Haweswater (24 page)

But the words were lost on Ella. She had gone too far the way of her fury to be turned back.

At the fireplace she looked up at her husband. The flames blowing red against his face. He was a good and honest man, who had lived simply, his whole life an arrangement of natural actions, of gentle, moderate behaviour which was set against the harshness of his profession. The lifting of a lame calf, his hand squeezing in the sides of a loaf as he cut it, the way he left a wet cap in the sink next to the crockery. These were gestures which belonged without explicit motive. The way he pressed his boot down on a clump of daffodil bulbs, pushed them back into the soft soil, was simply a matter of seeing them out of place and responding. It was merely retaining what had gone before. His songs in front of the men and women of the valley, standing in their midst on days of celebration, were without shyness and hesitation, just as they were without conceit. His were un-selfconscious, natural duties. They were extensions of himself which had never
become the spokes of a wheel turning the opposite direction from a man, as so often happens, thought Ella. He assumed a position of least resistance, walking behind walls when the wind raged down from the fells, or refuting controversy by abandoning the quarrel. He was by nature a preserver. His visions of the future were unspectacular. She could not call Samuel’s defence of the Waterworks man weak or brittle, nor was there an agenda. He wanted nothing more than his children’s continued existence, contentment as they themselves envisaged it. As for his daughter, he had never had the strength, nor the desire, to nullify, to contain her. It would have been an insipid achievement in his eyes. He simply walked behind a wall when she raged.

Ella left her carding and moved to the window. On the other side of the house the front door closed discreetly. She had not heard it open. As she watched her daughter stride away down the fell, Ella saw something of her own nature in the girl, not for the first time, but now without the control which usually accompanied their brooding hearts, which made them both women to be feared in the district, having a high degree of self-mastery accompanying their tempers. The potency was unchecked, worrisome. The girl was too full. She was spilling at the edges. Ella climbed the stairs to the landing window, and watched until Janet moved out of sight behind the grey stone wall.

There was nothing to do but rely on her own inhibited behaviour, her touchstones, the checks and balances of her life – God, decency, her own zeal and puritanical government of matters – to handle this situation, as if, by having enough propriety for both, she would somehow override her daughter’s lack of restraint, and her sinning. She knelt to pray on behalf of her daughter, in the dark alcove window where so often lately she watched for the girl’s comings and goings, a black pagan bird of fear lifting its wings against her chest.

– Forgive us our trespasses.

But the black seemed to grow in her, reaching her throat. She could not go on. She re-laced her fingers for prayer. Her husband placed a hand on her tense shoulder, and for a brief, lit second, Ella imagined it was Janet, come to relieve her.

– She loves him. She’s given ova to it, Ella. Can it not be that in all this upset, there might not be sum consolation? Dusn’t it mek up fer it all? Can’t it do that?

His wife turned. A slight tear along her bottom lip where she had bitten into it. Such a good, simple man her husband, so settled into his life and detached from anything unordinary.

There was a vast black bird in her heart, she said to him, foreboding. It warned her of sickness and ill change, lifting its morbid wings. And with the dark man in their midst there was danger, she knew it. But Samuel could not understand. And how could he see fear taking shape or feel its feathery wingtips along her ribcage?

Light leaves the sky. But the ground is all white, a carpet of illumination. It has stolen the day’s radiance to keep locked in its cells, throwing it up now against the darkening fells, and the landscape is backlit. Isaac rolls with the dog in the powdery snow through the gates of the garden and down, down on to the land skirting his father’s property. And, laughing, comes to rest against a spring of heather. He had meant to check the river again before night, perhaps catch a lethargic trout if he could. Now it is too dark and the fish will be balanced on an invisible axis of current, sleeping. He stands up and brushes snow off his breeches. His gloves are sticky with packed snow. Isaac climbs higher on the scar, looks down into the ground-bright valley. Smoke rises from the chimneys in the snowy village. It is a pretty, winter scene, like a Christmas card, he thinks.

Two days more waiting for Christmas. His stomach flips over with excitement. What he adores most of all is the tiny
orange left in the toe of his stocking over the fireplace, tied with a red ribbon, pinned with crystallized fruit. It is always there, bulbous underneath the sack of nuts, the string bag of marbles or the wooden toy, every year, a colourful delight, and sweet, juicy, when he peels and eats it.

Whelter Farm Cottage smells of cloves and mincemeat and pine sap from the tree. A holly wreath is hung on the front door and the lamps are turned up in the windows in festive welcome. But there is little in the way of merriment within. He will delay going inside, so that the eventual overwhelming of warmth and fragrances will be all the more pleasurable and the lack of spirit will not be so hard to bear. Things will be better soon. His sister and his mother will make peace. And Isaac knows, despite his mother’s slander, that Jack Liggett is a good man, who respects water in a way that not many others understand. Besides, it is, after all, his favourite time of year, not only for the evergreen and the treats, but the songs and stories also, and this fact alone should make things right. He loves it when the carollers come to the house, their voices faint like angels, until the door is opened and song swells through the hallway, then they come inside for warming spiced soup. There are stories told to him only at this time of year. Fantastic, magical stories, the old Hollier in the woods finding only three red berries, which peel back in the night to reveal gifts of frankincense, gold and myrrh, Christmas in hot deserts, dust-blown countries, the necklace of tears and the story of the robin. There is an old, leather book from which his sister reads to him in the dark evenings. The season peels back, allows for diverse brilliance, and dreamlike enchantments. He loves his mother’s hands, rubbing oil into the wooden back of the baby Jesus, Joseph’s staff, so that the figures of the Nativity are imbued with a dull, unearthly shine. Set up, usually in the church, but this year by their cottage hearth, the hewn forms have within them a viscous, textured life. Mary’s arm links to Joseph’s. They are of the same, carefully carved piece of oak.

With his head full of the coming wonder, Isaac walks over the moor. At first he can’t quite make out the strange symmetrical markers forming a line in the snow. He comes closer. Yellow wooden pegs have been driven into the ground about twenty or thirty feet apart. They skirt along the side of the valley as if left like a trail or a signposted pathway. He cannot see what they are for, these strange, mysterious man-made objects. Then an idea occurs to him. Into the yuletide-filled head of a child comes a reason for their presence, so pure of innocence and so far removed from their original purpose that those who drove them into the earth might hang their heads in shame. Isaac gasps. These are the guides for Saint Nick to find him. A runway for his flying deer. But they are placed all wrong! Too far away from Whelter Farm, high above it. His house will never be found and there will be no filled stocking!

And how could he guess that these are the markers of the new waterline, the estimated shore of the full reservoir? That afternoon they were driven in by the engineers and their crew, who ghosted around the periphery of the village, encompassing it with the psychic yellow border of a murder, as if tracing a dead body, outlining the scene of a crime that has not yet been committed.

Isaac bends down and kicks at a marker, rocks it free out of the ground. He sees his sister walking down into the village and he shouts to her, but she seems not to hear him and disappears from view. Then he moves to another peg and pulls it out. He has some work to do if he is going to get that orange.

On Christmas Day the men do not have to work at the dam. They are free of machinery and welding rods, the sounds and smells of metal efficiency, endless compositions in stone. A morning carol service is held in the worship room and four
hundred men squeeze in, their hair combed straight, slicked down under water and oil. Their voices boom in the confined space, rich and lifting at the roof: ‘O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant’. It is magnificent noise, the singing throat of the woods. After the service, a roasted turkey dinner is served in the canteen, in two shifts so that half the men must wait in their bungalows, having lost the draw, sent almost mad by the drifting aroma of savoury meat and spice. They flip over cards with growling stomachs, unable to concentrate on the game. Then it is their turn for a feast of a meal, with potatoes and mashed swede, Cumberland sausage – the butcher and his boy at Shap have worked late through two nights to prepare the hundreds of meat and spice-filled tubes – bread sauce, followed by brandy pudding and a sixpence inside one of the portions for the lucky man who taps his tooth on it. The first half of the group of workers sways out past their hungry colleagues, they haven’t eaten so well since they began work six months ago. Inside the warm canteen, the second batch of men hold the puddings in their mouths, trying not to chew too fast, letting the softness and flavour melt on their tongues. There is a quart of ale each, crackers with folded paper hats. After the meal the men put on gloves and scarves and go out into the snow to play football, kicking drifts at each other when the ball is at the other end of the field. The game is chaotic, hundreds of men trying for a shot at goal.

In the afternoon the workers walk into the village of Bampton. The landlord at St Patrick’s Well has promised to open at two and, sure to his word, the doors are unlocked, the fire is blazing with logs and dried peat, which he bought specially at the market for a festive aroma.

In the Dun Bull that evening there is also a small celebration. Jake has baked mince pies and dusted them with sugar. There is whisky or brandy for a first drink on the house. The village has dwindled in numbers. The artist Paul Levell is gone now, back to Northumberland to paint the horizontal
coastline, as are a few of the farmers, and the Reverend Wood has secured another parish over in Kendal, though he has promised to come back to give a last service in the spring at the Mardale church, along with the Bishop of Carlisle himself.

For the first time in its existence the church in Mardale is empty and locked on Christmas Day and the Hindmarshes, the Lightburns and the Farrows have to drive through the snow to the chapel in Keld for the morning service. Ella still has a key to the church and, even though her cleaning duties are now over, she cannot bear to give it up. Once in a while she will take brass polish, broom and dusters and unlock the musty door. The muscle in her arm burning as she shines the fixtures. The key remains in the Book of Common Prayer in the top drawer of her dresser. She has not been able to post it away to the diocesan secretary. Besides, somebody needs to let in the Carlisle Cathedral wardens when they come for the lectern and the font. And when they do, will that eagle not shine as if it had never been left to the settling dust! On this Christmas night she walks with her husband to the Dun Bull’s doors, kisses him and crosses the road. She lets herself inside the tiny, creaking building opposite, kneels at the altar and, in the corner of her eye, a faint unshed tear glimmers. She will keep it back yet, against her eye, as if this place will always have a nest of liquid sorrow within her.

Jake McGill pours out brandy and Samuel lifts his glass in toast. To Nathaniel Holme, God rest him well, and to all the noble men and women ever of this dale.