Haweswater (18 page)

There is more peace in this night than at any other time they are together. The absence of light is liberating, both agreeing to go without themselves. He has no guilt, and for her there is only a body under the stars.

– You think I hate this place, that I’ve taken it, carelessly. I have always loved it, even as a boy. I used to ride the six o’clock train from the city without paying, standing outside the car when the inspector came through, not knowing if a structure inside a tunnel would swipe me clean off and kill me. At Shap summit the engine always slowed and it was possible to jump down if you were inclined to. If I came away with no sprain, I’d walk across Swindale to here, or someone would give me a ride to Borrowdale. My grandmother lived there, you see. She was good at keeping secrets and glad to
have me, hated her daughter’s husband, said he was responsible for her death. But a terribly kind lady. My father worked weekends and didn’t know I was gone. He worked on the ship canal, on these endless weekend shifts. He was a mechanic, a fixer, always being called to one faulty mechanism or another. The canal was never a masterpiece, even in its day, whatever they might say. It was floating with junk. But he made it seem so impossible, keeping water. Always a losing battle, a fallible endeavour, and constant. There were no successes, just resisted failures, I hated that idea. I went with him to get out of our house sometimes. You can’t know the filth of Manchester back then. To breathe was a waste of time! Children shitting in the streets. This was another world for me, up here, away from the city, all the little wet slate towns between the mountains. God, it was clean! I stole some boots from the Keswick Arnison’s, walked right out of the double doors wearing them, and carrying my shoes. They were the best thing that I had ever owned.

– How did y’mother die?

– It doesn’t matter. My father found the boots and guessed that I had stolen them. He broke my wrist and nose. Just like that. No warning, no indication of what was coming. That was his skill. The ability to throw a punch from a complete standstill. Afterwards, he said I had no sense of fair earnings. He earned less in a month than the boots cost, poor bastard. I didn’t hate him. I just had to make sure there was no lasting residue of my being his son.

She turns in the dark, an imaginary imprint of her buttocks on the cool grass. The moorland coarse behind them with its nocturnal noises and smell. He takes her hand and kisses the back of it, a strangely formal gesture after their intimacy.

– Everyone thought you were very wealthy. That y’stepped down into the valley from someplace soft where you were made. You have that smell, like you’ve always had finery, and time for the midday forecast.

– I imagine you don’t get time when you’re rich. It’s probably
a vacuum. Suddenly that sense of dragging hours disappears, there aren’t any factory clocks. Just a pleasant tick on the mantelpiece that means nothing except when dinner will be called. People would call it an achievement, I suppose. They think being poor and educated is an utter miracle, but it was easy. A scholarship, a bit of politeness, it really made all those concerned with my education feel good to think they were improving one of society’s wrecks. They like to make room for an occasional new member, in that way assuring themselves that the structure remains intact and operating, that we’re still a staggered lot. I didn’t even work my way up. I walked into the Corporation building like I had shoes hanging off my arm. And people don’t ask your name, of course, it’s too bloody rude.

He sighs and sits up. The moon’s reflection in the river is skimming the current to remain in the same position. Janet is quiet beside him and he knows she has been allowed sudden access to him. He smacks an insect on his arm, lifts his body above hers.

– I’m being eaten alive! It’s your turn, I think.

– You’re building a dam so y’can sink your childhood. Is that it? But you’re right, you haven’t been careful enough in abstracting the damage. You’re sinking ours too, mine, and Isaac, who hasn’t even finished his, and we never wanted rid of it. We never did.

Jack Liggett holds the warm, dry body on the dark lunar banks of the river. He is remembering the importance of money, has devoted much of his life to it, and remembering the smell of rotten vegetables in the kitchen of his father’s stack-house, the interruption of fists against human matter. The delivery of unrelated anger. And swinging his own small fists at effervescent corners of space, kicking his feet wildly in the slop on the kitchen floor, the blackness finally congealing.
The past unfurls. His hand between Janet’s breasts tracks the minimal double-tick of her heart as it lifts outwards, shudders in. Above it her sternum dulls the echo of the movement of manufactured blood. His forefinger slopes upwards, pointing towards the back of her neck. If a bullet were released there it would travel through everything vital, bringing in its wake a river of red.

In his arms, Janet turns, restless in the summer humidity. The river also moves past, sounding out rocks and inclines. She interprets a blunt, introspective mood stirring in her lover. His limbs have tightened a fraction across her. She places a hand behind his head, moves her face down to his.

– I think you understand yourself too well. It should be more of a quarrel. You need to leave room for a portion of uncertainty, space to get away from yourself now and then.

– Yes. You speak so … never mind. I want you to know that if there was any way … this valley. It’s too late now. And I am sorry.

– Don’t. It’s better to just keep ahead. Because I can’t stand the thought of being as I was before you came. There is only one way it can be between us. I believe that.

A hand on the base of his skull dragging him up. The smell of decay in the kitchen. And sounds like those of an animal being dragged to the roadside, awful, coming from his own mouth. He closes the memory, as if putting away a book.

In the morning the light was terracotta, a burnt orange lapping over the eastern fells. The road to Swindale was still eerie and unlit, twisting through trees on the steep valley side, soaked by shadow. Jack Liggett drove as he always did, with speed, exhilarated, as if there had been an agreement made upon purchase of the vehicle that excess caution would not be used in any circumstance. At the head of the valley he parked the car and the two walked up into the bow of hills
towards the waterfalls. She did not want to go back home yet, she had said to him on the banks of the river as the night began to thin. So they had gathered up their clothes and left Mardale, stealthy like criminals. She wanted them to visit a place that they both knew, had both been to before, separately. Half-way up the fell the waterfall became audible before it was seen, a hidden rushing noise. She moved ahead of him, finding footholds in the broken rock, between the wiry clumps of grass. Once she held out a hand to him and he smiled wryly, but did not take it. Instead he moved her fingers lightly across his lips. She shrugged and moved on.

Higher up, the waterfall poured into deep pools and dark narrow troughs, increasingly inaccessible. At almost the top of the fell they scrambled their way down a steep incline to the rocks and water below. The pool was brown and floorless and frothy under the waterfall where the surface was churned. Janet unbuttoned her shirt and removed the rest of her clothing. He watched her movements with anticipation, but she undressed naturally, as if preparing to wash at an enamel sink, and without flirtation. She stepped to the edge of the water and dived in, swimming cleanly through the liquid, up to the sheet of the waterfall, pulled herself half out of the water, her hair dark blue down her back. She called to him.

– I have something for you, but you’ll have to come here.

Jack moved to the edge of the pool, ran a hand through the water and shook it. It was icy cold.

– Cum round, if y’have to! You’ll manage. It’s not Scawfell.

He removed his boots and shirt and crossed the flat boulders at the bridge of the pool where it was shallowest. There were ledges along the cliff face, which became slippery as the spray reached them, and ferns grew in the small pockets, glimmering with water as it pulsed past. Her face looked bluish in the pool as he moved skilfully along the edge to her.

– If I fall, I shall no doubt die. That water is not going to sustain my life for long. Look at you, you’re as inhuman and
waterproof as your brother! You’re making me feel very ill.

The spot where she had lifted herself out was secluded, difficult to reach, but he twisted down to her, green moss smudging along his chest, his fingers aching as he clung on. She was braced on her hands.

On the ledges below him were four or five slender orchids, tenacious, hardy, bruised by the spray of the falls. They were almost colourless, only slightly blushed with mauve, as if deprived of light, and utterly delicate. A faint shiver of a stem.

– Northern marsh. Remember that, if you want to.

– Christ! I didn’t know. How remarkable.

– The Wildlife Society has been informed about them, they aren’t uncommon, but it’s a fairly well-kept secret. There aren’t many so adventurous as these. In general I think they prefer mires or beeches, you know, flat reedy soil. You can understand that I preferred not t’pick one for you, Jack.

She emerged more fully from the cold water, glistening and white and chilled. Made as if to come up to him above.

– Would you believe me if I told you it was warmer in than out?

– No! Hell!

She dipped herself into the water again. He turned his face so that the other cheek pressed on the cold, damp cliff. As he made his way slowly back round, she followed him in the pool. He glanced down and smiled at her. She was suspended in the thick liquid, her pale skin rippling in the brown murk. He could not see the bottom and he asked how deep it was. She swam down towards the basin floor, surfaced moments later and laughed. It was a laugh he had seldom heard from her, uninhibited, lacking any opposing tension, and it fitted with her white body, and came from it without protocol, suddenly convincing him that she was much younger. Then she rolled in the water and swam back to the bank. As he inched along, he wondered at the contents of the pool, strange prehistoric fish with fat lower jaws, jagged
spines, and the inevitable decomposing carcass of a sheep. Now that she was gone from the water, above the surface of the pool there seemed to be an abundance of dragonflies. They churred in the air, making furious sudden loops and stalling down on to the ferns. There was one just at his elbow, flickering double-winged on the rock. It looked like a blue vein, flown from the arm of a child. Another by his right foot, a smashed tube of amber. Then both shot into the air, released from the wall to follow their invisible strings through September and into October.

The cliff flattened out in front of him, becoming less slick and overhanging. But he closed his eyes, lifted his hands from the cliff face and, after a moment leaning back, his body was swallowed by burning cold water. Its shock on his skin was electrifying. He gasped air, sawing it down into his chest, and struggled to the shallows. Ahead of him, Janet was standing naked, still, except for the water running from her body. She looked like a statue of rain.