The Well (24 page)

Back in the house, I sleep because that is all I have to fill my days. When I wake, it is dusk. I have been asleep a long time, my head is dull, my mouth sackcloth; I drink a long glass of water. Out of the window, the languid evening is spreading herself in pink and gold satin over the curve of the earth. She blows the scent of a sweet old-time summer across the room and I breathe in evenings long gone: hosepipes on the lawn in London and Lucien running in rainbows; strawberries; a pub, somewhere by the Thames and Mark and I and a group of friends, celebrating something special, long forgotten. I splash water on my face and feel my way out into the silk-soft air. In my head, I play an old recording of a long forgotten orchestra, with the persistent ewes nagging their lambs to come back before dark, the scratch-picking of the hens, the touch of one petal from the pear tree settling on the dew-damp grass and the pulse of fruit forming like the half-heard, half-felt vibrations of a cello. With a blanket, I climb to the brow of First Field and sit, suspended in the sky above the flickering valleys beneath me. Amelia coached me like her prodigy, but strangely it is Angie I think of now, Angie a few years ago on holiday with us in Wales, telling me about her most recent treatment and the yoga they practised on the ward, saying sit like this, Mum, it really works, legs crossed, her placing my hands upon my knees, turning my palms outwards, both of us breathing in a conscious recognition of being alive. It works for a while. I blow out the candles on my forty years one by one until the past drifts away with the smoke and I am in the present and all that I have been and everyone I have known and loved and lost, yes even Lucien, they are part of the flaming sky and the kind clouds. This could be prayer. Maybe all is well with Angie; she seems close to me. Maybe I should work the land. Maybe it is possible to live with uncertainty.

So in love with the night, I cannot bear to go inside, but instead drag the old sun-lounger from the shed out into the garden so that
I can lie on my back and watch the stars; it is one of those nights when the meteors shower like storms over mountains, all sound lost, but light remains. I can feel the smallness of my breath, the ridges of the wooden chair hard against my back, the cool air on my bare feet. We used to watch the August meteors from the cliffs in Cornwall, on another holiday, very long ago, Angie asleep in my arms, Mark with his head on my lap. It was such moments we thought we might recapture at The Well, and here I am now, netting moths with candles.

It is the late shift and Boy is standing watch by the barn. He hesitates and then comes over. ‘I didn’t want to intrude,’ he says, ‘but I have been waiting all evening for an opportunity.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I interrupt. ‘I wasn’t very helpful this morning. Go ahead and do the garden, if you think it’s worth it.’

‘It’s definitely worth it, but . . .’

It feels good to apologise, even for something small, so I keep going while I can. ‘And I was horrible the other day, about the letter, it’s just that it’s so frustrating, I’ve been searching so hard for those things I told you about.’

‘That’s what I want to see you about.’ Boy checks over his shoulder and squats down beside the sun-lounger. ‘I found something this afternoon when I was on duty. It’s probably nothing.’

He pulls the something from the pocket of his army jacket and hands it to me. It feels like a ball of string, but he shines his torch on it and I see why he has brought it. It is a small amount of green wool, tidied as if it has been wound round and round a hand and then finished with a bow to keep it in place.

‘Did you find it like this, all wound up?’

‘I spotted it because I saw the end of it. I thought it might have been from the green jumper you talked about. You know, someone might have snagged it on something. But then when I pulled it, I realised it was attached to the rest. It’s weird, the way it’s crinkled; it does look as though it’s already been knitted once and undone.’

Slowly, I undo the knot and pull on the end, so it unravels slowly,
almost as if I expect it to knit itself back into Mark’s green jumper. ‘Where was it?’

‘At that place where the stream backs up, just beyond where the Sisters used to be. The scientist contingent ordered us to clear the leaves because it’s all blocked and it was there, as if it had been washed down. But there wasn’t anything else, I looked.’

It is the right sort of green, at least I think it would have been, but it’s now soiled and ingrained with dirt. But that is all I can say about it. I will not discard it, because Boy offers this gift with all sincerity, but in truth, even tonight when hope is possible, I cannot believe it is anything other than a false dawn. If it can’t be evidence, it can be an olive branch.

‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘I’m not sure it’s the same as the jumper, but thank you for looking.’

It is as though him finding a piece of green wool which means nothing has used up the odds of me finding a piece of green wool which might mean something, which is absurd I know, but nevertheless that is the way my mind works at the moment. Fighting to regain something of the optimism I felt earlier, I direct Boy’s gaze to one of the shooting stars and I point them out to him as if he were a child, all rancour over the post and the garden gone, the disappointment that is the wool dropped in the darkness. He cannot be much younger than Angie; maybe this is how we might have talked, Angie and her friends and me, if she had been a different sort of daughter.

‘These are the Eta Aquarids,’ he says. ‘Part of my now famous scientific knowledge. It’s when Halley’s comet appears – once in a lifetime.’

‘You’ve come, you source of tears to many mothers,’ I quote. ‘It’s from
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles
. I studied them at university.’

‘The comet always was an omen, good or bad,’ Boy comments. ‘Like the Battle of Hastings, just depends if you were Harold or William. It’s the same with all so-called celestial portents.’ Standing up and stepping away, he triggers the security light which exposes
us as nothing more or less than a soldier and a prisoner. It prompts him to pick up the torch and clip his radio back on his belt.

‘Goodnight,’ I say, ‘and thank you again.’ But he is already disappearing on his rounds, the beam sweeping the hedges and his heavy-booted footsteps startling creatures rustling along the edge of the wood. The light goes off.

Like a baby who throws its hands into the air, suddenly reminded by absence that it no longer has the womb to contain it, I grasp at the dark and then I pick up the wool and go indoors. Inside, the rotten core of me lurches and reminds me that all that hope was nothing more than a yarn or a star glimpsed fleetingly before the clouds black in from the west.

I
n daylight, the wool mocks me and I hate it for its lack of significance. I imagine some old woman finishing off her knit one, pearl one gloves for her grandson, never knowing that the remnant dropped by chance would, for a brief moment, give another grandmother hope of the truth. The wool goes round and round my neck seven or eight times, but being weakened by its life amongst detritus, lacks resolve and snaps at the first sign of pressure, leaving only red rings of failure. Worse still, Hugh is still unwell, apparently. I was a better visitor than him: Granny in her last days at the nursing home, a skeleton propped up in a high-backed, blue plastic chair, dislocated head nodding on a spring; Mum, her nighty hanging limp over her flattened chest; Angie in rehab, Angie with a black eye and a Domestic Violence worker, Angie in labour. Maybe it is a woman’s thing – all over the world women come in and out of each other’s huts, tower blocks, shantytown houses made of corrugated iron and newspaper, neat suburban terraces. Looking out at the empty drive, I realise how very much I want to be visited.

Yesterday, I thought I heard my mobile ring and went to rummage in my bag, in the way that the slam of a back door prompts the widow to put the kettle on. I am sure there was talk of being allowed one phone call a day to one of my approved numbers, but the truth
is I have no numbers. Internet I would value, even though I am now more than ever aware of what a web it weaves around the lonely. Still, there are lots of things I could do on the internet which would not contravene the isolation of my imprisonment: how could it hurt if I were to spend time Googling myself, just to see who I am now, or I could log on to
watchpaintdry.com
and see if it is more interesting than this, or I might allow myself to create a virtual garden and industriously weed my rows of digital vegetables, accelerate the pace of the growth, then click and drag them into my basket, where would be the harm in that? ‘No connection available.’ That is a phrase which seems to make sense to me at the moment.

When other people talk of my conversion, they have in their minds that picture, with the rainbow, the one that someone once described, without a trace of irony, as iconic. For me, the process started twenty-four hours before that moment. I had become somewhat addicted to the Sisters’ company, finding my own unreliable and the unpredictable presence of Voice disconcerting, so I went down to the caravans so as not to be alone. Things that day seemed different. There was no clatter of plates or smell of fresh bread, no T-shirts and jeans, no chatter. The Sisters were hushed and drifting in grey robes, shadows in the shade of the oaks. Sister Amelia came out of her caravan, barefoot, light and smiling at me, and I was a teenage girl with a crush all over again. She explained that the next day’s worship would be special and would be held at the Wellspring. The Sisters knelt, bowed their heads and Sister Amelia wound long strips of white cotton sheet around their eyes. Finally, she beckoned me over and held the one remaining piece of material out to me.

‘You must leave us now,’ she said. ‘Prepare as best you can. Fast. Come wearing white. Come barefoot. Come alone.’

The silence at the cottage seemed the loudest silence I had ever
heard, except now I know there is a silence louder than the lack of speech. Mark was out all that day, hoping to pick up a horsebox at a farm auction; he hated pecking around in the remains of bankrupt farmers’ tenancies, like a chicken in a scrap yard, but money was tight and he said we needed it to take the lambs to the abattoir. That made it easy to observe the vow of silence; we weren’t exactly overrun with people dropping round for tea. In the bedroom, I tied the sheeting around my own head, a child playing blind man’s buff with herself, and sat on the wooden floor, facing the open window, feeling the heat of the sun on my face.

Initially my thoughts were sparrows, flighty and easily scared. I was so hot, my back ached, my aloneness felt a punishment rather than a privilege, but after some time – and who knows how long – I felt a dampness in the room which was followed by a coolness, then I could see, and what I could see was an old-fashioned brown leather briefcase on the floor in front of me. I had never seen it before or since, but it was so real I could trace my initials engraved on the lid, weigh the tiny key in my outstretched hand, feel the stiffness of the catches against my thumb. Inside was a jumble of old pictures of varying sizes, in different frames. The first was a miniature, depicting in exquisite detail a woman in the desert carrying an earthenware vessel for water. In the second painting, in a cheap, metallic frame, another woman, this one in poor, dull clothes and with unkempt hair, slumped on the end of an unmade bed, cowering in front of a golden pillar of light. The third was a rolled canvas, so big I had to stand up to be able to hold it, and as I did so, the oil paint cracked and the room was full of the flaking gold and blue of disintegrating angels taking flight from a woman in white kneeling in a peeling garden, the thrust of their thundering wings threatening to crush me. I ripped at the blindfold, flailing my limbs heavily on the floor, screaming at my voice trapped in a constricted throat.

It is as clear to me now as it was then and as inexplicable.

Someone was calling me. There was no briefcase. I was aware I needed words, struggled to find some, held tight to them.

‘Up here!’

Mark had come home. I heaved myself up onto the bed just in time as his head loomed around the bedroom door. Looking away, I said I felt ill and when he came closer to the bed to kiss me, I retched. I said I didn’t feel like supper and was sorry I hadn’t made anything for him, but that I just needed to lie quietly in the bedroom with the shutters closed. It was the sun, he said, it had lost its capacity to be gentle with us. Anyone who stayed out too long would get heatstroke. He lay beside me for a while, on his back with his hands behind his head. I wanted to turn over and for him to earth me, but as I turned towards him, the other inside spoke to me and I withdrew. The moment was past.

The day drifted into night, although the heat clung on. I was not hungry any longer; I sucked on the darkness like a baby on the end of his muslin. The next morning I did not wake until late. Mark had left me water and an apple by the bed and a note saying he was repairing the barn and would be back to check on me at lunchtime – that he loved me. I sipped the water, feeling it settle in the cracks on my lips and left the fruit untouched.