Gathering the Water

by Robert Edric

  Part Three

  40

  I know it is a common thing among the poets to talk of the mournful cries of the curlews over these empty places, but the fact remains that their calling – the birds themselves all too often invisible – is so unavoidable and distinct that it cannot easily be dismissed. Too often, above the noise of the wind, it is the only thing to be heard here, and in most instances the cry of the birds is so carried by the wind and distorted by it as to create an unsettling effect in the mind of the solitary listener.

  It is now more than fifteen months since I last heard the dawn calls of the peahens on the lawns of Helen’s home. I was reminded then, I recall, woken so suddenly in the barely risen sun, of the poem which likened the call of the birds to cries of lost souls wandering in Purgatory.

  It seemed all sun and brightening dawns in those days. Here it is all growing darkness and ever-shortening days.

  I am told that the springs here are harder to bear by those unaccustomed to them than the autumns, and that the summers – short enough though they are – are longer in coming than they are in passing.

  I am frequently warned to make provision for fuel and food in the event of snow. When it comes here it arrives with a suddenness and a ferocity seldom seen further south. Its earliest falls are predicted daily. In the past, men who have been away from their homes here have been kept out of the valley for days and even weeks on end because no progress could be made against the falling and drifting. I am told that a fall of only a few inches under calm conditions might easily be drifted here to six or seven feet in the strong winds.

  Several days ago there were reports of falls to the west, and only yesterday word of a fall some miles to the north. The configuration of the higher land in both these directions means that they often receive the first of the winter, and the season is spoken of as though it comes at these outlying places like an unstoppable army, which, having conquered these first defences, is then free to advance further, arriving here with nothing to counter it.

  Speculation increases with each passing day of darkening cloud.

  From the ridge above my house I can see the distant whitening of the high peaks, and there are days now when the whole dome of sky is so uniformly dark and impenetrable, and without even variation in the shape or shade of cloud, that those days must be considered as little more than lesser nights.

  To add to this effect, there are also days, clear days, when the moon is both magnified and clearly visible from dawn to dusk as it curves across the heavens.

  I remember the summer’s evening ball in Shropshire to celebrate our engagement, planned to coincide with the full moon so that there might be light on the driveway for the coming and going of the carriages.

  41

  Four days passed since my meeting with Mary Latimer on the dam. I rose early with the intention of visiting her and Martha before her sister’s departure. Mary Latimer, I knew, would return later in the day, but I wanted to see them while they were still together and to offer them what little assistance she was still able to decline.

  I went by way of the dam, guessing that they would come down from their home to await there the carriage Mary Latimer had hired. I knew she would make arrangements to go early, before there were others around to witness what was happening, and so that she herself might return before dark.

  I arrived within sight of the dam and the dwellings and saw no one there. Convinced I was in good time, I waited.

  It was there, less than an hour later, that I saw the man to whom I had entrusted my mails. My first thought was to hide myself from him. My letters and packages, few enough to begin with, now scarcely repaid the effort to bring them, and each time I encountered him he behaved towards me as though we had agreed a contract on which I had now reneged. But even as I considered concealing myself, I heard him call my name. I raised my cane to him, and in reply he waved something in the air. I had never before seen him run.

  He came to me, an envelope clasped to his chest. There was always some drama attached to these arrivals, always some small ceremony to be endured. I feigned indifference. I saw my name on the label, saw too that, as previously, my address was written as nothing more than the name of the valley. Another man might have appreciated the status this conferred, but I personally regretted that throughout the time I had been there no one had thought to seek out the name of my lodgings from my own mails.

  The letter had come only an hour ago. It was fortunate that my carrier had been waiting in expectation of something else when it had arrived. I was a lucky man that he had no other pressing business that day. Had I seen him running? He had run all the way from the mail coach. It had been his intention to run to my home. All his other business would be suspended until my mail was delivered. I manoeuvred myself through this predictable charade, enduring and, where possible, shortening it until I was finally given the letter.

  He pointed out to me the word ‘Urgent’ written in capitals across the top of the envelope. I had already seen this, hoping to keep it out of our negotiations. He urged me to open the envelope, but I told him I was on my way home and that it could wait until I arrived there. Throughout all this I continued to watch for the arrival of Mary Latimer and her sister. I did not want the man to be there when they came.

  I waited for them for a further hour, regretting with every cold passing minute that I had not enquired further of their arrangements beforehand.

  By mid morning I waited with a growing sense of unease, knowing only that it was beyond me to approach the house and perhaps witness there the last of their awful preparations.

  I was about to leave when a woman, older than either Mary Latimer or her sister, approached me. She told me she had been watching me for some time. I explained about the important communication I had come to collect. She then said that she knew the sisters, that she had known them since they were girls, and that she was still occasionally employed by Mary to sit with her sister. She said she had seen me on my first visit to the house. I remembered the figure in the doorway.

  ‘You came in the hope of seeing them,’ she said.

  I apologized to her for my lie concerning the mail.

  ‘She told you she was taking Martha to the asylum today?’

  ‘She said—’

  ‘They went yesterday. Mary returned late last night.’

  ‘Is she at home now?’

  ‘It would be unwise to intrude,’ she said.

  Is that what I would be, what I had become to her – an intruder?

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  ‘She was in great distress upon her return.’

  ‘Did you see her?’

  ‘She came to my house to let me know that everything was done and that she was safely back.’

  ‘Then were you privy to all her arrangements?’

  ‘I was there when Martha was born. If Mary deceived you, then it was done for a reason.’

  We were approached and passed by several others, some of whom held cloths pressed to their mouths.

  The woman had nothing more to tell me. Perhaps she had even been told by Mary Latimer to look out for me and to disabuse me of any misplaced notion of participation in the proceedings I might still have harboured. She left me.

  Arriving home, I remembered my letter and went immediately to my desk and slit open the envelope. There was a single sheet inside, upon which I was perfunctorily informed that a delegation of the members of the Board – names and exact numbers as yet unknown – would be paying me a visit to see for themselves the advancements already made and undertaken. I would be required to present myself to these members, to guide them to what-ever they might wish to see, and to prepare answers and explanations for any questions they might have for me.

  The letter was signed by a clerk on behalf of the Chairman. The date mentioned for the visit was only six days away.

  I spent the remainder of the day examining my files. I prepared one itinerary, then another. There was nowhere for the
delegation to eat or drink, nowhere for them to rest. What if the weather were bad? How would they come and depart? There was no time to communicate these concerns to the Board. I was alone in my preparations, and all thoughts of Mary Latimer and her sister and what had taken place earlier in the day were cast from my mind.

  Later in the evening I remembered that the annual shareholders’ meeting was to be held on the twenty-first of December, only ten days after the proposed visit, so perhaps its purpose was nothing more than an opportunity for those members sufficiently interested in the scheme to examine it for themselves prior to reporting their observations to the others.

  I had hoped to be reassured by these and countless other explanations, but was not.

  My night was sleepless, and by two in the morning I had again had recourse to my medicine. At least afterwards I was able to empty my mind in expectation of the pleasant thoughts and dreams which might flow in to fill it, but which, in truth, have lately seldom come, leaving me adrift in a stupefied miasma of expectation and evasion, the very dusks and dawns now of my existence here.

  42

  I continued with this preparatory work the following day, too occupied by it to even leave the house. I did occasionally think of Mary Latimer alone in her home, perhaps making the further arrangements necessary for her own departure, or perhaps too sunk in and numbed by her grief for even that; but other than these momentary diversions, I gave her no thought. In truth, I would have to confess that a small part of me had hardened towards her, that I felt my sympathy and concern for her and her sister had in some inexplicable way been abused by her.

  I made a plan of work for myself and wrote this down in a series of lists which I pinned to the wall above my desk. When each task was completed I drew a satisfying line of ink through the instruction.

  I worked late into the night and fell asleep where I sat.

  It was late the next morning when I woke, gratified by the realization that everything was done.

  A storm had come and gone in the night, but by noon the rain had stopped, and I walked out to hear it coursing down the hillside all around me. Once-invisible streams on the far side of the valley were now white in their spate and raced in straight, unstoppable lines to the water below.

  43

  Ensuring that I had not too easily persuaded myself, and that all my preparations were truly completed – that I had not confused effort with achievement or panic with enthusiasm – I went to see Mary Latimer, confident by then of my pathless route over the hill.

  I met her where I had first seen her, at some distance from her home.

  ‘I was coming to see you,’ she said. Her voice was flat, and she made no effort to convince me of her intentions. I noticed that her hair, which had previously been so carefully kept in place, was unbrushed.

  ‘You feel deceived by me,’ she said. ‘It’s only natural.’

  I resisted the urge to tell her to stop telling me how I felt, but saw that in this her understanding and her honesty still outweighed my own.

  ‘It is no consolation,’ she went on, ‘but you are not alone. What would my father say if he could see what I have done? I betrayed her.’

  ‘Was it an awful parting?’

  ‘I thought they might soften, that I might be allowed in with her.’

  ‘And instead you were turned away.’

  ‘She was taken from me in a small antechamber, a room designed for that specific purpose, no window, no view of the world so suddenly left behind, and a door at either end, the first opened only from the inside, the second from the room beyond.’

  ‘Did you explain the circumstances?’

  ‘What circumstances? I had only moments before she was pulled from me. The second door was already open and with someone waiting beside it. I told her I loved her and that I would see her soon.’

  ‘Did she hear you? Did she understand what was happening to her?’

  ‘I don’t know. She only began screaming to be brought back to me once the second door was closed behind her. It was a heavy door, her screams were not so loud; I did not throw myself against it and shout for her to be brought back to me, that a terrible mistake had been made. They left me there alone for several minutes afterwards, time enough, presumably, to compose myself and for someone to return and unlock the outer door.’

  What other course of action was open to you? You had no choice.

  There was not one of my arguments that would have persuaded her, not one of them that had not already closed around her heart like a fist.

  ‘When will you see her?’ I said.

  ‘I was given a pamphlet. Eight weeks.’

  It was a time far beyond all reckoning.

  I told her about the visit of the Board, but little of what I said pierced the shell of her own thoughts. The wind at that height pulled at her clothes and she seemed barely to possess the strength or the will to stand into it and remain upright. I held her, but she flinched at my touch and pulled free of me.

  ‘I would rather you occupied yourself with your work ahead and not attempt to visit me,’ she said.

  ‘Surely I—’

  ‘We were wrong, you and I, Mr Weightman.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About the notion of contagion.’

  I knew she was not speaking merely of the contagion of insanity, and had she been in any stronger state I would have disputed what she said.

  It resumed raining and she folded her arms around herself.

  I left her where she stood. In all the time I had known her, she had at best been only half living through her days there; it was a kind of endurance I understood only too well. And she walked now constantly in the cold wake of her sister’s madness, tormented by her loss, and shackled by her grief and by the growing sense of unassailable shame she now felt.

  44

  I lived myself in what I can only describe as a confused state between this encounter and the arrival of the men of the Board.

  The weather continued to worsen – snow fell at the valley head, and the rain and sleet did their customary work elsewhere, confining me to my lodgings.

  I slept little and ate only when I was hungry, having no appetite otherwise.

  I took a small fever – not a serious illness, and any slight nocturnal delirium I might have suffered was cloaked in the urgency and disarray of my otherwise waking life.

  I spent several hours making the room in which I worked presentable. I was still not convinced anyone would want to come this far up the valley, but I felt easier in my mind for having prepared for the eventuality.

  I packed those journals and charts I was happy to have inspected, ready to take them to the delegation. I calculated the times of the trains to the closest station, plotted their onward route. I worked out a path across the dam and along the new shore. I knew where the views were most impressive, where the body of water stood at its deepest and broadest. I knew where the sun shone best upon its surface.

  I was gratified by the certain knowledge that all my errors of judgement and omission were long since drowned and forgotten. Gratified, too, by the growing realization that, despite my own recent reservations, with this first coming of the men of the Board since my arrival, my role in their work, and in the proceedings of the place itself, could no longer be denied, and might be better understood and appreciated by those on both sides who were now dependent upon me. I may have owned neither the land nor the water, but I still possessed these potent and undeniable rights over both.

  45

  I went again to visit Mary Latimer. I knew that she would not welcome my intrusion, that in all likelihood I would again be condemned by her. Or perhaps I believed that her anger and self-loathing might have subsided in the days since I last saw her, that the jagged edges of her grief might have grown blunt, and that she might now better understand my own part in what had happened.

  It was nothing so grand as forgiveness that I sought, merely the opportunity to redeem myself in some small way
in her eyes, so that when we eventually did part, we might do so without the seeds of suspicion and mistrust planted quite so deep within us.

  I spoke aloud to myself as I went, certain of not being seen or overheard, practising what I would say to her and replying confidently to all her evasions and rebuffs.

  By the time her house was within sight I was convinced that there was nothing she might now say to me for which I had not prepared an answer, nothing she might do or confess that would surprise me and cause in me again the feeling of constantly running behind her, which I had all too often felt during our recent encounters.

  I saw from a distance that no smoke rose from her chimney.

  Coming closer I saw that the front door was thrown wide open.

  I quickened my pace. Snow which had fallen in the night lay moulded and grey in the sunless crevices of the hills beyond.

  And then I saw her come round the side of the house, but even as I raised my hand and called out to her, I saw that it was not she, and then quickly identified the old woman who had approached me by the dam.

  She heard me calling and waited for me to go down to her. Her anxiety was apparent to me long before I reached her.

  ‘She’s gone,’ she said.

  ‘Left?’

  ‘Gone.’ She grabbed my sleeve and led me into the house. Nothing had changed since my last visit there. Clothes and books and other personal belongings still lay where they had lain then.

  ‘See,’ I said. ‘She merely went out.’

  ‘The door was open.’

  ‘She didn’t secure it properly. Her mind was on her sister. The wind blew it open.’ But I knew as I spoke that she was right and that the place had been abandoned. I saw what the wind had done to the room.