A Coffin Is Not a Body

Chapter One: The Water Went Down

The drought had been running four months when Deborah Wheatley came back to the reservoir she had promised herself she would never see again.

She smelled it before she saw it. Twelve miles out from Llanhedd, with the car windows down because the air conditioning had failed in June, the wind coming over the ridge changed. It went from cut grass and hot tarmac to something cold and mineral, an old-penny smell, wet slate and iron and rot. Her hands tightened on the wheel by themselves. Her body remembered before she did. That was the thing about bodies; they kept better records than people.

She pulled in at the top of the pass where the forestry track met the road, and got out, and looked down into the valley, and for a while she did not breathe properly.

Nethermill Water was thirty feet down.

She had seen the photographs in the newspapers, of course. Everyone had. It had been the story of that summer, the drought, the dead lawns, the standpipes in the cities, and then the reservoirs going down all over the west and giving back what they had swallowed. Roman bridges. Drowned mills. A church tower coming up out of the shallows like a raised hand. Nethermill had been on page five of a Sunday paper in July, and Deborah had turned the page and gone on eating her toast and had shaken for an hour afterwards without knowing quite why.

Seeing it was not the same as the photographs.

The water had drawn back to a narrow dark channel in the middle of the valley floor, and everything else was mud. Not brown mud. Grey. A pale, dead, lunar grey, cracked into plates the size of tabletops, and out of it stood the village.

She could see the chapel first, because it was the biggest thing. Roofless, the gables still square, the arched windows empty, the whole building standing in its own black stain. Below it, the school: two courses of brick and a set of steps going up to nothing. And a lane. That was the part that made her put her hand flat on the warm bonnet of the car to keep herself upright. A cobbled lane, still cobbled, going down from the chapel to the place where the Wheatley farm had been before 1965, before the water board's men came with their maps and their compensation forms, before the money that had bought her family out of the valley and into the Waterhouse.

She could see the shape of the farmyard from up here. A rectangle of stone footings and, at the bottom of it, the mouth of the flood channel, a concrete throat two feet wide that in her memory had roared like a train and which now lay open and silent and full of silt.

That was where Lottie went in.

Deborah stood on the pass with the sun on the back of her neck and made herself count. Four things she could see. The chapel. The lane. The white scab of the salvage compound where somebody had parked a digger and a portable toilet and a stack of pallets. The dam.

Three things she could hear. Crickets, a kite calling somewhere over the plantation, and the tick of her own engine.

It was a trick her therapist had given her eleven years ago, and it worked about as well as putting a plaster on a door.

The dam was at the north end, a grey concrete crescent four hundred feet across, curved into the neck of the valley like something set in a jaw. Its face was streaked with lime and thirty feet of tide-mark. At the western end was the spillway, a wide stepped chute down which nothing had run since March. And built into the dam wall itself, halfway along the crest, hanging out over the drop with its slate roof and its two chimneys and its long windows facing the water, was the house.

The Waterhouse. The old keeper's lodge, put up by the water board in 1963 for the man who would open and close the valves, with three bedrooms and a scullery and a parlour and a hundred and ten feet of air under its floor.

Her grandmother's house. Where Deborah had grown up. Where she had learned to sleep through the sound of water going down a hole.

There was a light on in the parlour window, in full afternoon, and that was how she knew Enid really was dying. Enid Wheatley had never in her life burned a light she did not need.

Deborah got back in the car.

On the passenger seat, under her recording bag, was the letter. It had come eight days ago to her flat in Bristol, in a stiff cream envelope with her grandmother's headed paper inside, the address printed in copperplate, THE WATERHOUSE, NETHERMILL, and the whole thing typed, because Enid's hands had gone in the nineties and she had never learned to write left-handed.

Deborah had read it perhaps forty times.

Dear Deborah,

I am told I have weeks, not months. I have asked the others also. The sale of the Waterhouse and the dam land to the water company completes on Monday morning. The transfer from Bryn Tarren opens at midnight on Saturday and the valley will begin to refill; the engineer says eleven weeks to full. After that Nethermill goes back under and stays under, and I will be in the ground at Llanhedd, and there will be no one left who was there.

So come this weekend. All of you. I will not sign the sale until one of you tells the truth about the night Lottie died.

I know what I am asking. I know better than any of you what I am asking.

Your grandmother, Enid Wheatley.

Underneath, in biro, in a hand like barbed wire, the only handwriting on it: I have changed my will.

Deborah had spent twenty-five years arranging her life so as not to be in rooms with her family. It had been a real career, that arranging; it had taken talent. She lived alone. She had two friends and no partner and a job that sent her to places where nobody knew her, and she made radio documentaries, and she was good at them, because she had discovered at sixteen that if you put headphones on and pointed a microphone at the world, the world became something happening at a distance to somebody else. She had won a prize for a programme about the sound of the last coal train. She had turned down three commissions about drowned villages.

And here she was on the pass, going down.

The reason was not the money, though Enid's estate would be the better part of two million once the water company paid. The reason was the last line of the letter and the way it sat wrong.

I know better than any of you what I am asking.

Because everybody in the family knew what had happened on the eleventh of August 1998. Deborah, who was nine, had been down at the flood channel with Lottie, who was seven. There had been rain in the hills. The channel had been running hard. Lottie had gone in, and been carried into the culvert under the old farm road, and they had not found her for three days, and the coffin they buried at Llanhedd had been closed because there are things you do not show a family.

And Deborah had been holding Lottie's hand, and had let go.

That was not a family secret. That was a fact, the central fact, the one she had built her entire personality on top of the way you build a shed over a well. She had never denied it. She had never once, in twenty-five years, been asked to.

So what truth did Enid think was still owed?

Deborah drove down the pass with the mud getting whiter and closer, and the smell coming up thicker through the vents, and somewhere in her chest a nine-year-old girl standing very still, hoping not to be noticed.

At the bottom, where the road forked, a new sign had been zip-tied to the gate.

NETHERMILL RESERVOIR — DRAWDOWN OPERATIONS. EXPOSED SEDIMENT IS DEEP AND UNSTABLE. NO PUBLIC ACCESS TO THE VALLEY FLOOR. REFILLING COMMENCES MIDNIGHT SATURDAY.

And under it, someone had written in marker, in capitals, the way men write when they mean it: WE HAVE PULLED TWO PEOPLE OUT OF THIS. IT WILL NOT LET GO.

Deborah looked at that for a moment. Then she took her phone out and photographed it, because she photographed everything now, the way other people bit their nails.

She had two bars of signal at the gate. By the time she reached the dam access road she had none, and she would not have any again for a very long time.