After the Rain

by John Bowen

  Sonya said, “But how could you get away with it?”

  “I didn’t want to,” said Wesley, “I’d have hanged for Mother and welcome, but they wouldn’t have me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he didn’t do it,” said Muriel, “that’s why not.

  “I did. In all but the act, I did. Mother looked up at me from the wash-basin. ‘Put that thing down at once, Wesley,’ she said. And when I saw her looking at me so straight and vindictive, I put the cleaver down on the toilet seat, you see, and started to cry.”

  “Then?”

  “It was the concentration of it, I suppose; she was always telling us she wasn’t strong. She stood there with the wet stockings in her hand. ‘I’ll not forget this, Wesley,’ she said. Then she caved in at the knees, and fell on the floor. I lifted her up, and slopped some water over her, and carried her back to her room, but it was too late. She never spoke again before she died. I killed that old woman.”

  “No such thing.”

  “I killed her. Muriel didn’t want me to, but I went to the police, and spoke out what I knew. But they wouldn’t take any notice. I murdered her, and I ought to suffer for it. You can’t tell me God isn’t punishing the world, when such evil is allowed to flourish.”

  “Well!” said Sonya.

  Wesley said, “We are all guilty. I am guilty because I killed my wife’s mother, and you are guilty because you allow me to do it. You don’t think I ought to be punished, I know that.”

  “Well, no, I don’t,” I said, “I think you’ve probably punished yourself too much already.”

  “You’re right there,” said Muriel.

  “Fools!” Wesley said, “The earth is given over to a kingdom of fools, and the Lord is wrath. He sendeth the waters from on high, and those who have turned away from righteousness shall be swallowed up.”

  “I never heard such nonsense,” said Sonya.

  “That’s just what Mr. Banner told him. Mr. Banner being a clergyman, you’d think Wesley would listen. Miracles, he said; there’s no such thing as miracles nowadays, he said; the Church doesn’t take any account of Divine Punishment. He sat there on the roof of our house with Wesley for hours and hours, explaining to him how that Flood in the Bible had really been caused by the earth shifting its axis or something, and how God was just a spirit inside us, but it didn’t do any good. Once Wesley has an idea inside that head of his, he won’t change it,” Muriel said tearfully, “I know. It was just the same over Mother.”

  *

  Another picture stays in my mind.

  We had unloaded the dinghy and put it away in the hold, when we saw Tony Ryle, the body-builder.

  Tony Ryle was fishing. At one edge of the raft, by the lashed steering bar, there was a little shelter like a sentry-box, and in this he sat. From the back you could see only the wet wooden shelter, peaked at the top, the smooth sea beyond, and the rain like a thickness in the air. From the side, the rod and line projected from the box-like decoration, and so did Tony’s head, wet with the rain as he watched the float.

  Just as, Aristotle tells us, every man has within him the possibility of the Good Man, so Tony’s shape was raw material for the Good Shape, and he had gone a long way towards achieving it. Broad of shoulder, narrow of waist, thick of neck, curly of hair, Tony sat, like God, brooding over the face of the waters in the rain and the evening twilight.

  *

  “You’ll be wanting to shave,” said Arthur.

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “You’ll find a razor in the bathroom. There’s no hot water—we try to conserve power to that extent—but the rain water is very soft.”

  “But I don’t want to.”

  “We like to keep ourselves looking neat. I have always found that a man who allows his appearance to go to pieces, goes to pieces mentally and morally as well.”

  “What about soap?”

  “You will have to manage without. The skin soon gets used to it.”

  Banner’s face, Wesley’s, Tony’s, Arthur’s own face; all bore the scars of cold water, soapless shaving. “Captain Hunter has a beard,” I said.

  “He had it when we came.”

  Hunter said, “I keep it trimmed, you know.”

  “Will you say grace please, Mr. Banner?” said Arthur.

  “For what we have just received, may the Lord make us truly thankful.”

  “Amen.” Sonya grinned at me across the table; she and I had been the only two people at supper who had been able to finish our portions of fish-head stew.

  “We don’t allow irreverence here,” said Arthur. “Not for any superstitious reasons—I am an agnostic myself—but because we find that an element of formality at mealtimes helps to remind us that we are civilized beings.”

  Mr. Banner said, “We’re all agnostics nowadays. In a manner of speaking.”

  “I’m not,” said Sonya, and Muriel, emboldened, added, “Nor am I, I’m sure.”

  “That will do,” Arthur said. “You’ll find the razor on the top shelf of the bathroom cabinet, Mr. Clarke. Please clean it after use.”

  I was not in the mood or position to dispute Arthur’s leadership. Indeed, Sonya and I were simply grateful for the tidy behaviour that was expected of the raft-dwellers; whatever “new view of social relationships” Arthur had adopted did not seem to include rape. I left the table obediently, and went into the bathroom.

  Arthur followed me. “I wanted a word with you, Mr. Clarke,” he said. “As a new arrival, you are not yet used to our ways here, and, if you wish to stay, I am afraid you will have to adapt yourself to them.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “I don’t know whether you have come to any explanation in your mind about this Flood?”

  “God?”

  Arthur smiled tolerantly. “So Mr. Otterdale would tell you,” he said, “and Mr. Banner would say the whole thing is due to a fine dust of silver oxide, which has somehow penetrated the earth’s atmosphere from outer space. As an agnostic, I am not interested in supernatural explanations, Mr. Clarke. But one thing is certain. Whether the Flood is intended as a Divine Punishment or not, it is the best thing that could ever have happened.”

  “What?”

  “I do a lot of reading in my spare time,” said Arthur. “I have never believed that time should be squandered; a man who is not interested in improving himself is not worth the gift of reason, in my view.”

  “I gather who-is-it—Tony?—agrees with you.”

  “Mr. Ryle, he tells me, is a body-builder; that is to say, he is a narcissist of a rather stupid kind. He is not interested in mental discipline, Mr. Clarke. I myself, on the other hand, have been practising the strictest mental disciplines ever since I was a boy. I do a great deal of reading. If I had not done so, I should not be in command here.”

  “No.”

  “And if I were not in command, it is doubtful whether any of you would survive.”

  “You think we shall then?”

  “Of course. Why else have I already set the crew to work making nets, caulking water barrels, improvising rough furniture from the empty crates in the hold? All these things will be useful to us when we land. I have it all arranged, Mr. Clarke. Natural Selection is responsible for the Flood, and by Natural Selection certain people will survive it. I shall be one of them, and so, if you are careful to follow my orders, will you.”

  “And all of us here?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Just why, do you think, did Natural Selection——?”

  “I can see that you are not a serious student of human affairs, Mr. Clarke.”

  “So much of my life has been spent in the kitchen,” I said.

  “Perhaps. Then let me use a kitchen metaphor to explain matters to you. Have you noticed what happens when you have too much of any foodstuff, Mr. Clarke? —too much meat? too many loaves of bread? too many bottles of milk? too many tomatoes? They go bad, and spoil. That is what has happened to the human race. Rece
ntly there have been too many people in the world, and they have been increasing at an increasing rate. Did you know, for instance, that the population of Ceylon was increasing at a rate of about 3 per cent a year—by three out of every hundred in the first year, 3.09 out of every hundred the next—the whole process had an accelerator built in. In three generations or so, we should have used up the natural resources of the earth, and reverted to a state of the most appalling barbarism. I tell you, Mr. Clarke, if it had not been for this Flood, there would have been disaster before very long.”

  “You mean we’ve been saved from race-suicide by an act of—well, Nature if you like?” I said.

  “Nothing of the kind. If you wish to understand what I am saying, you will do better not to interrupt. Not only were men increasing their numbers at a terrifying rate, but the poorer, more brutish sort were increasing at a rate faster than the others. Have you any idea of the rate of mental deficiency in Great Britain over the past fifty years? No, of course you haven’t. The proportion of morons and near-morons has increased because, although one can persuade intelligent people to practise birth control, one cannot teach contraceptive methods to idiots, and large families have persisted among people of low intelligence. In other words, men have increased their numbers while lowering their quality; idiots have increasingly outnumbered the intelligent, and, under a system of democracy, had as much political power.” He took off his spectacles to polish them, and I noticed that his hands were trembling. “Lunacy!” he said. “It was lunacy.”

  “I see.”

  “The Flood has wiped all that out. Only intelligent people will survive it, and such of the stupid people as they choose to carry with them.”

  “Why carry any?”

  “For the rough work. You observed Mr. Ryle’s physical proportions. He will be very useful to us when the waters subside, and we begin our settlement. And with careful cross-breeding——”

  “What if they never subside at all?”

  “Of course they will subside,” Arthur said angrily. “Of course they will. Do you imagine Natural Selection intends to replace us by fish?”

  *

  In fact, I did find a way to use Glub in the cooking; it turned out that I was a good cook of the sort which improves by experimenting. Glub Grits pounded together made a substitute for breadcrumbs, and I invented a kind of oil by crushing the scales and viscera of fish. The day we had fried fillets of cod, my claim to be a graduate of the École Gastronomique was recognized.

  I have said something already of Arthur and Hunter, something of the Otterdales. The others of our party were Harold Banner, Tony Ryle and Gertrude Harrison, who used to teach Voice and Dramatic Art to private pupils in an Earl’s Court mews flat.

  Banner, the clergyman, had been rescued with the Otterdales. He had become their lodger in the early days of the Flood when his own rectory, a Nissen hut in the churchyard, had become uninhabitable, and he had remained with them. I understood that they had spent several days together in a rowing boat. Wesley would not row, because to save himself would have been contrary to God’s will, and Banner had not allowed Muriel to do so. His hands were raw when the raft picked them up, and still bore the scars. He told me that, during his university days when he went in for this kind of thing, the blisters had always turned into callouses eventually, and he had supposed they would do so again.

  Tony Ryle did not tell me much about himself at that time. I gathered that he had worked for a printing firm as a machine-minder. He had always been interested, he said, in improving his physique. To “improve one’s physique”—and not to body-build—is, I discovered, one of the body-builders’ stock phrases. The key word is “proportion”; if you don’t improve your physique proportionately, you might as well not improve it at all. In fact Tony had concentrated the area of his improvement on the chest, back and shoulders, and, although his legs were sturdy and well-shaped enough, one felt that their only purpose was to support the massive and knotted triangle of his trunk.

  Most human beings want to be admired. Some men can sing, play the piano in pubs, add up columns of figures in record time, write plays or sonatas, paint, grow giant vegetable marrows; but all these activities demand, not only application, but some sort of inborn talent. Body-building requires only a body, and the slighter it is to begin with, the better: “I was a Seven-Stone Weakling” is the beginning of the body-builders’ Cinderella story. Tony had never been a seven-stone weakling, but he had thought people laughed at him when he went bathing at the local open-air pool; “I never had no chest,” he said, “I was sort of puny really.” He was not sort of puny any more. Even on the raft he had made himself some weights and a piece of board, and he used to go down to the hold every day to practise. When Sonya found this out, she insisted on practising too, and Arthur encouraged them; he was very much in favour of recreational activities, and said that men had been kept alive in lifeboats by playing guessing games. The two of them would stand there, a little unsteadily as the raft tilted from side to side in the gentle swell, and Tony would lift his weights while Sonya did a simple barre, using two crates piled one on top of the other.

  Tony never talked much. He would do his exercises, or fish, or scrub out the galley, or perform any of the other jobs Arthur would think up for us, his blue eyes always a little anxious, as if each activity took up the whole of his attention and left none over for conversation. If one of us were to appeal to him in discussion he would say, “Well, I don’t know really,” and the discussion would roll past him while he was still sorting out his ideas. (In this he did not resemble Hunter, who regarded ideas of any sort as not concerning him.) Only Sonya would have the patience to wait for Tony. “He’s a nice boy,” she would say, “and I don’t think they ought to go so fast.”

  Fastest of all was Gertrude. She had no patience in talking. All conversations were to her vehicles for emotion: “There is so much to give,” she would say. “One must give it all.” All her life, Gertrude had been giving. She had given to her friends, her pupils and (less frequently as time went by) to the Public, and the more she had given, the more she had to give; the process was self-renewing.

  Gertrude gushed. It was not the gushing of a silly ill-informed woman, but the gushing of an oil-well—all good rich stuff, and from the heart. I am sure she must have been an excellent teacher because she had no sense of the ridiculous; you could make a fool of yourself with her, and if only you felt what you were doing, Gertrude would not see the foolishness, and neither would you. I can remember her standing on the table in the cabin after supper, delivering Mark Antony’s oration to the citizens, her arms two flexible pistons of indignation, her breasts quivering, breaking off from time to time to explain the psychological implications of the situation; and somehow what should have been supremely silly became a moving theatrical experience.

  None of this did for Tony. He could not understand it, and she would not stop for him; her pupils, I suppose, had taken what they could use from the generous flood, and if they took only a twentieth of what there was, it was still enough. And, surprisingly in such a woman, she was impatient with him. Naturally sympathetic to atmosphere as any actress must be, she had caught from Arthur a little of the scorn he felt for Tony, and it remained at the back of her mind as a feeling that Tony was not “one of our kind of people”. And so, although she appealed to him sometimes (she appealed to everyone; she would have appealed to the gulls of the air to confirm a point of feeling), she did not wait for him, or notice his bewilderment and pain when he was snubbed.

  What surprised me was that she should think highly of Arthur; surely he was not “one of our kind of people”? She had so little in common with him, except to complement his narrowness with her breadth, his bile with her richness. What circumstances had first brought them together, I could not discover; Gertrude who would talk freely of her life in the old days, was reticent about her escape from London. Arthur had met her, and had picked her up, and had taken her with him until they found
safety together on the raft. She seemed to admire him and to accept his leadership completely; I had not the courage to ask her whether she actually liked Arthur, nor am I certain whether she knew.

  *

  Arthur was holding an after-supper conference. “We shall have to think about scurvy,” he said.

  “We shall have to think about mould,” said Sonya, “I’m sure the Glub’ll have penicillin growing all over it if this goes on much longer.”

  “It’s vacuum packed,” said Hunter.

  Muriel said, “We shall have to think about rheumatism. It can’t be healthy, never having dry underwear.

  “I have already thought of that. We shall light the stove one day a week.”

  “Oh bliss!”

  “What shall we use for fuel?” I said.

  “Driftwood.”

  “But it’s wet.”

  “We shall use some of the wooden crates in the hold to start the fire. Driftwood will be stacked close to the stove to dry, ready for use on the next occasion when further driftwood will be similarly dried. Is that clear?”

  “Dear Arthur!” said Gertrude. “At all times so far-seeing!”

  I said, “But if we do that, can’t we keep the fire going all the time? There’s plenty of driftwood.”

  There was a moment of silence. Arthur’s mouth contracted, and his adam’s apple jerked a little. “There is no reason why not,” he said, “provided that somebody is always on hand to keep the stove from going out.”

  Ridiculously I found myself a little frightened. Arthur, so benign a leader at other times in his acid way, lost all his benignity if one suggested altering any detail of his plans; I should have phrased my suggestion more tactfully. But, while hostility from Arthur might have been expected, there was more than that. In that moment of silence I could feel the hostility spreading from Arthur to Gertrude, to Hunter, to the Otterdales, to Banner. I could hear the sound of the rain and the tick of the electric clock. Sonya moved from her place by the empty stove, and came and stood by my side. “Of course,” I said, “it might be difficult to find enough driftwood. I’m sure you’re right, Arthur. I’m sorry.”