The Well

by Catherine Chanter

  Rolling away from him, I huddle under the duvet, shaking. He thinks I am ill. He is right, I am sick to the core.

  ‘What’s been going on this last week? I read the log; you’ve hardly got up . . .’

  ‘You need to leave me.’

  ‘I’ll go and get you some paracetamol. You need a doctor.’

  ‘No. And I don’t want your paracetamol. And, you know what, Boy, I don’t want you either. Go back to your barracks.’

  Boy puts his head in his hands. Grabbing his arm, I lean forward and press my advantage. ‘For God’s sake, go. It’s pathetic – me a menopausal headcase and you, nothing but an adolescent looking for a cause. You’ve picked the wrong one. And do you know what, sooner or later you’ll conform, get a house and a job and wife and kids and all this will be a story you tell at supper parties.’

  My fists pummel him as hard as my words, beating against his ‘oh so traditional’ successful youth, his ordinariness, his future, hating him because he has so little to lose, so much life left to live and I have lost it all already – and Lucien never even got to try. But he does not flinch under my blows and he does not leave and I cannot carry on so I collapse, exhausted, and turn away from him. Sit there, I think, if you must, and catch my disease. In the silence which follows, the thing that really needs to be said stirs in my stomach and organises itself into words.

  ‘I have spent the week remembering the worst times. But it’s been worth it. I think I killed Lucien,’ I tell him. ‘I think I have remembered it all.’

  Still, he won’t leave. His shoulders are a little lower, his chest rises a little higher when he breathes. He doesn’t look at me when he speaks.

  ‘What do you remember?’

  ‘Details. How I tied his laces, how he hit his head, how I held him under, my footprints in the mud.’ I sit up, cross-legged. ‘It’s a relief. I can tell everyone now, be charged, go to prison. It will all be so straightforward. And no –’ I stop him interrupting – ‘don’t say I didn’t do it, because you have never quite got it, how mad I am, how miserable, how delusional. Actually’ – it seems I have been searching a lifetime for the right word and suddenly I find it – ‘how selfish.’

  Boy moves away and sits on the broad window sill where the light behind silhouettes him and his shadow falls across the bed. It means I cannot see his face very well, but his voice gives away the fact that he is struggling.

  Boy speaks slowly, in a measured tone. ‘I think you are a very beautiful woman – not like that, I don’t mean physically, I mean all of you. I don’t know if you murdered Lucien, I’ve never been sure. You never tied his laces in a double bow, did you? He hated that, it said so in the press – that you would never have tied his laces in a double bow. Then there’s the jumper and the wooden rose, you’ve never remembered where they are. And footprints mean nothing, everyone – Amelia, all the Sisters, Mark, Lucien, you – the world and his wife were at the Wellspring that evening.’

  ‘You just don’t want to believe it, Boy. But you must. Piles of wet clothes, me exhausted in the morning. And who else would Lucien have gone with, in the middle of the night? I didn’t know what I was doing half the time when I was awake, let alone when I was asleep. Face it, Boy, I could have done it.’

  Boy throws open the window to let some air in, then paces to the other end of the bedroom and stands defiantly. ‘And it wasn’t just you in the frame, there’s Mark – from what I gathered in the news, he had pretty much lost the plot by then. What about the Sisters?’ He presses on through my silence. ‘A cult like that can do anything; think of all the unbelievable things that have been done in the name of religion throughout history. I’ve told you I don’t get religion. I never met these Sisters. I don’t doubt they were good people, you seemed to trust them, but that’s the thing, isn’t it? Those mass suicides in Texas, suicide bombs, 9/11 for God’s sake . . .’

  ‘No lectures, please. I’ve thought about all those things too. Yes, there are other people, other ways of telling the story,’ I acknowledge. ‘It doesn’t make this version any the less true.’

  Boy ignores me, sits back down on the bed and takes my hands in his. ‘I don’t know if you killed him or not. Even if you did, it wouldn’t change things, because it wouldn’t be the real you who had done that. I don’t know how to put it.’

  ‘Well, don’t bother to try, it won’t change anything.’ I pull back, he holds on tight.

  ‘It’s like thinking it was my mother, or someone like that, who people are saying has done something awful. Even if she’d done it, it wouldn’t change the fact that she’s my mother and I know she’s an amazing person. Do you see? It would have been another Ruth, one who was stressed, ill. You were put under massive pressure by the government wanting the land and the rain and your marriage falling apart, quite apart from the Sisters and all their crap. You read about it all the time, people who can’t be held responsible for their own actions.’

  There is a short silence. Here we are, handcuffed to each other to fulfil our own needs. I break away. ‘In the end there are some things you can’t change with speeches, Boy, and one of them is guilt.’

  The next morning when I wake he is not on duty. No Boy. I am filled with dread, thinking that we were too close yesterday and Three has read into that what he wanted to see and has got Boy redeployed – but I am panicking unnecessarily. Anon reminds me that Boy has gone to Hugh’s funeral. I wanted to go myself to ask for his forgiveness, but I didn’t even bother to apply for permission: I would have just been a freak show at someone else’s private grief. There is one piece of good news. Apparently the notice which restricted me to the house has now been lifted. The ways of God have remained a mystery to me, but no more so than the ways of this government’s judiciary. Nevertheless, it makes a difference. It means I can mourn in the orchard, where Hugh and I sat for so many hours; I am sad that he never tasted the wild raspberries in the hedge behind the bench, nor did I get the chance to give him a bag of gooseberries to take home to have with some cream from his beloved Jersey cow. How he would have loved that. He gave me so much and I never thanked him.

  In this mood, I am ill-prepared for Boy who comes back from the funeral proper a little drunk, all yesterday’s seriousness forgotten. Apparently Hugh had left express orders that the mourners be allowed to polish off his substantial collection of rare Irish malt whiskeys and Boy gives a graphic and verbose description of the wake, saying it was a pretty happy occasion – a thanksgiving for a life well lived. Boy says he hopes he gets a send-off like that and collapses in a heap on the bench by the back door. I point out that it might be sooner than he thinks given the state he’s in.

  ‘Did you bring me back a wee dram in a party bag?’ I add.

  ‘No. Just some fruit cake. And a cow.’

  ‘A cow?’

  ‘A cow.’

  It is not the drink talking. Hugh left instructions that on his death his beloved cow should come to live at The Well and Hugh’s daughter will be delivering her, just so long as she gets permission, which she has, apparently.

  ‘His beautiful cow, for me?’

  ‘All yours.’

  ‘I don’t deserve her,’

  ‘Well, you’ve got her whether you want her or not.’

  ‘When? Boy, be sensible! I mean it.’

  ‘Tomorrow.’ Boy turns a little green and lurches off to the barn.

  It is an act of great kindness, typical of Hugh, and for a time I think I cannot accept it, but then I realise that the greatest insult to Hugh would be to reject it. Mark would have known more than me, but I do what I can. I am sweaty and have red weals on my palms from dragging straw up from the bottom stable to the barn, broken nails from repairing the fence in the paddock and I stink like a public loo, having devoted the best part of an hour and a litre bottle of disinfectant scrubbing out two metal pails, but since I have spent most of an afternoon busy, two sensations overwhelm me: tiredness and hunger. Hugh’s gifts always had hidden messages.
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  I fidget my way through the morning. It is drizzling softly, so I sit under the porch, flicking through one of Mark’s old Smallholders’ Weeklys with advice on your first dairy cow. Then the trailer arrives and Hugh’s daughter introduces herself as Sam – two women of a certain age, we stand in the sun swapping names and small talk.

  ‘I’m so sorry about your father,’ I say. ‘I wanted to write, but I couldn’t think of anything that would be good enough to say. I am sort of out of the habit of writing.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. We had hundreds of letters. I suppose I’m going to have to reply to them all. Dad was very fond of his visits here. I used to drop him at the end of the track and he’d joke he was going into time travel mode. I can see why now. It’s as though the past two years simply haven’t happened here. Did it rain here this morning?’

  ‘Just drizzled.’

  ‘Drizzled.’ Sam let the word linger in her mouth like fine wine. ‘But it wasn’t just the place – it was seeing you. He was fond of you.’

  ‘He was a very good man.’

  ‘A good man who did good things. That’s what’s going on his gravestone.’ She turned away for a moment and in a rush I realise how much I miss the company of women. I put my hand on her elbow. It feels awkward and I wonder if I’m so out of practice that I’ve got everything wrong, like a traveller in a foreign land who is not sure of the significance of gestures – but she smiles.

  ‘Guess we’d better get her out,’ she says.

  Anon helps Sam lower the back of the trailer. Once it hits the ground, all Boy’s Christmases have come at once. He puts his hand on the cow’s golden flank and keeps her steady as Sam pushes and coaxes her backwards down the ramp. Anon beats a hasty retreat, as animals make him wheezy. At the bottom, Boy holds her halter and she looks around placidly, her huge dark eyes taking in her new home.

  ‘Cow heaven,’ says Sam.

  Annalisa is, as Hugh always said, quite beautiful: her breath is soft on my hand and she smells of The Child’s Guide to Farms. Sam holds out the halter rope to me and I lead my first cow slowly towards her five-star barn. If only Mark could be here; a cow was for year three on the dream plan. Boy and Anon are busy latching up the ramp and Sam follows me to the barn, carrying a dustbin liner.

  She says loudly, ‘Here are various bits and bobs you may need.’ She looks over her shoulder and then speaks more quietly. ‘I’m not sure what you’re allowed and what’s forbidden – he was always talking about the bureaucratic restrictions – so I’ve left a couple of things in the food sacks which may interest you. He did a lot of research, you know, before his death. I don’t know if he meant for you to have it or not. I had to make that choice. It may be nothing.’

  Sam says goodbye and hugs me; I’d like her to come again, but that’s too much of an imposition, so I say nothing.

  There is not much milk this evening; I think the travelling has affected her yield and I am an unskilled dairymaid. Even so, the sweet milk froths round the shining metal bucket and I carry it to the house with pride, remembering Hugh’s first visit. Boy joins me to help with the bedding down. We stand looking at her, warmed by her body and stilled by the steady crunch of her chewing our own sweet hay. We wonder if she will get lonely.

  Boy is shaking out the dustbin liner, trying to be helpful. ‘There’s something in here,’ he says as a plastic wallet falls to the ground.

  ‘It’s nothing important,’ I lie, picking it up quickly. This wallet could hold answers, information at the very least, an address for Angie, something from Mark, an update on the Sisters. I know Boy means well, but I will not risk losing this. ‘I’ll read it later on my own.’

  It strikes me he is a little resentful, being shut out of his boy’s own adventure. He leaves reluctantly and I am alone.

  It turns out there are only two pages. Notes for Ruth, it says at the top of the first one I look at; then ‘the Sisters?’ underlined. This is all about the Sisters then, nothing about my Angie or Mark. I cannot believe it was so impossible for Hugh to have traced Mark and if he had found Mark, then Mark would have known something about Angie. That just leaves the one explanation: that Mark refused to talk to Hugh. The conclusion is unbearable; I return to the paperwork about the Sisters.

  Beneath the heading is a list of internet sites, as if Hugh was Googling them; there is one that he has underlined twice, emphatically: Sistersoftheinlandsea.com. Beneath that is about half a page of jottings, as though he was making notes at the same time as looking at the site: ‘Blog – very similar. Picture of the Sisters’ ritual by sea, tall one – Amelia. They have reinvented themselves.’ Then an arrow pointing to the word ‘Norfolk’ and some illegible scribbles running vertically up the margin about Christian feminist tradition and a couple of Bible references to the Song of Solomon and Ecclesiastes. He has also written ‘Saints Days (???)’, but nothing more specific. Between the pages is a photo of Amelia, taken from a newspaper. Although it is black and white, her hair still looks auburn to me and she is as tall as ever, standing windswept on a beach, a long white gown full like a sail in the wind, her arms out as if in worship. I hold it close to my eyes, run my finger up her arm to her finger, touch it; I note the lie of the cloth against her breast, trace the faint line of a necklace she is wearing to the cleavage which conceals its pendant. If a blind man can read meaning in Braille, why can’t I read the truth here? Despite the shafts of light over the sea behind her, there is nothing in this picture to illuminate me, but one thing is clear: Sister Amelia has set up shop again. Although it is depressing and disorientating to see my miracle reproduced with such factory efficiency, it is little more than a personal humiliation. I look at the next page.

  This is a print-out from a twenty-four-hour news site. As opposed to just printing an article, Hugh has printed the whole page. There are links down one side, pictures of well-known presenters down the other, a link to what’s on live in the corner, the result of which is that the news article itself is in a tiny font and difficult to decipher in the low light of the barn. We always kept a torch down here. Mark said matches and hay were a poor combination. My arm remembers the movement, reaches up, fumbles on the little wooden shelf to the left of the door and there it is, and it still works. Cautiously, I move outside and check that there is no one around before turning it on. The beam illuminates the midges, makes it easier to spot the bats, but nothing else becomes clearer. The main news article is about a house fire in Portsmouth in which three people died and protests about the fire brigade’s lack of access to water. I guess he meant to print out something else, maybe one of the links and got in a muddle. I run my eyes down the links: State of the Markets – record low – click here; Drought Update – technical difficulties cause ten-month delay for water purification system – click here; At Home/Regional/Eastern – woman sectioned after attempted murder at seaside camp – click here; International News – Paris calm after nights of riots – click here. None of it makes any sense to me, so I turn over and squint at the immaculate handwriting on the back, which simply reads Exodus 20 and a D and three more words: the Ten Commandments. They enter my mind like those PowerPoint slides, where someone has text randomly appearing on the screen, from left, right, below, above, letter by letter, magnifying and shrinking; they flash before me in the order of the level of my guilt.

  Thou shalt not kill.

  Thou shalt not commit adultery.

  Thou shalt not worship graven images.

  Those are just the things I have done; there are many other things that I have left undone.

  I was hoping for so much more, but my disappointment is tempered by a realisation that I am relieved Hugh hadn’t brought these empty pages to me on one of his visits. I would have been angry with him.

  The sum of it is this: I spent a year surrounded by fakery. I try to imagine the Sisters, camped up on the seashore, a new altar for the Rose, Eve updating the site, Sister Amelia identifying another woman to be the fifth. I don’t know about Jack.
Not Dorothy, of course. D – that is what the D is for – D for Dorothy. I check the bits of paper again. There should be a reply from that priest she saw: he was going to write to her; Dorothy would certainly write back. But there is nothing. I wonder why Dorothy left when the rest of them stayed. Perhaps she just lost her faith, saw it all for the sham it was. She told me she had lied; did she tell me all of the truth? Thou shalt not bear false witness. Or perhaps she left because of what happened here, because of the way it all ended for them, for us.

  Hugh’s papers are hidden back in the dustbin liner in the stable, the torch is out, the darkness is complete. The way it all ended – that is what I recollect now. Mark was both right and wrong about the hay and the matches.

  The medieval mystics had a word for it – derelict. It’s a good word, conjuring up as it does empty stables with their rotting planks leaning outwards like gaping teeth, their innards just rusting machinery and corroded pipework. Dereliction. The state of not feeling cared for. After the funeral, a deep, debilitating depression rendered me passive and incompetent. With Mark gone, I was like a domestic animal left tethered in the stall when the villagers have fled the plague. The police patrolled the property, ensuring the search for the jumper, the rose and anything else that could be used in evidence would not be disturbed. Their dogs scoured the hillside and the coverts, noses down, tails up: ‘a south west wind and a cloudy sky, makes the scent lie breast high’, that’s what they used to say round here, when the quarry was a fox and the huntsmen blew for home at the end of day. The Sisters left food and herbs on the doorstep, Amelia wrote messages, but I told the police I wanted nothing to do with them. I kept the door locked, never allowed them in, nor did I eat their offerings, or read Amelia’s texts. Sometimes I slept fitfully during the day, but I only ever ventured out at dusk, as if, like Canute, I could hold back the waves of night and then when darkness came, I paced the hours away. The Rayburn went out from lack of oil, I did not bother with the stove but recreated instead the torpor of the hibernating dormice and hedgehogs, which I both envied and imitated. I existed, that was probably the most that could be said about me.