What the River Kept

They drained Ashcombe in the summer of the drought, which was not a decision so much as a surrender.

The reservoir had been low for three years. That August it went from low to indecent, and the water company sent engineers, and the engineers said the word silt a great many times, and by the end of the month there was a valley where there had been a lake.

And in the valley, a village.

Ashcombe had been flooded in 1961. Two hundred and forty people moved, most of them to the new houses at Netherton, some of them further. The church tower had been left standing because demolishing it was more expensive than drowning it, and for sixty years the top three metres of it had been a curiosity you could see from the dam in a dry spring.

Now there was all of it. Streets. Doorsteps. The war memorial. A gatepost with a hook still in it.

The county put up a fence and the county was ignored.

Margaret Ellery went down on the fourth day, at six in the morning, because at seventy-eight she had no intention of queueing.

She had been nine when they moved. She remembered it in the way of a nine-year-old: completely, in five or six pieces, with nothing in between. She remembered the lorry. She remembered her mother crying in the scullery and pretending it was onions in a month when there were no onions. She remembered being told to choose one thing from the garden and choosing, for reasons she has never been able to reconstruct, a stone.

She still has the stone. It is on her windowsill. It is an entirely ordinary stone.

The mud was worse than she expected and the smell was worse than the mud, and she went slowly, and she found Chapel Row without any trouble at all, which frightened her more than getting lost would have.

Number six had a doorstep and two courses of brick and nothing else.

Margaret stood in what had been the front room of the house she was born in and waited to feel something enormous.

She felt tired. She felt the mud coming over her boot.

She had expected — she was not sure. Grief, or its ghost. Something to justify the drive. Instead there was a rectangle of stone in a dead valley, and it was small, that was the shocking thing, it was so small, and she could not make it hold the weight of sixty years of thinking about it.

She was about to go when she saw the tin.

It was in the corner of what had been the scullery, half in the silt, and it was a biscuit tin, and it was the wrong one — she knew instantly it was the wrong one, hers had been green — and she dug it out anyway because she was there and her hands were already filthy.

Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, dry as paper: a bundle of letters, and a photograph, and a child's exercise book.

The letters were addressed to a Mrs D. Hurst, number eight.

Margaret sat down in the mud.

She remembered Mrs Hurst. Everyone remembered Mrs Hurst. Mrs Hurst had refused to go — had said, publicly and repeatedly and in the newspaper, that she would be in her house when the water came, and had been talked down eleven days before the valve was opened, and had moved to Netherton and lived another thirty years and never once come back to look at the water.

The letters were from her son. He had emigrated in 1953 and died in 1958 and the letters stopped, and there were forty-one of them, and she had wrapped them in oilcloth and put them in a tin and left them in the scullery of a house she knew was about to be drowned.

Margaret read the top one sitting in the silt with the sun coming up over the dam.

It took her a long time to understand, and when she did she found she had to put the letter down.

Mrs Hurst hadn't forgotten them.

She had left them. Deliberately, wrapped for water, in the one place in the world that was about to become impossible to reach — because she had spent five years unable to stop reading them, and she had found the only way she could think of to put them somewhere she could not go and get them back.

She had not been refusing to leave the house.

She had been making sure she couldn't come back for the tin.

Margaret wrapped the letters up again in the oilcloth. She thought about the fence, and the county, and the water company, and the fact that the rain was forecast for October and the valley would be gone again by Christmas.

She put the tin back in the corner of the scullery, exactly where it had been.

Then she walked up the hill in the mud, and did not look behind her, and went home to her ordinary stone.