The Well

by Catherine Chanter

  ‘No,’ I heard Mark reply. I breathed out slowly, warily.

  ‘Where will you sleep then?’ Lucien persisted. ‘We could both cuddle up, we’re good at hugging, aren’t we? There’s room for two of us in my bed.’

  ‘No!’ But that shout was from me, not Mark, and I don’t know where it came from.

  He stood up, very slowly, very silently, just the scrape of plate on the table as he pushed it away, the scratch of the chair on the stone floor and Lucien staring up at him, sensing something, not sure what.

  ‘That troubles you, does it, Granny R? The idea of me and Lucien sharing a bed? Do you want to say why? Perhaps you ought to warn him?’

  ‘Shut up, Mark.’ I leant over Lucien and cut up his toast. ‘Grandpa’s being a silly-billy,’ I said, the hand holding the knife shaking visibly.

  ‘How about I move out to the barn, to a safe distance, how about that?’

  Now with my back to him, standing at the kitchen counter, I returned to fiddling in the cupboard over my head and muttered something about whatever you think is best.

  ‘Then you and Granny can be together, Lucien. That’s what you want, isn’t it, Granny? Just you and Lucien. And we mustn’t forget Amelia, of course.’

  Here he comes, screamed Voice, run. But I didn’t run and I didn’t reply.

  ‘Is Amelia coming to live with us too?’ asked Lucien quietly.

  Without turning round, I took a jar from the shelf and put it on the counter, tried to think about the chutney, about apple chutney, if only I could open that, that would be something, but Voice was relentless, shouting at me about fire and knives. ‘Has anyone seen the thing that opens jars?’ I asked, controlling my words, praying wildly in my head for the Rose to still the storm.

  ‘I didn’t quite catch that.’ Mark was close to me, close enough to disturb the air around me.

  Behind me, Lucien was kicking the table leg over and over again; the kettle spat its boiling displeasure and the tap dripped the seconds away. I heard all that, but I didn’t hear him come at me. Mark grabbed my shoulder, swung me round so I was looking at him, our faces inches apart, his possessed and stretched across the canvas of his skull. Instinctively, I raised my hand to protect myself, but he grabbed that wrist, then the other, forced my hands high in his makeshift handcuffs, reading me my rights in a whisper, close to my ear and hissing. Then, when he had finished, he threw me across the room, my head catching the edge of the cupboard door and bleeding, my ribcage cracking against the counter. When I pulled myself up, he was gone and Lucien was crying at the table.

  ‘We can’t put this back together again now, can we, Granny R?’ he sobbed, picking at the splintered remains of the eggshell. ‘Was it me who upset Mark? Was it my fault?’

  To think that I ever promised to look after him.

  It wasn’t until it happened that I realised Mark moving out was a relief. The barn was my equivalent of an arms’-length safety plan. A couple of days later, leaning towards the mirror in the bathroom to examine the bruise on the side of my face more closely, I acknowledged to myself that I didn’t miss him. The make-up didn’t conceal anything from Sister Amelia. She pushed the hair from my face, kissed the swelling and whispered in my ear, ‘I told you so, Ruth, he has to go.’ Dorothy was the only one who questioned my reaction to his moving out. Talk to him, she urged, twenty years is a long time to love someone and see it gone in a moment. It must be part of the Rose’s plan, I told her, and Dorothy replied that sometimes it was hard to know the difference between the Rose’s plan, our own agenda, or someone else’s agenda. But I wrote my own sermons in those days. Then, as far as the party was concerned, Lucien was the cause for celebration, Amelia my partner, the Sisters my fellow revellers and Voice the soundtrack to which I danced. What else did I need?

  There never is such a thing as total separation in a family and there wasn’t then. Angie kept to her word and did phone, often enough, although by no means regularly despite what I said to her about children liking to know what’s going to happen when.

  ‘Mummy’s on the phone!’

  Listening in, I could hear Lucien telling her he missed her, asking her how long until Christmas, and I would hold my breath, but then he would say that he was very happy, that Granny and Mark were very well, that we were all very busy. Some of that was true, I hope, I pray. Lucien did seem content to be our go-between, trotting between the barn and the cottage with messages or food, or to spend time with Mark if I was in prayer. After the fight, Lucien really did seem to accept our arrangements without question, being used to a veritable thesaurus of ways of living and loving, and he relished the time he spent hanging out with Mark, helping him with the animals, digging and planting and pruning.

  ‘You can be my dad,’ he said to Mark once.

  ‘How do you mean?’ asked Mark.

  ‘I don’t know my dad and Mummy said you couldn’t have children, so you’re not her real dad. But you can be my dad, can’t you?’

  Mark told me about that conversation, said it was typical of Angie to load Lucien up with things he didn’t need to know at his age.

  I sift through conversations with Mark as if they are a sort of audible photograph album, chucking the ones that are little more than repeats of ordinary views, holding some up to the light the better to make sense of the detail, the doubt.

  Lucien and me, wrapped up together on the sofa, watching Bambi.

  ‘Mark says I’m very, very special. What do you think he means?’

  Soundscape. Tractor engine. Turned off. Wind. Sheep in the distance.

  ‘Look at my ploughing, Granny R!’

  Mark was planting up First Field with winter wheat, Lucien sitting on his knee on the front of the tractor, his woolly hat pulled down over his sticking-out ears.

  ‘Bounce me up and down again, Mark!’

  Mark got down, taking the ignition key, leaving Lucien playing with the gear stick.

  ‘He’s so happy here now, isn’t he?’ I said.

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘I think he misses his mum, that’s all.’

  I take a step or two away from the tractor, calling out to Lucien to be careful. ‘What do you mean? Has he said something?’

  ‘I don’t think he’d want to upset you, Ruth. Yes, he loves it here. But it’s not straightforward, is it? He is safer with Angie.’

  Dusk. Coming downstairs and jumping out of my skin, bumping into Mark unexpectedly standing in the half-light in the kitchen. He looked unshaven, smelt unwashed – for all I know he was sleeping in his clothes and drinking too much, like a tramp in a tunnel. I wanted to sit him down, pull his shirt up over his head, hands aloft like a five-year-old and run him a bath. I wanted him to leave.

  ‘I’ve come to kiss Lucien goodnight,’ he said.

  And I let him.

  And another time I remember, but it’s all in the wrong order. Dark this time. Mark came over and we talked in the porch under the sensor light, as if he was a door-to-door salesman with a variety of life insurance policies on offer. It can’t have been long after he moved out, because I remember him pushing the hood of my fleece down to look at the bruise on my head and I flinched. He took my hand.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘It will never happen again, whatever goes on between us. I can’t believe I did it.’

  Our hands lay loosely with each other, the slightest pressure would have meant something, but they fell apart, retreated to their owners’ pockets, although I at least was willing them on, aching with the memory of holding hands in other places in other times: in hospital when Angie was born, walking by the sea in Italy on holiday, the day we moved in here.

  Mark spoke first, returning to his pitch. ‘What would you do here’, he asked, ‘if I went, if Lucien was gone as well?’

  ‘You might be going,’ I told him, ‘but Lucien isn’t going anywhere.’

  ‘You can’t have it all, Ruth. Lucien, Amelia, me . . .’


  ‘Why not?’

  ‘As far as I can see, the Sisters believe Lucien should be gone. I think he should be gone too, you think I should be gone. That pretty much leaves you on your own.’

  ‘Don’t you dare threaten to send Lucien away,’ I threatened. ‘You’re just jealous.’

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I am.’

  Jealousy. That was one of the possible motives they ascribed to him, when he was in the frame.

  With Mark in the barn, Amelia became a more frequent visitor to the cottage. She didn’t come in, not at first. Initially, our long one-to-ones would take us meandering in a circle through the fields and back to the caravans, then we started to come back via the house and stand and chat outside, with Amelia saying no, she wouldn’t come in, it wasn’t right, then we sat in the garden and then, one day when a keen north-east wind was ripping the leaves from the oak, she came inside.

  ‘It’s just how I imagined it,’ she said, standing in the way that a prospective purchaser does when they look around the house – as we did I suppose, when we first arrived. I took what she said as a compliment and thanked her, but she corrected me. ‘No. I mean, it is beautiful, just like you’re beautiful, but there’s not enough of you in here.’ She peered into the study.

  ‘That’s Mark’s study,’ I explained. She looked at me pointedly and I added that he hadn’t moved his stuff from there into the barn, yet. She stumbled over Lucien’s Lego castle and I found myself explaining that his bedroom was very small.

  She examined each of the photos on the wall. ‘Not many of you,’ she commented and I said that I was usually the one taking the pictures. She got out her phone and before I had time to even protest, she said she’d soon put that right, clicked the camera and then leant in to take a selfie of the two of us, laughing like teenagers in a photo booth.

  She picked up the glass heron. ‘A present from Mark?’ she assumed.

  I took a pile of Mark’s books and fishing magazines from the study over to the barn when he was out and left them by the wood-pile, under the shelter, not wanting to go in. And I printed out the photo Amelia messaged me and blu-tacked it to the mirror in my bedroom, so whenever I looked at myself, I saw myself twice; once in an ordinary way and once as a curiously young-looking, startled woman with electrified blue eyes and a small mouth, half open, as if about to ask a question. A woman seen through the eyes of somebody else. She never sent me the other picture of the two of us; she kept it for herself. The heron stayed where it was, fixing me with its beak.

  Amelia hung a spare coat in the back passage and kept some of her tea which she made herself from nettles and elderberries in a screw-top jar in the cupboard, and before too long she had a place where she usually sat. And there, at the table, we spent hours so deeply immersed in our conversation it was if we were together at the bottom of a dark lake, wrapped in water and cut off from the intrusive sky and irrelevant sounds of the outside world.

  ‘Lucien, will Granny let you play outside? It’s a lovely day.’

  ‘Why don’t you send Lucien over to Mark? He might like the company.’

  We talked a lot about Mark. That is what women do, isn’t it? When relationships go wrong, they talk to each other: analyse, predict, hypothesise. We used to do it in the pub in London, supporting each other in the way that women do through affairs and divorce, through falling in love and walking away – so that’s what we did, Amelia and I. She had the role of what I suppose a counsellor might call ‘the critical friend’, or that’s how it seemed. She challenged me on my response to his violence.

  ‘He has only ever hit me that one time, Amelia, that doesn’t make a personality, it doesn’t make a pattern.’

  ‘I disagree.’ Amelia never ate or drank anything at the table. She sat straight, but earthed like a yoga practitioner, her hands still and joined on her lap, her eyes always focused even when mine slid away. ‘He’s done it once, he’ll do it again. And there’s the incident in Lenford. He hasn’t got his own way and men, like toddlers, resort to tantrums and beating their women with their fists when that happens.’

  Amelia’s antagonism towards Mark reached a peak one afternoon when Lucien and I had taken a rug down to the bottom field to read together. Our quiet time was broken by a commotion of some sort in the distance, barking and screeching like fighting foxes. Lucien clutched the book tight. I told him to carry the rug and wait when he got to the gate, then I struggled to run all the way, my heart thudding, rapidly trying to make sense of the scene I could half hear and now half see up at the house.

  Mark and Amelia were standing by the front door, a door we never used. Both there, both together, although I had no idea why. Amelia could have been a Spanish imagen, the sort they carry through the streets in Semana Santa, motionless and foreboding, carved in white against the wood; Mark was all mud-brown and movement, heavy boots for kicking, pacing, arms flung up and out and fists raised.

  Fragments of sentences, but only from him. Amelia’s responses, if there were any, were lost to the air.

  Not yours . . .

  What, want, what . . .

  I can’t see through . . .

  Leaving the gate open, I pushed myself to go faster across the last field, knowing I had to get there in time. I called out once – stop it! – but had no power to push the words out. Close enough to see them and their expressions, hear the rest of the sentences, all I wanted was for them both to leave, for them to separate.

  ‘Go away!’ I screamed. ‘Just go!’

  Amelia responded first. ‘You see, Mark, she just wants you gone.’

  Near enough now to smell his rage, I could see Mark’s body was wired, the muscles on the back of his shoulders pumping as if they had a life of their own, and his beautiful face snarling, burning. ‘I’m not going anywhere, Amelia. This is my fucking house. I know what you’re up to but you’re not getting it.’

  ‘It, Mark? Or her?’

  ‘I can call the police, get you evicted, you and all your she-devils . . .’ Mark was reaching for his phone.

  ‘Don’t, Mark.’ I spoke deliberately, slowing my pace, my hand out for the phone.

  He stepped away from me, shaking his head, a cornered animal, those with the nets closing in around him, turning between Amelia at the front door and me, this way and that.

  ‘You see. Ruth has invited me in,’ smiled Amelia, her hands held open in the sign of the peace.

  Mark lunged at her, grabbed her loose cotton top which ripped in his hands. I pulled at him – stop it, stop it, you’ll regret it – anything I could think of saying, anything, but it was as if he couldn’t let go of her, his fists clenched around the cloth. I prised them off, one by one, little finger first to ease the release of the rest and then he fell back and Amelia was left standing, upright and unshaken, her pale breast just visible through the rip in her clothing. Lucien was trembling at the gate, his face half hidden in the tartan rug.

  Mark kept himself to the barn and to the farm after that. Amelia came often and we settled into a pattern of living – work, worship, friendship. The only role I had which she resented was the one she could not control: I had not only become a mother again, but a teacher also and I loved every single, separate, precious moment of both of my jobs.

  I had promised Angie I would try to get Lucien into school, but I didn’t even bother to try. He was a long way behind, not just because his attendance had been so poor. As a teacher, I knew that if he went to school they would find labels for him – ADHD, SpLD– and they would put him on lists and on stages on those lists and fill in the boxes with comments about alcohol and drug use during pregnancy and developmental delay. Lucien only needed one label: grandson. The Well was for him an idyllic school and the Wellspring the best classroom of all. He was fascinated: we built an ant farm; we captured the rain which fell in the night-time and studied evaporation in the daytime; we wrote poetry describing the sunsets; we did the maths for the number of eggs we should have collected by Christmas. One morni
ng we were down at the Wellpond studying mushrooms, poring over my field guide to identify the Prince and field mushrooms, honey fungus and penny buns when Amelia appeared.

  ‘What’s happening here?’ Her horror was audible. ‘This is a sacred place.’

  ‘Granny R is teaching me all about mushrooms,’ said Lucien. ‘Some of them are really, really evil!’ he added with the glint in his eye of a boy who had recently discovered the cartoon world of superheroes and villains.

  ‘I’ve been telling him about the Death Cap,’ I explained. ‘They were growing under this oak tree last year. They’re the really tricky ones, because you eat them, get really ill for twenty-four hours or so, but then you feel better without realising they’re destroying your liver.’

  Lucien broke in with ghoulish delight. ‘And this,’ he said, running over to some bushes, ‘this is really, really poisonous. It’s called deadly nightshade and if you even touch the berries, you die! Like this!’ Lucien put his hands around his neck and fell to the ground with a suitably impressive death-rattle. He jumped up, laughing, but then turned more seriously to Amelia. ‘I thought you said this was a holy place. Why’s it got so many bad things in it?’

  ‘Who is to say what is good or bad, Lucien. Every living thing has its purpose, according to the Rose,’ said Amelia. ‘It’s just that we don’t always understand it.’

  ‘You mean like the magic?’ Lucien was full of questions about The Well and its magic, as he called it.

  ‘I wouldn’t call it magic myself, Lucien, nor would your grandmother. We would say it is the work of the Rose. Praise her!’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Sometimes I have been here and seen her.’

  ‘With your own eyes?’

  ‘With my spiritual eyes.’

  ‘Do I have spiritual eyes?’

  ‘A boy’s eyes are different from a girl’s eyes. One day, one night, I will bring you here and we will wait and we’ll see if you can feel the magic for yourself.’