Gathering the Water

by Robert Edric

  The valley downriver runs in a series of overgrown gorges until the water reaches its mother flow. By contrast, the land above the dam is broad and open. Downriver, the dwellings and mills are of necessity tightly gathered, surrounded by woodlands and small pastures, whereas upriver the dwellings are scattered and the only cultivated land is either taken in close by them or alongside the river on its small flood plain.

  You might say the world was conveniently divided here, and that the dam was its neatly drawn line.

  5

  ‘My name is Mary Latimer,’ she said at the instant of our unexpected encounter. She held out her hand to me. I was becoming accustomed to such abruptness – forthrightness, they would call it – but there was something in the woman’s manner and in her formality, her gentility almost, which led me to respond more cautiously.

  I introduced myself.

  ‘There is not a single person here who does not already know you,’ she said. ‘And, as you must be well aware, that which they do not know about you they can easily imagine.’

  ‘And those who do not possess the imagination?’

  ‘Oh, lies, half-truths, speculation.’ She smiled at this, and though she remained reluctant to look me in the eye, I felt then as though an understanding existed between us. I knew from her voice, her choice of words and her accent, by the way she held herself, and by her reserve, that she too in some way stood apart from the place and its people.

  I guessed her age to be between fifty-five and sixty. Her grey hair was held back from her forehead in a tortoiseshell comb. Strands hung by her ears, and she smoothed these back into place as she spoke. Her face, too, bore none of the more usual marks of age and hardship with which I was already familiar. Her skin was pale and little lined; her teeth even and white.

  ‘Do you live here?’ I asked her.

  ‘I have done for the past ten months. Before that I lived here as a girl and young woman.’ She looked around her as she spoke.

  ‘And are you back here because of the dam?’

  ‘Because everything is to be lost? Yes, in a sense. I am here to take care of my sister.’ At this last word she turned from me, and I knew then that she and her sister had been my silent watchers of several days previously.

  ‘You were on the hill,’ I said.

  ‘You raised your hand to us. You must consider us unforgiveably rude.’ She went on before I could answer her. ‘My sister is not well. We heard the raised voice of your visitor. She was alarmed by his dogs. Tell me, will the water come this far up the valley?’ There was no pause in her speech as the subject was changed and I was diverted from talk of her sister.

  ‘It can rise no higher than the height of the dam,’ I said, and regretted the glib remark immediately.

  ‘I meant will there be changes this far upriver? I know the hills will not be drowned.’ She continued to look around us. She showed neither anger nor remorse for all that was to be lost.

  ‘Where were you before returning?’ I said.

  ‘I’ve lived in many places. Some close by.’

  ‘But this is where your sister lives?’

  ‘This is where our parents lived. Lived and died. She and I were born here.’

  ‘And do you still feel some affection for the place?’

  ‘Very little. Surely, you must have heard from others about us. Surely, someone has said something. If not of me, then of her.’ She looked hard at me to determine whether my answer was an honest one.

  ‘Your name may be somewhere in my ledgers,’ I said.

  ‘My sister was committed to an asylum, in Colne, twenty-seven years ago. We still lived here then, with our parents. And last year she was released into my care and she would live nowhere else.’

  ‘Because this was all she knew?’

  ‘No. But she would go nowhere else.’

  ‘And is she … I mean …’

  ‘Is she well? She is an old woman, two years my junior.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and again I regretted the remark.

  ‘No, I am the one who should apologize. I thought you knew. We are a constant topic of conversation, she and I. We keep ourselves apart, you see. Or, rather, I keep us apart. I imagined you knew about her and were avoiding saying anything.’

  ‘I know what it’s like to be talked about and to be kept apart,’ I said.

  ‘I imagine you do. But you possess a power that neither she nor I possess.’

  I acknowledged the truth of this.

  ‘And now we must leave again,’ she said.

  She told me the name of their home and where it stood, but it meant nothing to me. I told her I would visit her, expecting her to make some excuse to keep me away, but instead she said she would be pleased to see me.

  I sensed that she was about to leave.

  ‘Have arrangements been made?’ I said.

  ‘Arrangements?’

  ‘By the Board. For you and your sister. A new home.’

  ‘I’m afraid neither she nor I meet your Board’s exacting requirements. No, I am making all my own arrangements.’ She gave a cold, hard emphasis to the word.

  Before I could ask her any more, she again held out her hand, turned and left me.

  I saw by the strides she took and by her pace over the uneven ground that, despite her age, and despite the fact that she was clearly accustomed to surroundings more comfortable, varied and stimulating, she was in no way unequal to this place and its demands.

  6

  Some of my charts contain very little detail of the land they cover. Some leave vast spaces blank, noting only prominent streams and landmarks, of which there are few. Not even a sketched tree or sheep or rabbit in place of those grinning fish spouting on the surface of unfathomed oceans. A man who was lost here would not find himself on these charts.

  My initial response to this lack of information was one of enthusiasm: here was a place I might construct to my own design in its emptiness; a place I might map into existence as though it truly were my own small domain. But in harbouring such despotic intentions I had reckoned without the place itself.

  Carrying my heavy instruments to these high places has proved an impossibility, and although recordings might be taken and heights and distances calculated in my note-books, any attempt to unroll a sheet of mapping paper and plot these with any degree of accuracy in the field is impossible on all but the stillest of days, and the present season is not renowned for those.

  There is no distinct line of divide marking this valley from the one to the north, only a pale track winding across the peat top. In the prospectus to investors there is mention of vividly yellow gorse blazing here and there like fires in the wilderness. These are no longer in flower, but might be eagerly imagined amid such dullness.

  The head of the valley is a confused place. Where elsewhere a river might rise out of the ground flowing from a spring, here the water draining from the peat forms itself into countless shifting channels, most no broader than my arm. In some places these have created valleys in miniature; elsewhere a flow forms in the impression of my heel, collects and then runs off.

  Yesterday I walked up the valley as far as the lead mines and their spoil heaps. I was surprised by the size of the buildings, by the substance of their construction in so inaccessible a place, and by the great extent of their spilled waste, hillocks piled one upon the other running from the mines to the valley bottom, and looking from a distance like giant eggs laid neatly out across the slope.

  7

  This is my first stay in the north of any length and already I have started gathering the details by which the true spirit of the place might be best understood, and which, to my naturalist’s mind at least, are worthy of record.

  Those peat tops, for instance, are everywhere called ‘hags’; the viper or adder is a ‘hagworm’; the kestrel is a ‘windhover’; the snail a ‘wallfish’; and the rowan tree is still without reservation referred to as ‘witchwood’.

  Long before my arrival, but upo
n learning of my appointment, I was warned by my acquaintances – now mostly lost – that the language, manners and customs of the place would be in great measure unintelligible, and, where intelligible, then repulsive to me. I feigned concurrence with this advice, and then humour at every joke it spawned.

  There are twenty names for the various rains which fall, and which often vary within a single shower. A storm of less than a day’s duration is a ‘small’ storm, and the thrush is without fail called ‘stormcock’ because of its perverse habit of turning into every wind and whistling undisturbed by it.

  8

  I went into that part of the lower valley where the dwellings are greater in number. Most are on the same side of the river, the opposite bank immediately above and below the dam being steeper and wooded. I went to observe the flow of the river below the dam now that its sluices are in operation and the movement of the water regulated. I have no power over the working of the dam. The bailiff alone – should he ever reveal himself to me – possesses that in conjunction with the distant controllers and planners.

  The flow was greatly reduced, revealing the gravel and boulders of the river-bed. Stepping stones rose in short pillars like the remains of a lost colonnade. I noted down everything I saw. The few people I encountered either ignored me or departed having exchanged the obligatory cold pleasantries.

  Another purpose of my visit there was to establish some means of communication with the outer world. I shall let the phrase stand; it is how I feel. The mail coach passed on the main road eight miles to the south, but I was as yet unsure how to make my connection with it. The Board men had seemed little concerned regarding this difficulty.

  Leaving the river, I climbed the bank and returned among the houses, and there I again encountered Mary Latimer. She emerged from a walled alley, a package of letters in her hand, which she inspected as she walked. I called to her and she stopped. I approached her and apologized for having interrupted her. She seemed relieved that it was I who had called and not someone else. A group of women stood a short distance from us, each of them having turned at my call.

  ‘Are you working?’ she said. She returned the gaze of the women, but this did little to dissuade them from watching us.

  I indicated her letters and told her why I was there. ‘You appear to have a great many correspondents,’ I said.

  ‘A week’s gleanings.’ It was still an impressive number. She told me the name of the man who brought the mail from the coach. She pointed to his home at the far end of the walled lane. Pieces of furniture stood around the house.

  ‘Will he too soon be gone?’

  ‘I imagine so.’

  ‘And what then?’

  ‘Then another door will be heard slamming loudly shut behind us. You must surely be familiar with the sound by now.’

  ‘They tend to slam shut ahead of me,’ I said, thus leavening our conversation. I made a note of the man’s name. ‘Will he insist on me coming to collect my mails?’ I asked, hoping to suggest to her that it would be arriving sufficiently frequently for this to be an inconvenience to me.

  She shrugged. ‘I am only forced to come myself because I refuse to pay more than I was originally charged.’

  ‘Is your home far?’

  She indicated the steep hillside behind us, but without turning. ‘A mile, perhaps a little further.’

  ‘Are you alone?’

  ‘Is my sister with me, you mean.’

  ‘It wasn’t my intention to intrude.’

  ‘Yes, I came down alone. There are still a few here brave enough to visit us and sit with her on the rare occasions I am obliged to leave her. There are still those who remember us as girls, who knew our parents.’

  Having stood for a minute, she seemed suddenly impatient to leave me. Perhaps the talk of her sister had reminded her of some ever-present responsibility. And yet even as I discerned this, I sensed too that she was savouring her brief freedom.

  ‘I will not turn her into more of a spectacle than she has already become,’ she said, her eyes flicking towards the watching women.

  ‘Would it disappoint you to learn that they were watching me walk up and down the dead river long before you appeared?’

  She smiled at this. ‘Then what a bonus for them. The two of us together. The twin serpents of madness and destruction entwined, and in full view of honest, decent, hard-working, God-fearing folk such as themselves.’

  She resumed walking and I walked alongside her.

  We approached the women, but rather than turning away from us or dispersing as I had expected, they held their ground, their arms folded defiantly in front of them. It was a feature of these women, when talking in a group, to fall silent on a single beat at the appearance of anyone unwanted or unknown to them, their concerted silence and cold stares intimidating the newcomers into turning away from them and warning those who had perhaps intended to join them not to attempt to do so.

  In this respect they were different from their men, who would continue to talk loudly, even if the intruder were the subject of their discussion, as I had learned to my cost on several occasions.

  It was not tact or shame which created these silences in the women, merely a form of expediency which, once acknowledged by the newcomer, allowed them to continue uninterrupted.

  Mary Latimer said ‘Good morning’ to them and they murmured their reply.

  We continued beyond them to the edge of the dwellings, where she stopped and said that this was where we parted.

  ‘I thought I might walk to your home with you,’ I said. I had made no plans for the remainder of the day.

  She looked directly at me. ‘Oh?’

  ‘Unless you would prefer to return alone.’

  ‘You know exactly what I am thinking, Mr Weightman.’

  It was the first time anyone there had called me by my name, and hearing it caught me momentarily off balance.

  ‘You see how protective I am of her, even with people who know her.’

  ‘And I am a complete stranger to you.’

  ‘Surely you must entertain some apprehension about meeting a madwoman?’

  My own mother, upon losing her second child, had been sent away to a sanatorium recommended by a colleague of my father. She had stayed there for four months before returning to us. I was seven years old at the time and the months had seemed like years to my young mind.

  ‘I would not wish to inconvenience her,’ I said.

  ‘You mean unsettle. You may say it.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘There are some here who would find it easier to lose their sight than their opinion on the subject.’

  ‘By which you mean prejudice,’ I said. ‘You would misjudge me to include me among them.’

  She acceded to this. ‘I know that.’ She searched through the letters she carried and pulled one out. ‘This is a communication from the director of the new asylum to which I shall shortly take her.’

  ‘But I thought …’

  ‘Thought what, Mr Weightman? That she and I might find some new, secure and secluded place in which to live out the remainder of our lives together?’

  ‘Is it what you want – the asylum?’

  ‘It was my decision to make enquiries about the place. Perhaps one day in every five she has some slight and fleeting understanding of what is happening around her, but for the remainder of the time she wanders a strange land among strangers. At least there they will be able to care for her.’

  I could see that it pained her to tell me these things, and only later did it occur to me that I might have been the only one in the valley to whom she had spoken of the place.

  ‘It distresses you to talk of it,’ I said.

  ‘The situation distresses me. Speaking of it – speaking of it to someone who has little or no connection to it – is of no consequence whatsoever to me.’

  She continued walking and made no further objection when I walked alongside her.

  ‘Except, of course,’ I sai
d after several minutes had passed silently between us, ‘that I am here to drown your home, flood your childhood haunts and drive you both out into an uncaring world.’

  ‘Ah, I’d forgotten. Yes, except for that.’ She put her hand on my shoulder, as though to console me for my burden. ‘There is another communication you might be interested to see,’ she said. She took a second envelope from the package. I recognized it immediately as coming from the Board, and my envy at her mails was instantly doubled. ‘You yourself are no doubt all too familiar with such platitudinous irrelevancies,’ she said.

  I shrugged to suggest my unhappy concurrence, and before either of us could speak again she tore the unopened envelope and unread letter into scraps and threw them up into the air.

  ‘You could retrieve all the pieces on your way back down,’ she said, fully aware of my discomfort at what she had done. ‘Take them home with you and reassemble them like a puzzle.’ She paused and looked at the scattered white all around her, tatters of which still floated in the air. ‘As big a puzzle, in fact, as why you were ever sent here in the first place.’

  I felt stung by the remark. ‘Oh? And more or less puzzling than the fact that you removed your sister from her previous asylum?’

  If I expected the remark to silence or provoke her, then I was disappointed.

  ‘No mystery there, Mr Weightman. Money. There is nothing left. Little enough to sustain us as we are. The dregs of a few long-depleted investments. Perhaps I should have gathered together what little remained and handed it over to your masters to invest in their lake. Would the irony of such a gesture be lost on them, do you think?’

  ‘Undoubtedly.’ It was an answer where none was called for.