Gathering the Water Read online

  ‘Is that why you came today?’

  She nodded. ‘And perhaps if the world had not been turning quite so quickly then I might have beaten it by those ten days and made my farewells properly.’

  There was by then no limit to the losses to be endured, loss upon loss, and loss within loss, all of them as tangible now as a blighted crop rising from the desecrated land in which it had so long ago been sown and then forgotten.

  29

  I noticed how she held her hands, how she clasped the fingers of one in the palm of the other, and then deftly reversed the position. She saw me looking at this and immediately dropped her arms to her sides. A minute later, she was at this agitated clasping and squeezing again.

  I asked her if there was no way she might calm herself.

  For the first time in many weeks she had come to my lodgings. Martha had suffered a seizure the previous evening, and now, at dawn, the doctor had come, along with a woman to sit with her, and the two of them had sent Mary Latimer out of the house with instructions not to return for several hours.

  I gave her a warm drink and built up my poor fire, pulling our two chairs closer to it.

  Slowly, her anxiety subsided and she sat breathing deeply, as though she were coming to her senses upon waking.

  ‘I’m pleased you came here,’ I told her.

  ‘I could think of nowhere else to go,’ she said bluntly, then, catching my eye, added, ‘Have I offended you?’

  ‘Not at all.’ I sipped at my drink and scalded my lips.

  A fine, cold rain blew across the hills outside.

  She put down her own cup and held her hands to the rising fire. ‘I could have gone back to the dam, I suppose,’ she said.

  ‘Oh? Why there?’

  ‘No reason,’ she said. ‘It seems to have become a focus for everything else that happens here, that’s all.’

  ‘I see.’

  She looked slowly around the room. Her hands were again agitated in her lap. ‘Fretting’, they would call it here.

  ‘Do they know what causes Martha’s seizures?’

  ‘They are common enough to most forms of madness, I believe,’ she said. She remained distracted; other thoughts filled her head.

  I took a deep breath. ‘What would you have done if she had died? Or if the authorities had refused to release her into your care?’ I said.

  She smiled at my boldness. Her hands fell still and she pulled straight the material of her skirt.

  ‘Would I have been grateful and relieved that the decision was no longer mine to make, its consequences no longer mine to bear alone, do you mean?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Had she died, I know I should not have let her be buried there. But if they had refused to release her to me, then I do not know. What do you imagine, Mr Weightman – would I have fought them, do you think? Or is that only what you might want to think of me?’ She bowed her head. ‘When she knows me and talks to me, when we share something together, something of what we were, then I am able to convince myself that what I did was for the best. But when, like last night, she raves at me and lashes out at me as though I were her vilest enemy, then I cannot convince myself that I would even want to know her as the most distant of my acquaintances. They tell me she is out of her mind at such times, but the things she recollects to throw at me, the things she says about me, about my treatment of her – I am less convinced than all those experts profess to be that the mad woman and the sane woman are as far apart as they insist.’

  ‘Surely, there must be some common ground between the two states.’

  ‘You sound like one of them.’

  I sipped again at my drink.

  ‘You say it, and because you believe it to be a reasonable and, in your eyes, valid explanation, you feel justified in having said it. But you are not there when all this happens. You stand on your clifftop and watch a storm far out at sea. There is a luxury in these explanations, in this easy knowing, that some of us are not afforded.’

  I acceded to this in silence for several seconds. Then I said, ‘But surely you must know that I am a man for whom not even the most violent of maelstroms holds any fears.’

  She laughed. ‘I heard. They are already saying you stirred up the water with your own feet and that you knew all about the phenomenon before you were called to tame it.’ I exaggerated my dismay at this dismissal of my bravery.

  ‘What was the cause of it, do you imagine?’ she said.

  ‘Whatever it was, it was not what they would have wished it to be,’ I said.

  ‘A sea monster would have suited them best,’ she said.

  ‘I doubt any monster worth seeing would have possessed the courage to swim this far from the sea. In Halifax, the river is one day yellow, the next day purple, depending on what dyestuff they are using that day.’

  ‘It would still have been something other than a dam and a reservoir,’ she said.

  ‘Is that why they were all so keen for me to wade out and investigate?’ I said.

  ‘You acquitted yourself well.’

  ‘Only because I don’t believe in monsters.’

  ‘She was talking again yesterday, Martha, before her seizure, of the ark that someone somewhere might be building to save us all. We indulged each other in our speculation, and right up until the moment her eyes turned in her head and she fell from her chair, she was considering how such a thing might succeed. We decided eventually that however commodious and watertight a vessel might be constructed, there would be nowhere for it to go, nowhere for it to land and release its men and animals to begin anew.’

  ‘So, the extent of my flood continues to disappoint,’ I said. ‘Do you believe all this excited imagining had anything to do with what happened afterwards?’

  ‘I doubt it. She said I would not be allowed on board the ark because I was too old and too ugly and that no one would want me to bear their children. She, on the other hand, would be the most desirable woman there. She said every man in the valley would be competing for her. She rose to show off her figure, delineating point by point all this crowd of eager suitors might find attractive about her. I imagine she sought to embarrass me in some small and private way, but though I pretended to be shocked by what she said, I was, in truth, encouraged by it. She spoke as she had spoken as an excited girl with her life and her prospects still ahead of her. There was nothing truly salacious in what she said – just as there was nothing then, all those years ago – and she, too, revelled in her daring.’

  ‘A pity then that the day did not have some calmer conclusion,’ I said.

  ‘A pity the water runs circles round you,’ she said.

  We sat together in silence for several minutes afterwards. The fire grew warmer, and the wind blew harder against the windows, adding to our illusion of warmth.

  ‘Do they gather on the dam solely to condemn it?’ I asked her.

  ‘Whatever brings them to it, it’s a hard thing to ignore. Did you imagine one or other of them might one day, and secretly, tell you that they admired it, that they saw in it what you see?’

  ‘I thought their condemnation of it might not have been so unthinking, so … wholesale.’

  ‘A man here might say he had heard a voice come down to him from a cloud and within a day fifty others would be ready to defend him against all detractors. And then the next day that same man might say something to offend one of those ardent defenders and all fifty would turn instantly against him and denounce him for what he foolishly imagined he had heard.’

  ‘You think the men of the Board could have better paved my way here?’

  ‘I don’t see one single thing they have done to assist you except to stay away themselves. Where future schemes are concerned, I imagine your own role might be deemed superfluous by them. After all, you are the first to admit it – the dam is built, the water is coming, and nothing on earth will now alter that fact.’

  ‘The dam might burst and the water race away faster than it came.’

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nbsp; ‘Whatever happens, it would still be too late for this place. The Book of Jeremiah, Mr Weightman. Chapter eight, verse twenty.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘“The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.”’

  ‘“Saved” from what? You embrace calamity where none exists,’ I said.

  ‘Them,’ she said. ‘Not me.’ And with that she rose to leave me.

  All the time she was with me, it later occurred to me, she had been aware in the acutest detail of everything that was happening to her sister on the far side of those hills.

  I offered to accompany her home, and, as I anticipated, she refused. She said that my company would prevent her from ordering her thoughts. She said that the woman who had come with the doctor would remain with her, through the night if necessary. She did not tell me outright that she did not want me to go into that house with her and perhaps witness there what had been done to her sister.

  ‘She may have made a full recovery,’ she said to me, making no effort to convince me.

  ‘I should like to return and see you both soon,’ I told her, and thus bridged our two courses of evasion.

  ‘I’m sure Martha would appreciate that.’

  ‘Will you tell her?’

  ‘Anticipation plays no part in any pleasure she might still experience.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. But I did not see. I did not see how one woman might know so precisely and so confidently the thoughts and imaginings of another.

  She took my hands briefly in her own, before pulling tight her gloves and letting herself out into the wind.

  30

  I sat today on the rise above the lower valley road and watched a procession of those finally departing pass me by below. Several families had hired horses and open carts to transport their belongings. Furniture stood piled in precarious mounds, rocking on the uneven road. Children ran alongside. Others pushed their belongings on smaller carts. I watched as one family took down a chest of drawers, settled it carefully by the roadside and left it there. Everyone coming behind stopped to inspect this. Several drawers were taken out and salvaged. Other possessions, mostly furniture, stood and lay scattered elsewhere.

  I searched among this exodus for people I might recognize. They knew I was watching them go and many paused to turn and look up at me. Few waved. One man, I saw, picked up a stone and stood as though he were about to throw it at me – I was far beyond his reach – but he was dissuaded from trying by his wife and let the stone drop back to the ground.

  Two days ago I had encountered another family making their preparations to go. I had been standing close to the dam when a couple in a nearby cottage started to carry out their possessions. They stacked these on the open ground beside their house, and then, much to my surprise, and before I could intervene, they made a quick blaze of them.

  I asked the man why so much was being destroyed, but he refused to answer me, and I saw too late that he had a malformed lip and palate. His wife came out to me and spoke for him. She asked me if I had come to oversee their departure. I denied this, but she did not believe me. She told me they were going to live with her sister six miles away. I congratulated her on having found somewhere so close. A line of spittle ran from the spout of her husband’s damaged lip and he wiped this from his chin.

  She told me of the village they were going to, but I forget its name, remembering only that it lay over the boundary into the next county and that the woman spoke of it as though it were a thousand miles distant.

  Several children came out of the house to assist with the blaze. One, a boy, shared his father’s deformity, except the divided lip seemed much worse, revealing more of the child’s teeth and gums beneath.

  The fire blew its smoke and glowing embers all around us and the ground was blackened by its heat.

  There was a rise on the road below me, creating a tendency for the departing families to gather together, and for those without horses to rest there. Ahead, the road levelled and then fell in a long curve, and the individual groups drew apart again. I could not see the first fork in the road which would divide them, nor the further forks and crossroads beyond, where they would be separated and scattered again.

  31

  I heard, in the usual circuitous way, that there was a fever starting in the valley. My informant was no more specific than that, and by the tone of her voice I understood that this was a commonplace thing. The symptoms she described to me suggested smallpox. Additionally, I read in one of the few week-old newspapers I had managed to acquire that there had been outbreaks of dysentery in some city centres, a rare occurrence that late in the year.

  The news served as my excuse for visiting Mary Latimer, whom I had not seen since her own visit a week earlier, and I took with me what few medicines I possessed.

  On my way down the valley I came upon a group of men erecting the posts of a sheepfold. I greeted them and they stopped their work. The old stone pen was drowned. A new one needed building. It was time to gather the sheep. The sheep needed counting. The sheep needed slaughtering. Coils of rusted wire lay alongside them like giant nests.

  I climbed the path and went to the house.

  I knocked but received no answer. The door was bolted. I walked round the building and peered into it.

  A low fire still burned.

  Then I climbed to the crest of the rise above the house, hoping for a broader view, and it was upon attaining the top that I saw the two women. They were half a mile distant from me, up-valley, standing together. I started across the slope, calling as I went.

  Eventually they heard me and turned. I saw Martha move instantly to stand closer to her sister, and Mary Latimer hold her briefly before leaving her and coming towards me.

  ‘I went to the house,’ I said, leaning forward to clear my mouth and to regain my breath. Mary Latimer lifted her apron and wiped my face, as a mother might a child. ‘It occurred to me that you’d gone,’ I said. I did my best to sound both unconvinced and unconcerned by the notion.

  ‘Without making our farewells?’

  ‘I heard about the fever.’

  ‘Yes, they do like their small dramas.’

  ‘So are you both well?’

  ‘I am. And Martha is fully recovered from her seizure.’

  ‘And otherwise?’

  ‘Otherwise what?’

  ‘I meant how has she been.’ My unintentional evasions continued to disappoint her.

  ‘Not well. Restless, sleepless nights. Her attention, her understanding of even the most trivial things is deteriorating. Yesterday she had another fit of screaming which lasted two hours.’

  ‘Caused by what?’

  ‘Who knows. The call of a bird, a creak in the rafters, the sudden understanding of all she has become.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I left her. I sat with her for an hour and then I came outside. I stayed within earshot of her, and when there was silence I returned. She greeted me as though I had been gone for an instant, as though none of it had happened. She wanted me to sing hymns with her.’

  ‘Hymns?’

  ‘She remembers all the words. It was something else we did together as children. Then afterwards, when our repertoire was exhausted, I did leave her for an instant, to secure the door, and when I returned she shouted at me, accusing me of wanting to abandon her. She spoke as though we had lived together, here, all the time she was absent. She wanted to know where our parents were, where our husbands and all our loving children were.’

  ‘It must have been awful for you,’ I said. And again I disappointed her.

  ‘Yes, awful.’

  ‘I brought some medicines. I didn’t know what you might have, if there was anything you needed.’

  ‘They say down there that the wind and cold air are cures in themselves.’

  ‘I daresay they have little enough else to put their faith in.’

  From where we stood we could see the spreading waters.

  ‘She
wanted to come up here and see it.’ For the first time since coming to intercept me, Mary Latimer looked back at her sister. The woman waited where she stood, her gaze fixed on the scene below.

  ‘Shall we go to her?’

  Mary Latimer shook her head. ‘Leave her. I’m afraid you have disappointed her yet again, Mr Weightman.’

  ‘Me? How?’

  ‘Your lake. She expected it to be so much grander.’

  ‘It seems part of my appointed role – to constantly disappoint,’ I said.

  ‘And did you once imagine that it might be otherwise?’

  ‘It wasn’t something to which I gave much thought.’

  ‘Or at least not until you arrived here among the heathens.’

  ‘No, not until then.’

  ‘I’ve received word from the asylum,’ she said.

  ‘Will you accompany her, or will someone come for—’

  ‘No, I will take her there myself.’

  ‘Is there provision for you to remain with her for a short period, to help her settle there?’

  ‘She believes so.’ She looked again to the woman.

  ‘But in truth?’

  ‘They do not encourage the relatives or guardians of new committals either to enter with them or to visit them for a given period following their internment.’

  ‘And by not encouraging they mean they forbid.’

  ‘The understanding being, I assume, that because I have absolved myself of all responsibility for her, then I must submit to their every demand, however petty, cruel or unreasonable they might seem to me.’

  ‘And she understands none of this.’