After Me Comes the Flood (18 page)

‘One afternoon, yesterday I think it was, it was so hot I heard the paint blister on the windowsill.’

‘I was reading on the lawn today and I swear a fly just died in the air and landed on my lap.’

‘…
dark, dark hath been the midnight
…’

‘Elijah darling, I wish you’d stop. It’s my birthday after all – were there never any happy hymns?’

‘…
glory, glory dwelleth in Immanuel’s land
…’

‘Eve, give him something to drink.’

‘Did you see that? Look east – no, over there, past the trees – lightning, definitely, down on the horizon…’

‘And it’s colder, I’m sure. Let me have your jacket, Walker, my shoulders will ache…’

‘Play a game with me, Evie, the ones from when we were little’ – and with the smack of palm on palm:

‘
I gave my love an apple, I gave my love a pear
,

I gave my love a kiss on the lips

And threw him down the stairs
…’

‘It’s going to rain! Did you feel that? It’s going to rain!’

‘
… aprés-moi, le deluge
…’

‘But surely it would have to rain for forty days and forty nights to break the dam, even if he was right all along?’

‘Don’t talk about it, not on my birthday, I don’t want to hear it. And look how happy he is, dancing with Clare, look how alike they are…’

‘… is that an owl?’

‘It’s the wind.’

Much later Clare came to find him, her hair coming out of its braids and her skirt streaked with dust. He was sitting cross-legged on the lawn, an empty bottle leaning on his knee, plucking stems of grass and winding them around his thumb. ‘There you are, I’ve been looking and looking. Hester says we should go inside – the rain will start soon, and I saw lightning, twice, over there.’ She pointed towards the reservoir – it was coming closer.

‘I want to stay here a while longer,’ said John, ‘And watch it coming.’

‘Can I sit with you? Look – Alex gave me this.’ She sat beside him, reaching into the bodice of her dress and taking out an envelope. John dully recognised the careful handwriting on the front, the name
ALEXANDER
, the unfranked stamp. So it had come after all, while he’d been sitting with Eve, or while he’d raged about the garden afterwards like a petulant child, still feeling her wrist in the circle of his fingers. It been such a small thing to ask him to do, and he’d failed, even at that.

He said, ‘What’s inside?’

‘I didn’t look! You can’t open someone else’s post – didn’t your mother tell you?’ She picked up the bottle and turned it upside down. A trickle of wine fell on to the grass. ‘He told me to get rid of it. He said he didn’t need it any more. Shall we burn it?’

‘I don’t have any matches,’ said John.

‘Oh.’ She turned the envelope over and over in her hands. ‘Shall I go and get Walker? He always has some, and he always knows what to do…’

‘No,’ said John, too quickly, and she looked at him in surprise, turning the envelope in her hands. Then she said, ‘Then I’ll bury it,’ and began to scratch a shallow trench in the dust. Then she put the folded paper in the hollow, and he helped her cover it over and find a stone to weigh it down.

‘I bet we’ll never know who sent them,’ she said, patting the stone three times. ‘But I think it must have been someone wicked, though Elijah says there’s no such thing, and we’re all as bad as each other… if I ever found them out I’d find a way to hurt them, you know.’ She gripped her hands together until the knuckles whitened, and her face, when she turned to look at him, was suddenly not childlike at all, but set hard with fury.

‘Maybe they did it because they were unhappy,’ he said, and she shook her head.

‘No, just bad, I think.’

‘How is he? How has he been – did he read the letter, then?’

‘Oh yes, he must have done – but he’s fine: they don’t hurt him any more. Nothing seems to, not even that woman by the sea and the boy who hurt himself. He’s all right. He’ll be all right.’ She dusted her hands on her dress. ‘Can we go now, John? Let’s go inside. I didn’t put my shoes on, and my feet are cold – and what if the storm comes and we’re still here, sitting under a tree? The lightning will get us!’

She pulled him to his feet, her arms far stronger than he’d thought they’d be, and they picked their way through empty bottles and a plate that had been broken when Hester, heavy with wine and heat, stumbled indoors. Someone had brought out the book of poems with its white vellum cover, and it lay open at ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’. John bent to close it, and would have put it in his pocket if Clare hadn’t dragged him on: ‘Can you feel it coming? The air’s fizzing, and it’s making my head hurt.’

He stood with her at the music room window watching the storm clouds pile up above the reservoir. The wind moaned through cracks in the window frame, and the grey air drew a veil over the garden. It was quiet indoors, and from somewhere along the corridor someone was talking in a low murmur. It might have been any of them, and John strained to hear better, wondering if it was Eve.

It won’t be long now
, he thought, and wanting again to gather everything he saw to be kept safe and complete in memory, gazed steadily around the room as though it were the face of a friend leaving for another country. The curtains at the window were torn and speckled with damp, and as he watched a flake of plaster detached itself from the ceiling and floated down like a leaf on a still day. Beside him Clare scratched the paint on the windowsill with her thumbnail, and leant her head on his shoulder. She said, ‘You don’t think he was right all along, do you?’

John bent his head, and let his cheek rest briefly against the top of her head. Her hair was warm, as though it had soaked up the last of the sun.

‘He wasn’t really in his right mind, I think. No, he was wrong – we’re safe here.’ She sighed, and her head grew heavy on his shoulder. After a while he thought she must be dozing where she stood; but then she straightened with a cry of delight, and leaned forward to push the window open. A gust of wind threw it back against the wall and cracked the glass, but they neither heard nor saw – it was raining at last. Amazed, they put out their hands to catch cold water in their palms; then all at once there was a change of air so sudden they felt it deep in the channels of their ears. Clare shivered, and began to step away from the window into the darkening room. ‘Don’t let the rain blow in,’ she said – then arrested by something she’d seen began to point down towards the garden. ‘Oh – John, what’s that? What’s happening?’

A flock of small white birds was flying down towards the reservoir, and John leaned out to see better and to hear their song; but it was only sheets of paper carried on the rising wind.

‘What is it? Where is it coming from?’ On the terrace the girl knelt to pick up a sheet of paper from where it had been pinned to the stones by the rain, and her white dress darkened at the hem. Water streamed over her hair and into her eyes, and she held up the paper, laughing and calling to John, beckoning to him to come out. He began to feel cold and uneasy – he wanted to turn his back on the darkening garden, and wait out the storm in his bed upstairs with the windows fastened against the sky.

‘Come out, John – why aren’t you coming out? Look, it’s only Elijah!’

Turning his collar up against the sudden chill, John went out onto the wet stones and turned to look at the house. All the windows were lit, their curtains drawn back, and directly above them, framed in a panel of light, Elijah stood with the naked light bulb swaying in the wind and sending his shadow back and forth across the wall. He’d opened the windows as far as they’d go, and held sheaves of paper in each hand which he threw out on to the wet wind. Currents of air lifted them briefly towards the eaves of the house, then they were tossed down the garden, where the light from the tower was hazy with rain.

‘Elijah!’ Clare called, waving the paper she’d picked up like a handkerchief. ‘Can you see us? What is it? What are you doing?’

He heard her, and waved to them both; then, laughing, began to throw out handfuls of paper until the air was full of it.

Then the first lightning strike came, a bluish filament leaping from cloud to cloud, and the whole house sprang out from the darkness then receded into the rain. The full-bellied clouds bore down upon the roof, and John thought:
Just another few feet and we’ll all be swallowed up
. Turning his face into the rain, he shouted to the preacher, ‘The sky’s falling in, Elijah – you were right all along!’

‘You know I don’t think I’ve ever seen him laugh,’ said Clare, but he couldn’t hear above the noise of the rain on the stones and the slate tiles of the roof.

When the second lightning strike came it seemed to John that the light came from inside the earth, was an upward surge that shone out through the windows of the house and every crack in the lawn and every fissure and borehole in the trunks of the trees receding into the rain. It gave the world a moment of absolute clarity, and in it the preacher at his window saw something that made him rigid with terror and warning; even above the hammering of the rain they heard his frantic bellow.

John looked down at the water at his feet and thought:
so he was right, after all – the dam has broken
. But no, that was absurd: it was only the rain pooling on the terrace stones, rising, having nowhere to go. Elijah shouted again, gripping the windowsill and leaning so far out that John was afraid he might fall, and he put out his arms as though that would be enough to catch him.

Clare said, ‘What is it? What’s happening?’, and gripped John’s arm so hard above the elbow that a few days later he found a mark, and was grateful for a reminder that he had been there at all.

‘I don’t know, I can’t hear…’ Elijah vanished from the window, and all they saw was the shadow of a moth beating against the light. John wanted to call out for the others – none of this was anything to do with him; he ought not to have been there at all; surely someone else was coming? In the high wind a tile slipped free from the glasshouse roof and shattered, its shards lost in the rising water, while beside him Clare plucked frantically at his shirt. Then away to their left, as the lightning flared again, he heard a door slam from the side of the house nearest the garden wall. A moment later Elijah, his head lowered like a charging bull, ran down the garden towards the reservoir at the end. It was then that John realised it was not, of course, the dam breaking: it would have come not in a rising flood but a rush of black water. But whatever Elijah had seen had made him forget his fear of a godless earth, and was a nearer and more urgent danger, and John began running too, grasping for the young woman’s hand.

The lawn was too dry to suck up the rain, which might as well have fallen on a tiled floor, and as they ran water dark with mud and leaves lapped at their ankles, and the white-covered book was open again, floating face down in the reflection of the swing. Ahead of them the bright grass verge of the reservoir wall was an indistinct barrier, and above it the yellow light from the tower showed clearly.

It wasn’t until there was another lightning flash, a bright thread connecting two black banks of cloud, that John saw what Elijah had seen from his window: Alex, standing at the furthest edge of the verge beside the reservoir, staring fixedly down at the water. Below him on the rubble beach the lapping water had begun its rise towards the rim of the embankment. As they watched he tilted back his head as though seeing perforations where the rain came through, and the water dragged his shirt from his back. On they ran, calling out his name; he stepped once towards the water and in his arms they saw a black object, small and heavy. The unkind light came again and lit each separate cloud, and John saw Hester in her party dress, beetles scuttling at her throat, rise up the embankment behind them. Her wide eyes were rimmed in white; she stumbled and slipped, and might have fallen if Walker and Eve hadn’t appeared at her side and taken her weight between them. On the surface of the rising reservoir, the water moved in eddies as though just beneath large fish waited patiently, and the pines at the water’s edge let loose a volley of cones as the rain struck their branches.

Alex raised his head – he’d heard his name – and John saw it was the cannonball he held, so heavy it raised the tendons in his neck. He moved towards the curved steel barrier marking the place where the reservoir grew deep, and stood gazing fixedly downwards. It occurred to John that perhaps he was looking for the post office sign; he shouted out idiotically, ‘No, it’s not there, it’s this side, it’s over here!’ The wind threw his words elsewhere, and Alex never heard – without looking back, he stepped over the barrier and into the black water rising, which snatched at him as though it had been waiting all along.

Clare covered her face with her hands and shook her head violently as though she refused to believe what she’d seen. Beside her Hester first sank to her knees then began to scrabble at the grass to get enough purchase to stand again; she was not crying, only saying, ‘No, no, not him, not now,’ on a rising cadence that died down for a moment, then started up again each time she drew a breath.

John pulled his arm from Clare’s grasp and tried to run forward, tugging at the neck of his shirt, but there seemed no strength in his legs, which buckled beneath his weight before he could reach the water’s edge. By then Walker had stripped and with a face set in courage or denial jumped into the reservoir. Eve, her curls drawn into a glossy cap, leant over the barrier, calling the names of the two men in turn as if she might be able to coax them out of the water, while beside her Elijah clasped his hands under his chin, his eyes closed and his mouth moving.

‘Too late for that, isn’t it?’ said John, fear making him unkind, and he stood with Eve at the barrier, staring into the black water. Later he would think of those minutes as having been hours of waiting – he and the preacher poised at the water’s edge uncertain how to help, Eve trembling between them, Hester digging at the grass while Clare bent over her, trying to lift her coils of hair out of the mud. But it could only have been less than a minute before Walker plunged upward through the water; he gulped at the air then was gone for a moment, returning with a dark head cradled in the crook of his arm. He called out, struggling against violent currents; John, his weight borne on Elijah’s shoulder, leaned over the barrier with hands outstretched, shouting encouragement as though it had been just a race all along and there might still be a winner – ‘That’s it Walker, come on, that’s it, only a little further.’