Haweswater (17 page)

So sudden is the rain, and heavy, that the two do not realize they are sharing the same shelter, a vast sycamore tree. They have run blindly, with rivers on their foreheads, stumbling for dryness. Until he comes around the trunk shaking his untucked shirt, the shelf of his ribcage dripping, to face her, and both gasp at the shock of proximity. Neither can breathe or speak. This moment has been imagined to death, never expected, and the coincidence of it is like a poor joke. The valley is alive with water. It roars down, drums, patters, splashes over the webbed-handed sycamore leaves, trickles on the ground.

He looks away. He cannot tell her she is not beautiful, here in this sudden rain, the rain half soaking her hair and clothes against her skin. He knows only that he wants to cut it off, bury her hair under the roots of the tree, so that her head will be bare and will not provide him with ropes to wind round his fists. He wants to lift her up into the branches, let them catch and tear her dress away so that he will not have to use his hands. And there will be an aftermath of blame. He knows that.

For now, there is only the ceremony of rain, the swell of blood, a pulsing sound of water in the meadow as the long grass is flattened. The temperature of a body. She exists like light grown in water, slightly ahead of him.

At first she will not let him touch her. She bangs her head back off the bark of the tree trunk when his hand reaches for her waist. Her scalp is cut on the sharp wood, as if she is demented, trapped in an asylum with walls of precipitation. The sobs leave her, torn and long. Her banging head damaging the seduction that she cannot otherwise articulate no to. He waits for her. Rigid with anticipation as she calms. Then
her mouth’s violet against his neck, taking soft rain from the skin. His head falls to the side, his long fingers are at her throat. The damp skin along the collarbone is one deep bite away from stopping his lung, though that organ is useless, he is not breathing. His hand presses on the tree for balance, she is small between the two structures, her arms, her hair, fluid. Then, a man she is required to hate above all others is quietly begging love as he holds her to him, head held back, please, please, and she, trying not to break him, enters his open clothing.

It is rain, running within the space of one valley only, which ends as suddenly as it begins.

She would never agree to meet him. She would not listen to his invitations, the places he wanted to arrange for their encounters. It would only ever be chance, in the dark woods next to the new road, the cave by the tarn, which would bring them together and allow that, so she could keep a tiny piece of resistant anger by her side. Unwilling to admit it was within her control, that she was complicit. She preserved her warring state of mind as best she could, would not let him smooth away her resentment with a simple hand on her cheek. There would never be a public appearance as far as she was concerned, never courtship on an open bench, of lovers linking fingers. So he kept watch on her house from his car with its window open. Rain splashed inside and the seat’s leather perfumed, became a strong, acrid odour. Even this aroused him, reminded him of what was to come. He did not know that she was more aware of his movements within the valley than he was of hers. That the direction of her walks was dependent on first pinpointing his location or hearing word of where he had been.

He saw her leaving the school, bidding goodbye to Hazel Bowman one last time, because her mentor was leaving
Mardale for the war in Spain, one of only a handful of women who would go. The two exchanged a rough, desperate kiss and he watched the scene like a silent picture. The words passed between them were a mystery, but he felt sure that Janet had made a confession of the affair, to the only person she felt she could without serious repercussions. Her head fell to the woman’s shoulder, a rare and unexpected tear, he could not be sure. Her teacher took her chin, lifted her face. The advice or blessing was given with love. It must have been a meaningful culmination to all the philosophies and lessons of the past. Words injected with pride and an abundance of mortal strength. Hazel Bowman handed over her heart’s marrow and Jack Liggett was moved in a way he could not have anticipated.

He followed like a star in the distance, with an umbrella at his side, ineffective in the sudden Lakeland storms.

She would take long walks, as if his coming to her would be accidental, his fault, his responsibility. The obtrusive car was parked on the roadside like a red rag on a door, but the village had become used to its conspicuous presence in the corners of the dale. In the woods, she smeared pine sap into his dark hair, telling him it would never wash out, that he would forever carry a piece of her ruined home with him. She told him she would have him branded if she could, that she still hated him. He laughed at her and threw her to the soft, pine-needled floor, pinning her down with his foot. He wanted any tactile response from her he could provoke. Even force. A struggle, combat. And she flung a fist sideways into the cap of his knee, making him fall perfectly straight as though his strings had been severed.

There were always injuries. Bruises as she struggled to leave him, again and again, a ring of blue fingers round her wrist, her ankles. Pieces of her hair torn out when she demanded he leave, feigning indifference, pushing him back. He grasped her anywhere he could, a handful of hair. She would scream, demand he release her.

– I can’t.

– Go back to your wife. Go back to the city. You don’t belong. I don’t want you.

He crawled up behind her, over her, put an arm around her neck, whispering.

– I know that.

His torn lip, as she struck out, furious with herself for letting him come inside her, for asking him to. Fuck sobriety, she had said. Her quiet lectures to the village schoolgirls in the blue-walled classroom about birth control forgotten, or abandoned at the back of her thoughts that afternoon on the moorland climbing up to the tarns. She sat facing him with her chin on her knees, her skirts about her waist, dry grass scratching their flesh. See what we’ve done? He himself badly shaken from such lucid lack of restraint. Then she stood and began to gather bracken for animal bedding, saying it was needed at the farm. He watched her ripping at the ground, blood starting on her hands.

– It’s not enough. I can’t carry enough.

He began pulling up the plants too, his palms becoming raw from the thick, knotted stems. They carried it down and left it in a heap by the gate next to Whelter’s upper fields. She turned him away from her and kissed a spot between his shoulder blades. Later that day, she found herself staring at the abortive bottle of vinegar in her mother’s cupboard. An old wives’ tale clucking at the back of her mind.

Each time, at the start, everything was done to him. He let her fists hit his body, covering only his head for protection, sometimes laughing, because she still needed to attack him before she could love. And calmer, she would kiss him, delicate and without apology. His body was a sallow heart, the walls moved easily when touched, she massaged emotions through him. He was unable to keep his voice in check, vocalizing low, every move she made. As if he could not help but cry out after so many nights of restraint, where he was unable
to let himself be touched, having to position a woman away from him like a chair under a window. As if it was all an adolescent game now, how long he could hold back, her exquisite mouth slowly moving over his stomach, down. Finally, reaching for her, for the soft bones in her shoulders, which he felt he could almost break with the force of his grip.

She stood and left without saying anything. He called after her, unable to stand yet from weakness, his legs shot from orgasm, stumbling to button his trousers, fasten his belt.

– Come back. Please. I want to talk to you. Don’t go into the woods.

But she would always leave him, breathless and with her glass body smashing past trees and low branches. She followed shortcuts that she knew he could not find, would not be able to track her down, hiding behind walls if she heard his voice calling near by. Slapping at her own face from the frustration, the absurdity of it all. There were times when she carried her father’s bowing knife across the slip of her underskirt, thinking she would slit his throat if they met that day and leave his beautiful form out for the rooks and the vermin to strip clean. Or herself, a quick, open vein. A solution she desperately sought, and easier that way than murdering another. She would empty herself out, endure her own failing resolve no longer. She would not keep the magnetic blood that tormented her, that spun its compass-pin north when he came, bending underneath a wire fence, coming towards her in the wet field with the look of a man walking dead. As if he would devour her heart. And time after time she whispered into the gully of his bare back.

– Can’t stop. Can’t keep away. This must end.

After she leaves him he reaches into his sticky hair. He smells like the character of the forest.

– Come back to town with me. Spend the night. I’ll get a room in a hotel. I want to see you sleep, that’s all. And we can go dancing. Don’t you get tired of wading in mud and filth?

– No. I can’t do that. Y’know it. Especially this coming week, there’s too much to do. I’ve already been away too much.

– One night, then we can decide how to find you a flat in the city. You can’t move around this valley as if nothing has changed. Make your peace with it, it will be better. I won’t have to behave like a sick dog whenever we meet. You know I adore you. God, I can’t spend a day without you, Janet!

– Don’t ask me again. And don’t look for me for a few days. I’ll be working.

She sat up from the argument, pulling the dress over her head and tying up her hair.

– Leave it down, you look less sabotaged. I’ll have to leave soon, the Waterworks won’t always need me here. Hell, they don’t need me now. Has your father found another tenancy yet? If he wants to buy I have money …

A hard slap on the left side of his face. His eye stung, broke water. She was suddenly weary of her own violence.

In July and August the farmers in the valley sweltered under the dry sun as they worked, rolling and collecting hay, and transporting it in carts to barns and out-sheds, tying the bales down under tarpaulin for storage. Chaff and pollen-dust filled the warm air and floated around on the summer currents, and the smell of dry scorching grass was heavy and sweet in their nostrils. It was a good time of year. The men worked together on each other’s properties and their families joined with them, for there were usually only a few days of good weather before the next rains would come. A fast shower to disrupt the work, saturate the hay bales and set in a rot. It was more practical to form a skilled group rather than undertake the hay timing as individuals, which would take twice as long. They watched the morning and evening skies to predict a spell of dryness. Sniffed the breeze for a pure gap of summer. The older farmers observed the behaviour of birds, and the shoots of plants. There were always indications, narcotic references within the biology of the wildlife in the valley that a continued period of dryness was coming. These men could read nature, could navigate its warm signs. The limp head of a bullfinch, drowsy in the warmth. Stray feathers. A retracted stem of elderflower. The farmers consulted the shepherds on the higher stretches of land, were told if the marshes were firming, if the springs were thickening with moss and weed.

Around dawn the air was fresh and soft, the temperature rose during the day with the sun’s ascension and passage between the fells. The men took off their shirts and their backs reddened, skin peeled and finally became tanned. Their forearms were burned a deep brown, masking the veins
which had previously been seen easily, bluely, under their pale, northern-English skin. They hung their shirts over fences and walls, left them on the handles of pitchforks piercing the ground.

Freckled children, broken from school for the summer, had written cards and letters to their departing teacher and promised to continue studying when they resumed school in Bampton. They climbed the bales and slid down the undulating sides of the mounds. They leapt from the rafters of the barns into the new, fragrant hay, built tunnels and passages through it, in which a secret kiss was traditionally stolen if boy and girl met head-on. Kiss or dare. They brought their fathers water and bread when the two o’clock heat became too heavy to move in, and the men sat in the shade of a tree, unstopped the bottles and gratefully drank. They slapped clegs off their bare arms as the insects came drilling in towards the sweet smell of human sweat, seduced away from the dry mounds of horse-dirt. Butterflies and bluebottles lumbered about over the fields, admirals flitting between the starched blades, and the cuckoo called from the trees at the bottom of the valley without interruption.

After lunch the men unhooked their horses from the carts and led them to the river to drink, standing in the water up to their knees, their boots skidding on the loose, slippery pebbles, the sucking clay, as the animals shook their noses in the flow. The farmers cupped their hands in the water and poured it over their brown necks. Back in the fields, one man held a bale while another tied it with twine. More men cutting a new section of field. The slow, hand-driven harvester turning. The horses steady, linear in the haze of the valley floor. It was an old dance, the members of the village were used to these movements, though they knew that this would probably be the last haying season in the dale. The last summer.

Later in the day the women joined their husbands, their hair tied back with coloured scarves, bending with forks to lift loose hay up into a cart, the hem of their skirts tucked up
into the waistband, ankles scratched by the sharp, cut grass. The drips of blood on their skin firmed into tiny red domes in the heat. Recognizing the potential of the scene, Paul Levell broke with tradition and set his easel up in the field, caught the women and the stacked haycocks with a stroke or two of a brush. He said that posterity favoured life over war, as far as humans were concerned, and so too would he. They were among the last scenes of Mardale ever to be painted, and in that brilliant season they came away glowing with colour, aesthetic rural compositions. The artist himself wondered at his bucolic creations, mystified by his own visiting serenity.

Jack Liggett also watched the summer carnival of haymakers on his walks through Mardale. They nodded to him if he passed by, politely, but did not break with their labour as the publican and the artist did if he encountered them in the village. He sat on the crossed-wood stiles and squinted over the farmland. The smell of the hay left him lethargic and contented, the sun was a warm anaesthetic on his shoulders. He was slipping under.

With their hair lost under scarves, he could not tell at first which woman was Janet Lightburn. The faces were in shadow when facing the ground and masks of white when upturned to the blinding sun. They were a group of bobbing heads and lifting hands. It was only at rest, when they sat on the carts, tipping back liquid, that he could distinguish individuals. She sat with her mother, slightly apart from her, close enough for the two to pass a canteen of water between them, leaning over to swing the leather strap. The strong, handsome face of Ella Lightburn emerged from a moon of shallow planes, and next to her the daughter, with deep shadows and hollow eyes under a scarlet headscarf.

As he watched her, he saw her former life brought alive, the old actions of her limbs were suddenly reinforced. She had helped out with haytiming since she was a child, just as she had helped with lambing season in April. For her, these were seasons as natural as winter and spring, locked into the
year’s calendar. So she had stepped back into her past. He could now believe almost any story she told him. Her sarcasm of the previous week, when she had mocked his spare time and leisurely existence, compared his flexible work with the constant effort of agriculture, began to seem less harsh, less unfair. He wanted to approach her, his mind filled with ideas not of who she suddenly was but who she had always been.

He had not seen or touched her for five days. She had told him to stay away during this busy time, making him swear to remain in the background. Inanimate, like a piece of dead wood left at the river’s edge. But it is she that composes the background, he thought. Without her presence any meaning the terrain once possessed had become superficial, had gone. For the first time in his memory the region had become invested with a human element. On the tip of his forefinger he held up a ladybird, bringing it in line with Janet’s red head, two bright spots of colour in the yellow fields.

In the early evening the haymakers finished their work, and laughter was heard alongside the rattle of the cartwheels and the snorting of Clydesdales. Jugs of cold beer came splashing down in the hands of the children. Sometimes the group sat in the fields they had been tending until the sun lost its heat and the tree shadows lengthened and dispersed. And the cooling air brought sage notes, fragrances released at a different temperature. Then the group would wander home with aching backs and sore palms to wash up for supper, before everyone made their way to the garden benches of the Dun Bull Inn. Even on the periphery of it all there was pleasure enough for Jack Liggett, as he watched the ground become satisfyingly shorn, heard the slow laughter in the dusk.

The next time the lovers meet, after the week of haying, it is in darkness. She has gone to the hotel and is standing under the window, silent and waiting. He has told her of his tendency to prowl round the village in the early hours, if he can’t sleep, which is often. Or, if a bold spirit comes to him, he will go night climbing on the crags, his sense of touch the only means of traverse, eyes almost useless in their sockets, secondary. She has heard of certain individuals who tackle the peaks in this manner, the extremeness and legend of such sport baffles and irks the local population, who consider it utter recklessness and somehow disrespectful. Though in some circles, among young men who have not yet had the thrill of a war to explode the myth of human invincibility there are coveted prizes for ‘night-bagging’, underground wagers, and the entitlement to rarest bravado.

Jack Liggett claimed that he once climbed Helvellyn this way, at night, tightroping the knife edge after months of daylight practice, and as she heard the story she believed him capable of it, foolish enough, lacking respect for the terrain. There are evenings when he does not return from High Street until ten o’clock, later. In the darkness, he has trained himself to listen, noctambulist-perfect, to a mountain, to detect the passage of wind across open chasms or immutable rock, and aim at its face as if aiming at volatile levels of an imaginary human body with a knife, a fist. He spins between crevices, punching shadows in the solar plexus, as if he wants to out-manoeuvre and overwhelm the nerve system of the mountain as he would an enemy. It is a strange skill, this blind murder of landscape. There are chemicals that the body releases to tighten the concentration, he said to her. The feeling is pure, fluid exhilaration. It is better than love, sex, power, morphine, all these things. She laughed, dismissing his theory. Is there anything better than this, she had said, reaching for him, and the argument fell away. Afterwards she told him about the man who was found face-down in a peat gully under Harter Fell a year after he went missing. His body had decomposed,
but the face was preserved by the bog and still wore an expression of freefalling terror.

Now she wants to summon that spirit of restlessness upon him. At the window of the Dun Bull, her fingertips leave mist along the glass. She passes the silk of petals from the flower planters outside the hotel.

This is a warm night towards the end of the summer in 1936. The stars are brilliant above the fells, many still unmapped, unnamed, though the solar system is being completed. She uncovers her shoulders and waits, hopeful of his insomnia. A new tenderness has led her here, coming from their short separation. During the long days of haying she missed him, sorry for her demands that he keep away. The fatigue of her limbs dissolving as she imagined his hands on them.

After a time there is movement by the hotel’s door. The sound of a body, cautious in the black. She follows the noise, with her hands held in front of her and her heart thumping madly in case it is not the man she wants but a stranger that she will inevitably touch. She can hear the slight scuff of boots on the gravel car park, the fizz of bootlaces being tightened, retied. Her blood pulls and she trusts it. Her fingers brush past his face. The figure recoils, startled, as if a large moth has alighted on his shoulder, releasing a stifled cry. He hears someone inhale, the growl of energy gathering somewhere in a near portion of darkness. He is being attacked. Then her hands touch again, more certain this time, and he knows it is a friend.

– Lord! I didn’t dare breathe!

They tangle arms, laughing, his face in her hair, and make their way out of the hotel grounds, messily, tripping on flowerbeds and over an abandoned bicycle. He is unused to an extra body on his back when he navigates the darkness. He is trained only to move his own body, as a solo hollow. But he finds her breast with ease in his practised medium, his hand slipping between two buttons of the loose shirt.

– You sleep in this? I sleep in my skin.

She laughs, moves away, but he has found her again and has her close. He gloats, showing off his ability to kiss precise bones across her shoulders, her ribcage, whilst she is clumsy in working buttons loose, naïve in tracing his anatomy. But he is overjoyed at her broken habit of denial, and she knows it. It gives him a new determination, fearlessness is pouring out of him. On the moors they move with speed, half-running over the springy ground, falling over peat gullies, the distance seeming further, the movement faster, when it is invisible.

On the ground next to the river he brings her legs up over his shoulders and she cries out without fear of being heard, her cry just another kill in the night landscape. Darkness camouflages noises as it masks vision, the ear will not recognize a sound without the balance of light, so the lovers are unbetrayed. He is brutal with her, selfish, superior within his knowledge of the turbid atmosphere, the pitch black, aroused by her sudden vulnerability, her nakedness under the old shirt. He is able to wrestle her arms back, she does not know the direction of his coming to her. Then tenderness, it is fascinating to guess her emotion and pleasure against him. From nothingness, the sudden shock of his lips at her navel.