Haweswater (16 page)

Expecting only a ghost this time as he answered the sharp rapping on his door, Jack Liggett was surprised to find flesh and blood and a face of all protruding bone in the dim hallway. His lower stomach turned, as he remembered his coat next to her face, the cotton she had kept inside the cave of her
mouth. The two had exchanged glances in the hotel’s bar since, but had never spoken after the meeting on the fell almost two months ago.

On this occasion they shook hands like civil colleagues, or reasonable acquaintances. Her hair was knotted at the nape of her neck, tidily, and he was only partly shaven, his visage halved, a white and dark, theatrical mask. He invited her in, and continued attending to his face in the mirror over the sink.

– I miss my barber. Somehow I do not feel it would be in my best interest to have a haircut locally. I might find my throat cut instead, yes? It’s not the same, administering to my own face. I’m no good at it, would you believe that?

He put his silver comb under the tap and ran water through his hair, watching her in the mirror. She made as if to leave.

– Perhaps another time …

– No! Stay. I’m done. Will you sit? You’d rather not?

She shook her head, cleared her throat. He began making the bed, smoothing the rumpled covers.

– I understand Manchester City Waterworks will own the farm property in the valley after this quarter’s rents are paid. Is that correct, Mr Liggett?

– It is.

– And, as a rough estimation, how much time until the properties are no longer viable?

He smiled at her. He sensed an impending negotiation. Similar to the calm facilities she displayed during their previous encounter, involving her brother, she did not seem unsettled by this meeting. Rather she was clear and direct, a tactic seldom employed by the men of the city he was used to dealing with, who were characters altogether more slippery and furtive. In the artificial light of the room he was aware of her skin’s detail. The shattered-disc scar on her forehead, the small curls over her ears and frontal scalp, and flecks of orange within the imperfect grey irises.

– Why ask?

– Might not the Waterworks benefit from a few extra rents until such time as the buildings are no longer safe?

She looked to the side, out of the window. In profile, her face became less severe.

– I suppose it might. However, I don’t think we’re hurting in any way.

– Let me be plain. There has been a national depression. You might be enjoying a little more comfort in the city, but here there is not much recovery yet. Tenancies do not fall from trees in this part of the country, especially not now. Wool cheques are down by a large percentage, it’s barely worth clipping. Twelve months of a year is about what it takes to break even, all told. If the people here had a little more time to find alternative accommodation, it would be helpful.

– Helpful?

The rough edge of her accent had been kept in check up to this point, subdued, as if she had been conscious of not wanting to sound colloquial or compromise her position. Now it came back with fury.

– Yeh. I tek it yer dam won’t go up in t’blink of an eye. How long?

Jack Liggett laughed out loud. His dam! A personal note buried under her emotionless façade. It was a cracked exterior, after all. But don’t we all have these false surfaces, he thought, imperfect, with tiny fractures? If force is applied to those fractures the whole thing splits, falls off like shell, and inside, a genuine, delicate piece of flesh, too raw for untruth. He gestured for her to sit on the bed and again she shook her head. He sat himself, leaning back on the plastered wall, wishing to prolong the exchange. In truth, he was enjoying it considerably. His head moved into a beam of sunlight which lit the grey hairs at his temple. She was looking at his neck, the flick of a pulse.

– A year. Maybe less. Maybe more. There are several factors to consider. Weather permitting a speedy construction, for
example, and all the damned things going on abroad have to be taken into account. I have others, if you’re interested. You’d be the only one who is.

– And if some want to remain until then, you’ll accept rent? Same rates as present.

– It’s only a year. One year only. No point in burying in …

– A year is a year, it can mean all the difference. A month’s notice fer severance should work, both parties. It’s mutually beneficial, there is no argument against that I can see. Well?

Jack knew full well that this would bother the chief executive, who wanted a definite clearance of villagers as soon as humanly possible. But there was little that Jack Liggett could not convince his colleagues of when it came to business. He sat forward on the bed and took her hand. They shook for a second time and then she released from his grip, which had been of the strength of a handshake given to another man, an equal. As if he knew gentleness would, for her, be an insult, would be perceived as humouring her, trivializing her efforts. Within the handshake there was a margin of agitation, a touch of static.

– Honestly, I thought someone might have ventured this before now. I’m quite surprised they didn’t.

He was aware she would not thank him for his acceptance, nor did he wish that she would. Sure enough, she left without another word. His door closed softly. There were no audible footfalls on the wooden steps of the hotel, but he knew she had gone.

Soft, breezy May of this land-altering year in Mardale. Samuel and Ella Lightburn walk to the church in the village on Sunday morning as they have done many times before, though now they know it is finite, that somewhere just out of sight on the horizon is the sharp, sudden edge of the world. Along the sides of the verges are primroses and the first bluebells of the year.
From the hedges along the path comes a quick chittering, and small birds dart in and out of their nests, stealing at unripe berries from within the briar. On the path in front of husband and wife three scruffy sparrows brawl and peck at each other, scuffling in the dry, dusty earth and lifting off as the couple approach, only to land hopping and scrapping again a few more feet in front of them. As if it’s all for show.

As the two walk, their shoulders knock against each other a little, the path is uneven, throwing the weight of a body slightly into its centre. It is Ella that breaks the twittering quiet and her words are unhesitant, perhaps louder than they need to be with her husband so close by.

– Eileen Ferguson says she has room for a secretary in a month or so.

– Oh?

– Penrith Agricultural Committee. They cud tek Janet, eh? It’s a gud wage. She’s enough experience typing to git by. The rest’ll pick up.

– She’ll niver go. Not now.

– The’s nowt to stop fer.

They walk on in silence for a while under the pale-blue sky, the sparrows still scrapping on the path. The bell begins to ring from the church and Ella steps up her pace a little, frightening the birds off once and for all.

– Yer might try persuading her fer a change, Sam. Shi’s stubborn, that lass. And if it cums from me, it’s got t’be a poor idea from t’start t’ finish.

– Mebbi, after dam an’ all.

– Place’ll be gone by then, Sam!

– Lassie should git ter college. She’s a rite gud heed on her. Minny’s a lass gone ter college in this day an’ age, eh? Nowt unusual. Not like in our day.

Ella stops and swings round to face her husband.

– Pardon me, Mista Lightburn, but am I not alive on God’s green earth yet? This is still my day, then! And as t’money? You tellin’ me we’ve enough to send a daughter off fer study?
A daughter! It’s niver a wonder she’s not gotta fella, not with yer handlin’ of her. Never comes t’ worship.

– Besides, Ella, shi’s grand as owt at balin’ cum a coupla weeks. I’ll be glad o’ t’help. And she loves helpin’ Hazel wi’ kiddies. Let her a while bifor the school shuts.

Ella takes her husband’s hand in hers. Her eyes have in them both anger and gentleness, a battle which is often fought in her. Samuel bends and kisses her forehead, he puts his arm round her. She reaches over and straightens his old brown tie against his collar.

– And what about us, Sam lad? What of us after dam?

– Give it a while, Ella. Summet’ll cum.

They walk on in silence for a while, with the ringing church bell in the distance. At a fork in the path, they meet with the Hindmarsh family, on the way down from High Bowderthwaite, father, mother, two young daughters, all dressed in their best, and a son, who wears a suit with only one filled sleeve. As old friends, they greet each other with warmth, the women walking ahead and talking in low tones, the men quiet at the back. This fine May morning, as on many Sundays, the valley’s paths become a stage for well-dressed villagers on their way to church, for the kings and queens of Mardale.

For almost two decades Janet Lightburn has walked the roads and fells of the Mardale valley. She has lived every day solvent. Her knowledge of the place is as unconscious and simple as the mechanisms of breathing. The seasons of the farming community have structured her knowledge so that a margin of fell or common land does not exist without agricultural references. She is surrounded by an intricate union. There are deaths that have made more sense than lives here. But nothing hangs in the balance. She has been pressed between two vast mountain ranges without claustrophobia or repression; each year she is re-forged. She accepts the weather and the ability of the rain to overwhelm all else. It’s inconsequential. This is a sacred place. It is a holy land. She has picked up its old habits. Her body chemistry alters as the terrain decomposes, turns, begins again. She would have her ashes scattered to the open face of the scar. She has given herself over to this saturated strip of Westmorland.

What she begins to see now is the shadow of her own ideals, simplicity overwhelmed by its old adversary. Many faults and errors have entered the orthodoxy of her system. She has sculpted the corners of their existence herself, in a way, with all her mundane, extreme acceptances of land, of liquid soil, of time and continuance and balance, which leave a void for something else, a blemish in the mirror image, invaded space. Hazel Bowman had warned her in her youth of the structures that always enter the self-governed heart and the words were lost on her, cast aside as not being relevant. She was in a place too remote to fall prey to political or industrial dissembling. Now the horizon pulls in. Now she has to alter her vision. She must look with new eyes. In the mornings, the grey mass of
Harter Fell faces her from the window of Whelter Farm, no longer in stasis. It flexes new limbs and its base is temporary. Filling the valley, there are subjective angles, rushed states of existence. A rock is not dimensional until it is lifted or turned. Neither is her heart useful without first being averted.

There must have been encounters which kindled emotion, some kind of internal, controversial passion. A visit from Jack Liggett to Whelter Farm with a new contract to be signed by her father, where she had been sleeveless from working in the garden, discouraged by the swift compliance of her proposal, secretly wanting contention, a conflict which she might feel gratified in undertaking. But instead she received decency and did not know what to do with it. So she handed him a clump of soil-stringed onions from the vegetable patch, wordlessly, seriously, as if fulfilling her end of a treaty. A stray glance across the felt-capped vista of the Dun Bull on weekends, after accidentally coming to know some of his subtle domestic habits, what his face was like clean and unshaved, how he tucked the corners of the sheets under his bed as if sealing an envelope. Her eyes able to convey honesty at last, in which dislike and desire are not exclusive states. The fact that the tellurian pull between two people is often an inexplicable, belligerent thing, not manufactured willingly by the parties involved, but arriving like a tumour along a piece of body. Of it and yet deformed, damaging.

There were those days when she observed her brother in the man’s company, the two chatting civilly, spiritually almost, like men of the cloth, or Isaac handing the tall man a plant or a trinket for him to look at, which he always did patiently, and she was softened. Or it could have been that there was no avenue of flight for the anger building, the force of frustration over the new world that was beginning to stack upwards. And when the structure became too tall for itself, it
tipped over in an oblique direction, scattering into a section of herself where there was less rigid government of the heart.

It could have been sheer mischance. For there are times when passion can describe a random passage of its own accord, like electrical energy in the atmosphere which will strike out in any direction, seeking a high object to ground itself on. This, then, could have been the reason for their affair. Though it has never been fully understood in the following years, by the later generations of that family. Even now it might be written as a smudged signature, a blurred identity of non-specific proportions. In language which does little more than crawl below the underbelly of love.

Perhaps, though, there is a simpler explanation. Those unguarded moments when Janet caught sight of Jack Liggett’s gracious side, that which she would have as nonexistent, more in keeping with his perceived role in the village. A good-humoured, self-damning joke for the benefit of the men of the valley, who did laugh; they granted him some credit, some humanity. His lifting of a stubborn lamb out of the road when it would not shift as he drove up to it in the red car. Picking the thing up like a hanging child. The look of confusion and slight embarrassment on his face as the creature bleated and skipped back towards him, naïve and too young yet to be skittish around humans. He was not wholly a bad man, for all his blunt infiltration, and it was becoming apparent as he spent more time in the village. He had his lighter folds and creases.

Or she passed by his hotel window, on the way to the cottage store, looking up to see a glimmer of bare skin as his shirtless back moved past. A fraction of a second’s sexual exhibition. An accidental flirtation, that’s all, and unintended, but enough of a sighting to startle her, and she lost a breath. His back had been like marble through the square frame, pure and aesthetic, masculine. A classical sculpture. This intimate glimpse of a man who had already aroused a volatile state of emotion in her, could have helped to carry those
affections and agitations into another context. It could have been the tiniest and most direct of arrows.

Nor could she have avoided him in the village, with its small confines. There were words exchanged between them which might have moved her, even though she took care never to match his level of warmth and amiability. There were his eyes, forged from compressed sable. Was he playing for her? This able and ponderous man. His peacock feathers now blanched and gone. A beige, quail-like normality finding him. Was he more plausible now, simply a possibility of flesh? Were his eyes suggestive, giving something away, his nocturnal visions that included her treacherous mouth?

He stopped her once at the gate of the hotel in the second week of his residency at the Bull.

– Hello. Tell me something. How does that woman in the cottage with the shelves of perished sardines ever come by all her information? I’ve never seen her leave the village. That old wagon of hers looks as if it wouldn’t make it five feet.

– Her name is Sylvia. She makes half of it up. Take care not to believe all you hear in these parts.

– Oh, I think I’m learning to separate the whey from the chaff, as they say.

The moderate weight of his words held her momentarily. Was his tone imbued with references? Or a turn in the flow of colour at the back of his eyes, past their pupils, like a piece of water suddenly shifting around a stone in a riverbed. But she hurried past, barely pausing to fulfil her end of the conversation, and leaving him to wonder at her ability to be frugal, to separate herself from her voice.

Or could it not have been her dreams that eventually turned her? Alluding to remote possibilities. As Jack Liggett’s body was filled with longing in sleep, so too hers lifted towards him in those amorphous hours. Hours when the pent-up, raging ghosts of the subconscious are released into the body’s fluid. To swim slickly though the water of limbs and influence cells, to touch, to caress, morphing into imaginary solids, hands,
fingertips. So that when she woke, a papery spasm fluttering internally, she slowly remembered the figure who had moved through her dreams, and, try as she might, she could not discard the memory in daylight. So when the torch finally lit, it burned savagely, and the air surrounding it went roaring inwards, towards the mouth of flame.

Inside the enclosure, there was tar up to her elbows and on her shirt. Her long hair was wound up and tucked under a flat cap to keep it from the thick, black treatment. Though several strands had fallen free, had gathered black on their ends like paintbrushes. As Jack Liggett strode down the slope of the fell he observed her with her father and another farmhand working in the corner pen of one of Whelter’s fields. The two men were pushing sheep through the narrow enclosure, holding each one for Janet to coat their tails with the solution, which would make it impossible for maggot infestations to take hold in the softer flesh there. They had recently been dipped in a solution of whale-oil and arsenic to kill any residual lice and ticks, and the sweet-bitter stench from the dipping-basin wafted out across the field. The sheep were coughing and hacking, bleating, avoiding each other, pushing against the fences.

Since Jack Liggett had entered polite society, he had not seen a more unusual or subversive scene concerning a grown woman. He was fascinated by it and slowed his pace, imagining the faces of those from the upper strata of the Corporation if they could see such a thing. The combination of agricultural odour and her attire was as disconcerting as it was intriguing. She painted the rear of the animals and kicked them on the rump to send them on. Her movements were liberal and generous, unrefined. There was a dark patch of sweat on the shirt from the small of her back. Her forearms were soiled, a filthy, sooty, bitumen colour.

He opened the hook on the gate of the field and came through on his way down to the village. There was pitch on the wood of the frame and as he re-hooked the gate he looked at his hands. They were both smeared with the sticky, burnt-smelling tar. Janet saw him staring at his hands, as did the two farmers. He looked up and smiled at them, slightly whimsically, holding up his hands. The men nodded curtly at him and Samuel Lightburn spoke a few quiet words to his daughter. She walked towards Jack Liggett with a rag in her black hands. There was a streak of oily-looking pitch on her chin. She gave him the cloth. He could not be sure, but he thought her smile, for once, was without derision. Though there still seemed to be something of a struggle about it, as if the expression was against her will. For a moment, he leaned in towards her, towards the smile, careful to keep enough of a respectful distance in her father’s presence, though the two men were concentrating on the tarring once more. She did not step back. He was close enough to have moved a painted strand of hair with his breath as he exhaled. When he was done cleaning his palms she took back the rag, careful to leave a soft, black fingerprint against his wrist as she did so.

June. The rain comes as if out of nowhere. Suddenly it is fat and fast, warm in the air. A strong breeze the only warning of the impending torrent. Then the sky is gone above cloud, and a fractured column of water rests between the hills. Anything living in the valley heads for the nearest place of shelter. Sheep into wall corners, rabbits back into the maze of warrens within ground, and the villagers, if they are out, find the cover of trees or neighbours’ houses. The summer cuckoo at the far end of the dale lets up. Everything sentient is moving, except for the half-wild fell ponies, which stand absolutely still in the rain. Pure to it. They stand in the meadow’s long grass, afraid to move, or perhaps contented in the downpour.
Six or seven black and white animals, static, steaming with heat, the sweet odour of their rough coats trapped in the mist of water now filling the valley. A small swish of a coarse tail. Nothing more. Beads of water collecting in their beards, and on their backs, shining.