Gathering the Water (12 page)

‘I thought their condemnation of it might not have been so unthinking, so … wholesale.'

‘A man here might say he had heard a voice come down to him from a cloud and within a day fifty others would be ready to defend him against all detractors. And then the next day that same man might say something to offend one of those ardent defenders and all fifty would turn instantly against him and denounce him for what he foolishly imagined he had heard.'

‘You think the men of the Board could have better paved my way here?'

‘I don't see one single thing they have done to assist you except to stay away themselves. Where future schemes are concerned, I imagine your own role might be deemed superfluous by them. After all, you are the first to admit it – the dam is built, the water is coming, and nothing on earth will now alter that fact.'

‘The dam might burst and the water race away faster than it came.'

‘Whatever happens, it would still be too late for this place. The Book of Jeremiah, Mr Weightman. Chapter eight, verse twenty.'

I shook my head.

‘“The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.”'

‘“Saved” from what? You embrace calamity where none exists,' I said.

‘Them,' she said. ‘Not me.' And with that she rose to leave me.

All the time she was with me, it later occurred to me, she had been aware in the acutest detail of everything that was happening to her sister on the far side of those hills.

I offered to accompany her home, and, as I anticipated, she refused. She said that my company would prevent her from ordering her thoughts. She said that the woman who had come with the doctor would remain with her, through the night if necessary. She did not tell me outright that she did not want me to go into that house with her and perhaps witness there what had been done to her sister.

‘She may have made a full recovery,' she said to me, making no effort to convince me.

‘I should like to return and see you both soon,' I told her, and thus bridged our two courses of evasion.

‘I'm sure Martha would appreciate that.'

‘Will you tell her?'

‘Anticipation plays no part in any pleasure she might still experience.'

‘I see,' I said. But I did not see. I did not see how one woman might know so precisely and so confidently the thoughts and imaginings of another.

She took my hands briefly in her own, before pulling tight her gloves and letting herself out into the wind.

I sat today on the rise above the lower valley road and watched a procession of those finally departing pass me by below. Several families had hired horses and open carts to transport their belongings. Furniture stood piled in precarious mounds, rocking on the uneven road. Children ran alongside. Others pushed their belongings on smaller carts. I watched as one family took down a chest of drawers, settled it carefully by the roadside and left it there. Everyone coming behind stopped to inspect this. Several drawers were taken out and salvaged. Other possessions, mostly furniture, stood and lay scattered elsewhere.

I searched among this exodus for people I might recognize. They knew I was watching them go and many paused to turn and look up at me. Few waved. One man, I saw,
picked up a stone and stood as though he were about to throw it at me – I was far beyond his reach – but he was dissuaded from trying by his wife and let the stone drop back to the ground.

Two days ago I had encountered another family making their preparations to go. I had been standing close to the dam when a couple in a nearby cottage started to carry out their possessions. They stacked these on the open ground beside their house, and then, much to my surprise, and before I could intervene, they made a quick blaze of them.

I asked the man why so much was being destroyed, but he refused to answer me, and I saw too late that he had a malformed lip and palate. His wife came out to me and spoke for him. She asked me if I had come to oversee their departure. I denied this, but she did not believe me. She told me they were going to live with her sister six miles away. I congratulated her on having found somewhere so close. A line of spittle ran from the spout of her husband's damaged lip and he wiped this from his chin.

She told me of the village they were going to, but I forget its name, remembering only that it lay over the boundary into the next county and that the woman spoke of it as though it were a thousand miles distant.

Several children came out of the house to assist with the blaze. One, a boy, shared his father's deformity, except the divided lip seemed much worse, revealing more of the child's teeth and gums beneath.

The fire blew its smoke and glowing embers all around us and the ground was blackened by its heat.

There was a rise on the road below me, creating a tendency for the departing families to gather together, and for those without horses to rest there. Ahead, the road levelled and
then fell in a long curve, and the individual groups drew apart again. I could not see the first fork in the road which would divide them, nor the further forks and crossroads beyond, where they would be separated and scattered again.

I heard, in the usual circuitous way, that there was a fever starting in the valley. My informant was no more specific than that, and by the tone of her voice I understood that this was a commonplace thing. The symptoms she described to me suggested smallpox. Additionally, I read in one of the few week-old newspapers I had managed to acquire that there had been outbreaks of dysentery in some city centres, a rare occurrence that late in the year.

The news served as my excuse for visiting Mary Latimer, whom I had not seen since her own visit a week earlier, and I took with me what few medicines I possessed.

On my way down the valley I came upon a group of men erecting the posts of a sheepfold. I greeted them and they stopped their work. The old stone pen was drowned.
A new one needed building. It was time to gather the sheep. The sheep needed counting. The sheep needed slaughtering. Coils of rusted wire lay alongside them like giant nests.

I climbed the path and went to the house.

I knocked but received no answer. The door was bolted. I walked round the building and peered into it.

A low fire still burned.

Then I climbed to the crest of the rise above the house, hoping for a broader view, and it was upon attaining the top that I saw the two women. They were half a mile distant from me, up-valley, standing together. I started across the slope, calling as I went.

Eventually they heard me and turned. I saw Martha move instantly to stand closer to her sister, and Mary Latimer hold her briefly before leaving her and coming towards me.

‘I went to the house,' I said, leaning forward to clear my mouth and to regain my breath. Mary Latimer lifted her apron and wiped my face, as a mother might a child. ‘It occurred to me that you'd gone,' I said. I did my best to sound both unconvinced and unconcerned by the notion.

‘Without making our farewells?'

‘I heard about the fever.'

‘Yes, they do like their small dramas.'

‘So are you both well?'

‘I am. And Martha is fully recovered from her seizure.'

‘And otherwise?'

‘Otherwise what?'

‘I meant how has she been.' My unintentional evasions continued to disappoint her.

‘Not well. Restless, sleepless nights. Her attention, her understanding of even the most trivial things is deteriorating. Yesterday she had another fit of screaming which lasted two hours.'

‘Caused by what?'

‘Who knows. The call of a bird, a creak in the rafters, the sudden understanding of all she has become.'

‘What did you do?'

‘I left her. I sat with her for an hour and then I came outside. I stayed within earshot of her, and when there was silence I returned. She greeted me as though I had been gone for an instant, as though none of it had happened. She wanted me to sing hymns with her.'

‘Hymns?'

‘She remembers all the words. It was something else we did together as children. Then afterwards, when our repertoire was exhausted, I did leave her for an instant, to secure the door, and when I returned she shouted at me, accusing me of wanting to abandon her. She spoke as though we had lived together, here, all the time she was absent. She wanted to know where our parents were, where our husbands and all our loving children were.'

‘It must have been awful for you,' I said. And again I disappointed her.

‘Yes, awful.'

‘I brought some medicines. I didn't know what you might have, if there was anything you needed.'

‘They say down there that the wind and cold air are cures in themselves.'

‘I daresay they have little enough else to put their faith in.'

From where we stood we could see the spreading waters.

‘She wanted to come up here and see it.' For the first time since coming to intercept me, Mary Latimer looked back at her sister. The woman waited where she stood, her gaze fixed on the scene below.

‘Shall we go to her?'

Mary Latimer shook her head. ‘Leave her. I'm afraid you have disappointed her yet again, Mr Weightman.'

‘Me? How?'

‘Your lake. She expected it to be so much grander.'

‘It seems part of my appointed role – to constantly disappoint,' I said.

‘And did you once imagine that it might be otherwise?'

‘It wasn't something to which I gave much thought.'

‘Or at least not until you arrived here among the heathens.'

‘No, not until then.'

‘I've received word from the asylum,' she said.

‘Will you accompany her, or will someone come for—'

‘No, I will take her there myself.'

‘Is there provision for you to remain with her for a short period, to help her settle there?'

‘
She
believes so.' She looked again to the woman.

‘But in truth?'

‘They do not encourage the relatives or guardians of new committals either to enter with them or to visit them for a given period following their internment.'

‘And by not encouraging they mean they forbid.'

‘The understanding being, I assume, that because I have absolved myself of all responsibility for her, then I must submit to their every demand, however petty, cruel or unreasonable they might seem to me.'

‘And she understands none of this.'

‘Do
you
wish to tell her?' She wiped a hand over her face, as though suddenly and fleetingly weary of the great burden placed upon her. ‘You mentioned medicines,' she said.

‘I doubt there is anything your father would not already have been familiar with thirty years ago.'

She looked into the satchel I held open, but with little enthusiasm.

‘Where they lived,' she said, ‘my parents, it was a richer place than this. My father would say often enough in his prayers that they were caught up into Paradise and they would never leave it. I envied him his conviction then and I envy him it now.'

I recognized the phrase and sought hard to identify it.

‘Saint Paul,' I said eventually.

‘In his letter to the Corinthians. I won't flatter you by saying you surprise me. Look over there.' She pointed to a rocky outcrop. ‘See? And look beneath us.' Another exposed face rose out of the grass.

‘Do they have names?' I asked her.

‘Can you not guess? They are known as Saint Peter's Gates.'

‘The Gates to Heaven, to Paradise? Here?'

‘I imagine that is the interpretation many might give them. It was the name, too, remember, of the gates on Mount Purgatory, guarded by Peter's angels.'

‘And is that how
you
choose to see them?'

‘My father would have told you that wide is the gate and broad the way that leadeth to destruction. Tell me, will the water rise high enough to cover them?'

‘I doubt it, no.'

‘So are we even to be denied our own Charybdis and Scylla?'

‘I doubt most days you will even have waves.'

‘And will it ever freeze completely over? Or would that be too unbearably direct a comparison?'

I did not fully understand the remark. ‘In the shallows, perhaps, or during the severest of winters.'

‘Then she and I will never see it.'

She looked again to her sister. The woman remained perfectly still, looking down over the valley. Occasionally she raised and then lowered her arm as though pointing something out to an invisible companion. She spoke, too, but her voice was carried away from us in the wind.

‘I sometimes think it is the greatest loss of all to bear,' she said. She continued staring at her sister as she spoke. ‘To be lost in the truest sense, and yet to remain ever present, to be an ever-present reminder of that loss, the embodiment of loss.'

She paused, perhaps conscious of having told me too much, or perhaps stopped by the sweet taste so suddenly in her mouth.

Afterwards we stood together in the silence of the hills for a long while. And by silence, of course, I mean the countless small sounds other than those of our own voices, of which so-called silence is all too often composed.

Eventually, having insisted upon her accepting my medicines, I told her I would return soon, and that she was to get word to me if her sister's health worsened. She acquiesced to all this in silence.

I raised my hand to Martha, but the woman, despite looking directly at me, gave no indication that I existed.

Later, returning home alongside the dam, I saw the other sufferers there, all of them standing with their faces turned into the wind, and all with their mouths wide open, as though the wind were indeed a proven cure and they were drinking it in.