The Drowner

by Robert Drewe

  All the silver is tramped off the grass by the time he spots a suitable hazy hollow. A wind-curled tree leans into the depression. The sun is well up. Will’s legs are wobbly from fatigue and hunger. Dew sprays off his father’s boots as he circles the tree, pensively breaks off a twig, circles it again. The boy wills it to be the special spot.

  Squinting into the sun, his father says, ‘The mist will condense on these leaves, you see, and fall into my pond.’ Will is doubtful but feels like cheering. His father winks. ‘And a bit of rain as well.’

  To mark it as Alphabetical Dance’s site, he heaps small rocks into a cairn. His mark. Then looks shrewdly at Will. ‘No Sunday work involved, just a little decoration of stones.’

  Surprisingly, this ruffled badger then brushes himself carefully down, rubs his boots with sacking and brings out a comb to part his hair. ‘You might want to smarten yourself,’ he says.

  By the time they lead the pony down to the trap and harness it up, the sun is on the downs. His father whistles something through his teeth. Still in no hurry but with the air of someone heading somewhere. His stubble glints ginger. He’s as blithe and twinkly as a pirate in a book. Dew still puddles the sheep track and smothers the dandelions and wild geraniums.

  ‘Warming up,’ says Alphabetical Dance, peeking at his watch. ‘But it’s not true spring till you can put your foot on three daisies.’

  Will’s mood, however, is bleak and wintry. Missing chapel on Palm Sunday! Descending the slope, it seems a fast drop to damnation and his unhappy mother. Then suddenly they are facing east, and below them the roads from the plain are dotted with people from neighbouring villages, on foot, in carts and on horseback, all heading in their direction, towards the hill. Children’s squeals and laughter float up. People are setting up stalls along the road, lighting cooking fires, tapping barrels of ale and tuning up musical instruments. The squeak of a fiddle and the aroma of frying bacon slice the air.

  Alphabetical Dance inhales deeply of the present and the long ago. ‘Palm Sunday fair,’ he says, noncommittally, and without looking at Will he allows the pony to slow and stop by the spring at the foot of the hill.

  They breakfast on bacon and flat gingerbread cakes, on walnuts and Lenten figs. They drink hot tea and warm elderberry wine and the traditional drink of sugar dissolved in water from the spring. Crunching gingerbread, Will watches a boy blowing a tin whistle pass by on a painted donkey. It’s Saul Bodkin, his age. Saul’s insouciant manner, the clever way his donkey’s ears poke through a cardboard witch’s hat excite Will’s deepest envy. Not knowing such shrewd jollity—and scarcely knowing entertainment—he can hardly comprehend this bold and tasty morning.

  At noon Alphabetical Dance accepts a nip of gin, then moves on to mugs of ale. Church services are over and crowds of people dressed in their best clothes join the drinking and eating. Bitter ale and gin and cider and country wine, ham and beef and viggety puddings a yard long and broad beans boiled in spring water—as many as can be stabbed by a three-pronged fork—for a penny a serve. An old woman gives Will a wooden cup of cider, and stands by nudging him until he drinks it.

  By one o’clock people are singing. Will wanders through the rowdy crowd in the meadow. Oddly, he now has a mug of ale in his hand. Grinning faces from his village loom and vanish. Viola Brownbill, Maude Grundy, ‘Old’ New, Mr Ramage the miller, the blacksmithing Woosett brothers—Shadrach, Meshach and Frank. But no one from the Ebenezer Chapel.

  By two o’clock people are smirking and bantering and, soon after, kissing. Maude Grundy pats away men’s prods and squeezes. Some men and women join hands and begin to dance Threading the Needle across the meadow. Shad Woosett and Viola Brownbill form an arch with their linked arms. Other couples scamper through it, threading the needle, some stumbling and giggling, until the last couple reaches the head of the line. Sometimes they circle Will, their mouths and eyes wide and riotous, sometimes the procession crumples and skitters off, shrieking, across the meadow.

  He roams among them, looking for his father. A lot of the men resemble him in his new ruddiness and thickness, but he isn’t there.

  Loose-headed and toothy, sweat and spittle flying, the dancers are stomping by, chanting over and over: ‘The tailor’s blind and he can’t see, so we will thread the needle.’ As they frolic back across the meadow, ‘Old’ New falls on his back and the others are laughing too much to help him up. When the procession reaches the spring, however, it judders to a halt, and the hot-faced dancers snap upright, dig into their pockets and purses and, their expressions suddenly sober, throw money, votive tokens, into the water.

  Will lies in the greener, softer grass by the spring, at the bottom of the hill where he’d spent the night learning his father’s skills. The meadow is blurred white with daisies. A stirring is everywhere. Nothing is dead or still. His head throbs with the chirruping of the earth, the buzzing stones, the ringing water.

  Merrymakers are a slurry of shapes and sounds around him. Fleshy blows and grunts and harsh laughs slap the air. The Woosetts are punching and wrestling, now striking each other with wooden staffs. They accept the blows like rewards—the taking of the blow more important than the giving. Blood runs into their dull, accepting eyes and learing mouths. A shrieking woman lifts her dress and shows her bush, then slumps to her knees and vomits into the dandelions. The sun is not yet behind the downs. He still can’t see his father. He’s struck by an urgency to find the cairn of stones. He strains to see the dewpond site, but the glare is still too sharp and he closes his eyes against it.

  Strange that it’s here, by the juicy brink of the spring, in the sheep pellets and glinting grass of the meadow, that he faces his mother’s worst demons. The pagans of history’s, and the future’s, mists. The big woman who wakes him by clambering onto him. Laughing and rubbing her arse up and around his narrow thighs. Pressing her strong body. A smeary face with skin like hail damage. Swampy body, cider breath. Her foxy familiar manner.

  ‘Well, at least you’ve got one another’s noses,’ she says.

  His own astonished breath jolting from him as she rides his skinny belly, pelvis, legs. Hooting at his squirming fright and the wit of her own fat jiggety antics.

  A moment later she rolls off him and reels away muttering through the grass. Shrieks and cheers shake him further. Raising his head to the dazzle, he’s forgotten his whereabouts, the time, even the cause of his giddiness. His absence from chapel strikes him first. Then he has reason to sit up abruptly. Sliding from the sun, speeding down the steep, almost perpendicular hill towards him, comes a horde of screaming tobogganers, their faces twisted by bravado and mockery and beer, and the fierce novelty of using as sleds the skulls and jawbones of horses.

  SPA WATER

  THEY SIP GLASSES of spa water. Their hair is still damp and their cheeks flushed from the bath and its excitements. After a bath in the King’s Bath it’s the done thing to liaise in the Pump Room and drink a pint or two of the aqua sulis which fell as rain ten thousand years ago.

  ‘So,’ he says, for want of anything better.

  ‘I am an actress,’ she says, raising her chin a little, and looks it.

  ‘I’m a drowner.’

  A white lie. Used to be a drowner. Or could be a drowner. But he’d thought she’s an artiste and he was so impressed it just burst out. And it was easier to put a poetic slant on what a drowner did.

  ‘A drowner?’ She seems a little uneasy at that.

  The water smells peculiar. It contains forty-three minerals and is supposed to be good for you, but it tastes like warm flat-irons. She has a habit of raising her eyebrows and as she sips again she does so.

  ‘What do you drown?’

  ‘A drowner controls water. He makes land float, and meadows of water and ponds of clouds.’

  Laying it on like his father, who had taught him the drowner’s skills so he could take over. But he won’t be, having three weeks before, on his twenty-second birthday, completed his articles with the note
d Bristol civil engineer David Faulkner Oates. Although for a moment his own voice, his performance, sounds to him disconcertingly like Alphabetical Dance at full steam, the look of her, the intensity of her gaze encourage him. His hands ripple in the air as he describes the mole tunnelling on the river bank.

  The old mole story seems to please her. Now he’s struck by the defiant yet delicate angle of her cheekbones. This hint of vulnerability and the optimistic sunlight falling across their table makes him adjust his particulars.

  ‘My profession though is engineering.’ He swallows a self-conscious sulphate belch. ‘My father’s the Hartbridge drowner and I learned drowning from him. He drowns the land’—his airy gesture takes in the Pump Room and its suave customers, so pink from their baths that their cheeks and ears look buffed and glazed—‘and then he revives it.’

  Handel trickles from a piano in the gallery. Two pumpers do brisk business dispensing the waters from an elaborate fountain. Her eyes are the grey-blue of lakes at first light. Cool, high, Lake District tarns with both shadow and a speck of sunrise in them.

  ‘I love the outdoors. You could call me a pantheist.’

  So to this young woman, this actress—her name is Angelica Lloyd—Will gushes the family’s yarns. He babbles anything that comes to mind. His grandfather being the drowner before his father, and his great-grandfather before him, and so on. His grandfather having once pulled the skull of a prehistoric ox from the deep pool in the Avon. The skull was from the Palaeolithic era, one-third bigger than an ox’s today, and Will’s father, then a boy of nine or ten, looked on, awestruck. Bad luck the museum wanted it.

  ‘Even fossilised the horns were five feet, tip to tip.’

  ‘Fancy.’

  ‘Grandpop also found a hippopotamus in Surrey. In a river. Well, the bones.’

  ‘What next?’ She has another habit of dipping her head toward his shoulder when a remark pleases her. Of urging him on by patting his arm. He’s astonished that a strand of hair momentarily brushing his shoulder, such a random touch, could leave such glowing imprints.

  ‘You’ve heard of Moonrakers?’ he asks, and he swells with wit and folklore. Extraordinary how a fragrant stray hair-tickle could make you feel like the last man on the face of the century! ‘Well, my old man venerates the moon and is steeped in the magic of water.’

  ‘Do go on. I love otherworldly stuff.’

  He puts on a village accent. ‘It be bad luck to spy the crescent moon through glass, or to sleep where moonlight strikes your face.’ Then he laughs, to show he’s had experiences away from the countryside.

  The way these old fancies intrigue her shows she’s not a village girl (who would be bored witless by such blather). Well, he’s happy to paint his father as rustic seer. Never mind that the pragmatic Alphabetical Dance is hardly more wizardly than Ramage the miller, whom he outranks in the local hierarchy. And much less fey than Mr Vinnicome the vicar, who just outranks him. She laughs too, and touches his arm again. Two modern people.

  Did she know that the moon and water were both female, whereas the sun was male?

  ‘Yes.’ But the idea pleases her.

  ‘Or that if the new moon lies on its back, or holds the old moon in its arms this scandal will cause rain?

  ‘Scandal?’

  ‘The, ah, wanton attitudes.’

  ‘Only nature, surely, the phases of the moon.’

  ‘Just an old wives’ tale.’ He hurries on. ‘Plants must grow with the waxing moon, and with the changing of the moon the weather will change.’ Now he’s running out of enchantments and sounds like any old turnip farmer.

  But she’s helpful to this keen boy. ‘A drowner sounds so tragically Shakespearian. I’ve played Ophelia in Plymouth and understudied Ellen Terry in Bristol.’

  He searches his mind. ‘And Portia?’ A little too breezily.

  ‘Brighton, Salisbury and Bristol—at the Hippodrome again.’

  ‘Acting,’ he says. He blows air through his lips as if he’s overwhelmed by the vivacity and mystery of the prospect. ‘You must be very imaginative. To act.’

  She modestly sips her aqua sulis.

  ‘I did enjoy East Lynne.’ With appropriate eye-rolling, he recites, ‘Dead, dead, and never called me mother!’

  ‘An old crowd pleaser, that’s for sure.’

  Suddenly out of his depth, he grabs at straws. ‘I suppose drowning and acting both depend on a mixture of art and observation.’

  ‘How so?’

  He’s off again, buoyant and expansive, elaborating on how bringing water on to the land at will and taking it off again was really a high art. And knowing the right time to do it came only from the keenest observation.

  ‘The drowner’s motto is On at a trot and off at a gallop.’

  She’s gazing off towards the fountain. ‘I wonder what the actor’s motto would be.’ Her laugh has a crystal edge. ‘My own performance over all.’ She turns back to him. ‘My father is Hammond Lloyd.’

  ‘What decided you against drowning?’

  By the time she asks, each knows from the other’s rapt attention that a more important parallel dialogue is taking place.

  What he’s silently appreciating are those devil-may-care eyes. The lascivious eyelashes, moist lips, shrewd teeth. All overlaid with his body’s recall of that second’s tensile softness in the bath. The beauty of her form and movement.

  Above all, her great novelty.

  Similarly, she’s not voicing the attraction of his amusing eyes and mouth, and the outdoor forearms protruding from the slightly too-short sleeves with the missing button. The memory of their bodies touching in the water. The surprising effect now of his damp combed hair and tang of freshly washed animal.

  But her spoken question was crisp enough to turn Pump Room socialites from their gossip. Her looks, dulcet tones and theatrical emphases already drawing surreptitious glances and whispers. People trying to place her.

  The water music dribbles to a stop. In the hiatus he says: ‘A matter of sheep shit.’

  Her brows shoot up. She’s not unaware of her surroundings, the eavesdroppers, appropriate social behaviour, relations with the theatregoing public. Like that man with the important-looking nose and chin disapprovingly clearing his throat and shooting his cuffs. Or the swollen woman stopped in mid-sip and making a sour face.

  He’d managed to surprise her.

  ‘It’s true,’ he says. The local crops depended on well-manured soil. Sheep manure was best and the manure of the Wiltshire Horn best of all.

  He’s in his stride again. ‘The Wiltshire Horn had the strange ability to hold its dung all day.’ Ewes and lambs walked to the water meadows, fed on the new grass and returned home to the grain fields at dusk. ‘Then they dropped it just where it was needed.’

  Her heart is sinking under these smelly facts.

  ‘Another advantage of the Wiltshire Horn,’ he goes on. It wasn’t overladen with flesh or fleece. Light enough not to flatten the water meadows, heavy enough to prepare the soil to the right consistency for sowing.

  A medium-sized, house-trained sort of sheep. Some murmur of polite interest is unavoidable. ‘And?’

  He talks of development, mechanisation. His hands are waving. Progress. The Wiltshire Horn being crossed and re-crossed out of all recognition. The resulting breed, the Hampshire Down, a big improvement in both wool and carcass. He says loudly: ‘So it doesn’t matter that it’s a less dependable shitter.’

  She can’t believe she’s discussing dung in the Pump Room, or anywhere. There must be more to him than this!

  Of course, he says, the delicate intricacy of a water meadow responded ungratefully to machine-driven hay making. And so forth. Progress again. Blah-blah. A drowner needed workers, and manual labour these days was prohibitively expensive. So his father was one of the last. Probably the last drowner.

  Her look is suitably sympathetic. But he shakes his head.

  ‘No, no. I’m a progressive myself.’

&nbs
p; ‘Then I’m glad you got all that off your chest.’

  He smiles at her condescension. Oh, he fancies her. ‘And you? Have you always acted?’

  Ever since she was Moth, a fairy in Midsummer Night’s Dream. She and Kate—Peablossom—both twelve-year-old gossamer girls on the edge of excitement. Fluttering about with Cobweb, Mustardseed and company in their first appearance at the Royal, or any theatre.

  Peablossom making the biggest impact. Of all the fairies flapping around Oberon and Titania none had fluttered more prettily than the shadow-dancing Peablossom.

  The Bath Register’s review had pointed this out. So, hurtfully, had he.

  ‘My darlings!’ he’d said in the dressing room, sweeping them both into his arms. Sweet. He could have been their suitor. Attentive. ‘Sit your little elfy-selves down! Let me rub those tired feet.’

  Much more taken with Peablossom than Moth.

  Did she remember a brown coat? Mother beetle pottering quietly, smoothing costumes, patting wings proudly in the background.

  ‘Oh, oh, so delicate, so vulnerable,’ he’d repeated for the past ten years, in the endless post mortems of their performances. Moisture regularly rimmed his eyes at the memory. ‘She could break into pieces in your hands.’

  As an actor Hammond Lloyd’s main concern was his own performance and the projection of his personality. He readily admitted this failing, although of course he wouldn’t have called it that. He was proud to be one of the most popular dramatic players of his time. That he invariably converted Shakespeare’s characters into projections of his own stage personality, as both Wilde and Shaw had so caustically insisted, could hardly be denied. Nor could his relish of the most extreme melodrama—A Poor Girl’s Temptation, The Spectre Bridegroom, Sixteen String Jack, The Bells and, of course, East Lynne—which had made his name.