The Fish Ladder (32 page)

But the truth was, I no longer really cared. My father, the only father I could ever need or want, was the man who claimed me when I was a baby, the man to whom I had given my first smile, at the very moment that we met, and who had given me his family’s name. Who had laid me down on a rug on the living-room floor and said: ‘Now, what are we going to call
you
?’ My father was Emeritus Professor John Frederick Norbury, OBE, B.Sc., M.Sc., Ph.D., LLB, Fellow of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, our Fred, the village boy made good, who had won a Highfield Tannery Scholarship and obtained a first-class honours degree by the time he was nineteen. Who had proposed to Mum on the summit of Tryfan, on one of two rocks called Adam and Eve, and then held her hand as they leapt from one to the other. Who had wrapped his hand around mine and walked with me to the top of Scafell, and then carried me back down on his shoulders. Who had returned our family to the same town in Scotland, so that my brother could defend the trophy he had won playing golf there the year before, when he was only fifteen years old. When I began to read Philosophy as an undergraduate and hated it, I had telephoned home at midnight from a payphone at the end of a rain-filled street to tell Dad how unhappy I was. He had got out of bed, and answered the phone, and said: ‘Well done, darling, it’s great that you know how you feel about this. Now, don’t worry about anything, just go back to bed, and we can make some plans in the morning.’ Whenever I had gone to the mountains, because I often walked alone, Dad would telephone the hotel, or pub, where I was staying, every day, to ask how I’d got on. He had welcomed Rupert into our family the first moment they had met, already laughing, his arms held wide, even as Rupert climbed out of his car. His grandchildren he called
my shining diamonds
. When Dad entered a room he had the ability to make everyone in it feel special. You could see it in their faces, and I had been told about it often enough. This lovely, kind, irreplaceable man was, in every way, my father, and if I have a sense of loss, it is because he has died, and there isn’t a day when I do not think of him.

Notes on
Afon Rhiw

The Well at the World's End

Rupert and I had gone to a party at the home of the writer, Kirsty Gunn, when
The Well at the World's End
came up in conversation. Kirsty, it turned out, was a distant relative of Neil Gunn. We chatted about the book, and I told her of my journey to Dunbeath, now three summers earlier, and she asked me: ‘Did you visit the well?'

‘No!' I said, and told her how I had tried to find out where it was but had eventually abandoned the search, and had followed the Dunbeath Water instead.

‘My sister lives in Caithness,' she said. ‘I'm certain she knows where it is,' and Kirsty promised that she would write to her straight away. She was sure that her sister would be able to draw a map, there was really no mystery about it. But the reply, when it came, was tantalisingly vague and as fruitless as my earlier searches. The sister had forgotten the exact location of the well, and suggested I contact the Heritage Centre in Dunbeath. I had done that three years ago, too. But I did write again, and the same kind lady I had spoken to then now wrote to Neil Gunn's nephew, Dairmid Gunn. This time Mr Gunn was not away from home, and he wrote to me by return.

 

Dear Kate (if I may)

I have been asked by Meg Sinclair of the Dunbeath Heritage Centre to give you directions to reach the well . . .'

 

It was that easy. Evie and I went together. The road journey, again, took three days to complete. We went first to Dunbeath because I wanted to show her the loch. We stood with our backs to the sea, until a black wave slapped the harbour wall with a crack like a starting pistol. We followed the river until we were high above the town. We passed the cemetery and the waterfall and the abandoned farm and the empty house called Poll Roy. At the farm the wool from a recent shearing clogged the path like sea-foam. We were careful to avoid the rabbit traps. We bent to finger the tangled heads of bog-cotton. Morven, invisible when I had come alone, appeared as a blue wedge on the horizon. The river was the colour of tea. Two pale hinds appeared on the skyline, their leaf-shaped ears revolving like antennae. We slept side by side on the heather. We began walking again just after four the next morning. We saw no birds at all. There were midges. There were
midges
. The only sounds were of the river and our footfalls, the occasional chatter of our voices, and the
swoosh
as we walked through long grass. Mostly, we walked in silence. Once, there was a noise, like a glass of water being knocked over, and a slick black salmon broke the surface of a pool. It made a pattern like a firework before it disappeared beneath the shelter of the bank. Evie stared at the place where the salmon had been. It was the only living thing we had seen all day but for the midges. There was little or no breeze as we followed the river, but above our heads the clouds rolled quickly from the sea, like an autocue of Rorschach inkblots.

We reached the edge of the water table. Clumps of mist in curious shapes appeared like empty dresses. The land was much heavier than when I had come by myself. We had been up to our knees in mud and moss, the peat hags too spongy to be safe, and were now walking barefoot up the streambed. The mist began to press about us, silently stopping up our senses. We perched next to one another on a dryish clump of heather and pondered what to do. The memory of slipping into water that covered my head, on our visit to the source of the Severn, was fresh with me. I couldn't, with good conscience, take Evie across the blasted shell holes between the head of the stream and the unseen loch.

It was as though a blind had been drawn down over our endeavour. It was strange to me how receptive the landscape had felt when I had come here on my own, and how enigmatic, and secret­­ive, it was today. There were no birds, no deer. Only the whine and pin-prick of midges, although the mist – mercifully – had dispersed them for a while. It was like being in an empty theatre between performances. As though the action was happening elsewhere.

‘Is this where the well is?' Evie asked.

‘No, there's a loch, but we wouldn't see it in this mist. The well is a few miles from Dunbeath. If we turn back now we could find it before nightfall.'

‘Let's find the well,' she said.

 

Later that afternoon Evie reached into the glove compartment of the car and took out Dairmid Gunn's letter and an Ordnance Survey map. The place Dairmid had described was a few miles south of Golspie. Evie opened the map, and ran her finger down the pink stripe of the A9. We had a grid reference. Evie's finger came to rest on a single letter: W.

Meaning,
Well
.

Evie hated map-reading. We drove up and down the same stretch of road for about half an hour. In Neil Gunn's novel, the well is close to a collection of cottages. The hero has gone to fill his kettle at the well but when he looks at the water it's so clear he can't see it, and so he tells the old woman who lives in the nearby cottage that it's dry. ‘That well is never dry,' she replies. We pulled over and I looked at the map. There were two little cubes opposite the ‘W' on the map. We'd driven right past them. I turned the car round. The cottages were on a particularly lethal bend in the A9 but they could have been lifted from the book. A band of woodland ran on both sides of the road, and at the northern boundary of the wood, on the opposite side to the cottages, was a lichen-covered wooden gate. We tried to find a place to park. The A9 is the only significant road in that part of the Highlands, and cars fumed like killer bees. I eased the car onto a low grass verge. As I got out I saw a penny. I picked it up and showed it to Evie. She took her bottle of water and emptied what was left of it onto the road.

‘For the well water,' she said.

We passed through a wooden gate. A high wicker fence ran alongside a footpath. We could see the woodland between the reeds of the fence, and it seemed to be in a poorly state, black pines leaning against one another. Other trees had been cut down, but not replanted. A chill hung in the air, the only sound came from the creak of the pines, and the occasional buzz from the road. After about fifty yards the path opened out onto a blackened mulchy glade, where a wicker man, wearing a kilt, with a wooden sporran, a tam-o'-shanter and Wellingtons lay alongside an empty stream­bed, pebbled with pine cones and dried leaves. Bronze pine needles covered the earth. The well-keeper scarecrow implied that this was the right place. My heart sank. It seemed as though the well had, after all, dried up. I placed the penny I had found on top of the reclining figure's sporran.

And then I saw it, we both saw it, seemed to notice it together. In a dark bank, a few yards away, surrounded by tendrils of new ferns, was a wooden door. It was made of boards and painted ox-blood red. It wasn't big, more like a cupboard, and on the lintel, in block capitals, had been carved the words:

 

THE WELL AT THE WORLD'S END

 

It was similar to the door that I had dreamed about, but unlike that door, which had no handle, there was a ceramic doorknob and a brass bolt. Above the lintel were two chipped enamel cups containing a smattering of pine needles.

We crouched in front of the door.

‘You do it,' said Evie. ‘Go on.' I slid back the bolt. I was terrified that the well would be empty, filled with broken twigs, like the streambed a few yards to the left of us. I opened the door.

At first I thought that a light had come on. We were looking into a rectangular box, with smooth pale stone sides and a fine whitish sand on the bottom. Looking above it I saw that the roof of the chamber was like a cistern, made of stones the size of apples. A bright fern curled between two of the stones. The water wasn't immediately apparent, but a couple of pine needles that I dislodged on opening the door revealed its surface. The light appeared to be coming from inside the well, and I thought of the words that had inspired our journey:
a well whose water is so clear it is invisible
.

A pulse, like a heartbeat, seemed to move the air in front of us. Without really speaking we fumbled for a cup. Evie passed it to me, and I pressed the cup into the water. A curved meniscus seemed to swell along the rim, to hesitate momentarily before flooding the beaker. I lifted the cup.

‘You go first,' she said.

‘No, you're my daughter.'

Evie drank off half the water in the cup, and then I finished it. We drank with speed as though we had run a race. It was sweet. Like swallowing light.

A small wind entered the clearing, circling, rising, the trees behind the wicker fence creaking like halyards. We heard the ratchet laughter of crows and then, overhead, a bird with trailing legs flapped slowly above the circle of trees.

‘Is that a heron?' Evie asked. The bird flew in an arc.

‘No, look at its head. The neck's extended, and it's white. It must be a stork.' The trees were moving around us. The sky had turned porcelain blue. Sunlight streamed to the floor of the glade. The change was so sudden that I found myself laughing, and then a silence fell all about us. A cloud settled over the sun like a dustsheet. The trees shuffled back into stillness.

‘What do you think?' I asked Evie.

‘I think the audience is over,' she said.

I closed the door of the well. We hadn't filled our plastic bottle. We walked quickly back the way we had come and as we reached the gate, Evie said: ‘Do you feel different?'

I hesitated. ‘Yes. Do you?'

‘Everything looks clearer,' she said.

 

We called Rupert to say we were coming home. The journey, as before, took three days. We called to visit Mum. Since her illness her memory had grown extraordinarily patchy and she was surprised to see us, although delighted, and sorry when we had to go. ‘Look after yourselves,' she said, ‘and ring me when you get home. You children are all I've got!'

‘And you're the only mum I've got!' I said.

‘And my only granny!' said Evie.

The next night we stayed at the cottage, and then closed it up for the winter. On the third day we headed south through Wales. We drove over mountains and along a tree-lined valley. There was a thunderstorm on the road ahead of us. We passed the signpost to the village where Mrs Thomas lived. I was finding it easier to drive past the turn, knowing that she was there, but suspected that it was never going to be effortless. My phone bleeped and Evie looked at it. It was a message from Robert, he was on his way back from Cardiff. Where were we?