After the Rain Read Online Free Page B

bannisters and treads, and so supplement our stock of wood, and I saw, floating on the surface of the waterhalf-way up the stairs, one of the heat-resistant plastic cans in which food was preserved. It had been opened, and was empty.
    “I think there’s some food here if we can find the kitchen,” I said.
    “But it’s under water.”
    “I’d have to dive.”
    Outside, grey daylight persisted; it would not be dark for several hours. But the water was dark. We looked through the hole we had made in the floorboards, and watched damp plaster fall away from the ceiling of what we had settled to be the kitchen. Floating on the surface of the water only about a foot below us was a reassuring litter of kitchen stuff—a carton of cereal, egg-shells and stray pieces of vegetable matter. “Where will the larder be?” I said.
    “If you could find a cupboard.”
    I let myself down into the water, and swam about. It was very cold. Soon my knee hit against the top of a cupboard. I expelled the air from my lungs, and sank, groping in the dark water for the handle of the cupboard door. As I found it, and pulled, the cupboard itself leaned towards me. I felt the weight of it bearing me down, and I realized that I should die down there, ridiculously trapped beneath a kitchen cupboard on the floor, dead, drowndead, while Wendy coughed in the bedroom. I pushed violently at the cupboard, which moved a little to one side and continued to fall, and the kick of my legs carried me to the surface again.
    “What happened?”
    “The cupboard fell on me.”
    “Are you hurt?”
    “No. Frightened.”
    It was true. I felt a very great reluctance to submerge again and try to find the cupboard on the floor. When I did so, it had fallen with the door downwards. I surfaced, and swam round the sides of the kitchen, looking for something that might be the entrance to a larder. When I found it, I was already chilled. The water reached to the larder ceiling, and I dived into a black cold box, tight-packed, it seemed, with that hostile choking water. I could see nothing. All my movements were slowed down, and when my outstretched arms touched some sort of a can, I clutched it gladly, and turned to bear it back to the surface.
    I couldn’t find the door; I had lost direction. The can fell out of my hand as I beat in slow motion against the larder wall. My head hit the ceiling, but there was no air there; the larder was filled with water. Something in my chest was trying to get out, trying to burst the bonds of my body, and dissipate itself in the blackness. In my fear and pain, I almost lost consciousness. I do not know how, in the end, I found the larder door and the hole in the kitchen ceiling and Wendy’s hands, which reached down to help me, and to which I clung, sobbing, until I had the strength to pull myself up.
    I did not dive again that day, but slept by the fire, while Wendy watched, and kept it alight. In the morning, I went back into the larder, diving again and again to bring up cans of metal polish, a rusty tin that hadcontained salt, pots of spoiled jam, and seventeen of the plastic cans of vegetables.
    *
    Although I don’t suppose Bob Humphries had considered the possibility—or if he had done so, he must have put all his strength of will to dismissing it—the nature of our situation might have made it likely that Wendy and I should become lovers. Reading back over what I have just written, and remembering how, after she had pulled me from the water, Wendy dried me with a sheet, wrapped me in the fire-warmed smokey bedding, and lay beside me until she was sure I was tranquil again and on the way to sleep, I myself find it curious that we did not. Yet in fact the relationship that grew between us would have made sex into a kind of incest. We were too close together in the dinghy; we had no privacy, emotional or physical. And, although it was difficult and embarrassing at first to discard the habitual bodily reticences, we very soon