Jon McGregor - Reservoir 13

In August the young bats moved away from their mothers’ milk and the nursery colonies broke up. Their networks of flight were complex and unseen. They flung themselves through the grazing meadows taking dung beetles and moths while the adults began finding mates. On the baking stone path beside Reservoir no. 5 a slowworm was basking, and was taken by a buzzard to feed to her chicks. Richard and Cathy were seen having lunch again at the new organic pub in Harefield. Questions were asked as to why they’d felt it necessary to go that far. Inferences were drawn. The cricket was cancelled for weather, and the Cardwell team didn’t come over for drinks as they had done in previous years. Su and Austin Cooper had their twentieth anniversary. Austin had learnt that Su’s reluctance to celebrate dates was sincere and deeply felt, but this year she had surprised him with a card and a booking at a restaurant in town. Susanna Wright had agreed to babysit. When they got into the car to drive to the restaurant, both of them a little damp and flushed from the shower, Su braced herself for Austin’s reminiscing. It was what he did. She sometimes saw him, in the middle of some family moment — in the woods with the boys, at dinner with her parents, at the village pantomime, even the two of them in bed together — seeming to close his eyes and store the occasion up for future recollection. He enjoyed the recollection more than the moments themselves, it seemed. But he looked at her, and said nothing. They drove through the village, the sunlight low and flashing through the trees, the smell of summer’s tail-end coming in through the windows. She thought about their first meeting, when she was an assistant producer at the radio station and had come to do a piece on the well dressing, and found herself talking to this clumsy, hesitant man with a bag full of cameras and Dictaphones and notepads. How he’d told her far more about the well dressing than she needed to know, but had then asked her about radio journalism and the BBC, and the other stories she was working on. He did a lot more listening than most of the men she knew, especially the journalists. When the well dressing was finished they’d gone for a drink, and when the drink was done they’d gone for a walk, and the walk had taken them all the way back to his tiny terraced house in town. The story had been simplified over the years, but it had never been much more complicated than that. She looked at him now. She wondered if either of them could ever be that impulsive again. They parked the car, and walked towards the restaurant, and she slipped her hand into his. She stopped him, and stretched up to kiss his cheek, and whispered thank you in his ear. He looked surprised, and kissed her back, and they walked on.

In the closing days of summer the eggs of the dark-green fritillaries in the beech-wood clearing turned from yellow to purple to grey before they hatched. There were no swallows left. The nests were still there, crumbling and mud-flaked, and would be there when the swallows returned in the spring. White campion thronged the verges along the road towards town, their neat flowers wrinkling as the seed-heads began to swell. In the beech wood the young foxes were ready to move on. It was Martin’s turn to put together the Harvest Festival display at the church, and despite regular promises not to let anyone down he disappeared at the last moment. Irene and Winnie stepped in. The river turned over beneath the packhorse bridge and ran steady to the millpond weir. Lynsey Smith came home from Leeds and moved back in with her parents. It was a temporary move but it took a hired van to bring back all her things. She’d been living with a boyfriend after graduation and it hadn’t worked out. He was older than her and worked at the university, and he’d decided the relationship had run its course. He’d told her she was too young to think about settling down. He’d told her she needed some time to find out who she was, to go into the world and have adventures and not be stuck in Leeds with a dowdy old lecturer in public health. He’d told her, when the conversation became a little more heated, that she was too needy and she made him feel trapped. It took her a while to share this with anyone. It made her feel ashamed, she told Sophie. It made her feel that she’d let him down in some way. He texted her sometimes, but when she texted him back he never replied. Sophie told her she needed to let it go. Her parents didn’t ask questions but they knew something had gone wrong. Her mother was patient but her father wanted to know what had been the point of spending all that money on university. They offered her work in the shop and it was easier just to say yes. The Workers’ Educational Association group stuck with Italian for a second year, and the more dedicated element started a conversation club at the Gladstone on a Wednesday evening. Tony ordered a few cases of Peroni in their honour. Cathy knocked on Mr Wilson’s door and asked whether Nelson needed a walk, and he asked her in for a cup of tea. She’d not sat down before he passed her his sponsorship form and told her she’d be sponsoring him for the swim he was doing. She asked if there was a choice and he gave her a look. These poor people don’t get a choice about not having clean water to drink, he said. She asked for a pen. He told her he was barely up to four or five lengths, tops, so she’d best make it at least a fiver per. She snorted, and then realised he wasn’t joking. She’d sat through his talks about this clean-water charity before, so she went ahead and put herself down for five pounds per length. Don’t go overdoing it now, she said. You don’t want to go damaging that hip. He poured the tea. Don’t you worry. The physiotherapy nurses are good but they’re no magicians. There was an unexpected smell about him as he handed over the tea, and she asked whether he’d been smoking.

At the allotments in the long days of rain the broad leaves of courgettes and beans were blackened with rot, the cow parsley collapsing into the hedgerows, the ground spread with a slime of autumn leaves blown in from the beech wood. Clive was cutting back the dead growth and raking it into a heap. Jones was digging his plot bare. Ruth and Susanna were talking on Susanna’s plot, sheltering under a large umbrella and watching the pumpkins ripen against the mulch. It had been a good first season for Susanna. The tomatoes and peppers in the greenhouse hadn’t amounted to much, and the carrots had never even germinated; but there had been potatoes and beans and courgettes and peas, and now these bright swelling pumpkins. The plot was nothing to look at but she had plans for the next year and she felt ready for what was to come. Ruth had been a help. At home Ashleigh had been filling in her university application, and Susanna remembered from Rohan how quickly this last year would go. Ashleigh had broken things off with the Jackson boy so she could concentrate on her A levels, and it didn’t look to Susanna as though either of them were much concerned. At midnight the clouds thickened and the moon dimmed. The widower hadn’t been seen for months, and Jones helped himself to what fruit there was. There had been a concern that something might have happened, and talk of breaking in the door, but when pushed Jones had admitted knowing the man was away, and being in possession of the key. He’d been offered a lecturing job abroad, was Jones’s information, and had taken his daughter with him for six months. For the educational experience. Jones knew a lot about the man, it turned out, but he didn’t share anything more. On Mischief Night a girl from another village dressed up in a white hooded top with a navy-blue body-warmer, and black jeans, and canvas shoes, and zombie make-up. She was driven back to her parents, and words were had. There was building work at Culshaw Hall, and talk the new owners were turning it into a hotel and lodge. The dams had their ten-year inspection and three of them were found to be failing, the steel rods in the concrete exposed and the concrete crumbling away. The Valley Echo carried a report of the sponsored swim, in which it was noted that Mr Wilson had shown unexpected stamina by swimming twenty-one lengths. Heartfelt congratulations were offered.