Gathering the Water (6 page)

Finally approaching the building, I saw immediately that it had once been more substantial than most others here-abouts, certainly better built and situated than my own, but that now it stood, if not in ruin, then in a state of considerable disrepair. It was larger than I had imagined, certainly far too large and demanding in its upkeep for the two women who now lived there. Slabs were missing from one end of its roof, and wood had been nailed over all the
upstairs windows. The porch which had once surrounded the front door lay in rubble on either side of the path.

The small garden was completely overgrown, and though I saw the remains of pasture walls stretching out from the enclosure, the improved land they might once have contained was now indistinguishable from the moorland beyond.

As I approached, Mary Latimer came out to me.

‘You lost your path,' she said.

I brushed at the wet stains which covered me to my knees. ‘I never found it.'

‘Welcome to our mansion.'

I told her I could still discern what the place had once been.

‘And I sometimes wish, looking at what it has become, that you could raise your water high enough to cover it, so that it might be gone completely.'

‘Is your attachment to the house strong?'

‘Once it was. But, as you have already surmised, it was not then what it has become. And I am here, now, with Martha, through circumstance rather than choice.'

Martha was her sister; I had not previously known the woman's name.

‘Is she well? I mean well enough to receive visitors?'

‘It may seem a harsh thing to say, but how she feels is of little consequence concerning much of the life passing around her.'

‘I never knew her name.'

‘Martha. Sister of Lazarus. The Disappointed Woman. Shall we go in? Look over my shoulder; she will no doubt be watching us through the window. We occupy only a
small part of the house: the kitchen and two of the downstairs rooms.'

I looked over her shoulder and saw the woman standing there. My apprehension regarding my introduction to her must have showed on my face.

‘There's nothing to fear,' Mary Latimer said. ‘There are days when she devotes far more of her energy to the passing birds than she does even to me.'

‘I'm not afraid,' I said.

‘Not even of offending me, perhaps, by some infelicitude or crass remark concerning her?'

‘Of that, perhaps, yes.'

To reassure me further, she took me by the arm and led me into the house.

The hallway was narrow and unlit.

‘Watch where you step,' she said. ‘Some of the boards are rotten.' Then she called her sister's name several times, both to warn the woman of our imminent appearance, and also to reassure her, as one might repeat the name of a horse or a dog in order to calm it.

She went first into the room in which the woman awaited us. It was a room similar in many respects to my own, with its windows facing down over the slope, and with a fire in the hearth at the far end.

The woman stood at her place by the window.

‘Martha, this is Mr Weightman. He is here to oversee the dam and the reservoir.' She paused, waited. ‘Mr Weightman.' She stood aside so that I might present myself more fully.

The woman looked first at my face and then down to my wet legs and feet.

‘He lost his path,' Mary Latimer said beside me.

The woman at the window nodded, and then she held out her hand and came towards me. ‘You should really have come down to the dam and then up through the houses,' she said. ‘Nothing else is reliable at this time of year. Come closer to the fire.'

I allowed her to lead me closer to the hearth. Mary Latimer remained where she stood in the doorway.

‘Please, take off your boots,' Martha said to me. She directed me to a chair and then knelt beside me, as though about to pull off my boots. The gesture – behaving as though I were a close friend or acquaintance – surprised me. I unfastened my laces.

‘You're very kind,' I said.

‘Oh, we know all about kindness,' she said, sharing a glance with her sister and making it clear to me that it was
un
kindness to which she referred.

A photographic portrait of their parents looked down at us from the mantel, still a benign presence in the house. Mary Latimer saw me looking and nodded to confirm my guess.

‘I brought them back with me,' she said, as though the portrait were her most treasured possession.

Once removed, my boots steamed in the hearth.

Martha sat in the chair opposite me.

I wished Mary Latimer would come closer, but I saw it was part of her plan to remain briefly apart from us.

‘Were you ever here before?' Martha asked me.

‘No, never.'

‘And were you never here during the summer?'

‘This is my first visit.'

‘Mine, too. I did once know a girl who lived here, but this is my own first visit in so many years. It was a much
larger place then, of course.' There was seeming contradiction in everything she said.

‘It was never larger than this, Martha,' Mary Latimer said. ‘We have merely retreated, cave-dwellers that we have become, to the only remaining habitable rooms.'

‘Have we? Will we get it all back?'

‘One day. Perhaps.' She at last came to join us.

Martha occupied herself by inspecting my boots and moving them away from the heat of the fire. I saw Mary Latimer surreptitiously hold the hem of her sister's dress away from the mound of glowing embers as she did this.

‘Will you take tea, Mr …' She had forgotten my name.

‘Weightman.'

‘Of course. Mr Weightman.'

I said I would, but rather than prepare this, she simply sat and looked at me.

‘She baked a cake,' Mary Latimer said to me. ‘Flour and water. No yeast, no sugar, no butter. Flat as a discus and hard as stone.'

Then Martha looked at her sister and said, ‘We'll take tea. Attend to it, please.'

Mary Latimer curtsied and said, ‘Yes, ma'am.'

When she was out of the room, Martha lowered her voice and said to me, ‘She bakes, but the results are awful. You may have to eat something just to show willing.'

I entered into the conspiracy and promised her I would. After that she sat in silence until her sister returned. There was something about her which reminded me fleetingly of my several indulgent spinster aunts when I was a child, tolerant beyond duty, and then silent when their indulgence finally reached its limit.

Upon Mary Latimer's return a distinct and unpleasant odour followed her in from the adjoining room.

‘You'll have to ignore it,' she said, indicating her sister, who now busied herself with the cups and saucers set down beside her. Only she seemed oblivious to the foul smell.

‘She knew you were coming. I told her often enough. I went out briefly.'

‘What is it?'

‘She's boiling blackthorn.'

‘Blackthorn? Is it a medicine, something to drink?' Among the houses lower down I had occasionally seen the slopes arranged with tenter racks. ‘Is it a dyestuff?'

Mary Latimer signalled for me not to persist with my questioning. On her knees between us, her sister poured the tea and handed each of us a cup and saucer and spoon. I expected the fragile crockery to betray some infirmity or shaking, but there was none. Even the surface of the liquid itself was flat and undisturbed.

‘You might come another day and I would spill it all down you,' she said, her tone even and serious. She sat beside me, her hand on the arm of my chair. ‘It was good of you to come and see us,' she said.

‘I would have come eventually as part of my work here.'

‘To drive us out and let the water come.'

‘Martha, Mr Weightman—'

‘Was it you who drove out the girl who once lived here?'

I looked to Mary Latimer.

‘This is Mr Weightman's first visit to the valley, Martha.'

‘He already told me that.' Her confusion grew more apparent, and with it she grew frustrated. She behaved like a woman who could remember and understand only the very last thing she had been told.

Mary Latimer understood this only too well. It was why she repeated the same few details over and over. Perhaps it was even why she insisted on repeating her sister's name each time she spoke to her.

‘And how are we to go on living here?' Martha said.

‘We won't. I doubt if the house will even—'

‘Not the house,' Martha said. ‘The water.'

‘The water?'

‘How are we to go on living here when everything is water?'

The question dismayed me and I considered how best to frame my answer.

‘Say nothing,' Mary Latimer told me, her concern turning to amusement. ‘She's teasing you.'

The woman beside me laughed at the trick she had played on me. Her laughter grew loud, and then louder still, and she clasped herself and rocked in childish delight.

Mary Latimer let this continue for a short while and then went to her sister and held her. The laughter subsided and the rocking ceased. Eventually the woman sat silent and motionless.

‘Your tea,' Mary Latimer said to her, putting the cup and saucer back in her sister's hands.

Martha looked hard at what she now held, but made no attempt to raise the cup to her lips.

I sensed that a boundary had been crossed, and that as a consequence of this my presence now made Mary Latimer feel uncomfortable.

Accordingly, I retrieved my still-steaming boots and told her I would go.

She acknowledged my understanding with a nod.

‘But where will we live?' the woman sitting beside me
suddenly shouted, great violence in her voice. ‘He hasn't said where we will live. Why doesn't he tell us?'

Mary Latimer came again to hold her.

I pulled on my boots and went outside to lace them. Mary Latimer came out to me a moment later.

‘I'm sorry,' she said.

‘Please, don't apologize.'

‘No, I'm sorry for myself. I would have liked you to have stayed longer. We could have talked.'

The house behind us was silent.

‘Will she be all right?'

‘She already is. I think perhaps there was too much for her to take in. At least you didn't have to eat the cake.'

‘And the blackthorn?'

She hesitated before answering, breathing deeply, and even there, outside, catching some faint odour of it.

‘When we were children, some of the girls we associated with, daughters of our tenants, our hired help, they used to boil the wood in the belief that it stemmed their bleeding.'

‘Their bleeding? You mean when they were injured?'

‘For some reason, Martha remembered. All her time in Colne and elsewhere, she never forgot.'

‘I still don't—'

‘Their monthly bleeding. The girls thought that by drinking the infusion they could somehow stem or reduce their bleeding.'

Only then did I understand what she was telling me.

‘She may occasionally forget my name, her own even, but some things …'

I told her not to explain.

‘I couldn't,' she said simply.

A cry from inside the house distracted us both. Martha stood at the window waving out at us.

‘She's waving at you,' Mary Latimer said.

I returned the gesture, and the instant I did so, the woman at the window ceased.

I was woken late the following morning by a man at once banging on my door and shouting up at my window. I woke with a start, unable to locate the source of this racket. I lay fully dressed, my bedclothes on the floor. Whoever had come to rouse me moved from the front of the house to the back, where he knocked and shouted again.

Rising, I doused my face and went down to him. I imagined he had brought me some communication, and I could see how this might be considered an event of some note, warranting his clamour.

He was standing before the door as I opened it, and he considered me for a moment without speaking as I fastened up my coat. I recognized him and asked him what he wanted that was so urgent. One of my buttons was missing.
I remained unshaven, my hair uncombed, and my appearance made him apprehensive. I asked him again what he wanted.

‘The water,' he said.

‘Has something happened? Has someone been injured?' He then composed himself, suddenly conscious of his duty and his role in the proceedings. ‘A maelstrom,' he said.

‘A what?'

‘A maelstrom.'

‘Do you mean a whirlpool?'

‘A maelstrom.' He nodded vigorously to give emphasis to the word.

I rubbed the last of the sleep from my eyes.

‘A maelstrom has formed in the rising water.'

‘Where?'

‘The river has flowed over its old course and a maelstrom has formed.'

‘Stop using that word. We are not sailors caught in an Atlantic gale.'

His face dropped in puzzlement.

‘Where?' I said again.

‘Beneath the chapel. You must come and see.' He reached out, as though to grab my arm, but then thought better of the gesture and took back his hand.

‘I must do no such thing,' I said, knowing immediately that it was my duty to go.

‘And bring all your tools. And your books for writing down.'

‘Do you know the cause of the pool?'

‘Only the Lord himself—'

‘Knows the answer to that. Of course.'

He considered me coldly. The door behind me swung on its hinges. I told him to come inside and wait, but he declined, saying he would wait for me where he stood. Then I told him to return to the site of the pool and wait for me there, but he refused to do that too, insistent on accompanying me, and no doubt wanting to herald my arrival and encourage further, endless speculation. The Lord was to have His day in the pool beneath the chapel.