Haweswater (3 page)

– No, Ella, lie back, there’s more.

Joyce’s words were paid no heed.

She was weak and pale and unstable as she opened the drawer of the dresser in the bedroom and took out the brass key to the church door, which she used every Saturday and Thursday when she carried out her cleaning duties. Her gown was yellow with sweat and a woman came to her and put a blanket around her shoulders. Ella steadied herself on the banister as she came down the stairs. She walked through the kitchen, past the table of empty cups, oblivious to the smoking crowd, and at the front door she paused to look back at the stunned, silent men, and at her husband, who had followed her down from the bedroom, not knowing what to say. He had their daughter in his arms. A small, screaming, blue and yellow kitten, lit up with hurried blood.

The church key pressed its shape into Ella’s fist as she held it tight. Her feet were bare on the flagstones. She lifted the latch and opened the door and an icy gust of wind swept into the kitchen. The freezing air seemed to bring her round a little. She stepped into a pair of shoes and hung at the door frame. Ella looked at the child held by its father and again looked out into the night. Then she called out a name which was half lost under the voice of the wind, and she was gone, down to the tiny church in the heart of the village.

As she said ‘Janet’ for her grandmother’s namesake, Samuel, half-hearing the wind, mistook her word and thought he heard ‘January’, for the month of her birth, and even later, when the mistake had been rectified, he always did call his daughter that, when his wife was not around to hear. And when she could, he settled for Jan, which was neither here nor there. So Ella went to the church to pray for forgiveness, and she would not curse God again for another twelve years, not until her son Isaac was born. So Samuel Lightburn grew the first of many hearts for his daughter.

Before school, when she is six years old, she will accompany her father to the paddocks and the lower fields backing up on the moors. It is early morning and a green dawn light covers the valley. There are flashes of dark green behind the night clouds, which she notices, looking up, as she walks next to her father. It is as if metal has found its way into the air and is burning. They walk on, down the rocky stone path, sightless, but aware of the distance of the walls on each side of the lane, their feet scuffing up loose pebbles. She takes three steps to his every long stride, a skip in the middle to keep pace. Their eyes strain and after a while adjust to the near-dark. At this time of day unnatural, optical physicality occurs, owlish intuitions. Her father is a dim outline. When she looks at him, she sees his breath coming out in short bursts. From time to time
he also looks down towards his breathing daughter. Behind and in front, two dogs slip silently along the drystone walls like ghosts swimming between their human keepers. Canine kelpies. She feels the presence of the near mountains, the pressure of them within the valley’s space of air. If she were to peer into the darkness she might make out the grey rock of Nan Bield pass or the ridges of High Street. She could summon their exact position from blindness. As the girl unhooks the latch of a wooden paddock gate, the cows, with a half-remembered instinct, gather for the run up to the farm. Her father and the dogs begin moving them from the back.

Janet helps him drive the herd of cows upwards to the dairy barn each morning, slapping the hot flanks of the animals as they pass by if they rock too far out of the channel of their own traffic. Their gait is heavy and slow, their udder sacks swollen, a taut pink-white, so that the legs splay out further to avoid the underbelly. They slug towards the dyke and are smacked back by her small hand on their rumps. Tripping hooves on the uneven road and the occasional murmur of a cow are the only sounds in this dawn landscape. Not even birds sound from the hedgerows yet. The cows are huge forms compared with the thin young girl, with lolling pink tongues and soulful, black-lashed eyes that shine with a high polish in the early light. Gentle, harmless eyes, she thinks. But if she is too close to their passage the full cows may push into her, unwilling to halt the stoddering flow once they are moving, nudging her with a slow strength into the river of beasts. Or a stray hoof will cover her foot, the weight of an animal unbearable for the slow second until its next full step, her twisted ankle on fire. Her calls are similar to her father’s, she has already learned his language of keeping animals.

– Cum to, cum long.

The lissom dogs weave in and out of legs, working up and down the herd. The older bitch is with pup. Samuel anticipates a fine batch, as the male breeder is a good working dog from Heltondale. He whistles and she halts and then flows to
the left of the herd, slower in her condition but no less accurate. The cows press upwards on the path, hooves clattering on the shale. From the window of Whelter Farm the movement of the beasts might appear biblical. Black spines crest the tops of the walls. Shoulder bones rolling under the hide.

Gradually, light smokes into the dale as the sun comes up over the fells to the east. The cows, plodding in the thick air, are now forms filling in with detail. Mucus streams from their wide nostrils, slow heads nod with the effort of pushing up the hill, swollen and heavy with their milk stones as they are. They have the father’s farm markings on the rump in a dark blue dye. This is the insignia of ownership: a cross-hatched L. Janet’s hands slap across the lettering.

Pieces of colour also emerge now. Orange in the early sky. A purple foxglove towering against the verge of the path is eerie, it is capable of death, has within its tubular petals that treacherous, chemical secret. Her father’s face and its beginning redness at the rear of the cows. She sees her own fingerprints coming out of darkness, under a yellow mantle of skin.

A shower has passed. The rain, as if used up from its long, vertical descent, thins and finally holds off. Her father is ahead in the farmyard with the cows and she links the last gate closed behind him. The path on the way back up to Whelter is pitted and covered with miniature cairns of sheep droppings and its pebbles shine in the sudden light. As Janet approaches the farmhouse the track disintegrates into a flat, grass-tufted field. She deftly steps over the deep ruts of mud. From the chimney of the farm comes a thin trail of smoke; her mother must have just lit the fire – the damp wood spluttering to pick up flame. Whelter itself seems to stand in a damp silence, the house martins’ nests under the gutters abandoned at this time of year, but as she comes closer to home there is the sound of water seeping around the house, attempting to
find ground from its higher position. The walls are a murky eggshell colour, stained green-yellow from mildew under the drains of the guttering. Moss is growing on the dashing, as if the wall itself is a living thing providing nutrients. Around the back in the dairy barn she can hear the lowing of restless cows as her father begins work, and the clanking of cattle against chain. Janet walks in through the back door of the farm and a few drops of rain, mint cold, fall on to her neck from the pools collected on the roof. She is already wet enough not to notice them. She closes the door on the trickle and patter of nature dripping.

Almost immediately she becomes aware of her mother’s scent. The smell of her is buried deep in the house, somewhere between the bitter rock walls and the wet grease of the dogs’ coats and the dusty character of the old building. A rich odour that is just as much a presence as the woman herself, so vital, in fact, that it is as if Ella Lightburn could be summoned from that sense alone. Her human fragrance, coming from just under her skin perhaps, or from the original sacks of fat and fur lining her body, blood aroma. It is comforting and disarming also, this scent, as it contributes to and finally dominates the household. Janet thinks of the dogs outside when they have been separated a while after a run up the fell, pressing muzzles close, as if inhaling will determine the other’s mood or intent. And such referencing can lead to playfulness, front legs tucked under, shoulders down and a lolling tongue, or to snarling confrontation, mostly between the female members of the group. A balance that is fine and easily swung one way or the other. The friendly tug at the collar suddenly becoming a brash of near teeth.

She pulls off her boots and leaves them on the stained boards by the door, enters the kitchen. Blue smoke curls up from the open stove door. Her mother is pulling out the drying rack.

– Lets have it, then. Tek it off.

Janet slips out of her damp wool coat and passes it to Ella.
Her mother runs a quick hand over its fibres.

– T’ll not be dry fer school. Neither will you, by all looks. Yer soaked through, lass.

She gestures for her daughter to come to her and Janet pauses before crossing the room. A dog-like tension twitching between the two, mineraled water dripping from the younger’s forehead on to the floor. Ella reaches for a towel hung on the sink and begins to rub at her daughter’s loose hair. The sensation of it is firm against her scalp and Janet lets her head move accordingly under the pressure.

– Mam. I’ll gan with Da t’put the tups out. Tom’s up at Goosemire and father’ll need help, eh?

– School fer you, lass. Yer father’ll manage.

Her mother’s voice is smoky, dispirited, like blackened stone. The brush begins to bite through the tattered strands of hair and flicks painfully past Janet’s ears. She doesn’t wince, but a cottony, internal itch starts in the small of her lower-left back, as it always does when her hair is brushed. A squirm of muscle. She buckles a little to one side and her mother rights her.

– Give ower, Jan. I’ve a dozen things niver dun yet this morning.

Ella twists the yellow mass into three separate parts and begins to braid. Her daughter does not mind this. It is like the pleasant numbness of a bee sting after butter is applied.

– Red or green?

– Red! Tup day, Mam!

Ella takes a piece of red rag out of her apron pocket and secures the end of the plait. She spins her daughter round to face her. For a moment there is an embarrassed, halting smile on her lips that starts, falters and begins again as if she is struggling in both releasing and stopping the expression.

– Daft lassie.

The administering complete, her daughter moves to the table, butters some bread and tears it in half. She scoops jam on to the larger half and folds the smaller down over it, then
runs a tongue around the edges where the jam has spilled out. Ella pours out tea for herself and a cup of milk for her daughter. They drink in a willing quiet. She pours a second cup of tea.

– Tek this out to Samuel, will ya, on yer way down. Gudgirl.

Janet puts her breakfast in her pocket and picks up her satchel from a chair, slings it over her back and lifts the tea between the fingers and thumbs of both her hands. She moves to the door.

– Jan! Coat.

– Mam! Can’t carry ivrything, eh?

Ella removes the wet, warm coat from the drying rack next to the stove and places it over the satchel, her actions circumventing any bickering.

– When I see you on that path back from t’shed, I want to see you wearin’ it an’ all.

Her dispassionate tone has returned and Janet knows that the brief interlude of lightness in her mother has departed. She is the first female of the house and as such there seems to be little room for the easy humour that her father often displays. She has within her a weightiness, as if carrying the combined stones of many riverbeds. As if gravity is the duty of a mother, not a father.

Outside, the fragrances of the farmyard and the weather and the season remove any memory of her mother’s scent and she will not be able to recall and recognize it until in its presence again. She mutters to herself on the path, Sam, Sam, tea’s up, Sam, her voice flexing inwards. Janet hands the cup to her father at the shed gate. His own hands are glowing from work, candid with heat. For a moment she considers asking her father if she can help with the sheep but her mother has already refused and, in fact, she does not mind attending school, far from it. Today that is the priority. She is allowed only some invasions of farm work into school time – busier periods than this, the introduction of the
breeders. Lambing and dipping constitute an emergent occasion. Or an unforeseen event, the volatile weather. Her father is leaning on the gate, slurping his tea as if it is hot, which it isn’t.