After Me Comes the Flood (7 page)

I’ve always thought people look diminished and vulnerable without their clothes, but Alex was so unselfconscious that he seemed to grow taller and broader as he stood there. He seemed to search my face for something – I don’t know what, or I’d have given it to him – then said again, ‘They will come, John, won’t they? When I tell them?’ Of course I didn’t know, though I doubted it – I was tired and hot, and the headache that had plagued me since I’d woken on the floor in my own room a hundred years ago was beginning to blind me again. I’d’ve said anything, I think, to avoid his gaze and go back to the iron bed upstairs, and draw the curtains against the sickly valve tower light. So I nodded and said, ‘I imagine they’d have to. If you had the proof.’ Then I immediately felt ashamed of myself and plucked another burr from the clothes I held – I knew I should reason with him, but I knew also that I was an imposter, and had no part in whatever they all chose to do. The young man’s face suddenly changed (it’s a trick they all have, I’ve noticed, of changing face like a tossed coin), and he gave me one of the frank childlike smiles that made me think he was saner than all of us.

‘Knew I could count on you,’ he said triumphantly. ‘Knew it! You see’ – he leant towards me and I could smell stale beer and meat on his breath – ‘I don’t know if they really believe me.’ He nodded ruefully towards the house. ‘They think I’m being a bit, you know.’ He tapped his forehead, and we both laughed.

As I remember it now I think how mad we both must have looked: Alex naked and at ease, idly batting away a fly drawn to his sweat, and me a little distance away fussing over an armful of clothes. I did what was easiest – I laughed with him, and tapped my own forehead too, and said, ‘No-one could think that, not really. Not if you told them everything you’ve told me.’ I let him think nothing could be more logical than for him to pick his way on bare feet across the rubble beach towards the black water.

The moon and the yellow light from the tower gave enough brightness for me to see him dwindle until the dark water reached his waist, then he struck out for the dam wall. He called out to me once, then after that it was so quiet I could hear the swift splashes of his arms cutting through the water. A moment later and there was nothing, although I think I heard him call again from somewhere away to my right.

I don’t know how long I waited. Perhaps he really had timed how long the task took, but it seemed to me that the moon moved across the sky and back while I walked up and down at the foot of the slope. Once or twice the yellow light flickered violently and I thought the bulb would blow – that I’d be left alone in the dark, and he’d have nothing to guide him out of the water – but it always came back and sent my shadow across the lawn towards the house. By the time he climbed silently out of the water I was tired and distracted, and when I felt his wet hand on my shoulder I thought for a moment the drowned men Clare was afraid of had found me out.

He said, ‘Nothing tonight, I’m afraid – nothing to see.’ He patted my back, as if he thought I’d disappointed too. ‘It’s all right, we can check tomorrow, can’t we, now we both know what we’ve got on our hands? Makes a difference to me, I can tell you, knowing you believe me – I’ll sleep better tonight.’ He grinned, took his clothes from me and quickly dressed. ‘You look awful,’ he said, ‘Let’s get you home.’ And because it was so ridiculous, finding myself being kindly led indoors by a half-naked boy, still wet from swimming at night to find a place underwater where birds might nest, I began to laugh and, as though it were contagious, he did too. By the time we reached the house we were both laughing, until we gasped for breath and clutched at each other’s arms as we walked.

At the foot of the stairs he said, ‘I’ll leave you now – I won’t sleep for a long while,’ and turned towards the kitchen. His feet left black prints on the flagstones. Then he turned back and said, shyly and as though he were afraid he might have transgressed, ‘Sometimes I forget where I’ve been and what I’ve done, so you see I don’t like to be alone… Tonight while I was in the water I thought, I can feel it on my back, and I can hear it splashing, and John is there waiting, and if he is there, so must I be too…’ Then he plunged forward, with the same motion as when he had struck out into the water, and squeezed my shoulder so hard that I have the marks of his hand on me now. Then Hester called him from the kitchen and I came upstairs alone.

IV

Hester watched their return across the lawn. The yellow light from the reservoir gave each man a kind of aura, and it was impossible to tell from that distance who was supporting whom, only that every few steps one would stagger a little with laughter or weariness and be tugged to his feet again. She drew the curtains, not wanting to be seen, and sat at the dining table rolling the glass eye back and forth across the wood. She felt rather sorry for it, with the white clouded and bloodshot, and the hazel-streaked iris turning uselessly this way and that. The house closed about her like a clam shell; it was the hour she liked best, with all her duties done. She numbered her guests one by one on her fingers, a tally of the day’s work: Eve, Clare, Alex (impossible to prevent a smile at the name), Elijah, John – she lightly touched the eye and imagined it blinking, hurt.

That rash promise the year before, just as the door to St Jude’s had closed behind them, had been sincerely meant. She’d felt a sudden urge to fill each room, remembering long years in which she longed to hear a door slam or the piano played. There’d been times when even an intruder would have been a welcome sight; she’d have opened up her jewellery box (truth be told, all those pretty things were never worn), and put the kettle on.

But once they’d come together through the forest – Alex mute, she remembered, curled in the back of her car with his knees to his chest – and taken up their residence, the promise had been quickly forgotten in a kind of collective act: better to think they’d always been there. She found herself growing deliberately vague about the house and its origins (oh, a family estate – a kind of inheritance, she supposed: unexpected, unwanted, a burden in many ways; but so good to be
useful
) and sometimes indulged in a little myth-making – she was born there; she’d found it one morning out walking; she’d broken in and never left.

Elijah’s tentative reminder of her promise, and his plea for the inclusion of the man he’d known before he’d parted ways with God, had been at first resented. Her protective impulse had grown stronger with every week that passed, until she came to think of it as exerting a power of restraint (
they cannot leave me
, she’d once said aloud). An outsider might break the bond; but she’d given her word and that was that. Odd, though – she picked up the glass eye and popped it in her mouth – she’d imagined him to be a younger man, a boy almost, and had been startled at the appearance of that tall grave man with the beard that grew rather thinly around his mouth, giving his face a vulnerable and sensual cast of which, she was certain, he was quite unaware.

She had felt also the effect on him of her own appearance, but was so accustomed by now to evoking a mix of pity and distaste that it hardly troubled her. It was a hard-won indifference, though she still remembered the painful realisation that she was unfit for the male attention her sister enjoyed (it was the same sister, encountering her once in the bath, who’d first alerted her to her own ugliness, by loudly recoiling from her too-fat thighs showing above the foam and going away laughing, the bathroom door open, so that Hester had to cross the room naked and ashamed to hide herself again).

It was not in her nature to avoid her faults, and so she took to a minute examination and cataloguing of them: the preposterous nose; the coarse skin, in which the pores seemed to grow larger over time; the tendency to spots and boils; the pendulous flesh on her arms; and the weight of her breasts and stomach, which pulled at the small of her back and made it ache. In time her shame had hardened into a kind of defiance; what God had taken away from her body he’d given abundantly elsewhere. No-one would look twice at her, it was true – but nor would they out-think her, outwit her, forget her, or cause her a moment’s unease. By the time she entered drama school (‘I daresay you’ll get a lot of
character parts
’) she out-ate and out-drank her companions, Falstaff in jet beads and high-laced boots. She was uniformly tolerated and frequently liked, and being both above and beneath suspicion was permitted friendships with men that might otherwise have been forbidden.

She taught herself to care nothing for the love she believed her body excluded, rejoicing at weddings while hardening herself against any expectation that she might one day wear the little gold seal of possession.

The hardening was not immediate or complete: there’d been, of course, a loved one, though she could not have said what fixed her affection on him, only that in his presence she felt elated and miserable all at once. That he openly enjoyed her company with an uncomplicated friendliness was so much the worse; she was a foil to his humour, which was not always kind, and at times the authority which was the compensation for her failure ever to be girlish was all that kept him in check. And being above and beneath suspicion, they often shared a room, to the amusement of his careless lovers (‘Oh Hester, do see he behaves!’). There was a night when she lay awake on the floor (not admitting that the offered bed was too narrow), and listening to his restless movements heard
Hester, come here I need you
, but feeling the shame of her body lay in silence. The thing was that he rarely remembered by morning what was done at night half-sleeping, and would not have known whether she’d kept her place on the floor, or come to stoop over him and put herself to his mouth, which is what he would have asked her to do.

She was no success on the stage, and blamed her appearance quite cheerfully, since the truth (she could not act) was far worse. It was easy then to retreat to the house with its dark places and curious yellow light, and welcome friends who’d come for a day and remain, enchanted, for a week. There came a time of enormous popularity, when her height and heaviness became cause for admiration, perfectly suited to her place at the head of the table. Clare and Alex, to whom she’d once laughingly refused to be godmother (‘I can’t help but feel He’s never been
entirely
on my side…’), were the remnants of that time in which she was half-hostess, half-servant, developing the lasting role which she now had perfected down to the last line and gesture. Their mother, for whom the appearance of children had been as much a surprise as if they’d been left on the doorstep by a stork, relied so much on Hester that by the time they grew out of biddable childhood and into their teens (though it was true that Clare remained hardly more than a biddable child), it was Hester they thought of as home. With what remained of their family abroad or indifferent they orbited about her, departing for periods but never quite escaping her pull, so that to retreat to her when all seemed dark and cheerless was not only natural, but essential. When what she thought of as ‘the Trouble’ came (she could never think of Alex as being ill, preferring instead to conceive of it all as being part of his character, and one for which there was no cure), it was her phone that rang first, and her hands which were needed, so that when harried nurses said ‘Your mother’s here,’ no-one corrected them, because no-one had noticed.

She heard their voices almost at the door –
alone and no-one sees me
– and put the glass eye back in its place. Wet from her mouth it looked more alive than ever; she turned off the lights and went down the hall to the kitchen, calling them home.

FRIDAY

All the day that followed John remembered the quiet splash of the young man striking the water, the constant shadow on his bare arm and the scent of algae drying on the rocks. The hour spent by the reservoir became part of the fabric of the house and its history; it had the effect of weighting him there. The next morning he’d have been startled and offended if anyone had stopped him at the door to his room and said, ‘But what on earth are
you
doing here?’

At breakfast Alex said nothing to his sister, nor to Hester as she stood frying eggs in spitting oil and stacking them on a tin plate. But passing John a mug of dark brown tea, he’d given him first a wink, and then a slow-growing smile of such frank happiness that Eve paused on the threshold and said, ‘Well now. And what are you boys planning?’

‘We’re going swimming today,’ said Clare. She had plaited her hair into two untidy ropes that fell over her shoulders. The effect should have been childlike, but it bared her unflawed face and pale mouth, and she looked more like a tomb-carving than ever. The cat dragged a fried egg over to where she sat, and crouched between her outstretched arms lapping at the yolk. ‘Can we? You said today we could go swimming.’

‘My darling, we’ve said so every morning since the end of spring.’ Eve, wearing a shirt that smelt a little of Walker’s cigarettes, sat beside John and drew up her legs. The long fine bones of her shins gleamed in the light.

‘No – everybody’s going, they said they would. Walker said so, and John.’

‘John?’ Eve drew out his name across several low notes, and her eyes glittered as she surveyed him through steam rising from the cup she cradled loosely between her palms. He shifted in his seat, feeling the insistent rasp of the other man’s jeans. They were thinning and frayed, and in several places burnt with cigarettes, and he’d found in its pockets a long steel screw which he lined up, with the others, on the windowsill. He’d chosen a white shirt that morning, but its sleeves were too short and he’d folded them neatly back towards the elbow. He found the sight of his own bare arm peculiarly unsettling, noticing for the first time how the dark hairs clustered at the bones of his wrists. The shirt was missing its top button, and John felt the woman’s gaze pass, amused, over his bare throat. ‘Our John, out swimming?’ The black arch of her eyebrow plainly doubted it; then she lost her brief interest in him and wandered out to the garden, leaving John once again feeling that she found him foolish.

‘Well, anyway – I’m not going in first,’ said Clare. ‘Will it be cold?’ She was wearing a child’s swimming costume worn to grey netting at the seams. It was far too small, and left red welts on her shoulders. The promise of a swim had woken her early – John had heard someone light-footed run past his door not long after sunrise, slamming doors in the kitchen downstairs and throwing windows open.

‘That depends when you go in,’ said John, remembering his nephews once dragging him towards an incoming tide. ‘Wait till after lunch, and the water will be warm as a bath and you’ll forget you ever stood on dry land.’

She nodded and said, ‘All right then,’ and scooping the cat under her arm followed Eve out into the garden.

‘The trouble with my sister,’ said Alex, turning away from the sink where he was inexpertly washing up, ‘is that she does as she’s told. You have to watch that.’

‘I imagine you do,’ said John.

Late in the morning, on his way to the garden, John found Hester seated on the step where two nights before he’d answered the phone. She was sewing buttons on to a blue and white striped shirt, which showed patches of dust and grease where she held it, her needle flashing in the light coming through the panes in the front door.

‘John,’ she’d said when she saw him, not looking up from her work, ‘is all as it should be, out there in the sun?’ Crouched there with her back pressed against the wooden stairs she looked childish and ancient all at once, and was placed at the centre of things. Her gaze took in the blue dining room and the kitchen, and – if she leant against the banister – along the hall to the door leading out to the garden. Little could happen that would not be seen or heard.

‘Elijah’s asleep in the dining room with the cat on his shoulder, and Walker’s dead-heading the roses. Clare says she won’t go swimming after all – she’s afraid she’ll cut her feet on the stones.’

She nodded twice, and then once more after a pause, as though she had given a problem some thought and reached a conclusion. She broke a length of cotton in her teeth, and sucked at the end to draw it through her needle. ‘And Alex?’

‘I saw him sleeping in the long grass.’

She nodded again, without surprise, and looked up from her mending to give him one of her sudden transforming smiles. It was impossible not to smile in return, and John stood watching the needle slip through the button and the fabric in a deft practised rhythm. Then she said, ‘
You’ll
look after them for me, won’t you, dear John?’ and this time mischief tugged at her smile, so that he felt irresistibly drawn into a conspiracy.

‘I’m going outside now,’ he said, ‘to brave the sun.’ The needle flashed through the cloth, and he imagined she was sewing not a faded shirt, but a fine net that drew them all together. As he put his hand to the door, she called after him: ‘When you see Alex, will you tell him I found the book he asked me for, and left it in the dining room, where he always sits?’

When he found Alex on the terrace picking moss from the lead face of the sundial, he passed on the message word for word with the accuracy of a clever schoolboy. The younger man frowned, scratching at an insect bite at the rim of the shadow-mark on his arm. ‘A book?’ He shook his head. ‘But I don’t remember any…’ Then he shrugged. ‘Oh well – so often I forget what I’ve done and said, and if I didn’t have Hester to remind me…’ He grinned ruefully, and patting John’s shoulder in thanks stepped through the glass doors and into the dining room behind.

Later still Clare came and sat beside him in the long shadow of the dying elm. She’d covered her swimming costume with a dark green dress that reached to her ankles, its hem splashed with mud from another season. Sweat had darkened the roots of her hair, and she was smeared with cream that lay on her skin like the marks on an animal’s pelt. The lotion smelt a little of honey, and had begun to attract tiny black flies. ‘Thunderbugs,’ said John, lifting one from the back of her hand with his thumbnail. ‘It means the storm’s coming soon.’

‘I don’t think I want to go swimming,’ she said. The cat had broken the string of beads, and she tossed them between her hands.

‘Why – aren’t you hot? Won’t the water cool you?’ He picked up a bead from where it had fallen, and put it in her palm.

‘I went up there just now and there was something under the water, like hair or clothes. Alex says it’s a plastic bag but a plastic bag would float, wouldn’t it?’

‘Aren’t you going to the seaside tomorrow? Then you can swim in the sea.’

‘That would be even deeper, though. Do you like swimming?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said again. ‘I can’t remember.’ This was true – there must have been swimming, he thought, on those short bed-and-breakfast holidays in Suffolk and Kent, but he was too dazed with heat to remember. He felt sweat collect where the girl’s shoulder rested against his, and moving away from her lowered himself onto the grass. She spread the beads in her lap and began to sort them, chatting idly to him without pausing for breath or answer.

Her undemanding presence soothed him until he lay half-asleep, now and then caught by a word or phrase: ‘The beads are pretty aren’t they, blue like bits of a broken plate – are they glass?… I tried to make him wear them but he wouldn’t – he said they smelt like the skin of the dead man who’d been wearing them but I can’t smell anything, can you?… I remember someone at St Jude’s had beads just like this on her wrist with a bird hanging from it and when she lost the bird I found it for her… oh yes, it’s hot but we mustn’t complain Hester says; it wasn’t like this last year when it rained and rained and Eve was unhappy then and wouldn’t play the piano, and the keys got dusty… well, of course that was before Walker got here but I don’t know why that would cheer her up; she’s always hated him and I heard him call her bitch once when he thought no-one was listening.
Bitch
, I said,
that’s terrible, you can’t say that
! and he laughed and said
Well, she’s more like a cat really, a dog’s a faithful thing
, and kissed me on the forehead like he always does when he’s sorry… and of course that was the year we took Alex away…’

At this she fell silent, so that the sound of the beads clicking in her lap roused John, who looked up between outspread fingers to see her frowning over her shoulder, back towards the house. After a while she began singing under her breath:
Oh, thunderbug fly away home, your house is on fire and your children will burn
… The low hum went through her and into the hard earth, and became part of the heat and the dry rustle of wind in the dying branches of the elm. Soon after he must have fallen asleep, because when he was woken by Clare shaking him urgently by the shoulder it had begun to grow dark, and the empty garden was in shadow.

The sound of a dog barking frantically reached them from the open windows of the house, and with it an unfamiliar voice raised in hysterical anger or pleading. John sat up too quickly, and felt the blood drain from his head. Specks of light floated in front of his eyes; shaking his head to be rid of them, he asked the girl, ‘What’s that, who’s come here? Who is it?’ His first thought was that he’d been finally found out, and his stomach lurched once and then receded, leaving him breathless and hollow.

Clare twisted the fabric of her skirt. ‘I think it’s that woman again…’

‘What woman?’

‘She never told us her name… She comes sometimes, because –’ She stopped herself, pressing her hand to her mouth as if she’d suddenly remembered there were things she mustn’t say. Then she slid her hand into his and said, ‘You won’t let her come down here?’

‘Of course I won’t,’ he said, thinking of the name written in the notebook upstairs, and engraved into the table in the kitchen. Was this Eadwacer then, come to deliver another of those foolish letters?

‘Let’s stay here.’ Clare crouched beside him clasping her knees, and whispered: ‘She always goes away after a while, let’s just stay here where she won’t see us – where’s Alex? She mustn’t find him.’ Up on the embankment wall, John could see the young man pacing back and forth. The yellow light above the tower had come on, and shed a sickly glow on the grass. ‘It’s all right, he’s up there,’ he said. ‘Who is she?’

‘She’s horrible – she shouts and cries, and always brings her dog. And I don’t like looking at her face – it’s all soft, like she doesn’t have any bones. Alex knew her, you know, back when he went away. She’s always trying to find him.’ She started to cry, and John patted her helplessly on the shoulder.

Then there was a lull in the noise from the house, and instead they heard Elijah’s deep and measured voice. The dog barked once more, in a single threatened yelp, and the cat bolted from the house with its ragged ears flattened against its scalp. Spying John and Clare huddled at the foot of the elm, it slowed to a saunter, and reaching them thrust its head into Clare’s palm and set up an ecstatic purr. The girl fussed over it for a while, and then said, ‘I can see her, look.’

As it grew darker, the lamp-lit rooms of the house became more distinct, and they could make out a small group in the kitchen, stiffly ranged against each other. Hester and Elijah stood side by side, their backs to the window, making a barrier. Elijah spoke, the lights making an untidy halo of the reddish curls on his head, his hand raised in a defensive soothing gesture. In the centre of the room John saw a short woman with thick colourless hair and a pale soft face twisted with anger or misery. She wore a shapeless grey coat buttoned to the neck, and light reflecting from the thick lenses of her glasses gave her movements a blind menacing look. The sight of her fractured John’s false sense of belonging – it seemed to him that she’d come to spite him, and he felt a surge of loathing and disgust, as though he’d woken up to find a spider on his pillow. Eve and Walker stood in the doorway, Eve a little behind the older man as though he’d pushed himself forward to shield her. The fine bones of her face were pale as paper underneath her cap of black hair, and her head was tilted back like a child trying to be brave. It was this, and not Clare crying beside him, that made John stand and say, ‘Do you think we should stay here? Shouldn’t we go in?’

She shook her head, and sniffed at her tears. ‘I don’t think so. They always make her go away. Won’t you stay with me here until she goes?’

‘But don’t you think it must be her, who writes those letters? Perhaps she came to put another through the door, and they caught her at it, and there was a scene…’ The idea satisfied him, as it would if he’d been sitting in his armchair at the shop, idly turning the pages of a book; but all the same there was a nervous twisting of his stomach.

‘I don’t know. Maybe – but stay here, please. I don’t like the shouting, it scares me.’

‘Of course I will.’ Her face, streaked with tears and dust, was suddenly very like his brother’s had been when he’d come to John with the terrible, brief distress of childhood. He patted her shoulder twice, and said, ‘Well then, let’s not think about her. Why don’t you tell me about your cat? How old is he?’

‘I don’t know.’ She wiped her nose on her bare arm. ‘I think he must be very old, look – he has white hairs on his nose.’ The cat shot John a baleful stare, and began to worry at its torn ear. ‘Is it true that all ginger cats are boys?’

‘Toms, yes. They call them toms, I think – look, is she going?’ The little group in the kitchen was slowly dispersing, and he thought he heard the front door close. A moment later the dog’s bark receded into the distance, and after a long silence in which they could make out the footsteps of Alex pacing the embankment wall behind them, Eve began to play the piano. The cat, sensing the crisis had passed, aimed a petulant scratch at Clare and idled back towards the house, pausing now and then to pat at something in the grass.