After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry Read Free Book Online

bed the daisies had shed their flowers; he collected them from the floor, and arranged them in a circle on the table, looping the jug that had held them (the amber-haired girl would like that, he thought – Clare, had that been her name? – and for a moment regretted he’d never thanked her for her misplaced kindness). Then he lifted the lid of the child’s desk and took the notebook from where he’d hidden it underneath a pile of yellowed newspapers, from some of which pictures and columns had been cut. He flicked through the pages, running his finger with surprise over the lines of neat blue handwriting – had he written all that, by the yellow light above the tower? He supposed he must have done, and saw again the black-haired woman turning to face him, and felt the sensation of cold wine seeping through his shirt.
    He turned to look once more behind him, then slipping the notebook into his pocket opened the door.
    Barring his way as certainly as any gate, Clare stood in the dark hall, turning away from him towards the head of the staircase where sunlight flew its banners on the wall. She wore a man’s white shirt which reached almost to her knees, and stood tiptoe on dirty bare feet as if ready to run at a moment’s notice. She’d been playing with bindweed and twisted a few stems around her neck, and John suspected it had been done for an effect he refused to feel. When she heard the door open she turned and the weeds turned with her, regarding him with white eyes open. ‘ John .’ She whispered, but as a child might, so that it carried along the hall and would have woken anyone still sleeping; and what occurred to him first was that Elijah had sent for him.
    ‘John – Eve says we need you and will you come now please.’ She shifted from foot to foot. ‘She says she needs you or needs someone and you’ll do.’ When there was no immediate sign of obedience the girl tugged crossly at the bindweed as if someone else had put it there. ‘There isn’t anyone else, is there? They’ve gone out for a while, and she said you’ll do, and that you’d know.’
    The nausea which had begun to recede struck him again so forcibly that he leant against the doorframe for a moment, and pressed his forehead to the cool white-painted wood. What now , he thought, helpless against his sickness and the plea that creased her face with anxiety: what ought he to know – who was that other John, who ought to be standing where he stood now? And then, alongside the confusion, he felt a needling of resentment: oh, he would do , then, ever the last resort. He imagined her saying it, that black-haired laddish girl downstairs in whose eyes and voice he thought he’d detected mockery the night before, and in the end it was resentment and not the plea for help that roused him. Squaring his shoulders, and breathing hard to suppress the gorge rising sourly in his throat, he said: ‘Where shall I go then? What shall I do?’
    She grinned in relief or surprise, and by way of answer dashed away from him and swung herself down the first step or two, calling over her shoulder, ‘Well, this way then, and hurry’, as if it had been the beginning of a game. He moved after her, then remembering that he still held the notebook hastily returned it to the drawer in the child’s desk, regretting that after all he could not take it with him.
    When they reached the foot of the stairs the girl paused with her hand on the banister and said, ‘I’m going to go now. You’ll know what to do.’ Then she ran out into the garden through the narrow door at the furthest end of the hall. It hung open awhile on tired hinges, showing a stretch of parched lawn and a glimpse of the high mossy wall he’d first seen from the road. John could not think what it was he ought to be doing, or why she’d left him there, and might have followed her had he not heard, from deep in the shadow cast by the front door, a kind of low cry. It was not quite of fear but of