MONDAY

I

On the morning of the sixth day John woke to find a grey haze gathering at the lower edges of the sky as though all the fields east and west were on fire. He stood watching a while at the window, buttoning a shabby blue shirt he’d found, wondering if the haze would rise and gather into storm clouds.

The changing sky made him ill at ease; certain he could not sustain the deceit another day and would soon be leaving, he wanted to memorise every detail of the house, as he’d once memorised poems to be recited in front of a class of boys he never came to know. Alone again in his ordered flat, would he remember what he’d seen and heard? Surely he’d forget the flight of steps and the green door, the blue lights in the blue room where they ate, and the lichen that crept across the terrace stones?

When he made his way downstairs he paused in the cool dim air of the hall. It stretched ahead of him, surely far longer than he’d first thought, and a bunch of keys hung in the lock of the front door. He heard a quiet dry rustle from somewhere very near, and looking up saw a strip of wallpaper peel from the damp plaster behind and droop towards the floor. Stooping to smooth it back against the wall, he saw for the first time the design of tangled leaves and branches, with small birds caught in the dense undergrowth. The pattern was so deep and dark he wouldn’t have been surprised to hear little furtive movements, and he stared for a long time at a goldfinch until he was sure he saw its black eye blink. He smoothed his palms against the paper, hoping it would fasten back against the wall, imagining Eve painted there and hiding in the thicket. He felt again the painful tugging in his stomach, and was so absorbed in imagining her there that when she passed by a moment later he thought he must have summoned her.

She said: ‘I have to talk to you,’ and put out her hand. It hung in the air between them an inch from his sleeve. The thin bluish skin was pulled tight over the strong musician’s bones, and there were blue shadows between the knuckles. Her voice had lost its particular musical tone – it was terse, all seriousness. The hand crossed the last inch between them and touched him lightly on the forearm, and the ends of her fingers were hot.

John met her gaze with difficulty, remembering Walker’s long sly glance at him as he had drawn her closer against his side – had he told her they’d been watched? Was he going to be mocked all over again?

‘Oh?’ said John. ‘What is it?’

‘I need your help.’ It had the rising cadence of a plea; he made a half-step towards her and brought his own hand out from his pocket, then, not knowing what to do with it, instead reached up to smooth his beard. She said, this time leaning on the first word, ‘We need your help.’

‘Of course,’ he said.

‘Of course. Well…’ She glanced over his right shoulder, where down the stone step the kitchen door stood half-open, then brought her eyes up to his with the snap of a key fitting its lock. ‘But no – shall we go for a walk?’ She slipped away down the dim hall, beckoning as she went, and he followed the flash of her bare feet on the carpet.

Outside, as he watched her walk ahead of him on the scorched sharp grass, John felt again the change of air, as though there’d been a disruption overnight. The stillness now wasn’t like the calm before a storm, which would surely be a gathered sort of stillness, like a muscle bunched before a blow: this was complete inertia, and more unsettling than a lightning strike.

She stood waiting on the lawn beyond the blighted elm. Around him the sun picked out every shallow fissure in the dried-out earth, and gave each blade of grass its own black shadow. But as he came near to her, he saw that she stood within a bluish shadow slowly moving. It spread for several feet around her to a blurred edge, and shed a softer light on the fine white lines of her face and hands. She beckoned – ‘Hurry up!’ – then lifted her arms above her head. The sky, empty for thirty-five days, was punctuated by a single cloud moving east, shedding white air at its fringes, as solitary as if it puffed out of the chimney stack. John came and stood beside her in the shadow. ‘You wanted to tell me something?’

‘Yes, I did.’ She drew her black brows together.

‘Is it Alex? Did that woman call again?’

‘No…’ She waved distractedly, as though pushing the stranger out of their dark circle. ‘It’s not that. At least, it’s not quite that. Look – I want you to take this.’ She reached into the pocket of her shorts and took out a small envelope. It was stamped, though the stamp wasn’t franked, and had been opened and closed several times until the pale brown paper was soft. Above the address the name ALEXANDER was written in poorly-made capitals.

‘Another letter,’ said John. The sight of it depressed him, and he took it reluctantly, as if the stupidity and spite inside might be contagious.

She nodded. ‘I found it yesterday. It was under the doormat. You don’t need to look at it’ – John had half pulled out a folded piece of newspaper – ‘it’s more of the same, another drowning – Wales this time, I think. Oh, John – who’d do this? Who’d be so childish?’ She plucked at the fragile skin on her throat and left it mottled and red. ‘I want you to hang on to it. In books they burn them, don’t they? But don’t burn it. Keep it. Maybe we’ll need it sometime. No good my taking it – Alex comes to my room too much, so does Clare; and I don’t want Hester to know. Did she speak to you this morning? About anything important, I mean?’

John shook his head, pushing the letter into his back pocket and feeling it weighing on him.

‘It’s her birthday tomorrow.’

‘I remember. Sixty.’

‘And not for the first time! Anyway – there’s supposed to be a party. You’ll be the only guest – no-one else is invited. There isn’t anyone else to invite.’

For a moment he was tempted by the old polite uncertain formula – ‘Oh, well, that really is kind, but I don’t’ – but it was much too late for all that. Eve, seeing his hesitation almost before he felt it, raised an eyebrow and said: ‘It’s all planned. More than she knows. Clare has made a cake.’ She threw him a glance from under her fringe: you and I will both be kind, however awful it is. It made him complicit, and gave him far more pleasure than it ought to have done. She lifted the curls from the back of her neck in a gesture he’d begun to recognise, arching her back as though testing the strength of her bones. Her shadow reached beyond the circle of shade, and then retreated as she lowered her arms.

‘And Walker wants to show a reel of film he found in the attic: Hester As a Young Woman. You can’t imagine, can you? I think she was an actress for a while. She has the voice. I suppose I’ll play something. Elijah might sing. Everyone has to do something. We did it once at St Jude’s you know…’ She looked anxious for a moment, as though she were afraid she’d been insensitive. John felt a pricking at the back of his neck and flicked at it, expecting to dislodge a sucking gnat, but it was only a leaping nerve.

‘What I need you to do,’ said Eve, stretching her bare foot ahead of her so that her long toes, already dirty, poked out of their circle of shade, ‘is talk to the woman. She wants to call it off – says it wouldn’t be right to celebrate. In the light of events.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s no good. I know what will happen because I know Alex better than her – he’ll spend all day down by the reservoir, feeling miserable and guilty because it will be his fault there’s no music and no-one’s dancing, and no-one ate his sister’s cake. We have to carry on as if everything is all right because if we don’t, it will never be all right again – especially after yesterday. You agree?’ It wasn’t really a query, but he nodded, glad again to be needed. ‘There’s no use at all my speaking to her. You’ll have to do it. You have a beard. It counts for something.’ So she couldn’t keep the mockery from her voice for long – the seriousness briefly left her and her speckled eyes roamed speculatively over his face. Then, as if regretting the change, she became grave again and said, ‘Please do. Please. She’ll listen to you.’

‘Of course I’ll try. But what shall I say to her? Has anyone ever changed her mind about anything at all?’

Eve turned to look at him. In the mild light of their little dark territory on the lawn her eyes brightened. Oh, but they’re not green after all, not quite, he thought. I’ll have to think what colour they are, so I can write it down. ‘Don’t you understand?’ she said, then paused, smoothed a damp curl from her forehead, and said: ‘Look, she doesn’t mean what she says. Nobody ever does! Dear John, you’re so like Clare. Don’t you ever pick things up, and look to see what’s underneath?’ Dear John, she said, on a cadence like the music he heard her playing at night, and without warning there began an insistent pulling in his stomach, so like the painful drawing of the day before that he put his hand to his stomach as though he felt sick. Then, afraid she’d notice, he arrested the movement, and instead hooked his thumb in the warm brass buckle of the stranger’s belt.

‘She doesn’t mean it – oh come on, follow me, it’s getting ahead of us: there must be wind, up there! – it’s just she needs to be heard saying the right things. She must have the correct feelings. D’you see? After all, how could we love her if we thought her selfish? And of course if we’re made to plead with her, and tell her how loved she is, how we can’t believe she can be sixty, how there’s no-one in the world quite like Hester, for she’s a jolly good fellow – well, then she’ll know we love her.’ John nodded, thinking not for the first time how changeable they all were, and how mistaken he’d been on almost every score. He said, ‘If I do this can I be excused from any – from any kind of performance?’ He said the word distastefully, then to show that of course he looked forward to her playing, if to nothing else, he added, ‘Because I’ve no talents at all, you know.’

‘We need a listener: they also serve, who only stand and wait. Now then,’ she touched him lightly again above the elbow, and this time her fingertips were cold. ‘Thank you… I don’t suppose you imagined we’d all need your help like this – but I promised Walker this will be the last thing we ask of you.’

The mention of the other man soured John’s pleasure, and he crossed the lawn slowly, setting his back straight like a soldier doubting orders. He looked once behind to see Eve standing in her diminishing circle of shade. She was waving down the garden towards the valve tower – someone was coming to meet her. Ahead of him, the house in shadowed replica on the lawn tilted towards him, and at the kitchen window Hester stood half-concealed by the lowered blind, her forearms plunging and withdrawing at the sink.

‘More tea?’ she said when he opened the door, rehearsing how best to begin.

‘Yes – thank you.’ He watched her move heavily between the table and the draining board. Something bubbled on the stove and gave off a thick floury scent he couldn’t place. She dried a teacup on her apron, which was not clean.

‘How’s Alex?’ he said, implying that she alone would have the full story. The kettle sang on the hob.

‘Tired, I think.’ She poured the water too rapidly into the pot and splashed her arm without flinching. When she came to the table with two overfull cups, scald marks bloomed on the back of her hand. ‘He didn’t sleep much. He was down at the reservoir most of the night, though I don’t think he went in the water. These days I think he just likes to be there. Hard to say by now whether it’s a curse or a comfort. It’s always the way, don’t you think,’ she said, getting up to stir the pan on the stove, ‘after a while our troubles are the only thing we have that never change and we wouldn’t lose them, even if we could.’

She sat opposite him in a chair that groaned under her. Her fine black eyes were hooded with sleep. ‘She called once more last night. There’s really nothing wrong with the child. He’d come to more harm at school! She didn’t thank us, not quite, but everything’s cleared up. There is – what do they say, on the news? – there’s no case to answer.’

She sucked thoughtfully at her cup, and a thick drop spilled from the rim. ‘Best just to leave him awhile. Best to let him sleep. There’s all the time in the world for talking.’ She began to sort through the piles of letters and magazines and books on the table, impatiently clearing a space, then returned to the stove and left her tea to stain a long-outdated headline (Austrian Excavators Return Empty-handed).

The table was scored with knives and burnt by pots hurriedly set down. John traced the words NOT THIS TIME with his forefinger, and felt a chill pass through the damp high-ceilinged kitchen. Behind Hester, in the cool green-painted alcove where the night before Alex had sat with his knees drawn up under his chin, Elijah was silently reading. Some trick of the light, coming at him from the windows and the harsh strip-lights set in the vaulted ceiling, doubled his shadow in the recess, and his heavy down-turned head was reproduced over each shoulder. Leafing through a paperback, he caught John’s surprise at the title and smiled. ‘Not exactly required reading in the seminaries, eh?’ Hume: On Suicide said the cover, in a pretty typeface unsuited to its subject. ‘You’ve read it?’

‘I went in for that sort of thing,’ said John, gripping his teacup. ‘When I was young.’ The handle was loose, and rasped when it was touched.

‘This sort of thing?’

‘Oh, you know. Thinking.’ Stirring at the stove Hester let out a quiet blow of amusement.

‘Ah.’ The preacher stroked the embossed paper cover. ‘Perhaps I’d’ve done too, if circumstances had been different. I find it hard to disagree with now. Might even have done then, when I lay down in green pastures so to speak.’ He smiled ruefully, and John could not have said whether he regretted having once been content to lie down, or having got up again.

‘I preached on it, you know,’ he said. ‘Very often. Popular sermon subject, nice and clear-cut: ending your own life goes against the will of God, which is that we would all live long enough to serve Him. What is the chief end of man?’ he recited thoughtfully: ‘To glorify God, and enjoy him forever. But this man here’ – he shook the slim white book – ‘says that if one day you went out walking, and saw a rock rolling down towards you, no-one would condemn you for stepping aside and averting your death, and diverting the will of God. Taking your own life in that case – isn’t it just the same, like putting your finger in the path of a raindrop on the window and changing its course? The raindrop will carry on rolling, because gravity tells it to; it’ll just take a different path.’ He shrugged, turning back to his book; and John, relieved of the need to reply, turned back to the kitchen table.

‘Have you seen outside?’ he said, tense with the burden of a duty not yet carried out. Hester bent over the pan on the stove and breathed in its steam. When she lifted her face it was blotched and wet. ‘Looks like the storm’s coming.’

‘Oh?’ she brought the pan to the table and sat opposite him, thoughtfully stirring. I hope that’s not lunch, thought John, looking at the thick translucent liquid with distaste. One final bubble burst weakly on the surface and left a shallow crater. ‘Good. I feel like my bones have been boiled for soup.’ She caught his gaze and laughing said, ‘Oh, this isn’t soup, you know. It’s glue.’ She reached behind to the dresser with its chipped crockery stacked on the shelves and brought out the bald china head and shoulders of a handsome man. His eyes were open and all over his brow and scalp were written the qualities of his character, which must have been a trial to his friends: Blandness, Order, Mirthfulness, Combativeness. The white packed bundle of nesting spiders’ eggs John had seen fastened to the shelf the day before had burst, and several black dots scurried, frightened, over the mouth and nose. Hester blew them away, scooped her middle finger into a pot of Vaseline and smeared a thick layer of jelly over the glazed features. Then she said, ‘Tell me how you are. I thought last night you looked tired – could you take this? Don’t let it stick.’

John took the pan from her and stirred the thick paste with a wooden spoon. ‘I’d walked a long way,’ he said.

‘But you feel rested, besides the walking and – well, the other business.’ She pursed her lips as if she’d tasted something sour. ‘I’ll know I’ve failed, if you don’t feel more peaceful now than when you came. It’s why you’re here, isn’t it? And you know we’ve all been saying how well you look. Just get rid of that dreadful beard and you’d look a boy again!’ She took a yellowing sheet of newspaper from the top of the pile nearest her, and began to tear it into narrow even strips. ‘They were saying so, the girls. Just the other night.’

‘Oh yes, completely rested,’ said John, who’d never felt so drained of blood and good humour. ‘Completely rested. Very peaceful.’ He stirred the glue into glossy whorls, and taking courage from his sudden skill at dissembling said: ‘I must say, I’m especially looking forward to tomorrow.’

Always alert to changes of air, Hester shot him a look from under the thick grey curls on her forehead. ‘Thank you, I’ll take it now.’ He passed her the heavy pan. ‘Tomorrow?’

‘I thought you said – did you say tomorrow was your birthday? Might I get a glass of water?’ He went hurriedly to the sink. And did Eve say so too, he wondered, running the tap to draw cooler water, did she really say I’d look like a boy again – does she think of me when I’m away from her in other rooms? That his mind could wander so easily to her made John ashamed, and he let the flame on the stove come too close to his wrist. In the slot between the windowsill and the edge of the blind the lawn showed bright uninterrupted green: the solitary cloud had burned up.

At the table Hester dipped a torn strip of paper into the glue, and ran it between two tight fingers until a gobbet of paste dropped off. Then she took the wet paper and laid it over the blind white eyes in front of her, pressing it into the sockets with her thumbs.

‘Yes, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.’ She shrugged expansively, and dipped another piece of paper. Some kind of actress, Eve had said, and John saw it now: she didn’t talk so much as deliver lines.

‘But I’m undecided – well, you can advise me, I’m sure! – about what to do. Things aren’t quite right, somehow. You know the feeling, John, that you might get shaken off your feet and fall over?’ Looking not in the least like a woman afraid of falling, she smoothed the wet paper on to the forehead in front of her.

It’s papier-mâché, thought John, like my nephews make. Must they all be so much like children? ‘What is it? What are you making?’

‘A mask. For tomorrow, if we go ahead, like dancers on a sinking ship.’

‘Nearer my God to thee,’ sang Elijah from the recess.

Hester picked up the glazed white head, turning it from side to side so that the shadows beneath its eyelids made it seem to slowly blink. ‘What would he tell me to do, I wonder, about this damn party tomorrow? He looks a wise old thing.’ Laying the head and shoulders down she said, ‘Well, perhaps we should go on with it. It might take his mind off things.’ John looked at the glistening strips of paper covering the blind face from eyes to chin. The mask would be too small to cover Hester’s coarser face, with its heavy pads of skin at the jowls and underneath her thick unplucked eyebrows.

It struck him that all the childish things they found to do – the mask and the packets opened in the garden, the long meals in the close hot dining room, the childish trips to the coast – were just a series of distractions, because they were terrified of what their idle hands might find to do. But all the same it was soothing to sit quietly, taking pleasure in having done as Eve had asked, watching Hester’s freckled hands dip over and over into the pan of glue and hearing behind him the slow turning of pages from where Elijah sat. However fierce the sun outside the kitchen was always cool: rivulets of condensation ran down the pale green walls, and the stone-flagged floor gave off a rising chill. John watched a daddy-long-legs creep across the floor, and instinctively drew in his feet with childish disgust. Out in the corridor a door was furtively opened, and after a pause – The wind through its branches is calling to me, sang Hester, and began to prise open a tin of black paint – footsteps receded upstairs. Perhaps it was Clare, and he was warmed by the thought, and by knowing that her feet would already be dirty, and that she would have in her pocket the cowries she’d found the day before. It might have been Walker, too, gone up to meet Eve in some small hot room he’d never seen; and at the thought John reached out with his foot and slowly pressed the daddy-long-legs into the cold stone. It left far larger and blacker a smear than its thin limbs ought to have done, and John turned back to the table.

The paper mask was almost complete, a thick grey layer of wet pulp through which columns of black type were still visible. Tilting his head, he made out what he could: revealed Martha Day, 61… strengthening in the east… suspended over allegations… then was arrested by a length of paper laid across the bridge of the nose perfectly horizontal so that it demanded to be read. The headline was truncated: FOUR FEARED DROWNE––, and accompanied by a photograph. Only a part of the picture remained, but it showed plainly a swollen river breaking its banks.

A dreadful thought began to gather from the corners of the room. He drew a thin breath in through a mouth dry as sand, and all the while Hester went on singing (With soft whispers laden…), dipping into the pan and carefully pasting on strip after strip until the flooding river was covered. The chill rising from the floor enveloped him and he shivered violently, looking away from the mask to the newspapers piled on the kitchen table. Pages had been neatly cut to remove whole articles or photographs, and in one or two places columns of type remained, so that he could see repeated over and over the same few phrases: drowned… lost at sea… feared lost… ‘Oh, no,’ said John, in a voice of childish dismay that he later regretted, because it committed him to a course of action from which he couldn’t turn back: ‘Oh, no…’

Hester looked up from her handful of soaking paper, and met his shocked gaze. It startled her: she began to scrabble with the pile of newspapers on the table, piling them on a chair out of sight. Her hands shook, and the papers fell on to the floor. She stooped to pick them up, but hurt her back, straightening with a groan and leaning against the table. The name EADWACER scored into the wood showed between her spread fingers, and she tried to cover that, too. If John had at first not quite believed what he saw – that it was she after all who’d been so foolish, and so spiteful, shoving scraps of paper into envelopes like a school bully – everything she did showed her guilt clear as a brand on her forehead.

John shook his head, and felt at first relief – there’d been fault here all along, and deceit, but it was not only his own. Then came a quiet fury as he pictured her sitting at the table at night, while everyone upstairs slept on stomachs full of the food she’d cooked, folding stories of drowning into envelopes she wrote on with her left hand. He imagined her leafing through the book concealed in its cabinet drawer, mouthing the unfamiliar names – Weland, Deor, Widsith – then finally Eadwacer, to be remembered, and written in the dust upstairs when the others were occupied elsewhere with their games.

We ought to be made to wear dunce’s caps, he thought, wiping at the salt sweat that had suddenly gathered in the hair at his temples, to’ve been so completely duped. Hester began wiping her hands on the dark blue dress where it pulled across her heavy thighs. She said, ‘No, no – it’s all right, it’s all right.’ They were the same soothing words she had used to pacify the distraught woman on the beach the day before, and he also stood, poised somewhere between pity and a rage that had begun to settle in a cold knot in his stomach. Then he remembered waiting by the reservoir while Alex prepared to swim out, and how white the young man’s back had been as he’d plunged into the water, and rage won. For a moment he couldn’t speak, and then he said, ‘But it isn’t all right, is it?’ Leaning towards her, he stabbed at the newspapers. ‘What have you done? Do you know what you have done?’

‘You don’t understand…’

‘There at least you’re right – I don’t.’ With effort he took hold of his voice, which had lifted with anger to the opened window, and brought it down almost to a whisper; behind him Elijah had dropped the book, and resting his head against the curved wall was sleeping. ‘I don’t. And I don’t want to.’

‘Sit down, won’t you? Please sit down.’ The deep voice had changed to a hesitant pleading, and her fine dark eyes were enlarged with tears. John suddenly felt tired and rather sick.

He sat down. ‘It’s too late for all that. Haven’t you seen him, out there every night? He says he sees it, whenever he sleeps, everyone carried away by the water…’

Hester fretfully smoothed a strip of newspaper across the high bridge of the porcelain figure’s nose. She looked so like a chastened miserable child that he started to laugh, then remembering the preacher sleeping in his corner quietened, and traced the name cut into the table with an outstretched finger.

‘It’s so stupid, so spiteful,’ he said. ‘So like a child… But no – a child would be ashamed; might do it once, perhaps – but not over and over again…’ He stopped, seeing again the scene on the path through the marshes and Alex’s uncomprehending silence. ‘Yesterday when we came back from the sea, I saw you looking at Alex, and I thought: why does she look satisfied? What is she thinking that she could be smiling after all that’s happened? I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t understand now. Is it that you hate him? But how could you – how could anyone?’

The woman pressed the back of her hand to her forehead, heavily beaded with drops of sweat that stood on the skin without falling. It was so very like a well-rehearsed gesture of distress that John pushed on, determined to make her face things: ‘You should be ashamed of yourself. Aren’t you ashamed?’

‘Oh, I’ve been ashamed all along,’ she said, as though exasperated at such a foolish question. ‘But after a while you get used to the shame and it becomes part of who you are. It was sneaking and stupid, yes, you’re right – it was just like something someone like me would do.’ She put her head in her hands, her coarse grey hair falling forward to show a white neck far more frail and slender than he’d have thought. He was afraid she’d begin to cry, with heaving shoulders and ugly gulps for air, but her tears came silently so that he heard each separate drop landing on the table. He said gently, ‘I suppose it’s quite funny, really. I nearly laughed, when Eve told me about it, and showed me the letters. I thought: it might be some sort of joke. Nobody writes anonymous letters. This isn’t a novel.’

She gulped, and it might have been either misery or amusement. Then he said, ‘But I don’t understand why you did it. It doesn’t make sense. I don’t understand at all.’ She raised her head from her arms. Without the authority and warmth she applied to her face as carefully as powder, she appeared to him very young, and it brought a sudden reversal to his anger.

‘There’s nothing so wrong it can’t be put right,’ he said, remembering how the words would console Christopher like an arm across the shoulder. ‘And this’ll be an end to it all now.’ Hester picked up the phrenologist’s head and surveyed it, biting her bottom lip. ‘You’re very kind,’ she said frankly. ‘Everybody says so.’ John, unwillingly moved by this, coughed and said: ‘When did all this start?’

‘Oh, I can’t remember. I can never remember the times of things. It’s staying here that does it, I think – it might be fifty years ago for all I know. I might be young again. I might be as old as my grandmother.’ Setting the head down again she caught John’s look of censure and said, ‘All right. It started about six months ago, I suppose. Not just this… I’ve made him believe he does things, says things, and can’t remember… I even let him think he might have hurt that child – after all, perhaps he did.’

John shook his head, appalled: ‘You don’t believe it. You don’t, and no-one ever could…’ (Between Alex’s outstretched hands the brown moth flexed its wing.)

‘He was going to leave me!’ Gazing down at the table as though she could make out in the knots and whorls of the wood grain the image of his face she smiled, with the old slow-gathering beam of warmth. ‘He was getting better, every day he was here. Everything I did for him made him go a little further away, and I realised that soon I wouldn’t be hearing his voice in the hall, or coming up from the garden. Then one night I found him sleeping out by the reservoir, because he’d tired himself out from swimming, and I realised that as long he was just a little afraid, he’d need me. There’s no other reason. I’ve got nothing else to give – I can’t charm. I’ve never been admired. I was never that kind. People like me don’t find affection coming our way – we have to scrabble about for leftovers.’

‘I see,’ said John, and thought that he did – of course a childless woman alone in a house that smelt of damp and too much furniture polish would love a boy like Alex. He imagined her calling him ‘son’ with a slip of the tongue, and saying to her friends, ‘I couldn’t have loved him more if he’d been my own flesh and blood. Not if he were my own!’

But when he looked at her again, her head hanging low as she traced a shape on the table in front of her, her smile was secretive and coy as though she were thinking over a private pleasure. She was blushing, too, colour gathering at the base of her throat where the skin hung in a double fold under her chin, and spreading up to her forehead. In a moment of clarity that made the kitchen seem brightly lit he realised that this ageing woman, in a stained dress that always smelt a little of stale sweat, had fallen in love. He said gently, ‘I see.’

She lifted her head then, firing a black look at him between narrowed eyes, as if she realised what he’d seen on her face and was challenging him to say more. ‘I think I understand,’ he said, faltering a little, ‘I know what you’ve felt…’

‘Oh, what would you know,’ she said. ‘How could you possibly know?’ He began to nod – her scorn was familiar, and he knew what she meant: that he’d nothing behind his ribs but books in hard covers, and nothing in his veins but ink. But then she made a furious gesture towards him, and he realised with a burst of mirth that this was not what she meant. She’d mistaken him for the other sort, who needn’t scratch and scrabble for affection, but found it coming their way when they weren’t looking.

He was so thunderstruck by the idea that he slumped against the hard back of the kitchen chair, and listened with his eyes half-closed against the facets of hers.

‘What would you know about it? Do you think I don’t know what they think of me – old and ugly, with a face that could curdle milk! I dress like this’ – she plucked furiously at the old blue dress and he heard the small rending of a seam somewhere – ‘when upstairs in locked cupboards are clothes with flowers sewn on the breast, and I can’t even touch them because my hands are too rough and the fabric is too fine and it catches on my nails…’

The heavy lids of her eyes lowered, and she said, ‘I didn’t do all this because he’s young and I’m old. It’s because I’m ugly, and he’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Every time I look at him I feel myself grow older and uglier, until I’ve dried up into nothing. And all the while he gets brighter and better and further away, and it’s so unfair, because I’m not stupid, I’m not unkind. They say you get the face you deserve, but I tell you John, I never earned my ugliness. All my life I’ve watched those women with faces they’re proud to show and bodies that deserve sunshine and I hate them, because they’re cut from the same cloth as him. And there are days I forget myself, because my eyes are the only ones that don’t see me – I look out and see beauty and think I take part it in then remember I am so different I might as well be a dog in the street, and I have never been desired, and it is beyond me to imagine it… and I’ll never tell him, even though I don’t want anything in return, because what’s really cruel is that no-one for a moment would believe that a woman like me could fall in love like everybody else.’

John would have liked to say that it wasn’t true, but wanted desperately to repay her honesty with his own, and he saw as plainly as if the notebook was on the table between them the words he’d written down: ugly is the only word that will do. They sat in silence for a long while, and then she said eagerly, half-reaching across the table towards him, ‘You can still help me, if you want to. It would be helping him, you see, most of all, and I know you’d do that if you could.’

‘What can I do?’

‘There’s more – only one – oh, God!’ She covered her face with her hands and almost laughing said, ‘I can’t stand to think of it, could I really have been so stupid? There’s one more and you must help me look out for it, get to it before he does, or one of the girls – they like to take him things: they go to his room and I hear them laughing together.’ Her lips compressed with envy and John, not knowing it, mimicked her, remembering how the boy had taken Eve’s hand, and with his thumb wiped dirt from the crease in her palm.

Then Hester stood and smoothed her dress with slow deliberate movements and said with her old authority: ‘It’s only eleven o’clock and the post never makes here till noon. Won’t you help me, John? I can’t stay there by the front door all morning, but they won’t notice you and what you’re doing. You can get to it, can’t you, before he sees it?’ She began to pull drying newspaper from the white head on the table, balling it up in her palms and tossing it deftly into the bin beside the sink.

Then, turning to him again, she said quietly, ‘You won’t understand this, a man like you – I can’t imagine you feeling anything you didn’t choose to feel, just when you chose to feel it – but you see I didn’t know when it started how far I would go.’

John stood up in his borrowed clothes, and accepting the hand she stretched out said, ‘Of course I’ll help. It’s an easy enough task, isn’t it? Even for a man like me.’ She smiled and gathered the newspapers on the table into a sheaf in her arms. ‘Thank you. How glad I am you came!’ she said, and went out with her arms full of torn newspaper.

They won’t notice you, she’d said. John had forgotten Elijah sleeping in his corner, so that when the russet head came suddenly out from the alcove his heart, already restlessly beating, convulsed behind his ribs.

‘Oh, the poor woman, poor woman,’ said the preacher, fanning himself with the white-covered book.

‘I’d like to kick her down a flight of stairs.’

‘No. No, you wouldn’t.’

‘All right. I wouldn’t. But why not poor Alex? Why did you think of her first – didn’t you hear it, don’t you know what she’s done?’ In the vaulted kitchen his voice rang high with indignation.

‘Let’s make tea. It’s her solution to everything, you know.’ Elijah stood at the sink filling the kettle, lifting with one hand the blind over the window to look down the bright garden. ‘Oh, I heard. But poor Hester all the same. It’s maybe not the saddest thing I ever heard, but sad enough.’

‘I don’t want tea. It’s much too hot. You ought to despise her now, much more than I do – she’s been a liar. Isn’t that a sin? Or did you give up the idea of sin when you gave up God?’

The preacher shrugged, and striking a match moved his fingers idly in and out of the flame. He turned and with a mild half-smile said: ‘Certainly she’s a sinner, if you want to think of it like that. But if you’d believed like I always did that the heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, you’re never very surprised when people turn out to be liars and cheats. That’s the trouble with you atheists: always so optimistic. What surprises me isn’t that we sin, but that we manage a single good action in all of our lives.’ The kettle screeched, and turning off the gas he added with a spread of his hands, ‘Well, that’s what I would have said a year ago. Amazing, isn’t it, how easily it still comes? So yes – poor Hester, and I think you pity her too, don’t you, or will soon enough. After all’ – he turned to John with a wry smile – ‘haven’t we all lied?’

John nodded twice – oh, a hit, a very palpable hit – and from somewhere in the garden came the sound of someone weeping.

 

II

We’ve all been outside watching clouds being blown inland. The sky’s been so empty so long they seem terrifying things that might swell until they swallow up the whole world. We didn’t talk much, only watched to see if the rain would come, but in the end we grew bored of waiting and came indoors to sleep, and I can hear doors closing all along the corridor, and the click of lights being switched off.

I’ll go on trying to write them down, though I’m all in the dark, a character at someone else’s mercy. Sometimes I imagine Tolstoy sitting at his desk with his notebooks spread in front of him, drinking tea from a samovar, or vodka if it’s going badly, and I think how easy he had it, always knowing what was coming next. He could tell you what Anna Karenina wore for dinner, all the while seeing steam from the train station puffing out between the final pages.

All morning I watched for that final, foolish letter of Hester’s, sitting at my old post at the foot of the stairs. Every now and then when my legs grew stiff I walked up and down the hallway with my hands in my pockets, looking at the wallpaper, sure I’d see birds moving if only I looked hard enough. Hester told me they wouldn’t notice what I was doing, and she was right, though I didn’t like to hear it said. They’re having a party tomorrow and they’re all occupied with something or other – Clare passed me on her way to the kitchen carrying a box of candles to decorate a birthday cake, and I heard Walker swearing in the dining room, trying to get an old film projector working so we can all see Hester when she was young, although you can’t imagine that she ever was. Elijah went straight up to his room singing something so melancholy I was glad when the low notes gave him a coughing fit and he had to stop, and Eve was playing her scales over and over in the music room at the other end of the hall. I watched for an hour at least, though it’s hard to tell here how time passes, but nothing came through the letterbox. After a while, as I grew restless, I heard footsteps in the music room and Eve put her head round the door.

I hadn’t seen her since she sent me away from her shaded patch on the lawn to talk to Hester. But I must have been thinking about her all along, because when I saw her face I thought how different it was from how I’d remembered it, but at the same time how familiar her mouth seemed to me, never quite closed, as if she is always about to sing or eat…

She looked up and down the hall until she saw me waiting there at the end, and when her eyes met mine I thought, so this is what they mean by a piercing stare. I swear I felt it perforate me, go through my borrowed clothes and my skin, between my ribs and through my liver, heart, spleen, kidneys, whatever’s packed away in there, and pinion me to the wall. It hurt, you know, or I thought it did – I wanted to look away because I could feel my cheeks burning, but I couldn’t because I thought even if I did, all I’d see, in front of me and behind me, would be those same clear eyes hunting me out.

Sometimes I think that if I had my way I’d wake up tomorrow and would never have seen her – would never have heard her name, and never would hear it either. So I don’t understand why it was that when she opened the door and beckoned to me I forgot about the letter and my promise to Hester, and followed her as dumbly as a dog.

The music room feels as though it must be the hottest part of the house – it’s a trick of the red-painted walls and the yellow and orange lilies Hester puts on all the tables. The lilies weren’t fresh when I first saw them on the second day, and by then were giving off a kind of animal scent, sweet but with something like flesh underneath it. When I brushed past, the pollen left stains on my sleeve as dark as dried blood.

I asked her why she wanted me. It never occurred to me that she might have wanted my company – I thought maybe she’d have some impossible task to test my strength or good humour, and ask me to take the piano out into the garden, or paint the room white to cool her down. But she said, ‘It’s nothing. I’m bored of these scales. Why don’t you sit?’ The piano stool is made for duets, I think – it has a tapestry cover worn through in the centre and is just wide enough for two. She was wearing denim shorts that would have looked better on a boy and her legs were sunburned. I said: ‘I’ve got things to do, you know,’ but she looked as though she thought it was very unlikely, began to play a melody, and asked me what I thought of it.

I hated it. It was brutally sad and sweet, and so obviously supposed to be moving that it made me determined to hate it even more. I told her it was lovely, and she smiled so suddenly it made me blink. She said, ‘No, it isn’t. Try this one.’ Without looking at the keys – she plays with her head tilted down and to the right, as though she’s seen something wonderful out of the corner of her eye and can’t quite catch it again – she played something else. Her hands hardly moved at all – there were just sly shifts of her fingers sliding on the keys – and the notes were pressed together in dark low groups I’m sure I felt as well as heard. If there was a rhythm I wasn’t aware of it – I felt displaced, watching her from a great distance, borne up by the notes, suspended above her. When she stopped I felt myself falling through the sudden quiet back into my seat, and realised I’d been bending low over the keyboard, watching her fingers so closely she must have felt my breath on the back of her hands. She laughed and said, ‘Better?’ and I said, ‘Much better,’ and waited for the old blush to start up underneath my beard, but it never came.

In the end her hands got tired from playing. She said, ‘Thank you. I hate to play alone. It’s like talking to yourself all night, and then I realise my arms are aching. If someone’s here I can go on and on without stopping.’ Then I asked her why she went on playing with aching arms, and she said, ‘It’s because everything’s such a muddle, and then I come here, and it never fails me. Look’ – she played a scale so swiftly I couldn’t really see where her fingers were falling – ‘it’s the same, every time, and your ears strain for it, and then the end you long for comes.’ With her thumb she played the final note again, and I knew what she meant.

I said, ‘I can only make sense of things when they’re written down. Sometimes, when I feel confused and in the dark, I think if only I looked hard enough I’d see words in their proper order, and I’d understand everything better.’

She didn’t laugh at me, but nodded and smiled and played that final note again, sinking her thumb on to the key so that the sound rang out around us. She said rather eagerly, ‘Yes, yes – I understand, I do: you have words, and I these eighty-eight keys, but the effect is the same…’ I remember looking at her from the corner of my eye; her face was turned away from me, the skin so white it was almost blue, and drawn taut over the high bones of her cheek. I looked at my hands and I don’t think I’d noticed before how slack my own skin was, and how ugly the black hairs on my wrist.

Then I said, ‘What will you play tomorrow night, for the others?’ and she asked me what I would like her to play and I said anything, I didn’t care. Then I touched her wrist and said, ‘Tell me what you’re doing here.’

She looked at my hand for a long while, then said, ‘It’s a very good piano.’

Since then I’ve wondered what could have suddenly made me incautious and unwise. Maybe it was the fault of the music, because it had been honest and true and meant only for me, and it made me think: Maybe I matter after all. She had started to withdraw from me behind the hard glazing of her green eyes, when just a minute before her head had almost touched my shoulder while she played. I heard myself say harshly, ‘None of you ever tell the truth, do you? Tell me what you’re doing here. You could practise anywhere, someone like you – why won’t you tell me?’

‘Why do you need to know?’

‘I wouldn’t ask if you all kept me at arm’s length where a stranger should be, but you don’t. You show me pieces of yourselves when you want to and never the rest. Is it because of Walker? What’s his real name, anyway? Walker! Does he think he’s in a film?’

‘You’re not a stranger now.’ She smiled at me, and it was the sort of kindly smile I imagine she might have given an impertinent child. I’d’ve preferred her to get up then and leave me there, but instead she made that gesture of lifting the curls from the back of her neck, and said, ‘No-one ever uses his first name. It’s so unlike him. It doesn’t fit.’

‘Why are you smiling? You hate each other.’

‘Oh.’ She looked hurt. ‘How could you think that?’

She slowly played a chord that I knew, because she’d taught me, was in a major key.

‘I saw you with him yesterday.’

‘I know. Walker calls you Peeping John.’ This made me miserable with anger and humiliation. I looked down at the clean sunburned lines of her legs and the narrow hips on the piano stool next to me. She said, with a flat detached voice as though she was speaking about someone she didn’t much care for, ‘It was a long time ago now and not worth speaking about. Of course at the time I thought it was’ – she flicked idly at the piano keys – ‘I wish we could come up with another word: this one’s got all worn out! – I thought it was love. But it broke everything up and spoilt things I thought would never be spoilt and in the end I was left on my own.

‘I disappointed everyone. They tell you, don’t they, that there’s no right and wrong these days. We’ve all grown up, put that sort of thing behind us a hundred years ago. But there’ll always be some things they won’t let you get away with and even the words for them don’t change. Infidelity, adultery…’ She shrugged, and the words with their hard consonants were like the snicking of scissors through paper. I remember hearing then a sharp metallic sound out in the hall that might have been the rattling of the letterbox or something dropped in the kitchen doorway and I thought: I ought to go, I’ve asked too much, I don’t want to hear any more – but my hand was still on her white wrist and it looked suddenly very frail and thin.

I said, ‘But Hester didn’t leave you alone, or Clare,’ and she said of course she hadn’t.

‘Don’t you know her at all? She’s a child, a young child, she never knew or saw what everyone else did.’ Then she looked across at me, and although I don’t think she meant it unkindly I thought it was mostly contempt that made her eyes glint under their white lids. ‘You’re not so different from her, are you, John? You watch and watch but you don’t understand any more than she does and you’ve had twenty years longer of living.’ Then she said, ‘I want you to understand because I don’t want you to think badly of me, and because you asked.’ Then she said, frowning and pausing between her words, examining them before they got to me: ‘If what happened back then – if it was all for nothing, just because I was foolish in the same banal uninteresting ways we always are, then it was all just a waste… but if something comes out of it, if I can love him now or make him love me, then it won’t have been a waste after all – it won’t have been foolish and destructive but something good.’ She laughed and said, ‘Elijah would probably tell me I’m trying to redeem my soul.’

I said, ‘He was married then – and is he still? Where is she… why doesn’t she come for him? Don’t you care about her, or wonder how bad the pain was when she knew what you had done?’

She smiled at that, and said, ‘I never think about her. I don’t even know her name. What has she got to do with any of it? Could I change what I felt for the sake of someone who I’ll never meet?’

I could see the sense and the cruelty in it, and it troubled me – I wanted to think only well of her. And all the while the heat made my head ache, and I kept hearing as clearly as if it were just outside the open window the two of them laughing at me as I hurried away from them across the lawn. So without much truth and with no kindness at all I said, ‘You must know he doesn’t love you. He’s laughing at you all the time and you can’t see it. It’s humiliating for you, following someone, being here because of them, I’m ashamed for you. And besides he isn’t anything, he’s just a man who’s getting old with grey in his hair. He knows nothing, he’s not kind to you, I’ve never even seen him make you smile…’

She said vaguely, ‘You’re hurting me’, and when I looked at my hand on the piano stool, I saw I’d been gripping her arm all along and had left an imprint of my thumb below the sharp knuckle of her wrist. Though I was hurting her she had not pulled away, but instead drew closer: she almost leaned on me – I could feel her shoulder on mine, and when I looked up her face was tilted so that when a tear edged from beneath her eyelid it ran back into the black curl behind her ear. When she spoke again her voice was low, murmurous, almost a monotone, as though she were an instrument being played and a single note, low and soft, was drawn out again and again. She said, ‘I’m afraid of not being wanted – I would rather it be him than no-one.’

When she had finished speaking she didn’t quite close her mouth, but left her lower lip loose, so that I could see where the flesh inside became smooth and bright with moisture. The pressure of her shoulder on mine grew more insistent – I thought perhaps she was reeling in the heat and might faint; then I looked again at the black lashes lying on her cheek and the half-open mouth and knew that I was being mocked all over again. It was just like her, that pretence at a kiss, or the beginning of it – I imagined dipping my head to hers and feeling laughter on her breath, and imagined her laughing later with Walker as they walked on the dark lawn sharing one of their cigarettes. I pushed her away and without looking back went out on to the terrace where the stones burned the soles of my feet…

There’s someone outside my door!

 

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.