Gathering the Water (16 page)

It lasted like that for an hour, before Caroline finally fell silent and we were able to disengage ourselves, one from the other, until only the bed and its corpse remained unmoving, and those of us who raised ourselves from the body wandered like ghosts around the dimly lit room in an emptiness so dark and so cold and uncertain that none of us knew any longer what we did or thought.

I paused in all this remembering to take account of the tears in my eyes, which ran into the corners of my mouth.

‘And then she died,' I said, not knowing whether I was repeating myself or saying the words for the first time.

Mary Latimer took out a handkerchief and wiped my face.

‘And you have been alone ever since,' she said. I closed my eyes.

She wiped my chin and then traced the tips of her fingers along my jaw to see what remained.

When I opened my eyes she was looking at me intently.

‘Perhaps I'll ask Martha to turn her leaves into jam for you,' she said.

I could not help but laugh at the remark.

She returned her handkerchief to her sleeve, where she must have felt the wetness of my tears against her arm.

This morning I descended the slope to discover the corpses of four supposedly drowned sheep laid out across the path, their fleeces flattened and matted by the rain which had been falling all night. They were thin beasts, with black faces. It is two days since I was last on the path and they were not there then. Their appearance is a puzzle to me. Not because I do not understand what they are intended to represent – the message they send to me – but because I am uncertain as to the intention behind the act. Am I to be provoked this late into some response? Is there someone above all others in the valley whose resentment will not abate?

Further along I encountered a group of men gathering stones in a field. It was clear to me by their response to my
greeting that they knew of the corpses and might have had some hand in putting them there.

The result of their labour lay in a small mound beside them, and having paused briefly to acknowledge me, the men returned to their work, searching out and retrieving the stones as though they were a valuable crop. To have asked them why they did this with the water only six feet below them, and soon to cover the field in which they stood, would have served no purpose. The condemnation of futility carries no strength here.

Considering the dead sheep, I was later reminded of a flood I had witnessed four years earlier in the Vale of Evesham. A small dam there had been poorly constructed and had begun to fracture from the day the full weight of the water was accumulated behind it. A warning to evacuate those close downriver was issued, but largely ignored. Engineers advised that the sluices be opened to reduce the pressure, but the owner of the reservoir dismissed all this as scaremongering.

The dam broke in the night and the reservoir emptied.

The following morning I watched from a hillside as the body of water rushed below me. It was an area of poultry breeding, and my strongest memory of the small flood was of seeing thousands of drowned white hens go floating rapidly past me in the current, looking from that height like nothing more than the windblown scattering of apple blossom in a May shower.

Mary Latimer came to me across the dam. She stood beside me and looked out over the water. I waited for her to speak.

‘A child died,' she said.

‘Where?'

She motioned to a house in the shadow of the dam.

This was the first winter the structure had been fully in place, and because of the falling trajectory of the sun, I saw that some houses, including the one below, were now cast into perpetual gloom by it.

‘They say their springs are polluted and that drains and cesspools are backed up and overflowing.'

‘This is clean water.' I indicated the surface stretching away from us.

‘It isn't the first death.'

‘Oh?'

‘An old woman, already ailing from a great deal else.'

‘And are more anticipated?'

‘What will you do? Put it in one of your reports? Visit the grieving parents with your condolences?'

Her hostility, accustomed though I had become to it, and knowing what purpose it served, nevertheless continued to unsettle me.

‘Is Martha well?' I said, knowing that we were already on the path back to her sister.

‘I came away to clear my head.'

‘Is she no better?'

‘She condemns me. All last night she raged at me for having deceived and betrayed her.'

‘In what way, betrayed her?'

‘She left that to my own imagination.'

I saw by the darkness around her eyes that she had spent a sleepless night.

‘She is now convinced the water has come naturally and that it is a judgement upon us, upon me. I know how laughably predictable the remark might seem, but
she
now chooses to believe it.'

‘I don't know what more you can do for her.'

‘No,' she said.

‘Several days ago a man cursing me for the loss of his home told me it would have been better if their flood – that was what he too called it – had come upon them without warning, in the night as they slept, and that it had swept everything before it in an instant, sparing nothing and no one, no building, no animal, no person. Then, he said, at least everyone would have
pitied
them.'

‘They pity themselves enough without any addition.
Life here may be hard, but what do you see any of them doing to make it even the smallest part easier for themselves? They live now as they lived when I determined to leave it all behind me and never to return.'

‘He said I was an excuse of a man put in charge of other men's excuses, one after another, and that I smoothed out all the problems for the money-makers at the cost of everyone here.'

‘Do you want me to tell you that he was wrong, that again you are misunderstood?'

I leaned over the rim of the dam and looked down at its wall. She moved closer to me.

‘I bound her to a chair,' she said. She too looked down at the barely perceptible curve, at the gentle lash of the waves below us.

‘Bound her?'

‘She would have done herself harm. She tore her clothes. She burned her hand in the fire and I deliberately bandaged it into a ball to soften her blows against herself.'

‘Is she alone now?'

‘No, someone is sitting with her. She finally fell asleep. I didn't even need to explain why I had secured her. Pity, you see. For me, for her, a surfeit of the ooze.'

‘When will she go?'

‘Four days.'

Her answer surprised me. I had asked merely to return to the practicalities of the situation.

‘So soon?'

‘I came down for my mail,' she said. ‘There was only this.' She showed me the final eviction notice sent to her by the Board. Its date was the last day of the year, thirty days hence.

‘Will you be ready?'

‘How long does it take to walk through a door and utter a prayer for the stones behind you to fall in a heap?'

Beneath us, the door of the house where the child had died opened and a man and a woman came out into the half-light. I instinctively withdrew from the rim so they would not see me, but she remained where she stood, watching them closely. I heard the woman's cries, amplified by the structure against which they were cast.

‘Can you not bear to watch them?' she said, eventually withdrawing so that she too might not be seen by the grieving couple.

She left me after that, leaving me alone on the structure.

The same man who had long ago told me about the lake at Hangzhou had also repeated a proverb which said that if a man sat for long enough on the bank of a river he would, in time, see the corpses of all his enemies go floating past him. I looked out over the rising lake and thought of those lost archers standing before their crushing wave.

I returned home, encountering no one.

Slender black clouds formed and trailed like ribbons over the far rim of the valley.

I was by then far behind in my report-writing. I had neglected to make several recent surveys, and a great deal else needed to be done. Increasingly, the weather was against me, but this, I knew, was an excuse. I was rising later than usual, and I frequently stayed up into the early hours of the morning and slept until noon. Where previously I had gone out in the sharpest of winds, I now avoided all discomfort.

For all the world knew or cared I might have been a lone envoy sitting at a river station deep inside some unexplored
country. Perhaps if I had been, then my growing discontent and uncertainty would have been easier to bear. What excuse was there for it here?

That night I woke, climbed from my bed, knelt beside it and said a brief, late prayer for the suffering woman and the dead child. It was my first prayer in over a year, and was said as much for my own sake as for theirs.

 

I know it is a common thing among the poets to talk of the mournful cries of the curlews over these empty places, but the fact remains that their calling – the birds themselves all too often invisible – is so unavoidable and distinct that it cannot easily be dismissed. Too often, above the noise of the wind, it is the only thing to be heard here, and in most instances the cry of the birds is so carried by the wind and distorted by it as to create an unsettling effect in the mind of the solitary listener.

It is now more than fifteen months since I last heard the dawn calls of the peahens on the lawns of Helen's home. I was reminded then, I recall, woken so suddenly in the barely risen sun, of the poem which likened the call of the birds to cries of lost souls wandering in Purgatory.

It seemed all sun and brightening dawns in those days. Here it is all growing darkness and ever-shortening days.

I am told that the springs here are harder to bear by those unaccustomed to them than the autumns, and that the summers – short enough though they are – are longer in coming than they are in passing.

I am frequently warned to make provision for fuel and food in the event of snow. When it comes here it arrives with a suddenness and a ferocity seldom seen further south. Its earliest falls are predicted daily. In the past, men who have been away from their homes here have been kept out of the valley for days and even weeks on end because no progress could be made against the falling and drifting. I am told that a fall of only a few inches under calm conditions might easily be drifted here to six or seven feet in the strong winds.

Several days ago there were reports of falls to the west, and only yesterday word of a fall some miles to the north. The configuration of the higher land in both these directions means that they often receive the first of the winter, and the season is spoken of as though it comes at these outlying places like an unstoppable army, which, having conquered these first defences, is then free to advance further, arriving here with nothing to counter it.

Speculation increases with each passing day of darkening cloud.

From the ridge above my house I can see the distant whitening of the high peaks, and there are days now when the whole dome of sky is so uniformly dark and impenetrable, and without even variation in the shape or shade of cloud, that those days must be considered as little more than lesser nights.

To add to this effect, there are also days, clear days, when the moon is both magnified and clearly visible from dawn to dusk as it curves across the heavens.

I remember the summer's evening ball in Shropshire to celebrate our engagement, planned to coincide with the full moon so that there might be light on the driveway for the coming and going of the carriages.

Four days passed since my meeting with Mary Latimer on the dam. I rose early with the intention of visiting her and Martha before her sister's departure. Mary Latimer, I knew, would return later in the day, but I wanted to see them while they were still together and to offer them what little assistance she was still able to decline.

I went by way of the dam, guessing that they would come down from their home to await there the carriage Mary Latimer had hired. I knew she would make arrangements to go early, before there were others around to witness what was happening, and so that she herself might return before dark.

I arrived within sight of the dam and the dwellings and saw no one there. Convinced I was in good time, I waited.

It was there, less than an hour later, that I saw the man to whom I had entrusted my mails. My first thought was to hide myself from him. My letters and packages, few enough to begin with, now scarcely repaid the effort to bring them, and each time I encountered him he behaved towards me as though we had agreed a contract on which I had now reneged. But even as I considered concealing myself, I heard him call my name. I raised my cane to him, and in reply he waved something in the air. I had never before seen him run.

He came to me, an envelope clasped to his chest. There was always some drama attached to these arrivals, always some small ceremony to be endured. I feigned indifference. I saw my name on the label, saw too that, as previously, my address was written as nothing more than the name of the valley. Another man might have appreciated the status this conferred, but I personally regretted that throughout the time I had been there no one had thought to seek out the name of my lodgings from my own mails.

The letter had come only an hour ago. It was fortunate that my carrier had been waiting in expectation of something else when it had arrived. I was a lucky man that he had no other pressing business that day. Had I seen him running? He had run all the way from the mail coach. It had been his intention to run to my home. All his other business would be suspended until my mail was delivered. I manoeuvred myself through this predictable charade, enduring and, where possible, shortening it until I was finally given the letter.