Gathering the Water

by Robert Edric

  37

  ‘Do you never speak of her?’

  Mary Latimer paused briefly to await my reply.

  I had mentioned Helen and my distant, former life – the life from which I now felt myself so far detached that it might have been the life and history of another man completely.

  ‘She died and it seemed to me as though I had lost everything I ever possessed to lose,’ I said. ‘We had planned too far and too well into the future. When she died, I felt as though I had been deceived in some way.’

  ‘I won’t make you smile by saying I know exactly what you mean.’

  ‘You would know better than most,’ I told her. I signalled to her that I appreciated the kindness intended in her remark.

  Martha walked ahead of us. I had encountered the pair of them on the far side of the dam. I was surprised to see them so close to the dwellings and told her so.

  ‘She insisted on coming,’ she said. ‘It was another of the places we used to walk. We avoided the houses by crossing the river downstream. We kept ourselves to this side.’

  ‘Was it where you came as girls?’

  ‘It was.’

  She watched her sister for a moment.

  Martha picked at the branches of a bush, collecting what few dead leaves it still held.

  ‘She thinks we are out gathering berries,’ she said. ‘It was what we did. I used to object to being sent on the task, but she always derived a great deal of pleasure from it.’

  Martha turned and waved to us and we both waved back. She held up what she had so far gathered. Most of the leaves fell from her hand, but she seemed not to notice this.

  ‘Was it a short illness?’ she said.

  ‘Short and sudden and thorough. Though when its first signs showed and the doctors were sent for, I was convinced it was nothing – an autumn cold – and that, young and otherwise healthy as she was, she would quickly recover from it. Caroline and I sat with her as she rested and spoke with her about all our arrangements. The wedding was then only months away. There was no possibility – no possibility whatsoever – that her full recovery was not guaranteed and that it would not be swift and complete. What was this one small thing against all our hopes and preparations?’

  ‘But instead it took hold of her, ravaged her and killed her.’

  I knew there was no callousness intended by the remark.

  ‘It took hold of us both,’ I said. ‘Ravaged us both.’

  ‘Were you with her at the end?’

  ‘After a fortnight of tremors and sweating, of heat and cold and cramps, she grew calm and her breathing at last seemed easy. The doctor who had attended her latterly expressed his relieved and considered opinion that the worst was finally over and that we might now expect a full recovery. And because I believed him, because I could believe nothing else, I wept in my relief. Both Caroline and I – we held each other and we wept. We even performed a little celebratory dance in the corridor outside the bedroom. Her parents were beneath us and I heard the man repeat the same words to them. I heard their own exclamations and prayers. I held Caroline as tightly as I had ever held her. She was Helen, see? In that instant she was her healthy and recovered sister, and we both understood that. I clung to her and she clung to me. My tears ran down her neck and hers down mine. I have never experienced a joy such as I experienced then, never before, and certainly never since.’

  ‘A joy that made what was to follow all the more painful for you.’

  I could only nod.

  ‘How soon afterwards did she die?’

  ‘The same night. We had a day, twelve hours of being buoyed upon our raft of hope and celebration. We prayed, we gave thanks, we redoubled our efforts to talk at every opportunity of the coming wedding.’

  ‘She was recovered enough to do this?’

  ‘Not Helen. I meant Caroline and I.’

  ‘I see.’ She remained close to me, her eyes passing from me to her sister and then back to me.

  ‘I remember that she and I went for a walk,’ I said. ‘It seemed we had been cooped up in that house for a month. It was a fine day. We walked to the boathouse and sat there looking out over the water. She held my hand. We told each other that our prayers had been answered and that the path of our three lives together – for she intended staying close to us when Helen and I were wed – was again straight and clear ahead of us. I sometimes sensed that Helen was envious of the easy understanding between her sister and myself. She and I possessed a similar understanding, of course, but the tie between Caroline and myself was in some small and vital way different. She was always more direct with me than Helen was. I suppose many might consider her less feminine. She called her sister a “flutterer-of-eyelashes” and herself a “pointer-of-fingers”.’ This sudden memory of the words and of her voice when she said them caused me to feel suddenly chilled. ‘She told me often enough that Helen and I were not well suited to each other, but it was only her way of avoiding saying a great deal more, and she never once doubted that her sister and I would make each other happy. I remember I once asked her what kind of man she herself hoped to marry and she refused to speculate. She said she would not blinker herself on the subject, and that she would only know what kind of man when he arrived. It would have pleased me no end to have heard her say that she would marry a man like me, and she sensed this and swore vehemently that she would never marry a pond-builder or a pipe-layer. A beggar-poet would suit her better, she said.’

  Mary Latimer smiled at this. ‘Then she saw neither the poet nor the beggar in you, Mr Weightman.’

  ‘I was never either. Besides, for what would I ever truly have the need to beg?’

  She avoided answering me by looking back to her sister and calling her name. Again, Martha responded with a wave.

  ‘That poor bush will consider itself harshly treated if she does not soon move on to another,’ she said.

  ‘Perhaps no other possesses such ripe berries,’ I said.

  The slope beneath us cut off all view of the dam and the water, and to stand there and look up the valley as we were able to, you might imagine that neither the wall nor the reservoir yet existed. I pointed this out to her and she agreed, adding that this was why she had brought Martha there.

  ‘There are still some things I am able to do for her,’ she said. ‘Little enough, but they mean a great deal to her.’

  ‘Do you believe she sometimes imagines herself to be a child again on these errands?’

  ‘It would be something to hope,’ she said.

  ‘So – shall I one day become a beggar, do you think?’ I asked her.

  ‘We are none of us above it,’ she said.

  ‘I begged for Helen to be spared,’ I said. ‘I begged for her life, for her health and her strength to return. What good then was my begging?’

  ‘And how soon did you know that all this talk of recovery was a false dawn?’

  ‘Soon enough. Her fever returned. She fitted and vomited continuously until another of the doctors was able to return and sedate her. He seemed surprised at the other man’s prognosis.’

  ‘And in that moment you felt the world pulled from under you.’

  ‘Felt it pulled away and felt myself pushed into the emptiness it left behind.’

  ‘And she died soon after.’

  ‘An hour after the man had gone. His sedatives stopped her fitting. She still vomited a little, and Caroline and I took it in turns to hold her head so that she would not choke. Her mother and father slept in the adjoining room and were in and out at the slightest sound. I see now what little account I took of their own anguish.’

  ‘Did she die in your arms?’

  ‘Caroline and I held her head between us. A particularly violent bout of retching occurred, made all the worse by her remaining barely conscious throughout, unable to hold up her own head or to support herself in the bed. We fetched bowls and cloths and warm water between us.’

  ‘You need tell me no more,’ she said, though the offer was made
for my sake alone.

  But I could not stop myself. I could not stop myself from saying the words, And then she died.

  In the midst of a violent spasm she blew out her cheeks, opened wide her mouth, let her eyes roll to look directly up at me, and died. Caroline cradled her sister’s head all the tighter and started to keen, and this unbearable noise summoned her parents and they too were with their daughter within seconds of her death, her father on his knees beside the bed, her mother holding so tightly to the grieving, living daughter that you might imagine she too was in danger of being taken from them.

  It lasted like that for an hour, before Caroline finally fell silent and we were able to disengage ourselves, one from the other, until only the bed and its corpse remained unmoving, and those of us who raised ourselves from the body wandered like ghosts around the dimly lit room in an emptiness so dark and so cold and uncertain that none of us knew any longer what we did or thought.

  I paused in all this remembering to take account of the tears in my eyes, which ran into the corners of my mouth.

  ‘And then she died,’ I said, not knowing whether I was repeating myself or saying the words for the first time.

  Mary Latimer took out a handkerchief and wiped my face.

  ‘And you have been alone ever since,’ she said. I closed my eyes.

  She wiped my chin and then traced the tips of her fingers along my jaw to see what remained.

  When I opened my eyes she was looking at me intently.

  ‘Perhaps I’ll ask Martha to turn her leaves into jam for you,’ she said.

  I could not help but laugh at the remark.

  She returned her handkerchief to her sleeve, where she must have felt the wetness of my tears against her arm.

  38

  This morning I descended the slope to discover the corpses of four supposedly drowned sheep laid out across the path, their fleeces flattened and matted by the rain which had been falling all night. They were thin beasts, with black faces. It is two days since I was last on the path and they were not there then. Their appearance is a puzzle to me. Not because I do not understand what they are intended to represent – the message they send to me – but because I am uncertain as to the intention behind the act. Am I to be provoked this late into some response? Is there someone above all others in the valley whose resentment will not abate?

  Further along I encountered a group of men gathering stones in a field. It was clear to me by their response to my greeting that they knew of the corpses and might have had some hand in putting them there.

  The result of their labour lay in a small mound beside them, and having paused briefly to acknowledge me, the men returned to their work, searching out and retrieving the stones as though they were a valuable crop. To have asked them why they did this with the water only six feet below them, and soon to cover the field in which they stood, would have served no purpose. The condemnation of futility carries no strength here.

  Considering the dead sheep, I was later reminded of a flood I had witnessed four years earlier in the Vale of Evesham. A small dam there had been poorly constructed and had begun to fracture from the day the full weight of the water was accumulated behind it. A warning to evacuate those close downriver was issued, but largely ignored. Engineers advised that the sluices be opened to reduce the pressure, but the owner of the reservoir dismissed all this as scaremongering.

  The dam broke in the night and the reservoir emptied.

  The following morning I watched from a hillside as the body of water rushed below me. It was an area of poultry breeding, and my strongest memory of the small flood was of seeing thousands of drowned white hens go floating rapidly past me in the current, looking from that height like nothing more than the windblown scattering of apple blossom in a May shower.

  39

  Mary Latimer came to me across the dam. She stood beside me and looked out over the water. I waited for her to speak.

  ‘A child died,’ she said.

  ‘Where?’

  She motioned to a house in the shadow of the dam.

  This was the first winter the structure had been fully in place, and because of the falling trajectory of the sun, I saw that some houses, including the one below, were now cast into perpetual gloom by it.

  ‘They say their springs are polluted and that drains and cesspools are backed up and overflowing.’

  ‘This is clean water.’ I indicated the surface stretching away from us.

  ‘It isn’t the first death.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘An old woman, already ailing from a great deal else.’

  ‘And are more anticipated?’

  ‘What will you do? Put it in one of your reports? Visit the grieving parents with your condolences?’

  Her hostility, accustomed though I had become to it, and knowing what purpose it served, nevertheless continued to unsettle me.

  ‘Is Martha well?’ I said, knowing that we were already on the path back to her sister.

  ‘I came away to clear my head.’

  ‘Is she no better?’

  ‘She condemns me. All last night she raged at me for having deceived and betrayed her.’

  ‘In what way, betrayed her?’

  ‘She left that to my own imagination.’

  I saw by the darkness around her eyes that she had spent a sleepless night.

  ‘She is now convinced the water has come naturally and that it is a judgement upon us, upon me. I know how laughably predictable the remark might seem, but she now chooses to believe it.’

  ‘I don’t know what more you can do for her.’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Several days ago a man cursing me for the loss of his home told me it would have been better if their flood – that was what he too called it – had come upon them without warning, in the night as they slept, and that it had swept everything before it in an instant, sparing nothing and no one, no building, no animal, no person. Then, he said, at least everyone would have pitied them.’

  ‘They pity themselves enough without any addition. Life here may be hard, but what do you see any of them doing to make it even the smallest part easier for themselves? They live now as they lived when I determined to leave it all behind me and never to return.’

  ‘He said I was an excuse of a man put in charge of other men’s excuses, one after another, and that I smoothed out all the problems for the money-makers at the cost of everyone here.’

  ‘Do you want me to tell you that he was wrong, that again you are misunderstood?’

  I leaned over the rim of the dam and looked down at its wall. She moved closer to me.

  ‘I bound her to a chair,’ she said. She too looked down at the barely perceptible curve, at the gentle lash of the waves below us.

  ‘Bound her?’

  ‘She would have done herself harm. She tore her clothes. She burned her hand in the fire and I deliberately bandaged it into a ball to soften her blows against herself.’

  ‘Is she alone now?’

  ‘No, someone is sitting with her. She finally fell asleep. I didn’t even need to explain why I had secured her. Pity, you see. For me, for her, a surfeit of the ooze.’

  ‘When will she go?’

  ‘Four days.’

  Her answer surprised me. I had asked merely to return to the practicalities of the situation.

  ‘So soon?’

  ‘I came down for my mail,’ she said. ‘There was only this.’ She showed me the final eviction notice sent to her by the Board. Its date was the last day of the year, thirty days hence.

  ‘Will you be ready?’

  ‘How long does it take to walk through a door and utter a prayer for the stones behind you to fall in a heap?’

  Beneath us, the door of the house where the child had died opened and a man and a woman came out into the half-light. I instinctively withdrew from the rim so they would not see me, but she remained where she stood, watching them closely. I heard the woman’s cries, amplified
by the structure against which they were cast.

  ‘Can you not bear to watch them?’ she said, eventually withdrawing so that she too might not be seen by the grieving couple.

  She left me after that, leaving me alone on the structure.

  The same man who had long ago told me about the lake at Hangzhou had also repeated a proverb which said that if a man sat for long enough on the bank of a river he would, in time, see the corpses of all his enemies go floating past him. I looked out over the rising lake and thought of those lost archers standing before their crushing wave.

  I returned home, encountering no one.

  Slender black clouds formed and trailed like ribbons over the far rim of the valley.

  I was by then far behind in my report-writing. I had neglected to make several recent surveys, and a great deal else needed to be done. Increasingly, the weather was against me, but this, I knew, was an excuse. I was rising later than usual, and I frequently stayed up into the early hours of the morning and slept until noon. Where previously I had gone out in the sharpest of winds, I now avoided all discomfort.

  For all the world knew or cared I might have been a lone envoy sitting at a river station deep inside some unexplored country. Perhaps if I had been, then my growing discontent and uncertainty would have been easier to bear. What excuse was there for it here?

  That night I woke, climbed from my bed, knelt beside it and said a brief, late prayer for the suffering woman and the dead child. It was my first prayer in over a year, and was said as much for my own sake as for theirs.