Stories

Kathryn had been the one who had pushed to purchase the old watermill. None of the machinery worked, of course, but the house was watertight and, although the ground floor had been flooded in the past, they had spent the summer after they bought the place sweeping out those old rooms, Kathryn on her hands and knees, her dress rolled up and pegged at her thighs, scrubbing the terracotta tiles from dirty-black to warm ochre. 

Together, they had whitewashed the rough-hewn walls, had replaced the skirting boards, repainted the single-pane windows that had, themselves, required hours of washing with warm water, soap and sponges, but in due course they came to gleam, and the house was flooded with light.

They laid old, moth-eaten rugs across the hard floors, swept the chimney, and used black cast-iron tools when laying fires at night, prodding logs cut, split and laid to dry from the few acres surrounding the mill. Even so, smoke from their evening fires would be fanned by the gentle breeze that teased down the chimney, and the earthy smell of it would drift through the house, persisting until morning.

Nonetheless, the two had been happy there, sat in old wicker chairs padded by musty, goose-down cushions. They had sheepskins which they pinned to the white walls downstairs and would gather down on cold evenings, wrapping themselves within them, she gently leaning into the crook of his arms and humming, looking at the fire as it crackled and spat, hearing the rushing of the water outside.

The irony, of course, was that when Kathryn fell pregnant and bore Jonah she barely wanted to return to the mill. It sat there as a folly of sorts, locked with its fat iron keys, and as the boy had grown they had visited it only twice. Once before they knew Kathryn was ill, and during that stay David had explored what might be involved in re-digging the gullies that would enable the water to flow back through the races and into the old millpond, which was full of sapling trees and damp, claggy brush. They had walked together along the dip in the earth where the flume had once run, him beating back the bracken and long grass with the end of a switch he had purloined from some undergrowth, she clutching Jonah, carrying him although he was too heavy, but was sleepy, resting his fat cheeks upon the soft lining of her coat, which she had turned out upon her collarbone.

The second time they went back, Kathryn was too sick to go walking. For so long she had wanted to stay in the town, where the hospitals were, and the supermarkets, bright conveniences open at all hours, illuminated by strip lights. She had sought to be so close to the fizzing static of modernity for Jonah, in case of emergencies, so many of her decisions made for his benefit and against the grain of what had been her desires before she had become a mother. But then, in her final days, when she knew she was close to dying, she had wanted to be driven out to the watermill, away from the hustle and bustle of things, to lay in one of those old, uncomfortable beds, the mattresses full of dust and time, wrapped in muzzled blankets, with one of the small windows propped ever-open. David had worried that this would make her cold, but she did not seem to mind, and when she was strong enough she would go to the window and look out across the rushing water, seeing the simple bridge with its loose stones, Jonah paddling in the eddies at the edge of the banks, smiling.

“David,” she had said to him, on one of these occasions, “I think it might be best if you and Jonah come and live here after. Not for always, perhaps, but I think it might be good for you both.”

David had stood watching her, leaning on the crooked doorframe, the tin mug in his fingers steaming with hot tea, and had not responded. All he cared to do at that time was watch her. To be close enough to smell her. To see the soft corners of her lips where her smiles bloomed out from, the honest smiles of her past and the newly forced, pained smiles of the present – smiles that were meant to say, “Everything is fine,” but really said, “I am hurting, and I love you, but please do not speak because I am so desperately afraid and do not know how to reply.”

They had not been able to stay in the mill right at the end, even though that is what Kathryn had wanted. He had been too fearful to let her die there. Wanted to do everything he could to keep her with him, even for a few more hours. Minutes. Seconds. He knew it had been cruel to rush her to the hospital, to have strapped her into the car and inserted the safety belt that she had not had the strength to fasten herself. And Jonah had sat quietly in the backseat, not really looking to him or to his mother, mutely aware that things were desperately wrong. Those small dark eyes, wet with tears he did not let fall, his mouth crumpled up like used fish and chip shop paper.

They had driven through the evening, all dressed in snug woollen jumpers, mud on all their boots, him focused on the road, staring out into the long darkness overhung by trees. He had driven too fast, careering around bends in the route, looking to get to the bright lights of town as quick as he could. To return to help, to assistance, to relief for Kathryn, and perhaps find someone who had good news for them. And when the town was in view, across the long valleys with their looming viaducts and sporadic clutches of coppiced trees, he had turned to look to Kathryn smiling, happy they were nearly there, only she had passed away in the passenger seat beside him, her head lolling as if she were at rest.

If Jonah had realised, he had not let on. He had simply sat in the backseat, looking through the window glass into the murk of the night, hearing the car engine thrum and rattle between the gear changes. Then, when they had arrived at the hospital, David had led his son to a kind nurse who had sat with him, and he had not let on, and had touched the boy’s face and run his fingers through his hair, and walked away so he could see someone about having the body moved.

After that day, David and Jonah were rarely found but a few metres from one another. Often, they were side-by-side, inseparable, habitually holding hands through the worst of it. The funeral, with the blue sky shining down with a sort of terrible optimism, everyone dressed in black and Jonah looking so smart. His hair combed. A small necktie tucked into his tiny buttoned jacket. At breakfast each morning, when David would spread cold butter onto warm toast, knifing thick loads of plum jam or marmalade onto it to pack the boy full of some sort of sweetness. And when he had cooked as best he could, hearty stews of lamb, chicken and beef, old recipes for casseroles, dumplings, pies made with spices and pastry, vegetables and offal. He would scrub vegetables, carrots, leeks, potatoes, fat mushrooms light as angel breath, adding salt, wine, celery for depth of flavour, but Jonah rarely had an appetite and commonly much of what David prepared went uneaten.

For the first few weeks, they had stayed at their home, Jonah off school. They had watched television together, gone for long walks in the park, wrapped in coats and jackets, with mittens on their fingers. They had taken trips to the cinema, the ice rink, skating together and not really talking. David had let the lawn become overgrown, not worried about weeding the flowerbeds, and had focused instead on reading Jonah bedtime stories, and on always having a hand on his boy – in his fine hair, on the nape of his neck, on the back of his tiny hands where it seemed as if just one of his broad, grown-up thumbs would cover all of the young boy’s soft skin.

Jonah had gone back to school, tried to mix in with his friends, tried to focus on his studies, and David had gone back to work, spending long days in meetings, staring blankly at computer screens. Neither had been successful in their endeavours, not really, and so one day, without much thought or notice, they agreed together to not go back to pretending life was as it had been. With some money in the bank, David closed up the house, emailed his employer to say that he would be going away for a while and was not sure when he would return. The pair climbed back into the car with the belongings they thought they might need. They passed by a supermarket and bought essentials, and then made the long, winding drive back out to the watermill, seeking solace from the silence of their lives in the frothing tumble of its rushing depths.

It had felt like camping at first. They found that they did not really have enough pots or pans, glasses, knives and forks. David did not much like having to do the washing-up by hand, and he often sighed as he swept out the fireplace of a morning, gathering all the half-burnt ash into a heavy dustpan before disposing of it into the overgrown millpond. He wondered how sustainable this was, staying out here for so long, just the pair of them, cutting themselves off from the world. The place had no telephone, was barely wired for electric lighting, and the single cold-water pipe was temperamental. Still, with a little advance planning he was able to heat water in a large iron pot over the fireplace, filling the cast-iron bathtub in fits and starts, getting it to a place each evening where Jonah could wash in steaming heat before David tucked him down in bed. After this was done, and the boy read to, or told tall tales from David’s own memory, David would close the doors upstairs and clamber into the bath himself, by now lukewarm or even cold, and he would wash himself and his aching muscles, and would think of Kathryn, and would weep quietly, his only company being the river.

There was plenty to keep them busy, of course. Initially, they simply went exploring, venturing through the trees grown fat and yellow-grey with lichen. Jonah enjoyed leaping onto the mushy flesh of fallen, rotten trunks, giggling as bark split open and disgorged orangey tendrils of damp fibre. Both wearing wellingtons, their faces wrapped with scarves, they wandered to the edges of the wood, sloshing through puddles, kicking up rotten leaves, noticing snowdrops sprouting, the bright butter blooms of aconites, primroses, and the dancing heads of daisies.

As the daffodils began to clamber from the soil hither and thither, and the purple stains of sweet violets shocked the cold spring mornings, the pair took to fishing. They went downriver, to spots where the water did not run quite so fast, using worms they dug from the ground, David pressing them onto hooks and lures he had left in a box in an outbuilding. They often used some of his old bulk and dropper floats, sometimes spending hours on end getting a little chilly and dank. But often, when the water was clear, they would catch a roach, or a chubb, or a barbel, and Jonah’s eyes would sparkle with glee.

Their evenings were often spent in quiet, David reading to Jonah, or Jonah himself leafing through books. He started to take an interest in trees and birds and fish, and would run his fingers along soft pages, scouring for details. At other times, he would read short novels, fairy stories mostly, or tales of knights and wandering adventurers. Sometimes, because the current through the electric cables was so weak, they would light candles and between them, with the glow of the fireplace, and the pop and crackle of the burning logs, time would seem to slip by with little fuss or concern, or much of anything at all.

Into March, with the pale wood anemones showing their faces, and the marsh marigolds blooming in the muddy clag, Jonah started to look to spend more time by himself. David was worried about this, of course, and always wanted him to stay in earshot. They started to communicate then by calling to one another.

“Where’s my boy?” David would holler.

“By the bridge!” would come the sing-song response. Or, “At the weir!” or “Mill pond!” or simply “Here!” and David would smile, pottering about, sorting this or that.

He set himself small projects. Clearing out long-dead flowerpots, stacking them in the lean-to to use later. He swept the flagstones outside with a hard-bristle brush, looked for a time at the remnants of the mill mechanisms, the space where the millstone had once been. And he counted the old millstones about the house, finding five in time, most half-eaten by the hungry earth, lost beneath mounds of whispering grass. Eventually, as it had all those years ago, his mind turned to digging out the gullies, for no particular reason. He just wanted to, wanted to see if he could rebuild the sluice gates, clear out the tale race, and see about letting the river return to the leats.

To do this, David dusted off an old shovel and pickaxe, striding out of a morning with Jonah, who had found some binoculars somewhere. While David would swing his axe at the earth, the cold air biting at his nose and his lungs, the blood burning in his shoulders, Jonah would find spots to sit or lay against the ground, hiding himself from view to spy at sparrows, starlings, blue and yellow tits, elegant wheatears and, in due course, a chiffchaff – something which filled the small boy with joy.

Day by day, as David dug and scraped and scrabbled at the ground, picking stones and silt and rubble from about the penstocks, he began to feel stronger. The skin on his hands had been soft, and although he suffered blisters and bruises, and the spaces between his digits chapped and bled, in a few days his wounds always healed, often felt numb in the cold, and he became proud of the new, leathery flesh that grew in rough patches to replace what had once been there. 

One afternoon, bursting with pride, Jonah came running to him, grasping him by the hand and dragging him over small hillocks and divots to a favoured spot for birdwatching. He had David duck low on a ridge, and the two laid together, Jonah finding what he sought before passing the binoculars over.

“Look,” he whispered, pointing. “There, by the bank, by that willow.”

David did not see it at first, focused instead on a tangle of roots by the edge of the water. But he scanned and scanned, looking left and right, before spying it, the bright azure of its plumage, the burnished gold of its belly, the black stab of its eye and its beak.

He looked to Jonah, who grinned widely. “It’s a kingfisher, Daddy,” the boy said. “And if you wait and look, you’ll see, over there, in the bank… oh, just watch. Watch!”

Doing as instructed, David put the binoculars to his eyes and observed, seeing the kingfisher perched high, barely moving, before suddenly, quick as a flash, it took wing, darting down into the water, emerging with a minnow held aloft, tail dangling. Next, the bird fluttered back to the bank, chomping, its tail feathers fanned, to where peeping heads then emerged, dancing and bobbing hungrily back and forth. That cluster of chicks was eager, clearly, for river-fresh vittles.

“My book says,” said Jonah, softly, “that there could be more than a half-dozen in there, but it’s so hard to count. I keep watching and trying, but it’s difficult to see.”

David laid down the binoculars and wrapped an arm around his son, who protested and first and then giggled. There was no resisting, ultimately, and David duly gathered up his child and held him close to his chest, placing the boy’s small head to the space above his heart and gripping him gently but tightly.

“I love you,” he said, barely louder than a whisper.

“And I love you too,” came the muffled reply, and the two lay there, beneath an overcast sky, for a long while, enjoying the warmth of one another.

The pair did not exist in total isolation, of course. When necessary, they would drive to a nearby village to pick up provisions, restocking their larder with tins and jars, buying fresh bread, milk, fruit and meat. Happily, the house had a small refrigerator, and there was a rattling old chest freezer that David cleaned and plugged into a socket in the outbuilding. There, amongst the soil and unplanted bulbs, slowly rotting sunchairs and tools, David spent quiet afternoons cleaning the fishhooks and mending the rods when necessary, cutting tangles of fishing line and rethreading spools as and when.

Jonah, meanwhile, spent his days adventuring. He built dens in the wood, collected pine cones in great numbers, because he found them beautiful and precious, and when he found rubbish, old carrier bags, wet clods of newspaper and magazine, or crisp packets with faded logos, he collected them. A lot of this rubbish went into the dustbin outside the mill, but from time to time he would also gather wood and twigs and interesting pieces of detritus he had found, and would make small fires. He liked to sit near them, relishing the warmth, and slowly feed bits and pieces to the flames. Crisp packets, in particular, were great fun, letting off foul black smoke and burning bright green and blue when tongued by the blaze.

Aside from the birds, which he liked to spy and tick off in his Ornithology book, he also noted other life forms or their traces. A family of otters, upriver, swimming together in smooth, serpentine shapes, whiskers trembling. The distinct shape of deer hooves in the mud. Badger tracks. Mole hills. He often found collections of rabbit droppings, though rarely saw their source, and as his father dug and sweated in the earth Jonah found himself at the centre of a kingdom of sorts. He came to think of himself as the Lord of the River, and he even made himself a small walking stick out of a thin, winding length of hazel branch. This walking stick, in his mind, doubled-up as a sceptre, and sometimes as a spear, and after a while he came to fit a particularly pleasing piece of flint in the head of the wood. It was not sharp enough to stab anyone, he knew, but it felt good in his hands, made smooth, he presumed, by years and years of having been in the water, and he believed, in his young heart, that the spirit of the tributary had somehow made its way into that stone, giving it magical properties that he could call on should be ever have the need.

Most of all though, Jonah liked to watch the kingfishers. Every morning he would race to the spot across from their nest and check in, waiting to see the adult bird hunt and feed her young, revelling in the progress the growing birds made as they began not just coming to the mouth of their nest but also hopping out onto the water, wetting their bright young feathers before fluttering back, ungainly, towards their hole in the muddy bank.

He knew, from his reading, that it would not be long until the birds were pushed out, to fend for themselves, and that once this happened the odds dictated that not all of them would survive. And although he had originally thought there might be six or seven birds in the brood, he now counted only three juveniles in his daily observations, perhaps because others had already perished, or perhaps because, back when they had been but little hungry mouths, he had not been able to accurately ascertain their number.

As time passed, the music of the rushing water was unchanged. Fists of ramsons burst from the earth, white as ivory, while a blanket of slithering bluebells stems rose from the floor of the woods, their heads violet and fragrance sweet on the breeze. All the while, David dug and raked and dragged earth from inside itself, shaping and emptying the gullies, filling buckets at first, and then a wheelbarrow, with loam, rocks and stones which he deposited in a great mound out of view of the house. And he kept watch of Jonah, who was growing beautiful and wild, his hair a constant tangle, in need of a cut, but neither really cared to engage in grooming. David himself let his beard grow long and rambling. He enjoyed how the insides of his pale fingernails were always lined with muck, and one day, while bathing, found mud in the rim of his ear that might have been there for a long time, unnoticed.

Of all the things he loved, liked and loathed about the mill, the only one that truly irked him was laundry. How simple it had been, he thought, to toss clothes into a machine, add power and a glug of conditioner, then press a button. Now, when it came to it, he had to fill up the bathtub with warm water, and scrub with his bare hands against an old washboard. His knuckles ached when he did it, far more than from the cold, and over time he looked mostly to only clean underpants. He pegged these on a length of fishing line in front of the fire in the evenings, leaving them smelling faintly of smoke, and when it came to shirts, jeans, socks, pullovers, pyjamas, and all other items of apparel, he and Jonah agreed, by silent decree, that they would only really launder things when it became absolutely necessary.

Otherwise, it might have been that David and Jonah lived happily at the watermill for a long time. David had tried not to think about money, and he knew that in a while they would have to return to the townhouse, to the lives they had had before, and when they did they would probably have to answer a few questions. Nobody knew where they were really, he thought, save perhaps from the bank, who would have been able to tell where he was by the details of his cash withdrawals in the village. But they had no telephone, no internet connection, no television, no newspaper subscription. The meagre electricity bill was paid automatically, as were all the bills at the townhouse, for all the services they had been paying for but not really using, had not, on reflection, needed, and although it might be nice to return to a place where hot showers were as simple as a twist on a tap, where meals might be ordered and delivered, packed with sugar and brightness, in less than an hour, or where there were people with all their amusements and concerns, David did not much care to go back. He must, he knew, sooner or later, to see about Kathryn’s will, and face up to the people who would want to know where they had gone, and to put Jonah back in school, and return himself to the world of work and suits and agendas, but perhaps, on reflection, not all these things were necessary. Perhaps, at the bottom of it all, the mill was where they belonged.

Soon enough, the time came for David to climb down into the mill pond and clear it. He was getting close, he knew, to being able to break the final dams of earth he had left, to open the mended sluices that he had picked clean and knocked into shape in the evenings, refitting the parts into their rightful spots, and to let the races once again run wet. And he could, he thought, just let the water pour into the millpond as it was, filled with detritus and vegetation and young trees. In his mind, however, this sat uneasy. Although once the water was in and had flowed deep enough into that chasm so that most of what was there would be covered and lost, he would know it was there. He would know that the job had not been completed, and needed finishing, so with a lot of effort, involving ropes and an old wooden stepladder, he descended into the claggy mayhem of the millpond with his shovel, his pick, some shears and an axe, and he began the process of clearing it. 

Progress was slow, and the amount of work more than he had estimated. He hacked away at tuffets of thick, wild grass, levelled sappy infant trees, found pieces of machine and stone slabs and rusted metal. He had to wear heavy gloves, was not strong enough to lift much of what he encountered, yet gradually, slowly, wilfully, he emptied a few square metres, then a few more, and a few more still.

On one momentous morning, he found the remnants of the waterwheel. It had clearly, once, stood vertical, and quite what its fate had been was difficult to determine. Most of the wooden paddles and slats, edges and spokes, had rotted away, leaving only hard, rusted, very beautiful pieces of ironwork. Lengths of bracing, like plates of armour, huge bolts forever doomed to stay welded to their nuts by decay, and a huge heavy axle that might have taken three or four men to lift.

Most of what David found, he piled up to one side, building a huge bonfire. But the fragments of the broken waterwheel were somehow sacred, he thought, and so he left them as he found them, anticipating that they might dwell forever in that place, drowned in a watery grave.

That same day, Jonah was watching the kingfishers a little way off, joyously observing their anxious flights further and further from their nest. Above them, always, their mother watched, showing no pride. Instead, she appeared affronted somehow, as if bemused at their progress, her beak tucked in close to her chest. But then, all of a sudden, she began flying, flapping her wings unlike before, and her children took so little notice yet Jonah looked on, his eyes growing wide in unseen panic.

He roved with his binoculars, up and down the river, trying desperately to find answers. When he did, it was already too late, for one of the young kingfishers, so electrically blue, was suddenly a mash of feathers, the orange of its breast folded up into a bloody knot in the jaws of a blackly-slick otter.

“Oh no!” said Jonah to himself, his voice a low moan. “Oh no,” he repeated, seeing now that the otter was not alone.

Indeed, the otter who had killed the bird had done so for prey. It was the mother, Jonah assumed, and a little way off from her three young pups yipped and gambolled on the riverbank. 

The terribly beautiful shape of the mother otter slid through the river, fighting the current with ease. She paddled with the young, limp kingfisher in her mouth, towards her children, and laid the dead bird between them. Jonah watched this, feeling as if he ought to cry, but he could not. Instead, he saw the mother return to the water and float downstream like driftwood, the kingfishers flitting this way and that all a-panic.

It did not take long, Jonah observed, for the otter to slay first another of the young kingfishers, this one as it returned to the nest. She waited, and when the bird came close she leapt slightly up from the bank, catching the back of the white-frilled neck, snapping it with total abandon.

Again, she swam up the edge of the river, again depositing the body by her young, and again she floated downstream.

Next the mother bird perished. It looked, to Jonah, like she was trying to attack the otter when this happened, drilling towards the predator with her sleek black beak, pinions spread wide and resplendent. And as the sun of the day filtered down through the sky, dappled in places by the leaves of the trees, Jonah saw her killed, just like her progeny, carried shortly off to be consumed.

While the pups tore and growled at the flesh of the birds, Jonah observed the last murder. The final kingfisher juvenile, not learned enough to understand, not wise to the ways of the world, returned to the nest as if nothing was wrong. And once again, the otter struck, only this time she did not leave the corpse for her young to eat. Instead, she paddled back up against the river’s flow, whistling and singing to her babes. The kingfisher’s body in her jaws seemed to make no difference to the sounds she could make as she frolicked and rolled in the water, her coat glossy and slicker than clay in the rain, and after a while of cavorting, and eating, and pawing at their bloody chops, the whole holt of beasts slid into the water, making their quiet, horrendous way home.

Once it was over, Jonah lay for a while, first on his front, then his back. Beside him was his walking stick, his sceptre, his spear, and when his eyes eventually fell on it he felt ashamed. He knew, in his heart of hearts, that there was little he could have done, that nature was cruel, and death came for us all, but still, his cheeks burned, and he pulled the smooth flint from the head of the staff and hurled it into the river. 

When it broke the water’s surface, it did not seem to make a sound.

Picking himself up, Jonah carried the stick with one hand, slinging his binoculars over his shoulder. He walked back towards his father, trying not to let on how sad he felt inside, and when beside the millpond he spoke up.

“Can I come down?” said Jonah, seeing the space that his father had cleared.

David turned, observing his son, and as he looked up at him, stood on the rim of the deep, empty pool, he felt that the child looked much taller somehow, and not just because he was being looked at from below.

“Of course you can,” David replied. “But watch your step. The ladder is tied on, but the rungs can be slippery. And once you’re down here, keep your eyes out for bits of metal. They’re everywhere, and the last thing we need is to be rushing off to hospital.”

Jonah did as he was told, carefully making his way down and seeing that the millpond was all but empty. It was darker down there, and colder, by virtue of the sun not reaching all its quarters. Confidently, however, Jonah walked over towards the vast pile of wood and rubbish that his father had cleared, brandishing his stick in one hand.

David watched him do this, and watched also as Jonah carefully put his binoculars on the floor, and took off his coat, and his satchel, and then grasped the length of hazel with both hands. The boy raised one knee, and then brought the stick down upon it at speed, snapping it in half, before tossing the two ends onto the pile.

“Think we should set it alight?” David asked, stepping closer to his boy.

In response, Jonah nodded, and that was enough for David, who clambered out of the millpond and returned, moments later, with a jerrycan and a box of matches. 

Warning Jonah to stand well back, David emptied the contents of the jerrycan onto the pile, splashing the foul-smelling liquid this way and that, and then, quick as a flash, he brought out the matches, positioned just far enough away to strike three at once and toss them at the tangled heap.

The two stayed together for a long time then, watching the flames smoulder and singe, huge rolling gulfs of wet steam rising up at first, blocking the sky and making them both cough and laugh. Before long however, the worse of the moisture burned off, and the blaze crackled and ate at the wood, and the burning grass whined and popped, and Jonah stood before David, who reached over his shoulders and held him. As the fire glinted in their eyes, and warmed them head to toe, Jonah finally wept, and so did his father, and their tears fell onto one another and the earth.

The following morning, when they woke, they found that the ashes were still licking away at themselves. Jonah helped David, mostly without speaking, and the two made everything ready. Primed, prepared, their labours concluded, the two knocked out all the dams and opened the sluice gates, and the river slid with icy fingers through the earth, tentative at first, or so it seemed, perhaps nervous because it had forgotten the sensation. But before long, the water was gushing through the gullies, splashing and surging down the flume, and the millpond, slowly but surely, began to fill, and man and boy chuckled and smiled as it did. 

That evening, while they sat before the fire, wrapped in the sheepskins taken down from the walls, stinking of mud and sweat and smoke, spooning another of David’s lamb stews into their mouths, watching out for molten-hot coins of carrot, and chewing on sugar-sweet flesh from onions, Jonah turned to look his father dead in the eyes. 

He spoke softly.

“Do you think,” he said, “that we might go back now? Not forever, of course, but for a while. And maybe we can come here sometimes, in holidays, and at weekends?”

David felt as if something had lodged in his throat, and although he was not choking on his dinner he knew that he could not speak. Instead, he nodded, and Jonah said no more. 

The two then sat, watching the smoulder in the grate, and outside in the dark the millpond slowly filled, and in the days to come the water brimmed up to the tail race, from which it flowed back out into the body of the brook.