Haweswater (23 page)

Janet cannot quite believe her brother is letting go of her hand and this beautiful, hateful, loved man is now taking it. Because the warmth of it feels no different, no different at all.

That evening Jack Liggett drives Janet into town, proudly, in his red rag of a motor. There is a tired smile firm on his lips, as if he has finished a long walk up a steep mountain. Under his shirt his chest fills slowly with air, releases it, with the gradual pace of a sleeper. In the car there is a short, one-sided argument about his revelation.

– Look at all the things I was taught to hate. You were one of them. They think of you as a person without basis. One of those classless types who believes that this place is about scenery and escape, and gettin’ something out that hasn’t bin put in! You have done this for reasons none else will see. It looks like spite, Jack. Don’t you understand that?

He is all smiles, unashamed, unrepentant. She curses him. He’s a fool. He does not realize the battle he has started within her family. A mother, who at first was too furious to speak, then who smashed dishes and ranted about sin for two hours. A father who is still quiet with confusion.

– And Isaac, well, you’ve completely spun that boy! I left him getting the worst of it because he admires you. Because he thinks yer some sort of disciple. God knows what the lad thinks! What anyone thinks!

– I just couldn’t manage our game any more. That’s all. They’ll see it’s right. They’ll see it like we do.

He moves a hand on her thigh as he drives, meaning nothing but reassurance by it. Her fingers stroking the glass window, petulant. Then she pulls his hand away, bites his fingers. He yelps. The sore finger inside her mouth now. Her anger converts itself. She unbuttons his trousers, leans over to him. The car swerves a fraction before he lines it back up on the road, drawing in breath erratically.

The dancehalls of Penrith are always crowded and warm and charged with palpable tension. Inside the old William Tarrant building, he sweeps her out into the middle of the floor. They
spin. Heels turning on the worn, dimpled maple floorboards. The band plays one number after another, without a break, the musicians perspiring against their starched collars, flipping music sheets over. The flare of a clarinet, muffled tin of a trumpet, snares. Old jazz numbers and twenties favourites. And more recent tunes, fuller, as they head towards the big-band era. Jack mouths the words as they slide out on the floor. He is a handsome, able dancer, and now that he finally has her in such an arena he displays his skill, showing off, spinning her on a half-beat. His body moves like a tight river, sensually against her lower torso. He sings along, keeping her eyes to his. Her hair wound up off the nape of her neck, tendons like sculpted marble.

– I need water. I’ll be back.

His grip tightens on her waist, the beginning of another bruise.

– I’ll be back, I said!

She pulls away, grimacing, moves through the reeling crowd to the hallway of the building. At the water fountain, she sips slowly. She is surrounded by soft-hatted men, smoking, laughing, parting for her. She smiles at them, turns to find her partner on the dance floor. The space is a mass of shining heads and flaring skirts, dipping shoulders. Jack Liggett steps on the periphery, in a dark corner. Dorothy from the George Hotel is in his arms. Her short, dark hair bobbing to his shoulder. She whispers something in his ear and he laughs, shakes his head. She pouts, puts a finger to his new beard. The two continue to move, jauntily, at the edge of the dancers.

Janet moves back, stunned, her stomach hot and her throat clenching. Her eyes sting. Her skin is tingling, the tiny blonde hairs on her arm lifting. Only a dance, she tells herself, but it is weak reassurance. There is half a year’s worth of rage and surrender and trust to support her anger now. She steps backwards on to the heel of a man’s shoe. His hands rest just above her buttocks, on the small of her back as he stops her.

– Excuse me.

The jealousy hardens, becomes a rigid incentive. Only a dance. She removes the stranger’s hat, tosses it to a table and takes his hand. He likes that. Likes the signal, the encouraging gesture. On the way to the dance floor he removes a pin from her hair and it sinks on to her shoulders. The two begin to move, the man’s hand under her hair, between her shoulders. She does not search the room, instead, her eyes blaze at her new partner’s neck. She holds her breath. A feeling of rocking beginning within her, easily, as if this is a man with whom she has already danced and moved through back rooms.

Within minutes Jack Liggett is at their side, Dorothy abandoned in the dim corner. He cuts in, his old courtesy and civility barely catching up with him.

– I’ll take her off your hands, if you don’t mind.

– In a minute.

– I’ll take her. Now.

The man halts his movement and holds Jack Liggett’s eye, both of them playing out a brawl in their minds, quickly, a series of pictures, like cinema projectors tracking the same scene from different angles. The man cut-in on steps aside with his hand held out to Janet. Before leaving, he brushes a kiss across her cheek, to her ear. Then back to Jack Liggett.

– Pleasure’s all yours. If I were you, I’d not be gone s’long next time. I’m an impatient man.

Janet is moved out into the floor once again, this time with gentle hands, his head held to her yellow hair. But his voice is unsteady, low.

– Put your hair up. The way it was.

– I can’t, he still has the pin.

– Please do not do that again.

– Don’t you. You fucker, she whispers.

He has become accustomed to such language, from her. His lips find the base of her neck. It is too indiscreet a kiss, too sexual for the public dancehall, too damp.

– What did he make you feel like? Like this, Janet?

– Yes.

Jack Liggett is not a man given to sharing any more, in theory or otherwise. She moves across the floor with him to the doorway, he stiffens against her, the stitched hem over her shoulders in his fist, bunched tight. Behind the Tarrant building she pushes him down against the stucco wall, sits across him, ignoring the couple that staggers past them with a bottle of wine. The indentation of stone in his back chafes the sallow skin. She moves above him, her upper body bare to his mouth in the cold November night, his arms cradling up her back so that his hands rest on the base of her neck, holding her hair. The small restraint of the dancehall now gone.

When Samuel found Nathaniel’s body it was purely by accident. His eyes might even have happened across the old man twice, three times or more, there on the mountain, before recognizing his camouflaged form. It is said that when great and wise animals die they instinctually leave their homes and herds for sanctuary. They hunt for old, spiritual places to give their bodies over to, somehow knowing the route to be taken even if it has never been travelled before by the herd, the pack. Elephants sway to jungle graveyards, to the overgrown fortress cages of ivory. Cats disappear in the night, finding that surfaced root of a rowan tree to wrap themselves around, serene, slack-jawed, and eagles come in from flight, step claws into a remote, dark crag, an arrow-slit fissure in the rock, where they lock away their wingtips, bringing a head down on to the soft feathers of a breast.

In December, nine days before Christmas Eve, Samuel and two other men took the winding path up to Blea Water and Smallwater in search of a neighbour’s missing pony, which had come untethered and left hoofprints out of the village towards High Street. At the base of the fells the hoofprints were joined by others, a herd of wild ponies had come in for shelter, and several tracks led away, indistinctly in the night’s fresh snow. The three men split up in different directions around Harter, Samuel following the mountain stream to the remote pools. At a higher altitude, the earth was frozen several inches down and the water was creaking to a halt around the lip of the first tarn. Up over Nan Bield pass he walked, circling round the blackness of Smallwater on the chilled path, his breath frosting above him. His boots rucked precisely against the stone and sharp granite, a sound-sensation so satisfying
and clean that it will seduce walkers and climbers up a pike or ridge in even the most frigid and prehistoric winter temperatures, even without the excuse of a lost farm animal. The air was so clear that he could faintly hear the workers down at the dam, almost eight miles away. It was over the ridge next at Blea Water, the larger of the two tarns, that he found Nathaniel Holme and the missing horse.

The Lakeland paintings of Paul Levell are key to the enigma. There are hidden riddles. They reveal rocks in the shape of people, and bury bodies in the environment with formal accuracy. Humans are jigsawed into a cliff or river, or hewn out of the landscape, a man’s torso kept in a cairn of rock, a child in the womb of a mountain wall, vast amalgams of environment and humanity. People of kept stone. They are almost always secondary, hardly existing at all against the background. These images speak a certain amount of truth for those who live with the land.

Samuel’s eye was first caught by the colt moving at the tarn’s edge. Across the water, the pony was grazing at some short moor grass under the snow.

But then something within the range of his peripheral vision emerged. Nathaniel was sitting on an outcrop of rock overlooking the unmoving steely water. He was not leaning against a supporting stone. Instead, his spine had settled into a position of natural balance, curved and holding the body’s weight exactly. Only fifteen feet from him. Samuel’s eyes adjusted, pulling out the form. The rock became a man, an old friend, grey with the cold and death, as grey as the background of scree. The place must have been chosen with care, with instinct, perhaps. He had loved the view from the tarns and the sense that the high-altitude pools were vascular, open grey wells collapsing deep into the earth’s core. To its heart’s source. There had been enough air left in the old man’s chest for the painful climb up out of the valley. Samuel smiled with sadness, with admiration. He turned his collar up against a flurry of snow, pulled down his cap.
His friend had been sitting there long enough that the wind had egged him safely into the hillside.

There is a track that begins at the head of the Haweswater valley which travels up the sheer sides of Mardale common, up over the Naddle mountain, and it weaves across the black ridges and peaty moors, past Swindale, until it falls back down into another plush green hollow several miles away. It ends at an old sandstone abbey, which, customary to many such monastic sites, until 1965, and especially in the 1930s in Westmorland, was inaccessible by motorized vehicle of any kind. The name of this path is the Old Corpse Road. Previous to 1729, the date when burial rights were granted for the church in Mardale, it had been used for centuries by the rural community of the area for passage of their dead to a final resting place.

In the iron-hard winter beginning December of 1936, Samuel Lightburn and Lanty Farrow bore the body of Nathaniel Holme over the pass to the monastery near Shap for burial. The corpse was wrapped in lint-mesh and tarpaulin, then placed in a small, rough coffin, which was strapped to the back of a squat, sturdy pony from the Farrows’s farm. The path was icy and tricky to negotiate in places, the men having to guide the horse into making several attempts at a high step as the grade steepened. A bray or two in protest and then a final push up. The horse kicked through drifts of snow at the summit of the lugubrious, arctic passage, leaving behind long hoofprints in the white terrain. But above, the sky remained blue and clear, sparkling light reflected in the icy streams. As had been the burial rite of many before, Nathaniel was accepted into the remote monastic gardens for burial.

Nathaniel Holme had several members of his family in the cemetery of Mardale, including his wife, Angela, and war
memorials for his two sons, but he would not be buried there. The following spring, the bodies were to be exhumed. In the thaw from the particularly harsh winter the inhabitants still residing in the village would dig up the remains of their families and move them to another graveyard. The decomposed flesh of the oldest corpses would always remain part of the land, supplying it with nutrients. The crumbling headstones, and even the pitted, lichen-mottled Celtic cross that had been the solitary presence in an uninhabited field long ago, would be uprooted and removed. The cemetery would be combed clean, and the rank, coppery odour of old blood and wood mixing would find its way into the air, as coffins were lifted from the red-black earth. Funds for exhumation and transport and new burial costs would be provided by the Waterworks, but the locals would have to make the necessary arrangements themselves. It is not often that a family must bury its dead twice.

After Nathaniel’s funeral, Samuel sat by the hearth, warming life back into his feet at the fire. He was reconciled with the loss of his oldest friend, had catered for the remains of the man and lifted him down into the ground himself and covered the coffin with sods of cut earth. The loss was not unexpected. Nathaniel’s health had been deteriorating for months, and his farm with it. The valley had lost a man who had been fundamental to its population and to its character, who had accumulated more intimate knowledge of the area than the rest of the village combined, could spin its history into threads and weave them together, births, marriages, deaths, nature’s cycle and its distortions, the amalgamation of the community and the external world through which it survived. He had been a man who knew that, essentially, he had not succeeded as a possessor, but rather he himself had been heritage, passed down to that which had also received his ancestors. He was
the last of his people, surviving his offspring, solely inheriting the pride of the family’s lengthy settlement, and he had died well, just as he had lived, immersed, with genetic comprehension of the landscape. Nathaniel had been a stitch in its very fabric, a true spirit, and in mourning that loop undone Samuel must also grieve for the unravelling valley. Yet how to? It was too large a thing. Too colossal a death to know what acknowledgement suited it best or how to show appropriate respect. So much was yet to be stopped and lost.

He turned to his wife, as if to communicate this failing, to find a sympathetic nod, an equal in the situation. Ella was carding wool opposite him. Her fingers worked quickly and the corners of her mouth were downturned. A cheek moving as if she were chewing the inside of her mouth. Her mannerisms suggested irreconcilable thoughts. Samuel turned back to the flames, knowing then that for each of them the mourning would be private, personal and endlessly varied. Like the grain and structure of an antler, he thought, each would grow with its own inherent pattern.

Outside, in the fresh snow, Isaac was playing with Chase, he could hear the barks of both, and upstairs their daughter was reading, perhaps, or trying to settle her own thoughts shifting relentlessly against each other. She had kept to herself lately, and had not been forthcoming when her mother questioned her about Jack Liggett, the apparent affair. She would turn away and murmur harshly under her breath.

– Mam! Leave it be, fer once in yer life.

But her mother would not let it alone, she could not help but persist with her inquiries, even though she tried to hold back, knowing it would lead to argument. She heard herself hissing. Why had she been late in for her supper? Had she been seeing that man? The one who was responsible for wrecking their lives. What did she think she was doing? What kind of a useless girl was she to tarry to such a man? Did she not appreciate the damage he had wrought? Was she so unmoved that she had no remorse for the loss of her home?
The questions came and were unanswerable. And tension gathered about the house, seeping into its pores and skulking in corners. Their daughter collected her coat and left without nourishment, again and again, slipping out into the wet, falling snow, past their waiting faces, past the anticipation flooding from them that there would be some kind of explanation soon, a bright epiphany for them all in this strange matter. Her brother looking as if she had taken something away that he could not understand. It had come to this, a ravine of silence over which she would not travel. Her bitter energy dormant. And, secretly, her mother worried at the loss of fire, the dwindling anger, which had always been amply witnessed before, surface deep and writhing in her daughter, because it was not unlike her own and so she could understand it, if not navigate it. But more than this. It meant ruddy health, equilibrium in the Lightburn women.

In the upstairs room Janet moved from wall to wall, a hand resting on the back of her neck, the book abandoned. She would have dearly loved to find the words to explain this obsession, this split in her own psyche, the venom which sent her again and again down into the village, to the side door of the Dun Bull. Gathering the antidote from his hands. She would have desperately liked to be able to find those oblique words which would come close to representing the widening gulf in herself, the senseless, driving desire, perhaps more satisfying for the groping hands in her own mind than for her mother’s anguished questions. Their clashes had become perfected, the quickest route taken in, an immediate blockage of reason, pivotal stalemate, the inevitable ill-parting of mother and daughter. The arguments now took only moments to mature, their velocity incredible. The house shuddering in the squall of tempers.

– You’ve been t’ town with the man agin.

– Jack had to go to the bank …

– Jack! Oh, Jack, is it? I’ll be jiggered if I take the name to my mouth.

– It’s not your business, not your concern. There’s more to it than …

– Get out of my sight! I’ll not allow it in my home, niver, do y’hear my girl?

Sometimes her father tried to defend her lover, perhaps unaware of the extent and history of the relationship. It was soul-destroying for Janet. She would rather he stride up to Jack and strike him full across his face. For all the taking he had done. Better than his blind, diffident vindication born out of an unconditional loyalty to his daughter, and going against his wife. She had blown a gale in between the members of her family with her indulgence, with the bellows of her obsession.

– He’s not a bad sort, Ella. Just doin’ his job. See how he tries with folk here. Fella nearly fell in t’dip t’uther month. Fumes got him, poor lad, didn’e know when t’ breathe and when not te. And dam’s his proper job, Ella. Can’t blame fella fer owt else.