The Well

by Catherine Chanter

  She couldn’t stay here. No one could sleep here.

  Mark made the decision. ‘I will stay with Angie in the Motor Lodge,’ he said. ‘We will drive up here early in the morning and then we can all go together to the church.’

  ‘Together?’ asked Angie.

  Mark nodded at her, then asked the DI, ‘Will that work?’

  The DI stood up also. ‘We’ll make it work, sir,’ he said.

  I will sleep alone, then, I thought, tonight and for the rest of my life. The medication they’d given me wiped out both my memory and my ability to anticipate, so it was the sweep of car headlights and two slamming doors which woke me to a day which I greeted with a combination of relief and vomiting. Downstairs I could hear someone filling the kettle. I opened the shutters as my first step towards acknowledging the birth of the most deformed of mornings. Mark was sitting on the stile to First Field. Had it all gone to plan, he would have been preparing to lamb, but the barren sheep loitered around the hedges as if conscious of their purposeless existence. It was not raining, but snowing. Births, marriages and deaths – and all of them shrouded in snow. I could almost count the flakes as they landed on the black sleeve of Mark’s coat, his turned-up collar and his dark hair holding their form for the briefest of seconds, but before I could make sense of it the flurry was over and Mark had come back into the house.

  Sitting on the top stairs, I eavesdropped on my own husband and daughter.

  ‘You’ve got snowflakes on your hair.’

  ‘Is Mum up?’

  The clinking of a spoon on a mug.

  ‘I can’t go up there again.’

  Two hours, more than two hours without ceasing she had wailed in his bedroom the evening before, with Mark shut in his study and me out on the porch in the dry-eyed darkness, both in our terrible, separate silences, hearing it, before Mark had persuaded her to leave. Keening, they call it in Ireland, and that is the right word, the endless knife-sharp pain of it.

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll go in a minute. There’s no need for her to wake up yet, the day will be long enough anyway.’

  The spitting of the kettle, newly filled, being put back on the Rayburn.

  ‘Fucking mess this place.’

  Tap running. Crash of pans being put in the cupboard. I imagined her scrubbing the surfaces, like me, desperate for cleanliness. I got up slowly, but the floorboards creaked under my feet.

  ‘That’s her.’

  The tap was left running, so the pump thundered into action, summoning water from The Well. I pulled Mark’s old dressing gown around me, reluctant to get dressed, and got as far as the doorway to the kitchen. Angie ignored me. ‘Do you think if I leave it long enough, it will run out?’ she said. ‘Then that’ll be the end of it all.’

  ‘Your mother asked me that once.’ Mark gently prised her hands off the taps, turned them off and then hugged her as she sobbed. Only when they moved apart did I feel able to step forward.

  Someone had organised a formal undertaker’s car.

  ‘I think Lucien would have liked it,’ said Mark, sensing Angie’s hatred of the thing. ‘He liked the idea that there was the right sort of car for the right sort of job.’

  ‘Remember how cross he got because the window cleaner arrived in a van that looked like the postman,’ I said.

  ‘When was that?’ said Angie.

  ‘I don’t know, love. London some time. Must have been when we were looking after him.’ Words chosen by a devil with a long-handled fork.

  ‘I can’t do it, Mark,’ sobbed Angie and I didn’t really know what she was talking about and what they were talking to the police about until I saw Mark helping her into the back of the unmarked escort car and calling back to me that he was sorry and it was only as far as the church, before he joined her and slammed the door. I got into the funeral car and sat on my own in the middle of the long back seat, big enough for three, four at a push. Ahead, the police motorcyclist skidded slightly on the mud at the junction of the track with the lane and the cars slowed. Then I saw them, the Sisters and not just Sister Amelia and the others, but all the Sisters from the camp over the road as well, dressed in white and lining either side of the lane. In front, Mark was leaning out of the car window and shouting, but the sound was turned down inside my coffin.

  We crawled past them, each face tear-stained, each hand holding high a Rose of Jericho, each mouth moving silently in prayer. Dorothy looked as an old woman should at a time of grieving; Jack, dust and leaves falling from her Rose as her hands shook; both of them hand in hand with Eve, trying hard to stare the future in the face. Suddenly, Sister Amelia stepped out in front of us, arms outstretched, forcing the car to stop.

  ‘Behold a Chosen One of the Rose of Jericho!’ she cried.

  The driver was blaring his horn, several police ran towards Amelia and dragged her out of the way, her long hair knotted in their hands, her white robe scuffed up to her hips and her bare feet scraping the gravel. Some of the Sisters ran to help her, scratching at the policeman and screaming, tugging Sister Amelia’s hands; others took up the chant, louder and louder.

  ‘Behold a Chosen One, the Rose of Jericho! Behold the innocent!’

  Hiding my eyes in my hands, I rocked back and forward in my solitary black cavern. ‘No! No! No!’ I repeated, over and over again until the rhythm of the journey told me that we had gathered speed and had left the Sisters behind. In my head I fought with Voice who wanted to come to the funeral.

  The endless aisle was mine alone, Mark and Angie had walked on ahead, arm in arm and were already seated. The half-turned faces of the strangers in the congregation bloated and contorted in my sight as I passed and I heard the whispering cease and resume like the silence between waves as I was pulled towards the altar, eyeball to eyeball with the crucified Christ. I slipped apologetically into the pew to sit beside the two who were my husband and my daughter. Whatever they all thought, these people who had come to mourn, we had one thing in common, we were all ill at ease with death and religion, uncomfortable with the offer made by a thousand years of stone and stained glass. Someone had filled the plain country church with lilies and their scent blended with the smell of damp hymnbooks and polish and the low moan of the organ. Some of the travellers had come, including Charley; if anyone was going to help Angie get clean again, I thought it would be him. They had brought their kids, girls in woolly tights and long skirts with bunches of snowdrops in their hands, and boys in jeans, unable to sit still. Henni came up to Angie and said he had brought along a photo of Lucien’s bike. He thought he might stick it to the coffin with Blu Tack because Lucien would like that, to take a picture of his bike with him when he went. Angie nodded, kissing him on the head, and said it was very kind and he should do that. So the vicar and all the mourners and the policemen at the back of the church and the lady vetted and brought in to play the organ and me and Mark and Angie all watched as Henni walked the length of the aisle in his squeaking trainers and stuck the photo of the bike to the lid of the wicker coffin.

  The coffin was small, so impossibly small.

  There were hymns – I am not sure who chose them. ‘Lord of all hopefulness, Lord of all joy, whose trust ever child-like, no cares could destroy . . .’ ‘A thousand ages in your sight are like an evening gone.’ Standing up. Gone, said Voice. Sitting down. Kneeling down. Gone, gone, gone. Sitting up. My body a robot, my mind a black screen virus. Mark holding Angie, Angie weeping and weeping, and me, not a tear to be dragged from my dry sockets. Not even in the graveyard, where the diggers had brought in a mechanical digger the day before to help them get through the packed, dry earth; not even as they lowered the coffin; not even when Angie kissed his special duck and dropped it into the dull grave; not even when the children threw their flowers into the chasm.

  Not even now.

  Wordless, Angie left me at the graveside. I turned around and she was gone, leaving no promises or forgiveness behind her. A doctor and a policeman took me back to The Well. Mark appare
ntly managed the wake in the village hall and then left without ever coming back here again. The doctor was a kind man. He stayed with me, told me later that the statement had been a good idea; he hoped it might put an end to the queues of people waiting to pay their respects.

  Statement?

  The family would like to thank everyone for their kindness and sympathy expressed over recent weeks. They cannot find the words to say what a gap the death of Lucien has left behind in their lives. He was the most wonderful son and grandson anyone could hope for and loved by everyone who ever met him. They know that there has been a lot of speculation throughout the country about The Well and about the family’s future plans for the farm. What is important to the family is that this special land is now used in such a way as will best benefit the rest of the country suffering so terribly as a result of the drought and then Lucien’s death may not have been in vain. They will therefore be leaving the land shortly and making legal arrangements for the change of ownership to a charitable trust.

  The family now ask to be left to grieve their terrible loss in private.

  ‘It was sensible of Mark to write it,’ said the doctor. ‘He said he thought you had enough on your plate without having to write statements for the press.’

  That was his public valedictory speech; for me he had a different message.

  Dear Ruth

  This is the hardest letter I shall ever have to write, but I cannot put it off any longer. I am leaving. By the time you read this, I will have left and this time I will not be coming back. I am sorry.

  I wanted to stay. The Well was a dream for both of us to start with. It didn’t belong to you or me, but it has driven us apart. We’ve tried every permutation now. Together in the house, then separate bedrooms, then separate houses, the next logical step was always going to be for one of us to go, but then all this. The last few weeks I kidded myself that you needed me again, but I was wrong. You have not needed me for a long time. You have had your daughter, your grandson, your sisters, your god – I have been way down your list for a very long time. Since Lucien’s death you have allowed me to feed you and count your pills, but that is not enough and I am going.

  If I could share your beliefs, I would, but I can’t. I don’t have any other answers, as you so often remind me, but I think that to rely on some God-centric explanation of how and why we have ended up at The Well is weakness, not strength. It is delusional. As I have tried to tell you so many times, out of love not malice, you are being exploited by Sister Amelia. I hope you stay away from her. You need medical help. Unlike Angie, I do not think the Sisters are harmless.

  I think we agree on one thing – that The Well is bigger than us. I’ve invested everything in it as our smallholding, but it’s not a small thing, is it? It is not and never really has been ours to own – if it offers answers to the drought, they belong to everyone. So I have signed my half of the Government Temporary Lease Order and lodged it with our solicitors. I have not received any money for this yet. It never was to do with the money. Surely you know me well enough to believe that. This March would have been our wedding anniversary. You have meant everything to me and perhaps that is why it has been impossible to accept anything less than all of you.

  Do you remember those lists you used to write for me and Angie, if you were away for a conference? Jazz dance on Thursday, don’t forget the lasagne in the freezer, Angie’s reading book due back Friday – all that. I want to write one for you – check the sheep every day for footrot, the supplement for the Tamworths is running out, the brake lights on the trailer need fixing . . . I want to remind you to look after yourself, to eat properly, to lock the back door, not to use jump leads on the Land Rover, to steer clear of the internet . . . but you haven’t done any of these things for months, so what’s the point in me saying it now. So what if they all die? For my own sanity I need to be able to walk away, so I will stop now. I need to look after my own grief. You can look after yourself.

  I have left all the paperwork, financial information etc. in my desk. I’ve downloaded all The Well paperwork onto your laptop in a file called Leaving. There is some money in the bank, but it won’t last forever – at some point we will need to talk about that. Maybe I will ask the solicitor to get in touch. Do not try to contact me. I will not reply. It is over.

  I don’t know what I’m going to do. Will says he knows someone who may need some law work done, but my heart will not be in it.

  You have left me as surely as I have left you. I am sorry I hit you. I am not a violent man, but you have punched me so hard that there are times when I can no longer breathe. Maybe this will all be over soon. Maybe it will start to rain. But until we know who murdered our grandson, it is impossible to think of forgiveness. I hope against hope it was not you.

  You can have all my love, I will never need it for anyone else.

  Mark

  Remembrance comes at a cost and does not travel alone. I wake up with its companion beside me, its cold body spooned against mine despite the heat of the day, its rancid breath against the back of my neck causing me to pull my knees up to my chest and howl like a dog. Before Hugh’s death, I was beginning to think it might have packed up its leaden suitcases, laden with grief and deceit, and dragged them down the stairs and out. But it was hiding all along, biding its time and here it is again.

  Staring at the ceiling, I mock my small steps forward with my strides backwards. At some point during the morning I turn onto my side, look out of the window and see the wheat sprouting amongst the thistles in First Field and the regimented experimental crops on the government plots. Here are the functions of all living things. Be born. Feed. Defecate. Grow. Reproduce. Die. The rats which scuttle near the compost heap are more accomplished at all of these functions than I will ever be. They do not, as far as I know, kill themselves.

  My hand reaches for my thigh and feels the raised welt of the branded pattern there; it does this often, my hand, as if it is worried I might forget something. At this moment it strikes me as likely that I could have killed Lucien. His face appears from the knot and twist of the grain of the floorboards and confirms my guilt, not some abstract moral responsibility, but the physical act: waking him up in the early hours of the morning, putting my finger over his mouth to sshh him, whispering in his ear about a dawn adventure. I lace his trainers for him, double bows and ends tucked in. He is sleepy. I hang the rose around his neck and in the dim light my fingers know how to tie the knot by heart. I search for his hand hidden under the long sleeve of the green jumper and then lead him down the stairs. He is awake now and excited.

  ‘Where are we going, Granny R, and why?’

  ‘Look how dark it is, Granny R.’

  It is very dark and very cold. There are no stars. There is no moon. We hold hands, Lucien so he cannot get lost in the night, me all the better to lose him. At the top of the field, we look out over Cadogan Hill; there are no lights on in the distant farmhouses, no one wants to wake to see this.

  Voice tells us to hurry. Dawn will break soon.

  ‘Are we going to The Well, Granny R, is that where we’re going?’

  We are going to The Well.

  He is frightened now, climbing the stile into the wood. I can feel the tightness of his grip on my hand as he clutches on to the one thing that will harm him. We arrive at the black water and Lucien bends down and touches the surface with his hand. It is slow to wake up and recoils drowsily to the edges of the pond where it cowers in the reeds; the water itself does not want to shake hands with evil.

  ‘You’re not going to leave me here, are you, Granny R?’

  Yes and no.

  ‘How deep it is, Granny R. Can you touch the bottom?’

  Yes, and rise again.

  We sit on the cold earth and he leans against me, saying he feels a little sick and can we go home now, come again another time, but I tell him the water makes everything all right.

  ‘Will we see the magic?’

  Yes, I say, but
we have to do things properly for the magic to work. Follow me.

  Hand in hand, we stand in the cold waters of the Wellspring, the mud sludge sucking us in, Lucien giggling and shivering. One more step. One more step along the road we go, one more step along the world I know. From the old things to the new, keep me travelling along with you. I start to sing to him, quietly, and he joins in because he knows this song. He sings like a girl. He has hair like a girl, I feel it in my fingers. But he has the genitals of a boy. Deeper, says Voice, go deeper.

  ‘How cold it is, Granny R.’

  I tell him that when you are cold, the best thing is to go deeper. The cold, the pain you have in your tummy, the fear you feel in your fists, when you are in deep enough, they all disappear with the magic. You just have to believe.

  ‘I do believe, Granny R, honestly. I do believe, but I’m very cold.’

  Trust me.

  He lies back against my arms, but when the water splashes on his face, he screams. Suddenly he has a thousand arms and fingers and they are scratching at my clothes and pulling my hair. Stumbling in the dark, I lurch into him, he beats me, kicks me in the breast, we fight like drunks, he half stands, half slips and his head flies backwards, crack, against the old moss steps and then he slumps, slides into the water. I hold his perfect, bleeding head under the surface. Just once, feebly, his hands reach out for something to cling to, but finding nothing they open to float like flowers. He stills, becomes beautiful again and I allow his pale face to surface to meet the moonlight, his lips puckered like a rosebud.

  Voice says I have done well and then I am home in my bed and the house itself is weightless and outside the dawn is coloured like a rainbow.

  ‘Ruth, are you OK?’

  ‘I didn’t know you were back.’

  Boy feels my forehead. ‘You’re very hot.’