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

seen in the house before. It ran the length of the east wing so that all along the outer wall eight windows faced south to the grey-paved terrace, then to the parched lawn and the dark pines beyond. The light that came in ought to have blazed in every corner, but instead was absorbed by red-papered walls and Turkish carpets scattered unevenly across the wooden floor. The ceiling seemed lower than in the other rooms, and had been recently painted with illogical pairings of spring flowers and roses, and all around the light fittings, from which hung broken chandeliers trailing chipped strings of glass drops, were painted yellow-beaked blackbirds caught in a briar thicket. The furniture was set around the piano, which was by far the largest John had ever seen, and bore no resemblance to the comfortably scuffed wooden instrument his brother’s children played. It seemed newly made, lacquered to so black and lucid a shine that he saw in its raised lid a perfect dark reflection of himself at midnight. The keys were not ebony and bone but plastic, with a fine strip of scarlet felt running behind them. The harsh colours in the dim and shabby room reminded John of false teeth bared in a grin. Scattered all around the piano were piles of sheet music, some of it torn and foxed with illuminated title pages, others on clean white paper. Elsewhere the furniture was desperately shabby: a velvet-upholstered couch was balding in the seat, and the pair of tables set between the windows looked as if they had rickets. All around the room, stuffed into vases and jugs and attracting a number of voluble bees, were stems of untidy long-petalled red and yellow flowers, their hard stamens ejecting puffs of dark pollen. It looked as if someone had set a dozen small fires, and they smelt revoltingly sweet.
    ‘Asphodel, she calls them,’ said Eve drily, closing the piano lid. ‘Lilies, to you and me.’
    Alex laid his armful of packages in a neat row on the seat of a couch. He looked up at the girl, who returned his gaze with a searching, anxious look of her own which swiftly became a smile. ‘I’m done, I think, for now – where’s Walker? Have you seen him?’ Standing half-hidden in the curtain’s musty folds John saw Alex lift her hand and examine it, turning it over and putting his thumb in her palm. ‘Don’t you ever wash, Evie?’ he said gently. ‘Look at all this, under your nails.’ He let her hand drop, and then he said: ‘I haven’t seen him this morning. He’s probably up with Elijah, leading him astray. Yesterday he was teaching him to gamble, you know…’ The woman laughed, then pushed her curls back from her forehead, waved distractedly at them both, and went out into the hall.
    The young man watched her go, scratching at a raised mosquito bite on his arm; then he shook his head and, seeing John, started as if he’d forgotten he was there. ‘I can’t stand this much longer,’ he said. ‘Still, we’ll all be out of it, come Saturday.’
    John glanced behind him out of the window, expecting to see clouds pulling at the sun, but there was only the same empty blue canopy. ‘Oh?’
    ‘Didn’t they tell you? We’re getting out of here, going to the sea. Won’t you come too?’
    ‘Of course,’ said John. How easy it would be to leave them then, with none of those inept excuses he’d dreamed up in the night. He imagined pushing open the door to his flat, and seeing inside the rush mat with three pairs of shoes neatly paired alongside, and the bookshelves as ordered as those in the shop. He awaited relief and longing for home, but neither came.
    ‘It can get a bit closed-in here sometimes,’ said the younger man suddenly, sitting up and grasping the arms of the chair: ‘Nice to have another face – another pair of eyes, if you see what I mean.’ He looked at John with such warmth and gratitude that he flushed, and stooped to pick uselessly at a shoelace. Then Alex said, worrying at a graze on the back of his