THURSDAY

I

John was woken by ringing that came not from the piano he’d heard the night before, but from a newly hollow place inside his skull. Through the pink net of veins in his lowered lids he saw the sun filling the room to its corners, and began to raise himself on his elbows. Pain surged from the back of his neck to his forehead then receded in a sickening wave. He sat cross-legged on the sheets, carefully counting air in and out of his lungs and swallowing bile. His bladder was painfully full, and when he was sure he could stand without vomiting he crossed the room to the small bathroom. He sat to relieve himself, wondering how long it would be before he was sick, and whether afterwards he’d be himself again. The little room was surprisingly cool: he shivered, and saw gooseflesh break out on his knees, but in time the chill settled his stomach, and he sat there a long while fixing his eyes on the sink, willing the world to shrink to the proportions of the blue bar of soap in its cracked clay dish.

A little while later, with nausea stirring his stomach, he stood half-dressed at the window. It was another day without any sign of rain, another morning without birdsong; in the clear early light the garden below looked diminished and ordinary, the folly at the end a prop for an abandoned play and the glasshouse stained and shabby. The windows were thickly glazed in uneven panes that threw back a mottled reflection nothing like the neat-edged image in his own mirror every morning. The face he saw now was too pale and lean, the hair too long, and under heavy lids glossed with sweat the pale eyes glittered. He raised his right hand, uncertain whether the other man would raise his left in the proper greeting. ‘What came over you?’ he said. ‘What in God’s name have you done?’ The watching man had no reply, and John returned to the edge of the bed, cradling his aching head in his hands: what had he done, after all? Nothing brave or impassioned, not the brief lapse into madness to be expected of a man arriving suddenly in middle age, but an abuse of kindness and trust: he’d been welcomed and cared for – he touched the place where the woman had put a kind hand – and in return he’d deceived them all. Recalling the words of the preacher the night before (I think perhaps we should talk) he felt the unease of a child awaiting the headmaster’s summons.

In the sober light of morning, away from the gaze of a dozen eyes, there’d be no difficulty in slipping downstairs and making his way through the forest to his car (he imagined it sinking already into the dense verge, its windows curtained with an overnight fall of pine needles), back on the road to his brother, or to his ordinary ordered life. He thought it must be early still, though outside on the terrace the sundial was lying. He pressed an ear to the door, but the house was silent: his heart quickened – here was his best chance of quietly leaving with no questions asked or answered. In their jug beside the bed the daisies had shed their flowers; he collected them from the floor, and arranged them in a circle on the table, looping the jug that had held them (the amber-haired girl would like that, he thought – Clare, had that been her name? – and for a moment regretted he’d never thanked her for her misplaced kindness). Then he lifted the lid of the child’s desk and took the notebook from where he’d hidden it underneath a pile of yellowed newspapers, from some of which pictures and columns had been cut. He flicked through the pages, running his finger with surprise over the lines of neat blue handwriting – had he written all that, by the yellow light above the tower? He supposed he must have done, and saw again the black-haired woman turning to face him, and felt the sensation of cold wine seeping through his shirt.

He turned to look once more behind him, then slipping the notebook into his pocket opened the door.

Barring his way as certainly as any gate, Clare stood in the dark hall, turning away from him towards the head of the staircase where sunlight flew its banners on the wall. She wore a man’s white shirt which reached almost to her knees, and stood tiptoe on dirty bare feet as if ready to run at a moment’s notice. She’d been playing with bindweed and twisted a few stems around her neck, and John suspected it had been done for an effect he refused to feel. When she heard the door open she turned and the weeds turned with her, regarding him with white eyes open. ‘John.’ She whispered, but as a child might, so that it carried along the hall and would have woken anyone still sleeping; and what occurred to him first was that Elijah had sent for him.

‘John – Eve says we need you and will you come now please.’ She shifted from foot to foot. ‘She says she needs you or needs someone and you’ll do.’ When there was no immediate sign of obedience the girl tugged crossly at the bindweed as if someone else had put it there. ‘There isn’t anyone else, is there? They’ve gone out for a while, and she said you’ll do, and that you’d know.’

The nausea which had begun to recede struck him again so forcibly that he leant against the doorframe for a moment, and pressed his forehead to the cool white-painted wood. What now, he thought, helpless against his sickness and the plea that creased her face with anxiety: what ought he to know – who was that other John, who ought to be standing where he stood now? And then, alongside the confusion, he felt a needling of resentment: oh, he would do, then, ever the last resort. He imagined her saying it, that black-haired laddish girl downstairs in whose eyes and voice he thought he’d detected mockery the night before, and in the end it was resentment and not the plea for help that roused him. Squaring his shoulders, and breathing hard to suppress the gorge rising sourly in his throat, he said: ‘Where shall I go then? What shall I do?’

She grinned in relief or surprise, and by way of answer dashed away from him and swung herself down the first step or two, calling over her shoulder, ‘Well, this way then, and hurry’, as if it had been the beginning of a game. He moved after her, then remembering that he still held the notebook hastily returned it to the drawer in the child’s desk, regretting that after all he could not take it with him.

When they reached the foot of the stairs the girl paused with her hand on the banister and said, ‘I’m going to go now. You’ll know what to do.’ Then she ran out into the garden through the narrow door at the furthest end of the hall. It hung open awhile on tired hinges, showing a stretch of parched lawn and a glimpse of the high mossy wall he’d first seen from the road. John could not think what it was he ought to be doing, or why she’d left him there, and might have followed her had he not heard, from deep in the shadow cast by the front door, a kind of low cry. It was not quite of fear but of something more like denial, and then there was another voice, and a name said softly several times over: Alex, Alex, Alex…

As his eyes accustomed themselves to the hall’s dim air, he saw the young latecomer from the night before crouching against the door and resting his head on his forearms. He looked diminished, as though overnight he’d lost half his height and strength, and when he raised his head his eyes were rimmed with shadow. Beside him stood Eve, stooping to rest a hand on his shoulder, her arm showing white against the dark fabric of his shirt. Neither acknowledged John, but talked instead in low urgent murmurs, the young man gesturing towards the door as though he’d seen something slip out or come in. Then Eve turned to John and without speaking communicated a plea that conferred on him a responsibility and knowledge he neither felt nor understood. With a slight dip of her head, she gestured towards Alex, who’d drawn himself up a little and was picking at a graze on his knuckles with all the concentration of a craftsman. The movement plainly conveyed that John should do something, and that he would instinctively know what it was – she raised a hand towards him in mute appeal then passed it wearily over her forehead. Then she came towards him, put her mouth close to his ear and whispered: ‘Look, I’m sorry, it’s your first day, I know – only I have tried, and Hester will be gone awhile now – won’t you have a word?’ She drew away from him, and said – with delicacy, as if a boundary had been overstepped: ‘You understand. Don’t you? That is, you know…’ She paused, and he felt a moment’s pleasure in seeing her disconcerted before the sensation of being entirely at a loss overwhelmed him. He began to protest, but the schoolboy stammer held his tongue, and before he could frame the words to keep them all at arm’s length Alex stood, with a quick fluid motion wholly at odds with his defeated posture a moment before.

‘Eve, look – it’s John. Why didn’t you say!’ He cuffed at his eyes, and it was as if the rough gesture dislodged the misery and weariness that had weighed him down. Patting at his clothes, which were dusty from his huddling against the door, he came towards them, and landed a friendly blow on John’s shoulder. Then he patted at the wall behind them, where a strip of paper unfurled from the damp plaster, and said vaguely, ‘I might go and have a snooze.’ He paused beside Eve, frowning as though he’d forgotten something, then briefly gripped her hand and said: ‘Yes, I think so,’ and slipped behind them into a room which John had not yet seen. As he did so a small brown envelope fell from his hand or pocket to the floor, and grateful for an excuse to conceal his confusion John stooped to pick it up. When he straightened, Eve had not followed the young man, but stood instead with folded arms, examining him as though he’d just arrived. She beckoned twice, imperious, and John passed her the envelope, noticing the stamp had not been franked. She folded it over and over as if she might eventually reduce it to nothing, and pushed it into her own pocket. ‘Shall we go? Clare has something to show you, I think.’ Then, with an authority that sat so curiously on her John could not have resisted it, she indicated that he should follow her down the hall and out into the garden.

It was early still and there ought to have been dew on the grass, but already the hard-baked earth had stored up the morning’s sun and John felt it through the thin soles of his shoes. The forest pines huddled against the garden wall were shedding their needles to lighten their load, and up ahead an elm had been struck with disease so that half its branches were damned to perpetual winter. In the shade of the elm Clare in her white shirt knelt over a series of irregular white objects which might have fallen from the blighted elm. Drawing near John saw they were a dozen small parcels wrapped in paper and tied with waxed string, several opened out and surrounded with scraps of paper in the long grass. Seeing Eve and John come towards her the girl snatched up a clay doll and shook its ugly little head to send them away. ‘You can’t have her, she’s mine!’

‘I tell you the child never sleeps, up in the attic and down in the cellar at all hours, bringing out her treasures.’ Eve touched Clare’s head with a fond gesture. ‘Last week it was a cannonball, of all things – it had been used as a doorstop in a room we never use, and she carried it out to the garden thinking it would make a bowling ball, and dropped it twice, and broke the floorboards on the way…’ Then she fell to her knees, and tearing at a bundle of tissue withdrew a bundle of bamboo pipes set around a lacquered black dome. ‘What’s this doing here, with these old things – isn’t this mine? Didn’t I have it last year?’ She examined it, frowning, then pushed the black dome beneath her lower lip, and blowing over the pipes produced, without a thought, a line or two of Bach. So it was her, he thought, at the piano last night, and in the morning. He was disappointed, and would much rather it had been Hester making something fine and beautiful with her ugly hands.

Clare set the clay doll down in the grass, and covered it with a sheet of tissue paper, carefully leaving its upturned face exposed. Beside it lay a corked jar of yellow liquid in which a mouse or vole curled its pink hands and waved a naked tail. She said, with a shy eager smile, ‘I found them, all by myself, and brought them down while everyone was still in bed. Look!’ She held up her wrist, which was looped three times with a string of irregular blue beads. ‘What do you think? Where do you think they came from?’

John stooped and tugged at the beads. He had seen something like it before, in a glass case or displayed on a cloth somewhere. ‘It might be tomb beads – from Egypt, you know. Nothing precious, just chips of glass – something to be buried with, so you don’t go in poverty to the afterlife. Then in time all the sand blows away, and there they are, waiting to be picked up.’ He thought she might recoil, but instead she stroked them thoughtfully, satisfied, and turned to a larger parcel, wrapped not in paper but in a length of chamois leather. John, by an instinct for the familiar he later regretted, saw in the parcel the dimensions of a small book, and felt the idea of leaving recede a little further. He crouched beside her, and with a proprietorial murmur – ‘Shall I, do you think?’ – took it from her. The strings came untied easily, as if it had been recently opened and they’d lost the habit of their knot. Inside the chamois was a second layer of frayed blue cloth, wrapped tightly around the book’s pale vellum binding. The gilding on the spine had worn away, and John, setting the book on his knees, turned to the title page. The thick paper showed an engraving of a bearded man, splendidly aloof, resting a long finger on a rolled parchment.

It was a volume which had come and gone from his own shelves over the years – a collection of Anglo-Saxon poems, inscrutable and lovely, the Old English and the new shown on facing pages. The book’s scent was so familiar it conveyed the sound of the clock ticking in the empty shop, and the bell above the door. The weight of the book spread evenly between his palms gave him the courage an icon might to a man of anxious faith.

Clare bent forward and traced a line or two with her finger. ‘Where is the horse gone,’ she read: ‘Where the rider…’

‘… and where the giver of treasure…’ It gave John such pleasure to be back over the border of his own familiar land that he went on, eagerly, as if she’d asked to be taught: ‘Noone knows now – might not have known then! – who was the rider, or where he rode, or even who wrote the poems. Their meaning is mine or yours; they belong to whoever reads them, and no-one can say you are either right or wrong.’

Eve, black brows drawn together in distaste, took the book. ‘So spoke the wanderer, mindful of hardship.’ She snapped it shut, seeming again the boy he’d first taken her for. He laughed, and said, ‘Not all are so mournful, though most… This one I knew by heart when I was young, though I never knew what it meant: “Wulf and Eadwacer”–’ He stopped abruptly, remembering the notebook upstairs, and seeing in the sulphurous yellow light the name EADWACER, scrawled half a dozen times, and repeated on the deck of cards dealt out the night before. As he said the name the two young women kneeling on the grass paused, and looked up at him. Clare looked stricken, as though he’d said something to wound her, and Eve said sharply, ‘What? What did you say?’

Her hostility was so sudden and unearned it took great effort for him to say without stammering: ‘It was nothing – just another poem, that’s all.’ He felt them begin to withdraw from him – Clare rocked back on her heels and crossed her arms against her breast, and Eve’s narrow white face had become fixed and hostile.

‘It was only the name of the poem. I don’t even know if I’m saying it right…’

‘Show me.’ Eve took the book, drawing quickly away from him. ‘Wulf is on one island, I on another.’

The obscure old riddle became part of everything else that was uncertain and troubling: he was still a stranger in their strange land. She said, ‘Why did you choose it – why did you have to say it out loud?’

‘We’ve heard it before you see, John,’ said Clare gravely. She looked, he thought, rather disappointed, and all at once older than her years.

‘Yes.’ Eve began to wrap the book roughly, winding the string so tightly John flinched – oh, but careful, you’ll break its spine – ‘Yes – everywhere, all over the house, cut into the table, written in dust on the windowsills. Down there’ – Eve flung out an arm towards the high green bank at the garden’s end.

‘Down there?’ John shielded his eyes from the sun at its height.

‘Haven’t you seen it yet? The reservoir.’ Oh, but it’s a reservoir, of course, thought John – he’d seen that kind of embankment before on the outskirts of small towns where he and his brother fished without joy for trout and pike.

‘We’re going swimming there tomorrow,’ said Clare, forgetting for a moment the book and the hated name. The few tears she’d shed dried on her cheek. ‘We keep saying we’ll go, but we never do.’

‘We might, darling,’ said Eve impatiently, not yet finished with John. Her eyes were opaque as smoked glass; then they cleared, suddenly, as though she had reached a favourable verdict on some fresh evidence. She shook her head. ‘Oh, how could you know? There have been’ – she paused, as though selecting a word and finding it distasteful – ‘letters. Anonymous ones.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Well, yes – you’re smiling, and why wouldn’t you. Absurd, isn’t it? I keep thinking Holmes will arrive, with Watson following by train…’

‘I wouldn’t have thought so,’ said John. ‘Miss Marple, perhaps.’

‘It is more her line of work, isn’t it?’ The smoke receded, and left her mossy eyes clear and frank. ‘Poison pen letters. That’s what they call them, as if it’s not the person writing that’s at fault but the pen in their hand – they come for Alex, of all people! You can imagine someone wanting to torment Walker, can’t you.’ She said this with a slight secretive smile, which she swiftly shook off. ‘Or Hester, or even me. But Alex’ – she shook her head. ‘Well – you know.’ John, who knew less now than he ever had, nodded.

‘There’s always something, with Alex. It was bridges before. This time it’s the reservoir – he’s got it into his head the dam will break, and the reservoir will burst the embankment, and the water will reach us down here. He says he sees it at night – he’s standing on the front lawn and the sky turns black, and black water from the reservoir bursts out of all the windows and doors, taking all of us with it. I tell him every day it would need the Severn or the Thames to flood us here, even if there hadn’t been a drought, even if the dam burst…’ She shook her head, and unfolded a square of stained linen from its paper packet. It was embroidered with the text THOU GOD SEEST ME, and underneath the words a blue eye was coming unstitched. Eve picked at the trailing threads.

‘Of course we don’t argue or disagree with him, it would only make things worse, and besides, what do we know, about this dam or any other…’

John watched her refolding the linen square on her lap and saw, with a prick of anxiety, that the bluish-white skin above her knees was beginning to burn. ‘But surely – a disaster on that scale: it’s unthinkable.’ He looked again at the raised grass bank; it seemed, in the curious brightness of its grass, more permanent than the house itself.

She shrugged. ‘There’s a crack, he says, although I’ve not seen it. Out he swims, when we’re all in our beds, then comes and wakes me, with his hair dripping on my pillow, to tell me it’s the width of his thumb, then the palm of his hand…’ Kneeling between the scattered drawers, she spread her own hands hopelessly. ‘Then, a few weeks ago, just at the beginning of summer, down we came one morning and there were two letters for Alex, side by side on the doormat. Oh, he was pleased – no-one writes any more, do they? He thought a friend had found him. You know, from before.’ She said this tentatively, and again John had the curious feeling that she did so out of a delicacy for his own feelings, but could not think why. ‘Only they weren’t letters, of course – just newspaper clippings, and all of them showed drownings, or floods. There was one with a terrible picture, from France, of two children who’d been stranded on a sandbank hunting for shells. They were lying on the sand, their hair all mixed up with the seaweed…’ She shuddered. ‘On all the pieces of newspaper was that name again, Eadwacer – oh, how do you say it? Then it started turning up – scratched on the table, or written in pebbles down by the reservoir, or so he says – I’ve never seen it and of course, you never quite know.’

The whole tale was so absurd, and at the same time so cruel, that John would have liked to laugh. The woman stood wearily. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘What could you say? What can any of us say? It’s so childish. Once I even thought he was doing it, but he was never that way, not even –’ And again she said: ‘You know, John. Not even then.’

They think I’m in on something! he thought, and unwilling to risk her anger again said carefully, ‘But if the name’s written down by the dam or on the patio then either it’s one of you, or someone who comes here often.’

‘I know. And I don’t know which would be worst. Isn’t it odd,’ she said, smiling: ‘You turned up and I never for a minute thought it might be you, though even as strangers go, you’re fairly strange.’ Much later John was to remember that phrase, and wonder why it had felt so like an unexpected touch on the arm. Pressing her hands to the dip in her spine and turning her face to the sun she said, ‘Let’s not talk about it any more.’ Then she ran to peer at the shadow on the broken sundial, swore beneath her breath, and vanished into the cool dark house. Clare stood, examining a bitten-down thumbnail, while the sound of a piano played in intricate swift patterns reached them across the lawn.

‘How did she know the time,’ said John, ‘when the sundial’s broken?’

‘It doesn’t matter, does it? It tells the same wrong time every day.’

The music sank into a deep murmur felt as much as heard.

‘Have you been friends with Eve a very long time?’ John unbuttoned his cuff, and let the girl stoop to wrap the string of beads around his wrist.

‘She’s not my friend, not really. She knew my brother from school. I didn’t see her for years, not for years, then she came to St Jude’s and of course we saw her all the time then, sometimes every day.’

‘I see,’ said John. St Jude’s? The image of Eve’s black head bent over folded hands vanished as soon as it came. From across the lawn the patterns of music changed to an insistent motif that made him uneasy. ‘She’s very good,’ he said, though really he couldn’t tell.

‘See, they suit you – yes, they say she is, and if she makes a mistake she slams the lid so hard you’d think she’d smash it in pieces. Did you know it was Eve who found the piano at St Jude’s – it was old and damp and none of the notes would come out right – but she paid to have it fixed. Alex liked to hear it.’ She gave him a curious look that was, he thought, half-pitying: ‘Of course everyone did.’

Did she feel pity for him, then – for the man that should’ve been there, kneeling on the lawn with his wrist in her hands? The idea baffled him, and he put it away to examine later by a better light. Then she fastened the beads and said, ‘You know, sometimes she plays so long her fingers bleed. You can’t go near her now, not until she’s done.’

‘I promise I’ll never disturb her,’ said John, remembering how quickly her mossy eyes had darkened. ‘I wouldn’t like to make her angry. Listen: isn’t someone calling for you?’

At the kitchen window, almost hidden by the half-closed blind, Hester beckoned the girl indoors, and dropping the blue beads in the grass she dashed away, forgetting him as easily as a child might.

He retreated into the strip of shade thrown by the high walls that divided the garden from the road, imagining an iron gate set within the bricks, its lock and hinges choked with ivy. I’ve wondered enough at what I have done, he thought, but what have they done; what keeps them here, pleasure or punishment… ‘Still no birds, then?’ Alex had come quietly on bare feet and stood smiling at him, his hands deep in his pockets, nothing like the frightened boy crouching by the door he’d seen that morning. His skin had tanned so darkly the long-fringed eyes appeared pale.

‘No, none; it’s like this in London – just as I left I saw one dying in the gutter – I thought here it would be different.’

‘London, eh?’ The younger man looked surprised. Then he shrugged, and said: ‘Makes you wonder where they’ve all gone, doesn’t it? But it can’t last – nothing ever does… John, I want to say something.’ He flushed, as though he thought he might be speaking out of turn and, forestalling a response, went on: ‘I know what it takes just to leave everything, not to do what they tell you to do, but you’re not on your own. And I’ll help you, if I can – oh, you don’t want to talk about it, I understand.’

John, wretched with confusion and guilt, said, ‘You’re very kind.’ Casting about for a means of moving the subject to firmer ground, he gestured to the packets scattered on the lawn. ‘Ought we to take these in?’ He took up the book and concealed it beneath his arm. The young man stooped obediently and began to gather up what remained, now and then exclaiming, ‘What is all his, anyway? And where did she find them? Let’s take them to the red room, and find a home for them there.’

Singing under his breath something that echoed by chance or design the melody that reached them across the lawn, he led John towards the house and a glass door which stood open at the edge of the stone terrace. Pausing at the threshold John saw a piano with its lid raised and a dark head bent low over the keys; remembering his resolve not to trouble Eve he slipped quietly inside.

It was a larger room than any he’d seen in the house before. It ran the length of the east wing so that all along the outer wall eight windows faced south to the grey-paved terrace, then to the parched lawn and the dark pines beyond. The light that came in ought to have blazed in every corner, but instead was absorbed by red-papered walls and Turkish carpets scattered unevenly across the wooden floor. The ceiling seemed lower than in the other rooms, and had been recently painted with illogical pairings of spring flowers and roses, and all around the light fittings, from which hung broken chandeliers trailing chipped strings of glass drops, were painted yellow-beaked blackbirds caught in a briar thicket. The furniture was set around the piano, which was by far the largest John had ever seen, and bore no resemblance to the comfortably scuffed wooden instrument his brother’s children played. It seemed newly made, lacquered to so black and lucid a shine that he saw in its raised lid a perfect dark reflection of himself at midnight. The keys were not ebony and bone but plastic, with a fine strip of scarlet felt running behind them. The harsh colours in the dim and shabby room reminded John of false teeth bared in a grin. Scattered all around the piano were piles of sheet music, some of it torn and foxed with illuminated title pages, others on clean white paper. Elsewhere the furniture was desperately shabby: a velvet-upholstered couch was balding in the seat, and the pair of tables set between the windows looked as if they had rickets. All around the room, stuffed into vases and jugs and attracting a number of voluble bees, were stems of untidy long-petalled red and yellow flowers, their hard stamens ejecting puffs of dark pollen. It looked as if someone had set a dozen small fires, and they smelt revoltingly sweet.

‘Asphodel, she calls them,’ said Eve drily, closing the piano lid. ‘Lilies, to you and me.’

Alex laid his armful of packages in a neat row on the seat of a couch. He looked up at the girl, who returned his gaze with a searching, anxious look of her own which swiftly became a smile. ‘I’m done, I think, for now – where’s Walker? Have you seen him?’ Standing half-hidden in the curtain’s musty folds John saw Alex lift her hand and examine it, turning it over and putting his thumb in her palm. ‘Don’t you ever wash, Evie?’ he said gently. ‘Look at all this, under your nails.’ He let her hand drop, and then he said: ‘I haven’t seen him this morning. He’s probably up with Elijah, leading him astray. Yesterday he was teaching him to gamble, you know…’ The woman laughed, then pushed her curls back from her forehead, waved distractedly at them both, and went out into the hall.

The young man watched her go, scratching at a raised mosquito bite on his arm; then he shook his head and, seeing John, started as if he’d forgotten he was there. ‘I can’t stand this much longer,’ he said. ‘Still, we’ll all be out of it, come Saturday.’

John glanced behind him out of the window, expecting to see clouds pulling at the sun, but there was only the same empty blue canopy. ‘Oh?’

‘Didn’t they tell you? We’re getting out of here, going to the sea. Won’t you come too?’

‘Of course,’ said John. How easy it would be to leave them then, with none of those inept excuses he’d dreamed up in the night. He imagined pushing open the door to his flat, and seeing inside the rush mat with three pairs of shoes neatly paired alongside, and the bookshelves as ordered as those in the shop. He awaited relief and longing for home, but neither came.

‘It can get a bit closed-in here sometimes,’ said the younger man suddenly, sitting up and grasping the arms of the chair: ‘Nice to have another face – another pair of eyes, if you see what I mean.’ He looked at John with such warmth and gratitude that he flushed, and stooped to pick uselessly at a shoelace. Then Alex said, worrying at a graze on the back of his hand: ‘I don’t think I did know you, back then, did I?’ His eyes met John’s, and for a moment he was the huddled wretched boy he’d been that morning.

‘Oh no, no. No – I don’t think so, I’m sure I’d remember.’

‘Only you see I am sometimes – sometimes not always clear…’ The graze evidently became sore; he winced, and rested his head on the arm of the chair. ‘But here it feels safe, as if nothing can make it through the forest to where we are. Do you see?’

‘I think so.’

‘Listen,’ he said, standing. ‘Would you help me with something?’

‘If I can, of course.’

‘I could do with a hand, later. Down by the reservoir.’ He looked anxious, and John remembered the tale Eve told, and saw that name again, with its familiar syllables: Eadwacer, written in the notebook upstairs and scratched into the wood on the kitchen table, and perhaps in other places waiting to be discovered.

‘If you think I can be any use,’ he said.

‘Can you swim?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said John: ‘I can’t remember.’

‘It won’t matter – was that Hester calling us to lunch?’ He put a hand on John’s shoulder where the shirt was damp with sweat growing stale, and said: ‘You’ve probably got time to change.’

 

Dear Jon (may I call you Jon?)

Last night I slept in your bed, and this morning I put on your clothes. I took them from one of the bags you left here: I hope you don’t mind. I’m sure they’re all wondering what a man like me is doing in a red tartan shirt with sleeves too short by an inch.

‘A man like me’, I said; but the point is that I must be a man like you – I must be you, and put you on when I put on these jeans (which I notice are not clean and have about them a smell a little like smoke and a little like the lawn outside, where all the grass has died).

I’ve kept a record of what I’ve done and said in your name. Don’t be alarmed – I’ve done no harm, though I’ve done what I ought not to have done, and left undone those things which I ought to have done…

I’ve been through your bags, and this is what I found:

A biology textbook, hardly read.

A joke set of plastic false teeth with pink feet attached.

Two bottles of clear nail varnish.

A Book of Common Prayer (marked with Elijah’s name, and an address scratched out).

Four white porcelain dolls’ hands, and a plastic doll’s leg.

A prescription for antihistamines made out to a Mr Williams.

A bottle of lavender oil (empty).

Five steel bolts, very clean.

A thin glove packed with gauze.

A glass eye.

Actually, the glass eye was in the pocket of these jeans. I thought perhaps you collected marbles, and found myself rolling it between my finger and thumb, wondering if you did the same for comfort’s sake. When I took it out just now and saw the green pupil and the bloodshot white I half expected it to blink, so I put it back in my pocket to protect it from the light.

Who are you – who are we? What did we all do that brought us here? I only know they can’t ever have seen you, or even heard your voice – when we spoke on the phone you had an accent I couldn’t place that was nothing like mine.

Who are you, Jon? And what are you doing with these things – that glove you could mistake for a severed hand, the limbs of a doll, the teeth you must’ve found in a joke shop on a pier? Carry on like this and you’ll have enough to make yourself a whole new man.

I’d guess that you’re young, and as troubled as they all seem to be. You’re shorter than I am and stockier too, and from what I’ve seen on your collar I imagine your hair could do with a cut. And you’re a thief, with the names of other men on your books and papers – is the textbook even yours? What was it you wanted to know – was there no-one to ask? You’ve read the prayer book – I can see that – Elijah would never have folded down the pages till the paper cracked. And I can see the page you’ve read most, because you touched the paper too often with dirty hands – ‘You have placed in the skies the sign of your covenant with all living things…’ (and I’m not a religious man but I know a rainbow when I see one).

I know what you’re thinking. I’ve no right to your clothes or your name or your place at their table. But read what I’ve written and you’ll see: they took my arm – they touched me and wanted me here…

Oh, but it’s useless I know. Soon enough they’ll catch me out and besides, it was never me they wanted.

Keep this book safe, would you? Please do that.

Yours,

John Cole

 

II

Later, when a too-heavy lunch had been eaten, and doors closed one after the other upstairs as the afternoon torpor settled on the house, John walked alone in the garden. The letter – torn from the notebook and placed under the painted Puritan’s frame – ought to have shaken him loose, but seemed instead to fix him in place. As he walked across the dying lawn he cast about for sight of Eve walking between the poplars or Hester at her window, already feeling it his duty now to observe, if not take part. He rolled the glass eye across his palm; there was the dying elm, and there the raised bright bank of the reservoir, but nothing moved – no shadow on the grass, or shiver in the branches overhead. There also, of course – he’d never thought to look! – would be the narrow track down which he’d walked, and beyond it the long road home. He stood sunstruck alone on the lawn – I can go I must go I will – then thought suddenly of the notebook upstairs. He imagined Clare finding it one early morning as she ranged about the house, passing it between them all, reading it aloud.

He turned back, to the grey-paved terrace and its broken sundial, and the roses dying in their beds. Upstairs a window was opened and the sun slid across the pane; a note or two was struck on the piano, but nothing came of it. John crossed the threshold to the blue room where he’d sat in silence the night before, feeling the glass eye grow hot in his palm, and gave a shameful cry of surprise as a hand emerged from a dim corner and beckoned him further in. Elijah, holding a glass of water in which floated an opaque ice cube cracking as it melted, gestured towards an empty chair. The gentle invitation had the proportions of a threat (I think we’d better have a talk): John started guiltily, and dropped the eye, which made its way across the carpet, settled against the leg of an armchair, and fixed its gaze upon the ceiling.

‘John!’ It was clear he’d been waiting. ‘John! That is to say…’ Delicately, by little more than a raised eyebrow, he put out the question which John had dreaded and longed for.

‘Oh no – I am John. You see, that’s been my trouble!’

‘Care to tell me about it? I’ve kept a good many secrets’ – the preacher pulled, wincing, at the iced water – ‘not all of them mine.’

‘It was just a mistake,’ said John. ‘I didn’t mean to do it.’ The plaintive note in his voice was new and unwelcome, and flushing miserably he wished the arms of the chair would draw him in until he seeped into the wood.

‘So easily done,’ said the other man, benevolently. ‘Wide is the gate, and broad is the way…’ He paused, then thinking better of the turn he’d taken said: ‘You came in last night so pale, and seemed so weary, that it didn’t much matter that you weren’t the Jon I knew. Certainly you looked as though you belonged here – what right did I have to turn you out?’

‘Does everyone know?’ Appalled, John considered the possibility that all their welcome had been an act of amused pity. The glass eye rolled his way in sympathy.

‘Oh, no! No, they never knew the lad – he was one of mine, if you take my meaning, and fetched up at St Jude’s a while back, following his pastor like a dutiful member of the flock. A tendency to a particular kind of kleptomania, I’m given to understand. Harmless, but one never knows where these things lead. In my day we sang with the children “Little sins become big sins, and big sins kill” – just like that, can you imagine – big sins kill!’

‘I’ve no right to ask you, I know – but I’d like to understand at least what I’ve seen and heard since I came – what is St Jude’s? What does it mean? I thought at first of a church but can’t seem to make it fit.’

‘Ah…’ There was another of those slight changes of air, and Elijah sat a little straighter. He pursed his mouth in a gesture of distaste, drained his glass, and set it down. ‘Not a church, or not quite: a private hospital, a – what do they call it these days? – a psychiatric hospital, a convalescent home, an institute, a retreat. I was there first, biding my time, waiting for it all to pass. Quiet it was, at first; routine, order, soft-soled shoes. Then Alex came, not in his right mind. There’d never been anyone quite like him before, not in my time at least. A deep sadness in him, an anger even; they couldn’t contain it at first. And then the women came – I remember thinking it was like Mary visiting Christ in his tomb. Hester first, with Clare always at her side, and not long after that Eve also, though she looked so different then, and wore her hair so long she could wrap it round her like a scarf.’

‘Months ago? Years ago – weeks?’

‘I don’t remember. Autumn was coming – a year ago, I suppose. Then Walker came – something to do with the finance of the place; I never asked. And something altered, and in the end every boundary was crossed, every mark was overstepped, and we all left together – Alex, Clare, Eve and me. It was Hester’s doing, as things so often are. It’s a lonely place this, with all the rooms empty, and she told them “Send others, if they need it; if they’re not ready to be alone.” Between you and me, I think she’d hit on a way of saving her soul. But no-one ever came, and we never mentioned St Jude’s again. Then a month ago I took a call from Jon, and said: do come, do. There’s no harm in coming here.’

He shook his head, and left a quiet opening into which John – leaning forward, imagining a confessional grille suspended in the air between them – put all the events of the day before. Elijah greeted the tale without surprise or censure, nodding now and then, and murmuring ‘Yes, I see’ or ‘Yes, quite so’; and when John had finished he said, ‘I consider it none of my business whatever. Stay or go as you please, and I’ll say nothing. If asked, well – I can try my hand at a lie.’

Muddy with heat, John stirred in his chair; a new thought had come to him, and with great difficulty he forced it on to his tongue. ‘Then – is this why no-one ever asks me where I came from, or what I’m doing here?’

Elijah, standing with a groan, gave a smile of mischief and delight. ‘Oh, they think you came from there too. They all just assumed you were mad.’

 

III

It’s very late or very early, depending which way up you hold the day, and I’ve been down at the reservoir with Alex. He told me to wait for him after we’d eaten, and I sat till after midnight on the terrace, drinking the coffee Hester gave me (she makes it bitterly thick – no wonder I can’t sleep), watching bats come over the wall from the forest and listening to Eve play in the room behind me. She’d opened the windows wide and I could smell the lilies dying in their vases. By then the heat had made everyone tired and listless and no-one seemed to feel much like talking. Mostly they left me alone, although once someone put their hand on my shoulder on their way down through the trees. Clare sat cross-legged next to me for a long time, showing me how to blow a blade of grass like an oboe reed. I pretended I didn’t know how, and let her teach me, all the while thinking: tomorrow I’ll leave and be forgotten by the time the weather breaks.

Behind us Walker paced up and down smoking so heavily it looked as though autumn had come and he was walking through morning mist. Elijah came to the window once or twice and looked down towards the yellow light by the reservoir as if he wanted to go down, but was terrified of what he’d find. I wonder what frightens him? Watching him there at the window I thought it must be something he sees that passes the rest of us by.

The chair I’d carried out was too old and worn in the seat to be comfortable, but all the same I dozed off twice, my chin on my chest and the back of my neck stretched as if it would break. Behind me Eve went on playing, breaking off sometimes to swear quietly but viciously, and play a dozen times the phrase she’d mistaken, until the memory of it must have lodged in all the bones and tendons of her hands. The same phrases over and over seemed to give me a kind of clarity – I remembered the poem I’d seen that morning as clearly as if I had memorised it yesterday, or years ago perhaps when I was young, and my mind held on to things. I recited the lines to myself making them fit with the phrases she played… Wulf is on one island, I on another, Wulf is on one island, I on another… Then Alex came and woke me with a thump between my shoulders so hard it nearly threw me out of my chair.

He said, ‘Sorry to keep you, John – shall we go?’ and crooked out his arm towards me. I took it, and it wasn’t until we’d gone a little further on I realised no-one had walked with me like that since I’d last seen my brother. He’s shorter than Christopher, and his arm was slender but strong. He said, ‘It’s good of you, you know. I don’t like asking the others. Clare’s afraid of the water at night – she thinks drowned men will come up and get her by the ankles. Have you been down and seen it yet?’

I said I hadn’t, and he squeezed my arm.

‘It’s not much of a reservoir, really. We get our water from there, and so do the villages between here and the coast road, but no more than that. You’ve seen the valve tower?’

‘Is that what it is? I can see the light from my window. It doesn’t look like it belongs here.’

‘I hate the light. It keeps me awake and turns my skin yellow like a man that’s been poisoned… I’ve told Hester I can go down and take out the bulb, but she says she likes it, like a midnight sun – as if we haven’t had enough sun by now!’

We walked slowly down towards the light, and as we left the house behind the hard earth became springy and pliable underfoot. As we drew nearer the rough land beyond the garden I could make out white patches on the earth, like smears of drying salt water. While we walked he told me more about the reservoir, quite contentedly, not at all as if he dreaded the water breaching the dam and reaching us where we stood. I wondered if Eve had been teasing me that morning as we sat under the dying elm, and felt suddenly very relieved. The whole business of the letters had been so childish and inane that I was glad I didn’t have to believe it after all. Alex went on talking, and I remember thinking how like his sister’s his voice was, cheerful and childlike and not much bothered whether or not I was listening, or had much to say in reply.

He told me the reservoir was made before the war by flooding a hamlet that had once been within view of the house. The dam had stopped up a river so narrow no-one had really believed it would rise to cover the post office and chapel, and the dozen cottages clinging to the single road. There were no protests, he told me – no-one had much cared about the chapel, which had been used by a sect called the Particular People, famous for praying out of doors. Elderly couples in the cottages were only too glad to move to new apartments with neat kitchens and a warden who’d come if they had a fall on the doorstep. Only the postmistress had taken it badly, hoarding letters in their sacks for weeks so they were never delivered, and were dislodged when the water came. For a long time after, he said anyone passing by would have seen white envelopes floating on the black water.

‘About a week ago the water got just low enough to see the post office sign. When we get there, tell me if you can see it.’

I asked him about the valve tower, and who came there. We’d drawn near it by then, and its yellow light gave him a hard translucent look as if he were made of amber. The tower was smaller than it had looked from the window, with red bricks neatly set in a checkered pattern, and a crenellated roof. The door was sheet metal, secured with rivets and heavily padlocked, but I could see through a grimy window to a mechanism studded with dials, and a computer with a dusty screen. A laminated sheet of paper stained with damp had been taped to the door. It said NO ENTRY.

‘It’s supposed to regulate the flow of water from the dam,’ he told me. ‘They come once or twice a year, maybe more. I never see them.’ Then his arm through mine tensed suddenly. He lowered his voice to a whisper, although there was no-one near who might have heard. ‘I tried to call them. I did. There’s a number on the door. Yesterday I called and the day before, and twice this morning before anyone was up, but they won’t listen. They said they’d send someone this month, maybe next, but it might be too late by then – the summer’s ending and there’ll be rain for days.’ We’d reached the place where the parched lawn gave way to gravel and rough grass, and banks of bramble with berries dying unripe between the leaves. The brambles had put out low branches that crept across the ground and caught our ankles as we passed.

We came to the cannonball Eve told me had been brought down from the attic – it must have been found on a tideline somewhere, and was crusted with barnacles and rust. Alex bent to pick it up, holding it out to me cupped between his hands, laughing and hefting it from side to side as though he wanted me to see how strong he was. He carried it a few feet, pretending to toss it in the air like a tennis ball, but I could see how the weight of it raised ridges of muscle and tendon in his arm, and when he dropped it I thought I’d hear it ring like a ship’s bell on the hard earth. I looked at Alex, who’d stopped suddenly when he dropped the cannonball, and was staring fixedly at the embankment. It was only ten or fifteen feet high, on a sharp slope he could’ve dashed up without losing his breath or footing, but he looked for a moment old and defeated. He started plucking feverishly at the skin on his bottom lip, leaving a smear of blood. I walked past him and said loudly, ‘I’ll beat you to the top.’ It was childish of me, but it worked – he laughed and overtook me, and I reached the crest of the embankment a moment after him.

We stood together on the high grass verge, the valve tower throwing its light on the dwindling reservoir. The waterline must once have been almost level with the grass embankment, but had receded in the drought and left a kind of rough beach littered with feathers and algae. All around us the dark pines of the forest stooped towards the water as if they were thirsty. I’d grown so used to parched lawns and dying flower beds that the few spikes of purple foxglove growing near the water’s edge seemed strange and rare, and I looked down at my feet afraid I might trample them into the ground. Alex swept out a hand to take in the reservoir from where we stood to the dam wall in the distance. ‘What do you think?’

It was smaller than I’d thought, and darker. The surface of the water was black and opaque, and the reflection of the moon at our feet looked very small. He beckoned me nearer the edge, asking if I could see the post office sign, and I stepped forward until I was almost on the rubble beach. The pupils of my eyes opened to the dark until I could make out, just below the thick water, the familiar red oval.

He told me how he liked to go there alone, watching for waterfowl. One day he’d seen a pair of geese that looked as though their breasts had been painted red, and had never seen them again. There’d been kingfishers, and once an adder he’d known by the diamonds on its back. He pointed out the pine where he thought he’d heard a cuckoo (‘Just like the clock!’ he told me, although I don’t see why that would be a surprise). Then he turned his back to the dam as though he wanted to put it out of his mind, and in his rush to tell me everything he’d seen – mayflies mating on the water, and a vole lying dead with its tail in its mouth – he began to swallow and stumble over his words until I couldn’t follow what he was saying.

All the things I’d heard that morning came back to me – the letters, the flawed dam and the water ready to rise; St Jude’s and everything Elijah had said; Eve playing to people I pictured leaning on white-painted walls to listen. I saw also the many versions of Alex I’d watched throughout the day: huddled by the front door, or asking for my help as easily as if we’d been friends for years. Looking at him then, as he stood linking his thumbs and flapping his joined hands, imitating a white moth he’d seen the night before, it suddenly seemed obvious that he was suffering in ways I couldn’t describe or understand.

I found myself nodding and saying ‘Yes, yes, I see’, and moving back from the water’s edge. Then, without pausing for breath, he tilted back his head to look at the sky, and said, ‘I think that’s the Pole Star isn’t it? Elijah taught me how to find it once – look, you follow the line of the W, I forget what it’s called – yes, it’s the Pole Star right enough.’ Then he looked back at me, and it was as if locating that single point had steadied him, as though it were not something distant at all, but a bright shaft that pinioned him safely by my side. He frowned and shook his head, knuckling at his eyes like someone who’d just woken from a brief sleep. When I told him that he was right, and that every day it is there too, though we can’t see its modest light when the sun’s nearby, he gave me one of his frank childlike smiles and immediately I thought I must be wrong, and that I’d mistaken nothing but a harmless preoccupation for lunacy – it was as steady and direct a smile as I’d ever seen. Then he said, ‘Anyway, I’d like your help. Can you swim?’

When I told him I’d really rather not in that dark water he laughed and said ‘Fair enough’, and told me he only did it now he knew the water so well he could have swum there blindfold. He stooped to unlace his trainers, and I asked him why it was he needed to go out there at all. I tried to sound as if I didn’t care, and he didn’t look up but said casually, as if I probably knew already, ‘Oh, I like to check at midnight, you see. No sense checking in the morning then leaving it all day – anything could happen at night, don’t you think?’

Then he took off his socks, pushed them into the toes of his trainers, and began to stoop and stretch like an athlete before a race. Between deep breaths he told me why he wanted to swim out into the black water.

He’d sat one day on the embankment wall reading a letter when he saw a bird fly up from near the centre of the dam. From its forked tail he’d thought it was a swift, but when later that night he’d looked it up he knew from its pale breast it must have been a house martin. For a few days he watched for it, and saw the same bird go to and from the dam early in the morning, and again at sunset. He could never make out where it had been going, but often it had a scrap of something in its beak – a piece of bark or blade of dying grass, and once a white fragment torn from a pillow or cushion – and he knew that somewhere it must have made itself a home in a cleft in the reservoir wall.

‘Everyone knows, don’t they, how house martins make their nests in houses or barns – anywhere they find a place,’ he said. ‘But it was a long time before I knew what it meant, although now it seems so obvious – yes, yes: you thought of it straight away, didn’t you, I can tell! Somewhere there must be a hole or crack, just big enough for the bird to be making its nest, growing wider and longer every day while we all sit down there in the garden. But even then I didn’t see it. I was slow, always have been, but now I understand, now I know what’s coming. They say a storm’s on its way, and the water will rise and – oh,’ he stopped and put his hand on my shoulder and said, smiling, ‘I don’t need to tell you, do I, it’s so obvious – it’ll go into the crack and force it open, and then…’ He waved savagely towards the reservoir then swept his arm down towards the house, and I imagined that after it he brought a hundred thousand gallons of dirty water. ‘Hester, Elijah, Walker, Evie, Clare,’ he said, as if he were seeing them all going under.

With every name he pressed my shoulder until it hurt, then suddenly he let go and took off his T-shirt. I remember turning away out of decency and confusion, then remembering that he also was a man and turning back. He was sunburned on his neck and forearms, and elsewhere his skin was pale as Eve’s – it looked in the dark as though he were dressed in white. When he turned away from me I saw, on his upper arm where a muscle dipped as he moved, a patch of darker skin the size of my palm, as though he were always accompanied by a small shadow. Then he dropped the shirt and looked out over the water. ‘It’s all right, I won’t be long,’ he said kindly, and I realised I must have looked apprehensive, and tried to pin up a smile. He said, ‘It takes me sixteen minutes – I know because I timed it. Four to swim there and four back, and a little while to see what’s happening.’

He dropped the rest of his clothes in the dust, and I was so anxious to help, and so unsure what I should do, that I picked them up and began to fold them over my arm. His T-shirt had picked up burrs from the weeds growing thickly on the bank, and I tugged them free from the folds of cloth and tossed them into the water. He said, ‘I haven’t found it yet – the place where the dam’s breaking. But as the water-level gets lower and lower, I stand more chance of finding it, you see, and then’ – he nodded towards the valve tower – ‘then they’ll have to come, won’t they?’

I’ve always thought people look diminished and vulnerable without their clothes, but Alex was so unselfconscious that he seemed to grow taller and broader as he stood there. He seemed to search my face for something – I don’t know what, or I’d have given it to him – then said again, ‘They will come, John, won’t they? When I tell them?’ Of course I didn’t know, though I doubted it – I was tired and hot, and the headache that had plagued me since I’d woken on the floor in my own room a hundred years ago was beginning to blind me again. I’d’ve said anything, I think, to avoid his gaze and go back to the iron bed upstairs, and draw the curtains against the sickly valve tower light. So I nodded and said, ‘I imagine they’d have to. If you had the proof.’ Then I immediately felt ashamed of myself and plucked another burr from the clothes I held – I knew I should reason with him, but I knew also that I was an imposter, and had no part in whatever they all chose to do. The young man’s face suddenly changed (it’s a trick they all have, I’ve noticed, of changing face like a tossed coin), and he gave me one of the frank childlike smiles that made me think he was saner than all of us.

‘Knew I could count on you,’ he said triumphantly. ‘Knew it! You see’ – he leant towards me and I could smell stale beer and meat on his breath – ‘I don’t know if they really believe me.’ He nodded ruefully towards the house. ‘They think I’m being a bit, you know.’ He tapped his forehead, and we both laughed.

As I remember it now I think how mad we both must have looked: Alex naked and at ease, idly batting away a fly drawn to his sweat, and me a little distance away fussing over an armful of clothes. I did what was easiest – I laughed with him, and tapped my own forehead too, and said, ‘No-one could think that, not really. Not if you told them everything you’ve told me.’ I let him think nothing could be more logical than for him to pick his way on bare feet across the rubble beach towards the black water.

The moon and the yellow light from the tower gave enough brightness for me to see him dwindle until the dark water reached his waist, then he struck out for the dam wall. He called out to me once, then after that it was so quiet I could hear the swift splashes of his arms cutting through the water. A moment later and there was nothing, although I think I heard him call again from somewhere away to my right.

I don’t know how long I waited. Perhaps he really had timed how long the task took, but it seemed to me that the moon moved across the sky and back while I walked up and down at the foot of the slope. Once or twice the yellow light flickered violently and I thought the bulb would blow – that I’d be left alone in the dark, and he’d have nothing to guide him out of the water – but it always came back and sent my shadow across the lawn towards the house. By the time he climbed silently out of the water I was tired and distracted, and when I felt his wet hand on my shoulder I thought for a moment the drowned men Clare was afraid of had found me out.

He said, ‘Nothing tonight, I’m afraid – nothing to see.’ He patted my back, as if he thought I’d disappointed too. ‘It’s all right, we can check tomorrow, can’t we, now we both know what we’ve got on our hands? Makes a difference to me, I can tell you, knowing you believe me – I’ll sleep better tonight.’ He grinned, took his clothes from me and quickly dressed. ‘You look awful,’ he said, ‘Let’s get you home.’ And because it was so ridiculous, finding myself being kindly led indoors by a half-naked boy, still wet from swimming at night to find a place underwater where birds might nest, I began to laugh and, as though it were contagious, he did too. By the time we reached the house we were both laughing, until we gasped for breath and clutched at each other’s arms as we walked.

At the foot of the stairs he said, ‘I’ll leave you now – I won’t sleep for a long while,’ and turned towards the kitchen. His feet left black prints on the flagstones. Then he turned back and said, shyly and as though he were afraid he might have transgressed, ‘Sometimes I forget where I’ve been and what I’ve done, so you see I don’t like to be alone… Tonight while I was in the water I thought, I can feel it on my back, and I can hear it splashing, and John is there waiting, and if he is there, so must I be too…’ Then he plunged forward, with the same motion as when he had struck out into the water, and squeezed my shoulder so hard that I have the marks of his hand on me now. Then Hester called him from the kitchen and I came upstairs alone.

 

IV

Hester watched their return across the lawn. The yellow light from the reservoir gave each man a kind of aura, and it was impossible to tell from that distance who was supporting whom, only that every few steps one would stagger a little with laughter or weariness and be tugged to his feet again. She drew the curtains, not wanting to be seen, and sat at the dining table rolling the glass eye back and forth across the wood. She felt rather sorry for it, with the white clouded and bloodshot, and the hazel-streaked iris turning uselessly this way and that. The house closed about her like a clam shell; it was the hour she liked best, with all her duties done. She numbered her guests one by one on her fingers, a tally of the day’s work: Eve, Clare, Alex (impossible to prevent a smile at the name), Elijah, John – she lightly touched the eye and imagined it blinking, hurt.

That rash promise the year before, just as the door to St Jude’s had closed behind them, had been sincerely meant. She’d felt a sudden urge to fill each room, remembering long years in which she longed to hear a door slam or the piano played. There’d been times when even an intruder would have been a welcome sight; she’d have opened up her jewellery box (truth be told, all those pretty things were never worn), and put the kettle on.

But once they’d come together through the forest – Alex mute, she remembered, curled in the back of her car with his knees to his chest – and taken up their residence, the promise had been quickly forgotten in a kind of collective act: better to think they’d always been there. She found herself growing deliberately vague about the house and its origins (oh, a family estate – a kind of inheritance, she supposed: unexpected, unwanted, a burden in many ways; but so good to be useful) and sometimes indulged in a little myth-making – she was born there; she’d found it one morning out walking; she’d broken in and never left.

Elijah’s tentative reminder of her promise, and his plea for the inclusion of the man he’d known before he’d parted ways with God, had been at first resented. Her protective impulse had grown stronger with every week that passed, until she came to think of it as exerting a power of restraint (they cannot leave me, she’d once said aloud). An outsider might break the bond; but she’d given her word and that was that. Odd, though – she picked up the glass eye and popped it in her mouth – she’d imagined him to be a younger man, a boy almost, and had been startled at the appearance of that tall grave man with the beard that grew rather thinly around his mouth, giving his face a vulnerable and sensual cast of which, she was certain, he was quite unaware.

She had felt also the effect on him of her own appearance, but was so accustomed by now to evoking a mix of pity and distaste that it hardly troubled her. It was a hard-won indifference, though she still remembered the painful realisation that she was unfit for the male attention her sister enjoyed (it was the same sister, encountering her once in the bath, who’d first alerted her to her own ugliness, by loudly recoiling from her too-fat thighs showing above the foam and going away laughing, the bathroom door open, so that Hester had to cross the room naked and ashamed to hide herself again).

It was not in her nature to avoid her faults, and so she took to a minute examination and cataloguing of them: the preposterous nose; the coarse skin, in which the pores seemed to grow larger over time; the tendency to spots and boils; the pendulous flesh on her arms; and the weight of her breasts and stomach, which pulled at the small of her back and made it ache. In time her shame had hardened into a kind of defiance; what God had taken away from her body he’d given abundantly elsewhere. No-one would look twice at her, it was true – but nor would they out-think her, outwit her, forget her, or cause her a moment’s unease. By the time she entered drama school (‘I daresay you’ll get a lot of character parts’) she out-ate and out-drank her companions, Falstaff in jet beads and high-laced boots. She was uniformly tolerated and frequently liked, and being both above and beneath suspicion was permitted friendships with men that might otherwise have been forbidden.

She taught herself to care nothing for the love she believed her body excluded, rejoicing at weddings while hardening herself against any expectation that she might one day wear the little gold seal of possession.

The hardening was not immediate or complete: there’d been, of course, a loved one, though she could not have said what fixed her affection on him, only that in his presence she felt elated and miserable all at once. That he openly enjoyed her company with an uncomplicated friendliness was so much the worse; she was a foil to his humour, which was not always kind, and at times the authority which was the compensation for her failure ever to be girlish was all that kept him in check. And being above and beneath suspicion, they often shared a room, to the amusement of his careless lovers (‘Oh Hester, do see he behaves!’). There was a night when she lay awake on the floor (not admitting that the offered bed was too narrow), and listening to his restless movements heard Hester, come here I need you, but feeling the shame of her body lay in silence. The thing was that he rarely remembered by morning what was done at night half-sleeping, and would not have known whether she’d kept her place on the floor, or come to stoop over him and put herself to his mouth, which is what he would have asked her to do.

She was no success on the stage, and blamed her appearance quite cheerfully, since the truth (she could not act) was far worse. It was easy then to retreat to the house with its dark places and curious yellow light, and welcome friends who’d come for a day and remain, enchanted, for a week. There came a time of enormous popularity, when her height and heaviness became cause for admiration, perfectly suited to her place at the head of the table. Clare and Alex, to whom she’d once laughingly refused to be godmother (‘I can’t help but feel He’s never been entirely on my side…’), were the remnants of that time in which she was half-hostess, half-servant, developing the lasting role which she now had perfected down to the last line and gesture. Their mother, for whom the appearance of children had been as much a surprise as if they’d been left on the doorstep by a stork, relied so much on Hester that by the time they grew out of biddable childhood and into their teens (though it was true that Clare remained hardly more than a biddable child), it was Hester they thought of as home. With what remained of their family abroad or indifferent they orbited about her, departing for periods but never quite escaping her pull, so that to retreat to her when all seemed dark and cheerless was not only natural, but essential. When what she thought of as ‘the Trouble’ came (she could never think of Alex as being ill, preferring instead to conceive of it all as being part of his character, and one for which there was no cure), it was her phone that rang first, and her hands which were needed, so that when harried nurses said ‘Your mother’s here,’ no-one corrected them, because no-one had noticed.

She heard their voices almost at the door – alone and no-one sees me – and put the glass eye back in its place. Wet from her mouth it looked more alive than ever; she turned off the lights and went down the hall to the kitchen, calling them home.