Gathering the Water Read online

  ‘Please, take off your boots,’ Martha said to me. She directed me to a chair and then knelt beside me, as though about to pull off my boots. The gesture – behaving as though I were a close friend or acquaintance – surprised me. I unfastened my laces.

  ‘You’re very kind,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, we know all about kindness,’ she said, sharing a glance with her sister and making it clear to me that it was unkindness to which she referred.

  A photographic portrait of their parents looked down at us from the mantel, still a benign presence in the house. Mary Latimer saw me looking and nodded to confirm my guess.

  ‘I brought them back with me,’ she said, as though the portrait were her most treasured possession.

  Once removed, my boots steamed in the hearth.

  Martha sat in the chair opposite me.

  I wished Mary Latimer would come closer, but I saw it was part of her plan to remain briefly apart from us.

  ‘Were you ever here before?’ Martha asked me.

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘And were you never here during the summer?’

  ‘This is my first visit.’

  ‘Mine, too. I did once know a girl who lived here, but this is my own first visit in so many years. It was a much larger place then, of course.’ There was seeming contradiction in everything she said.

  ‘It was never larger than this, Martha,’ Mary Latimer said. ‘We have merely retreated, cave-dwellers that we have become, to the only remaining habitable rooms.’

  ‘Have we? Will we get it all back?’

  ‘One day. Perhaps.’ She at last came to join us.

  Martha occupied herself by inspecting my boots and moving them away from the heat of the fire. I saw Mary Latimer surreptitiously hold the hem of her sister’s dress away from the mound of glowing embers as she did this.

  ‘Will you take tea, Mr …’ She had forgotten my name.

  ‘Weightman.’

  ‘Of course. Mr Weightman.’

  I said I would, but rather than prepare this, she simply sat and looked at me.

  ‘She baked a cake,’ Mary Latimer said to me. ‘Flour and water. No yeast, no sugar, no butter. Flat as a discus and hard as stone.’

  Then Martha looked at her sister and said, ‘We’ll take tea. Attend to it, please.’

  Mary Latimer curtsied and said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  When she was out of the room, Martha lowered her voice and said to me, ‘She bakes, but the results are awful. You may have to eat something just to show willing.’

  I entered into the conspiracy and promised her I would. After that she sat in silence until her sister returned. There was something about her which reminded me fleetingly of my several indulgent spinster aunts when I was a child, tolerant beyond duty, and then silent when their indulgence finally reached its limit.

  Upon Mary Latimer’s return a distinct and unpleasant odour followed her in from the adjoining room.

  ‘You’ll have to ignore it,’ she said, indicating her sister, who now busied herself with the cups and saucers set down beside her. Only she seemed oblivious to the foul smell.

  ‘She knew you were coming. I told her often enough. I went out briefly.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘She’s boiling blackthorn.’

  ‘Blackthorn? Is it a medicine, something to drink?’ Among the houses lower down I had occasionally seen the slopes arranged with tenter racks. ‘Is it a dyestuff?’

  Mary Latimer signalled for me not to persist with my questioning. On her knees between us, her sister poured the tea and handed each of us a cup and saucer and spoon. I expected the fragile crockery to betray some infirmity or shaking, but there was none. Even the surface of the liquid itself was flat and undisturbed.

  ‘You might come another day and I would spill it all down you,’ she said, her tone even and serious. She sat beside me, her hand on the arm of my chair. ‘It was good of you to come and see us,’ she said.

  ‘I would have come eventually as part of my work here.’

  ‘To drive us out and let the water come.’

  ‘Martha, Mr Weightman—’

  ‘Was it you who drove out the girl who once lived here?’

  I looked to Mary Latimer.

  ‘This is Mr Weightman’s first visit to the valley, Martha.’

  ‘He already told me that.’ Her confusion grew more apparent, and with it she grew frustrated. She behaved like a woman who could remember and understand only the very last thing she had been told.

  Mary Latimer understood this only too well. It was why she repeated the same few details over and over. Perhaps it was even why she insisted on repeating her sister’s name each time she spoke to her.

  ‘And how are we to go on living here?’ Martha said.

  ‘We won’t. I doubt if the house will even—’

  ‘Not the house,’ Martha said. ‘The water.’

  ‘The water?’

  ‘How are we to go on living here when everything is water?’

  The question dismayed me and I considered how best to frame my answer.

  ‘Say nothing,’ Mary Latimer told me, her concern turning to amusement. ‘She’s teasing you.’

  The woman beside me laughed at the trick she had played on me. Her laughter grew loud, and then louder still, and she clasped herself and rocked in childish delight.

  Mary Latimer let this continue for a short while and then went to her sister and held her. The laughter subsided and the rocking ceased. Eventually the woman sat silent and motionless.

  ‘Your tea,’ Mary Latimer said to her, putting the cup and saucer back in her sister’s hands.

  Martha looked hard at what she now held, but made no attempt to raise the cup to her lips.

  I sensed that a boundary had been crossed, and that as a consequence of this my presence now made Mary Latimer feel uncomfortable.

  Accordingly, I retrieved my still-steaming boots and told her I would go.

  She acknowledged my understanding with a nod.

  ‘But where will we live?’ the woman sitting beside me suddenly shouted, great violence in her voice. ‘He hasn’t said where we will live. Why doesn’t he tell us?’

  Mary Latimer came again to hold her.

  I pulled on my boots and went outside to lace them. Mary Latimer came out to me a moment later.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Please, don’t apologize.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry for myself. I would have liked you to have stayed longer. We could have talked.’

  The house behind us was silent.

  ‘Will she be all right?’

  ‘She already is. I think perhaps there was too much for her to take in. At least you didn’t have to eat the cake.’

  ‘And the blackthorn?’

  She hesitated before answering, breathing deeply, and even there, outside, catching some faint odour of it.

  ‘When we were children, some of the girls we associated with, daughters of our tenants, our hired help, they used to boil the wood in the belief that it stemmed their bleeding.’

  ‘Their bleeding? You mean when they were injured?’

  ‘For some reason, Martha remembered. All her time in Colne and elsewhere, she never forgot.’

  ‘I still don’t—’

  ‘Their monthly bleeding. The girls thought that by drinking the infusion they could somehow stem or reduce their bleeding.’

  Only then did I understand what she was telling me.

  ‘She may occasionally forget my name, her own even, but some things …’

  I told her not to explain.

  ‘I couldn’t,’ she said simply.

  A cry from inside the house distracted us both. Martha stood at the window waving out at us.

  ‘She’s waving at you,’ Mary Latimer said.

  I returned the gesture, and the instant I did so, the woman at the window ceased.

  18

  I was woken late the following morning by a man at o
nce banging on my door and shouting up at my window. I woke with a start, unable to locate the source of this racket. I lay fully dressed, my bedclothes on the floor. Whoever had come to rouse me moved from the front of the house to the back, where he knocked and shouted again.

  Rising, I doused my face and went down to him. I imagined he had brought me some communication, and I could see how this might be considered an event of some note, warranting his clamour.

  He was standing before the door as I opened it, and he considered me for a moment without speaking as I fastened up my coat. I recognized him and asked him what he wanted that was so urgent. One of my buttons was missing. I remained unshaven, my hair uncombed, and my appearance made him apprehensive. I asked him again what he wanted.

  ‘The water,’ he said.

  ‘Has something happened? Has someone been injured?’ He then composed himself, suddenly conscious of his duty and his role in the proceedings. ‘A maelstrom,’ he said.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A maelstrom.’

  ‘Do you mean a whirlpool?’

  ‘A maelstrom.’ He nodded vigorously to give emphasis to the word.

  I rubbed the last of the sleep from my eyes.

  ‘A maelstrom has formed in the rising water.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The river has flowed over its old course and a maelstrom has formed.’

  ‘Stop using that word. We are not sailors caught in an Atlantic gale.’

  His face dropped in puzzlement.

  ‘Where?’ I said again.

  ‘Beneath the chapel. You must come and see.’ He reached out, as though to grab my arm, but then thought better of the gesture and took back his hand.

  ‘I must do no such thing,’ I said, knowing immediately that it was my duty to go.

  ‘And bring all your tools. And your books for writing down.’

  ‘Do you know the cause of the pool?’

  ‘Only the Lord himself—’

  ‘Knows the answer to that. Of course.’

  He considered me coldly. The door behind me swung on its hinges. I told him to come inside and wait, but he declined, saying he would wait for me where he stood. Then I told him to return to the site of the pool and wait for me there, but he refused to do that too, insistent on accompanying me, and no doubt wanting to herald my arrival and encourage further, endless speculation. The Lord was to have His day in the pool beneath the chapel.

  Half an hour passed before I considered myself sufficiently presentable and went back out to him.

  I cannot deny that my own excitement grew the closer we approached to the chapel. The usual small crowd was already in attendance. One man held a banner which he waved from side to side above his head. My guide and trumpeter pointed all this out to me. I told him I was neither blind nor deaf, and he looked at me as though waiting for me to present evidence to that effect.

  Throughout our conversation he called me ‘mester’. It is a hybrid of a word, born of and meaning both master and mister and all points in between. The scope of its additional meanings, twisted one way or another by the slightest inflection, was limitless. It might mean a dozen different things in the course of a single conversation from the lips of one man, depending on how he feared or favoured you in your dealings with him. Written down, the word acquits itself of all bias by being spelt ‘maister’.

  I paused on a small rise overlooking the river. My guide came back to me and urged me on. I told him there was no urgency and took out one of my notebooks. I sketched a simple plan of the river and its flood plain below the chapel, including the recently covered fields and the widening bulge of the flow itself. I marked the date – the first of November – and this seemed somehow propitious to me. Below me, rumour and supposition had birthed a cataclysm which could not be ignored. I even imagined I could hear the singing of some apocalyptic hymn as I made my few simple notes.

  I descended the final slope, and my companion ran ahead of me, pushing through the crowd with his torch of news. I had taken the precaution of wearing my rubberized boots, and as I arrived at the first of the spectators I pulled these up over my knees and shook loose the straps by which they were fastened. I heard words of admiration from some of the men I passed.

  I stopped at the edge of the water and asked loudly to be told what was happening. My guide ran back to me, but I silenced him and asked for an explanation from someone else.

  A woman came to me leading a goat. ‘A maelstrom has formed in the lost river,’ she said. ‘My animal here was almost drowned.’

  I waited for her demand for compensation.

  ‘But fortunately you rescued it,’ I said. I asked her to show me the pool. I had examined the river on my descent and had seen nothing out of the ordinary there.

  The woman pointed over the calm surface. ‘Be patient,’ she said. The people around us fell silent. We stood like that for a full minute and nothing happened. As I watched, I tried to remember the configuration of the river and its banks beneath the still surface. It was neither particularly deep here, nor fast-flowing; there was no sunken building which might have collapsed to cause the disturbance. And nor, as far as I could remember from my charts, were there any air shafts or abandoned workings beneath the fields on either side.

  The disappointment grew around me and a murmuring arose. I started to speak to the woman, but she waved me to silence. Her own gaze remained fixed on the water.

  ‘There,’ she said eventually, and slowly raised her arm to point. Her quiet word was amplified by others.

  I looked out to where she pointed and saw that there was just then some disturbance on the surface of the water. A circle formed, running in a clockwise fashion, and made all the more noticeable by the configuration of flotsam which followed its course and gave emphasis to its design. The ring was eight or nine feet in diameter, and slow-moving, though with an appreciable increase in speed as it progressed. The motion was at its most violent towards the outer edge. The centre, the vortex of all this activity, remained relatively calm, though even there a definite swirling could clearly be seen developing. The cries from the onlookers grew louder.

  ‘Well?’ the woman beside me said. She looked from my face to my boots.

  I guessed the water to be no deeper than two feet, reckoning this by the height of the walls against which it lapped. In truth I would have preferred to have waited before wading in and making my inspection, but the woman prodded me into action with another of her ‘well’s.

  I occupied myself by raising and then lowering my straps, by loosening and then tightening my belt.

  After several minutes of violent spinning, the whirlpool decreased in intensity, lost its power and faded. The circle of cut grass on its surface lost definition and again aligned itself to the flow of the submerged river.

  I handed over my bag to the woman, and she looked at me as though I were about to embark on a long and uncertain journey. I would wade no more than twenty yards out and twenty yards back. She seemed about to speak to me – I wished she had – but remained silent. I had arrived, I had taken charge, I was taking action, and I would have appreciated some public recognition of this other than the brief cessation of murmuring which accompanied my first few steps into the treacherous depths.

  The ground beneath the surface was softened, but otherwise good. A man stood beside me holding a rope. He offered this to me but I declined, pointing out to him the shallowness of the water into which I was wading. It surprised me to see how quickly most of them now disregarded or had forgotten what lay beneath the surface, imagining depth where none existed, and suspicious of something which had been exposed to plain sight only a few days earlier.

  The man with the rope called me a fool. The word made me feel brave. I had become a man of action, and what I did that day would be remembered.

  ‘If you see the maelstrom start to reappear,’ I called out, ‘then shout and let me know.’

  I was answered by a dozen nodding heads and fearful glances
.

  ‘You’ll know soon enough,’ the man with the rope said, deflating my bravado.

  I felt for the first time the weight of the water over my feet.

  ‘Shout all the same,’ I said to him. I wanted him to remain where he stood with his rope. I wanted him to stand ready to throw it out to me.

  I waded further, until I was midway between the water’s edge and where the pool had briefly formed. I moved more cautiously as I approached its lost centre, bracing myself against its sudden resurgence. But I felt nothing. The water rose to my shins and then to my knees. I calculated that I was now walking on the river bottom. I could feel its stones beneath my feet. I turned back to the watching crowd. The man with the rope raised it to me.

  ‘Nothing,’ I shouted. I raised my arms and turned in a full circle, an awkward dance of seeming nonchalance.

  It was as I waded back and forth over the site of the pool that I felt a stronger current against my legs. I stopped moving and steadied myself. I looked down, searching around me. Someone on the bank shouted. I felt a ripple against the backs of my legs, and the floating grass again began to form itself into a pattern as the tow increased in strength and I moved my feet further apart to stand into it. I saw the circle form around me. The voices on the bank grew louder. Someone called for me to save myself, which I appreciated greatly, concentrating hard on avoiding the indignity of being knocked over in two feet of water and sitting in it up to my waist.

  I saw that I was standing at the outer edge of the spinning pool, where the tug was strongest, and I managed by several judicious, shuffling steps to move myself towards its centre, where the current, though still appreciable, was much weaker.

  ‘He moves to its centre,’ I heard someone cry out.

  I saw how impressive my action looked. ‘Pray for me,’ I called out. I raised my own clasped hands.

  It sounded good to hear my voice above the clamour, and I wished the water itself could have made more of an effort on my behalf. Sure of my footing – if anything, the flow was already starting to fall away – I rocked from side to side, as though struggling against the current, and held out my arms to balance myself.

  ‘It grows stronger,’ I shouted. But I shall beat it. I did not shout this, but it was what I wanted clearly understood.