The Well (14 page)

Later that evening, he asked me what was happening to him. ‘I would have hit them, you know, if Willis hadn’t stopped me. I would have done it.’ His face was hidden in his hands on the table.

‘We’re so tired,’ I said, ‘we were up half the night and it’s been a long day.’ I kissed the back of his head. ‘It’s because this place matters to us, that’s why. And I don’t think you would have hit them, Mark, not when it came to it. You’re just not that sort of person.’

Like poachers turned gamekeepers, the following days were spent with Mark and Charley and one or two of the other men from the camp repairing fences and locking gates and towing boulders into gaps where ancient tracks met new roads. I ferried to and fro, between the house and the camp, bringing food out to the travellers, bringing questions home. Lucien was often with me at my side. The sightseers, soothsayers and naysayers gradually drifted away,
the police presence was scaled back, but they left a code which we were to give to the station if more people turned up or tried to break in. But it wasn’t just travellers who had us under siege. The newspaper article had opened a floodgate of obsession. We were contacted continuously by everyone from estate agents to extra-terrestrial enthusiasts. The guttural pulse of helicopters droned over the house like bees in winter. Several times one or other of us would come across a reporter, trespassing on our land, with a long lens and a thirsty pen. Despite the assurances he’d given me, I was worried that Mark, who was once probably one of the most cerebral and least physically aggressive people you were ever likely to meet, would get into a fight. I watched with foreboding when he headed out at dusk to check the fences, his shotgun cocked under his arm.

The post lessened slightly over the weeks, but still piles of envelopes pleading and promising and prying lay unopened on the spare-room floor. We changed our e-mail address, only answered our new mobile phone, and gave up going out unless we had to. We did attend Tom’s funeral, taking two of the extra chairs which had been laid out at the back of the packed church, but we were unwelcome mourners both for the publicity we attracted and for our perceived complicity in the drought which had caused his death. After that, we relied increasingly on the internet to connect with the outside world, shopping online, putting a large crate at the top of the drive where curious supermarket delivery drivers could dump their orders over the fence. Unless we collected our deliveries quickly, they were stolen, now that the price of even basic foods like sugar and bread was becoming unaffordable for so many people. Either that or the locals were trying to win the siege by starving us out. At home I struggled to concentrate on doing what I had planned to do, making a poor job of preparing the vegetable garden. Mark immersed himself in the farm, preoccupied with the arrival of his piglets. He settled them in like a foster mother, fussing over them, gradually increasing the size of the pen until they were free to rummage in the wood at will, clearing the undergrowth for us.
He found refuge there; I had Lucien. For a while, we muddled through, but not for long.

There was the evening I suggested tackling the backlog of post. Tired and unenthusiastic, having spent the day sawing up the wood left over from the improvements to the barn, I was slumped in front of the television watching a bleak documentary about the plight of the growing number of homeless people, victims of the now snowballing financial crisis. I imagined them, scratching their legs as they scrabbled over hedges, stinging their fingers on the nettles covering the stiles as they struggled onto our land, with Mark and I trampled underfoot on our own doorstep. I didn’t want to share my doomsday scenario with Mark; we were beyond sharing nightmares, or dreams or beds even, since for two nights now he had slept in the little bedroom. We pretended it was because he was coughing a lot; we knew it wasn’t. I had an idea: a waste-paper basket full of unopened post. We can’t just throw it all away, I reasoned, we can’t assume it’s all from nutters. Let’s do it now in front of the television, just clear the backlog. He didn’t want to, but he agreed. It was at least something we were going to do together. We even managed to laugh at some of the letters.

That seemed hilarious at the time, but it is perhaps even more hilarious now to think that I did spend a year worshipping the floral equivalent of the sacred pea. The Rose of Jericho mocks me and minds me still.

We pressed on. Mark emptied one bottle of our homemade damson gin and opened another and we sat next to each other on
the sofa, sharing some of the more bizarre offerings. Behind us the ten o’clock news showed 271 in the corner of the screen next to Big Ben – the number of days since it had rained on the London weather centre – but nevertheless we were laughing, letting our bodies touch each other in quite an ordinary way. I was even wondering if he might sleep in the same bed as me that night.

Mark had no inkling that I had an ulterior motive. I had loved him once for his straightforwardness, his truthfulness. I was convinced he was never a man who dissembled and I think he thought the same about me. I pulled out the formal letter to both of us, which I had in fact opened some days before and had been re-reading on my own over and over again. It was typed on paper headed ‘Cranborne, Cranborne and Chase, Solicitors’. They were acting on behalf of a private client who wished to remain anonymous, but who was prepared to offer in excess of £5 million for the freehold of The Well and all its land.

‘Yes, and pigs might fly,’ Mark said. ‘Next you’ll be showing me an unmissable offer from Nigeria from someone who says we just need to give him our bank details and ours is the kingdom of heaven.’

There were plenty of those if he wanted to read them, I said, but there were plenty of serious offers too. I showed him one from a philanthropist who wanted to buy the place and use it for research (I scanned the letter for the right wording), so as to ‘reduce the harmful effects of drought on the most vulnerable in our society’. They were not all from selfish bastards or big corporations, I told him. He took a plain piece of paper, with a beautiful italic, handwritten script. It was from a religious order which had been given the money to buy the place as a centre of spiritual peace and contemplation in difficult times.

‘We don’t need the brotherhood for that,’ I said, ‘your own daughter’s busy doing that off her own bat down the end of your garden, if you were only prepared to notice.’ I filled up my glass, half empty, half laughing.

But Mark wasn’t laughing; he had suddenly realised I was seriously recommending selling up.

‘Don’t talk to me about not making a go of it,’ he said. ‘I’ve put more of myself into this place than you. All of myself, in fact.’

‘This was,
is
my dream just as much as yours.’

‘It’s me who’s done the planting and the ploughing. I’ve invested a hell of a lot more in this place in practice than you have.’ He chucked the envelopes on the floor.

‘So you should have done. It was you who needed to get away.’

‘So we’re back to that, then? Never going to be allowed to forget that, am I?’

‘You know that’s not what I mean. For God’s sake, turn the telly off.’

Mark stood up and got the remote. ‘No. I don’t know what you mean because you never really knew what you thought, did you?’

With the volume on mute and the news playing out like a dumb show behind us, the room was silent for a pause between our ranting. I tried to continue in a quieter voice. ‘It’s nothing to do with that. Nothing to do with the money either. It’s about us.’

‘Exactly. That’s what I’m saying.’

‘No, it’s not.’

Mark stood with his back to me, staring at the silent screen, and said, ‘You’re not listening.’

‘Yes, I am. I want to leave, but not without . . .’

He swung round. ‘Well, fuck off and leave then.’

He turned the sound back on, racking up the volume notch by notch. I had to shout to make myself heard. ‘. . . not without you, Mark. I’m saying we both go. Hand this land over to someone who can make better use of it than us.’

‘I’m staying.’

‘Why?’

Mark did not reply immediately. He turned the television off completely and spoke slowly. ‘Because I love it here. Because it’s what I’ve always wanted ever since I was a kid. Because it was what I was always going to be until . . .’

‘Until what, Mark? Until I spoiled it for you? Because I got
pregnant with some other bloke and produced a daughter who turned out to be a nightmare. That’s what you’ve always wanted to say out loud, but haven’t dared.’

Mark sat back down. Having opened the door to the wood-burning stove, I started chucking in the envelopes one by one. The flames illuminated half of Mark, biting his fingernails, leaving the rest of his face in the dark. I reached for some more of the begging letters. He put his foot on the handwritten one from the religious brotherhood, then reached down and took my hand. Exhausted, I laid my head on his knees.

‘We’re in over our heads here. If we leave, it would free us up,’ I said, trying again.

I wanted so much to try again and again and again. I was a believer.

Before we went to bed, he opened the back door and called to me to look at the night sky. The Plough was low and clear; I followed the line of the constellation all the way to the North Star.

‘Wish upon a star?’ he said, slipping his arm around my back. From behind we must have looked like the perfect couple.

I found it hard to stop shivering then and I shiver again now, thinking about the black night, the North Star, everything it saw, the way it turned a blind eye when it mattered.

Boy knocks on the door. Nothing important, he is just warning me that the electricity is going to be turned off for a couple of hours while they repair a break in the fence. That explains the alarms going off. I am encouraged that someone wants to break into my prison. Oh, there’s no end of people wanting to do that, he laughs. I love the way he laughs, so won over by his innocence and idealism that I tell him, quite unexpectedly, that I have just written to my husband asking him to come and visit me, but what a waste of time it has been, since I don’t expect to be allowed to post it. Boy looks at me, then at the floor and I know immediately that I have put him under pressure to post it for me and that is unfair.

‘But it doesn’t matter. It was a load of self-pitying drivel anyway,’ I say. ‘Probably better not to send it even if I could. That’s the good thing about letters, rather than e-mail . . .’

Boy interrupts me. ‘I can post it for you.’

He is an adolescent, all impetuosity and risk-taking. With a terrible lurch, he crosses a line and everything changes. The room fills with awkwardness: the lid which doesn’t match the teapot, the way the fridge rattles and dies as the electricity goes off, the squeak of the soles of my shoes on the lino. Although it is no later than six, it seems dark in the kitchen now with the lights off.

‘No, you mustn’t do that,’ I say quietly.

‘I will,’ Boy insists, ‘but you need to understand that I would have to read it.’

I turn to look at him.

‘It’s not that I’m into censuring stuff, or any bullshit like that, but at least if I was caught I could say that I’d followed the protocol. Because if I was caught, I’d be sent away, wouldn’t I, and then I wouldn’t be any use at all.’

I keep my thumb and forefinger on the edge of the envelope, but do not tear it, yet. ‘It’s not worth it, it really isn’t,’ I say. ‘What little life I have will continue to stutter along, but you’ll have served your time soon and then you’ve got everything ahead of you. If you walk out of conscription without a reference, you’re done for, if that’s the right expression.’

Boy pulls up a chair to the kitchen table and sits down and immediately looks embarrassed. It is the second thing he has done in the last five minutes which has usurped the ordained order of things.