Gathering the Water (7 page)

Half an hour passed before I considered myself sufficiently presentable and went back out to him.

I cannot deny that my own excitement grew the closer we approached to the chapel. The usual small crowd was already in attendance. One man held a banner which he waved from side to side above his head. My guide and trumpeter pointed all this out to me. I told him I was neither blind nor deaf, and he looked at me as though waiting for me to present evidence to that effect.

Throughout our conversation he called me ‘mester'. It is a hybrid of a word, born of and meaning both master and mister and all points in between. The scope of its additional meanings, twisted one way or another by the slightest inflection, was limitless. It might mean a dozen different things in the course of a single conversation from the lips of one man, depending on how he feared or favoured you in your dealings with him. Written down, the word acquits itself of all bias by being spelt ‘maister'.

I paused on a small rise overlooking the river. My guide came back to me and urged me on. I told him there was no urgency and took out one of my notebooks. I sketched a simple plan of the river and its flood plain below the chapel, including the recently covered fields and
the widening bulge of the flow itself. I marked the date – the first of November – and this seemed somehow propitious to me. Below me, rumour and supposition had birthed a cataclysm which could not be ignored. I even imagined I could hear the singing of some apocalyptic hymn as I made my few simple notes.

I descended the final slope, and my companion ran ahead of me, pushing through the crowd with his torch of news. I had taken the precaution of wearing my rubberized boots, and as I arrived at the first of the spectators I pulled these up over my knees and shook loose the straps by which they were fastened. I heard words of admiration from some of the men I passed.

I stopped at the edge of the water and asked loudly to be told what was happening. My guide ran back to me, but I silenced him and asked for an explanation from someone else.

A woman came to me leading a goat. ‘A maelstrom has formed in the lost river,' she said. ‘My animal here was almost drowned.'

I waited for her demand for compensation.

‘But fortunately you rescued it,' I said. I asked her to show me the pool. I had examined the river on my descent and had seen nothing out of the ordinary there.

The woman pointed over the calm surface. ‘Be patient,' she said. The people around us fell silent. We stood like that for a full minute and nothing happened. As I watched, I tried to remember the configuration of the river and its banks beneath the still surface. It was neither particularly deep here, nor fast-flowing; there was no sunken building which might have collapsed to cause the disturbance. And nor, as far as I could remember from my charts, were there
any air shafts or abandoned workings beneath the fields on either side.

The disappointment grew around me and a murmuring arose. I started to speak to the woman, but she waved me to silence. Her own gaze remained fixed on the water.

‘There,' she said eventually, and slowly raised her arm to point. Her quiet word was amplified by others.

I looked out to where she pointed and saw that there was just then some disturbance on the surface of the water. A circle formed, running in a clockwise fashion, and made all the more noticeable by the configuration of flotsam which followed its course and gave emphasis to its design. The ring was eight or nine feet in diameter, and slow-moving, though with an appreciable increase in speed as it progressed. The motion was at its most violent towards the outer edge. The centre, the vortex of all this activity, remained relatively calm, though even there a definite swirling could clearly be seen developing. The cries from the onlookers grew louder.

‘Well?' the woman beside me said. She looked from my face to my boots.

I guessed the water to be no deeper than two feet, reckoning this by the height of the walls against which it lapped. In truth I would have preferred to have waited before wading in and making my inspection, but the woman prodded me into action with another of her ‘well's.

I occupied myself by raising and then lowering my straps, by loosening and then tightening my belt.

After several minutes of violent spinning, the whirlpool decreased in intensity, lost its power and faded. The circle of cut grass on its surface lost definition and again aligned itself to the flow of the submerged river.

I handed over my bag to the woman, and she looked at me as though I were about to embark on a long and uncertain journey. I would wade no more than twenty yards out and twenty yards back. She seemed about to speak to me – I wished she had – but remained silent. I had arrived, I had taken charge, I was taking action, and I would have appreciated some public recognition of this other than the brief cessation of murmuring which accompanied my first few steps into the treacherous depths.

The ground beneath the surface was softened, but otherwise good. A man stood beside me holding a rope. He offered this to me but I declined, pointing out to him the shallowness of the water into which I was wading. It surprised me to see how quickly most of them now disregarded or had forgotten what lay beneath the surface, imagining depth where none existed, and suspicious of something which had been exposed to plain sight only a few days earlier.

The man with the rope called me a fool. The word made me feel brave. I had become a man of action, and what I did that day would be remembered.

‘If you see the maelstrom start to reappear,' I called out, ‘then shout and let me know.'

I was answered by a dozen nodding heads and fearful glances.

‘You'll know soon enough,' the man with the rope said, deflating my bravado.

I felt for the first time the weight of the water over my feet.

‘Shout all the same,' I said to him. I wanted him to remain where he stood with his rope. I wanted him to stand ready to throw it out to me.

I waded further, until I was midway between the water's edge and where the pool had briefly formed. I moved more cautiously as I approached its lost centre, bracing myself against its sudden resurgence. But I felt nothing. The water rose to my shins and then to my knees. I calculated that I was now walking on the river bottom. I could feel its stones beneath my feet. I turned back to the watching crowd. The man with the rope raised it to me.

‘Nothing,' I shouted. I raised my arms and turned in a full circle, an awkward dance of seeming nonchalance.

It was as I waded back and forth over the site of the pool that I felt a stronger current against my legs. I stopped moving and steadied myself. I looked down, searching around me. Someone on the bank shouted. I felt a ripple against the backs of my legs, and the floating grass again began to form itself into a pattern as the tow increased in strength and I moved my feet further apart to stand into it. I saw the circle form around me. The voices on the bank grew louder. Someone called for me to save myself, which I appreciated greatly, concentrating hard on avoiding the indignity of being knocked over in two feet of water and sitting in it up to my waist.

I saw that I was standing at the outer edge of the spinning pool, where the tug was strongest, and I managed by several judicious, shuffling steps to move myself towards its centre, where the current, though still appreciable, was much weaker.

‘He moves to its centre,' I heard someone cry out.

I saw how impressive my action looked. ‘Pray for me,' I called out. I raised my own clasped hands.

It sounded good to hear my voice above the clamour, and I wished the water itself could have made more of an effort
on my behalf. Sure of my footing – if anything, the flow was already starting to fall away – I rocked from side to side, as though struggling against the current, and held out my arms to balance myself.

‘It grows stronger,' I shouted. But I shall beat it. I did not shout this, but it was what I wanted clearly understood.

I could still not account for the phenomenon, other than to think that some lost or forgotten shaft or vent had been flooded and was now allowing the gathering water to some-how drain away, creating this surface disturbance. And I could not account for the intermittent nature of the occurrence other than to suggest that perhaps some buried blockage was being periodically shifted or cleared with the build-up of water above it. The Board would require my reasoned guesses, and I made them all as the water flowed and eased around me.

A few seconds later and my moment of glory had passed.

‘It weakens,' I called out when the decreasing flow would have been obvious to all on the shore. I made a motion with my hands as though I were hastening it away.

Then I turned back to the crowd and moved slowly towards them. The man with the rope had discovered his own reserve of bravery and now stood up to his ankles in the water.

Disappointingly, the onlookers dispersed ahead of me. I had endured and ended their drama. My messenger led away the man with the banner, and I found my bag on the grass where the woman had been standing. Only the man who held the rope approached me and quizzed me on what I had seen, but he too seemed disappointed that there had not been some more dramatic conclusion to the morning's events, and as I struggled out of my boots he told me at
great length about the other pools on each of the chief rivers into which all flotsam, living and dead, was drawn, never to be seen again. Perhaps they had hoped for something similar of their own.

My work today kept me out until after dark. Just as there are places in the far northern latitudes which remain light throughout the nights of high summer, so it seems to me that there are now days here when the covering of cloud from dawn to dusk gives the impression of night never having fully withdrawn.

Winter, I am told, will come in a succession of testing, exploratory jabs, usually late in the days and during the hours of darkness, and at decreasing intervals. And following these jabs, almost as though the season were aware of the preparations being made in advance of its final approach, it will make its hard and unyielding thrust into the stone and the air of the place. There are weeks at the
turn of the year when the temperature seldom rises above freezing, and when sheets and teeth of ice persist throughout.

I have seen the moon shining as bright at three in the afternoon in a broken sky as at three in the morning when I have woken and looked out. My bedroom is bathed in its cold light, penetrating the curtains and casting its grid of small frames over my bed and the wall beside.

I returned home earlier along the mine road and saw in the darkness how the pale stones set into its surface created a luminescence and gave it the appearance of a river flowing in the moonlight.

Earlier still, while out surveying, I saw in the distance beyond the dam the trail of steam rising from a passing engine. The machine itself I neither saw nor heard – the wind was behind me – but its plume of white I saw clearly enough, unravelling above the woodlands and cuttings through which the track ran. It surprised me to see it so close – though in truth it was still eight miles off.

I have packed torn rags into the door and loose window frames. Locally, the householders boil lumps of coal in their kettles and somehow manage to keep alight the gases rising from the spouts. I have experimented with producing my own gas, but with no success. There is always too much steam to kill the flame, and what little I do manage to boil off and keep alight fills the room with its stink rather than its glow.

I have taken a cold after my exertions, and suffer from a headache and a nausea that my volatile does little to alleviate. I am loath to use my common remedy so soon. And, in truth, it is of course no remedy, merely a means of
alleviating the symptoms of an illness otherwise known as misery, touching at times on despair.

Afterwards, I sat in my swaddle of blankets and looked at her likeness – it is all I possess of her now – until I found myself close to weeping. By which, of course, being a man, I mean that I wept.

For the first time, my work took me into the abandoned quarry and stone-yard. Hewn and uncut slabs lay all around the workings, affording me some impression of the activity in the place on the day when someone, calculating that sufficient rock had been cut and shaped for the dam, blew his whistle and shouted to everyone working there that their labour and pay were finished.

The blocks and splinters of rock amid which I stood were vividly red on their cut surfaces, and the low sun brightened these even further. I tried to climb several of the mounds, but was defeated by their looseness, making the noise of ten men in my clumsy attempts.

All the cutting and drilling machinery had long since been removed, and would no doubt now be at work
elsewhere as the Board's schemes fed one upon the other and leapfrogged into the future.

It was as I returned to the quarry entrance that I saw Mary Latimer walking alongside the river below me. I watched her for a moment to ensure she was alone. Had her sister been with her, I would not have revealed myself to them.

Upon seeing me, she stopped walking and I made my way down to her.

‘I was examining the quarry,' I said.

‘Before it was excavated for the dam there was a cave which was once home to a hermit.'

I had heard of such a thing only once before. The estate owner of the village in which Helen had lived had, during the summer months when his house and lands were frequently visited, employed the services of a man to sit in a grotto with a candle in one hand and a Bible in the other. For a few coins he would read to his small audiences. I visited the place once with Helen and her sister. He was a civilized hermit and read well, and because of this I was disappointed by him, by the sham he had allowed himself to become.

‘It was said he was able to cure most ailments by the laying on of hands.' Mary Latimer spoke almost in a reverie, and I saw again how tightly the vine of her sister was wound through and around her.