The Well (23 page)

‘It’s Ruth Ardingly,’ I said. ‘I had a call from my husband.’

There was a buzz, the door opened and I stepped inside and felt my heart calm a little at the reassuring click of it locking behind me. The woman in civilian clothes behind the glass said I should wait on the blue chairs opposite. I sat, a rack of leaflets to my left, a further locked door in front of me.

‘Know your limits!’ An explanation of the new domestic and commercial unit rates for water consumption.

‘Drought Crime is serious Crime. If you know someone using water illegally, you can contact DROUGHTLINE anonymously on 0800 700 900.’

God knows how many calls they had received about us.

She knows who you are
, said Voice.

‘Can you tell me what happened?’ I tapped on the glass. ‘Is my husband all right?’

‘I can’t say, I’m afraid,’ she replied. ‘Someone will be with you shortly.’

It seemed I had been waiting for ever and was about to summon the courage to knock on the partition again when the second door opened and a police officer came out, followed by Mark. His T-shirt was blood-stained and his nose, always slightly hooked, looked swollen. In fact his whole face was a mess.

‘Let’s go,’ he said.

‘Are you . . .?’

‘I want to go home,’ he said, pushing past my outstretched hand.

The policeman pressed the door release switch and we stepped back out into the light where a police car already had its engine running and blue lights flashing. The driver stuck his head out through the window and said it wasn’t his idea of good use of public money, but he’d been told to give us an escort in case there was trouble. Mark climbed tentatively into the passenger side of the Land Rover, without speaking.

‘What about the car?’ I asked him.

‘Leave it,’ he said. ‘I can’t drive like this.’

We followed the police out of the car park. Inside the Land Rover it was silent, except that my head was loud with Voice, but outside, the group of people by the traffic lights had grown and they shouted as we left: ‘Fucking Headcase’, ‘Pervert’. A few seconds later, as we passed cars queuing at the petrol station, a man with a shaved head yelled ‘Waterlegger’ and sounded his horn and a couple of the other cars joined him in a blast of hate-fuelled condemnation.

‘What have you done?’ I asked him. No reply.

The gate was opened for us and we careered back into our bewildering homeland, leaving the baked grey fields behind us and returning to our Technicolor, digitally enhanced comic strip of a farm. The police didn’t stop at the bottom, they did a three-point turn and left.

Lock him out
, suggested Voice.

I didn’t need to. Mark was in the house only a matter of minutes before he left again and climbed over the gate into First Field. I saw the flare of a match and the smell of cigarette smoke drifted back towards me and then he was gone before I had a chance to talk to him. Not one word of thanks for going to collect him, even though he must have known how hard it was for me. Angie had seen the police and came down to see what was going on, although there wasn’t much I could tell her, except that I was worried and angry, that I didn’t know where he’d gone, that he looked in a state.

‘He’ll be back,’ she said. ‘Come and see me in the morning, tell me what went on,’ and she also left.

I would have liked her to have sat with me, mother and daughter, during those long hours when I waited for him to return. She is a selfish cow, I thought to myself, if you think of all the hours we’ve sat waiting for her in police stations and A&E. He is a selfish bastard too, I continued to myself, he can go, for all I care, I’d be better off now without him, smoking, drinking, going to pieces. And that wasn’t Voice, that was pure me. As the dull purple of late evening blurred the outline of the forests and stirred the bats in the eaves of the barn, I began to think he wasn’t coming back at all and, as
he had nowhere to go, or so I thought, it occurred to me that he may never be coming back, that he had, as they say, done something stupid. I tried to check the gun cupboard but couldn’t find the key.

It will be a gun
, said Voice.
There will be a lot of blood
.

It was now properly dark and the moon was already showing above the oak. I will go to the Sisters, I thought, they’ll help me. I got to my knees, thanked the Rose for her guidance, pulled on a cardigan and slipped out of the house, shaking. Be careful what you wish for, Ruth, that is what I was thinking.

The thump of him climbing the gate behind me made me jump and all I could make out of him was his moon shadow and the sound of his coughing.

‘Mark!’

‘Where were you going?’ he asked.

‘To . . . the Sisters,’ I began, realising too late how that sounded.

‘I came back because I thought you might be worried,’ he laughed. ‘Stupid me.’

Go
.

‘You OK?’ I asked.

‘Never been better,’ he replied and went inside.

Welcome back – that was what Amelia said when I got down to the caravans. After night worship, when I returned, he was asleep in the little bedroom and it wasn’t until the morning that I understood what had happened.

He had been in Lenford when some bloke had started on him. Nothing unusual, happened all the time when he went into shops, he said.

‘I never realised,’ I said.

‘No, I don’t expect you did,’ he said. ‘The bloke was bad-mouthing you.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you. Or do you think I have sole rights on being abused in the street?’

‘I didn’t know, I just assumed . . .’

‘I’m sure you did. Well, let me tell you what they said and you can see how it feels.’

Whore. Witch. Lezzog. Parasite. That sort of thing. So Mark had lost it. Usually, he said, he was able to walk on by, but this time it got to him, he had swung at him, the man retaliated, they fought, the police were called, the other guy went to hospital to get stitches while he ended up in the police station. Just another Wednesday afternoon in Little Britain, he tried to joke.

‘Did they charge you?’ I asked.

‘Disorder in a public place, that’s all. I’ll add it to our growing list of upcoming court appearances.’

Tentatively, I broached the subject of how to get the car back, but that triggered another outburst.

‘Why don’t you do something useful for a change?’ he stormed. ‘Why does it always have to be me?’

A couple of days later Amelia said she was going in for supplies and offered to see if she could collect the car. She thought it was unfair of Mark to make me pay for the consequences of his behaviour. Again. She said she would protect me from the stress of leaving The Well or the pain of enduring the rejection of the very people I was helping every time I worshipped. I was speechless with relief; I had been dreading having to go back to Lenford, given up even pretending that I could cope out there on my own. Eve was the one who managed to drive it back. She left it for us by the barn, without saying a word, and there it was, like a monstrous exhibit in a museum of modern art: the windows were smashed; the aerial snapped; it was viciously daubed with filth and slander against us, The Well, the Rose – I don’t know how they knew about the Rose. When I pulled the back door, the twisted metal grated against the frame and there was a sickening smell of stale smoke, the springs protruding through the blackened seat like charred ribs.

‘We can’t afford another,’ said Mark. ‘This is the last straw.’

‘Surely you can press charges?’

‘I do more law now I’m a farmer than I ever did before,’ said Mark, kicking the car before walking away.

Look at the car, said Voice. You will look the same when they finally find you
.

Amelia said, you can burn down all the structures in the world, but the Rose never dies.

I tried smoking them out once, the Sisters, like hornets. If they have built a new nest, Hugh will tell me, when he returns, if he returns.

I
t rained this morning. I wander into the orchard where the blossom on all the trees – apple, damson, plum – have opened just a little, the buds white, but pink-fringed now they are so close to blooming. Just a little rain and such a grand response. They hold their boughs above my head like a guard of honour at a wedding, and when a blackbird flies off, startled by my arrival, a slight shower of raindrops anoints me. My boots are brushed by the long wet grasses until the knees of my jeans are a darker blue from the damp and I sit on my bench, appreciating the resistance of the cold stone pushing up against my weight, insisting on gravity. I don’t know how long I am there or what I am doing except that I am grateful for the silence, the absence of Voice. I resume my chain of flowers.

‘So, you can pick flowers but you can’t grow vegetables? Where’s the logic in that?’

The question catches me unawares. Boy and I have hardly spoken since we sat on the felled branches, but the letter had gone from the table when I woke in the morning. I haven’t asked, he hasn’t said. Now, he is in the little plot behind the orchard, looking over the gate. He has his sleeves rolled up and the back of his white shirt is saturated with sweat. It looks as though he has been digging and the spade is resting against the fence that used to keep the rabbits
out of the vegetables. He seems to be expecting an answer, but he doesn’t wait long and resumes weeding, methodically working his way up a row of seedlings. When he reaches the end, he rakes the small pile of discarded nettles and couch grass to one side, brushes the mud off his hands, then steps carefully around the edge of the planted rows to pick up an old black plastic seed tray. On it are five or six small terracotta flowerpots, planted up; they have the familiar two tender leaves of young courgettes. He must have planted the seeds his mother gave me and grown them on, stuck them on a window sill. I imagine him in the barn, Three fixated by the split screen showing a dozen camera angles, Anon playing cards with himself, and Boy watering the courgettes like the plant monitor at school: your turn to look after the garden.

‘It’s a bit early for planting those out,’ I call over the hedge, but he doesn’t look up. He hasn’t heard me. I repeat myself, just a little bit louder. ‘We used to start them off in the greenhouse and then not even harden them off until the end of May.’

‘Not really an option now, is it?’ Boy indicates the broken-down shell of the greenhouse behind him. ‘What happened here?’

Holding tight to the security of my horticultural explanations, I continue. ‘It was because of the wind up here.’ I shout a bit louder. ‘And the risk of a late frost. Oh, go on; ignore the advice of a stupid old woman. What does she know about farming anyway.’

He has turned back to his work, forgetting me and himself in The Well that is a black widow of a property, enticing you before swallowing you whole and spitting out the bits that stick in the throat. I have lost a lot of men to this Well and now here she is flirting again.

Listening to the scratching of the trowel and the squeak of his boots as he crouches, I deafen myself to everything except the territorial robin. I scream silently at Boy because the glass is shattered and he has the arrogance to assume he has the right to work this land. I cry inwardly for him because what he is doing is futile, save for providing a few beans for a casserole at the end of a summer,
when the days are shortening and the leaves falling. I yearn to join him, but that would be breaking my word.