Haweswater (14 page)

Then she had walked forward, towards the drystone wall which led down into the valley, had placed her hands on the top of it, letting the chill granite take away the last of her sensation. Her forearms grazing against the sharpness as she held on to the wall’s spine. A cry of agitation into a crevice of the rock’s muscle. She had not moved from there for nearly an hour. And now as she finally went home, her hands did not belong to the rest of her.

Jack Liggett was staying in the border town of Penrith, thirteen miles from the proposed dam site and nearly twenty from the village of Mardale. The road he took into the valley was slow and winding and littered with ragged-looking sheep, but he drove it almost daily, arriving in the afternoon, and leaving in darkness. He did not take the main road to Shap and then down past Swindale and Rosgill to the valley, but instead came by a more direct route through the villages of Askham, Helton and Bampton. It was more scenic, more direct as the crow flew.

On this route he encountered several gates along the way, which were chained to posts to keep livestock separate from each other and out of the neighbouring fields. He made sure to close the gates behind him, recoiling, though, from the greasy metal of the lock and the odious sheep wool snagged into its links. The bestial smears and smudges on the lattices. There were also several bent metal cattle grids on this road, which saved the effort of having to get in and out of the car to tackle gates, but were hell on the suspension and tyres of the car. There was no easy method of navigating them. Fast or slow, each one would in turn make him wince as he drove over it, each gave out a loud metal strum and the car would bounce and shake. There were always several worrying bangs and crashes from the undercarriage of the automobile, as if vital sections of the exhaust and radiator had come off.

In places, the road through these tiny, hidden villages was covered with pools of meltwater which had spilled out of the warmed veins in the hills. Other sections, in the shadow of a hill or wood, were frozen in slippery sheets. The Waterworks had assured him that access to Mardale would not prove to
be a problem, that the roads of the Lowther and Bampton valleys were fair, if not in an excellent state for the lake country, and that the actual Mardale road was in very good condition, having been built only a decade earlier, a private venture of the Waterworks itself as it began to explore the region in earnest. But the new concrete road was not the marvel of modern transportation that he had been led to believe it was. The men at the Waterworks did not account for the strength and brutality of the region’s weather, which, even in only ten years, had broken up the concrete and displaced middle sections of it, leaving potholes and sags, an uneven camber. Jack Liggett’s car was new and reliable, but there were areas of the country where this did not matter, he realized.

Soon after his arrival in Westmorland he conveyed his disappointment on the telephone to a colleague, his concern for the automobile.

– The car’s simply not up to it. She’s coming to bits on me, Gordon.

The chairman of the Corporation was lacking in sympathy and seemed to find the whole matter something of an amusement.

– Consider it a challenge, Jack, you’re rather partial to a good challenge are you not?

– I’m rather partial to the Sprite.

– You’ll get another, Jack. Besides, I cannot understand the need for all these courtesy calls, anyway. They know their holdings are to be closed now. Langdale has assured me the letters have been sent, urging final payment of rents and evacuation. Oh! The man is so superior, he makes me feel like a bank robber, what! He’s holding the bank door open, mind, the devil. But these visits, Jack, what good is rubbing their noses in it?

– It’s not a question of gloating, Gordon. It’s necessary for me to go, I assure you. One can’t just roll in and pull out the tablecloth with all the china still sitting on the table. There are still pieces to mend, still loose ends, and you know I despise loose ends.

– Very well. Have it your way.

And so, Jack Liggett went daily to Mardale, to visit two or three of the families in the village. Though it was not an easy task, socializing with the obdurate locals, he went optimistically and with a mind to settle the matter well. It was as if he needed their compliance and good wishes, even needed them to see the beauty of his idea. They received him into their homes, obliged him with tea and currant bread, did not meet his eyes for any great length of time. He would remain cheerful, unabashed, brushing the crumbs from the creases of his suit trousers. And he spoke of the dam relentlessly, the ins and outs of it, lecturing the patients about their own diagnosed cancer.

Each evening, after making calls to a selection of houses in the village, he would drive the winding road back to the town, with the yellow-green, phosphorescent eyes of fell sheep reflecting in his car’s lamps from the blackness of the moorside. Some of the animals lay in the road, sullen, ignoring the blaring horn, and finally hopping up spastically as a front wheel crept towards a hoof. At this hour the roads were less easily navigable than in daylight. Ruts became invisible, more treacherous. It would often take well over an hour to reach the dim orange glow of Penrith.

The car was a beautiful Riley Sprite, manufactured in the previous year, which had been bought from a showroom in Birmingham and delivered to his town house in Manchester. It was long and lean and sassy. Over the headlamps were thick, black spider-tapes like painted cartoon eyelashes. The running-boards were svelte as curved limbs. The interior was one of the most luxurious designs of the day, with a polished walnut finish, and brass instruments. Black Italian-leather seats still smelled of recently tanned hide. The car was a joy to drive, an enviable motor car, and Paul Levell’s assumption upon seeing it had been right: it was a young man’s dream, for Jack Liggett was still a young man.

Under the bonnet was a broad intestine of fitted chrome.
The car’s engine was composed of four cylinders, one and a half litres of blissful, surging power. Its pedals were tight, smooth, influencing the car at the slightest touch. Jack Liggett wore black leather gloves as he drove, which were tacky on the steering wheel, and almost an extension of the car’s internal décor itself. He sat upright, arms extended straight ahead to the wheel, a perfectly balanced section of the machine. The company which produced the Sprite held the slogan ‘As old as the industry, as modern as the hour’. This had seemed fitting to him when he purchased the automobile, with cash in a leather zipping wallet, placed softly down on the office desk of the district manager. It had seemed fitting indeed.

For six weeks Jack Liggett boarded at the George Hotel in Penrith. He would have a light dinner reserved cold for him, which he would eat late and alone, upon his return. Each evening he would telephone the chief executive of Manchester City Waterworks at home with a report of the day, including the envoy of Lord Langdale’s letters issuing a discontinuance of tenancy, the arrival of four civil engineers, who had rented a vacant cottage next to Brunswick Hill in Bampton and who were pacing round the site at the bottom of the valley like excited children. His reports gauged the climate in the village, recounted what meetings were attended in the Dun Bull and by whom, there were no secret, underground collaborations going on. He made no mention of Janet Lightburn’s visit to a solicitor’s office in Carlisle, the fact that she boarded the 10.20 at Penrith station one Monday morning in early April and caught the 6.17 home, thinking it better not to bring up a potentially worrisome event without anything else to go on. He supposed she had been told that any resistance was futile, that the position of the tenants was not a litigious upper hand, that they had no ground to stand upon, so to speak. He would reassure the chief executive that
the situation was tolerable, there were rumblings, yes, but the locals were adjusting to the idea of modernity, the prospect of change.

He anticipated that the evacuation would be smooth, he said. The word protest did not enter the discourse once. Occasionally, if the man on the other end of the line seemed agitated, he would suggest a plaque, bearing the name of the chief executive, to be erected near the dam wall on the roadside, in honour of his role as primary overseer of the project. He would give his kindest regards to the chief executive’s wife and he would hang up the receiver with an upbeat cheerio.

Then he would pour himself a large French brandy from the bottle he kept in his suitcase and smoke cigarettes out of the high window of the hotel, watching the town’s nocturnal character unwind.

In the street below there were nightly trysts. Stray cats hissed and spat on the walls, their bald, shredded ears twitching, their songs mournful on the black roofs. A fox came stealing from the crates in the kitchen alley of the hotel, silent as it blazed down the middle of the road, grey theft in its mouth. There was the racket of the Board and Elbow, ejecting its punters after midnight, their loud protests.

– Fucking cunt. A lot more’s come in nor goes back. Yer fucker.

And, in the old, bitten-at language of the area, with its sluggish, ugly vowels, there were words which he did not understand, which sounded brutal, and he could not guess their English equivalent. A brawl until a jaw broke, or the bully left to vomit himself sober against the town’s red bricks. He watched a man kicking blood from his wife’s stomach. Maybe for a wrong look given to a friend, or nothing at all. She crawled to his feet and he lifted her on to his back, carried her home like spilling coal. Occasionally there would be lovers in the alley also, not truly lovers, but passing, drunken exchanges, nothing more than a quick grunt of lust, shoes slipping for grip on the ground as the woman was pushed
back against the wall. The awful scene of three men holding a young girl down once to take turns on her. Perhaps money being passed, he could not be sure. And after they had gone, her crying was like laughter, disbelieving. He threw a cigarette down towards her weeping laughter, and a box of matches with the gold crest of the hotel’s arms.

Towards three, when the streets cleared, and all human heat evaporated, the sky would begin to bruise with thunder. And between the long rumbles, sometimes he thought he could hear the muffled, unshod hooves of the wild fell ponies on the road as they came down from the scrubland on Beacon Hill, though he never saw them, moving slowly, single file through town, as if on a pilgrimage. He would close the window and retire to bed. Or, if the two daughters of the hotel manager were available, Marion and Dorothy, he might stay up for a while, turning them to meet his body as the moment’s fancy took him, a hand over the mouth of one, fingers clenching indentations into her cheeks, bringing her to his groin. The other moving above him, stepping away, the glow from a streetlight on her spine. He would sleep for about five hours usually, not needing more than this, sitting against the pillows, his right arm crooked over his chest, his hand holding his left shoulder. In his suitcase, next to the brandy, the corrugated glimmer of a revolver. Though he had spent much time in rooms similar to this one, Jack Liggett was not a man comfortable in hotels.

Here in the George Hotel, there are nights of unending rain when he dreams of the blue-green valley that he will destroy. The hotel groans in the downpour, its foundations settling. His arm lifts off his chest and touches the cotton pillow, his fingers curling around the iron flowers of the headboard. He is somewhere between death and the beating drum of his subconscious. The dreams recall his youth, they return his
first visions to him, the libation of frontiers, new elevations. As a boy he was an avid walker and climber, scaling the sharp-side of peaks and ridges in the Langdale Pikes, the Kentmere valley. And the black crevices of Harter Fell, above Mardale. In his dreams he is there again, high up in the vein of a ghyll. Below, the valley edges are wet, like the sides of a green china cup, and there is only enough of a lake to take one sip. He finds miniature holds in the cornices of overhanging granite, weighing his body in the air for a swing to the next level, the summit. His nail ripping out as he pulls up the fractured crag towards a circular cave, a button in the mouth of the cliff. There are no ropes to secure him to the mountain face. He does not yet believe in immortality.