch was balding in the seat, and the pair of tables set between the windows looked as if they had rickets. All around the room, stuffed into vases and jugs and attracting a number of voluble bees, were stems of untidy long-petalled red and yellow flowers, their hard stamens ejecting puffs of dark pollen. It looked as if someone had set a dozen small fires, and they smelt revoltingly sweet.

  ‘Asphodel, she calls them,’ said Eve drily, closing the piano lid. ‘Lilies, to you and me.’

  Alex laid his armful of packages in a neat row on the seat of a couch. He looked up at the girl, who returned his gaze with a searching, anxious look of her own which swiftly became a smile. ‘I’m done, I think, for now – where’s Walker? Have you seen him?’ Standing half-hidden in the curtain’s musty folds John saw Alex lift her hand and examine it, turning it over and putting his thumb in her palm. ‘Don’t you ever wash, Evie?’ he said gently. ‘Look at all this, under your nails.’ He let her hand drop, and then he said: ‘I haven’t seen him this morning. He’s probably up with Elijah, leading him astray. Yesterday he was teaching him to gamble, you know…’ The woman laughed, then pushed her curls back from her forehead, waved distractedly at them both, and went out into the hall.

  The young man watched her go, scratching at a raised mosquito bite on his arm; then he shook his head and, seeing John, started as if he’d forgotten he was there. ‘I can’t stand this much longer,’ he said. ‘Still, we’ll all be out of it, come Saturday.’

  John glanced behind him out of the window, expecting to see clouds pulling at the sun, but there was only the same empty blue canopy. ‘Oh?’

  ‘Didn’t they tell you? We’re getting out of here, going to the sea. Won’t you come too?’

  ‘Of course,’ said John. How easy it would be to leave them then, with none of those inept excuses he’d dreamed up in the night. He imagined pushing open the door to his flat, and seeing inside the rush mat with three pairs of shoes neatly paired alongside, and the bookshelves as ordered as those in the shop. He awaited relief and longing for home, but neither came.

  ‘It can get a bit closed-in here sometimes,’ said the younger man suddenly, sitting up and grasping the arms of the chair: ‘Nice to have another face – another pair of eyes, if you see what I mean.’ He looked at John with such warmth and gratitude that he flushed, and stooped to pick uselessly at a shoelace. Then Alex said, worrying at a graze on the back of his hand: ‘I don’t think I did know you, back then, did I?’ His eyes met John’s, and for a moment he was the huddled wretched boy he’d been that morning.

  ‘Oh no, no. No – I don’t think so, I’m sure I’d remember.’

  ‘Only you see I am sometimes – sometimes not always clear…’ The graze evidently became sore; he winced, and rested his head on the arm of the chair. ‘But here it feels safe, as if nothing can make it through the forest to where we are. Do you see?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Listen,’ he said, standing. ‘Would you help me with something?’

  ‘If I can, of course.’

  ‘I could do with a hand, lat
er. Down by the reservoir.’ He looked anxious, and John remembered the tale Eve told, and saw that name again, with its familiar syllables: Eadwacer, written in the notebook upstairs and scratched into the wood on the kitchen table, and perhaps in other places waiting to be discovered.

  ‘If you think I can be any use,’ he said.

  ‘Can you swim?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said John: ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘It won’t matter – was that Hester calling us to lunch?’ He put a hand on John’s shoulder where the shirt was damp with sweat growing stale, and said: ‘You’ve probably got time to change.’

  Dear Jon (may I call you Jon?)

  Last night I slept in your bed, and this morning I put on your clothes. I took them from one of the bags you left here: I hope you don’t mind. I’m sure they’re all wondering what a man like me is doing in a red tartan shirt with sleeves too short by an inch.

  ‘A man like me’, I said; but the point is that I must be a man like you – I must be you, and put you on when I put on these jeans (which I notice are not clean and have about them a smell a little like smoke and a little like the lawn outside, where all the grass has died).

  I’ve kept a record of what I’ve done and said in your name. Don’t be alarmed – I’ve done no harm, though I’ve done what I ought not to have done, and left undone those things which I ought to have done…

  I’ve been through your bags, and this is what I found:

  A biology textbook, hardly read.

  A joke set of plastic false teeth with pink feet attached.

  Two bottles of clear nail varnish.