After Me Comes the Flood (13 page)

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

Eve

Eve…

No.
No
. Let me make an account of what Hester said this afternoon. She’d been out all morning buying food, and the kitchen was full of vegetables and meat and bottles of wine as though we’re under siege. There was a dozen green apples on the table, and someone had put them in a circle around the string of cowries that Clare had brought back from the beach, reminding me of a picture I saw once of tokens in a burial chamber. Hester sat me down and gave me some disgusting medicine in a glass – like ground-up chalk stirred into milk – and said it would stop me feeling sick, and I was so grateful for her company I wouldn’t have told her what the real trouble was even if I’d known. She said, ‘I’m sorry for what you saw yesterday, out on the marshes – I wouldn’t have had you witness that for the world. Not for several worlds, indeed!’

I had a mouthful of medicine, which was so thick it choked me, so instead of answering I settled for shaking my head and shrugging. I think she knew what I meant – she leant forward and patted my hand twice as though she were grateful and said, ‘I knew I needn’t worry – I knew you’d understand. He’s not himself, you know. A beautiful loving lad but never really free from what troubles him…’ She shook her head, and lowered her eyelids so that her whole face took on a resigned and mournful look. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something a little satisfied in her as she surveyed the aftermath of the day’s events and the unease that had prickled under my skin the night before returned. Then she got up quickly, with a dismissive sort of gesture as if she’d dispensed with that subject and was ready for the next, and started to fill the kettle. ‘He will be fine, now – none of us need ever think of it again. Let me make you tea – my mother told me it’s the thing for this weather.’

When she returned to the table with two mugs overfull with strong tea, she said, ‘Did I see you coming from Elijah’s room the other night? I hope you didn’t find his room too odd!’ She smiled, and this time it was so frank and mischievous, and so plainly affectionate at the mention of the preacher’s name, that I forgot my unease and would’ve told her anything she asked. I said I thought it a very practical way of forecasting a storm, and that made us both laugh. Then she said, ‘Have you spoken to him much? Or have the others told you why he wouldn’t come with us to the sea, or even go down to the reservoir?’

I told her that we’d talked awhile in his room, and said, ‘I don’t understand. How can I? I never had faith. I can’t imagine that mislaying it would be such a calamity.’

‘Nor I,’ she said. ‘But there it is. He’s afraid of everything, you know’ – she flung out her arms and gestured towards the window, where a bright strip of empty lawn showed below the blind – ‘Afraid of everything. Just – everything.’ Her hands dropped to her lap and fidgeted there. I said, ‘Heavens above,’ and she smiled.

‘Hells beneath, more to the point – though really we ought not to laugh.’

I told her how I’d seen him on my first night, standing at the window looking up now and then as though waiting for the sky to fall in, and as I spoke I realised I’d begun to remember things as though they’d happened years before.

‘Yes, that’s just it – waiting for the sky to fall in!’ Hester sat up straighter and pushed back the hair that was falling into her eyes. ‘That’s just it – the sun in pieces like a broken plate. He wasn’t always like that, of course – he had that kind of faith so solid it wasn’t faith any more, it was certainty. He didn’t
believe
in God any more than you believe in me. I’m here, aren’t I?’ I smiled at that, because with her heaviness and with her eyes that see everything there’s something about her you could worship.

She told me he had believed that the God who made Adam out of dust and clay knew Elijah, of Clapham, south London. ‘Believed that he’d counted the hairs on his head, watched him sleeping, helped him put one foot in front of the other without falling over.’ She shook her head. ‘He had a wife and three daughters – did he tell you that? – and they weren’t any less faithful than he was. Maybe you catch it if you breathe it in, like a virus. So there they were, just think of it – the hand of God turning the world on its tilted axis, and at the same time seeing to it that your cold improves and you can find a parking space when you need one, and you always have money for the gas bill.’

I imagined Elijah’s arms pierced and threaded for a puppeteer’s strings and shuddered, spilling my tea. As though she’d seen it too, Hester said, ‘Oh, I don’t think of it that way, like a great eye in the clouds. I think it was more that God was everywhere, being beautiful and good, holding up the sky. I remember Elijah saying once he only needed to look at dandelions growing by the side of the road, greasy and black with exhaust fumes, and there was the evidence of God. His was the Kingdom.’ She shook her head in admiration and pity.

I don’t know why, but I began to feel impatient with the old preacher, that he had let a fine and wise mind be broken over something so slight. What difference was there, after all? He had not seen God then; he did not see him now. I said, ‘Well, what happened, then? How do you lose God? You go out one day and he’s no longer there in the weeds?’

Hester drew together her heavy grey brows. ‘It’s easy to laugh, of course,’ she said reprovingly. ‘I did, at first. But if you could see how afraid he is – he said to me last week: It’s the Last Times, Hester! Then he remembered he didn’t believe in all of that any more, but that was even worse. The world ending because its Maker has decided it’s high time is one thing. It collapsing without purpose or meaning is quite another.’

Then she shrugged and went on: ‘He told me about the day it happened, though I’m not sure I believe it. I’m not even sure he believes it himself, but I suppose we all explain ourselves as best we can. Did he tell you about his study? Sometimes I think he misses that more than his family – his books and papers, the pictures on the wall, the cup he always used for tea in the morning. He had his desk against the window, so he could sit there and look out at Creation. Every morning he went to his study, and didn’t come out until the afternoon – except on Sundays, when there wasn’t time. Every week he had three sermons to prepare, or four on special weeks, and for hours he’d sit at his desk reading the Bible, or books about it. I imagine you’d believe in anything, don’t you think, if you read it every day?’

I smiled then, thinking of one long wet summer when my brother had learnt the language of Tolkien’s elves and wouldn’t answer to any name but Celeborn. I said, ‘I think you probably would.’

‘He told me it happened like this. One Sunday morning he’d just finished dressing in his suit and tie and was going over his sermon notes. It had been a hard year for some of the congregation and Elijah knew his duty, and wanted to comfort them. So he found out somehow – he might have counted, for all I know – that in the Bible the words
be not afraid
or something like it come three hundred and sixty-five times.’ She drained the last of her tea with a gulp and said, ‘Do you understand? To Elijah it meant only one thing: thousands of years ago God had personally seen to it there’d be enough comfort to go round for every day of the year.’

I felt again my annoyance, disappointed that a man I liked so much could have been so simple and childish in his reasoning. I said I thought it seemed to me a kind of madness, turning everything over until it fit an idea. She smiled and said, ‘But don’t we all do the same? I believe that right this minute we are circling the sun, because I have been told it’s so – I’ve no evidence for it myself. Anyway, there it was – proof he’d been made in the image of God, and the path he walked had been planned before time and was fenced off from danger. Then his youngest daughter came in – they all wore long skirts, you know, for the sake of modesty – and asked him what it was he planned to say, and he told her about the comfort of God, and the three hundred and sixty-five days. And d’you know what she said?’ I shook my head, and saw that her lips were pressed together as if she were trying not to laugh. ‘She said: What about leap years? What about leap years!’

She saw I didn’t understand and, lightly slapping the table, said, ‘Don’t you see? The girl said, You’ve always told me God has ordered everything for my own good. But every leap year, when winter has gone on too long and we’ve forgotten the feel of the sun, there’ll be one day when there’s no word of comfort from God. And either he knows about leap years, and means us to be unhappy and afraid one day every four years, or he doesn’t know about leap years after all. So either he’s unkind or he’s ignorant, and either way he can’t be God, because to be God you must be perfectly kind and perfectly wise…’

It seemed so absurd that I felt a curious mix of anger and amusement, until I remembered how grave and sad Elijah always seemed, and how he restlessly drummed on the arm of his chair. I said, ‘So for want of a nail, the Kingdom was lost?’

‘It was like the little tap on the glass that makes the window break. He told me she kissed him on the cheek and went out laughing, thinking nothing of it, and he went on sitting at his desk. Outside daisies were growing on the lawn, and suddenly they weren’t carefully made things there to make us good, or whatever it is he’d been telling the Sunday School children all those years, but just accidents. Happy accidents, but accidents all the same.’ She peered at the dregs of her tea. ‘He told me it was like falling out of love. He looked and looked at the weeds in the garden and the sun in the sky and so on, and tried to summon up – what: love? Awe? I don’t know – and it just wouldn’t come. It must’ve happened to you, John. We’ve all felt it. Love going for no reason you can think of; a face you thought beautiful becoming ordinary, or worse.’ She turned her black eyes on me like a light, and it was as though I were being searched. I thought of Eve’s face and of the small details that had become essential to me – the tooth that’s set a little further back from the others, the blue veins in her lowered eyelids – and could not imagine it would ever be ordinary. Afraid she’d see the change in me I stood and carried our mugs to the sink. On the windowsill someone was growing a seedling in a plastic pot; it had been left too long without water and the tips of the leaves were withering. I scooped water from the sink and dribbled it into the pot, imagining the seedling growing plump and straight as I watched. Behind me Hester said, ‘Of course he couldn’t just put his Bible under his arm and go up the pulpit steps. He might be afraid of everything, but he’s no coward. So he found St Jude’s and after that came here, and once he was over the threshold he never went out again. He’s alone for the first time in his life and he’s terrified.’

I asked what his family thought of his change of heart, and she said, ‘Well – they’re confused, I suppose. They write. He writes. They’ll go back to London soon and he’ll join them if he can – but what then? They’re still living with a light shining on their feet and a lamp on their paths. And now he’s just like you and me, stumbling around in the dark, trying to find his way.’

She stood up with a groan and joined me at the sink. Touching the leaves of the seedling on the windowsill with her little finger, she said, ‘One of Walker’s attempts, though I doubt it’ll survive the summer – and here he comes with Eve, laughing about I don’t know what. Are you all right there, John, or are you feeling sick again? The medicine is on the table – pour yourself another glass.’

After that I went down to the garden again, where lawn gives way to brambles and nettles. Everywhere bindweed had taken hold, so that it looked as if all the trees were blooming at once. I crouched awhile on a piece of wood that must have sheared away from one of the pines in a violent storm, and put my head in my hands. I tried to order everything I’d heard and seen since the day I arrived, but nothing would fit, and underneath it all was that curious ache in my side, as though I’d been injured and not felt the blow. When I lifted my head and saw Alex a little distance away, I was glad: he at least seemed to see me directly and clearly, and even to have need of me – not as he thought I was, but as I am.

As I came nearer I saw that he was crouched intently in the shade of a sycamore, with his back turned to me and his head bent. He’d taken off his T-shirt, which lay beside him in the grass, and I could see the bones of his spine and the birthmark like a shadow on his arm. The sycamore was shedding its spinning keys all around, but Alex didn’t look up – whatever it was he’d found on the ground absorbed him completely. Some distance away the cat huddled at the foot of the tree. Its eyes were swollen almost shut and it was licking its paw.