The Man Who Rained Read Free Page B

‘Patron saint of sailors, among all things.’ He chuckled. He had a habit of closing his
sentences with a chuckle instead of a full stop. Elsa wound open the window to poke out her head and look up, then up further.
    It was gargantuan, disproportionate to the needs of the tiny town; a massif of stone to rival any cathedral. And it was entirely unlit. The night air around it looked displaced, as if evicted
from its rightful position by the immense bulk of the building. She thought of the cathedrals of New York, and how at night their chiselled stone faces were celebrated by brilliant lamps. The
Church of Saint Erasmus was lit by nothing. And she could tell, even in the gloom, that it would be a very different kind of spectacle if it were. Its awe was in its darker-than-nightness, its
graceless silhouette, its sad blunt steeple hardly taller than the highest point of its roof, its broad sloping sides built for girth rather than height. More like a titanic pagan megalith than a
Christian church.
    They turned out of Saint Erasmus Square and drove along more streets of hunched terraces and town houses. She caught some of the names: Auger Lane, Drillbit Alley, Foreman’s Avenue.
‘There were mines here once,’ explained Kenneth. ‘In fact, the whole town is built on them.’
    Then they turned into Prospect Street, a name she recognized. Here, at number thirty-eight, Kenneth parked the car and turned off the engine.
    It was a four-storey house, crumbling but charming. Kenneth confessed that he spent most of his life in it watching cricket matches on television. He joked that cricket and lashings of rum were
all he had cared to hold on to of his old life in St Lucia. The keys he gave her for her room were large and warm, like the hand he clasped around hers when he placed them in her palm. He let go
slowly, giving her fingers a squeeze.
    ‘You are here now,’ he said in a formal voice, clearly aware of how momentous the occasion was for her. A kick of adrenaline perked her up. Yes, here she was. At the start of
starting over.
    She grinned and left Kenneth smiling after her from the bottom of the stairs, while she ascended to the uppermost floor. Kenneth had explained how he had converted this space into a one-bed
apartment some years ago, when his fully grown son came to live here and wanted a place of his own. Here stood the door: a panel of rich, varnished wood like the lid of a treasure chest. She
weighed the key in her hand: its head was the size of a medallion and satisfactorily heavy. She pushed it into the lock, pausing to enjoy the tarnished brass of the door handle and the flecks of
rust on the hinges, then she reached out, pinched her finger and thumb around the head of the key, and began to twist.
    The mechanism of the lock made a noise like a quarter dropped into a wishing well. She opened the door and listened to the hinges sing.
    She closed her eyes and remembered all the beds she’d called her own down the years. The bed she’d had as a kid, on which she used to sit with her duvet piled over her, reading with
a torch the cloud atlas her dad gave her; the bed in her college dorm that she’d shared with various bugs and boys; the bed in her New York studio, narrow as a pew; Peter’s bed and its
soft white sheets; stretches on sofas and floors.
    She opened her eyes.
    Beyond the door a dark stretch of hallway into which she walked so excitedly that she half-expected the air to crackle. She felt along the wall for the light switch and clicked it on.
    The walls were papered grey, with a pattern that might once have been artful but was now as broken as aeroplane contrails. In places the wallpaper peeled up where it reached the skirting boards,
which ran around a floor of bare wood. At the end of the hallway hung a full-length mirror in a silver frame, like something from a fairy story.
    She left her cases in the hall under a row of coat pegs, took another deep breath and closed the door to shut