Mark did not reply immediately. He turned the television off completely and spoke slowly. ‘Because I love it here. Because it’s what I’ve always wanted ever since I was a kid. Because it was what I was always going to be until . . .’
‘Until what, Mark? Until I spoiled it for you? Because I got pregnant with some other bloke and produced a daughter who turned out to be a nightmare. That’s what you’ve always wanted to say out loud, but haven’t dared.’
Mark sat back down. Having opened the door to the wood-burning stove, I started chucking in the envelopes one by one. The flames illuminated half of Mark, biting his fingernails, leaving the rest of his face in the dark. I reached for some more of the begging letters. He put his foot on the handwritten one from the religious brotherhood, then reached down and took my hand. Exhausted, I laid my head on his knees.
‘We’re in over our heads here. If we leave, it would free us up,’ I said, trying again.
I wanted so much to try again and again and again. I was a believer.
Before we went to bed, he opened the back door and called to me to look at the night sky. The Plough was low and clear; I followed the line of the constellation all the way to the North Star.
‘Wish upon a star?’ he said, slipping his arm around my back. From behind we must have looked like the perfect couple.
I found it hard to stop shivering then and I shiver again now, thinking about the black night, the North Star, everything it saw, the way it turned a blind eye when it mattered.
Dear Mark
I haven’t heard from you. I don’t know if that’s because you haven’t written or because they don’t let your letters through.
I only want to know if you have heard from Angie. Nothing more.
Do you think about The Well? It thinks about you. The coppice unharvested in the woods, last year’s spinach cropping up again, the damson blossom, you are part of all of it and more. Do you remember the night when I suggested we sell, when you said ‘Wish upon a star?’ I wonder what you wished for.
I am lonely. I cannot make sense of the fact that you have not contacted me once after over twenty years of being together. What am I meant to make of that? I am asking you to please visit me, visit The Well. I never was anything without you and now I am less than nothing.
I do not know who killed Lucien. If you know, and if you ever loved me, then you must come back and tell me, however awful that might be. If it was neither of us, we will be stronger in our search for the truth together than apart.
Ruth
Boy knocks on the door. Nothing important, he is just warning me that the electricity is going to be turned off for a couple of hours while they repair a break in the fence. That explains the alarms going off. I am encouraged that someone wants to break into my prison. Oh, there’s no end of people wanting to do that, he laughs. I love the way he laughs, so won over by his innocence and idealism that I tell him, quite unexpectedly, that I have just written to my husband asking him to come and visit me, but what a waste of time it has been, since I don’t expect to be allowed to post it. Boy looks at me, then at the floor and I know immediately that I have put him under pressure to post it for me and that is unfair.
‘But it doesn’t matter. It was a load of self-pitying drivel anyway,’ I say. ‘Probably better not to send it even if I could. That’s the good thing about letters, rather than e-mail . . .’
Boy interrupts me. ‘I can post it for you.’
He is an adolescent, all impetuosity and risk-taking. With a terrible lurch, he crosses a line and everything changes. The room fills with awkwardness: the lid which doesn’t match the teapot, the way the fridge rattles and dies as the electricity goes off, the squeak of the soles of my shoes on the lino. Although it is no later than six, it seems dark in the kitchen now with the lights off.
‘No, you mustn’t do that,’ I say quietly.
‘I will,’ Boy insists, ‘but you need to understand that I would have to read it.’
I turn to look at him.
‘It’s not that I’m into censuring stuff, or any bullshit like that, but at least if I was caught I could say that I’d followed the protocol. Because if I was caught, I’d be sent away, wouldn’t I, and then I wouldn’t be any use at all.’
I keep my thumb and forefinger on the edge of the envelope, but do not tear it, yet. ‘It’s not worth it, it really isn’t,’ I say. ‘What little life I have will continue to stutter along, but you’ll have served your time soon and then you’ve got everything ahead of you. If you walk out of conscription without a reference, you’re done for, if that’s the right expression.’
Boy pulls up a chair to the kitchen table and sits down and immediately looks embarrassed. It is the second thing he has done in the last five minutes which has usurped the ordained order of things.
‘No, stay there,’ I reassure him, as he half rises to his feet. I sit down opposite him. ‘Where’s Three?’
He smiles. ‘I can’t get over the way you persist in calling him that. He has got a name, you know.’
‘So have you, but I still call you Boy. Just terms of endearment.’
He answers the original question, spinning an apple around on the table. ‘He’s with Adrian down at the bottom of the Brook field, mending the electric fence. They’ll be ages.’
Saliva moistens my mouth; I catch myself scratching the back of my neck, an old nervous habit I’d quite forgotten. Signs of life. Across from me Boy bites into the apple, teeth on skin in silence and I think, that was my apple, and the chewing and the swallowing are audible, physical violations or invitations. He has said he will post the letter, so let him post the letter. I move around the table, dragging the chair behind me, sit down beside him with the letter in my hand. I take it out of its envelope, unfold it and spread it out in front of us.
‘If you don’t want me to . . .’ he begins, but I shush him by shaking my head.
It is difficult to decipher in the gloom. The rays of the lowering sun are at the one point of their daily cycle where they shine between the oak tree and the corner of the house and through the kitchen window. So we move up a bit, to take advantage of their temporary light. Our eyes follow the shapes of the words in front of us, up and down the uneven letters, but we are blind men reading. Touch is the only sense left in the room. I know that my leg is barely an inch from his. Not only can I feel my own chest rising and falling, but his too, his shoulders lifting imperceptibly beneath the khaki shirt, his ribcage swelling and retreating, his breath invisible but felt. Like a teenager myself, I shift fractionally until our legs are touching. He does not move away. There has been time enough to read the first page and turn over, but we sit in this magnetic state unable to go forward or back. The thought that this boy is beautiful finds space in the closed ecstasy of my mind – the boy is beautiful and he is touching me.
His radio buzzes in his pocket. Our legs divide. He gives some confirmation to Anon in an unnecessarily loud voice and then tells me the others are on their way back and he stands up abruptly. I walk without reason to the sink, turn the tap on and let the cold water run. Staring at the sink, I think, do not look at him, do not think about what has just happened. Then he is leaving, he is gone.
So is the letter.
The gap is flooded with Mark. Adultery comes dressed in many different garments, but when I am stripped naked, it is Mark who is there, Mark is everywhere tonight. He is sitting at his desk, sorting out the bills, he is leaning forward, cheering at the television, England vs. Wales: 24–23 in the last three minutes. When I go upstairs to bed, I meet him coming out of the bathroom, his pyjamas low around his waist, his chest bare, rubbing his wet hair with an old, fraying towel. He has a farmer’s tan. But when I close my eyes, I hear him: not the Mark that was meant to be, but the Mark he became, the Ruth and Mark we became. The scuttling of the mice behind the skirting boards becomes the relentless scratching of our arguments, the screech of the owl outside my window, the cuts we inflicted on each other.
An example: Mark is pouring himself another glass; I am deciding to stay sober. He is brewing up for a showdown; I crack the eggs into a bowl for an omelette. Lucien has asked to stay the night with us, but he is upstairs crying.
‘I expect he’ll settle.’
‘He’s very restless at the moment.’
‘I don’t think he’s very happy.’
‘He’s not the only one around here.’
‘Who do you mean?’
‘Who do you think I mean?’
‘We can’t go on like this.’
‘Like what? Just joking.’
‘It’s not funny. It’s not fucking funny.’
Mark stays drinking. Lucien starts crying again.
Another breakfast, another argument: Mark throws a pile of letters and printed e-mails onto the kitchen table and embarks on a monologue.
‘Forget the crackpots, the druids, the parish council, the society of rain dancers. These are serious. These all need a reply. Have you even bothered to read them? This one is from the Drought Environment Agency Force – something about compulsory access to the place. And this one is threatening to prosecute us because we haven’t replied to the first one. And this one is some sort of newly dreamt-up legal notice of right of government, something which we have ten days to respond to and which never existed on the statute books when I read law. Fucking interfering bureaucrats!’
A response to the monologue by me: ‘Don’t walk out, Mark. That’s so childish. Like all this is just going to go away if we pretend it doesn’t exist and we can carry on planting broad beans – wake up! This isn’t our land anymore anyway. Not our land, not our lives. It’s just our problem. Let’s leave, before it drives us mad.’
He has gone.
‘Before it drives us apart,’ I say to myself. The post stays on the table.
A third example: at night, when we were still in the same bed. We’d separate, try again; it would start conciliatory, then end up at loggerheads. I’d go to bed first and often pretend to be asleep.
‘I still love it here.’ Mark with his back to me, closing the shutters. ‘I know I’m going to get up tomorrow morning, look out of this window and think, how could we ever leave?’
I open my eyes. ‘Do you think I don’t feel that? But I don’t know how long we should give it. There won’t be anything left of us before long. Sometimes I think it may be better to cut and run.’
He gets into bed. ‘Where to?’
‘Take the millions and buy a farm somewhere else. Scotland maybe? There’s still a bit of rain in the far north-west.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Any land there that was for sale has been snapped up ages ago. Can’t you see? We’re the only two people in this country who have what everyone else wants. That’s why they hate us.’ With an exaggerated lurch, he turns away from me, grabs the duvet and pulls it like a shield around his head. ‘We’ve got what everyone else can only dream of. And we dream of being like everyone else. There is no choice but to stay. We’ve nothing to go back to.’
Wasn’t he the one who set fire to the bridges?
Mark continues to talk to the wall. ‘We took on the responsibility of this place and we’re not going to walk away.’
‘You talk as though it’s your baby. Like we might hurt its feelings.’
‘Maybe it is. And don’t start your pseudo-psychotherapy on me!’
It is my turn to roll away. ‘You never used to be so sarcastic.’
‘You never used to be so selfish.’ Mark takes his pillow and moves into the small bedroom.
That is how it was.
Those days before the Sisters came, Mark was working hard at the land, exhausting himself struggling to make a success of something, whereas I became more feckless, drifting from one task to another, leaving the hen shed unmended, the seedlings unwatered and in between these desultory attempts at putting something into the farm, I would find endless excuses to go to Angie and look after Lucien until one day she actually said that if I wasn’t able to give her a bit more space, she’d be moving on. I craved company, but I never went out because I couldn’t face the town. I found excuses, always leaving it just too late so the shop was shut, or planning to go to the post office on a Wednesday, knowing it was early closing, or suddenly finding out I didn’t need new socks after all – but it was the sweat on my palms and my desiccated tongue that told the truth. Mark went on the rare occasions when there were supplies we really needed and came back tight-lipped and tense. I had no friends, but nor did he. If it wasn’t for Lucien, I would have gone mad. Mark grew physically stronger in direct correlation to my mental deterioration; two sides of the coin which landed his side down when we tossed.
‘All I ever wanted to be was a farmer!’ There, he’d said it; I don’t know when, possibly one of those hideous nights, probably before the Sisters came.
‘I know. And all I’ve ever done is stop you.’
‘Maybe that’s the price I’ve had to pay to be with you,’ he replied, just a little too quickly.
Into all this stepped Sister Amelia.
Sunday. I expect Hugh to come with news of Mark and Angie and the Sisters and I am feverish with expectation, cleaning the kitchen floor to rub away the waiting time. When I hear him arriving, I tap three times on the wooden draining board, just to make sure it’s good news, then welcome him in. He arrives with an apology.
‘I’m so sorry I’m late, with you probably watching the clock and the hands going so slowly.’
He has come later than usual because his daughter has come to stay for a few days. Fussing, he calls it. Certainly his breathing seems shorter with each visit. The sun is not yet on the back wall – our usual spot – and it is a cloudy, oppressive day so we go inside and I pull up the stool for him to rest his swollen leg.
‘My daughter drove me up as far as the gate and that was a palaver. There’s been a lot of trouble in Lenford. She doesn’t seem to trust me not to smash the windows in the bank or riot in the public car park.’
‘I’m glad you got here safely.’
My lack of tolerance for small talk must have been obvious, because having checked that Three has left, Hugh goes straight to the heart of the matter. ‘So that’s Lenford and my daughter and I’m sorry to say I don’t have any other family news at all to cheer you up.’
‘None at all?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
With the excuse of getting him a glass of water, I leave the sitting room, but in fact I can barely walk straight, the disappointment feels so catastrophic. There seems no point in returning to Hugh.
His voice comes through the open door. ‘That’s not to say I might not be more entertaining on another visit. Now, come and sit with me because there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you.’
There is no need for social conventions to apply here. There is nothing to stop me behaving badly, slamming the door and going up to my room to sulk. Inexplicably, however, politeness prevails.
‘Have you changed your mind?’ he asks.
‘About what?’ I place the glass of water for him on the little table beside the armchair.
‘About working the land.’ He corrects himself, ‘about not working the land.’
No. I haven’t. I have remained steadfast to the three vows I took at the beginning of my sentence here and as a result mere anarchy is loosed upon the little bit of the world left to me.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘I noticed the little field at the back of the orchard.’
I haven’t been there for a while, the nettles are too high, the ground is littered with broken glass and there is no view from there anyway. Now I prefer sky and a sense of space.
Hugh persists. ‘Someone’s been weeding the old vegetable plots up by the broken-down greenhouse, hoeing them, planting maybe, by the look of it.’
My face gives everything away.
‘You didn’t know?’
I shake my head. This is small-scale stuff, not exactly an organis
ed assault on the wilderness by the Department, like the experimental strips on the top fields. I wonder out loud why someone would do that.
‘A much more rational question would be why someone wouldn’t,’ Hugh said. ‘Why this refusal to work this land you love? It’s hard to believe you sacrificed everything for The Well – your life, your marriage, your freedom – all for this dereliction.’
‘I choose not to.’ Even as I say it, it sounds adolescent. Shan’t. Won’t. Can’t. Don’t want to. It’s boring. Why should I? I say that out loud. ‘Why should I?’
Hugh closes his eyes for a moment, then takes his Bible out of the plastic bag and turns it over in his hands. He looks old, his head nodding and his shoulders sagging.
‘Are you all right, Hugh?’
He opens his eyes. ‘I am all right, Ruth,’ he says, ‘but I am worried about you. It seems to me something has changed here, though I can’t for the life of me put my finger on what it is exactly.’
I reassure him. I am getting on well with the guards – God knows I am not about to start confessing about my moment with Boy, although I desperately want to talk to someone about what happened – I am sleeping at night from time to time, getting up in the mornings, I think I may have even put on a bit of weight as my jeans feel tighter. As I speak, I am unpicking the loose thread on the fringe of the cushion on the sofa and it is unravelling in my hands.
‘Why are you worried?’ I ask.
‘I’m worried about the choices you are making,’
The last remaining thread snaps off, the stuffing is falling out of the cushion. ‘I am glad that you acknowledge I have choices. I thought your God was more in the business of choosing rather than allowing choice.’
‘Because you did feel chosen, didn’t you, Ruth? You did believe you were one of the chosen ones, for a while.’
Pick, pick, pick at the next loose thread. ‘Other people believed that. Amelia, the Sisters, they chose me to be chosen if you like and I acquiesced. But they were wrong, we were all wrong.’
The Well Page 11
