Gathering the Water

by Robert Edric

  ‘And Martha?’

  ‘She was always more of a home-bird. She relished the travelling to begin with, but as she grew older – remember, she cannot have been much older than eleven or twelve when all this started – she declined more and more often to come with us.’

  ‘And so you accompanied him alone.’

  ‘I did. And they were the most memorable occasions of my young life. Do you remember your own father well?’

  I told her that I did, even though he had died when I was sixteen. She heard the reluctance in my voice and did not pursue the matter.

  We stood at the door to her home. It was a clear day and there was some real warmth in the sun where we faced it. We turned into it and closed our eyes against its brilliance, as though we were lizards or some other cold-blooded creatures dependent on it for our energy. We both knew these were rare days, soon gone.

  Martha stood at a short distance from us. She washed clothes in a bowl and then wrung these out, making a pool at her feet. I had spoken to her upon my arrival and she had seemed lucid and clear-headed. She had told me the whereabouts of her sister and returned to her work.

  ‘Did these early travels encourage you to look beyond this valley, once you were grown?’

  ‘They let me know that I would not remain, that I would take my chances elsewhere.’

  ‘So only Martha chose to stay?’

  ‘While that opportunity remained to her, yes.’

  ‘I spoke to her earlier,’ I said. ‘Her mind seemed clear.’

  She held my arm and led me away from the other woman until we were beyond the dilapidated garden wall and in the taller grasses beyond.

  ‘I was always my father’s favourite,’ she said. ‘He was a fair man and he treated us both well and equally, but there was no denying that he preferred my company over Martha’s.’

  ‘You were the elder,’ I said. ‘You better understood him.’

  ‘Martha attached herself to our mother. After a year or two of joining us on our travels, she refused to go anywhere at all. She made this place her world. There was considerably more land then, and it was still good. It was the world she knew, the world she grew up imagining she would inhabit. She grew in accordance with all these expectations.’

  ‘Whereas you cut yourself free of them.’

  ‘Severed myself. I did. And with no expectation of coming back except to visit. I imagine Martha and my mother believed I had ideas above my station in life.’

  ‘And only your father encouraged you in your plans.’

  ‘He knew that I would never be contented here, that the longer I imagined myself restricted to the place, the harder I would pull to leave it and the further I would eventually go upon my release.’

  ‘Did your mother see what you wanted?’

  She pushed back the loose hair from her forehead. ‘She acquiesced to his wishes. It created some conflict between them, and I regret that to this day.’

  ‘And between Martha and yourself, I imagine.’

  She turned to look at me. ‘Light and bushel, Mr Weightman.’

  ‘It was a guess, but I can see how such conflict might arise. People change, they grow apart, their ambitions divide and oppose.’

  ‘She thought I should make a good marriage here. You would not think it to look at the valley now, but thirty years ago, less, it was a prosperous place. The manufactories were coming closer. There was even talk of laying a permanent road over the valley top. A branch line was proposed that would bring the railway to within half a mile of the village.’

  I saw how unlikely this ever was to be realized, what labour and expense would be involved for little return.

  ‘It was only when neither of these projects came to anything that the place began to suffer. The workplaces came only so far, and then they stopped, failed and withdrew. Better sites elsewhere, I suppose. And for all those years before your water, the place languished. There was always some great thing about to happen here, always some unlikely fortune about to be made.’

  ‘But by then you were far away from it.’

  ‘And both my parents dead and Martha in the asylum, yes. I wonder if you can conceive of a collapse of expectation on such a scale and with such consequences. Everything, everything we had held dear, all those childish certainties to which we had clung for so long, all of them taken away from us.’

  ‘Which is why it will not grieve you so greatly to see the place finally flooded and lost for ever.’

  ‘And why Martha will grieve for it so much more intimately.’ She folded her arms and held them tight across her chest.

  ‘My father had his own shipping company,’ I said. ‘I imagine he always assumed I would take it over from him. In his youth he was often at sea. He travelled frequently between London, Liverpool and Bristol. His father and grandfather before him made the firm the success it was. He, too, suffered reverses.’

  ‘Did you disappoint him greatly?’ she said.

  ‘I imagine so.’ It was still beyond me to tell her about my mother.

  At that point, Martha appeared around the side of the house, shielded her eyes to search for us, and then called to us. She shook her hands dry as she came and rolled down her sleeves. The ground between us was marshy and she diverted left and right to remain on the drier parts.

  ‘He would have drained and improved it all,’ Mary Latimer said, meaning her father. I saw how sustaining her memories of the man remained to her. And I saw too how she kept him to herself, how Martha’s own, imperfect recollections were kept apart.

  Martha joined us.

  ‘I was calling for the horses,’ she said. She looked around us. ‘Have you seen them, Mr Weightman? Did you pass them on your way up here?’

  ‘Horses?’

  ‘I let them graze over the hill, Martha,’ Mary Latimer said, her eyes on mine.

  ‘I thought we might go for a drive in one of the carriages,’ Martha said.

  ‘Later, perhaps.’

  ‘Will you accompany us, Mr Weightman? Or perhaps you would prefer to take us out on the lake in a boat.’

  ‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure,’ I said, looking to the other woman to ensure I had said the right thing.

  ‘You cannot swim,’ Mary Latimer said.

  ‘Me, neither,’ I confessed.

  ‘The sailor’s respect for the sea?’ Mary Latimer said.

  ‘My mother considered me a weak and sickly child,’ I said. ‘A single drop of water might have killed me.’

  Martha stared at me as I spoke, as though fascinated or alarmed by what I said. Then her reverie broke and she abruptly turned and left us. She started calling for the horses and clapping her hands to summons them.

  Mary Latimer left me, and keeping her guardian’s distance from her sister, went after her.

  23

  It was in the company of the men of the Board that I first saw a map of the scheme in its entirety. The word ‘scheme’ was theirs; here, as elsewhere, it retains its more obvious meanings and associations and I avoid the use of it wherever possible in my dealings.

  They unrolled their map like the treasure chart it was. The blank high land they had shaded the palest ochre, more yellow than brown, and they had removed from the map all those features which did not concern them, erasing both history and geography in this newly drawn world of theirs. In this sense, as in others, they truly were the Lords of Creation. The water – or, as I saw it more prosaically denoted, ‘supply’ – they had coloured the brightest of blues. A blue unseen beyond paintings of the sunlit Mediterranean. A lake beyond lapis lazuli, beyond azure, and already with the appearance of being a perfectly natural feature, more recorded than predicted or ordained. I saw how simple and yet how all-consuming and convincing a deceit they had created.

  And, as with the empty spaces of the ochre moors, so everything that might once have existed beneath the level of the coming water was also expediently removed. Thus were loss and change erased and abridged.

  The
few dwellings which did survive the map-drawing stood like ornamental lodges or boathouses along the shore of the lake. The blue threads of the tributaries remained in place, as did the river flowing from the base of the dam. In fact, the only unnatural-seeming feature on the whole chart was the dam itself, and even here their imaginative map-maker had sought to disguise its outline by thinner lines than elsewhere and by the drawing of dense woodland – in reality thin, dying trees – at either end of the wall.

  The map impressed me. How could it do otherwise? That was its purpose. That was the intention of the men who had invited me into their comfortable company and then shared with me this secret of the future. I was their honoured guest, and I displayed all the appropriate surprise and appreciation. And while I studied those blues and yellows they asked me if I still considered myself to be the man for the job, and like any man thus flattered and rewarded in conspiracy, I was beyond all denial or refusal.

  I remember now that amid my ball of thoughts on that occasion was the recollection of a distant memory when, as a boy, I had been shown a map of the Guinea coast bought by my father at an auction room in Winchester, upon which was printed the repeated warning ‘Cannibals: No Fresh Water Here’. My father had seemed no less thrilled than I had been to discover the wording and all it implied. And perhaps because of that simple connection so forcibly made, I knew as well as any of those men of the Board that the job they offered me was mine.

  I see now – just as assuredly as I was blind to it then – how considerably less appealing to the shareholders and investors a chart coloured the true colours of the gathering water under these dark hills and skies would have been.

  I had enquired if I might bring with me a copy of the map with which to impress anyone who came to ask me about my work, but they had refused me without explanation, and had afterwards treated me as though I had betrayed a confidence to which we had all been sworn.

  24

  Two hundred years ago, according to local legend – it is that genus of story – a woman was forcibly drowned in a pool beneath one of the river’s bridges, and the stones of the structure were afterwards pulled apart and cast into the water to cover her where she lay and to conceal the crime of her murder.

  I heard the story, ever varying in its finer details, from several tellers. I learned the woman’s name, that none of her descendants any longer lived there (they had all been driven away after the crime), that she had been killed by her husband, a hard-working, well-liked and respected local man, that she had been killed because of her unfaithfulness to him – and not merely that, but that she had been unfaithful to him with a gypsy man, and that she was also with child as a result of this alliance.

  I saw in the story all the elements of a perfect tale, one changing in shape and colour and emphasis as it was told and told again.

  I insisted on being shown where the drowned woman was buried, where the bridge had once stood that was now her tomb. Accordingly, I was taken to a place where the river-bed, divided into a dozen rising channels, did indeed seem mounded at its centre with dry boulders.

  I knew of a number of processes by which such a feature might have come naturally into being, but I kept close counsel, and instead I remarked upon the impressive appearance of the tomb.

  I asked if the stones had ever been investigated to see if the remains of a body lay within them, but here too the tale was sealed and protected by the dread and certain knowledge that were the dead woman’s spirit to be disturbed, then something terrible would befall the valley and its people. The man who told me all this made no connection between this lurid curse and what was happening now, and I changed the subject to avoid the association being made in my presence. I also resisted the urge to suggest that perhaps the stones should be excavated before the grave was lost for ever, that this was now the only decent, the only Christian course to take. It was similarly beyond me to suggest that, in view of the present circumstances, the woman’s tortured soul might now be released at no real cost to the valley or the people shortly about to leave it.

  Of a bridge elsewhere in the valley, I had heard the story told in Halifax of how the owner of the structure had demanded to be paid extra for it once the price was fixed on his land. The Board refused and the man fought the case in a local court, but was ultimately defeated. The court spectators, apparently, had burst into laughter when one of the Board’s lawyers, sensing victory, had asked the owner how much he believed an underwater bridge to be worth.

  25

  Years ago – in that other life – walking alongside the lake with Helen, I saw the taking of a duck by a pike, which rose vertically from the water to appear at the surface with its jaws already fully extended and the duck already a meal. It was not a duckling of which I speak, but a grown bird, a female mallard. So sudden, so unexpected and clean was its seizure, that only a moment later, the ripples already dead on the otherwise calm surface, it was impossible for me not to already begin to doubt what I had witnessed, despite the evidence of my own eyes.

  Helen, walking alongside me only a moment earlier, had paused and turned away from the water to gather some primroses which grew at the edge of the woodland there. I watched, mesmerized, as the fish rose out of the lake to its full, brilliantly green length, the duck already lost to its maw as it hung in the sunlight and the water drained from its flanks, and then as it twisted to one side, fell gracefully and with a loud slap and was even more abruptly gone. I was slow to gather my wits and call out, and when I did shout for Helen to come and see, all that remained of the fish and the lost bird was the barely disturbed surface of the water.

  She asked me what I had seen, and I pointed and told her. She did not believe me, accusing me of having thrown a stone into the water. There were no other birds on its surface. We walked on a gravel path bordered by lawn; there were no stones large enough to make such a splash. Conceding this, she suggested that what I had seen had been a fish breaking surface and nothing more. I searched the water for some sign of what had happened – a feather, perhaps – but there was nothing. Then she suggested that a child hidden in the trees was playing a game with me, and she pointed to where the rhododendrons overhung the edge of the water, and where someone might easily have been hidden.

  I remember I grew unaccountably angry at her refusal to believe me, and I became louder in my insistence until eventually she threw down the few flowers she had gathered, told me to believe what I liked, and then left me. She stopped after a minute’s brisk walking and waited for me to catch up with her and apologize for my behaviour. Which is what I did. Which is what she knew all too well I would do. Her primroses lay unretrieved behind us, proof of my intransigence.

  Our walk back to the house took us a full circuit of the small lake. It was late spring. Flies hatched on the water’s surface, and were here and there immediately nibbled at by small fish, perhaps themselves only recently hatched. She saw this and indicated it to me. Her tone was now conciliatory, and at no point then did I question why she had chosen not to believe me and had sought for these other answers instead.

  Martins swooped low out of the boathouse and these too scooped up the struggling flies. She pointed this out to me also. What I did later question was my own insistence at being believed. I behaved, I felt, like an innocent man unjustly accused of a crime.

  As we neared the end of our walk, about to leave the lake and return to the lawn and the house, where others awaited us, there was a second large splash, but this time I saw only the aftermath of the disturbance and nothing of its cause.

  It was at a greater distance from me than the previous splash, beyond one of the small jetties with its tethered boats, and I had been turned away from it when it had occurred.

  I could already hear the voices of the others on the lawn, sitting at cane tables, spread on the grass, reading, talking, playing croquet. I remember I paused on the steps leading away from the water, and Helen said she hoped I was not going to delay. I assured her that I was not, my frustr
ation and anger still thickly disguised.

  She climbed the steps ahead of me. Two of her friends and her sister Caroline came forward to join her. I remained where I stood. Even in the sunlight, the water looked black beneath the trees.

  ‘Charles saw a fish eat a duck,’ I heard her say to them, her voice raised and incredulous. It was another of my punishments. The three other women called for me to tell them more.

  ‘I threw a stick into the water some time ago,’ one of them shouted. ‘Perhaps it was that you saw.’

  ‘See,’ Helen said. She continued alone towards the house.

  The others waited, watching me, whispering. I could distinguish their legs through the fabric of their dresses. They, too, had some notion of this, for they whispered more urgently and then ran away from me at my approach.

  Ahead of them, Helen was now at one of the tables. The men around it turned their attention to her and my story skimmed the surface of the day.

  Only Caroline came back to me. She was two years younger than Helen and I had a great affection for her. She held my arm.

  ‘Why does she refuse to believe me?’ I asked her.

  ‘Because she knows, and tells everyone often enough, what a pedant you are.’ I felt her grip tighten.

  ‘Pedant?’ I remember how the word dried in my mouth.

  ‘She decries you because you believe only the evidence of your own eyes and understand only that which can be explained.’

  ‘She says all this?’

  We had been engaged to be married for almost a year, and here, already, was the first of those hairline fractures in the bowl through which the escaping water might one day begin its journey.