Gathering the Water

by Robert Edric

  We had come most of the way up the slope. She stopped and pointed out to me a house which had until then been hidden by the curve of the land. ‘Our home,’ she said.

  ‘And you are going to insist again that I can come no further with you.’

  ‘And you are going to look more closely and see my sister waiting for me at the gate.’

  I looked and saw the distant woman. She stood by the wall of the small enclosure which surrounded the house.

  ‘And I, of course, having already come so far against your wishes, am in no position to refuse you,’ I said.

  ‘Of course.’

  I looked again, and this time saw the outline of a second woman standing in the doorway behind the first.

  ‘You would be wise not to tell the mail carrier that you come on my recommendation,’ she said, both drawing me back to her and returning me to my original errand.

  I held up my hands to her in defeat.

  ‘And it was a great pleasure to have had your company and conversation,’ she said.

  ‘Yours, too.’

  ‘Offer him half of what he asks. The more you receive, the lower his price should be.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said.

  She laughed aloud at this, understanding perfectly my predicament. ‘Now I regret even more having torn up my own letter.’

  She walked away from me, waving vigorously as she went. I watched for some response from the woman by the gate, but there was none.

  9

  The occasion of my interview was my first visit to Halifax, and I was surprised to find the town so obviously prosperous. None of my interviewers lived in the town itself – they all had their ‘places’ in the improved country surrounding it – but this was where they made their fortunes and where all their business was conducted.

  It occurred to me even at our first meeting that here were men who had already made their decision concerning my appointment, and that I was there with them, in the Commercial Hotel, merely for them to confirm the strengths and weaknesses of my abilities and character, upon which they were already decided.

  I met with various of the men on each of the three days I stayed in the town, but I can say with absolute conviction that anything of any real value which needed to be imparted to me might have been usefully said in under an hour. Some – particularly the more senior members of the Board – were there merely so that I might acknowledge their presence. I flattered myself then that they, in some unspoken reciprocal arrangement, might take an interest in my work, even if only because of the connection between it and their own ever-growing fortunes.

  Some of my questions – I had prepared many – set several of my interviewers ill at ease, and some of what I asked them they treated as a private joke.

  There was a further great plan to rebuild the sewers of the town, and then those of the towns and cities close by, and it was suggested that the reservoir, and others like it, might one day become a vital part of these schemes, thereby becoming greatly increased in value.

  One man, the Director of Procurement, told the story of a piece of land he had bought several years previously upon hearing that a new railway branch line was to be built. He calculated the likely route of the line in advance of even the railway engineers and then sought out all the possible land for sale along it. Other speculators had the same idea, he said, and they all paid high prices for the narrow corridors of land upon which the railway, in their estimation, would be forced to run. But this man did not want that. He professed himself an expert in the construction of tunnels and predicted great advances in the field. To that end he bought a spur of high land over which the railway would be unable to climb, and which was too extensive to be dug through. He bought this land for a fraction of what the others had paid, and then he waited. And when the railway finally did come – and with it his predicted advances in tunnel-building – he sold the right of passage at a great profit. And then he sold the excavated rock for use elsewhere. And afterwards, when the railway was built and running, he reacquired the land above the tunnel for his own use.

  He counted off these gains on his fingers as he spoke. It was an easy enough lesson for me to learn and to remember.

  10

  ‘John Wesley himself, the preacher John Wesley, he sermoned at that chapel.’

  Of course he did. And at every other fallen-down hen-coop and walled midden in this valley and the dozen valleys on either side of it.

  ‘John Wesley the preacher?’ I said, my tone even.

  The man nodded vigorously. I guessed him to be sixty-five or seventy, though he may have been younger by ten years. He leaned on the chapel wall. I knew something of Wesley, of his work and conversions in the district, and I knew that the old man himself could never have met him except possibly as a very small child.

  ‘You attended here?’ I said.

  ‘John Wesley himself,’ he said. ‘Come all the way down from Hawes on horseback through a storm.’

  And if it hadn’t been Wesley then history would have fractured again and it would have been George Fox or Father Grimshaw, building chapels with their bare hands and spending a month on the conversion of a single soul.

  I had tried the chapel door and found it locked. Arrangements were already under way to exhume and remove the few dozen bodies the small burial ground still held. The place had never been licensed for baptisms or marriages.

  Wesleyans, Methodists, Independent Methodists, Quaker Methodists, Methodist Unitarians, Primitives, New Connectioners. Even Magic Methodists. It would not surprise me to have to add the odd tribe of Jumpers or Tenters to the list.

  ‘Man is a poor, blind, fallen, wretched, miserable, helpless sinner without grace,’ he said. And if this applied to him, too, then he seemed proud to be in possession of any or all of those attributes. Or perhaps we had all already sinned away our Day of Grace without being in the slightest degree aware of it.

  ‘Do you have relatives buried here?’ I asked him.

  The question surprised him and he considered it without answering me. ‘All truth is in the Bible,’ he said. ‘I never knew a man, woman or child to find truth outside of it.’

  Most of the graves were undistinguished, many unmarked by even the simplest stone. The few small memorials still standing bore only the necessary details of names and dates and those left behind to mourn, and most of these had been long since tilted and planed by the wind.

  ‘You know what they say,’ he said.

  It did not matter whether or not I knew what they said.

  He went on: ‘Wesleyanism is the religion for the poor.’

  And Primitive Wesleyanism the religion of the poor.

  ‘And?’ I prompted him.

  ‘And Primitive Wesleyanism the religion of the poor.’ This revelation pleased him and he waited for my response to his cleverness, which is certainly what he considered it to be.

  A solitary thorn grew alongside the building; no mourning yew here.

  ‘There was never an Israelite in this valley,’ he said, causing me to wonder if our ‘conversation’ had not taken some other course without my realizing it.

  ‘And now never shall be,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So you see another benefit of the water.’

  My irony was lost on him and he turned away from me to look out over the valley bottom. I had heard it said in Halifax that one unexpected benefit of the flooding was that it would eradicate for ever poverty in the valley.

  ‘My father said that the number of conversions at any meeting or revival could be predicted here by counting the number of fish gathered in that pool.’ He pointed to where the pool no longer stood, already lost beneath the flooded skim of meadow. But he still saw it. ‘Five fishes, five men converted.’

  After that we stood in silence for several minutes.

  Then he said, ‘And when will the dead arise?’

  ‘On Judgement Day, surely.’

  ‘I mean our dead.’ He indicated the bu
rial ground.

  ‘The diggers are contracted before the end of the year.’ It was as much as I knew. It was part of my work to visit each of the families concerned. Thus far I had found only six among the living who still cared for the treatment of the dead. It would have been considerably easier and cheaper merely to remove the remaining headstones and to leave the graves undisturbed. There was a new burial ground, seven miles distant, still more field than cemetery, to which all the dead of the valley were to be removed. Any compensation for whatever loss this removal entailed was absorbed in the cost of digging, carting and reburial.

  ‘Where are your own family buried?’ he said.

  ‘My parents in Hampshire.’

  He shook his head, puzzled; the place did not exist.

  And Helen, dead at twenty-three, at her family plot in Shrewsbury.

  ‘You have no wife?’

  ‘My mother died when I was a child.’

  ‘No wife or childer of your own? You’re a grown man. Were you never married? No man here, unless he is mad or cast out, is ever unwed by the time he reaches twenty-five. And even if he is mad or cast out he might still hope to be wed by thirty.’

  Dead almost a year now, three years to the day of our meeting. My fiancée. And I wish with all my heart that it were otherwise.

  ‘They won’t come out easy,’ he said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Our dead. This land is chopped out, not dug. It goes back down like iron. No plough was ever used here.’

  I pitied him the lack of a skull to hold and a ham-bone to shake in my face.

  11

  Soon after entering this profession I was told the story of the Chinese city of Hangzhou by one of my teachers. This fabulously wealthy city was at its most magnificent during the tenth century and contained a great palace. It was a city surrounded by extensive lakes, the water of which was controlled and exploited by massive and complicated waterworks.

  Sometime during the tenth century there was excessive rainfall, and flooding took place in the mountains to the west of the city. The level of the Great West Lake rose alarmingly and went on rising. Eventually a tidal wave rose at a great distance and swept towards Hangzhou, ever growing as it came, and driven by strong winds until it rose to twice the height of the city walls.

  The governor at that time was a man called Qian Liu. Messengers came to him hourly with reports of this approaching wave. Thousands fled their homes towards the east. Qian Liu was petitioned to take action to save the city and the palace. He climbed a high tower and saw for himself the great and unstoppable wave, by then grown even higher. Qian Liu considered through the whole of a sleepless night how best to save the city, and the following morning, as the wall of water completed its journey towards Hangzhou, he sent out four thousand of his finest archers to line the shore of the lake, to form into double ranks there, to draw back their bows and then to fire their arrows into the wave the instant before it broke over them, and in this way destroy it.

  Following our laughter, one of my fellow students asked if the plan had proved successful. Our teacher told us that no one had survived to say whether it had worked or not. There was more laughter. Then our teacher asked which of us, being in possession of four thousand archers and nothing more, and seeing what Qian Liu saw, would have done anything differently.

  12

  There is a place here, an abandoned barn called Low Syke, which is to be the first of the buildings lost to the reservoir. It stands in the valley bottom close upriver to the dam, and there is now a daily increase in the water filling the braided channels around it. This has not yet risen above the unfaced foundations of the dam, nor to the painted marker which will measure a depth against the dam of six feet. A pity this was not raised higher than the height of a man. Even here there must be those who attain that height.

  Low Syke was once a farm, then latterly a barn for winter provender. The water has already mounted its worn step and spilled inside, most of it to soak instantly through the earthen floor, but still inside.

  A crowd has gathered to witness this first identifiable loss. Futile to point out to them that the structure was already derelict, its roof flags sagging and ready to fall with another winter, or that, being so low in the valley, it had already been inundated in a succession of past floods.

  I considered it no less than my duty to mark the occasion with my presence. And, needless to say, there were those among the onlookers who resented me being there; but those too, I was gratified to find, who were beginning to show some interest in my work, and who disguised poorly their enthusiasm for their own departures. The people here seemed to me like the poor soil of the place, laid down begrudgingly generation after generation, but sustaining little, of little value, and easily lost between the rock below and the wind above.

  Children paddled in the few inches of water which rose into the enclosures of Low Syke. They threw stones for the simple pleasure of causing a splash. Some of the older ones stood ready with sticks for the rats they were certain would soon emerge from the doomed building, but which, like their shipboard cousins, had gone long in advance of the water. A solitary rabbit ran awkwardly along the flooded bank of the far shore, too distant for their stones.

  A shout went up to indicate when the lap of water into the empty building came level with the water outside. There cannot have been more than two inches over the whole of the barn’s floor.

  I went to the water’s edge, and in an effort to stamp my authority upon the occasion I took out my notebook and wrote in it. Simple enough details, but ones which settled a silence around me. Another man might have listed all the other buildings to be lost and then drawn a line through the names as they went. Was a place lost when it was no longer accessible because of the build-up of water around it, when it was first breached by that water, or when the uppermost coping of its roof was finally covered? Those standing close to me looked over my shoulder at what I wrote. I noted that it was no longer raining, but that the rain from two days previously still flowed in the tan-coloured channels. I noted that in addition to the abandoned barn, the once-cultivated land of its small enclosures was also flooded.

  I surreptitiously counted the number of people present and made a note of that too. It will be interesting to see how these spectators increase or decline as the process continues and they are made ever more forcibly to understand the irrevocable nature of what has been set in motion here.

  I closed my notebook, fastened its thin binding and returned it to my pocket. Another man might have thought a short speech appropriate, might even have said that we were witness to History.

  I returned to my lodgings following the line of the river instead of the rising track, leaving myself a steep final climb to my door. I met a man who had been present at the gathering and I learned from him that there had been other strangers there besides myself. I asked him who these men were, but he said he did not know, guessing them to have come from a neighbouring valley or one of the downriver villages. Had they expected some kind of celebration, I asked him. Again, he did not know. The world was full of men content to witness the loss and suffering of others, he said. The slope exhausted me and I stumbled frequently in the wet grass.

  13

  My interview and appointment, my leaving the south, my coming north: all this was to be my new start. Upon losing Helen I entered the dark, uncharted territory of grief and longing; I had no understanding then, no vague awareness, even, of the true dimensions of loss and how it might be measured, let alone how it might be contained and endured.

  Starting anew, I began to discern the light and the landmarks of the possible future. There was a time in between, of course – a period of confusion in which life went on and I acted out my part within it – but it was never starting anew, never a rebirth, merely a succession of lesser endings, during which I severed my ties one after another – my family, my work, my connection to Helen’s family, to her sister, to my colleagues, and finally, upon reaching the shapel
ess centre of that darkness, my hopes and expectations of the future.

  How shocked and surprised they would all profess to be – all those others – to see this written here; how indignant or solicitous they would become.

  I see now, of course, that I placed too great an emphasis on this new beginning, and that those lesser endings continue to reverberate, that I feel their chills and tremors even now. And only now, here, detached from those old foundations, am I able to understand the true nature of those losses, and the shape, too, of the mould in which I sought to form myself anew. I had hoped to be burnished by my suffering, but I was all too often doused in self-indulgence, allowing new flaws and lines of fracture to be easily established.

  But I knew none of this at the time of my interview and appointment, and my hope then, for once, was as alive as a kite in a windy sky.

  14

  ‘A poet once wrote of this place that there was a vein of hard and shining madness bred into it like a vein of glittering quartz laid down in its otherwise unremarkable rock.’

  Mary Latimer looked slowly around us, as though the truth of the remark might somehow be revealed to her in what she saw.

  ‘A poet who never spent a winter here, presumably,’ I said.

  ‘Undoubtedly. Except what wholly sane man or woman would want to do that? He suggested that the vein of insanity was essential to existence here, to endurance and survival.’

  I heard in her tone how long she had been away from the place. If there was a longing for it, then it was buried deep and unsought.

  We were again alone. She had come to the house and accompanied me on my short journey to the watershed. Her first remark to me was that she was unable to stay long, that again she had left her sister in the care of someone. She asked after my mails and I told her that the theory and practice of their delivery had not, as yet, been consummated. She referred to my house as a ‘misanthropist’s heaven’, suggesting some distant familiarity with the place. I assured her that I was no such man.