The Well

by Catherine Chanter

  ‘Angie.’ I found it hard to speak. ‘Dad didn’t say you were here! I didn’t know . . .’

  ‘Hi Mum!’ She hugged me, she put her arms around me and hugged me.

  ‘You look so good. So well. I am so . . .’ I couldn’t finish. I stepped away from her and wiped my face on my sleeve. ‘I’m sorry, it’s just that we haven’t heard from you.’

  ‘Looks like your mum’s brought your breakfast,’ said Charley. ‘Now that’s what I call maternal!’

  ‘It’ll get Lucien up, for sure,’ said Angie and Charley obligingly left us to it and went over to stick his head in the tent and called to Lucien to wake up. Angie read my thoughts.

  ‘Usually it’s just Lucien and his friend Henni who sleep in the tent and I’m in the van with Charley, but everything got a bit messed up last night because we got lost and arrived really late and it was dark. We didn’t want to turn the headlights on in case we woke you up and you were freaked out. We didn’t, did we?’

  ‘Not really, we thought we heard something, but . . .’ There was no point in starting off with an argument, but I did have questions.

  How had they got in? It turns out the police had got wind of their arrival without Mark ever having to phone and there was a police car at the gate when they pulled up at midnight. But it was the same ‘copper’ who had been round to The Well to identimark our farm machinery when we moved in and Angie and Lucien were around. He recognised them and let them in.

  Why hadn’t she kept in touch? Apparently they didn’t use phones much, these people she was travelling with; they tried to avoid television and the internet, she said. She didn’t even own a mobile any longer.

  ‘It helps us focus,’ said Angie.

  Focus on what?

  ‘The important stuff. The land. The community.’

  What brought them here?

  Word of mouth apparently. When Duccombe went down, everyone was talking about this other place which had been in the paper where it still rained and how people should mobilise to protect it. She didn’t even realise at first that it was The Well they were on about.

  You could have written, I wanted to say. The recriminations were rising; I swallowed to keep them under control. Every reunion for the last five years was like that: relief, then shock, joy, resentment, anger, regret, played out over and over again at different intervals and with different emphases, but always the same excuses, the same pain. I was saved this time.

  ‘Granny R!’

  Lucien. I see him now. I see him often. Curly hair, reddish gold like the sun, brown, barefoot. I give him a bun and he eats it, splats of ketchup landing on his bedtime T-shirt with a picture of a bee on it. A bee and a buttercup. Bees and buttercups have an unbearable beauty for me now.

  Mark was furious. Day after day, following the article, we had faced relentless petty incursions onto our land and all the adrenalin aroused in him when he first saw the travellers’ vans turned into bitter accusations for letting Angie turn my happiness on and off like a switch when she chose or chose not to appear in our lives.

  ‘She can’t just come and visit her parents like any normal daughter, can she? She couldn’t possibly have called ahead. No. She has to arrive in the middle of the night and bring half of La La Land with her, as if we didn’t have enough problems with trespassers.’

  His anger was familiar, in part fuelled by relief that she and Lucien were OK and in part by fury that she always turned up with other people in tow, without ever asking. We never dared say no; if we pushed her away, then we risked never seeing her or Lucien again and we owed it to both of them to keep trying.

  Angie and Lucien came down to the cottage to say hello and I think it was Lucien who persuaded Mark to come up and meet the travellers. Mark could never resist Lucien. He strode up to the camp, pressing down the ruts where the vans had driven over the field with his heel, picking up a leaflet about benefits which had blown across the drive from the caravan and dropping it ostentatiously into the fire. Once there, though, I think even he was won over. It was company apart from anything else. We were both starved of company. Bru’s death had deprived us of our one mutual friend and we didn’t feel ready to replace him. We never did. Mark got involved in a long conversation with a couple of the men about the shortage of temporary work and ended up saying he’d probably have some odd jobs around The Well over the next few weeks, as if he’d thought of the idea in the first place. There was a lot of fencing which needed doing if we were going to keep people out, he said. He couldn’t even do his usual rant about parasites and junkies because everyone who travelled with them took a pledge not to use. One of Angie’s friends was telling me how they helped each other keep clean, for the sake of the kids, for themselves, to be true to something and I found myself seduced by their thoughtfulness. I blocked out the distant whine of a siren in the valley and instead relished the prospect of company and conversation which Angie and her travellers brought with them. The siren grew louder. It had turned off the main road and was coming up the lane.

  Angie spoke to the group. ‘While we’re all here, I just wanted to thank Mark and Mum for letting us stay and I just want to say to everyone to respect the land, because this is like a working farm with sheep and stuff.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I mouthed at her across the group, but she was distracted because the siren had become deafening. From the other side of the distant hedge, I could see blue lights on our lane.

  Mark jumped to his feet. ‘It’s coming this way!’ he shouted, running towards the gate.

  I half stood up. Angie held Lucien tightly by the hand, presumably to stop him following Mark. Everyone stared at him running up the hill, with two kids behind him making nee-naw noises. The men closed ranks, asking each other what sort of shit was this? I moved away from them until I could see Mark talking through the window of a police car that had pulled up in front of our gate. He looked more at ease talking to the officer than with his daughter. I looked back at the travellers.

  ‘Go and help him, Mum,’ called Angie.

  Out of breath, I caught up with Mark. The two police cars had now been joined by an ambulance and a crowd of people were milling around, like extras in some cheap TV drama, waiting for the action to begin. Mark gesticulated at a line of cars and vans stretching down the narrow lane.

  ‘Hundreds of them apparently, on their way here from all over the bloody country, thinking we’re the Promised Land. I told you. Enough company for you now?’

  The policeman lived in Lenford. I recognised him as Morgan’s brother-in-law.

  ‘Sergeant Willis, isn’t it?’ I asked.

  ‘Afternoon, Mrs Ardingly.’

  He said they had reinforcements coming down from the north of the county and I said I didn’t think that was necessary, that once people realised they couldn’t camp here, then they’d satisfy their curiosity and be gone.

  ‘Are you crazy, Ruth?’ Mark was uncoiling barbed wire which he had brought up to the top hedge days ago when he had found a photographer snooping. He had no gloves and it was tearing his fingers, but he didn’t notice. ‘They’re believers, they won’t get fobbed off that easily. Not now they’ve escaped from the asylum and seen the Promised Land.’

  His reference to my daughter was unmistakable; his love affair with the travellers short-lived. The sergeant moved away as he talked into his radio and over by the gate a roar broke out from the gathered crowd as they started banging on the doors and roofs of a police van which had just pulled up.

  ‘Help me move the wire, Ruth,’ Mark shouted.

  ‘No, wait! Someone just needs to talk to them,’ I called back. Behind me, several of the travellers were lined up, watching, waiting, when a couple of dishevelled young men started to break through the hedge from the road and aggression agitated the crowd. Mark picked up a fencing stake.

  ‘Get off this land before I make you!’

  Sergeant Willis moved between them, his raised hand lowering the wooden pole. ‘Leave that to us, sir,�
� he said.

  Mark dropped it. ‘It’s because we’ve let this lot in,’ he ranted, pointing at the group of watching travellers. ‘That’s what the police think. She did this. Word spreads.’

  She didn’t even warrant a name, right then. I wanted to argue but it wasn’t worth it. Already explanations and listening were valuable commodities in short supply. Mark set off at a run down the drive to pick up the most recent investment in our smallholding: padlocks, bolts, chains, electric fencing, the stage props of imprisonment. Gradually the police took control, the shouting diminished, the vans manoeuvred onto the verges to do awkward three-point turns and head back to wherever it was they came from. Turning my back on all that, I walked slowly towards Angie and Lucien as Mark hurtled towards the house. I tasted separation in the back of my throat like sour milk and retched. My head swam and when the world stopped turning, Mark had disappeared out of sight.

  Later that evening, he asked me what was happening to him. ‘I would have hit them, you know, if Willis hadn’t stopped me. I would have done it.’ His face was hidden in his hands on the table.

  ‘We’re so tired,’ I said, ‘we were up half the night and it’s been a long day.’ I kissed the back of his head. ‘It’s because this place matters to us, that’s why. And I don’t think you would have hit them, Mark, not when it came to it. You’re just not that sort of person.’

  Like poachers turned gamekeepers, the following days were spent with Mark and Charley and one or two of the other men from the camp repairing fences and locking gates and towing boulders into gaps where ancient tracks met new roads. I ferried to and fro, between the house and the camp, bringing food out to the travellers, bringing questions home. Lucien was often with me at my side. The sightseers, soothsayers and naysayers gradually drifted away, the police presence was scaled back, but they left a code which we were to give to the station if more people turned up or tried to break in. But it wasn’t just travellers who had us under siege. The newspaper article had opened a floodgate of obsession. We were contacted continuously by everyone from estate agents to extra-terrestrial enthusiasts. The guttural pulse of helicopters droned over the house like bees in winter. Several times one or other of us would come across a reporter, trespassing on our land, with a long lens and a thirsty pen. Despite the assurances he’d given me, I was worried that Mark, who was once probably one of the most cerebral and least physically aggressive people you were ever likely to meet, would get into a fight. I watched with foreboding when he headed out at dusk to check the fences, his shotgun cocked under his arm.

  The post lessened slightly over the weeks, but still piles of envelopes pleading and promising and prying lay unopened on the spare-room floor. We changed our e-mail address, only answered our new mobile phone, and gave up going out unless we had to. We did attend Tom’s funeral, taking two of the extra chairs which had been laid out at the back of the packed church, but we were unwelcome mourners both for the publicity we attracted and for our perceived complicity in the drought which had caused his death. After that, we relied increasingly on the internet to connect with the outside world, shopping online, putting a large crate at the top of the drive where curious supermarket delivery drivers could dump their orders over the fence. Unless we collected our deliveries quickly, they were stolen, now that the price of even basic foods like sugar and bread was becoming unaffordable for so many people. Either that or the locals were trying to win the siege by starving us out. At home I struggled to concentrate on doing what I had planned to do, making a poor job of preparing the vegetable garden. Mark immersed himself in the farm, preoccupied with the arrival of his piglets. He settled them in like a foster mother, fussing over them, gradually increasing the size of the pen until they were free to rummage in the wood at will, clearing the undergrowth for us. He found refuge there; I had Lucien. For a while, we muddled through, but not for long.

  There was the evening I suggested tackling the backlog of post. Tired and unenthusiastic, having spent the day sawing up the wood left over from the improvements to the barn, I was slumped in front of the television watching a bleak documentary about the plight of the growing number of homeless people, victims of the now snowballing financial crisis. I imagined them, scratching their legs as they scrabbled over hedges, stinging their fingers on the nettles covering the stiles as they struggled onto our land, with Mark and I trampled underfoot on our own doorstep. I didn’t want to share my doomsday scenario with Mark; we were beyond sharing nightmares, or dreams or beds even, since for two nights now he had slept in the little bedroom. We pretended it was because he was coughing a lot; we knew it wasn’t. I had an idea: a waste-paper basket full of unopened post. We can’t just throw it all away, I reasoned, we can’t assume it’s all from nutters. Let’s do it now in front of the television, just clear the backlog. He didn’t want to, but he agreed. It was at least something we were going to do together. We even managed to laugh at some of the letters.

  Dear Sirs

  You will be interested to know that I have been bequeathed the seeds of an ancient pea from the Holy Land, handed from generation to generation since the birth of our Lord. I am offering you the chance to buy these seeds for £100,000 to plant in your holy land . . .

  That seemed hilarious at the time, but it is perhaps even more hilarious now to think that I did spend a year worshipping the floral equivalent of the sacred pea. The Rose of Jericho mocks me and minds me still.

  We pressed on. Mark emptied one bottle of our homemade damson gin and opened another and we sat next to each other on the sofa, sharing some of the more bizarre offerings. Behind us the ten o’clock news showed 271 in the corner of the screen next to Big Ben – the number of days since it had rained on the London weather centre – but nevertheless we were laughing, letting our bodies touch each other in quite an ordinary way. I was even wondering if he might sleep in the same bed as me that night.

  Mark had no inkling that I had an ulterior motive. I had loved him once for his straightforwardness, his truthfulness. I was convinced he was never a man who dissembled and I think he thought the same about me. I pulled out the formal letter to both of us, which I had in fact opened some days before and had been re-reading on my own over and over again. It was typed on paper headed ‘Cranborne, Cranborne and Chase, Solicitors’. They were acting on behalf of a private client who wished to remain anonymous, but who was prepared to offer in excess of £5 million for the freehold of The Well and all its land.

  ‘Yes, and pigs might fly,’ Mark said. ‘Next you’ll be showing me an unmissable offer from Nigeria from someone who says we just need to give him our bank details and ours is the kingdom of heaven.’

  There were plenty of those if he wanted to read them, I said, but there were plenty of serious offers too. I showed him one from a philanthropist who wanted to buy the place and use it for research (I scanned the letter for the right wording), so as to ‘reduce the harmful effects of drought on the most vulnerable in our society’. They were not all from selfish bastards or big corporations, I told him. He took a plain piece of paper, with a beautiful italic, handwritten script. It was from a religious order which had been given the money to buy the place as a centre of spiritual peace and contemplation in difficult times.

  ‘We don’t need the brotherhood for that,’ I said, ‘your own daughter’s busy doing that off her own bat down the end of your garden, if you were only prepared to notice.’ I filled up my glass, half empty, half laughing.

  But Mark wasn’t laughing; he had suddenly realised I was seriously recommending selling up.

  ‘Don’t talk to me about not making a go of it,’ he said. ‘I’ve put more of myself into this place than you. All of myself, in fact.’

  ‘This was, is my dream just as much as yours.’

  ‘It’s me who’s done the planting and the ploughing. I’ve invested a hell of a lot more in this place in practice than you have.’ He chucked the envelopes on the floor.

  ‘So you should have done. It
was you who needed to get away.’

  ‘So we’re back to that, then? Never going to be allowed to forget that, am I?’

  ‘You know that’s not what I mean. For God’s sake, turn the telly off.’

  Mark stood up and got the remote. ‘No. I don’t know what you mean because you never really knew what you thought, did you?’

  With the volume on mute and the news playing out like a dumb show behind us, the room was silent for a pause between our ranting. I tried to continue in a quieter voice. ‘It’s nothing to do with that. Nothing to do with the money either. It’s about us.’

  ‘Exactly. That’s what I’m saying.’

  ‘No, it’s not.’

  Mark stood with his back to me, staring at the silent screen, and said, ‘You’re not listening.’

  ‘Yes, I am. I want to leave, but not without . . .’

  He swung round. ‘Well, fuck off and leave then.’

  He turned the sound back on, racking up the volume notch by notch. I had to shout to make myself heard. ‘. . . not without you, Mark. I’m saying we both go. Hand this land over to someone who can make better use of it than us.’

  ‘I’m staying.’

  ‘Why?’