Gathering the Water (2 page)

‘I shall swim
down
to them. I shall swim on top of the water and I shall swim
beneath
it.' He lowered his foot and swung his arms as he spoke. ‘My hands also,' he shouted, thrusting his hands at me, palm up, palm down.

‘What of them?'

‘They too were once connected in the same fashion, but were cut by a surgeon when I was a boy.'

I almost laughed at the dry note of distant regret in his voice.

‘Then stay and swim,' I said to this frog-man.

‘I shall.'

‘And what will you live on? Fish?'

The question stopped him. ‘Will there be
fish
in the new sea?'

I did not know. Somewhere in the bundles of unread reports and assessments I had brought with me there would be something said about fish.

‘Of course there will be fish,' I told him.

‘Then I shall live off them.' He chewed the air.

I turned and left him, remarking on the business I had yet to attend to, and he, in turn, went back to the wall and put on his boots. He went down the hillside in a zig-zag, as though uncertain of the route he wanted to take, of where he might perhaps locate the first of the rising water. And one by one, because even in those untethered lives an order existed, the dogs rose from the grass and walked behind him.

As I was about to re-enter the house I looked beyond it to the crest of the hill and saw there someone else
silhouetted against the growing light. I shielded my eyes, and as I looked more closely this single watcher divided and became two, and I saw that these two were women. I saw by their movement and by the arms still held between them that one had been holding the other and that now this second figure was drawing away from the first. Thus separated, they stood motionless and looked down at me. I raised my hand to them, but received no acknowledgement. I considered climbing the short distance towards them, but some instinct – something, perhaps, connected to the way they still stood, apart and yet within reach of each other; the way the arms of one still seemed protectively half raised towards the other – kept me where I stood.

We observed each other like this for a short while, after which the taller of the two women pulled the other back to her, held her by her shoulders and then turned her away from me.

I have chosen the largest of the downstairs rooms for my workplace. Three heavy tables gathered in from the rest of the house will serve for my charts and plans. The fire is already laid and burning. Fires here are kept alight continuously throughout the winter, of which autumn and spring are lesser parts, and from which, seemingly, the summer is no more than a brief and unreliable reprieve.

It is a damp room, but I hope that the fire and the passage of air will keep this at bay and away from my papers. None of the Board men knew for certain how long the house had been standing empty, only that it had once belonged to a landlord here in the middle realm of the valley and that it had been quickly given up by him at their first offer of payment. I have with me the precise equations
by which these sums were calculated and then pared down until the bones of double-sided greed lay exposed. I can see what a fortune it must have seemed to the landlord, what a bargain to those men of the Board.

The room has other advantages. From its two windows I have a view over the width of the valley along almost half its length. Except, that is, on days such as today, when the rising mist or falling cloud obscures everything but the upper or lower slopes.

My charts and instruments are already spread around the tables in the hope that they will deflect all enquiries and demands. The map entrusted to me showing the final extent of the water I will keep well hidden until the reality of the changes outside is all too apparent to be ignored.

There is a single picture left hanging in the house, a poor print of a martyred saint – the designation does not say which – resembling, as I imagine all martyred saints must, martyred Christ himself, and holding in his hands a cross and a bird, which, in the poor light, might – not inappropriately – easily be mistaken for a plump fish.

There is no water piped into the house, but a short distance away is a clean and reliable spring, boxed in with slabs of slate, and with a trough set into the slope beneath it in which the water settles clear.

I was told that I would be met upon my arrival, or shortly afterwards, by another of the Board's employees, a bailiff called Ellis, but the man has not yet made himself known to me.

Earlier, I spent an hour with a rusted saw levelling the uneven legs of the tables, but everywhere I lay my hand there remains imbalance.

The smoke from my resurrected fire later dislodged some soot, which fell in the afternoon and laid its fine black dust over everything I had set out.

It is six months since the completion of the dam, and two since the first of its sluices was closed. The plans of the structure make it appear far grander than it actually is. Elsewhere the Board might incorporate some ornamentation into its architecture – some memorial to a founder member, a nod at passing fashion – but here there is nothing, not even the small towers by which most of its other dams are anchored to their shores.

I cannot see the structure from my lodgings, but I have already walked to the scarp overlooking it. Several dwellings and a small mill were demolished to make way for it, and other buildings now stand close by: those to be drowned by it, and those to stand abandoned in its shadow.

The water, when fully collected, will rise to half the
height of the dam. The outer wall is sheer, faced with gritstone blocks, already darkening. The inner wall, that to be submerged, is raised in a gradual curve. Here, too, it is faced, but the blocks are less precisely arranged. The centre of the dam is of rubble fill and poured lime. Again unlike dams elsewhere, there is no walkway along the top of the structure, only the exposed rim left unsecured against the elements. The surface is broad enough, and the blocks set level enough for a man to lead a horse across, but there is no connecting road or path at either side, only the exposed rock of the blasted hillside.

The valley downriver runs in a series of overgrown gorges until the water reaches its mother flow. By contrast, the land above the dam is broad and open. Downriver, the dwellings and mills are of necessity tightly gathered, surrounded by woodlands and small pastures, whereas upriver the dwellings are scattered and the only cultivated land is either taken in close by them or alongside the river on its small flood plain.

You might say the world was conveniently divided here, and that the dam was its neatly drawn line.

‘My name is Mary Latimer,' she said at the instant of our unexpected encounter. She held out her hand to me. I was becoming accustomed to such abruptness – forthrightness, they would call it – but there was something in the woman's manner and in her formality, her gentility almost, which led me to respond more cautiously.

I introduced myself.

‘There is not a single person here who does not already know you,' she said. ‘And, as you must be well aware, that which they do not know about you they can easily imagine.'

‘And those who do not possess the imagination?'

‘Oh, lies, half-truths, speculation.' She smiled at this, and though she remained reluctant to look me in the eye, I felt
then as though an understanding existed between us. I knew from her voice, her choice of words and her accent, by the way she held herself, and by her reserve, that she too in some way stood apart from the place and its people.

I guessed her age to be between fifty-five and sixty. Her grey hair was held back from her forehead in a tortoiseshell comb. Strands hung by her ears, and she smoothed these back into place as she spoke. Her face, too, bore none of the more usual marks of age and hardship with which I was already familiar. Her skin was pale and little lined; her teeth even and white.

‘Do you live here?' I asked her.

‘I have done for the past ten months. Before that I lived here as a girl and young woman.' She looked around her as she spoke.

‘And are you back here because of the dam?'

‘Because everything is to be lost? Yes, in a sense. I am here to take care of my sister.' At this last word she turned from me, and I knew then that she and her sister had been my silent watchers of several days previously.

‘You were on the hill,' I said.

‘You raised your hand to us. You must consider us unforgiveably rude.' She went on before I could answer her. ‘My sister is not well. We heard the raised voice of your visitor. She was alarmed by his dogs. Tell me, will the water come this far up the valley?' There was no pause in her speech as the subject was changed and I was diverted from talk of her sister.

‘It can rise no higher than the height of the dam,' I said, and regretted the glib remark immediately.

‘I meant will there be changes this far upriver? I know the hills will not be drowned.' She continued to look
around us. She showed neither anger nor remorse for all that was to be lost.

‘Where were you before returning?' I said.

‘I've lived in many places. Some close by.'

‘But this is where your sister lives?'

‘This is where our parents lived. Lived and died. She and I were born here.'

‘And do you still feel some affection for the place?'

‘Very little. Surely, you must have heard from others about us. Surely, someone has said something. If not of me, then of her.' She looked hard at me to determine whether my answer was an honest one.

‘Your name may be somewhere in my ledgers,' I said.

‘My sister was committed to an asylum, in Colne, twenty-seven years ago. We still lived here then, with our parents. And last year she was released into my care and she would live nowhere else.'

‘Because this was all she knew?'

‘No. But she would go nowhere else.'

‘And is she … I mean …'

‘Is she well? She is an old woman, two years my junior.'

‘I'm sorry,' I said, and again I regretted the remark.

‘No, I am the one who should apologize. I thought you knew. We are a constant topic of conversation, she and I. We keep ourselves apart, you see. Or, rather,
I
keep us apart. I imagined you knew about her and were avoiding saying anything.'

‘I know what it's like to be talked about and to be kept apart,' I said.

‘I imagine you do. But you possess a power that neither she nor I possess.'

I acknowledged the truth of this.

‘And now we must leave again,' she said.

She told me the name of their home and where it stood, but it meant nothing to me. I told her I would visit her, expecting her to make some excuse to keep me away, but instead she said she would be pleased to see me.

I sensed that she was about to leave.

‘Have arrangements been made?' I said.

‘Arrangements?'

‘By the Board. For you and your sister. A new home.'

‘I'm afraid neither she nor I meet your Board's exacting requirements. No, I am making all my own arrangements.' She gave a cold, hard emphasis to the word.

Before I could ask her any more, she again held out her hand, turned and left me.

I saw by the strides she took and by her pace over the uneven ground that, despite her age, and despite the fact that she was clearly accustomed to surroundings more comfortable, varied and stimulating, she was in no way unequal to this place and its demands.

Some of my charts contain very little detail of the land they cover. Some leave vast spaces blank, noting only prominent streams and landmarks, of which there are few. Not even a sketched tree or sheep or rabbit in place of those grinning fish spouting on the surface of unfathomed oceans. A man who was lost here would not find himself on these charts.

My initial response to this lack of information was one of enthusiasm: here was a place I might construct to my own design in its emptiness; a place I might map into existence as though it truly were my own small domain. But in harbouring such despotic intentions I had reckoned without the place itself.

Carrying my heavy instruments to these high places has proved an impossibility, and although recordings might be
taken and heights and distances calculated in my note-books, any attempt to unroll a sheet of mapping paper and plot these with any degree of accuracy in the field is impossible on all but the stillest of days, and the present season is not renowned for those.

There is no distinct line of divide marking this valley from the one to the north, only a pale track winding across the peat top. In the prospectus to investors there is mention of vividly yellow gorse blazing here and there like fires in the wilderness. These are no longer in flower, but might be eagerly imagined amid such dullness.

The head of the valley is a confused place. Where elsewhere a river might rise out of the ground flowing from a spring, here the water draining from the peat forms itself into countless shifting channels, most no broader than my arm. In some places these have created valleys in miniature; elsewhere a flow forms in the impression of my heel, collects and then runs off.

Yesterday I walked up the valley as far as the lead mines and their spoil heaps. I was surprised by the size of the buildings, by the substance of their construction in so inaccessible a place, and by the great extent of their spilled waste, hillocks piled one upon the other running from the mines to the valley bottom, and looking from a distance like giant eggs laid neatly out across the slope.

This is my first stay in the north of any length and already I have started gathering the details by which the true spirit of the place might be best understood, and which, to my naturalist's mind at least, are worthy of record.