Haweswater (8 page)

One bright day at the back of the winter of 1936, a man came into the Mardale valley with the intention of changing it for ever. He came as the spokesman for a project so strange and vast that at first it was not taken seriously by the village. It was as if the man spoke to them in another tongue, or in abstracts far removed from the life of these men and women. His purpose was inconceivable.

The first that the village heard of this man was a low throaty growl, the mechanical purr of a smooth engine, as he drove up the winding east lake road in his new car. The sound rose gradually above the movement of elements, the fussing of livestock; it was an easy and toned hum, unlike the roar and splutter of the ancient iron-wheeled tractor struggling up the incline to High Bowderthwaite Farm, the clanking of chains in the dairy barn of Whelter.

The artist Levell, hearing the engine, came to the window of his studio room, once a grand dining hall, where he had been finishing an oil portrait of Blencathra mountain. On the periphery, moving glassy light caught his eye. Flashes of low red and silver flickered between the trees on the road. Almost immediately he was aware that the automobile was very new and very fine. And utterly incongruous with the environment in which it now found itself, ten miles at least from the next village. The driver not yet realizing he was lost. Hearing the sound louder, Levell left the building and walked along the walled track from Measand Hall to the village, pulling on his beret and a sheepskin coat against the cold. And all the while the vision of Blencathra’s sharp saddleback edges never deserted him, but became clearer as he left his canvas.

A traveller had come astray, perhaps having taken a wrong turn at the Shap junction, meaning to go on up to Penrith, or more likely to the city of Carlisle, for such a vehicle was rare in the parochial border towns. But the car came fast and in a high gear, flashing between the trees, too fast for the conditions, for the ice blackening on the ground. The driver was not slowing or pausing to look for a widening of the road where he could turn round, nor were the gears clashing in frustration at the predicament. He drove without the use of a brake, he drove casually, comfortable with the hazardous terrain, utterly without timidity. And as the trees thinned and the Naddle forest gave way to open land, a sleek red automobile was revealed, glittering in the low sun. A sports car. A young man’s dream, thought Levell.

Transfixed, Levell watched the man turn into the village and park beside the church. He got out of his vehicle, which made pinc-pinc sounds as the engine died, then finally quietened. Levell was still a fair distance from the stranger, and he heard the definite slam of the car door a moment after it had been shut, as the echo moved sharply up the valley in the frigid air. Closer over the frosty field, the artist paused within calling range but did not lift his voice. The drag of a match on the rough side of a box as a cigarette was lit. The air was clear, crisp, bringing unadulterated sound. There was the slight scuff of a heel as the man pivoted to look up at the summit of Kidstey Pike, one gloved hand sheltering his eyes from the winter glare, pausing a fraction away from his forehead. He was wearing a dark-green suit, like a forest at night, and his shoes had been polished to a high shine by a variety of street boys all over the red city of Manchester, though Levell only knew of their condition after the fact. The tight tie at his neck was yellow-gold, pinned with an opal, and there was a yellow silk handkerchief in the top pocket of his jacket. He was dressed for a dinner, or a dance, like an unusual, exotic bird, its silk and sheen foreign in the cold landscape. The artist thought to himself that the man was not lost. He had
come to the valley as a man would enter a room to receive a guest – territorially, impossibly possessive, and with charm, politeness, with the tip of a hat, a warmly shaken hand. He, the stranger, assuming control.

Levell hung back behind the wall, watching the scene intently, like a tall, silent heron scanning the waters. The stranger did not appear to be in need of assistance. He twisted his neck, rolled it to the side to bend out its stiffness from the drive, but seemed at a general ease. He half-circled to observe his surroundings. A brief nod of the head. No, he was not lost. And yet he could not be in the right place, must somehow have become dislodged from his natural, metropolitan setting. Unless he was a tourist, but Levell did not think so. He had neither the attire, nor the aroused composure. The man turned again, this time to look at the village, the church. Levell cocked his head, stepping closer, the edge of the mountain now gone from his mind.

The man in the suit did not touch himself with his own hands, but kept them gracefully away from his body, his neck. As he smoked, his movements seemed perfectly to complement the action, as if he was the kind of man whose habits would always shortly become fashionable with the general public. There was poise to him, purpose and elegance. Something else too, an alarming degree of control, as if he was detached even from himself. The artist paused along the wall again, suddenly feeling unable to approach the man. All thoughts of assistance disappearing, his typical affability and garbled verbosity absent.

Levell had with him a charcoal stick and a small, porously papered notebook. He was seldom without such equipment. His hand was cold but he rested it for a moment under the collar of his sheepskin, warming it back to life. His sketch was furious, it can have taken no longer than a minute. He caught the man in abstracts, the first time his art had become broken down, deconstructed, since the war. The first time he had rendered a human being since that same troubled period, also. So
the man in the suit was moving, persuasive and, in a way, terrible or beautiful, enough to bring a man out of himself for a time. Enough to set him back. In the sketch the face was dark, like the hair, and it was made up of many layers, of paper and office objects, his cigarette a stack chimney, his skin smoke. In the man’s hair were the bright wings of industry.

The stranger had still not seen the artist. He checked his wristwatch, pushing his arm out so that the green jacket sleeve slipped off his wrist and crooking his hand back, without a single touch, with no self-affection. But the horizontal light in the valley told the man all he needed to know. He was standing in almost the last piece of it. It was early evening. Soon darkness would be pulling the men in from the fields.

He buttoned his suit jacket, opened the car door and pulled out a briefcase, then a hat and an overcoat, both of which he put on. Looking to the side, the stranger saw that the village was not deserted as he had thought it to be. There was a man in the field next to him. A wiry, lean character, who must have been sketching the mountains. They held eyes. For a while they did not speak, the tall, unkempt artist and the man in the suit like a forest at night. Neither felt compelled enough by the silence to break it, neither felt that an exchange was warranted. Nor did their eyes drop to the earth. Then a smile from the visitor, as if to welcome the artist forward, as if to give permission to come beyond the gate of the field and to him. His smiling mouth, like full leather, like smooth upholstery.

– Beautiful afternoon. If I could draw, I’d take it down also.

The man’s accent was northern, but milder than that of the men and women of this valley to which he came. He did not turn the corners of his words so sharply. Levell lifted a long hand upwards in acknowledgement. Then he turned and loped away, his feet occasionally cracking through a shallow drift of snow blown into the corner of the field.

The suited man walked on into the heart of the village and there he stood in the frozen, rutted road, smoking another cigarette. A group of boys spilled out of the doorway of one
of the cottages and began trying to scrape together enough compacted snow to form a ball worth throwing. The stranger watched them. After a while they came up to him, nervous, but their timidity overlaid with curiosity, the boldness of the very young.

– Mista, mista, yer lost in’t ya, mista?

– No. I’m sure not, fellas. Boy, it is cold though.

He laid it on for them. The use of such language had the boys whispering among themselves about gangsters and guns. The man noticed their ruddy complexions, the absence of city reflections in their eyes. These children lacked the pageantry of Manchester orphans, the youngsters with their theatre of wide-eyed hunger, their articulations of distaste and misfortune. They were not any heartier, indeed some seemed more gaunt, but it was the difference between a thin working dog and a ragged stray, the man thought. They were quiet at play, their shouts few and to the point.

– Fetch us that. Gan ova bridge, will ya? Cy, Cy, gan ova bridge.

They were templated from an entirely different press. He told them to fetch their fathers, and their mothers, the rest of their families too, if they wished. He needed to call a meeting. At first the children would not go. The man was too much of a peacock, too great a spectacle for them not to observe him. Just as he studied them, so he in turn was evaluated. His polish, his pressed creases, the tight, symmetrical seams of his tailored suit, a thing from beyond the gamut of Westmorland. They found him intriguing and lingered around him, stroking the hem of his coat as if to spy a pistol kept under the garment. He handed out Saskind’s peppermints from a tin to them, promising more when they returned, rattling the box in his gloved hand. He scruffed the hair of the boy nearest as he ran past him and winked, his eyelashes flickering like the dark, pollened wings of a moth.

At the cottage on the end of the row was a red post-office sign. He entered the building and encountered an old lady,
with raisin-brown skin and hooded eyes, with the flesh of her face shrinking in all directions, a soaked neck. After a brief discussion he found out that there was no village hall in which to conduct a meeting, and even the church could not house all members of the village at once. It would have to be done outside. Though the woman pressed him for more information he gave her none, even as she gathered up her coat to accompany him outside. The two stood in the widest part of the village near to the church and the stranger listened to an account of one of the brawls which had occurred in the village of Shap the weekend before from the old grey gargoyle of a woman. She spoke to him casually, name-dropping and expecting him to know those individuals mentioned as if he had lived here all his life. Slowly, within half an hour, the village assembled, in the hard mud road next to the bridge over the river, in the waning light.

Let them be assured that none of this was within his control, this they must understand before all else. He was simply a messenger, he said, come to tell them of their future. By the second sentence the locals had him pegged as a salesman, not the first to make it down into the valley and not a very good one, however well dressed. There was a silent pause, immaculately executed by the man. He might have been about to wheel out a marvel of the modern world from behind him. He smiled widely then, at the crowd of working men, and frowning women, as if to encourage confidence in him. Then his expression changed and was replaced by concentration, he began speaking softly, shallowly, and at the same time his accent heightened and became mannered. It was a voice for addressing others regarding serious matters, a well-oiled public-speaking voice. As he spoke, he moved his words out and away from himself, and it was as if he was speaking of another place, another land, as if this was in accordance with
some eventual reckoning that reaches all quiet and secluded areas in time. The modern world was just behind the man. What he was selling was the end of their valley.

It began as a simple proposal. Manchester City Waterworks had been hunting in the Lakeland and the borders for a site suitable for special development. This valley had been considered among others. For the past fifteen years geologists and engineers had surveyed the area, boring holes in the rocks of the valley and testing the water. Their results, when they reported back to
MCW
, had been favourable. The valley had been excavated by glaciers, which melted away to leave the small lake in the basin. The rocks along the sides and floor of the valley consisted of compacted slates and grits, layers of volcanic ash and lava which became hardened by subterranean heat and pressure and could not be eroded by the passage of water, an aspect vital to the scheme. In the words of the geologists and the surveyors, it was an old, firm valley, the site was admirably suited for development of the kind that the Waterworks was considering. In fact, this valley, with its own natural shape, created as the earth’s muscles cramped and pulled with ferocious sloth millennia earlier, was perfect. Six miles down, at the bottom of the dale, where the fells curved towards the ground and flattened inwards, hard volcanic rock came to the surface, and it would be possible to lay down a flat arm of cement and brick. An arm belonging to a colossal stone god, capable of holding back a full valley of water. It would be a dam unlike those built anywhere else in the country. A wonderful piece of architecture and engineering, megalithic, inspired. Yes, the site was perfect, but for one thing.