by Robert Edric
‘All my own expectations would have been crushed had I stayed,’ she said. ‘Even now, thirty-five years on, everything here seems all too easily reduced to the equation balancing struggle and achievement against failure and loss.’
‘Did you and your sister leave together?’
‘We did. And lived together for a while. Until her illness parted us.’
‘I searched my documents for mention of your home,’ I said. It had been my intention to encourage her to tell me more, but I knew even as I spoke how committed to failure I was.
‘Oh?’
‘There was talk of it remaining intact, for use by the bailiff, or as a store.’
‘I know.’
‘They offered to buy it,’ I said.
‘For a fraction of its worth.’
‘The report said it had been left standing empty for a considerable time.’
‘I’m sure it did.’
‘Why do you object to the plan?’
‘I’m not sure that I do. Perhaps I only object to the principle.’
‘But, surely, the money would have helped with your sister.’
‘And did your report also mention how much we were offered for the house, regardless of it being used or not?’
‘No, but perhaps I could make some recommendation,’ I said, instantly betrayed by my lack of conviction.
‘And make more trouble for yourself? Please, not on our behalf.’ She looked at the watch she carried. ‘He said that God had been here, had reached out to bless the place and had then withdrawn his hand at the last moment.’
‘The poet?’
‘I wonder if he didn’t merely float over us all on a glorious summer’s day in a balloon, drinking Madeira and feasting on exotic fruits.’
‘We have a lot in common, he and I,’ I said.
‘Possibly. But he was up in the air, passing us by, and you, unfortunately, Mr Weightman, are as earthbound as the rest of us, planted here as solidly as your dam and waiting only for the water to rise up your legs and cover you.’
I laughed at this. ‘Please,’ I said, ‘call me Charles.’
‘I cannot,’ she said immediately. ‘It was my late husband’s name.’
‘And did—’
‘He died two years ago.’
And with him went all the comforts and certainties of your life.
‘I understand,’ I said.
She considered me for a moment, and then said, ‘You came expecting to find the place deserted. You cannot deny it. You came expecting to find us all gone. Otherwise they would have sent another man, someone more suited to doing what you now find yourself forced to do.’
I acknowledged the rightness of her guess and the compliment it contained.
She stood in a seeming reverie for a moment before leaving me, all sound of her passage through the heather drowned out by the soughing of the wind.
15
The purpose of the early incursions by the wreckers was to demolish those dwellings that would, like Low Syke, be lost the soonest to the rising water, and to take down any prominent features of the buildings expected to succumb soon afterwards. To this end they attacked all the chimney stacks and the ventilation columns where they rose from the ground over which the water would come to rest.
The wrecking crews came with their own maps and lists of empty buildings, but mistakes were still made. Chimneys were lopped on houses still inhabited, and roofs destroyed by the toppled stacks.
On at least one occasion the wreckers were confronted and held off, and some were discovered to be local men put out of work elsewhere.
Later, once the dam was completed, the tactics of the Board changed. As individual dwellings were vacated, so the wreckers were set on them in the night. Walls were razed to the ground. All good stone and slate was taken away. Fires were made of floors and rafters, more to prevent the timbers being salvaged than to destroy them. Nearby dwellers stayed away, listening from behind locked doors to the sounds of destruction. In this way, over several months, the main part of the work was done and the people here grew accustomed to living among ruins.
All this had happened through the previous winter, when the nights were long and the days themselves dark.
Throughout the past spring and summer, however, the wreckers had come more openly. They were no longer local men. They were brought by the railway and then carried on carts, delivered and collected. They considered themselves superior men. They took pride in their brutality. Occasionally a small crowd might gather to watch them work and these men would play to their audience. One of the overseers, apparently, upon finding himself and his crew observed, had turned to the crowd and called out to them that they should consider themselves fortunate not to have possessed a church with a steeple or tower. Otherwise, he shouted gleefully, this would have been the first of his targets. The open chapel belfry rose scarcely four feet above its low roof.
I am reassured – insofar as I am reassured of anything connected to the Board – that the chapel, despite the imminent loss of its burial ground, will not be demolished, but will be left to the water.
It is the natural condition of every stone-built structure in this place to fall into ruin, and in most instances there is little to distinguish between the piles of overgrown rubble and the slopes of scree and drifted talus that occur here naturally. Wood, too, is quickly bleached to the colour of a cut stump and loses all trace of its man-made shape in the course of a year exposed to the elements.
In considering all this, I cannot ignore the obvious comparison between the wreckers and myself. These other men are skirmishers, come seemingly out of nowhere, destructive and quickly withdrawn; and, allowing the comparison, I find myself little more than a camp follower, a scavenger, benefiting from this brutality, and trudging with my account book through the aftermath, the mess and loss and suffering of battle.
Earlier today, and not for the first time, I heard myself called ‘flooder’. The name and all it implies makes me smile.
16
I crossed to the far side of the middle valley and turned downriver, coming eventually to the tributary I sought. A decade ago a flood had risen in this lesser valley and had flowed disastrously into the main watercourse, killing seven men and over a hundred penned sheep. A swathe of high pasture was cut to bedrock and lost for ever. One explanation for this sudden deluge was that a great blister of moss and peat had risen following several days of heavy rainfall, that the land itself, having absorbed as much of this water as it could contain, had then turned to liquid, risen in a black dome, burst and spilled itself out along the narrow tributary with the force of a torrent and giving no warning of its rush into the main valley below. Four of the seven bodies were soon recovered, but the others were never found, not even later when the waters receded and a fuller search was made.
It occurred to me as I climbed the far side that the effects of the recent saturating rainfall might one day be felt again, and I sought out the location of the blister. The grass beneath my feet sprang water where I walked.
I eventually located a shallow crater, forty feet in diameter, and although partially regrown, this was clearly the site of the phenomenon. A broad scar of exposed rock stretched from the crater down to the stream, and the stream itself was deeper and wider beneath the mark. Inside the crater lay an almost perfectly circular pool. It was beyond me to understand how any of the drainage engineers might accurately predict the likelihood of any such recurrence, but I felt reassured by the fact that the reservoir would be sufficient in size and depth to absorb and to act as a brake on any further rapid flooding originating in the hills above it.
It was as I left this side valley that I saw a figure beneath me. A man was coming uphill with his head down, concentrating on the effort of walking. I descended and called out to him. He stopped at my cry and looked up. I saw that he was laden with satchels, that he carried a small spade, and that a chart case similar to my own hung at his side. My first thought was that here a
t last was the water bailiff come to introduce himself.
But instead of approaching closer, the man waited where he stood for me to come to him. In those places where the sun shone most intensely against the slope, a thin vapour rose from the grass.
‘You’ve visited the site of the flood,’ he said, and put out his hand. ‘Are you the overseer?’
‘And you?’ I said. It only then occurred to me that he might have had some other connection to the Board.
‘On a quest for Venutius. Thirty years thus far, and barely a thing found.’
‘Venutius?’
‘Warrior chief of the Brigantes. He broke with the ruler, Queen Cartimandua, in disgust at her passive capitulation to the Romans.’ He spoke as though he had been called upon to explain himself a hundred times before.
‘And you search for him here?’ I looked at the emptiness all around us; it seemed no place for the romance of history.
‘It was to these parts that he fled, better able to resist. He raided to the east of here for over twenty years.’
‘What became of him?’
‘What you would expect.’
‘He disappeared into legend,’ I said.
‘Unhappily, no. The Romans hunted him down, killed him, killed or enslaved his family, his children and followers, and then destroyed all trace of him. And that, as I am constantly reminded, is what makes my own task so difficult.’
‘Have you found nothing?’
‘A few clues. Some of his followers were set to work in the first lead mines here. I daresay their descendants might still be found, though I doubt many survived for long or had the inclination to breed families of their own.’ He too looked around us. ‘It seems an unnatural pursuit at the best of times in these parts.’
‘Is there any one thing for which you are searching?’
‘A shrine. Built by the Romans to Silvanus.’
‘The god of wild places,’ I said. I had heard of others during my work elsewhere.
‘And believed to be somewhere along the higher reaches of this valley side, or the valley adjacent.’
‘And you still search for it after thirty years?’
My discouraging tone did nothing to dissuade him. ‘I do,’ he said. ‘And if I am running around in circles, then I must start to run even faster.’
‘Oh?’
‘Your scheme.’
‘You think the water will cover it?’
‘Possibly, possibly not.’ Then he asked me which direction I was walking and offered to accompany me part of the way.
‘You could return to search above the level of the water,’ I suggested.
‘My task at present is all but impossible,’ he said. ‘Imagine impossibility doubled.’
I drew for him with my hand where I thought the water might come.
‘I have visited the supposed grave of Agamemnon,’ he said. ‘He is laid beneath Mediterranean limestone, and a softer rock you never saw. The whole tomb has been hollowed out and used by bees. A grave filled with honey.’
‘It seems a different thing entirely, history there and history here,’ I said.
‘Then you are not familiar with the Historia Britonum? There is a cave in the rock beneath a castle not twenty miles away in which Arthur and his knights are said to be sleeping.’ He turned to look in the direction of the distant, invisible place.
‘By which you mean dead and buried.’
‘Legend insists they are merely sleeping, awaiting the call to awake and come to the nation’s rescue.’
‘Rescue from what?’
‘From invaders, I daresay. From men come to seize the land.’
‘Then I shall seize and pillage and destroy as quietly as I know how,’ I said.
He then diverted a short distance from our course and beckoned me to follow him. ‘The larder of a shrike,’ he said, indicating a thorn bush, the points of which were filled with the impaled bodies of insects and worms and several small frogs. He studied these and searched around us for the butcher, but the bird was not to be seen.
He explained to me that it was his belief that once, countless years ago, years beyond any biblical span or explanation, the whole of these uplands and their valleys had lain buried beneath a deep sea of ice. Ice as solid as rock, and as deep as the ice which now covered the Poles. He saw that I was not convinced by this, but went on with his description. It was his opinion that every feature of the valley could be traced back to the weight and motion of this ice, and especially its melting and draining away. Even the smallest feature, he said, might be accounted for by this cap of ice and the cataclysm of its departure.
He made the present upheaval seem as nothing by comparison with this distant event. I asked him if there had been people living here at the time of all this ice, and he told me that he believed there had been, and that it had once been his ambition to locate their remains.
I asked him to tell me more, but he became suddenly evasive on the subject, considering, perhaps, that my disbelief might turn to ridicule behind his back.
We parted where my path home crossed the river.
In later considering my conversation with the man, it occurs to me that I might be said to be suffering from an opposing affliction to those sailors who, spending long periods on the open oceans, begin to imagine they can see green fields, woodland and rolling hills where, in truth, there is only the limitless sea. This affliction is called ‘calenture’. But whereas they look out over the expanse of water and see those fields and woods and hills, I look out over those same features and see only the expanse of coming water. I can extend the fanciful comparison no further. Do the mariners fully recover their sanity upon reaching home, I wonder, or is it lost to them for ever in a storm of madness?
17
I went today to visit Mary Latimer and her sister. I followed a different path to the one she and I had climbed from the dam, expecting the two to intersect close to their home. Instead I was led away from where I calculated the house to be and was forced to cross a waterlogged hilltop to reach them.
Finally approaching the building, I saw immediately that it had once been more substantial than most others here-abouts, certainly better built and situated than my own, but that now it stood, if not in ruin, then in a state of considerable disrepair. It was larger than I had imagined, certainly far too large and demanding in its upkeep for the two women who now lived there. Slabs were missing from one end of its roof, and wood had been nailed over all the upstairs windows. The porch which had once surrounded the front door lay in rubble on either side of the path.
The small garden was completely overgrown, and though I saw the remains of pasture walls stretching out from the enclosure, the improved land they might once have contained was now indistinguishable from the moorland beyond.
As I approached, Mary Latimer came out to me.
‘You lost your path,’ she said.
I brushed at the wet stains which covered me to my knees. ‘I never found it.’
‘Welcome to our mansion.’
I told her I could still discern what the place had once been.
‘And I sometimes wish, looking at what it has become, that you could raise your water high enough to cover it, so that it might be gone completely.’
‘Is your attachment to the house strong?’
‘Once it was. But, as you have already surmised, it was not then what it has become. And I am here, now, with Martha, through circumstance rather than choice.’
Martha was her sister; I had not previously known the woman’s name.
‘Is she well? I mean well enough to receive visitors?’
‘It may seem a harsh thing to say, but how she feels is of little consequence concerning much of the life passing around her.’
‘I never knew her name.’
‘Martha. Sister of Lazarus. The Disappointed Woman. Shall we go in? Look over my shoulder; she will no doubt be watching us through the window. We occupy only a small part of the house: the kitchen a
nd two of the downstairs rooms.’
I looked over her shoulder and saw the woman standing there. My apprehension regarding my introduction to her must have showed on my face.
‘There’s nothing to fear,’ Mary Latimer said. ‘There are days when she devotes far more of her energy to the passing birds than she does even to me.’
‘I’m not afraid,’ I said.
‘Not even of offending me, perhaps, by some infelicitude or crass remark concerning her?’
‘Of that, perhaps, yes.’
To reassure me further, she took me by the arm and led me into the house.
The hallway was narrow and unlit.
‘Watch where you step,’ she said. ‘Some of the boards are rotten.’ Then she called her sister’s name several times, both to warn the woman of our imminent appearance, and also to reassure her, as one might repeat the name of a horse or a dog in order to calm it.
She went first into the room in which the woman awaited us. It was a room similar in many respects to my own, with its windows facing down over the slope, and with a fire in the hearth at the far end.
The woman stood at her place by the window.
‘Martha, this is Mr Weightman. He is here to oversee the dam and the reservoir.’ She paused, waited. ‘Mr Weightman.’ She stood aside so that I might present myself more fully.
The woman looked first at my face and then down to my wet legs and feet.
‘He lost his path,’ Mary Latimer said beside me.
The woman at the window nodded, and then she held out her hand and came towards me. ‘You should really have come down to the dam and then up through the houses,’ she said. ‘Nothing else is reliable at this time of year. Come closer to the fire.’
I allowed her to lead me closer to the hearth. Mary Latimer remained where she stood in the doorway.
