After Me Comes the Flood (17 page)

III

John closed the notebook and pushed it underneath a folded newspaper. In the band of light below the door a shadow showed of someone waiting there. He cupped a hand behind his ear and could just make out, above the beating of his heart, the visitor’s shallow breaths. He stood cautiously, pushing back his chair, which skittered on the bare uneven floor and fell with a crash. The breathing on the other side of the door ended on a gasp, and there was a long anxious silence in which John imagined each of his fellow guests standing in line along the corridor.
They’ve found me out
, he thought, darting on bare feet to press himself against the wall beside the door –
Elijah told them I lied and they’ve come to send me away
.

On the other side of the door, the indrawn breath was suddenly exhaled with a sigh. It was a woman’s voice, and he thought:
It’s Eve – it must be, who else would come so late
, and imagined the bruise darkening on her wrist. Low in his stomach, spreading up to make his throat ache, all his confusion and loneliness sharpened into a single clear impulse to have her nearby. He put his hand flat against the door and left it there, as though instead of unpainted wood he had under his palm her sunburned neck, her thin hands with the nails bitten down, her black curled hair that had smelt, when she sat beside him at the piano, very faintly of oranges. Her breath came now with unnatural steadiness, like someone who’d had to be taught how to do it, and he began to match his breath to hers, drawing in the air as she let it out, fancying it was the same, that in him were particles that had passed down her throat and been warmed by her blood. Then she tapped politely three times on the door, and without pausing – if he did, he’d go back to bed and draw up the covers until he couldn’t hear the knocking any more – he pulled the door open.

Standing back as though she’d started to change her mind, clutching a thin dressing gown high at the neck, Clare stared at him with a clear shocked gaze.

‘Oh,’ said John. The longing receded, scooping him hollow. He leant against the doorframe to steady himself.

‘Hello,’ she said. She stepped forward and John saw the gown was printed all over with strawberries and too short at the wrists, as if she’d worn it as a child. She’d wrapped the red cotton belt twice round her waist and tied it, exactly in the centre, with a neat bow.

‘Clare,’ he said, as though to be certain, and then: ‘Is everything all right? What’s happening? Is it the dam?’

‘Nothing,’ she said, ‘nothing’s happening.’ Then, making her voice lower and softer than it ought to have been, she added, ‘Nothing’s happened yet. Let me come in?’ He stood aside, bewildered, and as she passed he smelt sweet alcohol on her breath, cherry brandy perhaps, something a child would drink in furtive nips when parents were away. She went and stood beside the window and he looked up and down the hall, bewildered, as though he’d see all the others standing laughing in their doorways at some prearranged joke, but it was empty and unlit. He closed the door and stood with his back to it, gripping his left hand with his right to reassure himself he was awake.

The girl looked curiously around her at the bare tidy room. ‘What is it you do up here all night? I see your light on sometimes.’

‘Come away from the window. Are you unwell?’

She put her hand up to the cotton gown at her neck. ‘I’m okay. Do you read all night, then? Eve says you’re the sort of person only ever happy with their head in a book.’

‘Does she?’ John watched her uneasily. Realising that his eyes were on her, the girl reached up with her right arm and began lifting the hair away from the back of her neck, arching her back as she did so. She was mimicking Eve in a parody as unconvincing as a schoolgirl in her mother’s shoes. Then she plucked at the red cotton cord at her waist: the dressing gown fell at her feet and she stood facing him, naked and afraid. Her imitation of Eve – of the tilt of the head, and her long restless back that flexed and stretched at the dinner table or on the piano stool – was so absurd John would have laughed had she not bitten her lip like a child trying to be brave. He’d have liked to say, ‘What are you doing?’, but knew she wouldn’t have been able to answer, and when he put out his hand and rested it on the outcurve of her hip it wasn’t desire or curiosity that moved him most, but pity. She flinched, and wondering if his hands were cold he said, ‘I’m sorry’, and stepped away from her towards the window.

He could see all her flaws and defects: a picked mosquito bite on her shoulder above a smear of blood that hadn’t been washed away, and the plump uneven flesh on her thighs. At the side of her left breast was a birthmark the size and colour of a copper coin, a remnant of the constant shadow cast on her brother’s arm, and when she reached up to dash impatiently at a fly troubling her, the hair under her arms was the same dark amber as the thick plait she drew over her shoulder.

Moving towards her, John put his right hand on her breast-bone, and fitting his thumb to the hollow in her throat felt her blood beating. But looking down he saw that her eyes were very like her brother’s, and dark with apprehension. It made her seem a child again, and he shook his head violently as if denying something, and stooped to pick up her dressing gown.

‘Don’t you want me?’

‘If everyone always did everything they wanted…’ He shrugged, and spread his arms in apology and dismay.

‘Oh…’ She considered this without rancour or hurt pride, the way another woman might have done, then obediently pushed her arm into the sleeve he held up. ‘I see what you mean.’ Then she clutched her stomach. ‘I feel sick.’

‘How much did you have?’

‘Two glasses, big ones, and it tasted of currants. I don’t like your beard, I can’t tell if you’re smiling.’

He wrapped the belt twice round her waist, fumbling with the knot. ‘Well, I am.’

‘But I can’t tell.’

‘All right then, I’ll shave it off.’ She nodded, then looked with disapproval around the small neat room, her hands shoved into her pockets. He wasn’t sure what he ought to be feeling – ashamed of himself and embarrassed for her, perhaps – but felt a steadying rush of affection, nothing like the painful drawing he’d felt when he thought it was Eve waiting on the other side of the door. He finished tying the belt at her waist, drawing the loops until they matched precisely.

‘I saw you with Eve, earlier,’ she said reproachfully. ‘I looked for you all morning but couldn’t find you. I’ve made a cake for Hester. I thought you could help me put the candles in, but you weren’t anywhere I looked. Then I heard her playing the song she always plays when she wants someone to like her, and I knew you’d be there, so I went and looked, and there you were.’

The song she always plays
, thought John. The hollow place in his stomach deepened. Clare kicked the nearest of the boxes. ‘Why haven’t you unpacked?’

‘I’ll do it tomorrow.’

‘Can I sleep in here?’ Outside, the light above the tower dimmed in the brightening air. ‘It’s not long now till morning… Can I lie down just here? I won’t make any noise.’ She lay politely still on the edge of the bed, tucking the dressing gown around her hips and watching him expectantly, so that sitting elsewhere would have been stranger than simply to lie beside her on the thin mattress. John took off his shoes, and stretched out beside her. The raised edge of the bed pressed them together, and her hair was caught up with his on the pillow. After a while she said, ‘When we shared a room and I didn’t like the dark, my brother told me stories.’

‘It’s quite light in here,’ he said, but the long line of her body next to him was still with expectation.

‘What story shall I tell you?’

‘Tell me yours.’

‘Oh…’ He shifted, and caught the eye of the painted Puritan, who was trying not to laugh. ‘I haven’t one worth telling. Ask for another.’

‘Couldn’t you tell me about that name:
Eadwacer
– however it’s said. It was all written down in that book you found and I want to know what it means, and who it was, and why it’s ended up here in the house.’

‘“Wulf and Eadwacer”, you mean? I can try, though I don’t remember it well, and never understood it even when I did. Nobody ever really knew what it meant, or who they were, only that it’s a very sad story that didn’t end well.’

She turned a little, drowsing against the pillow: ‘I don’t mind, it’ll be easier to believe – tell it to me now, just until I sleep.’

He moved his foot against the sheets in search of a cooler place, and rested his hand on the white-painted rail of the bed. ‘A long time ago now, and a long way from here…’

‘That’s not right! Start properly.’

He let out a long silent breath. On the wall the remnants of the light from the valve tower faded as the bulb went out. He began again: ‘Once upon a time there was a woman whose name everyone has forgotten. She lived on an island where nothing grew but heather and no birds sang but ravens and crows. Her hair was the colour of grass when it has dried in the sun, and she wore it in two plaits that came over her shoulders, as thick and strong as ropes.’

‘I’ve plaited my hair too.’

‘Yes – but will you listen now? This woman had a husband she loved. It had been raining the day he put his arms around her for the first time, and since then it was the falling of the rain and not the light of the sun that most made her happy. His eyes were like amber and his long hair grew black and grey, and when he hunted beasts or men it was by the light of the moon. Because of this he was known as the wolf, and if ever anyone had known the name he was given at birth, it was long forgotten. Wulf was the name they called him, and Wulf was the name he signed himself. When their son was born, he too had eyes like amber and they called him their wolf-pup and their whelp.

‘But you see, this was a time of warring, and a day came when the woman’s countrymen gave her away as a kind of sacrifice. One night when the crows called from the rooftops and the moon was too young to give any light, she was taken from her Wulf and her whelp to another island, one that lay low among the fens and black marsh grass. The people of this particular island were murderous, and bore long grudges that could only be placated by taking captives and watching them mourn. I think – though I can’t be sure – that it was here the man Eadwacer lived, among the woman’s captors. Probably he stood where he could not quite be seen, and listened to her singing across the water to the island where her Wulf waited.’

The girl stirred, and raised her head a little on the pillow. ‘But I thought Eadwacer was a woman, too?’

‘Not in the tale I’m telling. So can you see it, then? Two islands set apart by a dark sea that froze in winter, and in summer was white with storms. Whenever the rains came the woman remembered Wulf and pined for him so that the bread they brought her was like a stone in her mouth, and the water they gave her was too bitter to swallow. When the rains came she remembered his arms around her, and when there was no rain she thought of nothing at all. Her skin became grey as storm clouds and her hair came out in handfuls, and gathered around her feet where she sat.’

If he had hoped to lull the girl to sleep, he had failed. Troubled, she raised herself on a folded arm, and said: ‘What was Eadwacer doing all this time?’

‘It is hard to be certain,’ said John, ‘but I think perhaps he watched her as she called over and over to the other island, where Wulf her lover was. In time perhaps they spoke, Eadwacer and the captive woman, and though the captors were his people, and he ought not to have done it, he also put his arms around her, whether or not it was raining.’

He could not think where the story went from there, and paused for a while. Beside him the girl leaned back on her pillow and let out a long slow breath. ‘And how did it end?’

‘It never did, only the woman carried on calling to the island across the water, wishing her voice could meet the voice of her Wulf, so they made only one song between them, and whenever she spoke to Eadwacer, though I think he loved her by then, it was with contempt in her voice.’

The girl gave a snort of disdain. ‘I don’t like that story – not at all. I don’t even know what it means – do you?’

‘No, and no-one ever has, not in a thousand years.’ He lifted a strand of her hair from the pillow between them. ‘But it need not mean anything, I think – it’s not necessary to understand everything. Only you should feel what the woman felt, and hear her calling as if we were on one island and she on the other – now go to sleep won’t you, for an hour or two. It’s only just dawn, and I’m tired, and I can’t think any more.’

She turned obediently away from him and towards the window, where the light was sharpening in the split between the curtains. From underneath them a rumble had begun, that rattled the bed’s iron frame against the wall and receded in a while to an insistent whine. Downstairs in the kitchen Hester was washing her clothes.

TUESDAY

John sat alone in the garden a moment past midnight, his back against a copper beech, an empty bottle in his lap. A black cloud drew across the sky: it reached the moon and for a moment was fringed in silver; then it moved on, and nothing broke the darkness from end to end.

He was the last to go inside. Behind him, in bright-lit rooms that cast panels of light on the lawn, Hester and her guests sat dozing in armchairs, or listlessly picking at fragments of food. All night they’d moved between the house and garden, alone or pressed so close together their limbs could hardly be distinguished as they danced and drank. Anyone watching would have thought they were fragments of a larger party having a better time.

They’d gathered in the dining room at eight o’clock, when Hester struck a gong three times. John – who’d cut himself shaving and stood stroking the tender spot anxiously, wondering if anyone would remark on his newly naked face – had been first to obey the summons. He’d found, among the other man’s possessions, black trousers free from stains or cigarette burns, and a dark shirt that only lacked one button. When the others arrived, tricked out in bright dresses and shirts, he felt drab in their company, and stood quietly by the folds of the heavy curtains.

‘And where’s our Hester gone?’ said Elijah, seeking him out and passing him a glass of wine. ‘Making an entrance, I expect. Have you a gift for her? I haven’t – she forbade it – but then women always do, don’t they, and one never knows…’

‘Seen the sky tonight, John?’ Clare, appearing at his shoulder, patted his bare cheek and smiled approval. She had found in a cupboard somewhere a white dress with a short skirt that stood out in folds at her waist – it looked rather like a child’s Sunday School dress and displayed a grass stain on her knee, and above it her flawless face looked more incongruous than ever. ‘Have you been outside, and seen it? The sky’s getting dark, and it’s going to rain…’

‘I thought I heard thunder earlier,’ said John, and stooped to kiss the girl’s cheek, but she turned away – Hester had arrived, and paused in the doorway, one hand on her hip and the other braced against the frame in a parody of a model’s pose. She wore a dress in fine black fabric printed all over with a pattern like the bark of a tree. It covered her from her wrists to her ankles, and over it she had put on a collar of Egyptian scarab beetles carved from bone and stained unevenly turquoise. From a distance it looked to John as if they might at any moment detach from their binding and scuttle to the four corners of the room. Then the guests called out: ‘Hester, it’s Hester… for she’s a jolly good fellow!’ and she made a deep, mannered curtsey, as though her performance had already been made.

John had last seen her early that morning, as she stopped him in the kitchen and drew him into the corner: ‘That letter – I hate thinking of it, never mind saying it aloud: how could I have been so stupid – did it come? Did you see it? And how can I thank you, John…’

‘I watched all day,’ he’d said untruthfully, hoping she wouldn’t see in his face the memory of the hour or so at the piano with Eve, ‘and it didn’t come. It’s going to be all right – look.’ And they had both turned to the window, where they’d seen Alex on the lawn with Walker, struggling with a film projector toppling on iron legs.

As she stood in the doorway taking her applause, John thought she gave him a look of apology and thanks, and he nodded –
might the danger have passed
, he thought, watching Alex fill his glass for the second time and raise it in a general salute.

‘And so say all of us!’ cried Eve, then dashed to the door and kissed Hester’s hands and cheek. ‘When shall we sing for you, darling? Shall we do it now, and get it over with?’

John, who’d only ever seen her in the boy’s clothes that left her limbs bare, had turned away from the door when she came in, wrapped in a green dress with a high upturned collar and thin shining fabric that showed the bones of her hips and shoulders. On her left wrist, positioned precisely above a purplish circle of bruising, was a silver snake consuming its tail. With her curls pinned back from her face she looked to John like a black flower blooming on a frail stem.

Walker wore trousers with a narrow satin ribbon at the seam, and a pleated white dress shirt unbuttoned at the neck. He looked carefully dishevelled, as if he’d not yet slept after a grander party elsewhere. Appearing at John’s elbow with a glass of wine, he said, ‘I put an ice cube in to keep it cold. Drink up, I would – this could go on for hours.’ And he drew on a cigarette, narrowing his eyes at Eve, who lifted her hands to conduct them all in singing ‘Happy Birthday’.

‘Happy
bir
thday, dear
Hes
ter!’ sang Elijah, in a sober jacket better suited to the pulpit. He slipped into a bass harmony that so delighted Hester they sang twice more, while Clare, her hair in plaits, grew increasingly out of tune and lightly touched John’s cheek again. ‘I’m glad you did it. Have you hurt yourself? Only – you look a bit like
him
now,’ she said, nodding at Walker, who raised an eyebrow and flicked the butt of his cigarette on to the terrace.

Later they went into the music room, where the lilies gave off a rank scent that wouldn’t be covered with the perfume Eve sprayed in the air. ‘I can bear it if you can,’ said Hester, sinking onto a threadbare couch and arranging the beetles at her breast. ‘We can’t have a party without music.’ The raised lid of the piano had been polished; reflected on its black surface, the garden was already at midnight. Eve took Elijah’s hand and pulled him smilingly towards the stool. ‘Sing what you like,’ she said. ‘I’ll find you.’

Walker rested his heels on a table, then removed them under Hester’s glare, and murmured to John: ‘Pass me the whisky, would you? I can’t take this sober.’

The preacher straightened his tie, and with a quick downward glance at Eve as she settled at the keys began to sing. After the first deep melancholy notes had shivered in the floor-boards and in the high back of the oak chair where John sat, the woman joined him, fixing her eyes on his: ‘
As pants the hart for cooling streams when heated in the chase
,’ sang Elijah, his eyes fixed on the floor and the lamps putting red lights in his hair. John closed his eyes and saw the deer panicked in a thicket somewhere, thirsty and frightened, and felt his own mouth dry up in the heat. Outside a chorus of crickets started up in the long grass.

The song faded as the preacher forgot the words, and Eve, laughing, ended on a low chord that seemed unfitting to the melody. ‘Beautiful,’ said Hester, ‘but much too sad for me – Eve, play us something merrier or we’ll not have the stomach to eat.’ Elijah inclined his head with a rueful smile, and came to sit in the small space beside her on the couch; she mimed a scowl of disapproval and tucked a cushion behind his head, leaning forward to whisper something that made him smile.

Eve pressed her hands into the small of her back, arching it with a moan that rang loudly under the high ceiling, then launched without warning into a high-stepping tune that made the room a speakeasy and filled all their glasses with gin.

Clare said, ‘Surely we should dance – who’ll dance with me?’ but they were too weary with heat, and contented themselves with rapping their heels on the floor, and when the song finished called for another.

‘No more from me – everyone has to do something, that’s what we agreed.’ Eve stood, showing a black blade of sweat in the centre of her narrow back. ‘Alex, come on, what have you got to show us?’ He stood reluctantly, pulled by Eve at one arm and Clare at another. Finding a basket of fruit on a sideboard, he juggled with oranges, tilting back his head to watch them, grinning at their applause when he snatched another and another, until half a dozen circled at the end of his outstretched hands. John felt pricked with unease:
they can’t really be fooled by all this
, can they? he thought, watching the young man nail up a smile.

Then one of the open windows slipped its latch and blew back against the wall. It startled Alex, who dropped the oranges and watched them roll between the legs of chairs and tables. One burst as it struck the bare floor and filled up the room with its Spanish scent.

‘Was that the wind?’ said Eve, running to the window and leaning out. ‘It’s getting colder – look at my arms: I have goosebumps.’ She thrust her arm towards them, and John saw the fine dark hairs raised in the sudden chill. ‘The storm must be coming, after all,’ she said. ‘Come on, let’s go outside, let’s go out and wait for the rain.’

‘A tenner to whoever feels the first drop,’ said Walker, following Eve into the garden with his hand at the back of her neck.

The hum of crickets in the long grass rose and receded like a dry tide, and the wind picked up dust from the lawn. Hester clapped with feigned surprise when she saw they’d brought out a white sheet and stretched it between a pair of poplar trees. ‘Dear me,’ she said, ‘what on earth have you been planning?’ On the terrace the film projector rested against the sundial.

‘Sit down there, sit down,’ said Walker impatiently, stooping over the projector and fiddling with a case of film pock-marked with rust. Sighing they all subsided onto blankets and cushions brought down from the bedrooms, glancing behind to wave at Elijah, who’d brought his chair to the long windows beside the patio and raised his glass in reply.

Clare leant against John’s shoulder. ‘I thought I felt a drop of rain but it’s just me, I’m sweating, look’, and she turned her face up to show him.

The breeze had moved on elsewhere, leaving the air so thick with moisture they felt the weight of it on their shoulders. The bright-lit bank of the reservoir wall seemed to have crept closer while they were inside, and behind it the black fringes of the Thetford pines were unmoving against the sky. Hester let out a moan as she sank onto a cushion: ‘I wish the dam would break, I wish it would, and float me away’ – then glanced guiltily first at John and then at Alex, who seemed not to have heard and was wetting Eve’s feet with a watering can.

‘There,’ said Walker, rubbing dust from his hands. ‘Do you remember this?’ The reel of film began to tick through the projector, and Hester appeared as a girl. Forty years were crossed at the push of a switch: the same black eyes challenged the camera from the same face, a little softer perhaps, and framed by thick black hair that fell over her shoulders. The sound was cracked and faint, and the rising wind tugged at the sheet and distorted her features. They watched in silence, glancing curiously over at the woman seeing her youth replayed in front of her. The young Hester raised her arms above her head –
What am I saying? Have I lost my senses
? – then the sound hissed and cut out abruptly, and she was left silently mouthing at them.

‘Turn it off, turn it off,’ cried Hester, delighted. ‘And I can still remember the lines, you know:
At every word I say, my hair stands up with horror
! Racine, of course,’ she said to John, as though confiding in a fellow conspirator, and he nodded, though he’d never heard the words.

Walker took out the reel of film and handed it to Hester, who idly began pulling it from its case. ‘I don’t remember having ever been so young,’ she said, winding the tape around her fingers: ‘But at the same time, I don’t think I’ve ever grown older…’

Eve sank on to a rug beside John, thoughtfully running a thumb over the bruise on her wrist. Seeing it, John flushed with shame and confusion – how could he have hurt her; no-one else would have done it; he must lack something essential, after all… She caught his eye and shrugged, smiling, and it was so like the acceptance of an apology he hadn’t yet managed to give that his throat constricted, and he bent forward to say with hurried relief, ‘It was dreadful though, wasn’t it? She couldn’t act at all!’

She grinned, and put a finger to her lips, then turning to look over her shoulder called out, ‘Cake, Clare – time for cake!’ and the other girl dashed indoors and reappeared carrying a uneven white-iced confection on a peeling silver board.

‘No candles, thank God…’ said Hester.

‘There wouldn’t have been room,’ said Walker, ducking a blow to his ear then catching her hand and kissing the knuckles one by one.

‘But we can sing again, can’t we?’ Clare look anxiously at John, who found himself leading another chorus of ‘Happy Birthday’ as Alex thrust up his glass and made an arc of red wine in the air, and Elijah joined in from across the terrace.

‘Someone else cut it, my hands are full,’ said Hester, showing them a tangle of film on which her face in miniature was repeated every inch. There was a quiet snap, and the wind tore the sheet from the pegs tethering it to the branches, and blew it on to the patio where it huddled in the corner.

‘Give me the knife,’ said Walker, cutting savagely into the cake. ‘I’m hungry.’ It split open, and the smell of almonds mixed with spilt wine and the herby scent of the parched grass. ‘Oh, it could be cyanide in there,’ he said. ‘We’ll all be found dead in our beds…’

Eve smilingly pushed the first piece between his open lips. ‘No more than we deserve,’ she said. ‘Hester? Will you risk it?’

John had stood then to ease the aching in his legs and wandered away towards the reservoir. A column of cloud struck a barrier and began to spread outwards in the shape of an anvil showing clearly on the darker sky behind, and against the wall poppy seeds rattled in their husks. He saw the uneven swing hanging from the poplar tree, stirring in the rising wind, and sat there watching for the storm, listening all the while…

‘… and who was that new young man, Hester, with the shaving cut and the dark shirt? You never said you’d invited strangers in…’

‘I forgot the words, forgot them! I used to remember every hymn in the book, you know – all the verses – no I’ll stay here, I’d rather stay indoors…’

‘… so handsome, and so tall, but has anyone seen John tonight?’ That was Eve, laughing – did she know her voice carried to him over the lawn?

‘Are we out of wine? We can’t be. Give me that bottle, let me see…’

‘I didn’t go down there today, I was sleeping. There was a letter, you know, and I took it upstairs to read then lay down on the bed and went straight off, went out like a light – maybe I’ll go down later and check, just once before the rain starts. Will you come? Who’ll come with me?’