Short story · 6 min read · Set in The Terraces ·
The Family Upstairs Sends Letters Back
On the Terraces the water has risen an inch a week through a dry house while no rain falls. The family has moved upstairs and posts letters to whatever is below, and the letters come back answered.
The water came without weather.
That was the first fact the council could not hold on to. Colette Wray had kept the rainfall charts out of a lifetime of cheap habits, and there was nothing on them — no rain for nineteen days, drains dry, water table steady, her brother the plumber had walked the whole of the Terraces tapping pipes with a coin and found nothing but iron and quiet. Yet the kitchen floor of number 11 stood a quarter-inch deep on the Monday, and an inch on the Monday after, and kept rising. An inch a week. Clear, cold, still. It did not smell. It did not move unless the house moved.
The city sent a man with a dipstick and a clipboard, and he wrote down his figures, and approved a form, and the form regretted to say that the origin of internal standing water could not at this time be established. They moved upstairs. That was the whole of the advice anyone gave, and it was good advice, because the water stopped where the ground floor stopped — flat, patient, levelled at the underside of the ceiling as if it had read the plans. It never rose to the stairs. It never put a hand on the first floor. Frank said it was polite, and meant it as a joke, and then did not joke about it again.
They learned its manners. It rose while they slept and was never at the doors when they came down to look. It carried nothing into the house and took nothing out — the ring binder of recipes floated to the dresser and back each week, sightseeing, and stayed dry wherever the leaves had been pressed flat. Sounds carried strangely through it. On still nights the flooded kitchen held a note like a wet finger on glass, and stopped holding it if you breathed on the other side of the floorboards.
It was in the sixth week, at the point where the water stood at the third stair, that Colette wrote the first letter. She would like it understood that she was not a woman given to writing letters to water. She was fifty-one years old, she did the pools, she had buried her mother in Ashby with the correct paperwork. But the house had gone quiet in a way houses do not go quiet, and she was upstairs with a biro and no blank walls, and she wrote:
To the tenant below. We are not leaving. Kindly direct any correspondence to the first floor, first door. — C. Wray.
She copied it out fair, put it in an envelope, wrote the address on it — The Tenant, Ground Floor, No. 11 — and carried it down and posted it through her own kitchen door, into the water, because it seemed less mad than shouting, and no madder.
Nothing happened for three weeks except that the water rose four more inches and passed the worktop.
Then the letter came back.
It did not come floating up the stairs. It came through the front-door letterbox, dry, franked with a postmark that was a genuine postmark shape and no town anyone reads, in a hand she recognised before she got the envelope open. It was Frank's hand — his fifty-eight-year-old hand, the hand he writes the cheques with. There is a wife somewhere who could be made to laugh at that, and then who opened her own husband's handwriting while her own husband sat upstairs doing the crossword, and could not laugh.
Yours of the sixth received and understood, it said. The house is not empty below. It has never been empty below; the water is not an occupant, it is an office. Regret the delay. Yours.
Colette sat on the top stair with it for a long time. Then she went up, and put it in the drawer with Frank's old love letters from 1971, which were in the same hand and did not help her compare them, and she did not tell Frank on the Wednesday, and told him the Friday, because a marriage is a thing you post things through.
They wrote back together after that. It became, by some degree that Colette has never been able to fix in date, ordinary. The replies came — through the letterbox, always dry, always franked wrong. The prose was courteous and slightly wrong, the way a form is wrong when the typed word has eaten a line: Reference your enquiry of the fourteenth. The silt is not ours to place. You will find it has chosen. Do not endorse the kitchen door, it is already stamped. Each reply was in a hand they knew — Frank's that first time, then her mother's, then the landlord's, then a schoolteacher neither of them thought of from one decade to the next. The hands were accurate. That was the worst of it. The handwriting could be sworn to.
The eighth week, the flood turned. It went down the way it had come, an inch a week, calm and weatherless, and in the fourth week down it left, exactly as the old stories along the Terraces said it would, a thin grey coat of river silt on one object, and one only: the photograph of Frank's father in the passage, in the frame Colette had been meaning to give away since the spring. She did not give it away. She put it back on the shelf, silt and all, because placing it seemed to be a signature of some kind and she would rather the house know where she stood.
The laboratory did find them at the end, this one thing: the silt matched no soil in the county. It matched, closely enough for two men in dust coats to go grey about it, the riverbed of the Colne waters, dammed in 1931 and forty kilometres away under a reservoir, on a bed no dredger has touched since.
The letters kept coming after the water left. The kitchen is dry, the floorboards are up inspected, and every so often an envelope comes through the letterbox, wrong town, right hand. The latest one is the shortest, and it is the one she has not answered yet, because it is in her own handwriting — not hers as she writes now, but hers as she will write it, looser, older, the hand she has seen in her aunt at seventy — and it is dated the ninth of next month, three days from now.
Received and filed, it says. Thank you for your patience. The house will not write again.
She has the letter on the kitchen table, dry as the day it was posted, and she has not decided whether to treat it as a bill, or a blessing, or a death that has not come to her yet. What she would like to know — and she is aware the city has no form for it — is what she will have written on the ninth, and to whom in that house the thanks will have been owed.