Haweswater (12 page)

The two men walked down the fields towards the village. They walked comfortably in a silence accepted by both parties. Words, when they were exchanged, were restrained, cordial.

– Seca grand evening, like.

– Aye, grand, Nate.

The wind was getting up. It brought references to the winter within it, which bothered Nathaniel’s chest. He wheezed but never slowed his pace. The two men paused by a herd of cows in the lower fields and Samuel bent to check the hooves and underbelly of one of the beasts. He stood up and sent a piercing whistle back over the darkening hill, and a minute later Chase came streaking down it with a rabbit in her jaws. She jogged lightly by the feet of the two men.

– Gudog.

They continued on towards the small clutch of houses
which was disappearing into the dusk. By the time they reached the Dun Bull, the night had almost settled down fully. From the mountains half-circling Mardale came the released scent of the earth, strong and woody from winter’s concentration, and along with it came the fresh flavour of the pushing spring.

Janet Lightburn had not wanted to spoil her father’s birthday, nor had she been in the mood for an argument with her mother about any of the information she wanted to disclose. At the gathering in the Dun Bull Inn there was little room for her to find a clear space and deliver the news, it was crowded with men of the dale who had come to discuss the visit from the suited man and the air was yellow with smoke, making it difficult to get firm eye contact with them all in turn as she wanted to. But she stood firm among them, inhaled the collective masculinity of the place and adopted a fairly fierce tone to get their attention. It was nothing new in itself, she had been known to speak with authority on issues before, and with the confidence of a politician. Nevertheless, the men grumbled as they became quiet, begrudging her presence somewhat.

The shake to her hand was not nerves, it was not even the subconscious intimidation of being outnumbered fifty to one by men. If she trembled, it was because the issue she was discussing stirred her up and agitated her. She had put in a telephone call to the Lowther Estate, she said, that morning, and after a considerable run-around from Lordie’s secretary she had managed to speak to Peter Talbot, the estate manager. They would all remember him, having helped to drag him from the lake after a disastrous fishing trip last year when he was using the Langdale boathouse. Crooked-nosedy fella, aye. He confirmed that the Mardale tenancies were under review. Relating to a private business endeavour with a
Manchester corporation. She was assured by him that they would all be informed, by letter and within a month, of the estate’s decision.

Murmurs went through the crowd, a comment or two about a woman’s place, very quietly. Basically, that means yer all fuckin’ out, she said, and slammed a hand hard down on to a table. And if Teddy Hindmarsh was so convinced this was horse shite, and that a lassie couldn’t understand grass for grain, she suggested he make a call himself and try his hand with that wan bastard who’d be better off drowned.

Behind her the tall figure of Paul Levell had entered the bar and was nodding slightly. Janet Lightburn stepped between broad unwashed bodies to the bar and ordered an ale from Jake McGill.

Sometime after midnight of the following week, Janet and her father walk into the farm kitchen, which still has warm air from the glowing cinders of the range. Their hands are frozen and bloody. Janet moves to the sink and soaps her wrists in cold water. The water tank is not hot at this time of night and she has to work the blood off without the aid of dissolving heat. It sets under her nails as she scrubs, blackens. There is a numb buzzing in her head from the strong wind on the fells, where she has been braced on the ground with her father for over an hour. Her eyes are weary. Lambing season means little sleep for Westmorland farmers, but within days their bodies have adjusted to the new routine, finding a strange and fraught level of energy that comes in the wake of sleep-deficiency. It is a difficult time, when winter can sweep down into the valley just as the village is beginning to see the crests of snowdrops and crocuses budding through the earth. Snow buries and camouflages labouring sheep and only the stray sound of a bleat will indicate the hole into which the animals have headed.

If they can find the animals due to birth, and bring them into the safety of the farm sheds or a sheltered corner field, it is a far easier task. There is steady light from the hurricane lamps and the ewes can be positioned and helped, the sticky lambs kept warm. But predictions are seldom accurate, and it is bleak searching the fells for a twisting ewe in early labour. These births are almost impossible to assist in the black cold. The bark of the dog, frantic over a fallen animal. A wet lamb, rocking in the savage wind, often has to be shown how to live and move or it will not survive a single, tenuous night. There is precious little on the side of a farmer during this time of year.

Even later in the lambing season the spring weather brings its share of problems. Treacherous mud and constant rain churn the ground and there is no firm outside surface offering traction and stability, a table upon which to drag still-borns from their mothers. Dejected, the sheep often cry over their listless lambs, refusing to eat in the coming days, the loss double for the farm. Panicked by imminent delivery, a sheep might stumble off its heft, up into the crags where it cannot be reached. Silly season, Samuel calls it, though his daughter is all earnestness during these weeks, mirthless, and more driven than even her father.

Samuel Lightburn scuttles coal into the oven. He fills the kettle with water and places it on the hotplate. Ella has left out some biscuits and cheese on a plate, covered with a cloth. The two eat ravenously while moving about in the room, unbuttoning coats, wrenching off wet boots and setting them against the range. The house is quiet above them and a carriage clock ticks on the shelf. Two-fifteen.

Father and daughter sit at the table with their hands wrapped around mugs of hot, sweet tea. There is no point in climbing the stairs to bed at this hour. At four another shift of lambing will begin. In the kitchen only the dog sleeps by the hearth, with her nose curled under one paw, and her hind legs twitching. She works even while dreaming in her sleep.
Samuel has come to know less than ever about women through the disposition of his daughter. Where his wife is a hard, often stubborn woman, who believes in separate roles, Janet is above and beyond. She terrorizes the old notions, batters her way through and out the other side. There are no absolutes to be found in the blood on her wrists, and under her nails. She has feral qualities not belonging to either sex. But he cannot say he isn’t proud of her. Because, by God, he is!

In March the running water of the valley is bitter, acid cold, as snow on the fells begins to melt and is brought down over chilled rocks and icy beds. It has in it all the breaking soul of winter, thousands of dying flakes in one long, moving water-coffin. But despite the cold, the streams and waterfalls are very clear, clearer than they have been all year, a perfect window into the living houses of the river. Sediment and detritus are bound to the ground, by ice, and are unable to dissolve into the passing liquid until the thaw takes a better hold in April, loosening the old skin of the earth, allowing it to shed.

Isaac lies half on the ground, half braced on a rock over a channel of the river. His face in the water turns purple and yellow and his lips soon numb. If he is not careful, his muscles will start to spasm uncontrollably and he will lose his balance, shocking the rest of his body into the water, electric cold. He times himself within the icy cataracts. He has perhaps no more than ten seconds before his cheeks begin to roll of their own accord, as if he is fitting, then he must surface. Knowing the direction of flow, he turns his face downstream, using his head to block its passage, protecting his eyes from the burn of the moving current. He opens their lids. There is a second when their mechanism falters, they will not adjust to the temperature, having lost the slim warmth of an eyelid covering, the lenses will not still and focus is impossible. Then, the panic subsides. Pupils retract. The world of the inside river appears, detailed and precise.

Water is white-clear. And after a while it is non-existent. There is no wetness. There is no thin element rushing past, only frigid movement, arctic winds in another planet’s sky.

He sees sharply, down to the rocks on the riverbed, and a
prehistoric tail, a grey crayfish leg is tucking itself under a dolmen. He reaches down with a quiet hand and turns the rock over without so much as a particle of soil or sand lifting into the current of the river. The crayfish, a dark lobster-cat, does not move. Its whisker antennae, sensitive enough to feel a shift of life a foot away in the water, twitch, touch-sighted, its pincers gather energy. It knows the house is gone. Isaac moves a small hand through the current quick as a diving bird and pinches it on the armoured back at the point where it cannot reach a claw back to him. It kicks its tail, flicking back into the firm grip. The divisions of its shell click against each other, the sound dull underwater. He loves that sensation, the language of sound. He turns it over, examines the pale-grey underbelly, the alien anatomy riddled with legs, then drops it into the wind to watch it swim backwards under the shifted rock, to continue sleeping in the river. He puts his fingers in his mouth, sucks them, moving his tongue, as if to create a friction of heat. But his is not a fish-blood, there is no oil under his skin to keep him warm in the river’s cataracts.

Ten seconds have passed. His teeth are moving against his cheek. Cold invades every pore of skin with tiny arrows. He ignores the sensation of spears a few seconds longer.

Trout gape at him. Their spots shimmering fire, locked with brown-silver and lit by the water’s light. Minnows butting the current, all eyes. The black silk of a hidden eel. Crustaceans adding sections to their shells along the cratered stones of the river valley walls. It is all worthwhile.

The houses are filled with life even in winter, reptilian, marine, and the fish, sluggish in the near-zero climate. All is stark at this time of year, barren, before the sun warms reeds and algae to life from the rich beds, and grassland returns once more in the river, forestation, jungle, beating slowly in the benthic weathers. But now, life gives itself up utterly for observation.

He will stay down for as long as he can, a watery pioneer, caught between two worlds. His foreign body, learning the
river’s tricks. His nostrils closing, eyes in stasis, not giving away a suggestion of life, no tell-tale air bubble struggling to the surface to reveal his presence. His blood crystallizes, congeals. His lips turn blue and their cells die. But he will cut into the water again and again for the pleasure of the other world, a boy tranquillizing his face. His head smashing through the reflection of a lumbering crow in the sky. Because the March water is sparkling and icy and pure, a conductor of vision, a magnifying glass to all corners of the pools. A rare month for spying on these inhabitants, the strange and beautiful nations.

He holds his body out of the stream, better to preserve a supply of warmth, though the ground and rock under him steals at it. He allows a hand now and again into the water like a wingless bird diving for silver, keeping the other on a slippery, moss-covered stone above the river, which still has little pieces of ice tucked tight in its fur.

The crayfish is a good find, time-consuming, but he remains submerged for over fifteen seconds, unwilling to neglect other species in their tender cages.

Then the pain begins to dissolve all other sensation in his head and his eye rolls back to life. Spasms rock his flesh and he surfaces. Coming up, the air seems even colder than the water. The mountain breeze licks at his dripping ears, nips at them with quick bites, his forehead smarts. He breathes, unable to prevent a dry, clamped cough from coming up as the oxygen is taken into the halted lungs. He massages his neck and throat. The glands have tight knots. His wet collar has begun to freeze, stiffening against his neck, and chafing. He unbuttons the shirt, folds it off his skin. He puts the cold-staved fingers of his right hand under his tongue again but there is no heat left for either to borrow.

At least once or twice a day Isaac will come here to do this. In the summer he will swim down to the riverbed, wholly submerged,
and in the winter he’ll break ice to feel water on his forehead. Even though his mother will scold him for the damp clothing and his frozen hands. He’ll tell her that God has made a botched job, that he should have been a fish, and his mother will scold him for that, too. But she knows it, really, that he cannot keep away from water. That he is mesmerized by it. Ella has set firm in her mind the notion that her son will meet his fate in the waters of the Mardale valley, though he swims well enough. That one day she will find his corpse, a pale bag locked full of water at the bottom of Hop Grumble ghyll, where the torrent meets the lake. Or that Samuel will have to wade out under the Measand bridge, grope a hand between the reeds and find a son. She has her visions, her omens. The drowned wasp suspended in a jar of honey, a silver birch leaf fallen into a puddle. She tries to explain the dangers to him, to encourage him into other habits. He will not be swayed. He is called to the river. Because there he has the freedom to fly, weightless and sighted through the currents of the valley’s water. It is a better world, where life is slower and quicker at once, and there is silence except for the movement of the river’s atmosphere itself.

After a while Isaac stands, turns down the path, dizzy and rigid with cold. Today he has stayed down too long. There are side-effects to his devotion of the river. Bright stars of yellow light are imploding near the corners of his eyes. His peripheral vision is destroyed. The horizon is dull and its lines are separating, closing together, separating. He stumbles, sits down on a rock, rubs the last of the river out of his eyes, crushing his palms’ heels into the sockets, smashing out frost and winter tears.

An impossible creature is just ahead of him, steaming on the roadside. A red dragon, maybe fourteen feet long. And beside it a man made of dark-green panels. The lines around
the beast and the man chase and flex. It is a picture in a dream, an illustration from a medieval book made modern, a hallucination. As if the peculiar effects of the river have begun freezing the soft tissues inside his head. He does not trust his eyes, which are banging with light. But no, hallucinations are reserved for fevers, diseases. The river does not make him sick. He rubs his sockets, crushing yellow stars against his skull, opens his eyes, blinks. And blinks again. No, a dragon, definitely. Dragon.

When the man in the suit saw Isaac he thought at first that the boy was sick. He was pale and dripping with sweat. His shirt was dark with it. He did not seem stable and was swaying on the rock where he sat, staring intently straight ahead, but without seeing what his eyes offered up, it seemed. His hair had separated into bright blond icicles.

The man took a few steps towards the boy, as if to catch him if he fell. But he jumped up from the rock.

– Don’t run.

The boy stood for a moment, swaying, then sat again with a sudden jerky movement. The gesture seemed unrelated to the request. The man walked slowly up the steep path towards him, holding one hand in front of him as if to urge calmness, to dissuade flight. As if approaching a stray of some kind.

– There’s no need for running. No need at all. Just stay, and I’ll come to you.

Isaac squinted up one eye, bearing his teeth on that side of his face as his mouth followed upwards after the squint. There was a terrible pain behind that eye, a narrow, tunnel hole of pain going back towards his skull. An ache of bone. Ice-pain. The man sat next to him, flipping up the back of his suit jacket as he sat.

– You’re soaked. Are you unwell?

– No, I’m well enuff.

There was a brief silence, during which Isaac sniffled loudly. The man wondered whether he should offer the boy a handkerchief to dry himself with, blow his nose, but decided against it. They sat for a time quietly, without talking, a damp, cold boy in a wet shirt and a man who looked as if he would be more at home in the offices of Piccadilly or Manhattan, not the lake country. Both were dressed in wholly unsuitable attire, respectively out of place in the wintry environment.

– What d’yer want?

– Well, nothing, really. I just thought you might be unwell. You looked poorly.

– I’m grand as owt.

– You’re shivering.

– Aye, so’d you be, if you’d bin in t’beck.

– Did you fall in?

The boy grunted as if annoyed, as if the man had suddenly become very stupid and had asked a ridiculous question. He coughed without putting a hand over his mouth. His body was shaking.

– You mean you went in voluntarily? That’s a bit irregular at this time of year, isn’t it? Won’t your mother be angry? Won’t she scold you?

– Shi’ll not if she dun’t know.

– Oh. Of course. Well, rest assured you can count on my complete discretion.

The man in the suit put out his hand, paused, then laid it on the boy’s wrist.

– You’re frozen. You feel like ice cream, you look about as pale as ice cream, too.

Then the man laughed. His laugh was full of genuine mirth and there were small, fine lines around his eyes.

– Well, what’s your name?

– T’s Isaac.

– Pleased to make your acquaintance, Isaac. I’m Jack.

The boy hopped off the rock and turned to face the man. He
stuck out a hand in a blunt gesture. He was still squinting one eye savagely. They shook, the older of the two charmed by the unexpected manners of the boy.