Крис Бекетт - Spring Tide

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.