After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry Page B

pillow. Eve and Walker stood in the doorway, Eve a little behind the older man as though he’d pushed himself forward to shield her. The fine bones of her face were pale as paper underneath her cap of black hair, and her head was tilted back like a child trying to be brave. It was this, and not Clare crying beside him, that made John stand and say, ‘Do you think we should stay here? Shouldn’t we go in?’
    She shook her head, and sniffed at her tears. ‘I don’t think so. They always make her go away. Won’t you stay with me here until she goes?’
    ‘But don’t you think it must be her, who writes those letters? Perhaps she came to put another through the door, and they caught her at it, and there was a scene…’ The idea satisfied him, as it would if he’d been sitting in his armchair at the shop, idly turning the pages of a book; but all the same there was a nervous twisting of his stomach.
    ‘I don’t know. Maybe – but stay here, please. I don’t like the shouting, it scares me.’
    ‘Of course I will.’ Her face, streaked with tears and dust, was suddenly very like his brother’s had been when he’d come to John with the terrible, brief distress of childhood. He patted her shoulder twice, and said, ‘Well then, let’s not think about her. Why don’t you tell me about your cat? How old is he?’
    ‘I don’t know.’ She wiped her nose on her bare arm. ‘I think he must be very old, look – he has white hairs on his nose.’ The cat shot John a baleful stare, and began to worry at its torn ear. ‘Is it true that all ginger cats are boys?’
    ‘Toms, yes. They call them toms, I think – look, is she going?’ The little group in the kitchen was slowly dispersing, and he thought he heard the front door close. A moment later the dog’s bark receded into the distance, and after a long silence in which they could make out the footsteps of Alex pacing the embankment wall behind them, Eve began to play the piano. The cat, sensing the crisis had passed, aimed a petulant scratch at Clare and idled back towards the house, pausing now and then to pat at something in the grass.
    Clare began to cry again, this time quietly and with a steady fixed look of sadness. She seemed to John less like a child then than she’d ever been, and it made him anxious and unsure of himself and his methods; he took his arm from her shoulder and said, ‘Let’s bring your brother in, shall we? Look, here he comes – don’t let him see you cry.’ She reached up her arms, and he pulled her to her feet. ‘That’s right, everything’s all right,’ he said, patting his pockets for the handkerchief that was always there, forgetting he wore another man’s clothes. ‘It’s just us now, there’s no-one else here.’

SATURDAY
    I
    With the bright sea at his feet and at his back a black rock, John sat listening on the shore:
    ‘… warm in the water like a bath, it’s so shallow – Hester do go in…’
    ‘Look what’s this one then, all spotty like an egg; what is it Eve, did you see one like it before?’
    ‘… a cowrie, I think – and if I don’t play at all today I won’t be able to do any at all tomorrow – my fingers will hurt and be stiff…’
    ‘I shall not go in, however warm, however shallow. A cowrie, yes – how many have you there? They’re fortune-teller’s shells, if you know how to use them.’
    ‘… three… four… five… once I caught a shell alive… Walker give me that one there, there, there by your foot…’
    ‘John asleep again, I see. What have you done with my cigarettes?’
    ‘… a necklace of them like this, maybe a starfish in the middle…’
    ‘A whole day without music. What a waste.’
    ‘Where else but where you put them – shall we eat? I’m hungry and the bread is still warm… sing then Eve, if you must, there was singing before anything else… No, don’t wake him, don’t be unkind!’
    ‘… don’t feel like singing, my head aches. Oh, blow it the other