Gathering the Water (3 page)

Those peat tops, for instance, are everywhere called ‘hags'; the viper or adder is a ‘hagworm'; the kestrel is a ‘windhover'; the snail a ‘wallfish'; and the rowan tree is still without reservation referred to as ‘witchwood'.

Long before my arrival, but upon learning of my appointment, I was warned by my acquaintances – now mostly lost – that the language, manners and customs of the place would be in great measure unintelligible, and, where intelligible, then repulsive to me. I feigned concurrence with this advice, and then humour at every joke it spawned.

There are twenty names for the various rains which fall, and which often vary within a single shower. A storm of less than a day's duration is a ‘small' storm, and the thrush is without fail called ‘stormcock' because of its perverse habit of turning into every wind and whistling undisturbed by it.

I went into that part of the lower valley where the dwellings are greater in number. Most are on the same side of the river, the opposite bank immediately above and below the dam being steeper and wooded. I went to observe the flow of the river below the dam now that its sluices are in operation and the movement of the water regulated. I have no power over the working of the dam. The bailiff alone – should he ever reveal himself to me – possesses that in conjunction with the distant controllers and planners.

The flow was greatly reduced, revealing the gravel and boulders of the river-bed. Stepping stones rose in short pillars like the remains of a lost colonnade. I noted down everything I saw. The few people I encountered either
ignored me or departed having exchanged the obligatory cold pleasantries.

Another purpose of my visit there was to establish some means of communication with the outer world. I shall let the phrase stand; it is how I feel. The mail coach passed on the main road eight miles to the south, but I was as yet unsure how to make my connection with it. The Board men had seemed little concerned regarding this difficulty.

Leaving the river, I climbed the bank and returned among the houses, and there I again encountered Mary Latimer. She emerged from a walled alley, a package of letters in her hand, which she inspected as she walked. I called to her and she stopped. I approached her and apologized for having interrupted her. She seemed relieved that it was I who had called and not someone else. A group of women stood a short distance from us, each of them having turned at my call.

‘Are you working?' she said. She returned the gaze of the women, but this did little to dissuade them from watching us.

I indicated her letters and told her why I was there. ‘You appear to have a great many correspondents,' I said.

‘A week's gleanings.' It was still an impressive number. She told me the name of the man who brought the mail from the coach. She pointed to his home at the far end of the walled lane. Pieces of furniture stood around the house.

‘Will he too soon be gone?'

‘I imagine so.'

‘And what then?'

‘Then another door will be heard slamming loudly shut behind us. You must surely be familiar with the sound by now.'

‘They tend to slam shut ahead of me,' I said, thus leavening our conversation. I made a note of the man's name. ‘Will he insist on me coming to collect my mails?' I asked, hoping to suggest to her that it would be arriving sufficiently frequently for this to be an inconvenience to me.

She shrugged. ‘I am only forced to come myself because I refuse to pay more than I was originally charged.'

‘Is your home far?'

She indicated the steep hillside behind us, but without turning. ‘A mile, perhaps a little further.'

‘Are you alone?'

‘Is my sister with me, you mean.'

‘It wasn't my intention to intrude.'

‘Yes, I came down alone. There are still a few here brave enough to visit us and sit with her on the rare occasions I am obliged to leave her. There are still those who remember us as girls, who knew our parents.'

Having stood for a minute, she seemed suddenly impatient to leave me. Perhaps the talk of her sister had reminded her of some ever-present responsibility. And yet even as I discerned this, I sensed too that she was savouring her brief freedom.

‘I will not turn her into more of a spectacle than she has already become,' she said, her eyes flicking towards the watching women.

‘Would it disappoint you to learn that they were watching me walk up and down the dead river long before you appeared?'

She smiled at this. ‘Then what a bonus for them. The two of us together. The twin serpents of madness and destruction entwined, and in full view of honest, decent, hard-working, God-fearing folk such as themselves.'

She resumed walking and I walked alongside her.

We approached the women, but rather than turning away from us or dispersing as I had expected, they held their ground, their arms folded defiantly in front of them. It was a feature of these women, when talking in a group, to fall silent on a single beat at the appearance of anyone unwanted or unknown to them, their concerted silence and cold stares intimidating the newcomers into turning away from them and warning those who had perhaps intended to join them not to attempt to do so.

In this respect they were different from their men, who would continue to talk loudly, even if the intruder were the subject of their discussion, as I had learned to my cost on several occasions.

It was not tact or shame which created these silences in the women, merely a form of expediency which, once acknowledged by the newcomer, allowed them to continue uninterrupted.

Mary Latimer said ‘Good morning' to them and they murmured their reply.

We continued beyond them to the edge of the dwellings, where she stopped and said that this was where we parted.

‘I thought I might walk to your home with you,' I said. I had made no plans for the remainder of the day.

She looked directly at me. ‘Oh?'

‘Unless you would prefer to return alone.'

‘You know exactly what I am thinking, Mr Weightman.'

It was the first time anyone there had called me by my name, and hearing it caught me momentarily off balance.

‘You see how protective I am of her, even with people who know her.'

‘And I am a complete stranger to you.'

‘Surely you must entertain some apprehension about meeting a madwoman?'

My own mother, upon losing her second child, had been sent away to a sanatorium recommended by a colleague of my father. She had stayed there for four months before returning to us. I was seven years old at the time and the months had seemed like years to my young mind.

‘I would not wish to inconvenience her,' I said.

‘You mean unsettle. You may say it.'

I said nothing.

‘There are some here who would find it easier to lose their sight than their opinion on the subject.'

‘By which you mean prejudice,' I said. ‘You would misjudge me to include me among them.'

She acceded to this. ‘I know that.' She searched through the letters she carried and pulled one out. ‘This is a communication from the director of the new asylum to which I shall shortly take her.'

‘But I thought …'

‘Thought what, Mr Weightman? That she and I might find some new, secure and secluded place in which to live out the remainder of our lives together?'

‘Is it what you want – the asylum?'

‘It was my decision to make enquiries about the place. Perhaps one day in every five she has some slight and fleeting understanding of what is happening around her, but for the remainder of the time she wanders a strange land among strangers. At least there they will be able to care for her.'

I could see that it pained her to tell me these things, and only later did it occur to me that I might have been
the only one in the valley to whom she had spoken of the place.

‘It distresses you to talk of it,' I said.

‘The situation distresses me. Speaking of it – speaking of it to someone who has little or no connection to it – is of no consequence whatsoever to me.'

She continued walking and made no further objection when I walked alongside her.

‘Except, of course,' I said after several minutes had passed silently between us, ‘that I am here to drown your home, flood your childhood haunts and drive you both out into an uncaring world.'

‘Ah, I'd forgotten. Yes, except for that.' She put her hand on my shoulder, as though to console me for my burden. ‘There is another communication you might be interested to see,' she said. She took a second envelope from the package. I recognized it immediately as coming from the Board, and my envy at her mails was instantly doubled. ‘You yourself are no doubt all too familiar with such platitudinous irrelevancies,' she said.

I shrugged to suggest my unhappy concurrence, and before either of us could speak again she tore the unopened envelope and unread letter into scraps and threw them up into the air.

‘You could retrieve all the pieces on your way back down,' she said, fully aware of my discomfort at what she had done. ‘Take them home with you and reassemble them like a puzzle.' She paused and looked at the scattered white all around her, tatters of which still floated in the air. ‘As big a puzzle, in fact, as why you were ever sent here in the first place.'

I felt stung by the remark. ‘Oh? And more or less
puzzling than the fact that you removed your sister from her previous asylum?'

If I expected the remark to silence or provoke her, then I was disappointed.

‘No mystery there, Mr Weightman. Money. There is nothing left. Little enough to sustain us as we are. The dregs of a few long-depleted investments. Perhaps I should have gathered together what little remained and handed it over to your masters to invest in their lake. Would the irony of such a gesture be lost on them, do you think?'

‘Undoubtedly.' It was an answer where none was called for.

We had come most of the way up the slope. She stopped and pointed out to me a house which had until then been hidden by the curve of the land. ‘Our home,' she said.

‘And you are going to insist again that I can come no further with you.'

‘And you are going to look more closely and see my sister waiting for me at the gate.'

I looked and saw the distant woman. She stood by the wall of the small enclosure which surrounded the house.

‘And I, of course, having already come so far against your wishes, am in no position to refuse you,' I said.

‘Of course.'

I looked again, and this time saw the outline of a second woman standing in the doorway behind the first.

‘You would be wise not to tell the mail carrier that you come on my recommendation,' she said, both drawing me back to her and returning me to my original errand.

I held up my hands to her in defeat.

‘And it was a great pleasure to have had your company and conversation,' she said.

‘Yours, too.'

‘Offer him half of what he asks. The more you receive, the lower his price should be.'

‘Ah,' I said.

She laughed aloud at this, understanding perfectly my predicament. ‘Now I regret even more having torn up my own letter.'

She walked away from me, waving vigorously as she went. I watched for some response from the woman by the gate, but there was none.

The occasion of my interview was my first visit to Halifax, and I was surprised to find the town so obviously prosperous. None of my interviewers lived in the town itself – they all had their ‘places' in the improved country surrounding it – but this was where they made their fortunes and where all their business was conducted.

It occurred to me even at our first meeting that here were men who had already made their decision concerning my appointment, and that I was there with them, in the Commercial Hotel, merely for them to confirm the strengths and weaknesses of my abilities and character, upon which they were already decided.

I met with various of the men on each of the three days I stayed in the town, but I can say with absolute conviction
that anything of any real value which needed to be imparted to me might have been usefully said in under an hour. Some – particularly the more senior members of the Board – were there merely so that I might acknowledge their presence. I flattered myself then that they, in some unspoken reciprocal arrangement, might take an interest in my work, even if only because of the connection between it and their own ever-growing fortunes.

Some of my questions – I had prepared many – set several of my interviewers ill at ease, and some of what I asked them they treated as a private joke.

There was a further great plan to rebuild the sewers of the town, and then those of the towns and cities close by, and it was suggested that the reservoir, and others like it, might one day become a vital part of these schemes, thereby becoming greatly increased in value.

One man, the Director of Procurement, told the story of a piece of land he had bought several years previously upon hearing that a new railway branch line was to be built. He calculated the likely route of the line in advance of even the railway engineers and then sought out all the possible land for sale along it. Other speculators had the same idea, he said, and they all paid high prices for the narrow corridors of land upon which the railway, in their estimation, would be forced to run. But this man did not want that. He professed himself an expert in the construction of tunnels and predicted great advances in the field. To that end he bought a spur of high land over which the railway would be unable to climb, and which was too extensive to be dug through. He bought this land for a fraction of what the others had paid, and then he waited. And when the railway finally did come – and with it his
predicted advances in tunnel-building – he sold the right of passage at a great profit. And then he sold the excavated rock for use elsewhere. And afterwards, when the railway was built and running, he reacquired the land above the tunnel for his own use.