Spring Tide

⁴ The Lake

When the first clamour of birds came sweeping across the lake, the professor’s wife was already wide awake. It was going to be one of those grey luminous days, she knew, when every splash and croak was full of meaning, and things suddenly happened with no apparent cause. She needed to get outside.

But the professor ate his breakfast very slowly, with the paper propped in front of him against a jar of honey.

‘Good lord!’ he observed amiably. ‘What will this awful government do next!’

‘Just go,’ she answered him in her head. ‘Just drink down your coffee and go!’

He spread another piece of toast, first with butter and then with marmalade, being meticulously careful in each case to go right out to the very edge of the slice. Then he poured himself a second cup, and turned the page.

‘Situation in Europe looks pretty dire.’ He took a bite from his toast and chewed thoughtfully while he continued to read.

What did he need to read the news for anyway? He’d be listening to it on his radio all the way to work, the same stories over and over.

As soon as he’d gone, the professor’s wife rushed out. She didn’t take a picnic, or a flask, or a bottle of water. She didn’t even bother with a coat. She just ran straight down to the lake. There were paths and boardwalks down there that led through the reeds, across the creeks, and between the stands of waterlogged willows. She wandered back and forth, round the bays and prominences, the little beaches, the twisted trees, the decaying wooden jetty. She was listening intently to every little sound, while all the time trying her best not to hear. She was looking everywhere for the smallest signs, but trying simultaneously not to see them. When water birds came and went from the surface, she felt the perturbations juddering right through her. And when bubbles or eddies rose from the depths, stirred up no doubt by creatures hidden below, she softly groaned as if it was her own skin that had been breached.

The sun came out and went in again. There were showers of rain, perforating the entire lake with exploding pinpricks, and her dress was soon soaked through. She barely noticed it, though, any more than she noticed her own hunger or thirst.

Early in the evening, exhausted, cold and parched, she spotted an egret standing alone on the mound of an old swan’s nest. The graceful white creature was her favourite among all the inhabitants of the lake, and she clasped her hands together with delight as it tipped back its head and opened its beak as if to sing.

But no sound came. Instead, thrusting itself out from the egret’s throat, came the head and neck of an old grey gander, which the graceful white bird had somehow swallowed alive.

The professor’s wife groaned. Always when she wasn’t expecting it! Always when, just for a moment, she’d lowered her guard!

She watched in horror as the gander stretched down with his thick coarse neck, to pull and tear and rip with his serrated beak at the delicate creature that held him prisoner. When he’d finally managed to tear himself free, all that was left of the egret was soiled white feathers and bloody flesh, with a head at one end and legs at the other.

‘Ha!’ honked the gander. And he turned his head sideways, as birds will do, so as to be able to stare triumphantly at the professor’s wife with a single small hard eye.

The world was breaking up now. Its smooth surface had been breached, and the present and the absent, the possible and the impossible, were swapping places at will. The gander gave the professor’s wife a sly wink, and then put two finger-like feathers into his beak to give a loud goosy whistle. Almost at once, four tiny white horses the size of cats came trotting along the boardwalk, harnessed to a tiny carriage. The gander reached into the carriage and took from it a red checked jacket, a yellow tie and a trilby hat. She watched him put them on, and saw him attach the bloody remains of his enemy to the back axle.

‘Gee up!’ the gander yelled, climbing up into the driver’s seat, cracking a whip, and thundering straight at her along the boardwalk.

‘If you can’t get justice from others,’ the gander honked as he went by, ‘you just have to take it for yourself!’

The head of the egret broke away from the spine and flew spinning into the water.

‘You have to look after number one in this life!’ the gander squawked as he came hurtling back again, lashing his miniature horses until they bled. And off he went again round a corner, to disappear into the rushes, the egret’s legs and spine bouncing along behind him.

The professor’s wife ran weeping back towards her home, hoping to reach it before the gander could pass her again. But she wasn’t quick enough. Even as the house was coming into view, here he was again, rumbling towards her at tremendous speed along the boards with much lashing of the whip and terrified frothing of his tiny horses’ mouths.

‘Attempted murder, that’s what it was!’ shrieked the gander, who obviously knew her fondness for the pure white bird. ‘Attempted murder, no less!’

Water voles and frogs stuck their heads out of the water and stared. A furtive coot paused in mid-step to take a look, as it stalked among the reeds. And so did a hawk at the very top of a willow. The hawk was clasping a still-living swallow in its deadly claws, but paused even so to take in the scene below. And so too did the swallow: predator and prey together cocked their heads to watch the scene with identical beady eyes.

It wasn’t the noisy gander going to and fro in his coach and four that they were staring at, though. They paid small heed to that silly vulgar creature, and none to the poor egret, which was now reduced to a single leg, from which hung a few torn tendons in a muddy fringe. No, it was her they all watched with such interest, their heads cocked this way or that the better to see: it was the professor’s wife.

Sobbing, she ran through the front gate of her house, that beautiful big house that she and her husband had chosen for the way it looked out over the tranquil water. Her face wet with tears, she ran up the steps and through the door, slamming it shut behind her.

The professor worked in a city some distance away. She always imagined him there constructing a gigantic house of cards, and she visualised this painstaking activity taking place in an oak-panelled room that centuries of beeswax had saturated with its brownish honey smell, and darkened until it was almost black. The addition of two more cards, as she understood it, might take a week or even a month of planning, and the tower as it now stood was the work of several decades, yet, in her imagination at least, a moment’s lapse could still bring down the whole structure in its entirety, so that total unblinking concentration was necessary for hours on end. As a result, when the professor came home, he often couldn’t concentrate at all on even the simplest matters. She’d speak to him and he’d make every effort to listen, but, still engrossed with his house of cards whether he wanted to be or not, he could draw no meaning from her words.

‘Is that you, darling?’ he called out from the living room. ‘I didn’t know how long you’d be so I made us a cold supper. I left yours in the kitchen.’

As she didn’t reply, he came out to see what was up. His face was mild, boyish and utterly transparent. She could see the panic rising inside him, as he took in the state of her, her sodden dress, her lank hair, her eyes red with crying. Not again, she could see him thinking, dear God, not this again.

She was a good deal younger than him, and what he had wanted from her when they married was that she be someone to come home to: a gentle, uncritical presence who would always just be there. And she’d been happy at first to play that part, or if not happy then willing. She’d greeted him with tempting little dishes she’d made, or whimsical things for the house that she’d picked up in some junk store for next to nothing. But these days, he often stayed late at work, or even slept there overnight on some pretext or another, just so as to avoid a homecoming.

‘Poor darling, you are absolutely drenched,’ was what he said, though. He wasn’t an unkind man, and his concern was genuine, though he couldn’t quite hide the dismay in his voice, or his fear about what might follow. ‘First thing you need to do is get into some dry things.’

He glanced wistfully back into the living room, with its smooth cream walls, its muted lights, its expensive and understated furnishings. He saw the colourful pictures flickering and dancing across the TV screen. He heard the TV’s loud and enthusiastic voice. All he wanted was to watch it all evening until the time came to sleep, thinking about nothing at all.

‘The egret’s been killed,’ his wife announced bleakly.

She was so thin these days. She hardly ate at all.

‘Oh, shame. A fox, I suppose?’

She didn’t reply. He knew nothing of the coarse gander with his trilby hat, or the carriage and its tiny horses.

‘I’ll get changed,’ she said.

‘You do that, dearest. You are a silly old thing, you know! Why on Earth didn’t you put on a coat?’

He glanced back hopefully at the TV.

The professor’s wife snatched the curtains quickly together across her bedroom window. She wasn’t quite quick enough to prevent herself from glimpsing some sort of activity going on out there beside the lake, but she refused to look, and now, whatever it was, the thick folds of fabric held it at bay. The mirror had no curtain to cover it, though, so she had to turn her back to it as she peeled off her sodden dress, for she knew that the shadow inside her was growing again, and she did not want to see the signs. When she’d removed her underwear, she stood for some time, naked and shivering, before she was able to summon the energy to towel herself down and pull on new clothes.

Then she went down to the kitchen. Her husband had left her some ungarnished leaves of lettuce, a tomato, some crisps and a slice of cheese. Coldly she scraped it all into the waste bucket. Then she turned on a tap and, for several minutes held the plate beneath it, letting the warm water run over her hands. After a while, the professor emerged from the living room a second time and asked if he could do anything to help. He was trying his best to find out what was troubling her, while simultaneously hoping to keep her just calm enough that he wouldn’t have to find out at all.

‘No,’ she said flatly.

This frightened him so much that he retreated, not back to the living room this time, where she might possibly follow, but to his study, where she never came, ‘to finish off some work,’ as he said.

She sat down in front of the TV for a while, but she found that, just at the moment when her mind was beginning to grasp hold of an image and make some vague sort of sense of it, it was snatched away from her again and replaced with another. All she could think about was the pressure growing within her, and the dark lake outside.

‘Pull yourself together!’ she told herself firmly, knowing all too well where all this was leading. ‘We can’t always have what we want. And we can’t just give way to our own impulses.’

She’d said this often enough, after all, to all those feathery ne’er-do-wells around the lake who came to her with sorry tales of their foolish, bungled lives: ‘It’s no good thinking we can put things right for ourselves by taking from others what isn’t ours. That just makes life harder for everyone.’

And as they stood there dripping into muddy puddles, they would hang their beaks in shame, their caps pressed respectfully against their chests.

‘We can’t just give way to our impulses,’ the professor’s wife repeated to herself firmly as she lay in her bed, waiting for her husband to finish reading.

Even at four years old she had expostulated with the foolish children who spoiled things for themselves by splashing paint all over their colouring books, and not even trying to keep between the lines.

‘It’s more fun if you do things properly,’ she’d told them.

All they’d be left with, after all, when they’d finished messing about, was a shapeless brown mess, and why bother with a colouring book at all if that was what you wanted? But they wouldn’t listen. They just laughed at her, and carried on shouting and fooling about while she sat all by herself across the room, carefully applying the colours in their proper places, and taking great care not to cross the lines.

But, for all that, as soon as her husband had turned off his light, kissed her on the cheek, and settled into a steady rhythm of snores, the professor’s wife jumped up and crept in her nightdress down to the kitchen. The fridge hummed in the warm darkness. The clock ticked on the wall. A red standby light, like a tiny glowing fire, dimly illuminated a wooden block of knives that happened to stand beside it. Her hands were shaking with excitement as she slid back the bolts on the back door and turned the key. And then there it was in front of her, with no curtains to hide it: the great black night.

‘Out you go then, trouble,’ she whispered to her shadow.

And she heard its throaty chuckle as it skipped off down to the lake in its little black dress and heels.

It would bring trouble, there could be no doubt about that, but it was still an enormous relief to let it go. Feeling almost weightless, she returned to bed, climbed in beside her still-snoring husband and sank into sleep at once.

But an hour later she was awake again.

Sounds came from the lake through the open window: croakings and patterings, plashes and reedy sighs. And behind those sounds, others, so faint as to be hardly sounds at all. Moans of pleasure, they seemed to be, or gasps, or muffled laughter.

For a long time, she lay there listening to the life beyond the walls of the house, and fighting the temptation to peer out. But finally a sudden loud splash was too much for her and she rushed to the window with a pounding heart, convinced that she would see her reckless shadow doing some awful thing like diving naked from the wooden jetty, with the whole lakeside watching, and maybe the gander in his waistcoat and his trilby hat, shouting out ribald encouragement. After all, didn’t her shadow long more than anything else to feel the world against its naked skin?

But no, the jetty was empty and the water around it calm. The clouds had cleared and the lake was so smooth that it seemed not so much a body of water as a silver membrane, gossamer-thin, stretched out between two great hemispheres of stars.

‘Are you alright there, darling?’ her husband murmured as she returned to bed.

She didn’t answer him. In fact, she hardly noticed him speak. She just lay down again and carried on listening to the night outside.

After another hour of wakefulness she jumped up again, having this time managed to convince herself that she could hear the creak and slosh of a rowing boat out on the lake, and the careless shadow singing and joking in the bow, stripped naked to the waist, while its admiring companions – the fox perhaps, and the hare with his foppish beret – laughed and cheered as they pulled together at the oars.

But there was no boat, no shadow, no fox or hare, only a single swan drifting sleepily under the moon. Paired with its perfect reflection in the still water, it resembled a scorpion, a giant scorpion of the stars crossing some vast and empty tract of space.

‘Come back. Come back to me,’ the professor’s wife whispered as she returned to her tangled bed.

‘Come back?’ muttered her husband, half-waking once again. ‘Is that what you said, darling? But I’m already here, my dear! I’m right here beside you!’

And he sank straight back into sleep.

Every time so far, she reminded herself as she lay there in the darkness, her shadow had come home before sunrise. Its face might be bruised and swollen, its black dress drenched, its feet bare and muddy, but each time it had returned, to be met by her at the back door with anxious, whispered reproaches.

‘What took you so long? Can’t you see it’s nearly dawn?’

She’d hurry it into the kitchen and, after one last furtive peep outside to check that no one had been watching, she would shut the door, bolt it, bolt it again, turn the key in the lock, and begin to ready herself for daylight.

But she knew, she already knew, that the morning would one day come when the sun would rise before her shadow had returned. It could be today, it could be tomorrow, it might not be for another month, but on that day, instead of a secret tapping at the back door in the dark, there would be a loud knock at the front door in full daylight, and then a strident ringing of the bell. She’d leap straight from the bed in her haste to answer it before her husband woke. She’d snatch a gown and run downstairs to open the door to the brilliant spotlight of the newly risen sun.

And there, head bowed, the foolish thing would be standing, flanked by stern-eyed swans in policemen’s hats, with truncheons dangling beneath their wings. All the creatures of the lake would be crowded at her gate behind them, whispering and murmuring as they savoured the scandalous scene, helpfully lit up for them, as if in some enormous theatre, by the dazzling sunlight from across the water.

‘Well, isn’t that typical?’ the gander would jeer, pushing to the front in his trilby hat, as the watching animals and birds, depending on their kind, quacked or croaked or honked with disapproval and malicious delight. ‘Isn’t that just typical? They’re oh so high and mighty, they’re oh so la-de-da, but look what they’re really like when you see behind the mask!’

And she knew that, when that day came, and her mild, bewildered, boyish husband, the professor, stumbled downstairs in his dressing gown to find out what was going on, it would be her standing outside there with her head hanging in shame, her between the policemen, her in the black dress drenched by the lake, with her hair all tangled and mud between her painted toes. The only shadow she’d have would be the one beside the professor, cast by the low sun, and stretching in from her own muddy feet across the threshold and the hallway floor, to zigzag away up the stairs.

It was still not dawn. Yet from far off to the east she could already hear the tide of clamouring birds.