Reservoir 13

by Jon McGregor

  In August the young bats moved away from their mothers’ milk and the nursery colonies broke up. Their networks of flight were complex and unseen. They flung themselves through the grazing meadows taking dung beetles and moths while the adults began finding mates. On the baking stone path beside Reservoir no. 5 a slowworm was basking, and was taken by a buzzard to feed to her chicks. Richard and Cathy were seen having lunch again at the new organic pub in Harefield. Questions were asked as to why they’d felt it necessary to go that far. Inferences were drawn. The cricket was cancelled for weather, and the Cardwell team didn’t come over for drinks as they had done in previous years. Su and Austin Cooper had their twentieth anniversary. Austin had learnt that Su’s reluctance to celebrate dates was sincere and deeply felt, but this year she had surprised him with a card and a booking at a restaurant in town. Susanna Wright had agreed to babysit. When they got into the car to drive to the restaurant, both of them a little damp and flushed from the shower, Su braced herself for Austin’s reminiscing. It was what he did. She sometimes saw him, in the middle of some family moment – in the woods with the boys, at dinner with her parents, at the village pantomime, even the two of them in bed together – seeming to close his eyes and store the occasion up for future recollection. He enjoyed the recollection more than the moments themselves, it seemed. But he looked at her, and said nothing. They drove through the village, the sunlight low and flashing through the trees, the smell of summer’s tail-end coming in through the windows. She thought about their first meeting, when she was an assistant producer at the radio station and had come to do a piece on the well dressing, and found herself talking to this clumsy, hesitant man with a bag full of cameras and Dictaphones and notepads. How he’d told her far more about the well dressing than she needed to know, but had then asked her about radio journalism and the BBC, and the other stories she was working on. He did a lot more listening than most of the men she knew, especially the journalists. When the well dressing was finished they’d gone for a drink, and when the drink was done they’d gone for a walk, and the walk had taken them all the way back to his tiny terraced house in town. The story had been simplified over the years, but it had never been much more complicated than that. She looked at him now. She wondered if either of them could ever be that impulsive again. They parked the car, and walked towards the restaurant, and she slipped her hand into his. She stopped him, and stretched up to kiss his cheek, and whispered thank you in his ear. He looked surprised, and kissed her back, and they walked on.

  In the closing days of summer the eggs of the dark-green fritillaries in the beech-wood clearing turned from yellow to purple to grey before they hatched. There were no swallows left. The nests were still there, crumbling and mud-flaked, and would be there when the swallows returned in the spring. White campion thronged the verges along the road towards town, their neat flowers wrinkling as the seed-heads began to swell. In the beech wood the young foxes were ready to move on. It was Martin’s turn to put together the Harvest Festival display at the church, and despite regular promises not to let anyone down he disappeared at the last moment. Irene and Winnie stepped in. The river turned over beneath the packhorse bridge and ran steady to the millpond weir. Lynsey Smith came home from Leeds and moved back in with her parents. It was a temporary move but it took a hired van to bring back all her things. She’d been living with a boyfriend after graduation and it hadn’t worked out. He was older than her and worked at the university, and he’d decided the relationship had run its course. He’d told her she was too young to think about settling down. He’d told her she needed some time to find out who she was, to go into the world and have adventures and not be stuck in Leeds with a dowdy old lecturer in public health. He’d told her, when the conversation became a little more heated, that she was too needy and she made him feel trapped. It took her a while to share this with anyone. It made her feel ashamed, she told Sophie. It made her feel that she’d let him down in some way. He texted her sometimes, but when she texted him back he never replied. Sophie told her she needed to let it go. Her parents didn’t ask questions but they knew something had gone wrong. Her mother was patient but her father wanted to know what had been the point of spending all that money on university. They offered her work in the shop and it was easier just to say yes. The Workers’ Educational Association group stuck with Italian for a second year, and the more dedicated element started a conversation club at the Gladstone on a Wednesday evening. Tony ordered a few cases of Peroni in their honour. Cathy knocked on Mr Wilson’s door and asked whether Nelson needed a walk, and he asked her in for a cup of tea. She’d not sat down before he passed her his sponsorship form and told her she’d be sponsoring him for the swim he was doing. She asked if there was a choice and he gave her a look. These poor people don’t get a choice about not having clean water to drink, he said. She asked for a pen. He told her he was barely up to four or five lengths, tops, so she’d best make it at least a fiver per. She snorted, and then realised he wasn’t joking. She’d sat through his talks about this clean-water charity before, so she went ahead and put herself down for five pounds per length. Don’t go overdoing it now, she said. You don’t want to go damaging that hip. He poured the tea. Don’t you worry. The physiotherapy nurses are good but they’re no magicians. There was an unexpected smell about him as he handed over the tea, and she asked whether he’d been smoking.

  At the allotments in the long days of rain the broad leaves of courgettes and beans were blackened with rot, the cow parsley collapsing into the hedgerows, the ground spread with a slime of autumn leaves blown in from the beech wood. Clive was cutting back the dead growth and raking it into a heap. Jones was digging his plot bare. Ruth and Susanna were talking on Susanna’s plot, sheltering under a large umbrella and watching the pumpkins ripen against the mulch. It had been a good first season for Susanna. The tomatoes and peppers in the greenhouse hadn’t amounted to much, and the carrots had never even germinated; but there had been potatoes and beans and courgettes and peas, and now these bright swelling pumpkins. The plot was nothing to look at but she had plans for the next year and she felt ready for what was to come. Ruth had been a help. At home Ashleigh had been filling in her university application, and Susanna remembered from Rohan how quickly this last year would go. Ashleigh had broken things off with the Jackson boy so she could concentrate on her A levels, and it didn’t look to Susanna as though either of them were much concerned. At midnight the clouds thickened and the moon dimmed. The widower hadn’t been seen for months, and Jones helped himself to what fruit there was. There had been a concern that something might have happened, and talk of breaking in the door, but when pushed Jones had admitted knowing the man was away, and being in possession of the key. He’d been offered a lecturing job abroad, was Jones’s information, and had taken his daughter with him for six months. For the educational experience. Jones knew a lot about the man, it turned out, but he didn’t share anything more. On Mischief Night a girl from another village dressed up in a white hooded top with a navy-blue body-warmer, and black jeans, and canvas shoes, and zombie make-up. She was driven back to her parents, and words were had. There was building work at Culshaw Hall, and talk the new owners were turning it into a hotel and lodge. The dams had their ten-year inspection and three of them were found to be failing, the steel rods in the concrete exposed and the concrete crumbling away. The Valley Echo carried a report of the sponsored swim, in which it was noted that Mr Wilson had shown unexpected stamina by swimming twenty-one lengths. Heartfelt congratulations were offered.

  In November the rain came day after day and at first people joked about it but by the third week it became uncanny. The moors were saturated and the water rushed off them and was everywhere. The smell of damp earth began to rise from between floorboards and everything was tinged with a dank green light. Les Thompson led his herd across the mud-thick yard from the shed. The sodden air was soon steaming with the press of bodies. From the riverbank up by the fishing pools
a heron hoisted into the air, hauling up its heavy wings and letting its feet trail out as it flew along the river. Rohan Wright had been away travelling but he was back again, living at his mother’s. She wanted to know what his plans were and he wouldn’t be drawn. He spent a lot of time on a laptop, working on his music. Sometimes he saw Lynsey, serving at her parents’ farm-supplies place or behind the bar in the Gladstone, and they talked about the others. Sophie was doing another internship in London, arranged through a friend of her father’s, and had been trying to get Lynsey to go down and visit. She’s moving with a different type of crowd now, Lynsey said. The money they spend on a night out, I couldn’t be keeping up with that. In an attempt to meet the county council’s target for budget cutting, the parish council agreed to the street lighting being turned off between midnight and five, not without much discussion, during which Miriam Pearson was advised that the expression black hole of Calcutta was no longer acceptable. There was an admission charge at the bonfire party for the first time, and nobody seemed to much mind. The predictions of cheapskates lining up along the boundary wall to watch the fireworks were unfounded, and if anything the numbers were up on previous years. Cathy knocked on Mr Wilson’s door and asked whether she wouldn’t be able to take Nelson for a walk again some time soon. Mr Wilson said he didn’t know about that. He stood in the doorway and he didn’t invite her in, and Nelson ran circles in the hall. She told him she’d already said she was sorry but she would never have offered that kind of money. He said it was the principle. He said the money was sorely needed and he was sure she could spare it in the long run. She said he had no idea what kind of money she could or couldn’t spare and he had no business making assumptions. She said she hadn’t thought she was writing a blank cheque. He said it wasn’t the money it was the principle and that when he’d been growing up people knew how to keep to their word. She said, David, I can’t bear for us to fall out over this. He closed the door, and she went back to her house and sat in the kitchen, and a few minutes later she heard his door slam and saw him struggle up the lane with Nelson. She wrote a cheque for £105, made it payable to a different charity altogether, and put it in an envelope through his door. She knew she was being petty, but she couldn’t think she was being more petty than he was.

  On a warm day in early December the small tortoiseshells in Sally Fletcher’s shed came out of hibernation and were seen feeding on the privet hedge, their wings dulled and ragged and soaking up the watery sun. At the river the keeper thinned out the alder along the banks by the meadow below the school. In his studio Geoff Simmons mixed a glaze and stirred in grass seeds and leaf fragments he had gathered. He stood at the worktable and dipped the newly fired pots in and out of the glaze. There was a rhythm to it that soothed. He held the pots lightly and then brushed the glaze across the dry spots his finger and thumb had left. If there was a way of leaving no marks at all he would take it. James Broad was working in Manchester, but was seen in the village from time to time. He came for the climbing, bringing university friends with bags of ropes and harnesses and plenty of money to spend in the Gladstone, and he always seemed to know when Lynsey would be behind the bar. He was developing a reputation for his climbing. He was known for studying a route with great patience, but then climbing it at such speed that he seemed to be carried up the face by momentum alone. He climbs like a man in furious pursuit, was the way one magazine put it. The less approving said he didn’t have the strength to hold one position for any time. His pace of attack meant he took risks which won as much disapproval as admiration, but he hadn’t fallen yet. He brought his new girlfriend home just before Christmas and introduced her to his mother, which she hadn’t been expecting. She might not be as pretty as that other one, his mother told Cathy, later. But I can at least pronounce her name. She seems nice enough. And she’s black of course, but I haven’t a problem with that. James took her up to the moor and told her what had happened with the missing girl. She listened, and told him it wasn’t his fault. He nodded, and told her people always said that. In the evening they met Rohan at the Gladstone. Lynsey was serving at the bar. On Christmas Eve he drove his girlfriend back to Northampton. His mother told Cathy she didn’t really mind. There was carol singing in the church and the sound of it drifted towards the square.

  Richard’s mother had left her papers in no kind of order at all. It took Richard months to even sort through the basics of reading the will, closing her bank accounts, and unsubscribing from the numerous magazines and charity newsletters that kept coming through the door. He was finding himself with longer downtimes between contracts now, and hadn’t yet told his sisters that he was no longer renting the flat in Balham that had been his base when he was in the country. He knew that they wanted to sell the house and share the money – Rachel had said they badly needed the money, which he found hard to believe – but he’d told them they should get the house in better shape before they thought about putting it on the market. He talked this over with Cathy one afternoon, and was disappointed to find that he couldn’t read her reaction in the slightest. There was a moment when she could have said she’d like it if he was in the village more often or even for good, but she was distracted by something on her phone and said nothing. He realised later that this had also been a moment when he could have asked her if that was a thing she’d like, but he was on the descent into Geneva by then, fastening his seatbelt and returning his seat to the upright position. On New Year’s Eve Cathy knocked on Mr Wilson’s door and asked whether Nelson wanted a walk. They had tea and cake and then she took Nelson quickly up the lane to the church, down past the orchard to the packhorse bridge and along the river. When she came to Hunter’s wood she stooped to unleash him, resting her hand on the wall where the topstone was worn to a watery shine.

  12.

  At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks going up from the towns beyond the valley but no one in the village even lifted their heads to look. The fires from the two previous New Years had made people nervous. The village hall was empty and people were standing out by their barns and buildings, half a dozen police officers patrolling and the fire brigade on notice. By half past the hour the tension had eased. A few people set off their own fireworks and a belated ‘Auld Lang Syne’ was sung. From the old quarry there was an explosion and the empty storage buildings went up. The fire brigade were there quickly but couldn’t go near for fear of what materials might be on site. The buildings burnt through, and in the morning a thin trail of smoke was still rising. There was talk about whether the fires might have been set by the missing girl’s father, but apparently he had an alibi. The police had checked. You wouldn’t want to be the chap who goes and asks the man a thing like that, Martin pointed out. Irene was having work done on the house, now that Andrew was finally settled in his new accommodation. It was a lot of work, and she stayed with Winnie for the duration. There were doorframes to replace, and wiring to repair. Mostly it was a lot of painting wanted doing. Whole place wants freshening, she told Winnie. And she was having the kitchen brought up to spec for the tourist board. She had a plan to bring guests in for bed and breakfast. Because what else am I going to do in that big house all by myself ? she asked Winnie. I’ll be bored off my feet. Bit of company will do me good.

  Cathy knocked on Mr Wilson’s door and asked whether Nelson needed a walk, and he was halfway out of the house before she’d even finished speaking. I think we’ll both come this morning, he said, Nelson already on the lead and bounding out ahead of him. As smartly dressed as ever, with something extra about him this time; the creases on his trousers sharper, perhaps, or his hair trimmed shorter. They turned left at the church and walked down past the orchard and the lower meadows to the packhorse bridge, and once they’d crossed the river Cathy asked whether he didn’t want to stop for a breather. He started to claim there was no need but thought better of it, standing beside the bench and gesturing for her to take the seat first. They sat and listened to the water turning over beneath
the packhorse bridge and the crows rising and falling from the sycamore trees. Nelson snuffled around in the long grass on the riverbank. The sun was high and the day was almost warm in the shelter of the overhanging rocks. Cathy tilted her face towards the sky to enjoy it. This was the first day of the year she’d been able to savour being out of doors. She noticed how still Mr Wilson was beside her. He felt poised. They were sitting closer together than she’d realised, and now he lifted a hand from his lap and laid it on her knee. Somewhere a little higher than her knee. It rested there, loosely, and they both looked at it. For a moment they seemed as surprised as each other. She lifted his hand, which was softer and warmer to the touch than she might have imagined, and placed it gently back on his lap. Neither of them spoke for a moment. My apologies, he said. But you won’t fault a man for wondering, will you? She smiled, and shook her head. It’s just that one does get lonely, on occasion, he said, looking away up the river. I know, David, she said, softly; we all do. The river turned over beneath the packhorse bridge. Nelson hunkered in the long grass, and Cathy reached into her coat pocket for the plastic bags.