After Me Comes the Flood (16 page)

‘I see,’ said John, and thought that he did – of course a childless woman alone in a house that smelt of damp and too much furniture polish would love a boy like Alex. He imagined her calling him ‘son’ with a slip of the tongue, and saying to her friends, ‘I couldn’t have loved him more if he’d been my own flesh and blood. Not if he were my own!’

But when he looked at her again, her head hanging low as she traced a shape on the table in front of her, her smile was secretive and coy as though she were thinking over a private pleasure. She was blushing, too, colour gathering at the base of her throat where the skin hung in a double fold under her chin, and spreading up to her forehead. In a moment of clarity that made the kitchen seem brightly lit he realised that this ageing woman, in a stained dress that always smelt a little of stale sweat, had fallen in love. He said gently, ‘I see.’

She lifted her head then, firing a black look at him between narrowed eyes, as if she realised what he’d seen on her face and was challenging him to say more. ‘I think I understand,’ he said, faltering a little, ‘I know what you’ve felt…’

‘Oh, what would
you
know,’ she said. ‘How could you
possibly
know?’ He began to nod – her scorn was familiar, and he knew what she meant: that he’d nothing behind his ribs but books in hard covers, and nothing in his veins but ink. But then she made a furious gesture towards him, and he realised with a burst of mirth that this was not what she meant. She’d mistaken him for the other sort, who needn’t scratch and scrabble for affection, but found it coming their way when they weren’t looking.

He was so thunderstruck by the idea that he slumped against the hard back of the kitchen chair, and listened with his eyes half-closed against the facets of hers.

‘What would you know about it? Do you think I don’t know what they think of me – old and ugly, with a face that could curdle milk! I dress like this’ – she plucked furiously at the old blue dress and he heard the small rending of a seam somewhere – ‘when upstairs in locked cupboards are clothes with flowers sewn on the breast, and I can’t even touch them because my hands are too rough and the fabric is too fine and it catches on my nails…’

The heavy lids of her eyes lowered, and she said, ‘I didn’t do all this because he’s young and I’m old. It’s because I’m ugly, and he’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Every time I look at him I feel myself grow older and uglier, until I’ve dried up into nothing. And all the while he gets brighter and better and further away, and it’s so unfair, because I’m not stupid, I’m not unkind. They say you get the face you deserve, but I tell you John, I never earned my ugliness. All my life I’ve watched those women with faces they’re proud to show and bodies that deserve sunshine and I
hate
them, because they’re cut from the same cloth as him. And there are days I forget myself, because my eyes are the only ones that don’t see me – I look out and see beauty and think I take part it in then remember I am so different I might as well be a dog in the street, and I have never been desired, and it is beyond me to imagine it… and I’ll never tell him, even though I don’t want anything in return, because what’s really cruel is that no-one for a moment would believe that a woman like me could fall in love like everybody else.’

John would have liked to say that it wasn’t true, but wanted desperately to repay her honesty with his own, and he saw as plainly as if the notebook was on the table between them the words he’d written down:
ugly is the only word that will do
. They sat in silence for a long while, and then she said eagerly, half-reaching across the table towards him, ‘You can still help me, if you want to. It would be helping him, you see, most of all, and I know you’d do that if you could.’

‘What can I do?’

‘There’s more – only one – oh, God!’ She covered her face with her hands and almost laughing said, ‘I can’t stand to think of it, could I really have been so stupid? There’s one more and you must help me look out for it, get to it before he does, or one of the girls – they like to take him things: they go to his room and I hear them laughing together.’ Her lips compressed with envy and John, not knowing it, mimicked her, remembering how the boy had taken Eve’s hand, and with his thumb wiped dirt from the crease in her palm.

Then Hester stood and smoothed her dress with slow deliberate movements and said with her old authority: ‘It’s only eleven o’clock and the post never makes here till noon. Won’t you help me, John? I can’t stay there by the front door all morning, but they won’t notice you and what you’re doing. You can get to it, can’t you, before he sees it?’ She began to pull drying newspaper from the white head on the table, balling it up in her palms and tossing it deftly into the bin beside the sink.

Then, turning to him again, she said quietly, ‘You won’t understand this, a man like you – I can’t imagine you feeling anything you didn’t choose to feel, just when you chose to feel it – but you see I didn’t know when it started how far I would go.’

John stood up in his borrowed clothes, and accepting the hand she stretched out said, ‘Of course I’ll help. It’s an easy enough task, isn’t it? Even for a man like me.’ She smiled and gathered the newspapers on the table into a sheaf in her arms. ‘Thank you. How glad I am you came!’ she said, and went out with her arms full of torn newspaper.

They won’t notice you
, she’d said. John had forgotten Elijah sleeping in his corner, so that when the russet head came suddenly out from the alcove his heart, already restlessly beating, convulsed behind his ribs.

‘Oh, the poor woman, poor woman,’ said the preacher, fanning himself with the white-covered book.

‘I’d like to kick her down a flight of stairs.’

‘No. No, you wouldn’t.’

‘All right. I wouldn’t. But why not poor Alex? Why did you think of her first – didn’t you hear it, don’t you know what she’s done?’ In the vaulted kitchen his voice rang high with indignation.

‘Let’s make tea. It’s her solution to everything, you know.’ Elijah stood at the sink filling the kettle, lifting with one hand the blind over the window to look down the bright garden. ‘Oh, I heard. But poor Hester all the same. It’s maybe not the saddest thing I ever heard, but sad enough.’

‘I don’t want tea. It’s much too hot. You ought to despise her now, much more than I do – she’s been a liar. Isn’t that a sin? Or did you give up the idea of sin when you gave up God?’

The preacher shrugged, and striking a match moved his fingers idly in and out of the flame. He turned and with a mild half-smile said: ‘Certainly she’s a sinner, if you want to think of it like that. But if you’d believed like I always did that the heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, you’re never very surprised when people turn out to be liars and cheats. That’s the trouble with you atheists: always so optimistic. What surprises me isn’t that we sin, but that we manage a single good action in all of our lives.’ The kettle screeched, and turning off the gas he added with a spread of his hands, ‘Well, that’s what I would have said a year ago. Amazing, isn’t it, how easily it still comes? So yes – poor Hester, and I think you pity her too, don’t you, or will soon enough. After all’ – he turned to John with a wry smile – ‘haven’t we all lied?’

John nodded twice –
oh, a hit, a very palpable hit
– and from somewhere in the garden came the sound of someone weeping.

II

We’ve all been outside watching clouds being blown inland. The sky’s been so empty so long they seem terrifying things that might swell until they swallow up the whole world. We didn’t talk much, only watched to see if the rain would come, but in the end we grew bored of waiting and came indoors to sleep, and I can hear doors closing all along the corridor, and the click of lights being switched off.

I’ll go on trying to write them down, though I’m all in the dark, a character at someone else’s mercy. Sometimes I imagine Tolstoy sitting at his desk with his notebooks spread in front of him, drinking tea from a samovar, or vodka if it’s going badly, and I think how easy he had it, always knowing what was coming next. He could tell you what Anna Karenina wore for dinner, all the while seeing steam from the train station puffing out between the final pages.

All morning I watched for that final, foolish letter of Hester’s, sitting at my old post at the foot of the stairs. Every now and then when my legs grew stiff I walked up and down the hallway with my hands in my pockets, looking at the wallpaper, sure I’d see birds moving if only I looked hard enough. Hester told me they wouldn’t notice what I was doing, and she was right, though I didn’t like to hear it said. They’re having a party tomorrow and they’re all occupied with something or other – Clare passed me on her way to the kitchen carrying a box of candles to decorate a birthday cake, and I heard Walker swearing in the dining room, trying to get an old film projector working so we can all see Hester when she was young, although you can’t imagine that she ever was. Elijah went straight up to his room singing something so melancholy I was glad when the low notes gave him a coughing fit and he had to stop, and Eve was playing her scales over and over in the music room at the other end of the hall. I watched for an hour at least, though it’s hard to tell here how time passes, but nothing came through the letterbox. After a while, as I grew restless, I heard footsteps in the music room and Eve put her head round the door.

I hadn’t seen her since she sent me away from her shaded patch on the lawn to talk to Hester. But I must have been thinking about her all along, because when I saw her face I thought how different it was from how I’d remembered it, but at the same time how familiar her mouth seemed to me, never quite closed, as if she is always about to sing or eat…

She looked up and down the hall until she saw me waiting there at the end, and when her eyes met mine I thought, so this is what they mean by a piercing stare. I swear I felt it perforate me, go through my borrowed clothes and my skin, between my ribs and through my liver, heart, spleen, kidneys, whatever’s packed away in there, and pinion me to the wall. It hurt, you know, or I thought it did – I wanted to look away because I could feel my cheeks burning, but I couldn’t because I thought even if I did, all I’d see, in front of me and behind me, would be those same clear eyes hunting me out.

Sometimes I think that if I had my way I’d wake up tomorrow and would never have seen her – would never have heard her name, and never would hear it either. So I don’t understand why it was that when she opened the door and beckoned to me I forgot about the letter and my promise to Hester, and followed her as dumbly as a dog.

The music room feels as though it must be the hottest part of the house – it’s a trick of the red-painted walls and the yellow and orange lilies Hester puts on all the tables. The lilies weren’t fresh when I first saw them on the second day, and by then were giving off a kind of animal scent, sweet but with something like flesh underneath it. When I brushed past, the pollen left stains on my sleeve as dark as dried blood.

I asked her why she wanted me. It never occurred to me that she might have wanted my company – I thought maybe she’d have some impossible task to test my strength or good humour, and ask me to take the piano out into the garden, or paint the room white to cool her down. But she said, ‘It’s nothing. I’m bored of these scales. Why don’t you sit?’ The piano stool is made for duets, I think – it has a tapestry cover worn through in the centre and is just wide enough for two. She was wearing denim shorts that would have looked better on a boy and her legs were sunburned. I said: ‘I’ve got things to do, you know,’ but she looked as though she thought it was very unlikely, began to play a melody, and asked me what I thought of it.

I hated it. It was brutally sad and sweet, and so obviously supposed to be moving that it made me determined to hate it even more. I told her it was lovely, and she smiled so suddenly it made me blink. She said, ‘No, it isn’t. Try this one.’ Without looking at the keys – she plays with her head tilted down and to the right, as though she’s seen something wonderful out of the corner of her eye and can’t quite catch it again – she played something else. Her hands hardly moved at all – there were just sly shifts of her fingers sliding on the keys – and the notes were pressed together in dark low groups I’m sure I felt as well as heard. If there was a rhythm I wasn’t aware of it – I felt displaced, watching her from a great distance, borne up by the notes, suspended above her. When she stopped I felt myself falling through the sudden quiet back into my seat, and realised I’d been bending low over the keyboard, watching her fingers so closely she must have felt my breath on the back of her hands. She laughed and said, ‘Better?’ and I said, ‘Much better,’ and waited for the old blush to start up underneath my beard, but it never came.

In the end her hands got tired from playing. She said, ‘Thank you. I hate to play alone. It’s like talking to yourself all night, and then I realise my arms are aching. If someone’s here I can go on and on without stopping.’ Then I asked her why she went on playing with aching arms, and she said, ‘It’s because everything’s such a muddle, and then I come here, and it never fails me. Look’ – she played a scale so swiftly I couldn’t really see where her fingers were falling – ‘it’s the same, every time, and your ears strain for it, and then the end you long for comes.’ With her thumb she played the final note again, and I knew what she meant.

I said, ‘I can only make sense of things when they’re written down. Sometimes, when I feel confused and in the dark, I think if only I looked hard enough I’d see words in their proper order, and I’d understand everything better.’

She didn’t laugh at me, but nodded and smiled and played that final note again, sinking her thumb on to the key so that the sound rang out around us. She said rather eagerly, ‘Yes, yes – I understand, I do: you have words, and I these eighty-eight keys, but the effect is the same…’ I remember looking at her from the corner of my eye; her face was turned away from me, the skin so white it was almost blue, and drawn taut over the high bones of her cheek. I looked at my hands and I don’t think I’d noticed before how slack my own skin was, and how ugly the black hairs on my wrist.

Then I said, ‘What will you play tomorrow night, for the others?’ and she asked me what I would like her to play and I said anything, I didn’t care. Then I touched her wrist and said, ‘Tell me what you’re doing here.’

She looked at my hand for a long while, then said, ‘It’s a very good piano.’

Since then I’ve wondered what could have suddenly made me incautious and unwise. Maybe it was the fault of the music, because it had been honest and true and meant only for me, and it made me think: Maybe I matter after all. She had started to withdraw from me behind the hard glazing of her green eyes, when just a minute before her head had almost touched my shoulder while she played. I heard myself say harshly, ‘None of you ever tell the truth, do you? Tell me what you’re doing here. You could practise anywhere, someone like you – why won’t you tell me?’

‘Why do you need to know?’

‘I wouldn’t ask if you all kept me at arm’s length where a stranger should be, but you don’t. You show me pieces of yourselves when you want to and never the rest. Is it because of Walker? What’s his real name, anyway? Walker! Does he think he’s in a film?’

‘You’re not a stranger now.’ She smiled at me, and it was the sort of kindly smile I imagine she might have given an impertinent child. I’d’ve preferred her to get up then and leave me there, but instead she made that gesture of lifting the curls from the back of her neck, and said, ‘No-one ever uses his first name. It’s so unlike him. It doesn’t fit.’

‘Why are you smiling? You hate each other.’

‘Oh.’ She looked hurt. ‘How could you think that?’

She slowly played a chord that I knew, because she’d taught me, was in a major key.

‘I saw you with him yesterday.’

‘I know. Walker calls you Peeping John.’ This made me miserable with anger and humiliation. I looked down at the clean sunburned lines of her legs and the narrow hips on the piano stool next to me. She said, with a flat detached voice as though she was speaking about someone she didn’t much care for, ‘It was a long time ago now and not worth speaking about. Of course at the time I thought it was’ – she flicked idly at the piano keys – ‘I wish we could come up with another word: this one’s got all worn out! – I thought it was love. But it broke everything up and spoilt things I thought would never be spoilt and in the end I was left on my own.

‘I disappointed everyone. They tell you, don’t they, that there’s no right and wrong these days. We’ve all grown up, put that sort of thing behind us a hundred years ago. But there’ll always be some things they won’t let you get away with and even the words for them don’t change. Infidelity, adultery…’ She shrugged, and the words with their hard consonants were like the snicking of scissors through paper. I remember hearing then a sharp metallic sound out in the hall that might have been the rattling of the letterbox or something dropped in the kitchen doorway and I thought: I ought to go, I’ve asked too much, I don’t want to hear any more – but my hand was still on her white wrist and it looked suddenly very frail and thin.

I said, ‘But Hester didn’t leave you alone, or Clare,’ and she said of course she hadn’t.

‘Don’t you know her at all? She’s a child, a young child, she never knew or saw what everyone else did.’ Then she looked across at me, and although I don’t think she meant it unkindly I thought it was mostly contempt that made her eyes glint under their white lids. ‘You’re not so different from her, are you, John? You watch and watch but you don’t understand any more than she does and you’ve had twenty years longer of living.’ Then she said, ‘I want you to understand because I don’t want you to think badly of me, and because you asked.’ Then she said, frowning and pausing between her words, examining them before they got to me: ‘If what happened back then – if it was all for nothing, just because I was foolish in the same banal uninteresting ways we always are, then it was all just a waste… but if something comes out of it, if I can love him now or make him love me, then it won’t have been a waste after all – it won’t have been foolish and destructive but something good.’ She laughed and said, ‘Elijah would probably tell me I’m trying to redeem my soul.’

I said, ‘He was married then – and is he still? Where is she… why doesn’t she come for him? Don’t you care about her, or wonder how bad the pain was when she knew what you had done?’

She smiled at that, and said, ‘I never think about her. I don’t even know her name. What has she got to do with any of it? Could I change what I felt for the sake of someone who I’ll never meet?’

I could see the sense and the cruelty in it, and it troubled me – I wanted to think only well of her. And all the while the heat made my head ache, and I kept hearing as clearly as if it were just outside the open window the two of them laughing at me as I hurried away from them across the lawn. So without much truth and with no kindness at all I said, ‘You must know he doesn’t love you. He’s laughing at you all the time and you can’t see it. It’s humiliating for you, following someone, being here because of them, I’m ashamed for you. And besides he isn’t anything, he’s just a man who’s getting old with grey in his hair. He knows nothing, he’s not kind to you, I’ve never even seen him make you smile…’

She said vaguely, ‘You’re hurting me’, and when I looked at my hand on the piano stool, I saw I’d been gripping her arm all along and had left an imprint of my thumb below the sharp knuckle of her wrist. Though I was hurting her she had not pulled away, but instead drew closer: she almost leaned on me – I could feel her shoulder on mine, and when I looked up her face was tilted so that when a tear edged from beneath her eyelid it ran back into the black curl behind her ear. When she spoke again her voice was low, murmurous, almost a monotone, as though she were an instrument being played and a single note, low and soft, was drawn out again and again. She said, ‘I’m afraid of not being wanted – I would rather it be him than no-one.’

When she had finished speaking she didn’t quite close her mouth, but left her lower lip loose, so that I could see where the flesh inside became smooth and bright with moisture. The pressure of her shoulder on mine grew more insistent – I thought perhaps she was reeling in the heat and might faint; then I looked again at the black lashes lying on her cheek and the half-open mouth and knew that I was being mocked all over again. It was just like her, that pretence at a kiss, or the beginning of it – I imagined dipping my head to hers and feeling laughter on her breath, and imagined her laughing later with Walker as they walked on the dark lawn sharing one of their cigarettes. I pushed her away and without looking back went out on to the terrace where the stones burned the soles of my feet…

There’s someone outside my door!