Is it all right? he said.
It’s fine, I said.
What is it? he said.
A lad, I said.
A twice-born.
Kat went frantic, of course, when she saw the state of him, but I told her that he’d only held the lamb and that I’d delivered it. She didn’t need to be worried unnecessarily with a month to go. There are lots of things I haven’t told her. She doesn’t know that I let Adam use the ear-tagger on the lamb we’ll have on Devil’s Day later in the year. I didn’t tell her that I let him carry the shotgun home from the Moss yesterday. Or that he helped me gut the mallards in the scullery this morning.
When I say to him, that’s between you and me, he knows to keep his mouth shut if he wants to carry on learning about the valley. And so it’s only when we’ve left Kat crocheting a baby bonnet in the kitchen and we’re out in the yard chaining Jenny to her kennel that he asks where we’re really going.
Somewhere you’ve not been before, I say.
But what about the lambs? he says. What if more come?
Grandma Angela and Auntie Liz are there, I say. And Grace too. They’ll look after them while we’re gone. Don’t worry.
Most days, I try and take him out to the hay fields or the other way to what used to be the Dyers’ place. He can’t walk quickly, even though he’s known the lane all his life. But that doesn’t mean to say that he can’t walk far. We’ve always assumed, Kat and I, that he would get quickly tired if we made him try any kind of distance, but why should that be so? His legs, at least, are as good as anyone else’s.
One foot, then the other, we inch along the lane. There’s a warmth to the sunlight when the wind drops. There is no question that it’s spring. All the muddy sloughing of winter is done with now and the river has a leap to it like the lambs in the bye-field.
It’s so loud, says Adam, and puts his hand to his ear. To him, water is everywhere. It fills the valley to the brim. It reminds him, constantly, to be afraid.
I can’t remember exactly how old he was when his hand slipped out of Kat’s and he fell off the stepping stones by the Beasleys’ bridge, whether he was closer to three than four, but he wasn’t in the water for long. Only the few seconds that it took for the current to sweep him under the concrete span and out the other side where I was cutting back the thistles. Hearing Kat’s screams, I’d thrown down the billhook and plucked Adam out by his arm coughing and crying.
For weeks afterwards, we scourged ourselves with what-ifs and imagined all sorts of awful things: the family name on the front page of the Lancashire Gazette, carrying a wee coffin into St Michael’s, the pair of us drowning for ever in guilt.
Kat went back and forth to the doctor with him, worried about the cut on his ankle from the edge of the stone, worried that he’d damaged his lungs or starved his little brain of oxygen. But he hadn’t been under long enough to do himself any real physical harm. It was in his night-terrors that he suffered, and for a good few months afterwards he’d slept in bed with us.
But that was a long time ago and he’s nearly eleven years old now. There’s no time for him to be a child. All that’s gone.
Where are we? he says.
At the deer, I say.
He knows the Dyers’ old place by the stag’s head carved into one of their gateposts; a finger of masonry torn from the doorway of the church when Richard Arncliffe was overhauling the bell tower. Ever since he was a little boy, Adam’s liked to trace his finger round the antlers.
The gate’s locked with a chain that’s gone rusty and the concrete track up to the farmhouse is sprouting new grass to cover the FOR SALE sign that blew down during the winter. For a while, when she was engaged to a dairyman from Clitheroe, Grace considered taking the place on. It made sense. The buildings they’d need were already there, she knew the land well, and her fiancé had raised his own cattle on his father’s farm and had the makings of a good herd. But the relationship had fizzled out, as they tend to do for Grace, and then Farrowing had come around and Angela and Liz needed her, and the idea was abandoned.
Folk in Range Rovers come to look now and then with plans in mind for country living and there was talk a while ago about someone opening a bed and breakfast, but the Endlands are remote, not secluded; watchful rather than peaceful. They’re a place of work, too, and these doctors and barristers who come with their families in their Hunter wellies soon see that they wouldn’t fit in here. And even someone with deep pockets would baulk at the money needed to renovate the farm. The house wants a hundred different repairs, and the roof of the barn is rusting towards collapse like the corroding stanchions of the cattle shed that still smells of disinfectant. It ruined the Dyers, foot and mouth, when it came to the valley. All their Ayrshires went in a pyre, the same as the Beasleys’ pigs, the same as our sheep. I was just glad that Dadda wasn’t around to see the farm being switched off.
Because we lamb late, our ewes were still pregnant when those men from the abattoir who’d found slaughter work of a different kind that spring came up to the farm with Leith one afternoon.
They went into the lambing pen with a bolt-pistol and some pithing canes and left it silent. Then we burned what they’d killed. Then we buried the ashes. Then we re-stocked, like Angela did. Then we tried for another baby and now Kat was nearly at full term. A girl this time, she says. As certain of that as she was that Adam was going to be a boy.
We carry on. If the world comes rolling down the valley—and sometimes it does—then we start again. We can look after ourselves. We can feed each other. We have houses that belong to us. The land is ours. Whatever happens, that won’t change. We’re not like the folk in Underclough, trying to live in wreckage.
It’s difficult to explain to Adam the difference between the village now and the village that the Arncliffes knew. I’ve described the mill to him and told him what it was used for but quite what he pictures I don’t know. Wheels and cogs and belts, like the innards of some enormous clock maybe. He knows that it closed when the Gaffer wasn’t much older than him, but what’s harder for him to understand is that the place really died with Jacob Arncliffe. After the Blizzard, work went on, of course, the looms still racketed from the early hours to the ring of six from St Michael’s, though the firm that had bought the business began to struggle and quickly realised that they’d purchased an antique. The following year, the war came and the mill played a small role in the effort, but only a fraction of the building was needed for what they were asked to produce and rooms that had once been bloated with noise now lay empty.
Men left the terrace and the Nine Cottages and on the boats to France wondered if the uniforms they were wearing had been cut from the cloth they’d produced. And, later, if the blankets of their hospital beds had been ones they’d trimmed to size in the finishing room. A few of them returned jumpy and altered, a few as if the whole thing had been an inconvenience, but most came back as names for the mason’s chisel. By the time the war memorial had been erected on the roadside near Sullom Wood, the year Gideon Denning sold the Endlands, those photographs Jacob had taken of the river and the church, the weavers hoeing their allotments at the back of New Row, the girls dancing ghost-blurred round the maypole, the farmers with their sickles and their crooks, they seemed old already. Pinned to a time that they could never claw back.
But we don’t live like that, Adam, I say. We don’t let things get lost. We don’t let things get taken away from us. We have the means to keep going. And so we must.
That’s what the Dyers forgot, or couldn’t see any more.
I sometimes come across Laurel if she’s down in the village visiting Betty Ward and she tells me every time what a blessing it was that she and Bill were forced to leave the valley. Bill’s more or less housebound now with his arthritis and she’s hardly in the best of health either. Imagine if they’d had a farm to look after as well? No, they’re happy in Fleetwood. She’d always wanted to go back to where she’d grown up and live near the sea. She ha
s a job in a fishmonger’s that pays for a little flat. And when Jeff finally arrived back in the valley, I could tell him that there was a room waiting for him there with a view over the esplanade.
Laurel is the only one who still believes that he’ll turn up. She still thinks that Jeff will one day walk through her front door and kiss her on the forehead and sleep in the room that she cleans for him each week. Even Grace resigned herself to him being dead years ago.
The police had looked into the case for as long as they ever look into things when someone goes missing, and it was hard to watch the Dyers going through it all. But better that than knowing what I’d found at Far Lodge.
We don’t talk about that night very often nowadays, Kat and I. But it’s there in our history and sometimes when it snows I’ll catch her daydreaming and I’ll know that she’s thinking about it.
It had taken Dadda and me an hour or so to walk back to the Wall with Musket, where Bill had been waiting with Fly since it was light enough to see. The sheep they’d driven down the day before were all well in the sheds. The ram was feeding. They’d found Kat wandering near Top Pond, her hands stiff and the blood gone from her lips. But once they’d got her down to the farm and she’d warmed herself and eaten something she was fine; she’d slept too, despite being worried about me and Dadda. It was Grace they were concerned for. She had a temperature. She couldn’t stop being sick. Laurel was looking after her. They’d called the doctor, but he wouldn’t be able to get through the snow for hours. Bill had been out with Dadda’s tractor and driven a cutting from the Moss to the farm, and on the lane Liz and Angela were clearing the snow, although fresh flakes were starting to come now, adding to the rind that covered all the outhouses.
When we got back, Kat put her arms around me and didn’t let go until she realised how cold I was and helped me off with my clothes and ran me a bath.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, as we waited for the tub to fill.
‘Where did you go?’ I said.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t tell.’
‘Why didn’t you wait for us?’
‘I was angry,’ she said.
‘Even so,’ I said. ‘You went off at some pace, Kat. Why?’
‘You’ll think I’m stupid,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I thought I heard someone calling me,’ she said.
‘Who?’
‘It sounded like Grace,’ she said.
‘Why would Grace have been on the moors?’ I said.
‘I thought she might have come looking for me with the others,’ said Kat. ‘Didn’t you hear it too? You must have done.’
‘I thought it was you,’ I said. ‘Weren’t you shouting for us?’
‘I did once,’ she said.
‘Perhaps that’s what I heard.’
‘But who did I hear?’ she said. ‘There was someone up there on the moors who knew my name and it wasn’t Grace.’
‘How is she?’ I said.
‘Really not well,’ said Kat.
‘She’ll have just caught a cold,’ I said.
‘It’s not a cold,’ said Kat. ‘It’s something else.’
‘Like what?’
Kat lowered her voice. ‘When I went to the bathroom earlier,’ she said, ‘I found her with her fingers down her throat.’
‘Is she bulimic, do you think?’ I said.
‘John, she said she was trying to get rid of the Devil,’ said Kat. ‘She told me that was why she smashed the mirror. She didn’t like him looking at her.’
‘That sounds like a fever talking to me,’ I said.
‘Or she needs a different kind of doctor,’ said Kat and switched off the taps.
‘Have you told Liz?’
Kat shook her head. ‘She’s still not talking to me. Get in. I’ll go and make you something to eat.’
She closed the door and went downstairs and I climbed into the bath, unstiffening my knuckles, waking numb toes. On the other side of the frosted glass, the snow was falling again. It would keep us stuck at the farm for another day or two at least. Time enough for Kat and me to talk again about staying for good. Enough time for her to understand how important she was. How she was carrying the Endlands in her womb.
∾
Is this where you were going to bring me? says Adam, running his finger in the groove around the stag’s face. I’ve been here loads of times.
No, we’re going somewhere else, I say. Across the Blackberry Field.
What’s there?
You’ll find out if you come, won’t you?
We walk past the green acre where the Dyers’ Ayrshires used to chew the cud and come to the place where Jim had once kept his horses.
I hold Adam’s hand as we negotiate the verge to get to the gate that’s held ajar by nettles. I squeeze through the gap first, stamping down what I can, and tell Adam to reach out for the wooden edge.
Got it? I say.
Got it, he says.
Pick your feet up when you come through, I tell him, though he still catches a toe on one of the hard ruts and stumbles and feels around for something to hold on to.
I’ve got you, I say, don’t worry. He sort of dangles from my hand for a moment before he finds his balance again.
We follow the line of the hedgerow, Adam treading with care, his free hand catching thistle heads and grass as the wind makes them bow.
We’re going to the Wood, aren’t we? he says. I can hear it. Is that where you’re taking me? I’ve been to Sullom Wood before, you know.
Not the place we’re going to, I say. You want to go somewhere different, don’t you?
He nods in that way of his that means he’s agreeing but agreeing with uncertainty. He’s just how Kat used to be.
Through the mud and puddles, it takes us a good half an hour to reach the fence on the other side of the field. When I was younger I’d been able to scale it with hardly a break of stride. A step, a step, a hand on the rail and down into the fallen leaves.
Let me climb over first, I say, and Adam grips my arm. You’ll have to let go, I say. Just for a minute. I’ll climb over and then I can help you.
His nightmare, he tells me, is that we’ll be out on our walk one day and I’ll fall or die (and he knows that mummies and daddies do die because of what I’ve told him about Mam) and he won’t know where he is.
Well, then you shout, I tell him. Someone would hear you. Someone would come.
But he knows that we’ve walked further today than we ever have and he’s lost all sense of distance.
Tell me about the birds you can hear, I say, giving him some distraction while I climb over the fence.
When he was younger, he’d sit on the bench in the yard and copy what Kat and I told him. Hear that, Adam? That’s a blackbird. That’s a robin. That’s a jackdaw.
If the cat ever left a gift on the porch step or in the scullery, then I’d let Adam hold it so that he knew how big one bird was to another. Then he could make comparisons. Sound on its own is tricksy. The wren weighs little more than the egg from which it hatches but fills the bye-field with its song. The great flapping marsh harrier that beats the bounds of the Moss does nothing more than squeak like a hinge.
Birdsong is how the seasons move for Adam. Summer is loud. Autumn downhearted. Winter silent. Spring ferocious.
What’s that? I say, as I clamber down the other side. Twink, twink.
Chaffinch, says Adam. And the chaffinch’s song is different everywhere. What they sing here they don’t sing anywhere else.
Who sounds like he’s sawing up wood?
A jay, says Adam. He’s angry about something. I can hear a nuthatch too. And that’s a mistle-thrush.
But I wish that he could see the light in here this afternoon. I wish he could see the bluebells and the campion and the dog violet.
After a thousand single steps, the trees change from oak and beech to silver birch and willow. And the sound of the river rises loud out of the G
reenhollow. A decade on from the fire, things are slowly returning to how they were. The willows that survived at the top of the ravine have thickened and sagged. And in time what is starting to sprout in the shadows beneath them will spread out over the river and meet the branches on the other side, knitting the roof back together. My daughter might one day see the place as I knew it.
Can you hear how big the trees are, Adam? I say. Can you hear the different sounds the leaves make? But he’s not listening to me or the trees but the brawling of the Falls downstream.
The slope to the water’s edge looks steeper than it used to do and what was once all mud and roots is now wild garlic and wood sorrel.
Put your arms around me, Adam, I say, crouching down next to him. I’ll carry you. It’s too steep for you to walk down yourself.
If it’s steep, you’ll fall, he says.
I won’t fall, I say, although under the leaves, waiting to catch my foot, are the remnants of what we cut down on the morning of Devil’s Day years ago, the bigger boughs still in the process of rotting away and the stumps mossed over.
Adam hangs his little weight on me, with his chin on my shoulder and his thighs clamped around my waist. I can smell the tomato soup Kat fed him at dinner time on his breath and in his hair.
I think: he is real and he is alive.
I think: he is my boy.
I think: the cold fact is that there will be a time when I am gone and Kat will be gone and there will only be Adam and his sister. He can’t fear the valley. It can’t be unknown to him.
We contour the bottom of the slope for a while, following the flow of the water, until the willows above us become heavier and the shade has stunted the weeds. I lift him over the shallows and carry him to the long flat rock that hangs over the Falls.
If we want to talk we have to talk loudly now. The spray is on Adam’s hair and skin. It dribbles off his brow and he blinks it away. His eyes still flinch at water and dust but they have no other use but to give his face a little colour. He carries them like he carries marbles in his pocket.
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