Waterland

by Graham Swift

  In 1813, while Napoleon, whose army once advanced so proudly in the opposite direction, retreats from Leipzig to the Rhine, Thomas Atkinson begins building the maltings at Kessling. He is now in his fifty-ninth year.

  In his fifty-ninth year he is still a hale and hearty – and a merry – man; a man who would claim no affinity with the vainglorious Emperor of the French. With his young wife (who now affects the loose gowns and coal-scuttle bonnets made familiar to us through pictures of Lady Hamilton and the mistresses of Byron), he strolls round the barge-pool at Kessling and inspects progress on the works. Is it merely coincidence that it is in the year 1815 that the large and lofty building is completed and christened, by inevitable choice, the Waterloo Maltings? Is it merely coincidence that at the outset of that year his father-in-law, the brewer of Gildsey, falls ill and is declared by his doctor to be not long for the world? Is it coincidence alone that the dignitaries of Gildsey, amidst the flush of national rejoicing, decide to forget their differences with this Norfolk upstart and to welcome him instead as one of their own, the bringer of prosperity to their town and a living emblem of the spirit of Albion? And is it no more than a sop to the times – or a sign of personal exultation, or a mark of willingness to be turned into a symbol – that when on a September day in 1815, amidst cheering and the fluttering of red, white and blue bunting, a little gang of four newly built lighters enters the Leem from the direction of Gildsey and, linked to a be-ribboned draught-horse, passes through the newly completed Atkinson Lock, the foremost of this gang – the flagship, as it were – should bear on its bows, beside the bright red stem-post and the device, soon to be familiar, of two crossed yellow barley-ears above a double wavy blue line, the name Annus Mirabilis?

  Children, there is a theory of history which may be called – to borrow a word from the ancient Greeks – the theory of hubris. This doctrine provides that there can be no success with impunity, no great achievement without accompanying loss; that no Napoleon can go carving up the map of Europe without getting his comeuppance.

  You sneer. Who administers this grand and rough justice? The gods? Some supernatural power? This is getting all too much like fairy-tales again. Very well. But even nature teaches us that nothing is given without something being taken away. Consider water, which, however much you coax it, this way and that, will return, at the slightest opportunity, to its former equilibrium. Or consider the handsome wife of Thomas Atkinson, formerly Sarah Turnbull, of Gildsey. Between the years 1800 and 1815 she bears Thomas three sons, two of whom live and one of whom dies; and a daughter, who lives, but only till her sixth year. For the techniques of land-drainage may have improved considerably but medical science is still in its infancy.

  Sarah watches, on the arm of her lauded husband, the lighters passing into the River Leem, but tempers the pleasure in her lovely face with due signs of decorum and restraint. For it is only three weeks since her father – who never saw, save in his daughter’s good fortune, the riches Thomas Atkinson promised him – went to his grave. And watching also, perhaps, somewhere along the banks of the Leem, are the Cricks – the father William and the brothers Francis and Joseph. But they do not cheer as heartily as the other spectators. Too much enthusiasm never went with their phlegmatic natures. And though they draw pride from their part in the making of this newly navigable, brightly gleaming river, they know that what water makes, it also unmakes. Nothing moves far in this world. And whatever moves forwards will also move back. A law of the natural world; and a law, too, of the human heart.

  The townsfolk cheer. They drink ale (but not Atkinson Ale, for the town brewery remains as yet in the name of Turnbull and it would not do to dishonour the dead). There is jubilation and merriment. But just for a moment, perhaps, Thomas Atkinson wonders if this is the sort of merriment he wants – the merriment that goes with grand openings and speeches and toasts to the hook-nosed vanquisher of Bonaparte.

  In the winter of 1815 to 1816 rain swells the River Leem which bursts its banks between Apton and Hockwell and floods six thousand acres of newly ploughed farmland. A grievous but sufferable disaster: Atkinson resourcefulness takes care of it and within three months the damage is repaired. In 1816 the price of wheat doubles and those same tenant farmers whom Thomas had provided with rich farmland can no longer pay either their rents or their labourers. Napoleon is beaten: the poor starve. In Ely a mob runs riot and sabre-waving dragoons who but a year before held the field at Waterloo are summoned to crush their own countrymen. Jubilation? Merriment?

  Thomas surveys the stricken Fenlands. But this too he can bear. Because he is a rich man – and a barley-man, not a wheat-man to boot – he can be accommodating to his tenant farmers. He hands out shillings and finds food for the hungry (his dear wife herself does not shirk from ladling gruel beside the maltings at Kessling). And it is only because of these charitable acts and because in these hard times he continues to provide employment, as he has in the past, that no mob runs loose in Gildsey and storms, as it surely would have done, the local Bastille of the town brewery.

  In 1818 – when violence has ceased but there is no less hardship – Thomas fits out the ground floor of his house in Kessling as offices for his maltings and makes the second move of his life, from Kessling to Gildsey, to a grand residence, Cable House (which still stands), north of the market square, but a minute’s walk from the brewery, with a view down the narrow lane, which was known then and is still known, though it is a wide thoroughfare now with a Boots and a Woolworths, as Water Street. The brewery is enlarged and ceases to bear the name it has borne for three respectful years, of Turnbull. The townsfolk taste, for the first time under its proper title, the inimitable flavour of Atkinson Ale made with Atkinson malt from Atkinson barley. The landlords of the Gildsey inns, whose names reflect the watery world which surrounds them – the Swan, the Dog and Duck, the Jolly Bargeman, the Pike and Eel – regale their indigent yet thirsty customers.

  Does it soften their grievances – a dose or two of tawny Merriment? Does it soften old Tom’s?

  For something is happening to Thomas, now a still robust sixty-three. He is becoming a monument. Man of Enterprise, Man of Good Works, Man of Civic Honour. The portrait painted of him in this same year shows a countenance of undoubted character, but it does not have the twinkle of his father’s eye or the soft creases of his father’s mouth – nor will his two sons, George and Alfred, revive these features of their grandfather. Thomas is becoming aloof. He can no longer stand by one of his new drains and clap the shoulder of the man who has helped dig it. The labourers who once worked beside him – the Cricks perhaps among them – now touch forelocks, venerate him, regard him as a sort of god. And when, with the express purpose of showing he is not aloof, he enters the tap-room of the Swan or the Bargeman and orders a pint for every man, a silence descends on these haunts of mirth, like the hush inside a church.

  He does not wish it – he cannot help it – but he feels himself measured up and fitted out for the stiff and cumbersome garments of legend. How he made the River Leem from a swamp. How he brought Norfolk beer to the Fens. How he fed the hungry by the barge-pool, became a pillar of … And, deep inside, he thinks, perhaps, how better and brighter things were that day in the old house at Wexingham, when the summer breezes blew through the window the sound of whispering barley and his father uttered the curious password: Drainage.

  But even this he could bear, even this would be all right – for, God knows, Thomas Atkinson never believed in heaven on earth – if it were not for the matter of his wife. In 1819 she is thirty-seven. The playful, girlish looks which once won his fancy (and suited his business ends) have been transformed by the years into something richer and mellower. Mrs Atkinson is beautiful; with a beauty which is apt to remind Mr Atkinson of the beauty of an actress – as if his wife occupies some strongly lit stage and he, for all his public eminence, watches from a lowly distance. It seems to him that he has worked hard and achieved much and yet failed to give due attention to
this wonderful creature with whom, once, he bounced so casually through the rituals of procreation.

  In short, Sarah Atkinson is in her prime; and her husband is growing old and doting – and jealous.

  In his sixty-fifth year attacks of gout confine Thomas within doors and disturb his usually even temper. He cannot accompany his wife on their accustomed walks, drives and visits. From the window of the house in Market Street, he watches her step into waiting carriages and be whisked away, and the constant paperwork before him, which concerns plans for the modernization and further enlargement of the brewery, the extension of the Ouse wharves and the conveyance of Atkinson Ale by river or road to ever more numerous points of consumption, cannot stop his thoughts, while she is gone, returning repeatedly to her.

  Several men fall under his suspicion. His own brewery manager; a King’s Lynn corn merchant; the younger members of the Drainage Commission; the very doctor who calls to treat his gout. And none of them can explain, for fear of imputing to the Great Man of Gildsey a slander which he has not openly voiced, that Mrs Atkinson is innocent, innocent, and has nothing but loyalty and devotion for her husband, whom everyone knows she adores.

  One night in January, 1820, an incident occurs for which no first-hand account exists yet which is indelibly recorded in innumerable versions in the annals of Gildsey. That January night Sarah returned from an evening spent, so it happened, in the irreproachable company of the rector of St Gunnhilda’s, his good wife and assembled guests, to a Thomas more than usually plagued by the pains of gout. It is not known exactly what passed between them, only that – according to what was unavoidably overheard by the servants and what Atkinson himself later gave out as confession – Thomas was gruff, grew surly, angry, and, whilst giving vent to the most unwarranted accusations and abuse, rose up from his chair and struck his wife hard on the face.

  Doubtless, even if this action had not had the terrible consequences it did, it would have been regretted infinitely. Yet Thomas had indeed cause for infinite regret. For, having been struck, Sarah not only fell but in falling knocked her head against the corner of a walnut writing-table with such violence that though, after several hours, she recovered consciousness, she never again recovered her wits.

  Whether it was the knock against the writing-table or the original blow which caused the dreadful damage, whether it was neither of these things but the moral shock of this sudden fury of her husband’s, whether, as some have claimed, the knock against the writing-table was only an invention to hide the true extent of Thomas’s violence – is immaterial. In a distraction of remorse over the motionless body, Thomas calls his sons and in a voice heard by the whole house announces: ‘I have killed my wife! I have killed my darling Sarah!’ Horror. Confusion. Plenty of Here and Now. The sons, inclined at first, at what they see, to believe their father’s bald summary of the case, send for the doctor – the selfsame doctor whose innocent attentions have contributed to this terrible scene – who is obliged not only to tend the stricken wife but to administer copious draughts of laudanum to the husband.

  On that night in 1820 Thomas Atkinson is supposed to have lost completely all the symptoms of gout. At least, he no longer took heed of them. Far worse torments awaited him. All through the next day and on into the next night he must watch by the bedside, praying for those sublime eyes to open and those dear lips to move. He must experience the rushing relief and joy of seeing, indeed, the lips part, the mouth flutter, only to suffer the redoubled agony of knowing that though the eyes open they do not see him, or if they do, do not recognize him. And though those lips move they will never again utter to Thomas Atkinson a single word.

  Sarah Atkinson is thirty-seven. Fate has decreed that, knocks on the head or no, she will live a long life. She will not go to her rest till her ninety-third year. For fifty-four years she will sit on a blue velvet chair before the window in an upper room (not the room once shared by her husband but a room to be known simply as Mistress Sarah’s room), staring now straight before her down the cluttered thoroughfare of Water Street to the Ouse, now to her left over the rooftops to where, in 1849, the tall chimney of the New Brewery, on its site by the Ouse wharves, will rise.

  But it is doubtful whether she will see these things. She will retain the paradoxical pose of one who keeps watch – but over nothing. She will not lose her beauty. Her upright, forward-looking posture will convey an undeniable grace. Even in old age when her flesh has shrunk but the firm mould of her bones remains (for in such a state her portrait will be painted, in a black dress with a diamond necklace, at the instigation of her sons – and what a perfect sitter she will make!), she will preserve the sadly imperious demeanour of an exiled princess.

  At regular times servants will come, with meals on a tray, to comb her hair, light the fire, prepare their mistress for bed, or merely to sit beside her at the window, through bright mornings or sombre twilights, offering unanswered comment on the activity in the street below. And so too will come Thomas, to sit by his wife, often for hours on end, to clasp and wring his hands, to utter God knows what entreaties – but Sarah will never make the barest sign that she knows who he is.

  All this he must endure. But first he must watch the doctor come daily, for prolonged visits. He must watch him look grave, thoughtful, shake his head and finally decide that he can do no more and the advice of specialists must be sought. Thomas will arrange, at great expense, for eminent physicians to come from Cambridge to examine his wife. He will conduct Sarah like some rare exhibit round the consulting-rooms of that learned city. He will take her to London to be examined, tapped, probed and considered by still more eminent men of medicine, and will donate to St Bartholomew’s Hospital the sum of £500 for ‘the Further Investigation and Better Relief of Maladies of the Brain’.

  He will offer a fortune to the man who will give him back his wife; but no man will claim it. He will return to Gildsey, to the silent unrelenting enmity of his sons and the judgement of a whole town. For will they not, considering all he has done for them, his works and undertakings, the prosperity he has brought them, forgive him this one act of human weakness? No, it seems not. There are even those few, yet die-hard disciples of Temperance who add to the existing rumours the embellishment that when Thomas struck Sarah he was blind drunk from his own fine ale – and does this not prove the truth of the old saying that (far from spreading good cheer) brewers are the cousins of brawlers?

  And if others have it in them to forgive Thomas, Thomas will not wish to be forgiven, not wishing to forgive himself. In the Jolly Bargeman and the Pike and Eel, where Temperance does not enter, they still smack their lips over Atkinson Ale, for its flavour remains ever true, ever conducive to the forgetting of troubles; and besides, the Atkinson business is now in the hands of young George and Alfred – long may they thrive. But as for old Tom, they preserve a dour brevity of comment or shake their heads, as once the doctor did over his poor wife.

  The times cannot be numbered when Thomas Atkinson will ask, Why? Why? And again Why? (For heartache, too, inspires its own sad curiosity.) Not content with the verdict of physicians, he will embark, himself, on the study of the brain and the nervous system. To his library in Cable House he will add volumes in which are contained what human knowledge, in the 1820s, has to offer on the mystery of the human mind. Where once he pored over the topography of the Fens and the innumerable complexities of drainage, flood control and pumping systems, he will pore over the even more intricate topography of the medulla and the cerebellum, which have, so he discovers, their own networks of channels and ducts and their own dependence on the constant distribution of fluids.

  But this is an internal land which cannot be redeemed, cannot be reclaimed, once it is lost.

  Abandoning science, he will turn to religion. The good church-goers of Gildsey who have hitherto observed Thomas alongside his wife and his two sons, uttering his Amens with the calm air of a man who regards the Sunday service as a wholesome if unabsorbing social duty, now
witness the bent and furrowed brow, the forever restless lips of the sinner wrapped in penitential prayer.

  He no longer attends to the expanding affairs of Atkinson and Sons. He no longer reads his newspaper (Castlereagh has cut his throat; Canning takes his place). History has stopped for him. He has entered the realms of superstition. It is even said that when God did not answer him, when God, even with his clear view, could not explain Why, Thomas sent out into the undrained Fen, for the services of one of those ancestors of Bill Clay, whose potions and charms were still regarded with respect. And that the reply of the wizened occultist (who had no cause to help Atkinson whose drainage schemes spelt the doom of his kind) drove the last rivet of grief into old Tom’s soul: that Thomas Atkinson, as Thomas himself well knew, was only receiving the punishment he merited, and that, as for his wife, no magic in the world could bring her out of the state which she herself – had not Thomas looked closely enough into her eyes? – wished to remain in.

  For two, three, four years, Thomas will look closely into his wife’s eyes. For four years he will continue to sit with her in the upper room, wringing her hand and his own heart. And then in December 1825 – story has it that it was in this selfsame upper room, in his wife’s presence, that death occurred, and that the two were discovered, the one stone dead, the other not batting an eyelid – this once vigorous and hearty man, who a decade ago, though sixty then, would have been credited with another twenty or thirty years, worn out with remorse, is released from his misery.

  He is buried with due dignity, ceremony and appreciation of his Works, but with what seems also a certain haste, in St Gunnhilda’s churchyard, a little distance from the south transept, in a grave capped by a massive marble monument, its corners carved in high relief in the form of Ionic columns. An inscription on the south face gives Thomas’s dates and a record in Latin of his deeds (qui flumen Leemem navigabile fecit …) but not his misdeed; and the whole is surmounted by an enormous, fluted, crateriform marble urn, half covered by a shroud of marble drapery on which, where it extends on to the flat surface of the monument, lie (an incongruous touch on such a classical edifice, but no visitor fails to be caught by it or to note the extraordinarily life-like rendering) two sorrily strewn ears of barley. In his last will and testament Thomas leaves it to God, Time, and the people of Gildsey, but, before all these, to Sarah herself – ‘whom Providence restore swiftly to that wholeness of mind so to pass judgement but long to await its execution’ – to determine whether his dear wife shall one day, again, lie beside him.