Elaine

She stands with her back to the room, leaning against the edge of the draining board as she rubs a damp towel over the dishes, still warm and rimmed with suds. The dog, Pippin, looks up from his basket in the corner, holds the pose for a moment, and then settles back into the long torpor of mid-afternoon. Outside, the river lies slack as soup beyond the fences and the dustbins and the tarmac that separate it from the neat, drab row of flats where she has lived for thirteen years come December.

She is a lady just beyond middle age; thoroughly unremarkable. Today, she has on a pink jumper and beige trousers that brush the tops of her small feet in their wool-lined slippers. One hand reaches up to adjust her hair as the other deals carefully with the cutlery as she slides each piece into the allotted drawer. A row of potted plants sit upon the kitchen windowsill, cheerful begonias, a tub of basil for cooking.  She watches from the window. She looks at the clock; it is nearly half-past four. She is waiting.

It had been a cold Sunday afternoon when she had first seen him. It was around four o’clock and the light was already draining from the dull sky when she buttoned herself into her coat and briskly clipped on Pippin’s lead The dog had not wanted to leave the placid warmth of the kitchen with its humming array of white goods and he stood rooted in stolid and silent protest before she tugged him out of the door and across the cul-de-sac to where the back of the houses joined the towpath. They took the usual route up towards the iron bridge and the new housing development that crouched shamefaced on the fringes of established, worn-in streets with their window boxes and comfy front gardens, stopping before they reached the fence that separated the last tentative fingers of the town from the flat, empty marshes beyond.

As always, Pippin trotted busily a few paces behind, sniffing primly at the corners of brick walls and black-and-white street signs, fumbling with tail-wagging eagerness at a rustling clump of long grass. The sagging bellies of the clouds drifted low over the bare trees on the other side of the river.  As she looked up a bank of swans came in, low and stark white against the dirty sky. Turning against a sudden gust of air, they made their skidding, stuttering landing on the water, rousing a flurry of barks from the dog. The swans spaced their origami shapes across the water and then began to drift silently downstream, imperious, masts of necks to the wind. Elaine watched them as they turned the bend, catching the stream at its centre. Then, calling to the dog, she turned for home. She was relieved to be heading back. The cold - that creeping freeze so peculiar to East Anglia that seeps up through the soil and takes root in the bone was spreading through her, filament by filament. Her fingers were red as she grasped the leash and moved with a beetlish scurry along the towpath.

The river is a fast one, narrow and angular, shallow for the most part but with unsuspecting channels where the force of the stream carves its way, made visible only by a slight tautening where the muscles of the water clench under the surface.

Yellow leaves twirled giddy on the skin; drab ducks tutted from sparse bunches of reeds at the river’s edge.  The banks were lined with barges, moored up by the old bridge and opening out by the jetty where a large and nondescript pub, barricaded all about with picnic benches, stood amid solitary broad-eaved houses draped in funeral wreaths of willow.

Further along the path were the small balconied boathouses of the colleges with their bright little insignias painted over the big rolling doors. Elaine noted the rowers as they waited for their outings, bundled up against the cold in leggings and coloured jackets and their cheeks chafed red in the raw wind that ruffled the dropping curtains of the bankside trees. There were groups of them clustered down by the launches, tall clean-faced girls with muscular thighs, square-shouldered boys jogging on the spot and the coach on his bicycle and the megaphone tucked under his arm. The cox stood, arms folded, a foot tucked through the metal rigger of the long eight-shell to stop the current from tugging it away as the rowers fetched their oars. They pulled them off the racks at the side of the boathouse and laid them, painted blades uppermost, by the river’s edge while they stretched and jumped and swigged from bottles of water.

Elaine wasn’t much interested in the rowing, though she always tuned into the boat race, every year - feet up, cup of tea in hand. She felt it her civic duty, in the same way that she tuned in to the carols from Kings each and every Christmas Eve despite having no religious sentiment beyond a vague, Sunday-schoolish adhesion to the principles of good clean fingernails and being pleasant to people in supermarkets. Her God came flavoured with the tang of orange squash and paper-doilied biscuits. She liked the carols, though, the trembling face of the soloist almost beheaded by his ruff like John the Baptist presented to the awaiting audience, and the absolute hush of indrawn breath before the first note flew clear as glass into the candlelit air. It was nice, the tradition of it. Her father had always made sure to watch the boat race too, studying the past form, staunch in his Fenland loyalties.

Today, as she passed the rowers she noticed them only to remark internally that they were going to give themselves colds going out onto the water like that. Pippin trotted ahead, interest piqued by some invisible beast in the turfs and ruts of grass, and she followed.

Soon, they were back, turning the plastic handle of the door and stepping back into the bulb-lit warmth of the kitchen. Good. Pippin skittered happily across the floor and began nosing into his bowl. Elaine removed her outdoor boots, and went over to the sink to wash her hands before cutting up the vegetables for dinner. She laid freshly-scrubbed potatoes and carrots out on a clean piece of newspaper and began to peel them, gathering a faint satisfaction from the scraping away of the roughened, cracked skins to the clean, crunching wet flesh beneath.

That was when the boy had first appeared. He was on the other side of the slatted fence that separated Elaine’s square of garden from the tarmac where the other residents parked. He was pushing a bicycle, hurriedly; his gaze scouting this way and that, searching out something. His hair was long curls, dark brown threaded with copper where the sun had burned flashes of red into it. His olive skin was sallow in the late autumn light. He approached the fence and began to chain up his bike, winding a lock through the gap between the boards and clipping it into place. Irritation surged through the woman in the kitchen. She put down the peeler and tapped on the window angrily but he did not hear. He was preoccupied with the fiddling lock. He stood up, adjusted his earphones, and set off at a lope in the direction of the boathouses.

Oh now, said Elaine, really.

It wasn’t on, she thought. Inconsiderate. She wasn’t one to make a fuss but it was private property and they were always leaving their bikes all over everywhere, the students. She remembered her daily bus journey to work, the sharp-breathed ire of the bus drivers as they ducked and whizzed past on their bikes, coming within a hair’s breadth of disaster, it seemed. And there were so many of them, flotillas of bicycles by the station, ranks and shoals of them taking up space on the pavement, being pushed carelessly side-by-side down narrow streets by gossiping young girls. And now this, chained to her own fence and no doubt scratching it. She had been going to weatherproof it over the summer but the time had got away from her. In the corner, Pippin yawned.

She might say something, she thought, when he came back. Tell him to do what everyone else did and find a proper space for it. In the end, though, there was dinner to make, and a good property program on the telly and she settled down on the sofa. It hadn’t been a bad sort of day.

The next day, though, he came again. He was less furtive this time as he slipped the springy lock through the slats of her fence and clicked it into place. She was upstairs this time changing the sheets and saw him from above as he came along behind the thin row of trees. She ran downstairs - her slippers skidding a little on the thin stair carpet - but by the time she had reached the back door he was already gone. She opened the door and stepped out into the bright chill. The dog half-raised his head, expectant, but she was too distracted to notice. She opened the latch of the fence and walked through to the other side. There it was, the boy’s bike, red and splashed all over with encrusted mud. There was a scuffed numbered sticker on the side. The handlebars scraped carelessly against the bare wood. It didn’t seem to have done any damage, thought Elaine - not yet, at any rate. She was irritated nonetheless at the thoughtlessness with which the boy had just dumped his bike outside her house. It was her house. He could hardly have failed to notice that it was there. How easily, she thought, people rode roughshod over one another these days. Only last week she had been walking through town and a couple had pushed past her knocking her bag from her shoulder. The woman half-turned to look at her but did not apologise; they swept on, holding hands as they strode like barges butting broad-shouldered up the street. She stared after, righteously indignant, but no-one caught her eye. This was normal, she supposed. People didn’t think, or they didn’t care. And now, there was this bike.

She looked it over carefully. She could leave a note, she thought, polite but firm; tuck it in between the spokes. But then again, that might seem a bit unfriendly. Small-minded. Her husband Arthur had always expressed a marked disdain for petty behaviour. He had been a short man, and voluble. A man with Opinions, thumped out with the base of a pint glass on the bar of the Bookbinder’s Arms, red-faced, with his horse’s laugh and his pot belly pressing against his shirts. I can’t stand stinginess, he said. And do you know it’s a kind of stinginess of the mind, it is, being petty. A neighbour, asking for the return of a loaned item. Elaine herself, for wondering aloud why it was that it was her that always paid for the food shopping. Petty it was, not to share. To give a bit. Live and let live, eh? Or else, if you were the kind of person that counted things like that to be important, then what were you? A skinflint. And he would raise his eyebrows, tapping the side of his head with a smirk. Elaine’s family – her parents had owned a butcher’s shop in Hitchin -  were included in this sweep. Parochial, he called them. Hicks. Didn’t understand the modern world and were too stupid to try. Your mother, he would say, with a short laugh of contempt. Remember that year we tried to have chicken instead of turkey for Christmas? You’d have thought we’d invited a bloody stripper to serve up, the way she looked at it. Always the first in the pub to buy a round, loudly, for other people’s wives and friends, he had left Elaine one drab March weekend for a woman he had met at his job. He had disappeared for two days before he came to tell her. He left the car running outside. That had been seventeen years ago. Three years ago, he had died of an aneurysm. A cousin in Chichester had sent a card. She had seen the notice in the papers. So that was where he had ended up, she supposed.

She kept her wedding dress hanging in the empty half of the fitted wardrobe in her bedroom in a sheath of drycleaner’s plastic. The long lace hem hovered just above the tops of her walking boots, an old, mothballed ghost of no use or ornament that she couldn’t quite bring herself to throw away.

She decided that she wouldn’t leave a note, not yet. If she saw him she would ask politely that he not leave his bike just there, because it was private property, but then again, perhaps he wouldn’t do it again anyway. Having settled the matter in her mind, she returned to the house.

The next day was a Thursday and Elaine was out to do the weekly food shop. Leaving a disappointed Pippin slumped in his basket ruefully chewing on a plastic bone she set out in the direction of town, bundled up firmly against the cold. As she crossed the iron footbridge over the river, the sky opened up before her. The open ground between the river and the main road was crisscrossed with sandy pathways where cyclists sped, people walked, dogs ran.

It was a bright day and some young boys were trying to launch a kite into the air, one holding the reel and shouting directions as the other raced, tossing the rhombus of fabric optimistically upwards, trying to hook it onto the faint winds that whickered over the field. A weak yellowish sun cast their shadows, sharp and perfect as a daguerrotype over the grass.

Elaine tucked her hands into her pockets and headed towards the supermarket. As she approached the narrow gate at the corner of the green she could make out a cyclist coming towards her, indistinct against the light. She stepped to one side to let him pass over the cattle grid. With a small lurch of surprise, she saw that it was him, the boy with the red bicycle. She looked into his face. He smiled back at her, a frank, open grin. ‘Thanks’, he said.

Elaine was perturbed. How strange, she thought. He couldn’t have recognized her. He had never seen her. She walked on without noticing she was moving, absorbing the moment. His eyes had been green, she saw, a startlingly feline shade. She had been silly to be annoyed, really. People weren’t so bad after all. She smiled to herself as she walked to the shop, feeling a little bubble of lightness somewhere between her ribs. When she got home, there was the bike again, against the fence.

Slowly, and by degrees, she began to wonder about the boy. At first, it was just something to think about as she tidied the house or shopped made her meals or watched the television in the evenings. Idle thoughts that sifted through the layers of the mind, like remembered music or the half-notion of writing a postcard to a friend. Somebody to ponder, like a new colleague or neighbour. Elaine hadn’t ever had many friends – there had been a couple of girlfriends at school, Anne and Susan, and then at nineteen she had married Arthur and that had sort of been enough. They had had friends, as a couple – people who invited them to dinners where they drank sherry and ate beef casserole and talked about nothing very much – but then afterwards, they had drifted away, awkward. She had always got on well with her colleagues at the bank. They would chat together, ask about plans for the weekend, eat biscuits on their breaks. Then when she retired she realised that there wasn’t really anybody she could go out to tea with or even just invite for a walk. That was when she got Pippin.

The whole of the following week, he came almost every day. It was usually between four and five o’clock in the afternoon when he appeared on the other side of the fence. She decided that if he were ever to look up she would wave, but he never did. At any rate, she supposed, the double-glazing would have only thrown his own reflection back at him. She noticed that sometimes he wore a cycle helmet and sometimes not, that sometimes he tied his hair back, bunching his thick curls at the nape of his neck.

The weeks that followed were undifferentiated but for the darkening turn in the weather that made Pippin’s walks short, bracing affairs, confined largely to the towpath. There were sensible reasons for this, but she also noticed that she began to look more carefully at the rowers in the boats that passed her while she was on her outings. The shrinking portion of daylight meant that more and more of them were on the river at once and there were frequent confrontations, with the blades of passing boats clattered roughly against each other while the coxes swore and struggled with the rudder and the coaches barely maintained their veneer of mutual politeness. The bargemen, too, cursed volubly from the decks when a misjudged stroke scraped against the side of their houseboats, scuffing a clumsy morse code along the tarred wood below the waterline. Sometimes she took with her a thermos of sweet tea and would sit in the late autumn sun and watch them pass.

Under this new scrutiny the boats were longer than she had thought; they came in different sizes – two seats, four and eight. The coxes sat hunched in the back with lifejackets and little headsets, speaking in a crackling language she could not make out, like the cries of the ducks on the river. The novices wobbled, missing their strokes, leaning on their oars and making the narrow boat flop from side to side like a drunken swan, bringing out a patient sing-song call of ‘easy there’ as the cox pulled them to a halt time and again. She sipped at her brew, content to spot the boats as they negotiated the tricky bends, marveling a little at the power of the better crews as they glided past balanced to a fault, faces set forward like so many well-trained hounds, almost quivering as they leant forward and dug the oars into the water, waiting, waiting, before the cox loosed them like an arrow from the bow. They skimmed over the river with astonishing speed, the thunk of their seats hitting the back of the slide in perfect unison as the oars shot over the water. The sullen river water flashed, caught on the blades as they snapped out and turned flat to skim above the surface, and then dipped again. The oars left pooling ripples behind them that bent in on themselves, small, sucking vortices on the oilish surface. Twice she thought she saw him but both times on closer inspection she was mistaken. Yet the bike continued to be chained to her fence several times a week, early morning and late afternoon.

She thought about the sort of life the boy might have. She had never taken much interest in that other, parallel city-within-a- city. She knew they still wore gowns but they weren’t all rich, not anymore. Someone she knew at the bank had once worked as an administrator there and another one of the tellers had been a student. She rarely went into the town after dark but sometimes, taking the dog for an evening stroll, she’d see groups of them, laughing and shouting down the narrow lanes, clustered around the doorways of pubs or the lamplit doorways of the colleges, or queuing outside the kebab vans in Market Square, with their striped scarves and untidy haircuts. She supposed he had plenty of friends, and ate his dinner on long oak tables in candlelit halls surrounded by smoky oil portraits of eminent old men. She scooped some dried biscuits out of a bag for Pippin. Alexander, she thought. He would be named Alexander. Or Stephen or Michael – they would do – but probably Alexander. Those green half-moon eyes. Maybe even a touch foreign, with that skin. He would be studying something clever. Science. He would wear a white lab coat and go to lectures on his bicycle. As she took her walks by the river, she began to notice small differences in the colours of the oars and the jackets the rowers wore, and what they meant. Green meant the boat was from Jesus College, deep blue for Trinity, pink for Corpus Christi. Sometimes, she wandered late into the dying hours of the day, watching the stain of the setting sun like mercury over the water working its slow, alchemical spell. Along the borders of the water, the pollarded willows raised their brutal amputated stumps, sprouting skinny fireworks of twigs into a sky the colour of bone.

At night, in the bed beside the beige-curtained window, the silver scent of the water pulled at the edges of her dreams. Brown, heavy fish spooled and hung in hidden channels and deep pools under bridges, still as stonecarvings. Moorhens bobbed across the surface, ran splay-footed over duckweed-coated ditches, sending up shrill and lonely notes in the darkness.  A cold moon rose, white as appleflesh above the fens. Far above, the winter stars tilted, and sharpened their swords.

It was a couple of weeks later that it happened. Countdown was over and it wasn’t yet time for the news, so it just happened to be that she was loitering in the corner of the kitchen that afforded the best view of the cul-de-sac. She was browning chicken quarters for the stockpot she saw him approach. Her heart flinched like an oyster; there was a feeling of sickness. She continued her cookery just as before but her gestures had become artificial, a performance of perfect domesticity enacted over the chopping-board. She sneaked a glance up under her eyelashes. He was there. A wild, fierce thrill ran through her. Perhaps this would be the afternoon that he would glance up and see her through the window; she could wave to him, and he would wave back and smile again.

She looked up. He was half-bent over, unlocking the bike from the fence, but today it was taking him a long time to work the clicking mechanism of the lock. He glanced towards her. She knew in that second that there was something wrong, something off in the way he looked straight ahead of him, seeing but not seeing. She stared openly, now, her fear of discovery forgotten. He reached out an arm and grasped the top edge of the fence, steadying himself. She saw him blink, lick his lips, twice, open his mouth as if to say something. Then he fell.

Before she could think she was outside, pulling open the bolt on the gate and then she was at his side. He had half-fallen on the pavement; he was on his hands and knees as she watched but he hauled himself groggily to his feet, seemingly with great difficulty. He seemed not to have noticed her. He raised the side of his hand to his head, and let out a sort of sigh. Out of pure instinct, she grabbed his arm as he stumbled heavily, almost dragging her with him as he fell. Oh, no, no, sorry, he said, in a quiet voice. His hands were shaking. She noticed for the first time the silver bracelet around his wrist.She helped him into a sitting position, half-cradling him as she knelt behind him on the road, her legs crooked awkwardly to the side. He was weak and heavy against her. Moved by some guiding instinct, or protocol snatched from television, she reached her fingers under his jaw to find the carotid artery. She felt the quickening pulse under her fingers, warm beneath the cords of his neck. He moved. He spoke to her.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, uselessly. He spoke like a sleepwalker. ‘I feel very bad. I think –‘

There was no time to believe it, to take in the strangeness of it all. She spoke; her voice was dry. She told him it would be all right. She asked what was the matter.

‘I’m diabetic.’ He closed his eyes. ‘I think I should have.’ He was blinking again, rapid and agitated. He struggled to sit.

‘Do you need sugar?’ she asked, desperate. She knew this was urgent. ‘Or insulin? Do you take insulin? Do you have it?’

He spoke in a dry rush, as if he were about to be sick. ‘- I need – I should have – some Coke. Or chocolate or something. An orange. Something. I’m sorry.’

‘OK love, OK. Can you stand? Could you stand up for me?’

‘Yes, I think.’ He leant forward, and pushing his hands against the floor, raised himself up again. He looked at her, through her. She stood, and took his arm, gently.

‘Come now, quickly now. This is my house. I’ll get you something, it’s alright, it’ll be alright, OK?’

She began to lead him firmly to the door. He followed, stumbling slightly. She brought him into the kitchen, grabbing at the kitchen table for support. Pippin started up, baring his tiny teeth and barking a sharp staccato alarm. She shushed him, sharply. She led the boy into the sitting room and told him to sit on the sofa. She dashed through into the kitchen, her mind racing. What did she have, what could she give him? She never kept fizzy drinks in the house. Chocolate? Somewhere. Hot chocolate…but then you had to make it up, boil the kettle and then wait for it to cool.  The dog continued to stand, hairs on end, a frozen statue of attention staring at the intruder as Elaine threw open cupboard doors, pushed jars and packets to the side. She found the cocoa powder and spooned five small molehills into a mug. She added sugar, pouring straight from the packet, and some milk. She stirred it, frantic but focused. She took the mug through into the sitting room and pushed it into his hands. The boy was breathing deeply, eyes closed. He opened his eyes, waited a moment, trying to form sense, then took a drink.

She stood over him, terribly anxious. She didn’t know what to do, who to call. Perhaps the ambulance. She should call the ambulance, or a doctor at least.

‘How is it? How are you feeling?’

It was very important.

‘It’s alright, it’s not so bad.’ He was grey and a sheen of sweat slicked his forehead.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked, timidly.

‘Nicholas,’ he said. ‘Nick.’

He drank the mug. He was shaking, still, and he sat on the edge of the sofa cushions staring fixedly ahead. She could tell that he was frightened. ‘You’ve had a shock, haven’t you?’ she said, gently. The dog stood in the doorway, bristling, unsure.

He said nothing. Some seconds passed. She waited.

‘Do you need me to call an ambulance?’

‘No. Thank you, no. I’ll be OK, I think. I just need – a bit of time to get my head together, I think. Thank you.’

‘Do you need some more? I can get you an orange, if you want.’

He spoke weakly, hardly louder than a whisper. ‘I don’t know at the moment. I should wait, I think.’

She was desperate to be useful, to help, but didn’t see what she could do. Suddenly she remembered the bike, left lying on the pavement. She went outside to fetch it. It lay, front wheel rearing at a crazy angle, handlebars to the sky like a broken insect, a metal zigzag on the black tarmac. She picked it up, wondering at its weight, and wheeled it to the fence. He had left the keys in the lock and she attempted to prop it up and rechain it to the wooden slat but her hands were all thumbs. Adrenalin fizzed through her blood, blotting time. The world was hovering in different pieces around her; the usual relations between objects had been all broken open. Things hung, suspended, animate. Her house sprang into strangeness as a cluster of coloured angles, blocks of orange and lines of white. He was there. He was inside. The bike would have to take its chances without the lock, for now.

She stood up, and a sense of the drama broke over her. Good God, she said to herself, how lucky I was watching. What if he had fallen, and no-one had seen? He could have got much worse, if I hadn’t seen him. What if he’d fallen on the path, and gone into the river?  It didn’t bear thinking about. I must be his guardian angel, she thought. She allowed herself a moment of glee, cuddling the thought to her chest. She could hardly believe it – he was there, in her sitting room right this second. She had to see it for herself, to make sure She went back inside and there he was, still sitting on the sofa. He wasn’t shivering any more.

‘I was just taking care of your bike, she explained. ‘How do you feel?’

‘Getting better, I think. Jesus.’ He ran his hand over his hair, rubbed at his forearm where he had fallen. ‘What an idiot. Sorry.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about it, not at all,’ she said. ‘What happened? If you can remember, I mean.’

‘Didn’t get a proper lunch, basically,’ he said. ‘Then we had a ten-k erg, and I pushed it too far. All my fault,’ he said, wanly. ‘I don’t usually mess it up. Must have miscalculated.’

She was overwhelmed with pity. ‘You poor thing,’ she said. ‘You sure you wouldn’t like me to call anyone? A friend, maybe?’

He smiled, abashed. ‘No, honestly, it’s fine. I’ll be all right in a minute. I’ll get out of your hair soon, I’m sorry.’

His voice was not quite what she had expected, she thought, but then realised that she hadn’t expected anything in particular. He spoke quietly, with no trace of an accent. There was something musical in his intonation: a woodwind sound, a faint and gentle pattern. His curls brushed the back of the sofa. She wanted to know more.

‘Does this happen to you very often?’ It was an asinine question, particularly as he had already given an answer ‘I hope not,’ she said, waving her hands. ‘It doesn’t look like it’s very much fun.’ She felt silly, breathless. He looked into her eyes, and smiled.

‘No,’ he said, kindly. ‘My maths is pretty rough, but I’ve had it all my life, so…’

‘You’re a student, then?’ It was an interruption, which she knew was rude, but she wanted to know as much as she could. She wanted to know everything.

He nodded. ‘Yeah. Just in my final year now.’ He took a last swig of the cold milk chocolate, and laid it aside.

‘Oh,’ she nodded, ‘that’s nice.’ She trailed off into silence. She felt a sudden, hot shame of her lack of conversation; out of practice, she had lapsed those skills and when they were needed now found them wanting. She had never been a big reader, at any rate. There were few books in the house; a leatherbound set of the complete works of Shakespeare, bought for decoration, a couple of atlases and a cookery manual, a copy of Tennyson’s poetry and some paperbacks she’d picked up from a charity shop for holidays. ‘You’ll be off to be a teacher after that, I suppose,’ she finished, lamely. He didn’t know, he said politely. Wasn’t sure yet.

She spoke quickly, before an impossible awkwardness rose between them. She tried to give the impression that she was accustomed to this role of hostess and nurse. ‘Would you like some more of that chocolate? Or I could make you some sweet tea?’ She stood over him in an attitude of concern. She knew best. ‘That’s what you should have, really, if you’ve had a shock. Or some water?’

‘A glass of water would be really good, actually.’

‘Right-o,’ she said cheerily. ‘I won’t be a moment.’

She was fluttering as she re-entered the kitchen. She hummed a song under her breath. As she reached into the cupboard for a clean glass she felt as if she could have danced, right there on the linoleum. She was useful again. She was warming to the theme of the ministering angel, and decided that hospitality ought really to be extended beyond the a mere glass of water. She fished out a plate and popped a couple of slices of bread in the toaster. Good wholesome stuff, brown toast with butter on it. And an orange too, just in case. She half-drifted into a reverie while the toast browned, a silly schoolgirl’s dream curtailed by the matter-of-fact click of the timer switch. Pippin stood behind her ankles, expectant, but she was wholly elsewhere.

When she returned to the sitting room she saw that he was leant against the back of the sofa, his head lolled to one side and his eyes fallen shut. She nearly dropped the plate. He must have heard her gasp of shock, because he started awake, embarrassed. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I’m fine – I was just – I’m just really sleepy. That’s what happens, after I go down like that. It’s normal. Sorry to have scared you.’

                                                                                     

‘No, no, it’s fine. I don’t mind.’ There was a peculiar tightness in her voice. ‘I made you some toast.’

‘Thanks.’

He was still a little green about the gills. He was so serious, she thought, so fine a quality of seriousness he had in him. His lashes were remarkable; dark gold and flared like flower petals.

‘You know, I think you should probably have a lie down. It’s no trouble, really it isn’t.’ He looked at her, questioning; she was quite astonished at her own daring.

‘You’re not well yet, and I wouldn’t feel right in myself letting you go until you are.’ She smiled, comfortingly. ‘You’ll need a proper rest before you ride home, it isn’t safe getting on a bike after that, and with the weather and all…’ She was gabbling, she knew, but she could see that he was tempted through sheer bodily weariness to give in, in spite of the awkwardness and oddity of the situation. Insistent, she pressed home the point.

‘It’s no trouble. Really it isn’t. And I will worry if I send you out after that, you know.’

‘It’s very kind, but – ‘

‘Oh, no. Anyone would do the same.’

The veneer of resolve shuddered, then broke. He smiled, a real smile.

‘If it’s really no trouble, I mean – thanks, thank you so much.’

‘Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Wait there.’

She climbed the stairs to her bedroom and heaped the pillow and duvet from her own bed into her arms. She bore them downstairs and pushed open the sitting-room door; it had a habit of catching on the thick pile of the carpet and becoming stuck.

‘- Here’

The boy smiled at her, took another sip from the glass of water. ‘Thanks,’ he said again. ‘I’ll be all right.’ He had taken off his trainers and set them neatly under the coffee table.

‘I’ll leave you to it,’ she said. ‘I’ll be in the kitchen if you need anything, OK?’

‘Yeah. Thanks. This is so weird, but thanks.’ He pulled his legs up onto the settee, took the pillow and placed it, with the air of one handling a foreign object, onto the arm. He gave it a pat, adjusting the position, then tucked his own arm underneath it. She hovered at the door of the room; he was already halfway to unconsciousness,

‘My mum would thank you,’ he said.

Elaine had never had a child. She had not wanted one with any firmity of purpose; she supposed that she had never been quite sure where she stood on the matter, which she suspected wasn’t really good enough. She had never felt herself to be deficient in her lack of offspring, nor understood the tidal urge that drew some women towards infants in the park, in the supermarket, cooing and prodding with rapt fascination over a sticky-chinned ball of dough with goggly eyes. At any rate Arthur and her - they’d talked about it, but it had never happened, and that was that. They seemed from her brief quota of insight into the messy, fleshly, neurotic universe of motherhood to be primarily a source of grief and anxiety, of weariness and fret from everything from chickenpox to school reports to getting in with the wrong crowd and coming home late and pregnant. Just another thing to worry about. Now, as she watched the boy asleep, she felt as if she might have too late understood. She had wrestled with herself, sat at the kitchen table, slippers tapping unthinking against the floor, half-biting her lip as she clutched a forgotten cup of tea. She had fought and her better judgement had at last thrown up its hands in defeat and permitted her to nudge the door open just a chink, heart in her mouth and breath clamped firm and tight within her chest, praying she wouldn’t disturb him, he wouldn’t wake. She was entranced.

He lay, perfect, in the rosy light. The still point of the turning world. The silence in the room absolute but for the slow, soughing noise of his breathing. She did not approach, but in the few inches of space between the doorframe and the wood, she traced the lines of his face, marmoreal, inviolate. Her eyes, reverent, slid over his body, the plane of his uppermost cheekbone, his hairline, the hollow of his neck, his blunt fingernails, wide forehead, the whorl of his ear, his arched eyebrow, his deep-scored feltrum and slightly protuberant white teeth. He was impossibly beautiful.

Elaine felt as if she were cast out of herself, suspended in a universal tenderness.

She was part of the aureate glow that surrounded the sleeping youth, walled in by the silence and the slow metronome of his breath. There was a spell that stood guard over him, burnishing his skin and the waxed leaves of the rubber plant, casting little stars from the half-full glass of water that lay on the table beside him. He looked almost mythic on her hire-purchase sofa, a young god newly cast from the mould, kinetic, full of unawakened being. Outside, at a great distance, rain fell; it was dark now and the rain fell in fits and squalls that fused out, weakly, against the shield of strong forces fallen over the house. She and the boy were protected, called out of time in the charmed circle of the lamplight. They were a world enclosed in glass together.

Hours passed, chartless and unheeded.

Elaine was sat at the breakfast table in the kitchen; she must have slept or at least passed out of active thought at some point because awareness curled its grey fingers through the slats in the blinds in the kitchen and she was suddenly there, awake. She sensed that it was some time later and that something had shifted, a disturbance just out of the edge of hearing, an invisible vibration in the air like the striking of a distant clock. Consciousness and the world had returned to foot their claim. She half-stood, almost involuntarily, palms flat against the wood of the table. She had been eating toast and the crumbs were scattered over the surface.

In the sitting room the boy Nick turned slightly, shifted to one side and then woke with a jolt at his unfamiliar surroundings. He sat up, heavily, as the world rearranged itself and settled down into some kind of sense. He sat there for some minutes, disorientated and shambolic, calming himself. He breathed out, heavily, shaking his head a little. Close one. He looked at his watch and was shocked to see that six hours had passed; it was nearly ten o’clock. Time to get going. He put on his trainers and stood up. He folded up the woman’s duvet. The pillow had become squashed into the corner of the sofa; he shook it out and set it down neat in the centre.

The woman was stood at her kitchen table, looking towards him as he came in. He felt guilty, somehow; he thought to himself that he should remember to send her a card or some chocolates, just to say thanks for sorting him out. ‘Hi,’ he said, abashed. ‘I’ve been taking up your sofa.’

She asked him if he’d slept well. He said that he had; apologized for having been asleep so long.

‘It’s no bother,’ she said. They were stood either side of the kitchen table. He had his backpack half-hoisted onto one shoulder. He did up the zipper on his jacket.

‘God, I can’t believe it got so late.’ He smiled. ‘You’ve been very kind.’

The woman seemed a little confused. Though that was natural, he supposed. The whole situation was hardly what you’d call an everyday occurrence. She looked at the clock on the wall. ‘It’s ten,’ she said.

‘I know.’ He coughed, to cover his discomfort. He sensed he was on the back foot somehow. The boy was prone to overanalysis, he knew, but still there was a faint air of unease. Somewhere in the room there was the obscure and unarticulated sense that he had broken some compact. Was he ungrateful? No, he was grateful, very much so.

‘I’d better get going,’ he said.

Elaine stood up. She had been fidgeting with the front of her jumper; it was pulled out of shape. The ceiling lights reflected off her glasses.

‘Are you sure you’re all right to go? Really?’

‘Oh, yep,’ he said, with certainty. ‘All fine and fixed now. Cheers.’ He gave a brief, polite smile.

She grabbed at the last sinking straw, earnest, desperate. ‘Stay. You can stay the night, if you want. It’s no trouble.’

‘I’m fine, really.’ He laughed, an attempt at breeziness.

‘I can make you some food? You – we -  could eat dinner?’

‘Oh – it’s – no. You’re too kind. I think it’s a bit late for dinner now, and besides which, they’ll be expecting me back. My housemates.’ He stepped towards the door.

‘They’ll be wondering where I’ve got to.’

The words seemed to come from somewhere else. Her voice was high, half-strangled. ‘You could call them. You could stay.’

Something opened in his eyes, then closed again.

‘No, I don’t think – thanks,’ he said. ‘I have to – be off. But thanks, really, thank you, for everything.’ He paused, but she said nothing. The woman was looking at him, just watching. He was more than a little unnerved. An image from last term’s module flashed unbidden into his head; Dido on the shores of Carthage. ‘Goodbye,’ he said, with a half-smile. He turned, closing the door behind him.

*

The boy returned to the house he shared in the small Victoria of wisteria and high  windows. The next day he went to college, to the library, to the bar. He didn’t tell anyone what had happened; it didn’t feel right, somehow. Back in the real world, his discomfort subsided. His overriding sensation was one of pity, tinted with obscure shame; pity for how badly things can turn out. He thought of the loneliness of the woman’s life, how desperate for human company she must be to try and keep a total stranger in her house. He felt a measure of pity too for himself. It had been horribly awkward, and he really only had himself to blame from start to finish. He knew that. By the end of the week, though, there was so much stuff to get through – two tutorials and an overdue essay his Eliot professor was snapping at his heels over as well as training – that thoughts of the incident were submerged, gradually, by the inching bustle of life.

*

She waited for the whole of the next day but he did not come. The day after that it was the same. The dog whined at the door for his walk but she didn’t really hear him. She prepared her breakfast, just the same. When it was finished she rinsed out the bowl and the spoon that she had used. She wiped them dry and replaced them in the cupboard.

Gradually, over a number of days, the normal routine reasserted itself. She got up, let Pippin out. She ate her meals. She watched the television. She took the dog for a walk. She went to the shop. She went to bed. She slept; her dreams were confused, corkscrewing images. A knight in armour falling from a tower. A child crying, lost, in a shopping centre. A sky with four suns, a frog in a hall of mirrors. She would wake in the night with a jolt and then the thoughts would return, clustering around her in a flock. She batted them away, fierce, but one by one they came back, sly and sneaking, settling over the branches of her mind. It would take her a long time to get back to sleep.

It had been weeks now and the boy had not come back. She waited for him, though she was no longer fully aware of what she was waiting for. Once or twice, hearing a noise on the other side of the fence, she started up from her settee and ran to the window but it was just somebody’s car starting up, somebody’s bin blown over. She went back into the living room. The carpet felt rough against her feet, thick and rough as raw wool.

Sometimes now she would catch herself speaking aloud - little snatches of thoughts, agreeing, questioning, disapproving, short starts of laughter bitten off with the realization that she was talking. She felt odd in the mornings, hollow in the head. The world was edged with felt. There was a small, smut-edged dent on the side of the fence where the bike had been. She reached out a finger, half-fearfully, and touched it. The wood was cold.

One day she looked around her living room that had been the same for twenty years, and stared at each piece of furniture with a questioning, sidelong scrutiny. That little brown table, where had it come from, and why was it there? She counted the row of books in the glass cabinet. Seven, ten, twelve, thirteen. She opened the cabinet and took out the books. She ran her hand over the slick, thin skin of the dustjackets one by one and replaced them. She found them difficult to look at; they seemed to evade her sight, to dodge sideways whenever she turned her full scrutiny upon them then hover half-solid on the periphery of her vision. They were too present, too visible. She pushed them to the back of the cabinet, where they sat, vibrating. She could hear them humming, like the motor of the fridge, faint but persistent through the walls.

Over the next few weeks, there came an incremental change in the nature of things.

One by one, the objects in her house began to disgust her. The sofa looked fat and squalid, an overstuffed, bloated thing, cuddling its own rolls and folds of flesh. Climbing the stairs, the banister under her hand had a greasy, grasping slickness. There was a sucking softness in the sheets of her bed that revolted her awake; she had to fight the beginnings of nausea when she accidentally brushed her hand against the leaves of the potted basil behind the kitchen sink. The still, cupboardish air of the house warmed to stagnancy in the lengthening hours of light but she would not open the windows because the smell of the river would come in, drifting, atom by atom, a low, insidious poison. The dog in the corner lay lethargic and silent. He rarely left the kitchen these days.

It was a Friday, and the weather had turned again. The streets shivered under the swollen bruises of clouds. Drifts of dull water slicked the pavements, collecting in worn places on uneven stones as the city hunched its shoulders against the rain. The forecast predicted no respite; it would be forty-eight hours of heavy precipitation on ground already saturated by a wetter-than-average month, and downstream from Thetford onwards the locks all along the Cam were thrown open to let the anticipated floodwaters through.  As the hours passed, the intensity of the rain rose steadily until the sky was full of water, a profligate downpour hammering blindly against the land.

In the centre the streets bloomed with a hundred snatched umbrellas, then emptied. Tourists dashed for cover under upturned coats. In the market square stallkeepers snatched in their goods. Stranded cyclists took shelter in doorways, staring out mutely into the storm. Behind the college walls, the surface of the river flickered and danced, bent and scarred out of smoothness. The underside of the bridge glowed with coloured lights, pale blue and violet.

On the other side of the river, Elaine left her house and locked the door behind her. The housing estate swam with rain. The edges of the pavements became running channels, dribbling and chattering with water choking the iron drains with flotsam; crisp packets and dead leaves rose up and swirled above their bulging throats, gasping and gargling on the run-off from acres of tarmac and concrete and the sodden woods beyond. She walked out of her gate, past the fence, across the pavement to the path by the river. The grass mulched sodden beneath her feet, half-submerged at the edges in puddles rising like mushrooms through the sod. She was soon soaked through; the thin lace of her dress clung heavy as sealskin to her body. She walked on, the hem trailing in the filth and wet. Now, the proper channels overwhelmed, drain runnings were forced gasping up through new cracks in the pavement as the water rose, helpless, swelling over the stones. There was some spattered shelter under the heavy trees, wet and thick with the smell of earth. Drops licked their way down the ivy leaves on their trunks, tumbling one after another. She turned her face a little upward to the sky and let them strike tiny blows against her eyelids, her cheek, invisible.

She moved out again away from the trees’ brief shelter, away, away to the quietness at the edge of the river. She did not really feel the cold – it was there, on some level, but placed on a high shelf out of immediate notice.

The riverbank was completely silent. Ripples stirred themselves against invisible obstacles beneath the water’s surface. There was a muted savagery to the river; it was not yet overfull but there was a new push to the current as if it were being squeezed by contractions through new-forced channels, a sense of those muscles clamouring for release.

For now, though, there was only the water, above and below and all around. Elaine stood in a strange echo-chamber of rain and river and land. She felt the sleeves of her dress. She was alone. The towpath was deserted. She was tired from the walk; she sat down on the bank to rest, utterly forgetful of the sodden ground. She thought she might as well. 

There was an old punt that was tethered against the bank half-hidden by a clump of sycamore trees. It had waited out the winter months for the first stir of tourists, forgotten or just neglected by its owners and in sore need of repair. There was no pole, but the paddle remained stowed firmly in the bottom of the boat. It was tied with a scrappy length of rope to an iron ring wedged in the concrete of the bank and it took a few minutes’ painful chafing of her palms and fingers grubbing with the rough plastic fibres before they grizzled and separated. She stood up and looked around. All she could hear was the quietness of water in her ears and the soft knock of the rotten wood of the punt against the bank. Fat, thick coins of rain fell, oblivious, patting against her uncovered head, sticking her hair to her cheek. She reached down and lifted the hem of her dress which was now black with mud, holding it daintily away from her as she stepped inside. The punt wobbled dangerously. There was a slew of dirty rainwater and fallen leaves sloshing about the bottom. It was hard to balance; there was a moment, a stomach-sickening lurch when her foot slipped an inch and she thought she might tumble but then she was in, safe.

She sat for a moment, rearranging herself, smoothing down the lines of the skirt. The thin white scent of the lilies she carried rose into the air. She was careful to keep the powdering orange stamens at a distance from the ivory lace drawn too tight across her stomach. You couldn’t be too careful with lilies. A voice, a memory came trailing after her, snagging at the edge of her mind. The sky above was white, white and breaking at the edges. She loosened the rope, pulling it through the ring until one end hung in the water. Keeping the bouquet clutched tightly in her hand, she laid herself down in the punt so the wooden sides rose above her, blotting out the land. She lay then, quite still, her eyes open. She wanted to see into the sky. She wanted there to be nothing above her.

The punt swayed against the bank, catching gently against the trailing fronds of willow. It inched forward under its own momentum, then, catching at the edge of the stream, began to move slowly, heavily, down the river.

The river rises, swells, overspills, chokes on itself, drowns and rises again. The city is slick and gleaming with the rain that only pauses to catch breath before falling again with all the force of a purgation. It will rain, day after day, sweet water. Far out to the west, the sun breaks through the ragged edge of the storm. A curtain falls, swimming in gold with the sudden flash of a benediction. She does not see as the punt moves its way down the empty corridor of water. Now the edges of the reeds blurred, became indistinct against the grey sky. Coots flash past. Hedges, a greenhouse, and then the open sky of the green, the cobbled pathways and the iron footbridge, down, on, past the boathouses all locked shut.

Time passes. She does not know as the punt is borne on the rising current under the dark spine of the gothic bridge. Lights bloom through high windows, distorted in ripples through old glass. Thoughts half-surfaced; her mother, Arthur, a sad reflection in a shop window of a sagging woman, empty, the taste of cinnamon, a few bars of a half-forgotten tune, a boy with golden skin and the eyes of another century. She is forgetting. The quietness of the river comes to be within her, atom by atom leeching into her pores, staining her the colour of water. The hour unfolded itself, slow as the rising stream. Noises fainted into shades of charcoal and white as drop by drop, the world drowned.

Several hours later, a punt containing the body of a middle-aged woman in a wedding dress was found by a porter against the bank of the river at the back of King’s College. The body bore no signs of having suffered violence; the coroner’s report was to conclude, some days later, that the woman – as yet unidentified - had died of exposure. There was a short report made in the Examiner, stating the facts in brief. The porter’s headlong dash across the forbidden lawn to the lodge had caught the attention of some students, who, running to help, had found themselves unwitting extras in a rare and solemn drama, gathered on the path where the famous chapel meets the river’s edge. Among this small and shocked crowd of onlookers there was one who watched, white-faced, as the embarrassed officers shambled back and forth, the lamplight gleaming off the reflective strips on their jackets. As they finally lifted her up to take her away, the white folds of her dress fell graceful from the policeman’s arms, just as if she were being carried over the threshold.