The Man Who Rained (31 page)

‘What do you think will happen to him,’ she whispered, ‘after the last of the rain falls?’

He frowned. ‘I hope it will not come to that.’

‘But if it does?’ She found she could not imagine, even though she wished she could, any alternative. She would lie here prone in a nun’s cell while the man she had fallen in
love with poured himself apart in the sky.

‘There is some medicine if you wish for it,’ he said, picking up a packet of pills left by the nuns. She took two of them with a grunt, but had to keep swallowing to drag them down
her aching throat.

The moth that had been looping on the ceiling settled. It spread its wings and stilled. She followed its example, finally letting the pillow support her heavy head, finally closing her eyes and
surrendering to the fact that all she could do was listen. She awaited each distant murmur of Finn’s storm, each faint hiss of the lightning. How tired she was. Or perhaps that was because of
the pills. She fought sleep because she needed to be awake to rescue Finn, although she did not know how she was going to do it. She closed her eyes. She thought she could hear an ocean. She
thought she was flying high above a whirlpool. She had drifted off to sleep.

Daniel ran his hands through his hair and stood up. He moved to the cell’s window and stared at the world without. Up on the Devil’s Diadem the sky was bare and the
land calm. Finn’s cloud over Thunderstown was the only one in the sky, but it was grey and massive like a fifth mountain. The sun had already set beyond Old Colp, but a red sheen still
coloured the western sky and bloodied the upper reaches of the storm.

When his father died, his grandfather had expressed no remorse, no softening of the enmity he had felt for his son. But when his grandfather’s favourite hunting dog had died that same
year, then his grandfather had wept into his glass of beer. That night he’d burst into Daniel’s bedroom long past midnight, turned on the light and crashed down reeking of alcohol on to
the bed beside his grandson. ‘It feels as if, wherever he has gone, he has taken every other one of my ribs with him,’ he’d said before passing out. At about three or four in the
morning, having not slept a wink, Daniel could no longer resist the temptation to feel in the dark for his grandfather’s ancient ribcage, to run his forefinger over the bones. All the ribs
could be accounted for, and Daniel had stayed confused and wide awake until the sun took the night away.

He left the cell window and paced to the door, then back to the window, then so on back and forth over the stone floor. Now at last he understood what the old man had meant. If that sensation
had been inflicted on his grandfather by the death of something as simple as a damned mutt, how much greater was Daniel’s own hurt at the loss of Finn, this sudden feeling of multiple
cavities in his torso, and the accompanying feeling that his legs and arms and even his skull had been cleaved in two, and the greater halves stolen away from him?

He became aware of the sound of his own breathing. Worrying that he might disturb Elsa’s sleep, he slipped out of the door and walked the cold corridors of the nunnery.

He was as familiar with this place as he was with the vaults and aisles of the Church of Saint Erasmus. When he was a child his father used to bring him up here, even though he was more often
than not a strain on his father’s priestly duties. While the Reverend Fossiter conducted longwinded meetings with the abbess, Daniel had sulked in the courtyard or played hide-and-seek with
himself in the cloister. On other occasions he had run madly through the laps of the corridors, or along the route of the chapel’s prayer labyrinth, which was a pattern of concentrically
circling red tiles embedded before the altar. Once, his father had caught him whirling along that path and right away forced him to lean over a pew while he struck him with the back of his hand.
Then he made him walk in contemplation along the red line of the tiles, until he reached the centre and promptly burst into tears.

The nunnery’s cloister, when Daniel emerged into it, was deserted. Overhead the first stars were peeking through. There was no wind: that was all down in Thunderstown, playing in
Finn’s storm.

He crossed to the chapel, which was just as empty. Inside, the only movement came from a flickering bay of prayer candles burning in an alcove. With no light in the sky to shine through them,
the designs on the stained-glass windows were hard to make out, but he had been here enough times to have memorized their depictions. They showed fearful saints on their knees, praying to their god
in the clouds for miracles and signs.

He slumped down on the back pew, throat dry, head sore with sorrow. He pushed aside the Bible and the prayer book on the shelf in front of him. He kicked away the cushion used for kneeling.

‘I would have become something gentler,’ he whispered through clenched teeth. ‘I would have been like a father to Finn.’

He wiped his eyes and tried to focus. ‘What might be done?’ he muttered. What might be done? His thinkings drew back with no solutions.

The chapel door squeezed open.

Kenneth Olivier slipped inside, letting the evening air of the cloister into the waxy murk of the chapel. He closed the door softly, then stood in the aisle with his hands in his pockets,
alongside Daniel’s pew but not facing it, looking instead at the tidy altar and its cream-coloured cloth, embroidered with a cross.

‘I don’t know about you,’ he said after a while, ‘but I’m terrified for her.’

Daniel’s eyes swivelled up to look at Kenneth. The two of them had shared the space of the Church of Saint Erasmus on more occasions than Daniel cared to remember, but aside from Sunday
pleasantries they rarely talked. Their last meaningful exchange had been on that awful day when Kenneth’s son went missing in the mountains.

‘Are you aware,’ asked Daniel gruffly, ‘that this is entirely my fault?’

Kenneth shrugged. ‘You say that, but I think it’s mine. All of it.’

Daniel frowned. ‘No. How could you possibly think that?’

‘How could
you
?’

Daniel opened his mouth to respond, but Kenneth stopped him with a raised finger. He opened a bag he had with him and displayed, as tenderly as if they were eggs in a nest, two cans of beer.

‘You and I have not really talked for a long while,’ he said.

Daniel motioned to the altar, to the prayer labyrinth painted on the tiles before it, to the statue of Saint Catherine raising her face to the heavens, to Christ nailed to the cross on the far
wall.

‘Not here, of course,’ said Kenneth, and took hold of the door handle. ‘But will you join me?’

With a laboured puff, Daniel put his hands on his knees, stuck out his elbows and eased himself to his feet. ‘After you,’ he said, and the two of them left the chapel.

Kenneth led the way through the short antechamber that exited the nunnery. Beyond the main door the slopes of the Devil’s Diadem skidded all the way down to Thunderstown, whose rooftops
were nigh on invisible beneath the darkness of the rain. From this distance Finn’s cloud looked like some jellyfish of the ocean, its downpour like graceful tentacles stroking the buildings
beneath. The last of the coloured sunset had faded, and a ring of stars encircled the storm.

The rocks and sparse slopes of the mountains were all deathly still, and when a shudder of lightning branched across the cloud they lit up and looked as fragile and white as porcelain. The
thunder sounded moments later, a rush of sound that could be felt as well as heard.

The two men rested their backs against the nunnery wall while Kenneth cracked the ring pulls of the beers and handed one to Daniel. He proceeded to drink his while Daniel stared through the
opening of the can into the dark liquid within.

‘It’s my fault,’ said Kenneth after a sip, ‘because I should have done more to warn her. I had so many chances to tell her about the ways of this town, but I never did. I
thought she might laugh at me, I suppose, and I let that stop me. I let her come to this town with only me for a guide, and yet I never warned her of its true character.’

Daniel raised his eyebrows and drank deeply from the beer. ‘It’s not your fault. I am responsible for this. I should have stopped Sidney Moses.’

‘You couldn’t have done. You weren’t there.’

‘Precisely.’

Kenneth sighed. ‘We could argue about it forever.’

There was a short silence.

‘It’s been a while now,’ he said, ‘since Michael went away.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did I ever tell you how grateful I was to you for everything you did?’

‘Yes,’ said Daniel. ‘You gave me a bottle.’

He remembered the rum Kenneth had presented to him, sweet and stinging at once, like eating honeycomb along with the bees that had made it. He had shared it with Betty and they had
underestimated its potency and dozed off flopped against each other.

Yet he also remembered the reason for the gift, the diving and diving into and into the tarn in which Michael was last seen. Scouring the gloom of the water for any trace of him and finding
nothing. Diving again and again until long after every other rescuer had abandoned the cause, surfacing and submerging until he lost track of what was water and what was air. Only when, because of
his confusion, he inhaled liquid did he stop, and only then because his body failed him. His lungs had spasmed and forced him to lie down in defeat on the banks.

‘I wish,’ said Kenneth, ‘I could have drowned instead.’ He paused to control his emotions. ‘Today I realized I’ve come to thinking, completely without meaning
to, of Elsa a little like I thought of Michael. Having her around, hearing her footsteps going up and down the stairs, catching a noise of her singing in the shower, her coming and going all hours.
Just having a younger soul around the house.’

Daniel nodded.

‘Now, seeing her lying in that bed, so unwell ...’ He shivered. ‘It’s terrible.’

‘She will be all right. She’s healthy enough to pull through.’

‘Yes, of course, when you put it like that. But that’s the other thing, isn’t it? She’s lost someone. That doesn’t heal like the body does. Now she will be like you
and I. Heartbroken.’

Silence.

Kenneth, stood up, shaking his empty can. ‘I had better get back inside and check on her.’

Daniel nodded and watched him go. He finished his beer, then dropped his can to the ground and screwed it medallion-flat with his boot. Maybe it was the alcohol, of which he drank so little
these days, or maybe it was something Kenneth had said. Either way, he could feel some deep part of his brain carrying on with the thinkings to which his forethoughts were not privy. When he tried
to focus on them they eluded him, but he sensed them all the same, as if they were the preparatory movements behind a stage curtain, before it lifts for a play. He waited impatiently for that
performance to begin, then when it did not he trudged back to the chapel.

Inside, he let the door swing shut behind him with a judder, while he stood in the aisle with his rain cap rolled up tightly in his fist. While he had been talking with Kenneth, many of the
prayer candles on their frail metal table had burned out. He approached them and counted fifteen exhausted rings of tallow: fifteen secret woes that had called for their burning. He dropped some
coins in the collection box and replaced each candle, mesmerized by the tiny flames that duplicated on to each wick they touched. When all were alight he turned from the bay and walked into the
sanctuary, not to pray at the altar but to stand on the prayer labyrinth that was marked out like a mosaic on the floor.

In his memory it was an expansive crimson spiral, but here in his present it was a faint pattern like the age rings of a tree stump. It took only a few of his big paces to circle into its
centre. There he remained for a while with his eyes closed, hoping for a revelation. He wished he had a mind like his father’s, which could work through any disaster with ice-cold
rationality.

Only when more of the candles began to wink out did he move again. He might have been standing there for hours, but his mind had made no progress. All he could think was that he had lost Finn
and that he did not know what could be done about it. He hung his head and plodded towards the chapel door, pausing with his fingers on the handle and hoping that some final inspiration would
strike. Then he exited into the cloister, where the distant hum of Finn’s storm was at odds with the balmy night and the glinting constellations. Starlight found the metal and enamel in the
countless charms hanging from the walls.

He pulled his handkerchief – his great-grandfather’s and embroidered D.F. – from his pocket and blew his nose. He had meant what he’d said to Kenneth. All of this was his
fault, or at least the fault of his family, for whom he was responsible. If they had been different men they might have guided the town to peace with the weather. What might have happened if they
had followed the example of his mother? She had not plied the teeth from the corpses of wild dogs to string up with paired coins and tatty feathers in the hope of driving them away. No, she had
petted them and stroked them and they had growled pleasurably in her company.

He reached into his pocket for the photograph he had found of her. He admired it. Her hair was black like a dream, her dress a frost’s silver. Then abruptly he remembered how his breath
had crystallized in the air when he found this picture. He tucked it back into his pocket, screwing up his eyes and drumming his fists against his temples in the hope of shaking out a way to save
Finn. None came, so he returned via the shadowy corridors to the cell in which Elsa slept.

Elsa found his presence reassuring when she woke next. At first he did not say anything to her, did not even nod. She preferred it that he didn’t. They kept each other
company, saying little. Theirs was a shared seriousness that did not require any mask of small talk and gesture. Every so often Daniel asked her something about Finn he said he hadn’t
understood, then would listen rapt to her answer, then fall back into frowning, contemplative silence.