The Well

by Catherine Chanter

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  ‘Are you . . .?’

  ‘I want to go home,’ he said, pushing past my outstretched hand.

  The policeman pressed the door release switch and we stepped back out into the light where a police car already had its engine running and blue lights flashing. The driver stuck his head out through the window and said it wasn’t his idea of good use of public money, but he’d been told to give us an escort in case there was trouble. Mark climbed tentatively into the passenger side of the Land Rover, without speaking.

  ‘What about the car?’ I asked him.

  ‘Leave it,’ he said. ‘I can’t drive like this.’

  We followed the police out of the car park. Inside the Land Rover it was silent, except that my head was loud with Voice, but outside, the group of people by the traffic lights had grown and they shouted as we left: ‘Fucking Headcase’, ‘Pervert’. A few seconds later, as we passed cars queuing at the petrol station, a man with a shaved head yelled ‘Waterlegger’ and sounded his horn and a couple of the other cars joined him in a blast of hate-fuelled condemnation.

  ‘What have you done?’ I asked him. No reply.

  The gate was opened for us and we careered back into our bewildering homeland, leaving the baked grey fields behind us and returning to our Technicolor, digitally enhanced comic strip of a farm. The police didn’t stop at the bottom, they did a three-point turn and left.

  Lock him out, suggested Voice.

  I didn’t need to. Mark was in the house only a matter of minutes before he left again and climbed over the gate into First Field. I saw the flare of a match and the smell of cigarette smoke drifted back towards me and then he was gone before I had a chance to talk to him. Not one word of thanks for going to collect him, even though he must have known how hard it was for me. Angie had seen the police and came down to see what was going on, although there wasn’t much I could tell her, except that I was worried and angry, that I didn’t know where he’d gone, that he looked in a state.

  ‘He’ll be back,’ she said. ‘Come and see me in the morning, tell me what went on,’ and she also left.

  I would have liked her to have sat with me, mother and daughter, during those long hours when I waited for him to return. She is a selfish cow, I thought to myself, if you think of all the hours we’ve sat waiting for her in police stations and A&E. He is a selfish bastard too, I continued to myself, he can go, for all I care, I’d be better off now without him, smoking, drinking, going to pieces. And that wasn’t Voice, that was pure me. As the dull purple of late evening blurred the outline of the forests and stirred the bats in the eaves of the barn, I began to think he wasn’t coming back at all and, as he had nowhere to go, or so I thought, it occurred to me that he may never be coming back, that he had, as they say, done something stupid. I tried to check the gun cupboard but couldn’t find the key.

  It will be a gun, said Voice. There will be a lot of blood.

  It was now properly dark and the moon was already showing above the oak. I will go to the Sisters, I thought, they’ll help me. I got to my knees, thanked the Rose for her guidance, pulled on a cardigan and slipped out of the house, shaking. Be careful what you wish for, Ruth, that is what I was thinking.

  The thump of him climbing the gate behind me made me jump and all I could make out of him was his moon shadow and the sound of his coughing.

  ‘Mark!’

  ‘Where were you going?’ he asked.

  ‘To . . . the Sisters,’ I began, realising too late how that sounded.

  ‘I came back because I thought you might be worried,’ he laughed. ‘Stupid me.’

  Go.

  ‘You OK?’ I asked.

  ‘Never been better,’ he replied and went inside.

  Welcome back – that was what Amelia said when I got down to the caravans. After night worship, when I returned, he was asleep in the little bedroom and it wasn’t until the morning that I understood what had happened.

  He had been in Lenford when some bloke had started on him. Nothing unusual, happened all the time when he went into shops, he said.

  ‘I never realised,’ I said.

  ‘No, I don’t expect you did,’ he said. ‘The bloke was bad-mouthing you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, you. Or do you think I have sole rights on being abused in the street?’

  ‘I didn’t know, I just assumed . . .’

  ‘I’m sure you did. Well, let me tell you what they said and you can see how it feels.’

  Whore. Witch. Lezzog. Parasite. That sort of thing. So Mark had lost it. Usually, he said, he was able to walk on by, but this time it got to him, he had swung at him, the man retaliated, they fought, the police were called, the other guy went to hospital to get stitches while he ended up in the police station. Just another Wednesday afternoon in Little Britain, he tried to joke.

  ‘Did they charge you?’ I asked.

  ‘Disorder in a public place, that’s all. I’ll add it to our growing list of upcoming court appearances.’

  Tentatively, I broached the subject of how to get the car back, but that triggered another outburst.

  ‘Why don’t you do something useful for a change?’ he stormed. ‘Why does it always have to be me?’

  A couple of days later Amelia said she was going in for supplies and offered to see if she could collect the car. She thought it was unfair of Mark to make me pay for the consequences of his behaviour. Again. She said she would protect me from the stress of leaving The Well or the pain of enduring the rejection of the very people I was helping every time I worshipped. I was speechless with relief; I had been dreading having to go back to Lenford, given up even pretending that I could cope out there on my own. Eve was the one who managed to drive it back. She left it for us by the barn, without saying a word, and there it was, like a monstrous exhibit in a museum of modern art: the windows were smashed; the aerial snapped; it was viciously daubed with filth and slander against us, The Well, the Rose – I don’t know how they knew about the Rose. When I pulled the back door, the twisted metal grated against the frame and there was a sickening smell of stale smoke, the springs protruding through the blackened seat like charred ribs.

  ‘We can’t afford another,’ said Mark. ‘This is the last straw.’

  ‘Surely you can press charges?’

  ‘I do more law now I’m a farmer than I ever did before,’ said Mark, kicking the car before walking away.

  Look at the car, said Voice. You will look the same when they finally find you.

  Amelia said, you can burn down all the structures in the world, but the Rose never dies.

  I tried smoking them out once, the Sisters, like hornets. If they have built a new nest, Hugh will tell me, when he returns, if he returns.

  It rained this morning. I wander into the orchard where the blossom on all the trees – apple, damson, plum – have opened just a little, the buds white, but pink-fringed now they are so close to blooming. Just a little rain and such a grand response. They hold their boughs above my head like a guard of honour at a wedding, and when a blackbird flies off, startled by my arrival, a slight shower of raindrops anoints me. My boots are brushed by the long wet grasses until the knees of my jeans are a darker blue from the damp and I sit on my bench, appreciating the resistance of the cold stone pushing up against my weight, insisting on gravity. I don’t know how long I am there or what I am doing except that I am grateful for the silence, the absence of Voice. I resume my chain of flowers.

  ‘So, you can pick flowers but you can’t grow vegetables? Where’s the logic in that?’

  The question catches me unawares. Boy and I have hardly spoken since we sat on the felled branches, but the letter had gone from the table when I woke in the morning. I haven’t asked, he hasn’t said. Now, he is in the little plot behind the orchard, looking over the gate. He has his sleeves rolled up and the back of his white shirt is saturated with sweat. It looks as though he has been digging and the spade
is resting against the fence that used to keep the rabbits out of the vegetables. He seems to be expecting an answer, but he doesn’t wait long and resumes weeding, methodically working his way up a row of seedlings. When he reaches the end, he rakes the small pile of discarded nettles and couch grass to one side, brushes the mud off his hands, then steps carefully around the edge of the planted rows to pick up an old black plastic seed tray. On it are five or six small terracotta flowerpots, planted up; they have the familiar two tender leaves of young courgettes. He must have planted the seeds his mother gave me and grown them on, stuck them on a window sill. I imagine him in the barn, Three fixated by the split screen showing a dozen camera angles, Anon playing cards with himself, and Boy watering the courgettes like the plant monitor at school: your turn to look after the garden.

  ‘It’s a bit early for planting those out,’ I call over the hedge, but he doesn’t look up. He hasn’t heard me. I repeat myself, just a little bit louder. ‘We used to start them off in the greenhouse and then not even harden them off until the end of May.’

  ‘Not really an option now, is it?’ Boy indicates the broken-down shell of the greenhouse behind him. ‘What happened here?’

  Holding tight to the security of my horticultural explanations, I continue. ‘It was because of the wind up here.’ I shout a bit louder. ‘And the risk of a late frost. Oh, go on; ignore the advice of a stupid old woman. What does she know about farming anyway.’

  He has turned back to his work, forgetting me and himself in The Well that is a black widow of a property, enticing you before swallowing you whole and spitting out the bits that stick in the throat. I have lost a lot of men to this Well and now here she is flirting again.

  Listening to the scratching of the trowel and the squeak of his boots as he crouches, I deafen myself to everything except the territorial robin. I scream silently at Boy because the glass is shattered and he has the arrogance to assume he has the right to work this land. I cry inwardly for him because what he is doing is futile, save for providing a few beans for a casserole at the end of a summer, when the days are shortening and the leaves falling. I yearn to join him, but that would be breaking my word.

  Back in the house, I sleep because that is all I have to fill my days. When I wake, it is dusk. I have been asleep a long time, my head is dull, my mouth sackcloth; I drink a long glass of water. Out of the window, the languid evening is spreading herself in pink and gold satin over the curve of the earth. She blows the scent of a sweet old-time summer across the room and I breathe in evenings long gone: hosepipes on the lawn in London and Lucien running in rainbows; strawberries; a pub, somewhere by the Thames and Mark and I and a group of friends, celebrating something special, long forgotten. I splash water on my face and feel my way out into the silk-soft air. In my head, I play an old recording of a long forgotten orchestra, with the persistent ewes nagging their lambs to come back before dark, the scratch-picking of the hens, the touch of one petal from the pear tree settling on the dew-damp grass and the pulse of fruit forming like the half-heard, half-felt vibrations of a cello. With a blanket, I climb to the brow of First Field and sit, suspended in the sky above the flickering valleys beneath me. Amelia coached me like her prodigy, but strangely it is Angie I think of now, Angie a few years ago on holiday with us in Wales, telling me about her most recent treatment and the yoga they practised on the ward, saying sit like this, Mum, it really works, legs crossed, her placing my hands upon my knees, turning my palms outwards, both of us breathing in a conscious recognition of being alive. It works for a while. I blow out the candles on my forty years one by one until the past drifts away with the smoke and I am in the present and all that I have been and everyone I have known and loved and lost, yes even Lucien, they are part of the flaming sky and the kind clouds. This could be prayer. Maybe all is well with Angie; she seems close to me. Maybe I should work the land. Maybe it is possible to live with uncertainty.

  So in love with the night, I cannot bear to go inside, but instead drag the old sun-lounger from the shed out into the garden so that I can lie on my back and watch the stars; it is one of those nights when the meteors shower like storms over mountains, all sound lost, but light remains. I can feel the smallness of my breath, the ridges of the wooden chair hard against my back, the cool air on my bare feet. We used to watch the August meteors from the cliffs in Cornwall, on another holiday, very long ago, Angie asleep in my arms, Mark with his head on my lap. It was such moments we thought we might recapture at The Well, and here I am now, netting moths with candles.

  It is the late shift and Boy is standing watch by the barn. He hesitates and then comes over. ‘I didn’t want to intrude,’ he says, ‘but I have been waiting all evening for an opportunity.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I interrupt. ‘I wasn’t very helpful this morning. Go ahead and do the garden, if you think it’s worth it.’

  ‘It’s definitely worth it, but . . .’

  It feels good to apologise, even for something small, so I keep going while I can. ‘And I was horrible the other day, about the letter, it’s just that it’s so frustrating, I’ve been searching so hard for those things I told you about.’

  ‘That’s what I want to see you about.’ Boy checks over his shoulder and squats down beside the sun-lounger. ‘I found something this afternoon when I was on duty. It’s probably nothing.’

  He pulls the something from the pocket of his army jacket and hands it to me. It feels like a ball of string, but he shines his torch on it and I see why he has brought it. It is a small amount of green wool, tidied as if it has been wound round and round a hand and then finished with a bow to keep it in place.

  ‘Did you find it like this, all wound up?’

  ‘I spotted it because I saw the end of it. I thought it might have been from the green jumper you talked about. You know, someone might have snagged it on something. But then when I pulled it, I realised it was attached to the rest. It’s weird, the way it’s crinkled; it does look as though it’s already been knitted once and undone.’

  Slowly, I undo the knot and pull on the end, so it unravels slowly, almost as if I expect it to knit itself back into Mark’s green jumper. ‘Where was it?’

  ‘At that place where the stream backs up, just beyond where the Sisters used to be. The scientist contingent ordered us to clear the leaves because it’s all blocked and it was there, as if it had been washed down. But there wasn’t anything else, I looked.’

  It is the right sort of green, at least I think it would have been, but it’s now soiled and ingrained with dirt. But that is all I can say about it. I will not discard it, because Boy offers this gift with all sincerity, but in truth, even tonight when hope is possible, I cannot believe it is anything other than a false dawn. If it can’t be evidence, it can be an olive branch.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘I’m not sure it’s the same as the jumper, but thank you for looking.’

  It is as though him finding a piece of green wool which means nothing has used up the odds of me finding a piece of green wool which might mean something, which is absurd I know, but nevertheless that is the way my mind works at the moment. Fighting to regain something of the optimism I felt earlier, I direct Boy’s gaze to one of the shooting stars and I point them out to him as if he were a child, all rancour over the post and the garden gone, the disappointment that is the wool dropped in the darkness. He cannot be much younger than Angie; maybe this is how we might have talked, Angie and her friends and me, if she had been a different sort of daughter.

  ‘These are the Eta Aquarids,’ he says. ‘Part of my now famous scientific knowledge. It’s when Halley’s comet appears – once in a lifetime.’

  ‘You’ve come, you source of tears to many mothers,’ I quote. ‘It’s from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. I studied them at university.’

  ‘The comet always was an omen, good or bad,’ Boy comments. ‘Like the Battle of Hastings, just depends if you were Harold or William. It’s the same with all so-called c
elestial portents.’ Standing up and stepping away, he triggers the security light which exposes us as nothing more or less than a soldier and a prisoner. It prompts him to pick up the torch and clip his radio back on his belt.

  ‘Goodnight,’ I say, ‘and thank you again.’ But he is already disappearing on his rounds, the beam sweeping the hedges and his heavy-booted footsteps startling creatures rustling along the edge of the wood. The light goes off.

  Like a baby who throws its hands into the air, suddenly reminded by absence that it no longer has the womb to contain it, I grasp at the dark and then I pick up the wool and go indoors. Inside, the rotten core of me lurches and reminds me that all that hope was nothing more than a yarn or a star glimpsed fleetingly before the clouds black in from the west.

  In daylight, the wool mocks me and I hate it for its lack of significance. I imagine some old woman finishing off her knit one, pearl one gloves for her grandson, never knowing that the remnant dropped by chance would, for a brief moment, give another grandmother hope of the truth. The wool goes round and round my neck seven or eight times, but being weakened by its life amongst detritus, lacks resolve and snaps at the first sign of pressure, leaving only red rings of failure. Worse still, Hugh is still unwell, apparently. I was a better visitor than him: Granny in her last days at the nursing home, a skeleton propped up in a high-backed, blue plastic chair, dislocated head nodding on a spring; Mum, her nighty hanging limp over her flattened chest; Angie in rehab, Angie with a black eye and a Domestic Violence worker, Angie in labour. Maybe it is a woman’s thing – all over the world women come in and out of each other’s huts, tower blocks, shantytown houses made of corrugated iron and newspaper, neat suburban terraces. Looking out at the empty drive, I realise how very much I want to be visited.

  Yesterday, I thought I heard my mobile ring and went to rummage in my bag, in the way that the slam of a back door prompts the widow to put the kettle on. I am sure there was talk of being allowed one phone call a day to one of my approved numbers, but the truth is I have no numbers. Internet I would value, even though I am now more than ever aware of what a web it weaves around the lonely. Still, there are lots of things I could do on the internet which would not contravene the isolation of my imprisonment: how could it hurt if I were to spend time Googling myself, just to see who I am now, or I could log on to watchpaintdry.com and see if it is more interesting than this, or I might allow myself to create a virtual garden and industriously weed my rows of digital vegetables, accelerate the pace of the growth, then click and drag them into my basket, where would be the harm in that? ‘No connection available.’ That is a phrase which seems to make sense to me at the moment.