After Me Comes the Flood (10 page)

Clare stood behind me and touched my arm briefly and uncertainly every few moments, as if she wanted to ask me something but couldn’t think what it was. I felt we were all ranged against Alex, that battle lines had been scored in the mud on the path: I wanted to place myself exactly halfway between the mother and the man who’d taken her son away, but couldn’t move, and as I write it now I feel it was cowardice that made me just stand by. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he kept on saying, and I wanted to shout that he should either say nothing at all, or tell us what had happened – what use was ‘sorry’ if he’d done nothing wrong?

The boy was sitting up by then – the cut on his forehead hadn’t after all gone deeper than the skin, and there was colour in his cheeks. He looked around, seeming unsurprised, not registering Alex’s face as any different from all the others that leaned over him. He recognised me. ‘We heard that funny bird again,’ he said brightly, and then began to cry. It seemed to me such a simple sound, so straightforward and easily remedied in all the muddle I’d been living through, that it calmed my anxiety, but the effect on the crouching woman was terrible. She stood up, and left unsupported the child almost toppled backwards. Clare, with her unselfconscious helpfulness, knelt next to him and patted his back with the same rough uneven strokes she used on her cat. The woman stepped forward towards Alex, who put out his hands and spread them in a gesture of fear, I think, and also of apology. It would be easy to look at the wringing hands and call it guilt, but that wasn’t what I saw then, and I don’t see it now, in my memory or as I write it out. He said again, ‘I’m sorry!’, this time making the words firmer, as if it might forestall the woman who was still coming towards him.

When she reached him, she put out her hand either to strike him or grip his arm, then pulled it back as if the idea of touching him disgusted her, and hissing between clenched teeth she said, ‘What did you do? Did you hurt my son? What have you done?’ Alex tried to speak but it came too slowly, and while he still formed the words on a stammer I’d never heard before, the woman said again, with controlled malice: ‘Well? Talk, can’t you? What’s wrong with you – cat got your tongue, is it? Say something, tell me what you did!’ She was moving towards him still, a small step with every word, and Alex backed away imperceptibly, holding out his hands to ward off the words and not finding any of his own. His silence infuriated the woman and with angry tears she said: ‘What have you done? What have you done?
What have you done?’

Hester, still standing close to Alex, moved forward a little, and I remember then being puzzled at her face, which briefly showed open hostility to a woman who had every cause for anger. If she was going to say something, to defend Alex, to placate her perhaps, we never heard it, because a thought occurred suddenly to the woman and she stopped, gasped and said, not shouting any more but falteringly, testing the thought: ‘Did you – did you
touch
him?’

Seeing the word now, written plainly and without the awful inflection she gave it, it’s impossible to think how we all saw at once how to touch could be worse than to hurt. But it hung in the air like a foul smell; Hester paused in her movement and I felt bile rising in my throat. Alex went white and his eyes widened, and the movement of his hands became frantic as if he felt the accusation against his face and wanted to bat it away.

Only Clare seemed not to have noticed: she and the boy had found something by the path and were parting the grasses to get a better look and I wondered if it was the toad who’d passed me earlier that day. I wanted Alex to shout ‘No!’, to shout it clearly and strongly to break through the hysteria I could see darkening the woman’s face, but he didn’t, only mumbled, ‘Sorry, I’m
sorry
, it isn’t
in
there, I can’t remember,’ beating his own forehead with a bunched fist, then sagging slightly against Hester’s shoulder. It must have looked like a confession, because the woman rushed at him and struck out, not with the comic flailing I see sometimes on my way home late from work, but with violent precision. She wore a ring with a cheap stone on her right hand and it flashed as her arm swung back; Alex flinched and put up his arm, but she was quick and the blow landed and I heard it loud as a knock on a door. He didn’t make any sound, and I remember being proud of him for that. The woman’s anger exhausted itself quickly, perhaps because when Alex raised his head again he was bleeding from a split lip. The woman ran to her son, who looked now like any child might who’d been playing in the mud somewhere and fallen. He and Clare had picked long broad blades of grass and were trying to blow them like reeds, but they were the wrong kind and made no sound. The woman bent and yanked the boy’s arm to make him stand, and he looked up, baffled at first, then remembered where he’d been, and that his head hurt, and started sniffling.

Standing there holding his hand, she turned to face us. By then I’d crossed the battle line and stood with Alex and Hester, feeling the force of her rage pulling me in with them. She said: ‘I’m calling the police. I’m going to go and get my phone and call the police – you took my son and hurt him, and everyone will know.’ The child stopped sniffling and rubbed his eyes and nose on his bare arm. Tears and snot made a path through the mud drying on his skin. ‘It wasn’t his fault,’ he said weakly, and I heard Alex make a small grateful noise, but the woman didn’t hear her son, or didn’t listen. She turned away from us and began walking back along the path, and I felt Hester move convulsively next to me and draw in her breath to call her back.

But a few paces away the woman stopped. It must have been only a second or two that she stood unsteady on the path, but I felt the moment stretch out in front of us, giving me time to wonder what had happened or might have happened, what would happen to them all now, what it meant for them and me. Then she spun round and said, in a voice she must’ve taken great efforts to make chilled and controlled: ‘I want your names. All of them. And your phone number.’ She said it again, only tried to make it sound professional as if she could intimidate us, but the words weren’t quite right and I almost smiled, because I was ashamed of everyone and frightened for them all: ‘I require your contact details immediately please, so this matter can be resolved.’ I think she must have seen my smile because her eyes narrowed and the chill left her voice and I saw the flush of anger or embarrassment creep back into her cheeks.

The woman had found a pen and a scrap of card in her bag, and thrust it at me with shaking hands. Thinking all the while how absurd this was, I wrote out my name in clear capitals, as if I were humouring an inquisitive child. I wanted to say, ‘You’re mistaken; you must be – I never knew anyone less capable of harming a child.’ But every time I took a breath to speak I remembered my own guilt in deceiving them all, and the old stammer came back, and I couldn’t make the words come. I passed the card to Hester, thinking that surely she would speak in his defence, but instead she paused and looked at me with what I think was gratitude, then wrote Alex’s name underneath. She made it complete – ALEXANDER – as if this could distance it from the boy she’d sent to bed the night before with a glass of water for the hot night. Then she wrote her own name, and underneath that her telephone number, folded the card, and walked towards the waiting woman, who held out her hand.

Hester put the card into her open palm and folded the other woman’s fingers over it, and I heard her say: ‘I am so sorry your child was hurt. And I am sorry your day is spoilt. But it was an accident, no-one touched him. You’re making a terrible mistake – and I understand, I do, the world these days is dangerous for children. But it is a mistake. Look at Alexander, look – can’t you see he’s hurt most of all, that this will take longer to heal than bruises? Call us, call the police, talk to the boy: we’re not afraid. We’ll talk to you, to anyone. But take him home. Talk to him: he’ll tell you.’

We watched and waited for an angry response but none came. Hester’s strength of will gives her words weight: there’s something in her face, although it’s ugly – or even perhaps because it’s ugly – that seems incompatible with deceit or half-truths. The other woman briefly touched her son’s forehead, then nodded at Hester, and walked away from us. Clare stood by her brother plaiting blades of grass. She’d realised by then what had happened, I think, and was leaning against him slightly, biting down on her lip in concentration or perhaps because she didn’t want to cry. Hester came back to us. She put out her hand and touched each of us lightly on the shoulder. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Time to go home.’

Not much was said or done that night. There were phone calls I only partly overheard, Hester saying little and Alex nothing at all. I was there when Hester told Eve and Walker what had happened, and saw Eve storm at Hester as if it had been her fault: ‘The woman’s an idiot. Who leaves a little child alone on a beach? She should be glad. She should be glad it was Alex who found him, who looked after him. She deserves to have him taken away. I hope she calls the police. I hope she does…’ Walker put his hand on the back of her neck with a possessive gesture I hated; she flung it off, and shut herself in the music room. She didn’t play the melodies I was hoping for but scales, painfully slow and even, and after a while it was like the noise of the crickets in the garden and we couldn’t hear it any more.

I found Elijah in the dining room, dozing in the high-backed chair with its wooden candlesticks, where I’d seen him the night I arrived. His grave quiet presence was a relief to me, and we played chess until Hester came in to draw the curtains against the moths drawn to the light. When I told him what had happened he listened without anger or surprise – either the thought of Alex doing harm was so absurd it deflected off him without sinking in, or he could accommodate the idea of wrongdoing more calmly than we, as being just another consequence of being human. When I finished the miserable tale he shook his head and picked up a white bishop. ‘I’m afraid I never was any good at chess. You’ve won again, haven’t you?’

Just before I came upstairs to bed I went into the kitchen. Hester was there, unpacking the plastic cups and plates we’d taken to the beach. Clare was there too, knocking the sand from her shoes on to the kitchen floor and being scolded for it; and I didn’t notice for a long time that Alex was sitting in one of the kitchen’s dark recesses with his legs crossed, inspecting his hands and looking up sometimes when he heard his name.

‘She called, of course,’ Hester told me. She pulled a foil-wrapped parcel from one of the bags. ‘That’s the fruitcake I made, and we never got to eat it,’ she said, turning it in her hands. It gave off a sickly scent of spice and honey. ‘Yes – she called, firstly to ask lots of questions. She took the boy to hospital – he’d been knocked out but not for long, though they’re keeping him in until tomorrow. Alex spoke to her. She wanted to know if Alex would tell her what the boy had told her. Whether it all added up.’

‘And it did,’ Clare told me.

‘Well, of course it did. The boy had lied to Alex. He told him his mother had gone to the marshes to look at the boats, and he was scared to go out and meet her on his own, and would Alex take him. There’s no-one on earth can lie as well as a child, because they believe themselves, so it comes out like the truth.’ She gave me another of her searching looks and I wondered what Elijah had told her. But she shrugged and said, ‘They went out to the marsh and she wasn’t there, of course. No-one was. And the boy ran off to look at some abandoned boat. He slipped and fell, and if Alex hadn’t been there he’d’ve lain out there on the mud while the tide came in.’

I asked her if the woman would carry out her threat to call the police, and she said, ‘I doubt it. What would she say? That she left her child alone and wasn’t there when he fell? That this man saved him and she thanked him with violence?’ She nodded at Alex. The wound on his lip was closing but the flesh was swollen and he darted out his tongue to moisten it. ‘I imagine she’s ashamed of herself. She should be.’

Hester took a sandy blanket out of the bag and shook it, then folded it against her breast, and as she did she sent one of her long bright looks over to the corner where Alex was sitting. I saw something then that I couldn’t believe – something so peculiar that I blinked my eyes to clear them and looked again to be certain of it. Alex had pulled his knees up under his chin, and was pressing himself against the kitchen wall as if he wanted to seep into the bricks and plaster. But Hester didn’t look angry that he’d been accused of something so unthinkable, or afraid the woman had seen something in him that had passed the rest of us by. I didn’t find in her face the confused pity I was feeling, or even the most straightforward things – tiredness and hunger and anxiety. What I found instead was a long slow look of satisfaction, like a woman who’d come to the end of a day’s work sooner than expected. Then she smiled, and it wasn’t the sudden unfeigned smile that comes when you least expect it, but a kind of smirk.

It shocked me more than anything else that day, and made everything I’d seen up to that moment shift and sharpen. I fumbled for a chair and knocked a knife to the floor. They all turned to stare at me, except Alex, who scratched over and over at the graze on the back of his hand. Hester turned very slowly away from him and said, ‘All right there, John?’ and smiled at me. It was the same warm, steady gaze that had greeted me when I arrived, in the same kindly ugly face, and everything shifted again and settled into its old patterns.

Soon after that I came upstairs, and set it all down. These words on the page are problems I can’t solve, but I’ll keep at it – and sooner or later I’ll work them all out…

SUNDAY

I

It had always been Walker’s habit to get up early and steal a march on the day. It had annoyed his mother, braced for a teenage son tangled in his sheets at noon; and it annoyed his wife, who wanted to be alone in the mornings when there was a chance of finding a jay on the lawn. But there it was: he found himself alert the moment his eyes opened; smoked before he drank or ate; and was never seen to be weary. Once – early on, before the days took on their pattern – Hester thought she’d beaten him to the kitchen, and had laughing laid out plates with a ringing of china on wood fit to quicken the dead, but he’d appeared a moment later, his grey hair bath-damp, smelling a little of cedar and on his second cigarette.

On the morning of John’s fifth day, which Elijah would once have called
the Lord’s Day
(and still did, sometimes, when he forgot to mind his language), Walker stood in the glass-house watching the sun come up. The pitched roof with its lapping glass tiles filtered the early light through a rime of lichen and moss, so that it cast a greenish pall upon the floor. Already the air was thick with moisture, and Walker pushed open a window and watched the reflected garden slide across the pane. He stood a while with his face turned to the opening, feeling a slight chill that would be gone within the hour. The sun had reached the high grass verge that bounded the reservoir, and he wondered where Alex had slept that night, if he’d slept at all – once they’d found him lying at the foot of the embankment, as if he’d climbed from the reservoir, and falling exhausted down the incline slept like a child where he lay.

The events of the day before were so vivid still that Walker wouldn’t have been surprised to find the woman at the window with the child in her arms. He hadn’t seen her, or the wound on the boy’s forehead, but overnight conjured up a lesion that opened to the bone, and eyes upturned to show their whites. Was it possible that Alex had hurt the boy? After all he was not well… He stooped to pick up a snail’s shell cleaned of its meat, and tossed it from palm to palm. It was weightless, and when he closed his fist it turned almost to dust. No – he could not believe that, or wouldn’t, at least. He opened his hand and let the fragments fall to the unswept floor.

Before Walker had come, the glasshouse had been locked for a decade or more. He’d had no interest in it at first, with its sour damp smell of neglect, though he and Eve had idly tried the key one night and found the swollen door could not be moved. It was Elijah who’d finally forced his way in, setting his shoulder to the door and leaving a dent in the rotten wood. Walker had found him that same day in a cane armchair that listed on a broken leg. He’d mislaid the half-frown that gave him a constant grave sad look and smiling said: ‘It’s the nearest I can bear to going outside. I can see the sky – I almost feel the wind!’

Together they’d unwound the lengths of cord that fastened the windows, and flung them open. Stale air crossed the painted wooden windowsills and left behind a very faint scent of peat and even – though only Walker claimed to have smelt it – of pollen and green leaves.

The glasshouse had been built hastily on a whim, and in high winds the window frames creaked at their joints and shed thick fragments of paint. The floor was paved in terracotta, and the bodies of ants clotted in the seams where the tiles were joined. At night it took on the appearance of a small shadowed grove – the remains of vines and roses would seem to bloom in the quarter-light, and it was possible to imagine, above the dust and damp, the shocking scent of jasmine opening at night. In the corner a vase that belonged elsewhere held a bunch of purple sea lavender, its colours bright as the morning it was cut.

Walker, who knew what work could be found for idle hands, took to spending mornings counting out seeds in their paper packets and pinning faded botanical prints to the walls. One morning he found under a bench a cactus in a mossy pot that had survived its long drought. It was greyish, like the skin of someone kept from daylight, and covered in spines that caught in the fabric of his shirt and irritated him later that night. Kneeling on the hard floor, he’d rocked back on his heels, holding the pot between his palms and raising it to the window – how had it clung on, there in the dark, with the soil at its roots shrinking as it dried? He raised it and drew in its scent, which was not of sap or leaves unfolding but something more earthy and enduring. When Eve came in a moment later she saw him in a new and unexpected light, revelling in something ugly and small with the uncomplicated pleasure of a child. It had pained her for reasons she didn’t understand, and later she found ways to be unkind.

One afternoon Alex squeezed the seeds from a tomato he was eating, and rinsing them free from their flesh gave them to Walker in a square of white paper. ‘See what you can make of these,’ he’d said, and watched disbelieving as under Walker’s ignorant care a small vine surged up its wooden cane, and all summer put out dark fruit pointed at the tip like quails’ eggs.

When he was thirty Walker had married a woman he’d found in the garden of someone else’s house, wrapped in a blue coat though summer had set in a week or so before. She was rather like a mouse, with pale brown hair cut close to her head so that it lay flat and gleaming, and very dark large eyes that darted about and never missed a movement anywhere. Her friends called her delicate but said it laughingly, because although she seemed frail, with her small slender limbs and long neck, there was something steely about her. Walker had teased her into removing the coat, and liked the way she leaned back in her chair with her arms hanging by her sides; he’d liked her clever wry commentary on the party as it unfolded in the darker corners of the garden, and liked buttoning her to the chin when the night grew chill.

He soon discovered that her delicacy was a skill cultivated with some care – she managed never to suffer from anything likely to dull her eyes, but instead developed headaches and fits of breathless anxiety in car parks and long dull parties, and spent her wages on a man who cleansed her spleen through the soles of her small high-arched feet. There’d been some surprise when they married – those who knew him best suspected him of doing it out of mischief. But Walker inhabited his marriage as if it had been a cell he’d bought and furnished for himself. It required self-discipline and restraint; it left no time for mind or eye to wander; it occupied him with so many small tasks of care and attentiveness that it held in check the restlessness he’d always thought would see him alone at fifty. It required him to be needed, and always to feel that he required nothing in return.

When his firm passed him files for a private clinic whose debts were so heavy the patients were in immediate danger of being turfed out of their beds, he’d flicked through the disordered paperwork with a prick of irritation – nothing was simpler, he’d always felt, than the neat ordering of incomings against outgoings, and the tidy accumulation of capital. The clinic had put its faith in God, and in an accountant of dedicated and patient corruption who over the course of forty years had drained its funding streams into many small channels of his own making.

‘You might find it easier,’ the chairman of the trustees had said, in an apologetic phone call early one morning, ‘to come and stay a day or so; no more than a week, certainly – we have room after all! – it’s the papers, you see – going back years – and to think how well we all liked him! He came to my daughter’s christening, you know – I can hardly believe it, and who knows how much of it all is false…’

‘They don’t really need you,’ his wife had said, her breath smelling bitterly of herbal tea. ‘Not half as much as
me
’ – but he went all the same.

He’d imagined with pleasure a sinister red-brick place, three-storeyed and deep-shadowed, with gargoyles spitting from the gutters, but St Jude’s was a modern building set around a neat small courtyard, with windows that let in light from the east and an acre of garden. The staff came mostly from the convent and were trained in medicine and prayer – they wore modest wimples so stiff they looked as though they were made of paper and their voices were implacably kind. Inside, the retreat (no-one ever said ‘hospital’) resembled a suburban home, with pale floral wallpaper and sofas with tapestry cushions, and a vast television in what the staff called the ‘lounge’. A piano huddled in the corner of the room under a grey canvas cover, every now and then showing a pair of scratched wooden feet, and in the courtyard benches bore brass plaques in memory of benefactors or residents moved on to better things. The patients were largely wealthy and devout, under the care of a consultant who came each week in a cab paid for by the authorities, who had an eye to the scarcity of hospital beds and were kindly disposed to St Jude’s programme of gardening and devotions.

Walker was greeted by a pair of trustees who talked in whispers, afraid the patients might overhear and become anxious for their future. He was given a room tactfully distant from the wards, with a pine cross above the bed and a view of the courtyard. He ate small plain meals alone. The task absorbed him, as he’d known it would, and late in the afternoons, content with his work, he’d go out to the courtyard to smoke. Curious, he kept close to the corners, watching staff move in patient circles between the gardens and the long dim corridors hung with watercolours of bluish hills and never meeting their eyes.

It didn’t occur to him to wonder why he felt no regret that the work was time-consuming and circuitous, and that he took no pleasure in his wife’s occasional calls. Nor did he notice that he timed his courtyard walks by the movements of certain patients, pushing away his work and patting the pocket of his shirt for his cigarettes when he thought he might catch them on their way outdoors. He liked to watch the man who’d stand for an hour or more at the window, tugging fretfully at his beard as though summoning the courage to go out; and the boy with the long eyelashes and amber hair who surely couldn’t have been unwell – he was too quick to laugh, and would stand beside the older man lightly touching his elbow and talking quietly as if encouraging him to step out into the autumn rain. Then the women came and brought a change of air – Hester in a coat that smelt of cats and woodsmoke, and Clare, so like her brother; and Eve, who drew a black fringe like a wing across her eyes when he passed her in the courtyard, and was always at the old upright piano. Remembering that music, and how he heard it first through the open window of his room, Walker paused at the wooden bench in front of him, looking out over the dying lawn where Clare dragged her shadow across grass. It had been nothing but an annoyance, that incessant repeating of childish patterns as she disciplined her hands, and the melodies he thought he recognised – he shook his head: he ought to have fastened the window against the sound, and turned back to his papers and the task he’d been set.

Behind him, Elijah opened the glasshouse door. His damp hair was combed into ridges against his skull, and he wore a dark tie printed with swallows. He paused on the step and looked up to the sloping glass ceiling; it was, he’d said more than once, the nearest he came these days to a chapel. He said, ‘Have you seen him?’, and picked a small fruit from the tomato vine. It had been left too long to ripen on its stem, and had split open; the lips of the broken skin were whitish with the beginnings of mildew, and between them showed the translucent flesh inside. He put it in his mouth and burst it against his palate with his tongue.

Walker took a steel tack from the windowsill and began to pick at the black soil beneath his fingernails. ‘Alex? Not since last night.’

‘Our new friend John told me all about it, then let me win at chess…’ He smoothed his tie, and lowered himself into the chair. The cane creaked and shed a flake of paint. ‘A terrible business – I heard Clare crying this morning, though Hester said there was no need. I would like to see him. I’d like to see for myself how he is… they say he doesn’t remember it, you know. You don’t think he might have…’

‘I don’t.’

Elijah smiled, and with his thumb tapped the arm of the chair. ‘No more do I. But still – he’s our responsibility, wouldn’t you say?’

Walker unrolled his shirt sleeves, and buttoned them at the wrist. He shrugged the question away. ‘You look tired.’

‘I am. Saturdays tire me – they were always the burden, you see, not the day after. I’d sit up all night waiting for morning, reading and praying until I was hungry. Hard habit to break, after all those years…’ He tilted back to look at the roof, but closed his eyes against the sun, and tried instead to recall a church he’d seen once stranded on a fen, its roof borne up by angels with cobwebs in their mouths. ‘And what d’you make of our John?’ he said, remembering with a smile how the other man’s pale brown eyes had widened with shock under their heavy lids:
we all just assumed you were mad
.

‘Oh – John. I don’t need to make anything of him. There he is – nothing we can do about it now.’ Walker shrugged, and Elijah, turning away, smiled and said nothing.

Not long after his last Sunday as a believer, Elijah had held a meeting in the study where he prepared his sermons late into the quiet nights. On his desk
Strong’s Concordance
was open at
persevere
, and above it a framed print of Bunyan’s Christian making his way to the Celestial City shone behind polished glass. Two of the church elders, arriving in dark suits and black ties as though the very worst had happened, listened with disbelieving sadness; the third and oldest had offered a series of kindly rebukes, but finding them met with silent agreement suggested instead that they pray. Elijah dazedly followed the familiar cadences –
Amen Lord: let it be so, to the glory of Thy name
– and noticed for the first time that his brother in Christ had taken to dyeing his hair.

He’d known it would be painful to remove himself from the pulpit, with its high wooden rails stained darker where his hands had rested those past twenty years, but confronting his wife had been worse. He’d married her for her soft rich voice and her piety, and her faith in him almost matched that in her God. She hadn’t believed him at first, and nor had their daughters, though he suspected them of revelling in so unexpected a turn of events – later that night he heard the youngest laughing on a long high note cut off suddenly as though she’d pressed a hand to her mouth. He was being tempted, she said, like Christ in the wilderness: would he give in so easily? He discovered that it was not merely a betrayal of a god too remote to notice or mourn his loss, but of something nearer and more easily hurt. They tried to find common ground; there was none. The best he could offer was a promise to think it over and to pray, if only he could: ‘I can but try,’ he said, finding that the loss of faith did not gain him freedom to deceive. He took the bag she packed him, and later found a Bible in the folds of his shirts.