The Well

by Catherine Chanter

  There is no doubt that Three knows about the moment with Boy, that Boy knows that Three knows; he has been busying himself with data and rain gauges and seems to have little time for talking, averting his eyes if our paths cross. Whatever the truth, Three is planning to punish me and all I can do is wait for it to happen and feel the sand running through my egg-timer days in the fields, so I walk while I still can and think. Checking doors, walking and tapping three times have become my therapy. If he takes the walking away, I will be back to pacing which is different. I wander all the way around the perimeter of First Field, marking my territory, noting the poppies which have flowered among last year’s crop and picking the red campion from the hedgerow. So much red, I think, but I never noticed the warning flags, nor did I listen to the people shouting from the shore. Looking back, Dorothy was one of those, waving her arms and cupping her hands to her mouth, in the hope that I’d hear her.

  I was painting the downstairs windows. Looking at them now, I can’t believe how quickly the woodwork has deteriorated, testament to the fact that I never put the hard work in, didn’t bother with the sanding down, the wire brush, the undercoats. At that time the Sisters almost never came up to the cottage, so it was unusual to see Dorothy passing the house, waving and holding up a bag of something, so I called her over. Of all the Sisters, I admired her the most, it seemed to me that she had lived long enough not to have to bother with what other people thought of her and therefore she was someone to be trusted.

  ‘Feverfew,’ she explained and held out the leaves to me. ‘For Jack. It helps her migraine. There’s a lot of it beyond the old pheasantry.’

  ‘I’d heard it was a womb stimulant,’ I joked.

  She laughed. ‘It’s powerful stuff, but it’s more likely to cure my arthritis than make me fall pregnant at my time of life. Why, do you want some?’

  ‘At my age? You’re joking.’ It wasn’t what I thought, just what I said.

  Dorothy didn’t reply. She just sat on the front doorstep as I continued painting, allowing the time to pass. ‘Steady work,’ she said eventually, indicating the pots and brushes.

  ‘That’s the thing about rain,’ I said, ‘it rots the windows so quickly.’

  ‘I don’t know, the things we have to put up with living in paradise.’

  That was another thing about Dorothy; she had a sense of humour about our peculiar situation, although she was careful not to let it loose when Amelia was around. Typical of her, she offered to start on the other side for me. We talked our way through the morning, dipping and painting, running our brushes slowly down the narrow edges and fluted sills, the paint bubbling up and popping, drips running slowly down the bars, leaving a raised mark against the fresh new coat. Dorothy worked carefully and I remembered that she painted watercolours of The Well down in her caravan. She wrapped an old rag over the top of her finger, dipped it in the turps and cleaned up the drips as she went as if it was the Sistine Chapel.

  ‘So, now Mark wants to sell,’ she said.

  ‘That’s the first I’ve heard of it.’

  ‘Sorry. It’s just that Sister Amelia told me that the two of you had been talking about him leaving.’

  ‘People are offering a lot of money. Lottery numbers. It is tempting. The Well hasn’t quite worked out as we thought it would.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘How long have you got?’ I asked her. ‘The isolation, the publicity, the security, the pressure, the bureaucracy, the legal threats . . . this was meant to be our second honeymoon, Dorothy, but it’s turning into one grand divorce court.’

  ‘Mark loves you very much; at least that’s how it seems to me when you talk about him.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘I think you’re right. But I’m not so sure how I feel about him. He’s changing. It’s like living with a beautiful mountain that’s just woken up to the fact that really it’s a volcano.’

  ‘He doesn’t really have anyone to talk to apart from you. That must be really hard for him.’

  ‘Do you know . . .?’ I hesitated. Dorothy rested her paintbrush on the tin, wiped her hands on her trousers. ‘Sometimes I used to wish it wouldn’t rain,’ I continued. ‘That we had drought like everyone else. Then we could be desperate like the rest of the country, but at least we’d be desperate together.’

  ‘Used to?’ she asked.

  ‘Until all of you came along and I experienced the Rose. I do believe, Dorothy, like you . . .’ I looked from the window sill at the handful of fresh herbs, heard the rainwater dripping from the gutter into the water butt and repeated the words to myself. I do believe. It was the first time I had said it out loud and it was true. I was a believer.

  ‘But . . .?’ Dorothy prompted me, intuitive as always.

  ‘But it can’t be right that I have to choose between The Well and Mark.’

  ‘Who says you have to?’

  ‘Sister Amelia. Because it’s a place sacred for women. Because Mark doesn’t believe. Because the Rose demands complete dedication, because, thousands of reasons . . .’

  I am not someone who cries easily. My lack of tears have been interpreted in many ways, particularly the fact that I have not cried since they found Lucien, but I cried then, with Dorothy to hold me, her paint-stained fingers making handprints on the back of my shirt as she hugged me and leaving traces of white as she pushed my hair out of my eyes.

  ‘We’ll pray about it,’ she said. ‘I am sure there is an answer. Trust the Rose.’

  I did. Trust the Rose, that is. If you say that word enough, you end up with just the rust. The flaking paint and the rust.

  Memories like this punctuate my walks, but my search gives them purpose, the search not only for Lucien’s rose necklace, but for the green jumper that was never found. Police dogs may have crisscrossed these fields, noses down, tails up, but no one knows this place like I do, its hidden alleys and camouflaged passageways. Today I make my way through the old pheasant pens – each rotten sack beneath a sheet of corrugated iron is a sleeve, each piece of baler twine caught on barbed wire, a thread. When I walk, I no longer look up to the grand sky, but peer in on the minutiae which mock me: the green of the reeds, the shape of the hanging jacket in the shadow, the empty feed sack flapping in the wind. But perspective depends on purpose and mine is a close-up lens with just the one focus: a man’s green jumper.

  It is in this mindset that I reach the bottom of the field, where the guards have been clearing low boughs brought down on the electric fence by George’s Wood. They have sawn them off and dragged them a little way into the field, ready to be cleared, but there is no one working here now. Sitting on one of them, facing south, catching the full warmth of the sun, scuffing the earth with my foot and sending the ants scurrying, I imagine how Mark would have been eyeing up next year’s logs. There is a lot of life in dead trees, Mark used to say. He became so knowledgeable about how it all works, from the sparrow hawk winging into its nest in the Douglas fir, down to the earwig feeding on mould from the fallen branch. I miss that understanding; I became so reliant on experience. A hundred yards away, a hare has emerged from the scrub at the edge of the field. It is motionless as a statue amongst the shifting grass, alert to the slightest change in the vibrations under its paws, to the variations in the sound waves carried across the hillside by the southerly breeze. The hare cannot see well when it is looking straight ahead and so it runs in circles. Dorothy told me that. Sister Amelia told me something else: that it used to be believed you could only kill a hare with a silver cross or by drowning it, because they were witches in disguise.

  The hare spies something and then, suddenly, Boy is behind me. The hare is gone. He stands there with his chainsaw, helmet on his head, visor pushed up above his eyes and heavy gloves on his hands. ‘Seventy miles an hour, that’s how fast they can go. Did you know that?’

  ‘No.’ I look at the place where the hare once was.

  ‘Fast enough,’ he
says.

  ‘Not always,’ I reply. ‘There are always things like foxes, predators who make the most of their weaknesses.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll come back?’

  ‘Not while you’re here. You didn’t post the letter, did you?’

  He puts the chainsaw and the helmet down, pulling off the gloves. ‘I am sorry,’ he says.

  ‘You do what you are paid to do. I expect you all had a good time laughing at it. You’re a bastard, Boy. I trusted you. You’d think I would have learned that lesson by now.’

  ‘Sarge watched the whole thing played back. He made me hand it over. I’ve said I’m sorry.’

  Sick in my stomach at the idea of Three watching that moment and not understanding it, I take my anger out on Boy. ‘You have no idea what it cost me, that letter. To write it. To ask you to post it. And afterwards – what happened between us, I wanted to explain, but I haven’t had a chance.’

  There is a flicker of movement in the far hedge, but it is a rabbit, not a hare.

  Boy sits down on the other end of the log. ‘I’m really sorry about that. I hope you don’t think I’d ever take advantage of the fact that you’re . . .’

  ‘A prisoner? And you’re my guard?’

  Boy shrugs and kicks his boots against the wood to get the mud off, his face flushed. I turn away to collect myself and then look him in the eye. ‘I didn’t mean that. I don’t think you’re like that at all, Boy. It was an amazing moment for me, in all sorts of ways you won’t understand until you’re old and grey and nodding by the fire. But it’s over. Don’t worry.’ I try a laugh for size. ‘I’m not a predatory woman.’

  ‘If you write again,’ Boy says, ‘this time, I will make sure it is posted. I promise.’

  ‘Don’t, you don’t need to.’

  ‘I do. The way you’ve been treated, by the government, I mean, legally it’s not right. I’ve always been an activist so I’m not going to just stand by. I want to help you, but you’ll be confined to the house and I’ll be posted if Sarge has any more evidence. So I have to be distant. We have to be careful.’

  I look back into the wood. ‘What are you doing in there?’

  ‘Just keeping the branches off the electric fence. I’m working down here alone until Adrian comes on duty. Should be about ten minutes. He doesn’t care anyway. And Sarge has gone to Middleton.’

  My back is stiff from sitting on the log and the sun has moved behind the tall pine at the edge of the forest, placing me in the shade.

  ‘There are things lost in these woods, Boy. A carved rose, a green jumper. If you want to help, keep your eyes open when you’re working down here. Answers, that’s all that matters to me now.’

  A woodpecker, somewhere out of sight, taps out its indecipherable code. The valley is loud with other voices; the earth is unstable when I stand.

  ‘And I will write to Mark again, then. Post it if you can, if it’s safe for you.’ I walk away, look back to thank him and see him arming himself again with his helmet, visor and his gauntlets. I make my way unsteadily up the field. The Land Rover is coming towards me, bumping over the grass towards the felling. Three is driving. My heart races. Did Boy lie to me about that? It’s always been a problem at The Well, knowing who to trust.

  Dear Mark,

  I have written once before, but I know now that it was never sent. You might not have got it anyway because I sent it to Will’s house in London. Something tells me that you are not in London at all, but have returned to your uncle’s farm. You were always happiest in the country.

  I always thought you were a better person than me. I think that is probably still true, but I just don’t know.

  I have been going over what happened here. That is the task I have set myself, to make sense of it all. Somehow, we have to find out the truth and we hold different pieces of the jigsaw. The final picture cannot be as hideous as this heap of fractured images. You have to tell me what you know. You owe it to me.

  One more thing. If you have heard from Angie, please tell me. Not knowing how she is, that is my second sentence.

  All my love,

  R

  P.S. I could tell you lots about The Well – how much the new hedge you planted has grown, how much blossom there is in the orchard this year. Whoever is innocent could start again here, that is still a possibility for someone . . .

  Take that, Boy, and post it, if you want to save the world.

  I go to bed and Mark is in the bedroom, sleeping with me, the shape of him haunting me with an ache of equal grief and fear.

  I took to making supper earlier so I could go and join the Sisters sooner. Initially, we would carry our plates and drinks to the old card table under the trees at the top of the garden (drinks – by which I mean a glass of water for me and most of a bottle of our homemade cider for Mark). The earlier routine suited Mark because he said farmers needed the lengthening summer evenings; he spoke as if I wasn’t a farmer any longer. He would come in off the field, wash up for supper, and go back out again. His mind would be on balers and making the lean-to rainproof for when he got the hay in, or, if he had got to his e-mails, composing a response to the next legal challenge for keeping the government off our land. We were now agreed, although for different reasons, that moving was not an option. My mind was somewhere, but never on the food. I was eating less and less, dividing the omelette unequally, slipping the chips into the bin. I preferred to pray on an empty stomach and then later, lightheaded from long meditation, I was all spirit and had no appetite.

  ‘You haven’t finished.’

  ‘You’re getting too thin.’

  ‘You’ll make yourself ill, you know.’

  My evening journey from one world to another developed its own rituals. I would stand with my back to the house, my eyes focused on the path ahead. When I started walking, I would start counting in fives. Five times five paces, and at the end of each five times five, I would pray one line from the Dedication of the Rose.

  It was very hot one week, impossibly hot. In the outside world, the relentless rise in the temperature at last made the drought look like a drought, with no more of these grey, quietly stubborn skies and temperatures average for the time of year, but the stuff of the build-up in apocalyptic films. There were disasters in tunnels on the London Underground, the elderly died of heatstroke and neighbours traced them only through the smell seeping under the tower-block doorways. There was sporadic rioting in simmering cities and photos of reservoirs like drained baths, the line of scum and residual hair all that was left of the comfortable past.

  At The Well, ours was a more traditional heat wave. Mark and Lucien spent the mornings stripped to the waist, repairing the old shed; Lucien, brown-backed and thrilled to be useful, passing up the tools, sorting out the nails by size. Sometimes he wandered up to the Sisters with me, but was shy with them, often peeping out from behind the oak halfway up the field rather than coming down into the camp. He got heatstroke and we were plagued by wasps at lunchtime; my shoulders were sunburned and the strap of my cotton top rubbed against the flesh. I hadn’t slept well for several nights, pulling the thin sheet up to cover my nakedness, tossing it off to find relief from the sweat. Next door, I would hear Mark getting up for a glass of water, then listen to the footsteps going back to the little bedroom. The Sisters’ caravans were torture chambers for them; Sister Amelia told me she was taking her mat outside and lying under the stars, often joined by Eve and Jack, who never slept easily. Awake in the cottage, I ached to join them.

  One night, the prayers started like any other evening – sitting in a circle, joined hands, eyes closed. Jack was on my left. Her hand was clammy and slid against my wedding ring as we felt our fingers into place. On my left, I was aware of Dorothy adjusting her position, straightening her back. I remember the flints in the ground sticking into my ankles, but not feeling able to move as the group found its lung, exhaled its tension, inhaled its inspiration, until the body was at ease with itself and the silence.

/>   Sister Eve led our meditation.

  ‘My beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of En-gedi. Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes. Behold, thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant: also our bed is green. The beams of our house are cedar, and our rafters of fir.’

  When the verses had settled with the sun, the Sisters spoke or sang as the spirit moved them and I joined in the responses, feeling my way tentatively around the dark waters of their worship, holding on to the edge. I don’t think I made any contribution that evening (I rarely did), nor do I remember Jack leading, but when Sister Amelia held the Rose high I was with them as the circle closed in, all self-consciousness melted away as I felt hands around my waist, bodies pressing my body, my fingers entangled in Amelia’s beautiful hair. Each of the Sisters’ unique invocations mingled like a million languages, cadences rising and falling in counterpoint, vowels and consonants meeting and parting and making space for expressions so guttural they were barely words, yet contained in them was meaning – I was sure there was meaning. And when this happened, as it did happen sometimes, the chaos of the individual orisons would somehow, like sand in the wind, be blown into form and before we knew how or why, we were in unison.

  Suddenly, the unity of the limbs of the great body was shattered by an arm flinging itself violently into the air. Jack’s clenched fist caught me hard under the chin. I staggered backwards. A high-pitched screech of agony scarred the evening and there was Jack, tearing at her grey shift, ripping at the cotton until it fell from her jerking shoulders onto the stamped ground. I watched as if this was a film. A near naked woman throwing her head back at such a crazy angle, her eyes must surely fly from their sockets, arms as wide as if they were no longer connected to her collar bones, which in turn must surely dislocate from her neck, all limbs unleashed from the core. The others froze too, motionless figures on a painted backdrop against the urgency of the fit. Jack slumped. For a second it seemed as if the hard ground must crack apart her exposed ribs and spine and splinter her skeleton. She writhed, the screaming transposed into an ululating, a sound thrusted from deep within the throat which was at the same time language and not-language.