Haweswater (19 page)

Her mother must have sensed that a change had come over Janet. Perhaps it was in her skin, an altered fragrance, the telltale sign that her body was being moved towards maturity, nightly. There was a soft lustre to her. Where once her face had been kinetic and lean, now it was often sleek, at rest and her eyes quiet. A lift of the forehead to smooth an expression. She had new moments of abandoned peace that were uncommon for her. Her mouth resting against an upper arm, her gaze off at the horizon. Everything stilled about her. And yet she was not entirely reduced to placid relaxation. After these moments of contentment in her daughter’s face came anxiety and agitation, seemingly arising from nothing, no good cause. Then the two extremes ran neck and neck, vying for precedence.

Ella carefully observed her spells of restlessness too.
Occasionally, she found her daughter engaged in frantic activity, washing her hands continuously at the sink, forgetting she had just completed the task. She would brush down the coat of the horse incessantly, the same section of stomach over and over with the metal brush. At these moments she could not be approached, would come out roaring from herself, suddenly livid. Even her father and brother would shrink back, but they seemed not to realize that Janet’s state was anything other than an extension of her torrid, choleric temperament, her typical self. When pressed on the subject, Samuel put it down to the loss of her home. Her dwelling on the future, as indeed they had all been. Not Ella. To her mind there was something else. Something to do with love, or loathing, she was wound up within a consummate situation. In addition, there were the missing hours. Janet had always been keen on time spent outdoors and alone, but there were endless days when Ella could not account for her daughter, her food was left cold on the table. And the farmhands could not report on her whereabouts. She harboured suspicions that it might be a man. While this did not sit badly with her in principle, she did worry that there was no formal courting going on, which suggested a poor match. Ella wanted to broach the subject, hoping to offer advice, but she found she could not. As with so many other issues, there was no way to reach her daughter, no obvious bridge. She did not guess that the stranger in their midst was largely responsible for her daughter’s moodiness, though in retrospect she could not believe she had failed to miss it for as long as she did.

She steps out of the cottage door, walks past the drying flowers in the garden, the farm gate, and the dog follows her a little way down the path before turning back. In her hands, a large china platter, which her mother wants returned to the woman to whom it belongs in the village. A strange request; her
mother does not ask small, irrelevant things of her such as this. And her face too was strange when she asked it, passing between curiosity and hardness, as if an accusation lay behind it somewhere, or a question. As if this duty was a test, though neither knew of what, or how exactly it should be undertaken.

A fresh breeze is coming down from the Rigg, stirring the hedgerows. Above, a flock of small, dark birds reshapes itself effortlessly in the sky, perhaps heading away from the cooling climate. The season is close to its end. Soon there will be the inevitable break in weather and one morning she will wake and know that it will not be warm that day or the next, that the rain and storms and an occasional hurricane tail whipped in from the Atlantic, the Irish Sea, will shortly perform surgery on the landscape. Pulling at its flesh and taking off skin. Filling in the dry holes, bringing back streams that have not existed for months. And finding a piece of land on which to lie with him will become more difficult. And finding ways not to know him will become more difficult.

If he stays. He says he is staying.

She passes the church and the hotel. On the bridge, two men are in conversation. A brief exchange with them, her mind not able to engage further, though they require no more from her than cursory acknowledgement. When she has moved by, they resume their intermittent discourse. A backward glance at the hotel across her right shoulder. Hopeful. Affected. And as her head is coming round, the sky is rolling strangely, grey and white, empty of wings. And then a flush of trees. And stone.

As she falls to the side, the village walls move past her vision, so the sky seems to harden. For a moment she feels like she is spineless, without an internal frame to support her, and it is sickening. Then the earth reminds her that there is a composition of bone within, banging hard against it, mapping each joint as it hits. There is a noiseless shattering. The itch in her palms tells her she is cut, perhaps badly.
There is blood and dust on her forearms, and broken pieces of green china embedded in her hands. When she looks down she is holding half the smashed platter. As if she might still use it to carry air. As if it isn’t destroyed. There is nothing in the road to indicate a reason for the fall. No obstruction, stray timber, cow-shit. No new rut that she has stepped into while her eyes were engaged elsewhere, not conscious of the path.

The men on the bridge come over to assist her as she stands and to investigate the damage. If she bends her fingers to pull out the shards in one hand others will go in deeper. One of the farmers takes her by the wrist, and the rest of the bowl drops to the ground, this time sounding accurately like something delicate blowing into fragments. The man looks for signs of an alarmingly fast leap of blood and, seeing none, begins to pull out the pieces, starting with the largest cusp at the base of her thumb. The sensation of it is like he is pushing dead glass in further. Her face is ambivalent to pain, aware then detached, as it has been all morning. Behind them Jack Liggett says not to do it. Says to stop doing what they are doing. He says that the best way to get glass out from a person is to wash it out. To let the water remove it softly, water will get behind the glass and lift it from the skin, he says. His hand is pushing down on an invisible object before him. He does not move in and the man lets go of her wrist.

The river does not begin to sting until the china has come out and the cuts are exposed. In front of her two men from the village who have known her as a child watch her palms being scoured of debris by the current. Behind them a man they do not know, whose birth-markings she could point to blindfolded, waits for an obscure indication that he should move forward. That he should leave. His face is flushed and abrupt, as if alcohol has suddenly made its way through his flesh to there. Her own face suffering the carved distance to him. And surely everything is apparent. Everybody’s position revealed,
their simple motives identified and hovering about like loud insects. Her eyes strip between the men deployed on the river bank. And she realizes how invisible massive human conditions are. How secret in status the largest portions of life can be.

Jack Liggett had tasted coconut before. He was one of only a few people in the country to have enjoyed that privilege. A few were being imported without sanctions from the Indies on Liverpool-bound trade ships and, in turn, they found their way on to the crowded market tables of Manchester and London. Under the creaking awnings of Old Shambles market place he had picked up the object and examined it. There were three sensual dips in its shell, a beard of hair at its head which reminded him of a dark female. Back at his Manchester townhouse he had broken into it with a carpentry tool, bitten into the flesh. The taste of it was unlike any other he had encountered. It was sweet, unique, and he thought never to find its equivalent.

He had not ever found the flavour of coconut rich in the air as he did now, after descending a steep, loosely shaled mountain. He was standing on the common scrub moors of Mardale Ill Bell – a half-mountain tucked behind the crags of the Rigg. At first he could not locate the source of the fragrance. He realized he was surrounded by flowering gorse bushes that were exploding perfume from their yellow flowers into the air. Nothing else was flowering yet on the high moors, except a stray flock of heather.

In his wildest imaginings he had never expected to come across a little Westmorland oasis where foliage assumed a tropical identity. After scrambling down the last of the scree into the rough half-valley, shrieked at by a lapwing guarding a hidden nest, he came close to a brilliant yellow bush, bent close and waited for the slow, itching bee to finish in the hollow yellow flower and lumber off before he inhaled. His nose entered the prickly, silky domain and was overcome
with scent only like that of a coconut. It was fresher than roses, somehow heavier, stickier, but without the sugar. It was a steamed-island, oily sweetness, nutty and bringing to mind the humid air of the Indies that lies on the skin like a damp, hot shirt. And he stood back, laughing, looking around the mountain, across the brown grass for someone to mention his find to, though he knew he would not find a soul. He laughed at the strange and marvellous world, surprising him with its simple, divulging gifts.

He did not know that the gorse would emit the fragrance for only a few short weeks, for a brief, very un-English season. But he knew that in this dale he alone could find a mirror for the scent in an exotic fruit from thousands of miles away. There was a quick reconciliation within him. Suddenly he felt validated, the reasons for his presence, old and new, fused, and the position of his boots’ soles against granite and heather became absolute.

For a few sacred months that summer and autumn, Jack Liggett renavigated the mountains of the Lake District. He journeyed out to the ragged peaks in the centre of the area, ascending the lower slopes and climbing rocky veins thousands of feet high. He stood up against the wind on the narrow paths of the Helvellyn and Blencathra ridges, balanced marionette-like on the razor edges of the Langdale Pikes, with gravity heaving at him from all sides. Wast Water, a sucking black hole beneath him, deepest of all the Lakeland pools. There were vertical pillars of rock in Kentmere and Coniston that provided him with peripheral splendour, needles shafting out of the moist valleys. Or the ordinary brown vastness of Skiddaw brought him up into the fast weather, the eerie realm of shifting mist.

What could he say of this land, with its influence over his body and his mind? Though he had heard of that certain
healing quality of the region before, from acquaintances who had been seduced by the beauty of the area, even from the infamous poetry which people absorbed as if it were a travel guide, he had never believed it reasonable, judging those protestations as sentimental and verbose. Only now did he begin to reconsider, to trace a marginal accuracy in the accounts, however loquacious and fanciful they might have been.

The Riley Sprite became covered with mud as he drove down the most inaccessible lanes to reach the base of a pike. Dirt firmed within the wheel arches, dropping off in dried chunks as he parked back in the driveway of the Dun Bull. It was not a suitable car to be navigating the Lakeland in, with the region’s conspiracy of water and landslides, the perpetually leaking solids, but he worried less and less for its pristine condition. He felt a youthful strength returning to him, knew that the invincibility of his boyhood was close at hand, and if he just reached another summit, crossed another ridge, he would have it again – that freedom of having stolen away from the city, that entrepreneurial spirit, adventure. He left stones at the summit cairns to be smoothed by the winds and the rain, broke off portions of mint cake and let it chill sweetly against his inner cheek as he caught his breath, surveying the world below that he had pushed upwards away from. And this was satisfaction, peace.

There were still his duties at the bottom of the valley. He would spend no more than an hour in the company of the engineers each morning, minimal contact, then the rest of the day was his own, and he was untroubled with the practicalities of the project. Telephone calls to the Corporation headquarters were rare, the excuse being the lack of such utilities to hand. He knew that the chief executive was displeased with the developments in Mardale, the lenient extension of tenancies
and such, the absence of his right-hand man, his most trusted counsel, but Jack Liggett also knew his position to be secure. His Lakeland sabbatical was something which would go unchallenged, it would be viewed as a reward for a job well done. He was something of a favourite amongst the directors, a conductor for pride, this young man of intense ambition and insightful business acumen, who had sown the seeds for treatment plantations and underground systems throughout the north-west, and seen them blossom. A practical, agreeable man, he rested as a jewel in the crown of the Waterworks.

Known for his gallant manner, and his foresight, he also demonstrated a reliability in bringing both ideas and schemes to fruition with a minimum of fuss, with an aura of serenity and without being in the least phlegmatic. Nor did he bow under pressure, or negotiate lightly. He seemed to have a gift for besting, without encouraging enemies. Manchester City Corporation’s take-overs in that decade were refined affairs, with Jack Liggett the driving force. It was as if he was simply born for his position, though few knew the circumstances of his upbringing.

So well did he play the role of upper manager that his colleagues never had cause to suspect foul play. He could have carried a safe out past their noses and they would have presumed he was making way for more light at his office table. Had any of them attempted to glean his past or question him too closely about family or connections, he would simply have stepped up his attitude a notch, convinced them of a history glittering with fine wine, college alumni and private wealth. Sufficient evasion of topic to suggest a charming modesty, not so much as to draw attention to the desire to elude interrogators. He knew how to enter a room of applause without seeming relieved, was wasteful enough with pâté and champagne at social gatherings not to seem unaccustomed. The only fault in the performance was perhaps its perfection, though textbook class was seldom disagreeable, and, in these
times of threatened social disorder, was more likely to be welcomed and protected than it was challenged. Jack Liggett was a man who commanded his own life, worked hard and gave away little. The Haweswater project was his, a product of mental stretch and insight and his longest commitment at mcw. It had been nurtured from conception, through a bureaucratic maze and the corridors of Westminster, through the development of the drawing office, to its physical realization, the metamorphosis of linear thought into the final weight of construction. There was nobody the Corporation would rather have on site.

As the summer progressed, there came to be more traffic in the Mardale valley. Machinery and equipment were brought in for the clearing and levelling of the dam site and the first of the workers, the machine operators, began to straggle in. The new road was often blocked with heavy machinery and the locals, who had grown accustomed to using it since its construction, once again began to favour the old western track down to Bampton.

The four engineers, who had made a quiet presence for months, became more animated and increased the volume of their discussions. They pored over plans and debated positioning, indignant to rebuttals of their suggestions. There was, for a time, stalemate between them. A divide of two versus two, as the group fought between plans for a slightly curved dam wall, allowing for irregularities in the strata of rock, and a straight-walled design, which would require a lesser amount of land alteration for its foundations. When the latter was eventually chosen, the issue of facing arose and created a problem of equal contention. The grey dolomite, originally intended to face the dam wall, was proving too difficult to work with. An entire section of planning had to be abandoned, opening the door to fresh argument. Jack Liggett often felt like a parent calming a squabble among children when the engineers started bickering. He would be curt and plain of manner, allowing little room for the stand-offs, sulks and
ultimatums of the four to invade his private schedule. And, in a way, it became inconsequential to him. He was contented in these months, another life was opening up to him, and love, and now that the scheme was well under way, he happily took a step or two back, camouflaging himself within the valley. From this position he could curse at the wagon driver who brought down sixteen yards of valley wall with his careless reversing, as if the damage done was somehow personal. The violence of his swearing coming from an unchecked portion of himself, with which he had little prior association.

There were long days when he was content to skirt the mountain ranges which surrounded the Mardale village, and as the machine operators began to arrive and set up the dam site, he sat in the long grass on the slopes and watched from afar. The season was turning bitter, the short, hot summer had all but bled out. There was a fresh, woody smell in the air and the red bracken was wild over the sheep paths, twisting its stems together in firm, mature knots so that his boots had to rip through it as he walked. Warm rain from the summer was gone. Now, when the first drops came they were cool and refreshing on the back of his neck, the water was exhilarating on his gasping face.

His muscles became hard and the skin on the back of his neck burned a deep brown. The taut wires running through his stomach came to the surface. And he felt comfortable within his body, energized. He went unshaven, a stubble darkening his full mouth, the start of a soft beard. Lifting his hands to his face, he would rub his jawline, marvel at the new texture. Breeches and a woollen shirt were all he now wore, a uniform of comfort and flexibility. He carried with him a tall wooden staff for the purpose of steadying himself on the descent from a ridge, but, more than this, he enjoyed the firmness of it within his palm, growing accustomed to the
smoothness of the surface against his fingers, the groove for his thumb. He knew he was throwing off his old façade, but it was irrelevant. All that existed now were those mountain steps, one after the other, lifting him above the horizon.