Haweswater (25 page)

In his room above the Dun Bull, Jack Liggett hands Janet a box wrapped in silver paper. She is embarrassed by the gift, not wanting to open it in his presence and suspecting that it contains some kind of hard glittering extravagance. But he is insistent. As she pulls the silver ribbon from the top of the box
he leans in and kisses her hard, bruising her lip with his teeth. It is too intense an embrace and she smiles, her brow lowered with confusion.

– Open it. Open and see.

She carefully folds off the shiny paper. Inside the box, a tiny, crafted village rests against a green valley and is held inside a half-bubble, in a womb of clear liquid. There is a tiny church with a weather vane and a blue shining river snakes down from the moulded hills. She shakes the glass. Flurries of snow swirl and descend slowly over the village.

And what of her gift to him? It is a new life, she says. Not ways of living, but a new life.

1937. A new and last year for the village of Mardale. The dale seizes with cold, creaking to a halt in the bitter winter. A tearful auld lang syne is sung on New Year’s Eve and the villagers embrace one another. Jack Liggett steals a public kiss in the corner of the Bull, annexing the woman he loves, and surprising no one. In this coming year the villagers will begin a fuller exodus, packing up their belongings for the evacuation. Crockery and furniture and books and even a piano, stacked up in the back of carts and vans. In preparation for the migration of farmers to new stretches of land, cattle and sheep will be taken to auction and released for prices well below their true value, the market has not recovered sufficiently to make sales worthwhile. They will be bought back at a later date for twice the price. Little by little the houses will empty, stripped bare of fixtures, and even wallpaper will be peeled away in torn shreds, paper roses ripped in half, only to be stuck together again in different cottages. Bulbs will be lifted out of the gardens of the farmhouses, redcurrant bushes transplanted. Nothing is wasted in the valley if it can be saved. These are practical times.

Late in the spring a final service will be held at the Mardale
church. Three hundred people will stand in the wet fields around the monument, dressed in suits and hats, unable to be housed in the limited capacity of the building for the ceremony. Automobiles will be backed up and bottle-necked along the new lake road. The Bishop of Carlisle will take the service, and will solemnly bless the sacred ground on which they stand. Hymns will lift over the mountains. By then the ancient yew trees from the graveyard will have been cut down and fashioned into altar candlesticks. They will be presented to the purple-robed bishop after the service. Then the church bell will be brought down from the tower and the life of St Patrick’s church will be over.

In this coming year, the villagers will be able to buy frozen produce for the first time from Renkin’s in Penrith, a packet of garden peas, but many will not be able to store such luxuries and will have to bury them in the cold ground. Sylvia Goodman will scatter hers for the chickens and will tell tales of her poultry laying frozen eggs. On the BBC they will hear that the Duke of Windsor, the abdicated king, will marry Wallis Simpson in France. The old systems crack up, amorphous modernity emerges. It will be a year of upheaval abroad also, to be discussed in the Bampton Jerry over warm ale. In April, new German planes are to bomb the Basque city of Guernica, the loss of civilian life will be horrific, bringing many European men and women into their churches where they will fall to their knees and weep, and Ella Lightburn will clutch the altar rail of a different parish church and pray desperately for history not to repeat, dear God, not to repeat. Similarly, Shanghai will smoulder in ruins under Japanese bombers. A handshake between Hitler and Mussolini. Now the British government cannot keep its eyes averted. Edgy and cornered, Parliament votes on a course of action. Air-raid shelters are put up in the nation’s largest cities, York and Manchester in the north, and the country waits.

Jack Liggett had wanted the trophy bird because it was the largest to be found in that region, indeed, the largest in the country. He had wanted it stuffed by the best taxidermist, given amber glass eyes and mounted in a glass case in his Palatine Road residence. He had wanted it as an effrontery, a snub to the class he had successfully bluffed his way up to, which would consider it gauche, irregular and in poor taste. The golden eagle was no Indian tiger, no polished ivory tusk, it was not another country usurped, or the spoils of exotic adventure. It was indigenous, a symbol of the beauty of the islands, the hub of the empire. It would be considered by many as similar to scoffing at the new king. But, best of all, Jack Liggett had known that he would not care, rather, he would relish it, he would know he had become high enough up in the chain for his eccentricities to be unimpeachable. He would know he had made it.

He’d imagined its lifeless yellow stare disturbing the guests in his fine home. The comments, the uncertain, adulterated compliments over his prize. He had played it all out in his mind. He would keep it covered with a cloth, then unveil it dramatically to the crowd. Women would fidget nervously or emit startled little cries, as if a rude hand had been placed too near their backsides. There would be awkward silences among the men, he would be considered tasteless, a rouge – brutal, even.

The man in the dark-green suit with its gold adornments, who first came to the village like a conquering prince, had anticipated this exact style of controversy and the inability of others to judge him. It would have meant he had finally advanced to a standstill, and was mocking his equals for
allowing him that. He had played them at their English game of class and was now waving a proletarian prize. But that was then. The Palatine house was gathering dust and had not hosted human life for the best part of a year, even the weekly maid had been dismissed. Jack Liggett now was in another incarnation. He was a turncoat, or a better piece.

Jamie Brent, the poacher, came to the hotel door and asked for the Manchester fella to come outside. He had not been seen in the village for months until that day, in the third week after Christmas. Jack Liggett stooped under the door frame and walked over to the scruffy little man. The poacher noted his casual attire, the weathering of his skin. He walked as if his shoulders were no longer holding up the pressed granite of the city. Like a fine wire had come loose and was curling in his spine. He nodded to the tall man, then jerked his head backwards.

– She’s in t’sack.

– Oh? Who is? Your wife?

The poacher pulled the hessian bag off his shoulder. He held it out to the gentleman without opening it. There was an uncertainty in the taller man’s face, as if he had forgotten the arrangement, as if it had been a deal struck in another lifetime. The poacher scowled at the hesitation, he did not wish to be left hanging.

– Twa pund. Eh? Yan more ootstandin’.

Jack Liggett stared at him, recalling their last meeting. His humour evaporated. The desire not to honour the contract was overwhelming, though he still carried with him the sense of a businessman’s notion of settlement and knew he must see it through. After a time he reached out and took the bag and he was about to open it when the poacher clicked his tongue.

– Settle! Git yasil’ inside fust. It’s jus a chicken I’m givin’ yer, unnerstan’?

– How? I mean, how did you …?

– ‘Twasn’t easy, al tell y’that fer nowt. Nearly got misel kill.

He pulled his lips back off his gums, shook his head and continued.

– They cum in closer in t’winter, less prey fer ’em on t’scar. Jus’ had t’ bide me time. Knew ad get ‘er eventually.

The poacher held up an imaginary shotgun towards Jack Liggett, aimed and pulled the trigger. He laughed nervously, his mannish face becoming puerile.

– Clean like. Right thru t’neck. So you’ll ne’ be disappointed. But ad a helluva job climbin’ out t’ where shi lay. Helluva job. Should charge double, like.

– Oh, I see. Wait here, I’ll … I’ll see about your money.

He entered the hotel by the side door to avoid the bar room, where Janet and her father were propping up the bar, and climbed the stairs to his room. He laid the sack on the bed and went through his suitcase until he found a rolled-up bundle of notes. His heart was loud in his chest and sweat broke on his forehead. He felt a sick-panic rising within. The warm, watery dizziness which overcomes the body when a wrong that has been done is self-acknowledged and begins damaging the perpetrator internally. He faltered, dropped the money and went to the bed, sat down and took the bird from the bag. The weight of the eagle was shocking. This alone made him catch his breath. That so heavy a creature was capable of soaring, turning great arcs in the sky, precise loops and plummeting down to an unerring kill. The weight of what had been done shook in his arms.

Even in death, the bird of prey was magnificent. He put her gently across his knees. She was like a silk gourd, the neck gentle and loose. The head fell to one side, rolling against his thigh. The eagle’s talons were curling inwards, joints broken in relaxation, but their strength and power could still be interpreted. Her wingspan must have been close to six feet, he guessed. She was perversely beautiful, fallen. He bent and touched the short downy feathers of the eagle’s underbelly. Remorse flooded through him.

– Oh, God. So foolish …

Quickly, he made his way outside to the poacher, who was drinking a pint in the open air, ambivalent to the cold. He thrust a note into his hand, took the man’s collar in one balled fist. The ale slopped from the glass.

– Where did you get her from? Which nest? Which, man?

The Rigg was quiet and black that night as he made his way up. It formed a steep saddleback up to the triangular point of Kidstey Pike’s summit, where the land became fuller and eventually flattened off as High Street. He understood the eyrie to be about half-way down on the north-facing crags, which were deeper and longer than those on the south side, a gentle fall down to the first of the tarns. It was a starless night, the darkness unremitting, but patches of snow and ice gave off a moderate glow. Details were reduced to unified forms. Using his hands and feet for guidance, he navigated the winding path up. At the start of the ridge, after the path up the slope ended, he strapped on crampons.

On his back he carried the hessian sack with the eagle, but was confident of his climbing abilities even with the added weight. At the middle crest of the Rigg he would work his way parallel and down until he reached the rocky shelves where there should be, at some point, a loose pile of sticks and moss. He doubted whether he would be attacked for intruding, more likely the birds would sheer off, circling high to avoid contact. That was as far as his thoughts took him. He trusted that his hands would be competent at their task, he had on thin gloves for extra sensitivity, to detect changes in texture along the crags. He trusted that his feet would brace him securely into the schisms and fissures of rock.

And yet he knew that he was not filled with that eager spirit, nor the adrenaline which had led him on his night excursions many times before, and he had not spent a month mapping the route by day, as he had Helvellyn. He had neither the
right balance of taut muscle and slack carriage, nor the mental arrogance, the undaunted mind-set to navigate the mountains in these conditions. He had not walked the ridge for two months. More. A hollow under his lungs left him airy and light, yet he could feel the definite weight of his own organs within his body. Liver, heart, spleen, suspended in air and swaying in him as if on pendulums. And there were no cognitive specifics for the returning of the prey, it was an unexacting plan, sheer emotive distortion of the mind.

In his room above the Dun Bull Inn Janet was waiting for him, knowing nothing of this night-climb, expecting him soon. Her hair probably blue-yellow in the candlelight, her temper flaring a little as she thought of his absence in the late hour. Then she would leave and wait for him to come to her. Of all the challenges he had ever made within himself to be worthy of her, the woman at the back of this beautiful valley, torn into his back as she slept and relentless as she lived, this was his simplest, the most sincere and human.

The snowline became densely frozen ice before he expected it would. Digging in with his crampons he stepped widely along the wall of the ridge. He tried humming to focus his concentration. ‘I’ve got you under my skin …’ After a while the route became inaccessible this way, a slick sheet of ice. The interior of the crags was locked up tight. He would need to skirt upwards and along where the black rock came to the surface of the snow and it would be easier to grip, then down again. He started back. But in front of him it was all ice, a highlighted mass of shining ice. Had he come this impossible way in? He struck a spiked foot at it, and it scudded off, hardly breaking a chip or splinter with it. And he laughed, a self-damning, gentle laugh, as if amused by the predicament or surrendering good-naturedly to it, his eyes suddenly bright with water. Then he sang again. ‘I’ve got you, deep in the heart of me …’

The bag slipped a fraction off his shoulder, and he reached back for it, his hand lifting off the wall.

Janet sits at the kitchen table within an edgeless pool of light. At its centre the illumination is strong, becoming weaker as it unfolds, and at a place somewhere further out, a point which cannot be verified, it disappears altogether. The oil lamp on the table emits a greasy odour which has come to be part of the house after years of slinking over its walls. It has joined with the aroma of rock and wood and paint, with the smell of her mother, her father and brother, and her own scent too, which is coming to her tonight as she breathes, a faint under-fume, though she doesn’t feel she should be able to detect it, by all rights, as if she isn’t supposed to. Today she is aware of herself in the room. Her scent. She has been waiting all night for her life’s marrow to return. Now it is morning, wintry, still dark within the light. Her mother is already up, dressed and gone to the shop in the village for the last of the baking soda on the shelves, and her father is out with the dogs. Tiredness burns in her eyes, but she has a second wind, her body clock is signalling a new day, overriding the druggish stupor. In her hand is a single piece of old-fashioned yellow paper, which arrived in the post the previous day. It is stamped with a London borough postmark. Ruislip and South Harrow. She turns up the lamp’s wick and reads the letter again, breathing deeply as she reads. It is typewritten and there is no signature. A private well-wisher has made a generous donation towards the re-establishment of the Mardale school.

The genderless benefactor would seek to have no mention or credit for the aid. Simply, he, or she, would be satisfied with the knowledge of the establishment’s continued existence. It is requested, though, that the original building not be destroyed. Rather, the bricks and slates should be dismantled and transported to a suitable location where the school might be rebuilt, according to its previous structure. No larger, no smaller. This is the only obligation. A practical, if unusual,
request, covered by the sum of the donation which will be sent in a banker’s draft to the branch in Penrith for collection.

The letter is brief and lacking in perfunctory language, formalities. It is as if the author were swallowing back words when it was composed.

Janet folds the letter and puts it away into the yellow envelope. She had wanted to tell Jack last night, of the fortune, the reward for all her hard work. A small shiver travels the length of her spine. Blood speeds up in her veins and for a moment her heart clamours, missing beats, rushing others. A raw and painful thought, she puts it aside. She focuses her eyes. The lamp on the table with its wick turned high hardens its edges. Abruptly the table finishes and uninhabited space begins.

She considers all the children who must have travelled through the school over the years, some surely finding wealth and success later in life, all the visitors who happened upon the quiet lakeside building and were enchanted or moved by its unobtrusive, monastic character. Its unique display of modern history, walls made of printed words. The benefactor is somebody perhaps responsible for a piece of news which has been cut out and pasted to those pale-green painted walls. An influential sort, willing to get things done.