You watch me work, and little by little we fall into snatches of talk. You show me summer flowers and tell me the names of those that are particular to your people.
One hazy morning I am bold enough to ask, ‘Where do you come from?’
‘Around.’
‘But where is your home?’
At that you laugh.
‘Here. Where then is yours?’
I turn and point to the north-east where Holland lies.
‘It is beyond the sea.’
‘A place beyond the water?’
You turn in that direction as if Holland might be visible.
‘Tell me about it.’
So that day I sit on the grass and neglect my work, making a picture for you of Amsterdam and then of Tholen. You stay very still as I talk and say nothing. To speak of myself in this way is new to me, and the words come even more haltingly than usual. Each word in this unfamiliar language is an offering that I wish you to take.
Another day as you stand behind me I feel your hand on my back, distinct and strong against my spine. I am ready to turn and pull you towards me, but hesitate. I fear to anger you, as I did that first afternoon. So I tell myself it is my own desire that I feel, not anything that comes from you or runs between us.
This desire has grown with your curiosity and your presence and I have let it. I do not wish to contain it; but I fear that if you feel it in me you may disappear and never return. I do not know where you come from, and you have turned away my questions.
Then, in the last of summer while the days are still warm, there you are again, standing tall far away along the bank of the river. Once again I am in a manner struck dumb, and can only think to carry on my work and wait for you to come up to me, which you do along the narrow path that runs by the riverbank. You squeeze over and through the willow branches, solid and sure-footed.
‘Good day, Eliza,’ I say then, when you are right by me.
You say nothing, but I know suddenly what is to happen. I cannot remember how or how much time goes past before we move, but only that we are onto each other, and fallen to the grass, and I have one hand on your back pulling you towards me, the other already under your petticoat, and you, Eliza, though I do not say your name then – you, the same, your hand in my breeches so I gasp; and then we are together, and though everything about me is disordered, everything is at the same time clear, and it is not as if I am dreaming but rather as if the whole world is bursting into life, and all of nature standing still.
Then I am lying on the grass, breeches gone, everything gone. We are down to the bones, to a nakedness that seems to have stripped away flesh. There is nothing between us. You are lit up by the sun, lying on the grass with the light pouring down onto your back. My arms run right round you, and after everything you rise from my chest, and finally I look up and see in your golden eyes first a tenderness, then an absence, as if you were one moment with me and then in another you have already left. Quite in silence you put on your shift and shirt and walk away along a path that leads through the reeds, never turning back. Such paths are not safe for me to use, but I do not in any case attempt to follow you or see where you are going. I just lie there and perhaps I sleep, because by the time I come to myself the sun is dropping into the water. The mere is glazed with beauty, the reed heads dark against the red to the west, and lit up in feathery flames to the east. The notion comes to me that God is here, and walks near me; but I sit up and find myself alone and naked still.
I gather up my things that are scattered about. The moon is rising to guide me back to Ely Isle. I row over the darkening water until I arrive at the jetty and tie the boat to its slimy stump. Then I see the river flowing north and the great dome of night coming up. I stand and watch as the light goes and the stars become a hundred, then a thousand, then too many to count, and throw their light all over the black sky.
From that day the sun shines on everything in the world. It feels to me as if I have a new knowledge, and that the change that came over me when you first fixed me with your glance was the beginning of it. This knowledge is not from a person or a book. It is a knowledge of what is, neither sacred nor profane, but just the world itself.
Later, the day comes back to me, sometimes in fragments, sometimes to my moving sight. Though I see you and hear the sound of the whole Great Level as it lay stretched out in the summer sun, my mind is not the only vessel that holds the past. In my flesh and bones memory stirs and wakes. You have not gone from me but wait beyond the round curve of the earth, a part of it, and alive to my touch. With the beat of my heart life quickens and time falls away to the other place where we live as real as waking day. Then I can see into your eyes, not from afar as memory sometimes sees, but there, lying beneath you. Your shadow falls onto me from above. My fingertips run up your back and move bone by bone up to your shoulders and down over your breast to where your heart beats. The sunshine runs through your hair like living gold.
Chapter 5
The Great Level.
Autumn 1649.
Fine warm weather.
That autumn, while it is still warm, we find each other often. You sometimes come over the fen on foot, sometimes in your coracle across the water. I might be at the start of my day’s work, or you might arrive halfway through as I sit across a stump with my feet over the water, the willow leaves trailing in the current and my mind with them, when suddenly there you are. So we begin a sort of courtship, in which words and flesh take equal parts.
On the fen and under the sky we are alone. We might be the first two people in the world, except that Adam knew Eve, who was fashioned from himself, whereas you are everything that is strange to me. I do not guess when you will find me, or how you do so, or what you will say when we meet. At first I ask you little, fearing that you will take flight at any question, though everything about you excites my curiosity and interest. You seem to have come complete across the fen, and though I wonder, I know that you are a part of this world, and do not belong in mine. It is I who have come here to the Great Level and I approach you with a reserve and diffidence that are familiar to me, careful to remain at a distance. At the same time I am recording and noting, as my habit is, and determine to understand you as a geographer does the shifting land, with patience and by study.
I say your name when we first meet and then over and over as we lie together – Eliza, Eliza, Eliza. I trace your outlines until the surface of you in a manner gets under my own and I am not sure, lying on the grass, where we begin and end or that there is any division between ourselves, the water and the pale sky. On the inside of your broad wrist I can see and feel the veins that run beneath your skin. It comes to me that your body and my own, with their caves and hills, declivities and safe places, are part of the earth. This feeling fills me with a tenderness so that I want to hold you close and feel the soft hair on your arms stand at my passing touch. Our being together comes to be nothing strange, and concerns no other living being.
Lying with you my most secret self opens out and I begin to talk of notions that I have long kept close for fear of ridicule. Strange as it is, it seems that you, a woman from this rude place, can better understand what lies in my heart than any man of genius I have met. One day I say that I am sure we are present to God and approved by him in our nakedness. You do not scorn me or call me blasphemous, or tell me I am mistaken, but simply laugh, rich and strong, as if the subject is absurd, so that I soon come to think that having made this beauty, the creator loves it still.
Another time I explain my fancy that this east part of the nation of England was surely once joined to Holland. Great forests covered everything, scored through by rivers that flowed to the north perhaps, or to the south, but did not end, as all these rivers now do, in tangled meanderings and mud. Men walked freely over what is now the sea and mingled with one another in the time when there were no nations. So it was that these people used the same language. How long ago it was I cannot guess, but I am sure these two land
s were only parted when cut in two by some huge storm or sea-surge that brought this island into existence and made the coasts of Holland too.
As the weeks pass you tell me something of your people and how you live together on islands in the meres; how if two people quarrel they will part company, one staying, the other travelling to a different part of the fen to join others there. This, you say easily, is quite a frequent occurrence, and ask if the same happens amongst those I live with. I deny this, but later see that it is indeed so, and only the way we describe such an event is different. We prefer to call a separation in a family something else, an opportunity for advancement, or a need to trade; but its effects are the same.
One evening you point out to me dots of light in the gloom. They get brighter as darkness gathers, and then they vanish. It is my uncle, you say, with some other men. They are catching eels that make their way down the rivers and out to sea, lifting the eel traps and sliding the eels into buckets of water. One man holds up the lantern, the other raises the traps and empties them. When the lights disappear it is because they have put them down in the bottom of their coracles while they return the traps to the water.
As the weeks pass I stop wondering about your appearance in my life or why I keep it a secret. It is simply that a light has begun to shine where there was none before. Everything about you fills me with happiness. I leave Mrs Suckling in Ely and take lodgings in a damp farmhouse that sits above the old river in the south of the island. The two rooms have a charm to me, though they are nothing more than a bedroom and a parlour, furnished scantily with a wooden bed and chairs, a table and hooks on the walls for my clothes. The farmer seems more interested in the money I give him than in my person. Secure on the island, where his two dozen cattle graze the rich grass and feed well on hay through the winter, he knows my business but keeps that knowledge to himself.
The whole landscape, that soon will begin to change, now comes to seem magical. When I wake in the morning and fold the shutters open, the dark horizon and the sky meet in an opal glow where the sun will come up. I rise very early, eager to get out, tense with desire. My movements have quickened, charged with vitality even as I am measuring and writing, full of the task.
In the first weeks of autumn I begin to assemble the map. Van Hooghten joins his own drawings to it and together we sketch upon it the course of the two cuts that will carry the water to the sea. They will be magnificent structures, such as have scarce been attempted in Holland even, and never before seen in these lands. Each will be a hundred feet wide and be boundaried with fine broad banks to serve as both bulwarks and bridle paths.
The first cut will be made to the east of the River Ouse, with a high embankment on its eastern side, matched by the western bank of the old river which will rise to meet it. It is simple when I draw it upon fine linen paper. The new river slices straight through meadows, meres and marshes. The old river winds close by, as a slow old man walks mazily by a nimble youth.
As the weeks go on and the autumn advances Van Hooghten and I both shift our place of operations to the town of King’s Lynn that lies on the furthest edge of the Great Level, closest to the open sea. Towards the sea the whole landscape becomes indistinct. It cannot with any certainty be mapped and is scarcely traversed. There are no permanent islands here, no certain channels. Everything shifts and changes with the seasons, the years and the tides. Salt and sweet water run up against one another, rivers turn to estuary, islands to salt marsh, peat to mud.
In the marshes, where there might be a boundary, but is none, the two elements are fused. The land is water-soaked and the water carries its heavy load of silt. Yet we know that it is the water, not the land, that we must tame. Water is subtle; it must be drawn out from the land, never forced, but offered new channels and insinuated into a clean division of liquid and solid. As I make a map which turns the infinity of meres and streams, rills and islands into two elements only, rivers and dry land, that is my task.
In Holland we have for hundreds of years coaxed land from the sea, or joined new land to that we have already reclaimed, but this place is far stranger. Here the fens people make islands, not to add to dry land, but to float upon the water. There are hundreds of these islands now in the meres, or it may be thousands in such an extensive landscape. They are hidden by ramparts of reeds that grow too high for any man, even standing in a boat, to see over them. Now I begin to see many of these islands in the course of my mapping, and examine their foundations. This task I undertake with a degree of fear, knowing that behind the reeds the fensmen place their houses and draw up their coracles out of sight.
One afternoon when you find me at this work, I ask you about the islands.
‘It is plain, Eliza, that your people make these islands. How is it done?’
‘Over years, for we do not command the water,’ you say. ‘We do not cut the land. We make an island not by draining, but by an opposite sort of work.’
‘Tell me.’
‘The first thing is, to call upon the water.’
You tell me how you entice the passing water to give up its cargo of sediment and leaves. The first year there is a ragged accumulation of sticks and vegetation against the willow stakes. In the second year it thickens up. In the third, mud begins to stick and by the fourth the sediments start to harden. Then, once a kind of rampart has made itself, the fensmen capture silt and vegetable matter to build the interior. At any time they may have one or two near grown, several in their infancy of sticks and mud, and several halfway fixed. Sometimes an island is overwhelmed in floods and swept away, but, tended by the fensmen at its birth, it grows to permanence with reed beds and willows of its own. One plant offers a home to another; birds, insects and the smaller creatures likewise.
My own labour continues until the rains come, and the rivers and banks that I have been mapping disappear. The waters rise, and begin to bury the summer islands. I can see the grass waving underwater if I peer over the side of my coracle as I paddle along. In these last weeks before winter I am full of the wonder and delight of you. In my imagination I see the great lust and joy of God as he made the world out of himself. When everything was dark God’s spirit moved about over the face of the waters, hovering to and fro, deciding. There was then, in those first moments, nothing that God could not do, or make, and the first thing God did was to shout yes. ‘Yes,’ he shouted. ‘Let there be light.’ And his shout was so powerful and lusty that light appeared, and darkness with it, and then he pushed the light to one side, the dark to the other and called one the day, the other night.
I now give my attention to the beginning of the world. Out on the fen, with nothing but the mere about me, I imagine God’s joy, the way the spirit of creation rushed up through him when he had made the light and the darkness. Of course he went on; he could not resist, especially when he had made that most beautiful thing, the sun. With a huge roar he separated the waters too, half above the firmament and half below, the waters above whirling beyond the planets in a great spiral of snow and ice that we see as the blackness there.
That was the work of the first day, the evening and the morning. But he didn’t stop; life possessed him and gave him the whole strength of the universe. With a great lunge he gathered up the shining waters and made the dry land appear, rising up in mountain ranges and islands, deserts and volcanoes; and he dipped his bucket into the oceans he had made and flung the water across the earth. Lakes collected themselves, emptying out into rivers, and he plunged his hands again into the warm earth that he had created, the loam full of insects, the roots of plants streaming out from the tips of his fingers, pushing down and up until great forests grew, the branches opening out one from the other, everything multiplying together and ceaselessly.
But now he was aflame with the power of creation and it poured from him, so he pulled out clay from the land to make all the living creatures. They grew from his hands and ran scuttering and pattering and galloping over the new meadows and up the trunks even as the
bark formed and the fruit ripened. Seeing his creation God didn’t stop; no, he shouted his joy so that the heavens rang with it, and the stars shook, and it bounced off the lid of the firmament and ran off into the void beyond. In this way all the sounds of heaven and earth came into being.
And in the third and fourth days this lust grew stronger and the forms God created were more extravagant: sea monsters; and lions with shaking manes, golden like the reed beds here; and great whales with grilles for mouths; and tiny fish to feed into them. He worked on and on, the colours of his creations getting more beautiful and unlikely. In one burst he made the peacock and its shimmering tail that brushed the ground as it walked its uppity step, and rose high and trembling with desire; in another great waterfalls issued from his hands and he threw them down precipices and into lakes so that spray filled the air and danced in the sun with every colour he had ever wrought.
But neither the tiniest shrew nor the leathery rhinoceros was enough; nothing could appease the urge to make more. He wanted noise and heat, the crack of lightning and the roar of forest fires. He started the earth spinning and the winds following on, and he piled great clouds up and up with flinging arabesques of his hands and he stooped down to make tiny spores and seed heads, mushrooms that came up whole in the dark, and perhaps he might have stopped there, but he did not. On the sixth day he made a man, and gave him a name, the first name ever given, for God himself did not have a name, or anything attached to him, since he was the creator.
East of Eden God conjured a garden for Adam to walk in and planted it with all the most beautiful and fertile trees and plants he had created, and, as a last burst of creation, God added Eve. And this, I think as I go about my measuring and plumbing for depth, was the creation of the world.
God’s lust for invention waned after that. He was tired, and sat back and watched everything that he had made. He threw Adam and Eve out of the garden and set them to wander across Eden and into the world and have children, but still man disappointed him. Then God went back to the beginning, to water. Water was God’s great love, the first thing, the dry land only a second thought. So when he decided to rid the world of the evil of man it was water God turned to. In his rage he opened the floodgates of heaven and let the fountains of the deep pour over the earth. He made it rain unceasingly until all the earth was covered in water, men and children and women whirled away in the flood until only a few were left. Just in time he repented and ordered a ship made, men and animals saved, a voyage and a settling on Mount Ararat.
The Great Level Page 8
