Haweswater (7 page)

Her eyes were wide, sending ripples across her forehead in their wake, they were piercing blue and unavoidable. She left with directions to heat a cup every half hour and she would return with another batch in the morning.

The Reverend Wood managed a good recovery almost overnight. By the time the morning arrived, bringing Ella with a fresh pan of stock, he was fit enough to be dressed, to refuse the pan vehemently with protestations that it must be a miracle how much better he felt, and that the soup would be wasted on him now. Yes, a full recovery he had made!

Alas, his garden fuchsias did not manage to recover quite so well after receiving a substantial dose of broth over them that February. They were sadly not forthcoming the following summer.

The vicar did not particularly appreciate such devotion. He considered the woman to be excessively fraught with the desire to be close to God, and whilst he himself did not fault a deep love for the Lord, he felt that decent limitations were needed. There was something about the woman which did not sit right with the vicar. The confidence her faith allowed her was too inflated, to his mind. He had also heard disjointed pieces of an alarming tale about the birth of the Lightburns’ first child, which added to his suspicions that she may indeed be harbouring tendencies towards religious hysteria, and he often found himself picturing her wide-eyed and perspiring with a poisonous snake in each hand, in the fashion of those fervent reptile handlers in the American Appalachia about whom he had read. He had not pressed Ella herself on the issue, being slightly nervous of her reaction, but had gleaned all the missing sections of the story from other villagers over the five years of his administration, subtly, for he was not one for gossip, the majority of the tale being supplied to him by the woman who ran the local store, the village tattle-tale.

Reverend Wood would have liked to cancel Ella’s cleaning duties, especially since her wage came from the money directly allocated to him for the upkeep of the parish church. He would even have taken a polishing cloth in his own hand himself if it would guarantee her safe retirement. But she had been there at the church longer than he. Her position seemed unquestionable and he did not quite know how to execute
such a plan. And besides, his nerve always seemed to falter in her presence, as if he were a tiny mouse on the ground, addressing a mighty eagle perched over him, giving measly reasons as to why his existence should continue.

In the centre of the village stood a row of tiny cottages, and in the last, the one with the tumbling chimney, was a tiny shop, which took up no more space than the corridor between the front door and the sitting room. It was run by a woman called Sylvia Goodman, known to all in the village as Gobby. She had converted her hallway into rows of shelves, containing provisions, shoe wax, paraffin, string, boxes of flour, tins of fish and other mixed items. She was notorious for handing out district news with every purchase of sardines or tooth powder.

– Here’s yer polish, and did y’know that in Bampton three lasses are pregnant, they say sharing t’same father? I wunder, will they be sharing t’ring too? Molly Lincoln has thrown her husband out on tu t’street. Well, yer put two and two together … Dun’t tek much gissin’.

In her yard was a hutch filled with scruffy brown chickens that sporadically produced eggs for her to sell, but were capable of laying only if she told them stories and news about the district, so she said. A well-informed hen was a happy, productive hen. She fed them bacon grease, which was no cheap meal, and dandelion leaves, muttering about affairs and deaths, local controversies, as she scattered the food, and when there were no recent shenanigans to mention she resorted to renditions of the old border myths and long-ago frictions of the area. Her rooster, she claimed, was eighteen years old, and still a fine fellow. He crowed only during the evening hours and had twice survived being shot with an air rifle, though the second pellet had blinded him in the right eye.

The shop itself half ran on a system of exchange and barter,
with the swapping of produce as it was needed by each customer. Carrots for eggs, smoked ham for cigarettes or tobacco, apples for the occasional postage stamp.

Measand Hall stood off at the outskirts of Mardale, as grand halls and manor houses are in the habit of separating themselves from the drudgery of village life, and it had almost as much acreage as any of the tenant farms on the slopes of the valley. There was no aristocracy living in the great hall, nobody of such lofty heritage, though it was still owned by the Earl of Langdale. Unlike much of the estate, it had not been sold off to settle the recent crippling death duties. The building itself, old and in need of much repair, had been inhabited for the past fifteen years by an artist, a landscape painter by the name of Paul Levell. Levell was from Northumberland and in another incarnation he had been a war artist, active in the fields of France, who in peacetime had retired to the quiet valley to concentrate on landscapes and remake his sanity. Several of his Great War paintings had been accepted at the National Gallery in London, with their torn scenery broken down into primary shapes and colours, abstract, despairing, as if released from an awful, nightmarish dream.

After the war he began painting with startling realism, almost photographic accuracy, an exposed clarity which seemed to resist any interpretation other than that which was most apparent, like the bones of a carcass picked clean. Where once a broken plane wing stood for a ruptured human skull, now a mountain was just a mountain. And yet his work always remained violent and unromantic, if exceptionally beautiful. There was an impossibility to the perspectives of his high mountains, breathtaking verticals, paths fractured up over cliffs, pulling at the stomach and suggesting rapid currents of air during a freefall down to the eye of a dark tarn.
He pushed the limits of Lakeland geological existence. Stony ridges disappeared into thunderous, sudden stormclouds. Edges appeared suddenly and without regard for the safe grassy flatlands in the foreground of a picture. Humans were, without exception, banished from the bleak, natural scenes, as if unable to survive or simply not welcome in the wilderness created by Levell’s brush, save for a suggestive form in a rock, a woman’s back surfacing in a river as a stepping stone, the curled torso of a man, moulded into the spine of a barren outcrop of granite. Figures were swallowed up by the land, subsumed. There was no harmony of man with nature or the human conquest of environment which the Lakeland artists of the day favoured. In Levell’s work, life was brutal, distinct and pure.

Paul Levell himself was a tall, bearded, wild-looking man, who blinked constantly and spoke rapidly in broken sentences, with every second word seeming to be a curse. He either loped through the village on foot or wove dangerously on an ancient bicycle, his tawny hair smothered back under a fashionable French beret.

He was partial to discourse, and liked to draw his fellow villagers into political discussion, asking them to comment upon the troubles of old Europe, their feelings for Stanley Baldwin, but never made direct mention of the war, not even to Samuel or Teddy Hindmarsh, men who had shared memories of that horror, the insanity, the lost faith in leaders, and the suspicion that the present moderation was simply the country treading water. He was considered eccentric, pleasant, but better avoided unless the work for the day was complete, lest he keep a man talking for an hour or more. Mostly, Levell kept himself to himself in the old, crumbling hall, which was rented to him as a favour by Lord Langdale, who had bought several paintings from him and was something of a local patron. He ventured out early in the mornings, usually the first true tide of daylight after the herds had been moved, to run up the fells, his long legs taut with muscle, his hair a
ratty, sweaty mass, always talking softly to himself as he ran, softly, desperately, as if attempting to calm the energy within him that urged him to ascend mountains rapidly, to scramble along the precarious ridges like a bolting hare.

There were about twenty-five houses in the valley, most of them two or three hundred years old, that formed a dense clutch in the middle of the village and spread out as they progressed up the sides of the valley to make way for farmland. The fields undulated gently in the basin, steepening further out, where they were separated by the traditional enclosure of drystone walls. Oak and elm trees grew by the field walls, offering shelter for cattle and sheep from sun and rain.

On the low sides of the Rigg, a sharp, craggy ridge which ran up to the High Street mountain range, there was a dense covering of pine and spruce and half-way up the mountain, on the flat plateau of Castle Crag, were the foundations of an early British fort. At the end of the valley, a black, ragged-faced mountain called Harter Fell cast an enormous shadow over the head of the dale, almost to the foot of the village, and its north face was the last place to keep snow in the surrounding area, storing it in frozen black crevices until the May sun could warm it enough for it to trickle away.

On each side of the dale was a road, to the west side an old farmers’ track that had been used for the passage of animals and vehicles until the building of a new, concrete road on the sharper east wall in 1926, which cut through the darkness of the Naddle forest. The two roads met up at the bottom of the valley and then led as a single tarmacked highway to the village of Bampton, then on to Penrith, eighteen miles from Mardale. The western track was still frequently used, being closer to the upper fields of the farms. Along it grew hawthorn, gorse and broom. Brambles curled out on to the
road in the summer, there were wild raspberries to be picked and in June sticky, thorny roses bloomed, sweetening the air.

Further down, spanning the middle of the dale, the waves of a small lake lapped gently against the blue rock of the valley floor. The lake divided into two sections, the larger one, closer to the village, was known as High Water, and the smaller part at the bottom of the valley was Low Water. The two sections of lake were joined by a thin, deep channel known as The Straights, where fishing was always good. Four streams, Swanmere, Randale, Hopgill and Whelter becks, ran down into the lake, tumbling as waterfalls higher up in the fells on their journey. The rivulets from two tarns met up in the bow of hills at the head of the valley before they came down together in one large river, the Measand, which ran straight through the heart of the village, splitting into a tributary before joining High Water.

There was a stone, hump-backed bridge which spanned the river next to the church. In its keystone was carved a three-pronged mark, the signature of the stone mason who built it, a mark which was also found in one of the cornerstones of Measand Hall. For the last three hundred years or more there often could be seen a man or a child pausing on the bridge to look below at the water, idling in conversation with a companion, or as a solitary, watching the trout rise and flick between the reeds under the bridge. Casting an eye over the river, as if for no other reason than there was water flowing past.