After Me Comes the Flood Read Online Free Page A

shoulders, raised my voice, and prepared to explain their mistake. But from all sides hands appeared, passing me a plate piled with roast lamb and sliced tomatoes, and more wine, and torn pieces of bread that burnt my fingers, and the old stammer kept me quiet. Clare, the girl who’d brought me in, kept smiling as if I were a particular friend of hers that no-one had believed would come, and I couldn’t think how to get out of it without making her look foolish. I felt as if I’d tried to cross a small stream, sure I’d reach the bank in a stride or two, and suddenly found myself in a strong current, borne out to sea.
    Sometimes they spoke to me, saying, ‘Isn’t it better now, without the sun, and wouldn’t you be glad if it never rose again?’ or ‘The salt, John, would you mind?’, and then seemed to forget I was there. I remember it all in fragments: the black-haired young woman taking her companion’s cigarette and drawing so deeply her eyes ran, but refusing to cough; amber-haired Clare leaning her head on Hester’s shoulder and instantly sleeping; the tap-tap-tap of the older man’s fingers on the chair. Then I began to notice a sort of watchfulness, as though they were waiting for something to happen. Now and then the older woman looked up to the glass doors and then down at her plate with a frown. Once she saw me catch her out in an anxious glance and I believe she looked for a fraction of a second guilty, before passing me meat that had grown cold.
    A little later, as I was beginning to think with relief that I was dreaming, somebody else came in. He was young, no more than twenty-five, and I guessed from the colour of his hair and eyes that he was Clare’s brother. His clothes were wet, and he’d grazed the knuckles of his left hand. He looked weary but jubilant and said, ‘You know, I think it might be all right, after all… Maybe I’ve been wrong all this time and everything’s safe and sound…’ He stooped over his sister, his bright head touching hers, took her plate and began to finish off her meal, talking between mouthfuls about a water level somewhere and house martins making their nests. Then the girl whispered into his ear, and gulping down a piece of bread he wiped his hand on his shirt and thrust it towards me. ‘Oh – didn’t see you there – turned up all right, then? I hope it’s not too much for you, shut up in here with us all…’ He gestured around the table and they all laughed, affectionately but also too loudly, as though they were indulging a child who’d spoken out of turn. I said that no, of course it wasn’t too much, and wondered why it was they all seemed to be straining towards him across the table, sometimes reaching out to touch him on the shoulder, or brush dust from his sleeve. Once the older woman came to crouch by his side, steadying herself on the table’s edge and saying: ‘What were you up to last night? I heard banging downstairs as though you were breaking up the furniture – I almost called the police!’ He looked up, baffled, as though she must have been talking to someone else, but she shrugged and squeezed his shoulder and said, ‘Ah well – no harm done.’ For a few moments he was silent and troubled; then he shook his head violently as though to clear it and asked, smiling, if there was more to eat.
    So it went on, I don’t know for how much longer, and when the wine was gone they drifted out into the garden. Only the older man stayed, sometimes turning with an anxious look towards the glass doors to the terrace where the young man stood with his arm around his sister’s shoulders.
    I ought to have roused myself then, and found courage or reason or whatever it was I’d been missing all day. But the drink made me slow and foolish, and I might have stayed all night at the threshold watching and listening, if a phone had not begun to ring just the other side of the door. Elijah seemed not to hear it, nor the others in the garden; it