The Well (17 page)

So, for that one evening only, out of all the evenings, I was on my own. The lights from the houses way over the other side of the valley were dimmed by low cloud, shadows of sheep moved out of the mist towards me and away again, and an owl swooped low over the Hedditch where it found a branch and perched, motionless. It smelled of rain. So often, I had woken in the morning to damp grass and puddles, the drip from the gutters into the water butt, the sudden shower when the squirrel shook the oak, but I rarely actually saw it fall or felt it. Upstairs, under my duvet, the wind lifted the latch on the half-open window and drifted me in and out of sleep. It was not unusual for me to sleep alone, but now that Mark was actually away, I craved him, the round of his back, the warmth of him; his absence was a reminder of how well we fitted together.

It was in this half haze of a sleep that I dreamed about the rain: I was trapped in a metal matchbox and the rain was splattering on the tin roof of my miniature home; outside people were dancing
to the drums of the raindrops, trying to rouse me; inside, the beating of my fists on the walls was mistaken by them for rhythm and rapture. Half awake, I struggled to divide the dream from the night, but realised they were one and the same thing and, disoriented, I groped my way downstairs and out of the house. There were shapes in the darkness: the oak reaching heavenwards; the night-purple poplars pulling the veil of cloud over their faces and weeping into the brook which ran at their feet; the fields, like me, lying naked the better to feel the rain on their skin; and the outcrops of rock on the Crag washed clean by new streams. The shower slowed and was gone, the diminishing clouds released the moon and allowed her to regain her place, illuminating the silver puddles on the gravel. I had tasted the rain and it was good.

When I woke, it was dawn and I was not sure what had happened in the hours of darkness. Only the trace of footprints, writing in bare feet and mud across the kitchen floor told the story of where I had been. Even more dishevelled than usual after my restless night, I didn’t bother to wash or do my teeth, but pulled on Mark’s dressing gown and retraced those footsteps in an attempt to recapture the night. I went out of the kitchen into the back passage, out through the back door, unlocked as always, then followed the barely visible path through the long grass, ending up at the huge oak at the gate, and there was the woman, the woman with the long auburn hair. She was standing in a rainbow-coloured nightshirt, with the sun just cresting the horizon behind her and the concerto of the dawn chorus around her.

‘Good morning, Ruth,’ she said. ‘Welcome to the first day.’

‘Morning,’ I replied. ‘You’re up very early.’ I sounded absurd, as if I had bumped into someone on the way to catch the 6.45 to Waterloo.

‘I was very excited,’ she said. ‘I haven’t slept, I wanted to know every drop of rain; like you, I wanted to feel it on my skin.’

I didn’t know if I had heard her correctly, or understood her. She was implying that she was with me last night, or at the very
least knew where I was and what I was doing. She seemed to know everything about me. I pulled the dressing gown tight around me. I was naked last night. I was on my own then and now. What was this woman doing prowling around my cottage at dawn?

‘Oh yes, the rain, I suppose we’ve become a little blasé about it,’ I lied. ‘No, that’s stupid. What I really mean is that we’ve become used to it and it has brought problems as well as solutions, you know.’

‘Blessings,’ she said.

‘Sorry?’

‘Blessings. Solutions are blessings.’

I wished the dressing gown had not lost its cord. ‘And problems are problems whatever you do with the language,’ I told her. ‘You’ve obviously come here thinking this is some sort of paradise, but actually it’s a bit hellish, stuck up here, no company, hated by everyone around, trying to make ends meet. You need to understand that.’

Amelia came towards me, her arms outstretched, and hugged me, but at the point at which a stranger should have let go, she carried on holding me and at the point at which I should have politely wriggled free, I found my face hidden against her shoulder, her hair smelling of lavender; ridiculously I found myself close to crying. She said that she knew how hard it had been for me, but that she was there for me now, her and all the Sisters, that I wouldn’t be alone any longer. I was going to say that I was not alone, that I had Mark, but I didn’t say that and when we broke apart, she turned and left, diminishing as she crossed the field towards their caravans, but growing larger and larger in my mind.

M
ark arrived back mid-morning, hungover and fraught. People are getting desperate out there, he said. He had had a difficult time at the gate: some woman with a kid had run alongside the car holding onto the handle and when he’d got out to undo the padlock, she’d tried to push the little boy into the car, saying that now he’d have to let them in. He hardly paused to dump his bag, before pulling on his boots as he continued to talk.

‘She was crying about how she didn’t have a job, how she’d work for us. It was horrible, Ruth. Horrible. I had to shove her aside and slam the gate. Then the kid started climbing and I thought he’d get an electric shock and I was shouting to her to make him get down.’ He reached for the shed keys.

‘Come and sit down,’ I suggested. ‘It sounds awful.’

He looked at the keys. ‘I suppose it can wait,’ he relented and came back and kissed me. ‘Will was reminding me that I married the sexiest girl at Uni,’ he said.

At the table, he moved on to more ordinary-extraordinary news. The price of beer: apparently it takes forty-five pints of water to make one pint. And Will had then joked that Jesus would be turning wine into water if he was around now, though he’d do better as a
dealer: cocaine is cheaper than cider and it seems half the country is permanently stoned. They had been drinking at the hotel bar, because there were hardly any pubs left. We had realised of course that our local, The Bridge, had closed some time ago but had no idea the problem was so widespread.

‘I’ve spent a fortune, I’m afraid. We’ll have to take out a mortgage just to pay for the booze. Still, it was a small price to pay for a bit of escapism.’

Other things he’d noticed: standpipes, boarded-up garden centres, the army in convoys escorting water tankers on half-empty motorways. It crept up on people, he said, that’s what Will and he reckoned. Year after year of below average rainfall, the odd farmer in the south-east going bust, car washes out of order and then before you know it, drought. He wasn’t surprised The Well was such big news.

‘We’ve lost touch with what it’s really like out there,’ he said.

‘You could have let her in,’ I said quietly, ‘the woman and the little boy.’

Mark finished his coffee and chucked the mug in the sink. ‘Oh yes,’ he said sarcastically. ‘Every single one of them who leaves begging notes for jobs pinned to the gatepost. We could let all of them in, couldn’t we? But then there’d be no room for us. You just don’t get it.’

‘Are you interested in my news?’ I asked.

‘Sorry.’ He wrapped his arms around me. ‘Let’s not argue.’

The break had done him good; he even tasted of the outside world – smoke and borrowed toothpaste. Perhaps my news could wait, because in some way I felt I had betrayed him and The Well that morning, with the hug and telling a complete stranger how bad things were, and I wanted to repair that infidelity. Then again, perhaps it couldn’t wait. It was more than likely that he and the nun would meet and she would mention what had happened.

So I told him about the Sisters. I lied for the first time that morning and said that it was me who had let the nuns in and
given them permission to stay, not Angie. He said he thought I was mad, that he could scarcely get his head around it. Just before he slammed the door, he asked if I’d checked the sheep and I replied of course, indignantly, and wondered how I could possibly have forgotten.

Up at the travellers’ camp, I found Angie and some of the others had taken the offer of a day’s work shifting some rotten straw from a barn and had left early that morning. Charley had stayed behind and he explained to me how his damaged leg restricted the physical work he could do. It turns out that he’d jumped from a multi-storey car park, thinking he could fly when he was high as a kite.

‘Lucien’s gone too,’ he said.

Furious, I told him I thought it was totally irresponsible taking a small boy to do bale-loading where he could get squashed.

‘You mustn’t worry so much. Angie’s a great mum you know. People change,’ he added.

He made tea and I sat with him on one of the logs they had dragged from the woods. He continued sewing, large hands on the ends of scarred arms holding the needle gently, mending the tear in the tent with surprising deftness.

‘People do change,’ he repeated. The repair was neat – tiny, almost invisible stitches in a carefully matched cotton re-attached the zip to the tent lining, evenly spaced, evenly taut. He checked his work by running the zip carefully up and down. ‘Mended.’

‘Will it hold?’ I asked.

‘As long as someone keeps an eye on it, yes.’

Charley limped with me as far as the track. ‘Tell me about these nuns of Angie’s,’ he said.

‘You can’t see them from here,’ I told him, ‘they’re down in the dip.’

‘I know that, but what do they believe?’

Good question.

‘Do you think they’ll stay long?’ he asked.

‘No idea,’ I replied. ‘And you, and Angie and Lucien? How long will you stay?’

‘No idea either,’ he laughed. ‘But we’ll need to move on at the end of the summer, find somewhere warmer to live, like the birds.’

I could not risk another encounter with Sister Amelia, not without losing all the glue, safety pins and drawing pins which had kept everything together this far, but nor could I face the day in front which seemed to show me in all its emptiness what it would be like when Lucien and all the swallows were gone. Back at the cottage, I picked up a bucket of cleaning things and found a new packet of bicarbonate and thought how old-fashioned we’d become as a society, the smiling faces of the 1940s housewife being the new chic, gracing adverts on everything from vinegar to powdered milk and exhorting us to summon up that wartime spirit as the nation faced its new enemy. Suitably armed, I went to the barn, determined that Angie would never have an excuse to leave. No one had slept in it for a long time – friends who might have come and stayed had stayed away instead and tourists were the last thing on our minds, although I am sure we could have let it out for a fortune if we had chosen. ‘One week in Paradise – only £150 self-catering.’ The only problem would be getting people to leave; The Well had been a story of entrances and exits, but there is no logic as to who leaves and who stays.

The guards have changed the barn, of course, enlarging the living quarters and putting up partition walls, adding another toilet and putting in a whole load of electronic gadgets. Not so much a barn now as a barracks.

That day, I cleaned the barn, scrubbed the sink, threw out the sliver of soap left on the basin and poured cleaner into the toilet which had been unflushed for so long that it had left a brown rim around the bowl. I chipped away at the blue mould between the shower tray and the wall which was blotching the white tiles until they looked like old slices of bread at the bottom of the packet.

With clean sheets from the airing cupboard, I made the bed, running my hands over and smoothing the fresh pillowcases, wondering about Angie and Charley and imagining them setting up home here. Then I lay on the bed, aching with the awareness of my solitude, half hearing a line from a poem on the edge of my memory.
The glacier knocks in the cupboard, the desert sighs in the bed
. That was it. Auden. I had taught that in London and wondered then how the throbbing adolescents before me were meant to understand the bleakness of the sexually impoverished marriage. Back then I had understood by proxy, through shared intimacies from friends with failing partnerships, but after a year at The Well, I knew it for myself. I spoke the rest of the verse out loud into the silence: ‘
And the crack in the tea-cup opens a lane to the land of the dead
.’

I undid the top button of my jeans and slid my hand between my legs, letting the sharp urge catch my breath. As my finger worked its method, my eyes fixed on the whitewashed ceiling until I saw a spider, spinning a web down from the cracked oak beam above my head, its bulbous body turning and turning in the shaft of light, closer and closer. Suddenly the fear of the touch of its legs on my face made me scream and I tore my hand from my jeans and scratched frantically at my face, not knowing where the spider had gone. The moment was over. I stood up, buttoned my jeans, straightened the duvet and left, unsatisfied.

Outside the smirking day made me feel filthy and restless. There were things that needed doing, there always were. Things that I had begun to think of as tedious, like clearing the nettles from the young trees or weeding the herb bed, but the only respite I could think of was visiting the Sisters. As time went on, I fought the desire like an addict closes the door and leans against it to shut out the dealer, but on this occasion I went back inside the barn and counted the knives, forks, spoons, mugs, cups, saucers, dinner plates, side plates and bowls which were kept in the bottom of the dresser ready for the fictitious holiday guests. That way, I got as far as lunch.

By suppertime, another domino had fallen. I told Mark I’d cleaned the barn in case Angie and Lucien should want to stay. He said he’d been up to the nuns’ camp and had a quick word. He thought they looked harmless enough. There might even be benefits, he joked; there would be extra pairs of eyes to keep a lookout and anyway, it would be a brave man who wanted to break into The Well now that it was occupied by two of the nation’s most reviled groups: travellers and religious nutcases. I laughed along and when he said he’d even promised them a hose attachment for the water trough tap by the hedge, I offered to take it up to them. Peace was breaking out all around us, but founded on pyrrhic victories and hasty attempts at reconciliation. I found the hose adapter in the barn and stuck my head around the back door before I went to the Sisters.