The Well

by Catherine Chanter

  ‘I was surprised you requested a priest,’ he puffs and pauses and puffs again. ‘After all that has happened here with the Sisters of the Rose of Jericho. Who was the one? Sister Amelia, was it? Haven’t you had enough of religion?’

  His question reminds me that I had not intended to like him. ‘I wanted a visitor,’ I say.

  ‘Any old visitor?’

  ‘I am not spoiled for choice. You were one they couldn’t refuse.’

  ‘No other reason for a priest then?’

  I hesitate, deciding to be economical with the truth. ‘I am haunted,’ I say. ‘I thought you’d bring some answers with you.’

  ‘Who haunts you?’

  ‘There are any number of ghosts here. It depends on where I am, what I am doing. There are the Sisters, there are . . .’ I stop myself, I will not name the others. ‘There are others, I’m sure you’ve heard all about it.’ We pause at the top of the hill and look out over the fields and onto the yellow ochre hills beyond and I continue, ‘But here, at this spot, I am haunted by the ghost of a farmer. He was our neighbour, Tom. He was an absolute lifeline for us when we moved in. I don’t know how we would have survived without him, ordinary things, everyday stuff. It’s difficult to explain, but it almost came as a shock to us, his kindness, after everything we’d been through. We could hardly believe it was real.’

  His old milking parlour is visible from here; the corrugated iron which patched up the roof is catching the afternoon light. Fool’s gold.

  ‘Sometimes, if I am sitting out here, I see him walking the hedges, checking the lambs. He had a habit of tying baler twine around the gateposts in a clove hitch. They hung around for ages, the bits of orange string, like those gaudy flowers people tie to lampposts after an accident. Then it seems as though he is coming over to chat to me, but he looks straight through me, walks straight through me. My only visitors are ghosts.’

  ‘Times have been hard for farmers,’ acknowledges the priest, but I am not listening to him. I am both the storyteller and audience.

  ‘We did try to help. They used to farm the Well land, you know, before we arrived. Eventually, we offered to run pipes from the Wellspring down through his farm and Martin’s, but they were very suspicious of us by then, wanted to know what was in it for us, pointed out we hadn’t got a licence to supply and then Mark wouldn’t apply for one because he’d never wanted to do it in the first place and the whole idea fell flat.’

  ‘I’m sure you did what you could at the time.’

  ‘It wasn’t enough, was it? One night, after supper, with his wife in the kitchen doing the washing up and the brown envelopes piling up on the sideboard, he swapped his slippers for boots, his cardigan for his tweed jacket and pulled on his cap that he kept for market days. Then, it seems, he slipped out of the house, across the yard and wedged the barn door closed behind him with two fifty-pound plastic sacks of chicken feed. I expect he wanted to make sure that only a man could find him, do you think that’s why?’

  The Revd Casey half raises his arms, empty-handed; he doesn’t offer an opinion, he doesn’t have answers. ‘I think I know where this story is leading, Ruth, you don’t have to do this.’ He reaches out as if to touch me, but I flinch him away. He is wrong. I do have to do this.

  ‘It was new rope, you know, brand new, slung over the oak beam and secured around the handlebars of the quad bike. They owed a lot of money on that. Imagine him, taking time to steady himself as he climbs onto the old chair, clutching at the fractured ladderback until slowly, like a tightrope walker, he straightens up and catches the end of the rope and ties the knot. He was very good at knots, did I mention that? He still had his cap on when they found him; that would have mattered to him.’

  ‘The suicide rate among farmers has been something dreadful, may God rest his soul.’

  The priest crosses himself and we sit on the grass in silence. I respect people who are good at silence. I’ve been to two funerals at Little Lennisford; Tom’s was the first. It wasn’t as hard as the second, but it wasn’t easy. Both of them – guilt and grief – hand in glove.

  Finally there is a question from the audience. ‘Can you say why you are telling me all this? Were you thinking that I might be an exorcist?’

  ‘It’s far too late for that. Maybe if you – if any of you – had come along earlier. But you weren’t there when it mattered and I fell for it, the whole religious scenario, and now it’s too late.’ I get to my feet. He takes longer to struggle up and I am torn between offering to help him and watching him flounder.

  ‘Is it our fault then?’ he asks when he is finally standing.

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘Those of us who weren’t there when it mattered.’

  I kick at a molehill without replying.

  He continues. ‘God was there, somewhere. For you. For Tom. It is never too late to face the ghosts, you know.’ Now he is wheezing in his attempt to keep up with me, breathless by the time we get to the gate. ‘Come on, you wouldn’t expect to invite a vicar for tea and to get away without a sermon, would you?’

  ‘I became rather used to doing the preaching myself,’ I tell him. ‘I was probably as good as the next charlatan. Because that’s what it is in the end, isn’t it? All lights and mirrors. Besides, I’m not interested in the meaning of life any longer. There is only one question to be answered, as far as I am concerned, only one truth to be found. Nothing else matters.’

  ‘To not know who killed your own grandson is a terrible thing. I can only imagine the pain of not knowing,’ he says.

  Three is waiting for us, ostentatiously checking his watch. ‘Your pass expires at 5 p.m.,’ he says.

  The Reverend smiles beatifically. ‘The Lord alone knows when our time is up.’

  Church: one – army: nil. I hate to say it, but I like his spirit.

  ‘I don’t want to outstay my welcome, or indeed jeopardise my chances of coming again, so I’ll be off. If my parishioner and I might just have a moment?’ The Reverend holds the silence and under pressure Three retreats. ‘Now, about the Eucharist . . .’

  I put my hands in my pockets. ‘You’ve probably gathered by now that it wasn’t . . .’

  ‘Exactly as I thought.’ Revd Casey goes inside and through the kitchen window I can see him busying himself with the plastic bag, the Bible, the little box, the flask, while Three and I wait at a distance from each other without talking. The priest comes out and smiles benevolently towards the waiting soldier. ‘Ruth and I have shared a very special time here today.’ He raises an eyebrow quizzically as he looks at me.

  It seems I have a choice, an unfamiliar feeling, but it doesn’t take me long to make up my mind. Apart from anything else, I think this old priest could be easily manipulated and will have his uses. ‘Thank you, Reverend,’ I say loudly. ‘I look forward to seeing you next week.’

  ‘If I’m to come again, then you must call me Hugh. I will be here, same time next week. God bless you both.’

  The priest – Hugh, as I must learn to call him – begins his slow walk back up to the road, pausing again at the brow of the hill where I think I see his right hand rise and fall in the sign of the cross, although he may just have been adjusting his hat.

  ‘A very holy man,’ I comment to Three.

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ Three replies.

  Nor would I.

  The whole house feels different, even the air hangs awkwardly; neither of us is used to visitors. I walk through my garden in the dying light and reclaim it, surprised by how disorientated I am at this contact with another human being. He was right about one thing: there are ghosts to be confronted here. I turn back and go inside, but it takes a long time before I get as far as the landing. I stare at the closed door which separates me from Lucien’s room and strain to hear beyond the silence. My thumb is on the latch, my fingers around the black metal handle. I press and release the catch and open the door, just an inch or two, just enough to check the night-time breathing. Without going in, I reac
h around the doorframe and fumble for the switch, stepping into the room for the first time since I have been back. It is virtually empty, except for a black bin liner of Lucien’s things returned to us by the police, tied in a knot which I will never be able to undo. The mattress on the bed lies sullen and ugly – no sheet, no duvet, no pillow to grace it. No head on the pillow. No hair on the head. No carved wooden rose hung with a leather thread around his neck. To not know who murdered your grandson is a terrible thing. If only I were to find the wooden rose, I would be one step closer to knowing.

  I move the bedside light as if the rose necklace might have just dropped down behind, in the way that in more ordinary times pound coins find the gaps between cushions or earrings rest between floor-boards, but there is, of course, nothing. On my stomach I force my chewed fingernails between the cracks in the floorboards, lie face down with my mouth licking the dust, squinting into the darkness; on my knees I crawl to the bed and drag it from the wall so that the spiders scuttle from the skirting boards. Not this room then, not here, but surely somewhere there is a small rose carved in wood and threaded with leather and if that was found, then the truth would be next.

  In the bathroom, the medicine cabinet has been emptied by the guards, all cleaning fluids locked away, but I can still rip up the carpet and tear down the false hardboard wall which conceals the pipes, cutting my arm on the screws sticking out of the plaster. Downstairs, I can claw the curtains from the rails and I do; I can empty the coal dust from the bucket and shower the sitting room black so that it too can be in mourning, and I do; I can pull the emptied drawers from the sideboard and dislocate the sides from the front, the bottom from the sides, the brass handles from the front, and I do. I must, because somewhere is the small wooden rose which my grandson wore and which has never been found and if I can find it, if I can only find it . . . Nothing will stop me searching, nothing, nothing, nothing.

  ‘Can you speak to me, Ruth?’

  There are men on my brittle arms, over my wasted legs, the weight of men on top of me. Sister Amelia warned me about the weight of men, holding you under until you cannot breathe any longer. I am offered a drink in a small, cardboard beaker and I know it is poison from the moment it sleeps my tongue.

  Sleep is a malevolent force. It lurks around the edges of my bed like a sick dog, its bad breath hanging on the night air. There are many explanations for what I may have done. It is not unusual for people to be unable to remember the heinous deeds committed by their own hands, conceived in their own minds even in broad daylight, while wide awake. Then there are those who do terrible things when they are asleep. Then there have been those throughout history who have done things of great importance, both good and evil, when it was not clear if they were awake or asleep or in some half world, as yet unclassified by scientists. This is another grammatical construct I have not thought of until now. I have been thinking about what I may have been, what might have been, but now my mind turns to what must have been.

  My thigh is branded with the sign of the Rose. One night, during those last days, I must have stood over the Rayburn and heated the metal emblem until it was white, must have held it with an oven glove as I pressed it against my own flesh, must have smelled the burning, must have felt the million pins pierce me. Sister Amelia blessed and tended the burn the next morning with honey, I do remember that. The mark is here now, I feel its uneven writing with my fingers and it reminds me of the pain I could suffer and the pain I could inflict in an ecstasy of unknowing.

  Although the psychiatric assessments dismissed as unlikely the possibility that I was one of those people capable of terrible acts of destruction while in a state of sleep, there are those who still consider it a possible solution to Lucien’s unsolved death, myself among them. The press, of course, loved it.

  ‘The saint: did she sleepwalk her way to murder?’

  ‘Was this a visionary death?’

  I will never be able to dismiss that possibility until someone else is found guilty – and until that happens, I cannot sleep. When I do finally fall asleep, which is usually when it grows light (as if the diminishing darkness takes with it the possibility of destructive acts), then I dream of footprints leading in the reeds, of a heron cast in iron on the far bank of the Wellspring, staring. If I am not to become a prisoner not only of the state, but of my own self, I must go to the Wellspring again.

  The grass in First Field is becoming sparse, the thistles scratch my ankles and I can feel the flints through the soles of my shoes. We always thought the water table here was close to the surface, but as the rest of the country has proved, that cannot last forever. There is a strange quiet in this empty field. The guards told me that the government disposed of the remaining livestock, by which they meant my lambless ewes, my harebrained hens, Mark’s feral piglets. Disposed of. Shot. Hundreds of years these fields have hosted sheep, cows heavy with milk and the wind whispering the barley, and now they are barren, unless you count the sterile strips of engineered produce patrolled by the guards, and I don’t. Reaching the crest of the hill, I stop. The history of the River Lenn is embodied in the landscape around me: the position of the church close to the bridge, its Norman tower clearly visible now that so many of the trees, weakened by drought, have come down in the gales; the ribbon of cottages along its length, road following rail following river as our industrial past snakes its way towards Wales. Then to the north, the Crag, a bitter and rugged hill keeping its bald head bullish above the simpering lowlands. I bring my eyes away from the horizon to the nearby landscape and the footpath descending the hill in front of me, down to the stile into the wood, between brambles and low-hanging boughs of budding ash, until it reaches the Wellspring.

  Despite the afternoon sun slanting through the canopy, the water looks black and the reflections of the surrounding trees blur as three or four mallards dip their heads for food in the thickening sludge. Sister Amelia would not have liked the brash dominance of the male birds, their harassment of the muted females on her reservoir of femininity. There is a flash of blue over yellow as the kingfisher takes flight over and is gone, then it is still and quiet apart from the intermittent warnings screeched by the vulgar crows in the treetops. The water level is low and parts of the old moss-covered stones are exposed, but they hold in their memory the marks showing where the surface usually lies. Matter holds memory they say, in which case these are sad stones. I approach the pond, kneel down and dip my fingers in, feel the coolness, cup my hands and wash my face and let the drips run down the front of my shirt, trace their way down the veins of the inside of my arms. Staring into the dark mirror, it is as if I can see his face, as if he is about to say something.

  With my eyes closed, I can banish the spectre of the Sisters encircling the water and pray. No. It is not a prayer. It is rather a saying out loud of things which need to be said, but I do not anticipate being heard or answered. Tell me how he died.

  There is a time to cast stones and a time to gather. I pick three flints from the dust-dry floor of the forest. I toss the first into the water and watch the ripples in perfect circles pulse towards the reeds which are just breaking the surface with their lurid spring-green confidence. Screeching, the ducks take flight, heaving into the air with a gross flapping and a pandemonium.

  It could have been the Sisters.

  I throw the next flint, a little harder; it falls off centre, creating cavorting waves which cross the paths of the ripples and revel in the anarchy.

  It could have been Mark.

  The third flint fits my hand. I draw the sharp edge across the thin transparent skin of my wrist until a red weal rises up, with just the smallest beads of blood, congealing, not spilling.

  It could have been me.

  I stand and hurl the last stone into the pond. Water does not forget either. The blackness makes my head swim and, feeling faint, I grope towards the log where I used to meditate, staying there long enough to regain some sort of equilibrium and for the ducks to alight on the
water again as if nothing has happened there. As I retrace my steps back to the house, the breeze swings to the southwest and the horizon, far beyond Edward’s Castle and Cadogan Top. Clouds gather, great shafts of light ruling lines of fool’s gold across the forests on the other side of the valley.

  Last night I slept. This morning I wake and it has rained. I went to the Wellspring. It rained. It just depends which conjunction you choose to link the sentences. For me, it is a sign that The Well will give up its answers to me one day, but for others it is a justification of the paraphernalia which has been ploughed into this place. A convoy shudders down the drive. Government officials get out and crawl all over the fields with their probes and electronic gauges and high-tech equipment, while members of the press are invited to take photographs of the crops. Three is in his element, marshalling the parking like the science teacher at sports day. Boy and Anon are children, jumping in puddles.

  ‘Is this what it was like before?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Just some rain, falling here and not anywhere else. Everything else went from there.’

  ‘Did you know it was going to rain?’

  ‘Will it rain again?’

  I have a question of my own: can there be rain without visions and voices? That would be something worth having.

  There is one last emotion, though, which I have not anticipated. I am feeling smug. There, you thought you were just guarding a middle-aged crank who had delusions of grandeur, but now you’ll have to think twice, smart-arse.

  Rain, rain, go away. Come again another day. I dance like a witch-doctor around the sitting room.