by Sarah Perry
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 Heste
r 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.
FRIDAY
All the day that followed John remembered the quiet splash of the young man striking the water, the constant shadow on his bare arm and the scent of algae drying on the rocks. The hour spent by the reservoir became part of the fabric of the house and its history; it had the effect of weighting him there. The next morning he’d have been startled and offended if anyone had stopped him at the door to his room and said, ‘But what on earth are you doing here?’
At breakfast Alex said nothing to his sister, nor to Hester as she stood frying eggs in spitting oil and stacking them on a tin plate. But passing John a mug of dark brown tea, he’d given him first a wink, and then a slow-growing smile of such frank happiness that Eve paused on the threshold and said, ‘Well now. And what are you boys planning?’
‘We’re going swimming today,’ said Clare. She had plaited her hair into two untidy ropes that fell over her shoulders. The effect should have been childlike, but it bared h
er unflawed face and pale mouth, and she looked more like a tomb-carving than ever. The cat dragged a fried egg over to where she sat, and crouched between her outstretched arms lapping at the yolk. ‘Can we? You said today we could go swimming.’
‘My darling, we’ve said so every morning since the end of spring.’ Eve, wearing a shirt that smelt a little of Walker’s cigarettes, sat beside John and drew up her legs. The long fine bones of her shins gleamed in the light.
‘No – everybody’s going, they said they would. Walker said so, and John.’
‘John?’ Eve drew out his name across several low notes, and her eyes glittered as she surveyed him through steam rising from the cup she cradled loosely between her palms. He shifted in his seat, feeling the insistent rasp of the other man’s jeans. They were thinning and frayed, and in several places burnt with cigarettes, and he’d found in its pockets a long steel screw which he lined up, with the others, on the windowsill. He’d chosen a white shirt that morning, but its sleeves were too short and he’d folded them neatly back towards the elbow. He found the sight of his own bare arm peculiarly unsettling, noticing for the first time how the dark hairs clustered at the bones of his wrists. The shirt was missing its top button, and John felt the woman’s gaze pass, amused, over his bare throat. ‘Our John, out swimming?’ The black arch of her eyebrow plainly doubted it; then she lost her brief interest in him and wandered out to the garden, leaving John once again feeling that she found him foolish.