Haweswater (2 page)

The woman on the bed was screaming bold blue murder and Jesus Bastard Christ. Curses formed like saliva in her mouth and she spat them out on to the tangled sheets of the bed, a bed which had once belonged to her grandmother and in which her own mother had been born. The cotton under her hot body was saturated with her sweat and with her swearing. The woman’s body was making colours that her husband had never seen before, colours he did not know a human being could make. Soft orange on her, like human blood should never be, and white and a precise burgundy. Samuel Lightburn watched his wife struggling as internal shapes moved through her body, saw her muscles damaging themselves as she struggled. Jesus Bastard Christ. The woman screamed and slowly she came apart. He could not stand it.

– Ella. Ella.

Samuel spoke gently, uselessly, for the woman still remembered her own name. She was still in her right mind.

He swayed in the shadows, in the corner of the bedroom, his thumbs stroking the rough stone walls behind him as if looking to be soothed. The room was chilly, the walls glowing with cold. She screamed on, cursing the Lord, not caring about faith or decency or her God, in whom she had trusted her whole life, not any of the things that usually made her a tight knot of a woman, firmly wrapped, bound tight at the core. On the bed she fought with her own body, with God, with nature, unmaking herself. This was what her husband could not bear. The close threads of her were coming unwound as wave after wave of pain buckled up through her flesh and collected in her face. And her face was awful in its pain, a ripe beetroot dropped on the stone floor.

Women gathered in the room. Women in shawls and warm winter skirts. They told her to be calm and breathe. They placed the handle of a wooden spoon between her teeth as she raged and twisted. They instructed Ella Lightburn to control her pain. She could not. No more than she could control the snow falling fast and wet outside, smothering the valley. Joyce Carruthers had said to the company four hours ago that the Shap doctor would be needed, and word had been sent. But Dr Saul Frith was absent and, surely by now, unreachable. January in this Westmorland valley. Even the new Lakeside road was blocked by thick drifts.

Another roll like hot metal came up through Ella’s stomach. The old wooden bed creaked as she pushed her legs down, arched her back, her vast stomach breaching in the cold air. She fought on, cursing, spitting, almost eight hours more that day and into the night. There were deep wet troughs in the bed, made as her limbs turned this way and that, forwards and backwards. Her eyes red with panic, she looked around the room for her husband. Had she not heard his voice a moment ago or an hour? She looked for him and was terrified.

Samuel Lightburn had been present for the birthing of many animals. He had witnessed the impossible feats of nature many times, had seen all strength from a beast draining into one part of its body, accumulating there, and using itself up. He was accustomed to intervention also, reaching inside the hot, rough canal of an animal himself with a bare greased arm, his fingers certain to find a loose ankle, a hand-hold. But never a woman before, it simply was not done. And only now his stubbornness, the direness of the situation, permitted him to stay in the room. He had never seen or heard human labour before and he stared out from the dark corner, his thumbs caressing the wall over and over. He was not prepared for this. He was not prepared for his wife’s pain, or her colours, or for her terror. Nor the inversion of her faith.

There was not one household of the village which had not represented itself at Whelter Farm Cottage that day as Ella
Lightburn struggled with the passage of her first child into the world. The women came and went in the bedroom, gathering around the cursing woman, bringing water, cloths, fresh hope. They stood in twos and threes, leaving Joyce room enough to move around Ella as she needed to, taking turns in trying to usher Samuel out of the room, where he did not belong.

– Git. Git away, man. Go on with yer.

Trying to usher him downstairs into the large kitchen where the men of the village were sitting, standing, smoking. These men were mainly farmers, young and old. They listened to the woman upstairs, carefully, counting the screams and looking for meaning as a soothsayer might open up and read the intestines of a bird. They compared Ella’s sounds with the torrid calls of the cattle and sheep in their herds when their time came, a stuck bellow, a panicked bleat. In this way they tried to decipher her stages of labour. But they could not, because human birth is something unnatural, something beyond animal – female pain become self-conscious. They tried to know the situation, practically, and without speaking of it, their teeth clenched over curved pipes and their fingers gripping the backs of chairs.

As Samuel passed them on his way to the front door, desperately looking out into the snow again for the doctor as he was, they placed, in turn, a simple hand on the back of his head, or on his shoulder. Thick hands, like pieces of beefsteak. There were no words. These were quiet men, economical with language, who spoke only in definites and who limited their actions to useful gestures or to work. Their individual faces wore a combination of expressions, each having many moods upon it at once, as if scowls and laughter, lines of concentration and hardship were weathered one on top of another in a single, permanent façade. Every expression set and roughened and deepened by the wind and the rain, the sun, so that one could not be accompanied without its partners. Mirth within a grimace. A frown grafted on to the
bridge of lines created from squinting hard against the sun. And underneath all these encompassing masks was the suggestion, as common throughout the district, of unreachable, kept stone. Of distance.

The men were friends and colleagues. It was a small, remote district and they were joined by proximity, by community. Their wives were no different, nor their children. In the Mardale valley the bonds were strong and necessary and abundantly understood. To an outsider it might seem that the men and women of this dale were insular, as silent and self-sufficient as monks, closing ranks to off-comers, and uncommunicative and sullen with it. A joyless lot perhaps.

The villagers remained at Whelter Farm for as long as they were needed, as long as uncertainty remained, leaving only to fetch new equipment, or bring food for one another, or to check on their children and put them to bed under patchwork, woollen blankets.

Again Samuel Lightburn looked out of the farm door across the village, which stood a little way off, down in the bottom of the valley. He cast his eye over the black water of the small lake to the forested hills on the horizon. Chimneys were smoking, windows were illuminated by lamps, but there were no car headlights winding down the concrete road to Mardale. No doctor. The snow was easing off. The sky’s yellow lessening, and the clouds parting. A few stars were beginning to appear. Night was coming on and that in turn would bring fresh problems. It would be bitter cold and harsh without cloud cover, the snowdrifts hardening into firm barricades, a night without the doctor’s instruction, for certain. This was the situation. There were no miracles in this dale.

Nathaniel Holme, an old, wiry farmer, came to the doorway and stood beside Samuel. He brought a pipe out of his
pocket and tapped it on the cottage wall to knock out the old, hardened tobacco. After filling it from a pouch, he lit the bowl.

– No sign ova yonder?

His voice was thick up from his lungs in the cold, and gravelly.

Samuel shook his head, took out a rolled cigarette, lit it. Nathaniel spoke again.

– Teddy’s gone fer Frithy. Nowt else to dyah but wait. Thowt aboot garn misell, Sam. Twa arms better un yan, eh? Even auld bugger like misell.

The old man chuckled at the back of his throat and continued.

– Aye, til be a wunder if he gits there alive, poower bugger. But he’s a gud lad, that Teddy.

Samuel’s mouth moved a fraction upwards. His oldest friend had a way of lightening his spirits, even in times of trouble. Now the old man was laughing openly, deeply, his arthritic, busted hand gripping Samuel’s elbow for balance as he shook.

Young Teddy Hindmarsh had left at two o’clock that afternoon with his motorcycle on the new road to the east of the valley. Twice he had lost control of the Excelsior in the snow, the second time breaking two fingers on his right hand but feeling the pain in his missing left. The appendage had been lost to just below the shoulder joint during a shelling in the Great War, and he wore the sleeve of his coat flat, tucked into the pocket like a petal into a stem. He had finally abandoned the Excelsior in a drift four miles from Mardale. He bound up his fingers with a birch twig and some twine, using his teeth as best he could to tighten the splint. He began walking the next six miles on foot along the road round Naddle forest, for he dared not take the short cut up over the Swindale pass in
this weather, when the snow could cling in cornices to the top of the fells and form unstable bridges suspended over nothing but air. A foot anticipating the path might go straight through, pulling the body down with it in a freefall to the crags below. He trudged along beside the lake and finally took to the trees, the entire front of him white with driven snow. The coverage of evergreen would provide him with some shelter during the trek, but Teddy would not return to Whelter Farm until the next morning with the doctor.

There was little activity in the household while he was gone. Just small episodes, a man leaving, a woman arriving with towels, a chair pulled out so that someone might sit, water boiled for more tea or to sterilize Joyce Carruthers’s sewing scissors, the gathering of sweat and blood on the bed upstairs. The muffled contraction of cries.

Finally, Ella’s screams stopped. A close husky silence like that found in a forest’s centre settled about the house. Samuel threw his cigarette into the snow outside and strode from the kitchen doorway up the stairs. There had been so many people to help his wife, it had been a lengthy, fraught vigil. But it was Ella herself who made the last contribution to the day’s efforts. The child had almost travelled through her body when she suddenly sat up on the bed and became quiet and determined, her beetroot face contorted a last time. It seemed that her eyes were filled with an unholy scorn. She reached down and pushed the baby free of herself with her palm, as if ridding herself of a heavy stone that had been placed in her lap. The women of the village drew breath and kept to themselves that they suspected from this moment on a bitter and difficult relationship between mother and child. Neither did they speak later of Ella’s final whispered profanity against the Lord.

The tiny girl was blue and yellow from the cord wrapped tightly around her neck, but she needed no hand on her buttocks to start her new lungs. Blood colour quickly flooded through her, lighting the minute network of veins against her
skin. Her cries were fierce, like the mews of a hungry cat. Samuel came into the room and folded down on to the bed. His wife was faint against the pillows. He took the slippery child in his one giant hand and the straw turned redder in his face. A girl. A tiny, angry, malcontent girl. He turned to the women in the room and thanked them all for his daughter, overcome, and suddenly exhausted with relief. They looked away embarrassed by his sudden and unusual display of emotion, a man exhibiting such meekness, such altruism. Then Samuel turned to his wife and thanked her and he bent and kissed her wet brown hair.

But Ella was crying gently, which her husband had never before witnessed, and she was getting up from the mess of the bed, her arms lifting, tipping, to try to find her balance. She was crying for cursing Jesus, whom she loved above all, and she wanted to get away from the blood, and the baby, the scene of her crimes against Him. She wanted to limp to the church and pray for forgiveness. In those moments of guilt and regret she imagined that she felt that eternal freefall into nothingness, into isolation, and a keen desperation to be reunited with God overwhelmed her. She stood.