The Well (25 page)

The strip of cotton lay on the floor and I picked it up, tempted to blind myself again and was weaving it in and out of my fingers, staring out of the window when I saw them: four tiny figures in white, processing through the corn.
They are going without you
, Voice warned me,
and you are the fifth
. In theory, I had a choice, but in practice the soles of my feet pushed me upwards, the joints in my knees locked me steady as I descended the stairs, the strength of my spine held me upright as I walked through the fields and the magnetic poles held my eyes on the horizon. I do not know where my mind was.

The heat was unbearable that day, its weight a blanket thrown over a cage to silence a shrieking parrot. The buzzards were saving their energy for dusk and the sheep hugged the thin line of black
shade that ruled down the side of the hedges. Angie and all the travellers had gone to a festival and Mark was treating the barn doors with preservative, so the place felt deserted.

Some things I recall. Sitting on the doorstep. It must have been a halfway house, a point where turning back was still possible. Ants, trailing steadily across the gravel, a wren inching its way up the cooler side of the oak, pecking for parasites, the drone of a hornet going in and out of its nest in the wall – small things, making their presence felt in that vast, constipated wilderness. And in the dip between George’s Wood and the Hedditch, a slow, silent procession of women in white.

I wore a white cotton sundress. White, Sister Amelia had said. And barefoot, I remembered, the stones on the drive scorching my feet like hot coals.

Did Mark hear the slam of the back door up at the house when I left? Perhaps he put his brush down and thought to himself that I must be feeling better, up and about. Maybe he hoped I might be coming down with a drink, like I used to, when we were in it together or maybe he picked up the brush and wondered why he was bothering at all to preserve a rotting stable when he did not envisage another winter at The Well, with cows steaming in the straw and the hay in the manger.

Leaving the glare of the field behind, I entered the forest, the sudden darkness like the interior of a foreign church on a hot day. As light and sight found their natural equilibrium, I thought I saw a flicker of white and then there was a young roe deer in the shadows, quivering, staring straight at me, its entire being wired for flight. But it did not run, rather it gently picked a path through the undergrowth down to the water. I followed. When I arrived at the water, the doe had vanished. There, a softer gleam poured liquid gold through the black pines and the Sisters were spread evenly around the edge of the pond, motionless, mesmerised by their own perfect reflections. I joined them. We waited, the heat on our heads feeding off our hunger until we all swayed slightly in our lightness.

Look at me, standing in a stained sundress in the middle of a wood, about to join four women who I hardly knew for a baptism into a belief I hardly understood. Even then I did not fool myself that this was some spectator sport, a tourist visiting a temple, inhaling the jasmine and tasting the smoke from pyres before walking out into the traffic and taking a cab back to the hotel. No. Although it was never named, this was all about me, as I knew in my heart of hearts it was going to be. The Sisters encircled me, as the limbs of one body, one unbuttoning the eight tiny pearls down the front of my sundress, another taking the hem and drawing it over my head, a third releasing my hair where it caught on a hook. I looked to Sister Amelia for reassurance, but her eyes were one-way mirrors. They led me into the water and I did not resist. On the surface the caddis flies and alder bugs took flight and hid themselves in the reeds, the newts eased between the weeds; beneath our feet the sediment stirred, disturbing the gastrotrichs and protozoa, the hydra, crustaceans and caddis fly larvae. Sister Amelia raised her hand and they waited for the water to settle around the translucent dresses clinging to their legs. Sister Amelia lowered her hand and the Sisters lowered me into the water, my body arched and gasping, one at my head, two at my waist, one at my feet; then they raised me up again with a rush of water draining from me, running down my face, trickling over my chest, swirling between my legs. Again they lowered me and raised me. I arched. Then a third time they raised me and lowered me, and the fourth found me elsewhere in the way that only the dying or the transported are absent.

On the fifth and final occasion, they withdrew, slipping out from me and I felt that leaving like an exhalation. I lay, arms and legs wide, like a child in the sea, head back, eyes closed, hair like silk. The Sisters leant forward and cupped the water in their hands and sprinkled it over me, showering down through the sunlight until I saw a rainbow had formed over me and knew that the Rose had come.

The weeping women led me, drained and exhausted, from the water, all of us lurching and slipping on the sucking mud. Sister Amelia watched me shivering and moaning amongst the fungus at the foot of the ancient oak, hugging my knees, with the twigs and the dead leaves clinging to my wet body, and then she started to sing and the others joined in, their gasping finding form in their song of praise of the Rose of Jericho, louder and louder, deeper and deeper their ecstasy.

‘Behold, she blossoms with a thousand white flowers.

Behold, the Rose of Jericho.’

Finally, I was laid down like a slack-stringed puppet with disconnected joints, my sagging breasts and loose stomach strewn with wood anemones and white violets.

‘You are a chosen one,’ said Sister Amelia.

The Sisters picked the woodland relics from my skin, dressed me, fastened my buttons, tied back my hair and then stepped away from me. I lifted my head with a new strength.

‘I am ready,’ I said.

Back through the forest to the wooden gate, on out into the sunlight, across the field of corn I walked with them.

‘Behold the Rose of Jericho,’ the Sisters sang, their hands outstretched to the rain-swollen sky.

Mark would not have heard us, working with the radio on. The travellers didn’t get back until late. I imagine the policeman at the gate, clocking off, satisfied that the sightseers were gone for the day and only the usual two or three were gathered in their pop-up tents on the verge, still waiting for the day of revelation, no idea that inside one of those tents the screen on a phone was lighting up. One Message Received. Click. Sisters, behold the promise of the Rose of Jericho. One Image Received. Click. A rainbow over a woman floating in a pond. Forwarded around the country in minutes. She is come. That woman was me.

The first of the writings came to me unsolicited when I got back to the cottage – strange episodes of unknowing, leaving behind pages
which varied between lyrical and hysterical, often scrawled in coloured crayons. I hid the notebook in the box of fishing things, knowing that Mark would never look there again and that is where I find it now, on top of the broken tumble-dryer in the back passage. I take out the top tray of flies and hold them between my thumb and finger, naming them as if at a memorial service for the river: gold ribbed hare’s ear, the coachman, woolly bugger and blue wing olive. Beneath that, there are the reels, gut, line, knife and priest and, beneath them, the notebook.

What was this foreign language, this unauthored poetry, written in an uneven hand that I cannot believe was my own?

Months, that’s all it took – a few months to transform that birthing pool into a grave and write a different story.

I
t is eight o’clock precisely. I have been awake for a while, watching a brash red fox strut the hedge. No hunt now, no shotguns; even the slamming of the barn door does not make him run. He looks over his shoulder and saunters off into the labyrinth in the wood. Three comes into view, followed by Boy. Pulling on a jumper, I run downstairs, hope and fear as always fighting it out in conflicting hypotheses. Boy and Three are already in the kitchen; the creases in Boy’s trousers are sharper, the buckle on his belt shines just that little bit brighter. Three does not even remove his cap. He hands over to Boy, as he puts it, and Boy in a voice which I do not recognise delivers the news that I have been dreading: that I am once again to be confined to the house. There was no point in asking why, but Three commands Boy to explain anyway.

‘The original terms of the House Arrest Order specified under section 3 (f) that if anyone thought . . .’

‘Language, soldier, language. Read from it if you can’t resist the temptation to render everything civilian.’ Three hands Boy a printout, with a section highlighted, then props himself up on the table as Boy begins to read through the pages of the fine print.

‘In circumstances where the senior officer in charge, or in his absence, such officer as may have been temporarily delegated the
role of the senior officer or any other officer taking on those responsibilities as part of duties as described in the Armed Services (Drought Emergency Amendment) Act, whether that Officer or soldier be a member of the Armed Forces, or the Territorial Services or Her Majesty’s Emergency Drought Relief Community Conscripts . . .’

‘Oh for God’s sake!’ I make to leave the kitchen and go back upstairs, but Three blocks my way.

‘You’re not leaving.’

‘Get off! I’ll do what I want.’ I try to push past, banking on the belief that Three will not physically intervene, but I am wrong. He seizes my right arm, bends it round behind my back and pushes me onto a chair and holds onto my flesh just a little too long. ‘Nice. I see what you mean, Boy.’

‘You can’t do this!’

Boy does not meet my eyes. Three lets go of me as if I was infectious. ‘This is just the problem, isn’t it, Ruth? That you have come to forget that you are a prisoner of Her Majesty’s Government, that you were tried and convicted of serious crimes. That in a time of national crisis you sought to manipulate the water supply for your own benefit and that you are still under suspicion for the murder of your own grandson . . .’

‘That is not true.’

‘That you are under house arrest and that you cannot, I repeat, cannot do what you like. That is the whole point of locking people up. That and letting the rest of us sleep easy in our beds. Soldier, continue reading the prisoner the amended terms and conditions of her house arrest.’

There is no sign in Boy’s voice that he is anything other than a conscript – it is a pilotless drone. When they have left, I stand in the shower and try to wash Three’s fingerprints from my wrist, and then I return to bed. There is nowhere else to go.

What price a night on a bench, star-gazing with a teenage guard? Six pieces of silver. An orchard, a field, a forest, a sky.

Twenty-four hours in bed and now I expect Three will send for the shrink again, that will be his next kick. Twenty-four hours makes it Sunday. I dress, but get back into bed to wait. At last I hear him. Hugh is back. He finds me mentally frail, I find him physically weak; combined we are human. With characteristic understatement, he describes his stroke as a minor blip, says his daughter is fussy and grumbles that nobody nowadays knows how to milk a cow. Now I am downstairs with him, me curled up like the old woman I am on the sofa, him in his armchair, I realise how deeply pleased I am to see him, how unconditional his visits are.

‘The vegetable garden is looking good,’ he offers. It seems he has not been told.

‘I found out it was Boy’s work,’ I explain. ‘Apparently he wants to be a landscape gardener when he grows up so he’s landed on his feet. Come to the only place in the country where you can still choose that as an apprenticeship.’

‘I’ve seen some beautiful gardens in the desert,’ says Hugh, reaching for the mug, then, after something of a pause, ‘What made you change your mind?’

‘About the gardening?’

‘About the gardening.’

‘I hadn’t changed my mind. I didn’t garden. Now, even if I wanted to, I can’t. I’ve left it too late. They’ve changed the perimeters and I’m not allowed out of the house.’

He nods. ‘I thought they might,’ he says, in a voice lacking in indignation. I suppose his parishioners have told him much worse in the past; he must have seen much worse in his time in Africa – mine is a tedious, inconsequential suffering in the greater scheme of things. Hugh’s chest is rising and falling slowly, each breath a deliberate commitment, the pauses between some words are long and I wonder if his speech has suffered a little as a result of his stroke.

‘I haven’t asked about you,’ I say and reach over, putting my
hand on his arm. ‘I am sorry. I am something of a Robinson Crusoe here. I have forgotten how to think about other people. How are you?’

‘You’re telling me you haven’t found a Man Friday yet?’

‘No, I’ve found nothing. No footprints in the sand, no empty canoes. This is pretty much what the guide book says, a real-life desert island.’

Hugh smiles and answers my original question. ‘I am fine, very few after-effects really. My left arm isn’t quite what it was and my speech – have you noticed? I find it a little trying at times, but I don’t need to preach any longer, at least not to anyone except you.’