by Robert Edric
I could still not account for the phenomenon, other than to think that some lost or forgotten shaft or vent had been flooded and was now allowing the gathering water to some-how drain away, creating this surface disturbance. And I could not account for the intermittent nature of the occurrence other than to suggest that perhaps some buried blockage was being periodically shifted or cleared with the build-up of water above it. The Board would require my reasoned guesses, and I made them all as the water flowed and eased around me.
A few seconds later and my moment of glory had passed.
‘It weakens,’ I called out when the decreasing flow would have been obvious to all on the shore. I made a motion with my hands as though I were hastening it away.
Then I turned back to the crowd and moved slowly towards them. The man with the rope had discovered his own reserve of bravery and now stood up to his ankles in the water.
Disappointingly, the onlookers dispersed ahead of me. I had endured and ended their drama. My messenger led away the man with the banner, and I found my bag on the grass where the woman had been standing. Only the man who held the rope approached me and quizzed me on what I had seen, but he too seemed disappointed that there had not been some more dramatic conclusion to the morning’s events, and as I struggled out of my boots he told me at great length about the other pools on each of the chief rivers into which all flotsam, living and dead, was drawn, never to be seen again. Perhaps they had hoped for something similar of their own.
19
My work today kept me out until after dark. Just as there are places in the far northern latitudes which remain light throughout the nights of high summer, so it seems to me that there are now days here when the covering of cloud from dawn to dusk gives the impression of night never having fully withdrawn.
Winter, I am told, will come in a succession of testing, exploratory jabs, usually late in the days and during the hours of darkness, and at decreasing intervals. And following these jabs, almost as though the season were aware of the preparations being made in advance of its final approach, it will make its hard and unyielding thrust into the stone and the air of the place. There are weeks at the turn of the year when the temperature seldom rises above freezing, and when sheets and teeth of ice persist throughout.
I have seen the moon shining as bright at three in the afternoon in a broken sky as at three in the morning when I have woken and looked out. My bedroom is bathed in its cold light, penetrating the curtains and casting its grid of small frames over my bed and the wall beside.
I returned home earlier along the mine road and saw in the darkness how the pale stones set into its surface created a luminescence and gave it the appearance of a river flowing in the moonlight.
Earlier still, while out surveying, I saw in the distance beyond the dam the trail of steam rising from a passing engine. The machine itself I neither saw nor heard – the wind was behind me – but its plume of white I saw clearly enough, unravelling above the woodlands and cuttings through which the track ran. It surprised me to see it so close – though in truth it was still eight miles off.
I have packed torn rags into the door and loose window frames. Locally, the householders boil lumps of coal in their kettles and somehow manage to keep alight the gases rising from the spouts. I have experimented with producing my own gas, but with no success. There is always too much steam to kill the flame, and what little I do manage to boil off and keep alight fills the room with its stink rather than its glow.
I have taken a cold after my exertions, and suffer from a headache and a nausea that my volatile does little to alleviate. I am loath to use my common remedy so soon. And, in truth, it is of course no remedy, merely a means of alleviating the symptoms of an illness otherwise known as misery, touching at times on despair.
Afterwards, I sat in my swaddle of blankets and looked at her likeness – it is all I possess of her now – until I found myself close to weeping. By which, of course, being a man, I mean that I wept.
20
For the first time, my work took me into the abandoned quarry and stone-yard. Hewn and uncut slabs lay all around the workings, affording me some impression of the activity in the place on the day when someone, calculating that sufficient rock had been cut and shaped for the dam, blew his whistle and shouted to everyone working there that their labour and pay were finished.
The blocks and splinters of rock amid which I stood were vividly red on their cut surfaces, and the low sun brightened these even further. I tried to climb several of the mounds, but was defeated by their looseness, making the noise of ten men in my clumsy attempts.
All the cutting and drilling machinery had long since been removed, and would no doubt now be at work elsewhere as the Board’s schemes fed one upon the other and leapfrogged into the future.
It was as I returned to the quarry entrance that I saw Mary Latimer walking alongside the river below me. I watched her for a moment to ensure she was alone. Had her sister been with her, I would not have revealed myself to them.
Upon seeing me, she stopped walking and I made my way down to her.
‘I was examining the quarry,’ I said.
‘Before it was excavated for the dam there was a cave which was once home to a hermit.’
I had heard of such a thing only once before. The estate owner of the village in which Helen had lived had, during the summer months when his house and lands were frequently visited, employed the services of a man to sit in a grotto with a candle in one hand and a Bible in the other. For a few coins he would read to his small audiences. I visited the place once with Helen and her sister. He was a civilized hermit and read well, and because of this I was disappointed by him, by the sham he had allowed himself to become.
‘It was said he was able to cure most ailments by the laying on of hands.’ Mary Latimer spoke almost in a reverie, and I saw again how tightly the vine of her sister was wound through and around her.
‘And were people cured?’
‘I doubt it. But they came. He lived on their charity. I remember being told by my grandfather that he was some harmless lunatic driven away from other places and that he had come here in torment to purge himself in his miserable isolation.’ Her casual use of the word ‘lunatic’ surprised me and she saw this. ‘Then, as now, it seems, we lived in an endlessly scrutinizing and judging age.’
‘Did your sister recover after my visit?’
‘Rest assured, you were quickly forgotten. My grand-father said the man absorbed all the sicknesses that were visited upon him into his own body and that he sat alone with them, making no attempt to cure himself until they left him of their own accord and he made his recovery. This was never a healthful place. Dysentery, diphtheria, the smallpox, other small plagues; that is what they were called. I don’t know how long the man persisted, two or three years perhaps, but to survive even that short time through the winters here was a miracle of sorts, I suppose.’
‘What became of him?’
‘I don’t know. I remember that after a year or two he was visited more frequently, that people came from elsewhere to seek his help. Most, I imagine, were simply curious, pleasure-seekers after some new novelty, come to scoff at him. But some were kinder. Some came to talk to him, brought him food. He held a great fascination for children.’
‘So did you and your sister visit him?’
She paused at the memory. ‘Must you endlessly have your connections, Mr Weightman, however tenuous?’
‘It wasn’t my intention to suggest—’
‘I know. But you see how adept I have become at seeing these things and avoiding them. Yes, she and I came here. It seemed a strange place, then, before the quarry, before the river was lowered; strange and isolated, even by the standards of the valley.’
‘Do you think he was a lunatic?’
‘Possibly. But a harmless one. Perhaps just a soul provoked beyond endurance.’
‘As you are now provoked by my own prodding.’
She
looked beyond me into the derelict workings. ‘I daresay if he had been more provoked or ridiculed then there were other, even more distant and unvisited places for him to have lived.’
‘Then he was no Paul of Thebes, your hermit.’
She laughed. ‘No, nor an Antony of Egypt come to us on a quest for the spiritual alembic from which he would emerge purified and beatified.’
‘Ah, then if there is any connection between the man and the present place, then it is between him and me.’
She laughed again at this. ‘You are no hermit, Mr Weightman, merely alone and lonely and a very long way from where you think of as home. You expected much more, and everything you are now forced to confront here only disappoints you further.’
The words struck me like blows, and I could not understand how we had come so swiftly from one path to the other. She saw their effect on me and reached out, as though she were about to touch me and comfort me.
‘I don’t deny any of it,’ I said.
‘But it was still unthinking of me to have put it so bluntly. I apologize.’
I turned away from her, back to the quarry. ‘My employers are worried about the effect of so large and deep a structure on the flow beneath the dam.’
Water was already being released to provide for those manufactories and other concerns downriver which had come to private terms with the Board to maintain their own supplies. It was something I had hoped not to have to explain to her, being yet another weight placed upon the scales of loss and gain, where the loss was all here and the gain all elsewhere.
‘Excavate a new channel,’ she said. ‘Make simple that which others strive to complicate.’ Then, in a further gesture of reconciliation, she said, ‘Martha was speaking this morning about Noah’s ark. I imagine others have already made some comparison.’
‘What would I take? Sheep, rabbits, crows? Not much of a new beginning.’
‘No. But it was comforting to me to hear her talk about it. Another of your connections.’
‘She must have understood or remembered sufficient of my visit, of why I am here, to have raised the subject.’
‘Yes. She occupied herself by making a list of all you would need.’
‘I daresay there are others here who would be only too happy to assist her.’
‘And who would then draw up the gang-plank and bar your entry as you approached through the rising water.’
‘It seems a fitting enough punishment for all I have destroyed here, for the Perpetual Spring I have ended.’
‘I have to return to her,’ she said.
You are as lonely and as alone and as disappointed as I am. It was beyond me to even suggest the thought. Unnecessary, also, for her own understanding of these things – of what she called my ‘connections’ – far surpassed my own.
She shook my hand and then returned to the river-bed below. She was lost briefly in the impenetrable shadow of the dam, but then I watched as she re-emerged on the far bank. I waited where I stood, but it was her habit, once walking, neither to pause nor to look back.
I made my own way homewards after that, searching around me for everything I had so far passed unseen. I added sparrows and starlings and mud-caked pigs to my list of saved creatures. A fluttering white dove, I saw, would have been asking the impossible.
It was dark before I reached my door. Lights like the glowing bodies of insects drifted along the path beneath me, and, high above, patches of starlit sky were fleetingly revealed to me amid the coursing night cloud.
Part Two
21
I have made my first significant error. I daresay there have been inadvertent others – countless small miscalculations and misjudgements that the rising water has quickly erased, leaving that mirror in which only perfection is reflected – but I call this the first of my significant errors – perhaps ‘deceit’ would be more honest – because I was complicit in its making, by which I mean it was the result of a decision on my part where other, more honest courses still remained open to me. I acknowledge it here, though I daresay, like all those other small failings, it will be ignored elsewhere, lost to the water like a splash and afterwards of no consequence whatsoever.
Following almost two months of weekly dispatches to the Board, I received a communication from them suggesting that all my various reports might be more easily understood and appreciated were they to be gathered together, abridged, and presented as an overview of the scheme as a whole. As a sop to my standards and dedication, however, it was suggested that the individual points of interest within these overviews might then be developed by me in greater detail, ready to be inspected should anyone reading the shorter summary wish to do so. I received this communication – only the second since my arrival here – following a long day’s surveying, and it might easily be imagined how quickly my delight at seeing it on my floor turned to anger at its suggestions. I mention all this here only to make clear how unremarkable my error will remain and that it has acquired significance in my own mind only.
Five days ago I visited the far shore to determine the extent to which the streams debouching into the reservoir on that side were also depositing their silts into it, and also to see what new land was being claimed by the backing up of their courses. In my initial instructions it was pointed out to me that should any of these lesser courses be radically affected by blockage or change of direction as a consequence of the rising water, then conduit channels might afterwards need to be dug to cope with any wayward over-flow. It was common practice elsewhere, especially where the slopes of the feeder streams were not so steep. It was also suggested that I pay particular attention to the faster-flowing tributaries which entered closer to the dam. These, I was unnecessarily reminded, carried the greatest load of silt, and this would be laid down in the deeper water against the foundations where the flow was at its slowest, allowing sediment to build up where it was least wanted.
I left early in the morning. The most direct route to have taken would have been to walk down to the houses and across the dam, thereby surveying the most important of the feeders first, afterwards crossing the lesser streams on a long walk back up the valley. But I chose to avoid the dwellings, and went instead to a point two miles above my house where the river, though now slowly widening, was still easily fordable. From there I turned downstream, making my notes, drawings and judgements as I went.
I was midway through my work when, fording a particularly stony tributary, I stumbled and twisted my ankle. The pain initially was severe, but quickly subsided. I took off my boot and bathed my foot in the numbing water. There was some bruising, but not much, and I soaked a handkerchief and bound my foot tightly. Replacing my boot, I rose and found that, though there remained some discomfort, I could still walk, and so I continued downstream.
After a further half-hour, however, the pain increased and it became clear to me that I would be unable to complete my survey. Nor, at that reduced pace, would I be home before dark. The cloud that day was dark and high, resembling beaten pewter, and the day remained cold.
An hour after my fall I found myself opposite my house. There was no longer a ford where I stood, but I knew that by switching from channel to channel and negotiating the low shoals between them I would be able to cross with the water no higher than my knees.
Upon entering it, however, I found the river to be faster and deeper than I had anticipated, and I made several miscalculations before reaching the far bank. The pain in my ankle was again considerably lessened by my long immersion. I sat on the bank and rubbed the feeling back into my calves.
After a short rest I resumed my journey. The climb exhausted me further and I paused frequently. Eventually, the pain became excruciating again, and the noises I made as I panted up the final yards to my door sounded more and more animal-like.
It was several hours before I was able to reapply a bandage and then contrive a soft slipper from sacking and twine in which to cushion my injury.
I slept well and woke late th
e following morning. The pain still lingered, but much decreased, and so long as I kept my weight from the injured foot I found I could move around easily with the help of a stick.
Because any further excursion was out of the question, I chose to continue with several unfinished reports, and to compile the one upon which I had embarked the previous day. I completed my observations on the streams I had visited. I predicted nothing that anyone in possession of an understanding of the situation would not also have predicted, but there was substance to the work; it revealed the expertise of a man familiar with his enquiry; there was a measure of pride involved.
And then I grew frustrated that the report must remain of necessity incomplete, that its most significant part – the streams closest to the dam – must remain excluded. By early afternoon I had come to a standstill. I did not want to return to my other outstanding work, and so instead I went on with my report to include the tributaries I had not visited.
I did not allow myself to become over-imaginative in my fabrications; I merely addressed each stream through an understanding of its morphology, its flow and its gradients, and made predictions which, eventually, the rising water would allow to be neither proved nor disproved.
22
‘When we were girls we were occasionally allowed to accompany our father on his business trips to what seemed to us then the most distant places. We went with him to Leeds and York, Richmond and Darlington. We even went with him once to Carlisle and Whitehaven.’
‘What business was it?’
‘I cannot say for certain. Except that in addition to his doctoring he had some interest in several pharmaceutical firms. Knowing him even as I did then, I imagine he took his duties seriously. Perhaps he travelled to attend meetings. Perhaps he travelled only to be somewhere other than here. My mother was firm that she would not accompany him – I think that perhaps she alone saw the folly in all this moving around – but she was gracious enough to allow Martha and myself to go with him. They were such great adventures for us. We stayed in hotels, and in boarding houses on the way. I think I knew even then that I would not remain here, would not live here for ever.’
