After Me Comes the Flood (8 page)

Clare began to cry again, this time quietly and with a steady fixed look of sadness. She seemed to John less like a child then than she’d ever been, and it made him anxious and unsure of himself and his methods; he took his arm from her shoulder and said, ‘Let’s bring your brother in, shall we? Look, here he comes – don’t let him see you cry.’ She reached up her arms, and he pulled her to her feet. ‘That’s right, everything’s all right,’ he said, patting his pockets for the handkerchief that was always there, forgetting he wore another man’s clothes. ‘It’s just us now, there’s no-one else here.’

SATURDAY

I

With the bright sea at his feet and at his back a black rock, John sat listening on the shore:

‘… warm in the water like a bath, it’s so shallow – Hester
do
go in…’

‘Look what’s this one then, all spotty like an egg; what is it Eve, did you see one like it before?’

‘… a cowrie, I think – and if I don’t play
at all
today I won’t be able to do any
at all
tomorrow – my fingers will hurt and be stiff…’

‘I shall
not
go in, however warm, however shallow. A cowrie, yes – how many have you there? They’re fortune-teller’s shells, if you know how to use them.’

‘… three… four… five… once I caught a shell alive… Walker give me that one there, there,
there
by your foot…’

‘John asleep again, I see. What have you done with my cigarettes?’

‘… a necklace of them like this, maybe a starfish in the middle…’

‘A
whole day
without music. What a waste.’

‘Where else but where you put them – shall we eat? I’m hungry and the bread is still warm… sing then Eve, if you must, there was singing before anything else… No, don’t wake him, don’t be unkind!’

‘… don’t feel like singing, my head aches. Oh, blow it the other way, can’t you…’

‘It’ll keep away flies.’

‘… and besides what have you done with Alex?’

‘Yes, where’s my brother? I want to show him these: thirteen… fourteen…’

‘I recall a poem once in my youth, in those days when we memorised them and they lodged in there –
the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea
, it went – I don’t recall the rest – and at that time I had an opal ring and honestly thought,
honestly thought
, look hard enough Hester and you’ll see the white waves moving…’

‘Remember we used to keep the shells that were still on their hinges and you’d try and keep pennies inside? Sing for us, Evie, go on… oh, look, where have you been – I’ve been waiting and waiting! Look what I found!’

‘
No doubt did you please you could marry with ease
…’

‘… still warm, thank you – and is there cheese?’

‘
When young maidens are fair many lovers will come
…’

‘But you’re not fair, my darling, are you? Clare, now, she’s fair as the moon…’

‘And no maiden either!’

‘
But she whom you wed should be North Country bred…
give me the knife.’

‘… fair little sister, never growed up – show me your treasures then…’

‘I had thought Elijah might join us this time, really I did, but his times are in his own hands, I daresay – oh, careful now, mind John…’

And John, sand kicked into his eyes and the shade retreating from his feet, sat up, took the bread that was offered to him, and said, ‘It was always a favourite song of my mother’s, that one, though I don’t think she’d ever been north.’

After they’d eaten, and all but Hester had wandered out towards the long shallow pool that lay between them and the sea, John said: ‘I think I’ll go for a walk.’ Hester waved something between a farewell and a blessing, and resumed her watchful cross-legged position on the red blanket.

He’d woken that morning resolved to take his leave – the notebook left for the other man, the letter folded twice, the painted Puritan saluted at the door – but somewhere along the way he’d been caught up again, helpless, Elijah waving them farewell at the door, and delivering (or so John thought) a slow complicit wink. Still sleepy when they set out, he dozed fitfully in the moist hot air of the car, so that he only recalled waking now and then to see rabbits poisoned by farmers shivering at the roadside, and pylons coming at him across the fields like high-masted ships of the line. Stumbling to his feet, he’d seen a car park sloping to a quayside, where a boy sat cross-legged trailing a crab-line in green water. There was the familiar scent of clean air and salt and something deeper underneath, of fragments of fish dropped by gulls and drying out in hidden places, and seaweed dying on beds of rock; and above the calling of the gulls, the rushing and receding he’d once taken home in the coils of a shell that he pressed to his ear in winter, when there seemed no possibility of the sun ever shining again.

Returning now to the car park, uncertain of his way, he looked out to the line of dark squat shrubs that marked the beginning of the salt-marsh. The child had abandoned his fishing lines and now leant against the hull of a blue-painted tender, scratching patterns on the tarmac with a piece of flint.

The marshes were reached from a narrow raised pathway along a bank that formed a kind of sea wall. As John set out on the path he paused to let a toad cross; it splayed out its soft patient feet and crept past, a pulse throbbing in its stomach and its butter-coloured eyes rolling thanks. To his right as he walked were the long narrow gardens of the last houses before the sea; to his left, several feet below, was the low stretch of land that was drowned and revived every day by the industrious tides. It was an indistinct landscape riddled with irregular channels that ran into and out of each other everywhere he looked. Late in the day water would seep from under the soft mud and trickle unhurriedly in fine rivulets, gathering speed until the tide was high.

The land through which these channels ran was piebald green and blue, covered in grasses and fat blades of samphire or broad patches of sea lavender, its flowers so fine it might have been a bluish mist settling at ankle height, rolling in from the sea. It was impossible to believe it could ever have been underwater, but here and there a fine dark lacework of seaweed lay on the tips of the grasses, hanging like cobwebs in a forgotten room.

It was not a wholly unfamiliar scene – his brother had taken him to places like it often over the years. ‘These salt-flats are an eerie sort of place,’ Christopher had written to him, soon after he moved to the coast: ‘You couldn’t possibly stand alone out there under that massive sky and not feel
something
.’ On his first visit John had seen how empty it was, and how doleful, and felt nothing but the damp chill of a winter morning. That a man’s spirit could be brought low by nothing more than empty sky over empty land was absurd, he’d thought, and thumped his brother’s shoulder with cheerful force as they walked home.

He came down from the raised shingle track onto a broad stretch of cracked mud on which white salt stains glittered. Above him the sky was bright and the small hard sun pricked at his scalp. From away to his left, deep in a channel he couldn’t see, a curlew began to sing with a bubbling call that might have come from underwater.

He stooped to pick a head or two of sea lavender, wincing as the sturdy sharp stems rasped against the flesh in the crook of his fingers. The flowers were papery and dry, and held no scent. ‘All will be well,’ said John hopelessly to a herring gull dozing on a wooden boat nearby. ‘All will be well, and all manner of things will be well.’ It was plain the gull doubted this, and with a tired thrust of its wings it abandoned its wooden perch. John, who hadn’t noticed the boat when first coming down from the embankment path, walked curiously over. By far the largest of the crafts stranded on the marshes, it was an ugly, ill-proportioned, unpainted thing, with no rudder, mast or sail that he could see, as unseaworthy as a garden shed. A black stovepipe stuck up from the roof of the cabin, reaching down to a grimed oven that could just be seen through the centre of the boat’s three windows.

Moving a little closer, setting his feet carefully on the few raised firm patches between the damp rivulets of mud, John peered in. The window on the left was half-open, and swayed now and then in the breeze, sending the reflected sun sliding back and forth over the smeared glass. Three pans, untidily stacked, sat on the stovetop; a clean towel hung on a wooden rail. On a shelf nailed over the stove was a tin can with its bright label turned to the wall, and a childish egg cup with a blue stripe. If he stood on tiptoe it was possible to see, in the centre of a pine table pushed under the window, a stack of blue napkins ironed into neat squares, and a magazine with half its cover in shade, and half bleached pale by the sun. The boat was stranded in a stretch of damp mud as pale as the cap of a mushroom – no-one could possibly reach it from the soft wet marshes without floundering. A set of tracks, plainly showing the paws of a curious dog, led halfway to the tilting hull and back again at the anxious call of its master. Where the drier marshes met the mud several wooden planks were stacked, caked with mud and in places draped with seaweed. They made a dry path out to the boat a short distance away, but there were no marks in the mud. John watched it awhile, half-expecting to see a face at the window, but there was only his own, thinner than he remembered it, and anxious under an untidy thatch of hair.

Turning away, he returned to the path and followed it towards the empty horizon. Small furtive movements came from the grasses and sea lavender at his ankles, and sometimes a gull screamed out. Behind the stranded houseboat, beyond the embankment path, a line of pine trees showed black against the empty sky. Pigeons squabbled in the branches, bursting out of one tree and furiously into another. John watched them, peering through the black thicket. The sun raged at him – he felt it burning through the thin weave of his shirt and sending the blood to his head, where it beat implacably behind his eyes. A woman and child coming down the shingled path looked at him, startled, as they passed, the woman tugging at the boy’s hand to walk a little distance away from him. She had a pleasant soft face tanned by a week’s holiday; the boy was small, thin-legged, inquisitive, his green T-shirt still damp at the edges from the sea. Not sharing his mother’s suspicion, he eyed John frankly as he passed, taking him in with the same joyful interest he showed in the deep-cut channel and the listing boats.

‘Look, look,’ he said, seeing the window on the houseboat swing open and shut. ‘Is someone in there? Can we see? Do they live inside?’

‘I don’t think so. It’s too old. No-one lives there now.’

The two stood side by side at the edge of the pool of mud, dampened by thin channels of rising water. ‘Yes they do, they do – look.’ The boy jumped up and down to see better. ‘They’ve had their dinner, look.’ The woman peered in. ‘A long time ago, maybe. There’s no-one there now.’

‘But I want to go inside!’ His voice rose with indignation.

‘Well. You can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Why do you think?’

John had almost reached the path. Beside the wooden houseboat, the boy tugged thoughtfully at his T-shirt. ‘Because it isn’t mine?’

‘That’s right. It’s not ours, so we can’t go in.’ The woman smoothed his hair, then said: ‘Listen! Can you hear that funny sound again?’ She stooped to crouch beside the boy and turning him towards her put her head beside his. ‘Be quiet, and listen, there it is again!’

The child cupped his hands behind his ears and pulled them comically forward, straining into the breeze. John heard it too: the mournful bubbling call not far away now, hidden somewhere in the marsh. ‘It’s a curlew,’ he said, not quite to himself. The boy heard him and turned sharply.

‘That man said something!’ he whispered loudly, looking at John with astonishment. The woman stood and turned to John, her eyebrows raised.

‘It’s a curlew,’ he said again apologetically. ‘You can tell because he sounds like he’s singing under the sea. Like there are bubbles coming out of his beak.’ He smiled at the boy. ‘Listen. Can you hear it?’ There was nothing for a while, then it came again, starting on a high fluting note and falling unevenly through a scale. ‘You’ll know it when you see it,’ said John, ‘because his beak turns down at the end, like this.’ He made a curving gesture, and the child glanced quickly at his mother – could this be true? – and back, wide-eyed, at John. ‘Watch out for it,’ he said. ‘It won’t fly very high. It’s just a brown old thing, really. Quite ordinary. You wouldn’t notice it, in a crowd.’ He smiled at them both and turned back to the path.

‘Thank you,’ said the woman, smiling uncertainly at him. Then she said, ‘Say thank you!’ and the boy did, twisting the green fabric of his T-shirt around a dirty thumb.

When John was only a few feet along the embankment path he heard the call again, and the young child shouting.
They’ve seen it
, he thought, and hoped they’d not be disappointed.

Late in the afternoon he found Hester sitting alone with her back to the rock, her hands clasped over her stomach. ‘You’ve been gone a long time. I was worried – it would be easy to get lost, out there. I did once.’ She gave the impression she’d done so only out of choice, and enjoyed every minute of it.

‘I heard curlews singing, and the tide coming in – look: I picked some sea lavender.’ He’d tied the bunch with a ribbon of grass, and blushed when he gave it to her.

‘John! How sweet you are, and the flowers won’t fade, you know – there are bunches in the glasshouse someone must have picked just when the last century turned. Sit down, won’t you, and have a drink with me – let’s see if it’s kept cold, all tombed up in the sand…’ John took a bottle of beer from her and sank into the meagre shade. There was no sign of the rising tide – the sea was as far away as ever, and hadn’t yet reached the long pool which was busy with children, and with old women who’d wet their feet and go no further.

‘You’re all alone here, then?’ He fell to wondering where Eve might have gone, and whether she’d kept the sun from scorching her skin. He thought of the curlew’s call, and wished she’d heard it too.

‘Clare’s over there’ – Hester jerked her head to the left, where he could see the girl stooping to the sand, her amber hair falling over her eyes – ‘collecting shells. She’s making a picture in the sand – a tree, I think – it’s not very good.’ She paused, scratched her head, and seemed about to speak, but changed her mind. ‘Alex has been swimming but he’s there now, can you see? He seems to have made a new friend.’ Not far away, between their disarrayed blankets and books and the shallow pool, Alex crouched and spoke to a child. Leaning forward John saw the green T-shirt and recognised the inquisitive boy from an hour or so before. ‘Oh yes, I spoke to him earlier on the marshes – his mother can’t be far away.’