Gathering the Water (15 page)

‘He never even told me his name,' I said.

‘His name is Jacob Wright,' she said. ‘See how much more of an ordinary man it makes him.'

‘He told me something of the cause of his wandering.'

‘It was no cause, merely something for him to blame.'

‘Oh?'

‘His wife and family were never reluctant to leave their home. It was poorly located and built in an unsanitary place. Three babies his wife lost. Why should
that
not have played a greater part in his sense of loss and growing madness?'

‘Perhaps he distinguishes between those acts of God and the acts of men.'

‘More choice. A whole ripe tree of choice from which to pluck.'

‘Jacob Wright,' I said, seeing how much better clothed he was with the name than without it.

‘He was an engineer, like yourself,' she said. It was an almost intolerable thought.

‘What will become of him?'

‘Who knows? Is a man mad simply because another man points a finger at him and calls him mad?'

‘Then I wish he might be left in peace,' I said.

‘In this day and age? The nets are cast, Mr Weightman.'

I said nothing in reply.

She came to me and touched me briefly, as though to remove any pain she might have caused me by her earlier attack.

‘I wish I'd known his name and history from the beginning,' I said.

She nodded. ‘Perhaps there are people here who might think the same of you.'

‘To know about me?'

‘To understand something that might make their plight a little easier to bear.'

Their plight?

‘They have only to ask,' I said.

‘They would no sooner ask than reveal their own webbed feet to you.' She turned her face to the sky above us. The wind drew out her unbound hair. ‘I ought to be getting back and you ought to be getting on with your work.'

I waited until she lowered her face, and then said, ‘How many of those dutiful daughters would Martha have had?'

‘Three,' she said immediately. ‘Abigail, Rebecca and Mary.'

‘And her husband?'

‘A country doctor who loved her and cared for her, and who kept her comfortable and safe inside a well-appointed house inside a high-walled garden within a community of people who knew her and cared for her also.' She tried not to smile at all I had so easily exposed.

‘And grandchildren?' I said.

‘I try hard not to think of them,' she said. ‘There are limits to my indulgence; I know what purpose it serves.'

‘And you never confuse this imagining with choice.'

‘Never. But I shall not persevere in trying to persuade
you
of that.'

I let her know that I believed her. These beliefs were the props which kept her upright, just as the wind appeared to do on occasion, and she tested her beliefs as she leaned into the wind and tested that, too. I saw that she was strength and reason and belief enough for the pair of them.

We parted and I watched her go. She was quickly lost to
my sight, and only when she was finally gone did I thank her for not having asked me the names of my own unborn, beautiful and doting children.

In my dream I am walking across a field, the saturated surface of which is repeatedly rent open beneath me, causing me to leap from one spot to another, uncertain if the ground where I aim to land is solid or liquid or somewhere in between. It is a recurrent act – if such a thing can be said of the sleeping mind – only this time varied by the presence of a great crowd of people standing around me on the solid ground there, every one of them applauding my expertise at avoiding the pitfalls and soakings, and all of them shouting for me to run to them, these men, women and children all with their arms outstretched towards me, each one of them urging me to save myself. It is too large a crowd to be composed solely of the local inhabitants, and I recognize faces from long ago and hear voices I had never
thought to hear again, but these come only in snatches of unintelligible language, quickly lost to me amid the overall excitement.

I cannot say for certain that I hear in my dream the hatred, mockery and contempt that I know must season the calls of many in the crowd, but I hear something in that surge of yelling which, like the cry of a child, can be neither disguised nor ignored.

In places I sink to my waist; elsewhere the ground rises beneath me so that I stand clear of the water. At times I am wearing my high boots, and my leaping from place to place in the shallows is no more than a game, another act put on by me to entertain my watchers. And at other times my feet and legs are bare and I jump into submerged pools and land up to my waist in the coldest water. I feel my feet sucked into the mire beneath me. Several men throw ropes to me, but these fall short of where I stand, and the ones that do come close, the ones for which I might reach out, are quickly snatched away as my hand approaches them. When this happens, the laughter and the shouting is at its loudest, and it occurs to me then to stop jumping, to land upon some more solid ground and to stand there motionless, thus depriving my audience of its entertainment. But when I attempt to do this, and by my stillness and silence remove myself from this dreamed suffering, the solid ground upon which I stand turns to liquid, and I know – even in my sleep I know – that there is no end to my ordeal except waking into darkness.

‘Do you never speak of her?'

Mary Latimer paused briefly to await my reply.

I had mentioned Helen and my distant, former life – the life from which I now felt myself so far detached that it might have been the life and history of another man completely.

‘She died and it seemed to me as though I had lost everything I ever possessed to lose,' I said. ‘We had planned too far and too well into the future. When she died, I felt as though I had been deceived in some way.'

‘I won't make you smile by saying I know exactly what you mean.'

‘You would know better than most,' I told her. I signalled to her that I appreciated the kindness intended in her remark.

Martha walked ahead of us. I had encountered the pair
of them on the far side of the dam. I was surprised to see them so close to the dwellings and told her so.

‘She insisted on coming,' she said. ‘It was another of the places we used to walk. We avoided the houses by crossing the river downstream. We kept ourselves to this side.'

‘Was it where you came as girls?'

‘It was.'

She watched her sister for a moment.

Martha picked at the branches of a bush, collecting what few dead leaves it still held.

‘She thinks we are out gathering berries,' she said. ‘It was what we did. I used to object to being sent on the task, but she always derived a great deal of pleasure from it.'

Martha turned and waved to us and we both waved back. She held up what she had so far gathered. Most of the leaves fell from her hand, but she seemed not to notice this.

‘Was it a short illness?' she said.

‘Short and sudden and thorough. Though when its first signs showed and the doctors were sent for, I was convinced it was nothing – an autumn cold – and that, young and otherwise healthy as she was, she would quickly recover from it. Caroline and I sat with her as she rested and spoke with her about all our arrangements. The wedding was then only months away. There was no possibility – no possibility whatsoever – that her full recovery was not guaranteed and that it would not be swift and complete. What was this one small thing against all our hopes and preparations?'

‘But instead it took hold of her, ravaged her and killed her.'

I knew there was no callousness intended by the remark.

‘It took hold of us both,' I said. ‘Ravaged us both.'

‘Were you with her at the end?'

‘After a fortnight of tremors and sweating, of heat and cold and cramps, she grew calm and her breathing at last seemed easy. The doctor who had attended her latterly expressed his relieved and considered opinion that the worst was finally over and that we might now expect a full recovery. And because I believed him, because I could believe nothing else, I wept in my relief. Both Caroline and I – we held each other and we wept. We even performed a little celebratory dance in the corridor outside the bedroom. Her parents were beneath us and I heard the man repeat the same words to them. I heard their own exclamations and prayers. I held Caroline as tightly as I had ever held her. She was Helen, see? In that instant she was her healthy and recovered sister, and we both understood that. I clung to her and she clung to me. My tears ran down her neck and hers down mine. I have never experienced a joy such as I experienced then, never before, and certainly never since.'

‘A joy that made what was to follow all the more painful for you.'

I could only nod.

‘How soon afterwards did she die?'

‘The same night. We had a day, twelve hours of being buoyed upon our raft of hope and celebration. We prayed, we gave thanks, we redoubled our efforts to talk at every opportunity of the coming wedding.'

‘She was recovered enough to do this?'

‘Not Helen. I meant Caroline and I.'

‘I see.' She remained close to me, her eyes passing from me to her sister and then back to me.

‘I remember that she and I went for a walk,' I said. ‘It seemed we had been cooped up in that house for a month.
It was a fine day. We walked to the boathouse and sat there looking out over the water. She held my hand. We told each other that our prayers had been answered and that the path of our three lives together – for she intended staying close to us when Helen and I were wed – was again straight and clear ahead of us. I sometimes sensed that Helen was envious of the easy understanding between her sister and myself. She and I possessed a similar understanding, of course, but the tie between Caroline and myself was in some small and vital way different. She was always more direct with me than Helen was. I suppose many might consider her less feminine. She called her sister a “flutterer-of-eyelashes” and herself a “pointer-of-fingers”.' This sudden memory of the words and of her voice when she said them caused me to feel suddenly chilled. ‘She told me often enough that Helen and I were not well suited to each other, but it was only her way of avoiding saying a great deal more, and she never once doubted that her sister and I would make each other happy. I remember I once asked her what kind of man she herself hoped to marry and she refused to speculate. She said she would not blinker herself on the subject, and that she would only know what kind of man when he arrived. It would have pleased me no end to have heard her say that she would marry a man like me, and she sensed this and swore vehemently that she would never marry a pond-builder or a pipe-layer. A beggar-poet would suit her better, she said.'

Mary Latimer smiled at this. ‘Then she saw neither the poet nor the beggar in you, Mr Weightman.'

‘I was never either. Besides, for what would I ever truly have the need to beg?'

She avoided answering me by looking back to her sister and calling her name. Again, Martha responded with a wave.

‘That poor bush will consider itself harshly treated if she does not soon move on to another,' she said.

‘Perhaps no other possesses such ripe berries,' I said.

The slope beneath us cut off all view of the dam and the water, and to stand there and look up the valley as we were able to, you might imagine that neither the wall nor the reservoir yet existed. I pointed this out to her and she agreed, adding that this was why she had brought Martha there.

‘There are still some things I am able to do for her,' she said. ‘Little enough, but they mean a great deal to her.'

‘Do you believe she sometimes imagines herself to be a child again on these errands?'

‘It would be something to hope,' she said.

‘So – shall I one day become a beggar, do you think?' I asked her.

‘We are none of us above it,' she said.

‘I begged for Helen to be spared,' I said. ‘I begged for her life, for her health and her strength to return. What good then was my begging?'

‘And how soon did you know that all this talk of recovery was a false dawn?'

‘Soon enough. Her fever returned. She fitted and vomited continuously until another of the doctors was able to return and sedate her. He seemed surprised at the other man's prognosis.'

‘And in that moment you felt the world pulled from under you.'

‘Felt it pulled away and felt myself pushed into the emptiness it left behind.'

‘And she died soon after.'

‘An hour after the man had gone. His sedatives stopped her fitting. She still vomited a little, and Caroline and I took it in turns to hold her head so that she would not choke. Her mother and father slept in the adjoining room and were in and out at the slightest sound. I see now what little account I took of their own anguish.'

‘Did she die in your arms?'

‘Caroline and I held her head between us. A particularly violent bout of retching occurred, made all the worse by her remaining barely conscious throughout, unable to hold up her own head or to support herself in the bed. We fetched bowls and cloths and warm water between us.'

‘You need tell me no more,' she said, though the offer was made for my sake alone.

But I could not stop myself. I could not stop myself from saying the words,
And then she died
.

In the midst of a violent spasm she blew out her cheeks, opened wide her mouth, let her eyes roll to look directly up at me, and died. Caroline cradled her sister's head all the tighter and started to keen, and this unbearable noise summoned her parents and they too were with their daughter within seconds of her death, her father on his knees beside the bed, her mother holding so tightly to the grieving, living daughter that you might imagine she too was in danger of being taken from them.