The Well (27 page)

‘Fine.’ He comes over to talk. ‘Bored that’s all. Seriously bored and devoid of a social life. I’ve finished my last book and can’t face one more game of two-hand poker with Adrian.’

I feel sorry for him, stuck here just the wrong side of his future. He takes up my offer to borrow something, comes in with the door
slamming behind him and the dust blowing in with him, and I show him the shelves with the books covered in cobwebs and leave him to it.

‘Found anything?’ I call from the kitchen where I am avoiding the titles and the memories of who read them last and when and where.

Boy sticks his head around the door. ‘I’ve always wanted to read this,’ he says. He holds up a copy of
Long Walk to Freedom
, catches the expression on my face and then grimaces. ‘God, sorry, I’m so tactless.’

‘Get out of here. Take it, read it. He was an amazing man. Come to think of it, I should probably read it again myself when you’ve finished.’

But I won’t. I am fascinated by my own inability to either manage my imprisonment or envisage a future. I’m no Mandela, with his reading and thinking and writing notes in the margins of his Shakespeare and I can’t imagine I’ll be any more effective if and when I ever get released. If it starts raining again, it’s possible I might be freed – although not innocent. I wonder what I would do then. The thinking moves me from my Groundhog Day grammar to the ‘what if’. A future. Try as I might to be, to breathe, to live in the present, this present continuous, this ‘ing’ is not enough. Eating. Waiting. Tapping. I am not enough. I will be, may be.

The unanswered, unaskable question, then, is whether I would stay here at all, if I was free to leave. I see myself flogging the country, tracking down Mark and Sister Amelia to sniff out the scent of guilt, only to find the trail led to my own fingers, with their nails bitten and black. And if I was ever to leave here, it begs the question of what was the point of not having left before. So, after all that self-discipline, I have returned to the what-might-have-been. It is a magnet and I have little resistance left in me.

The ill wind started this thinking, collaborating with the guards to keep me inside. Although it is summer, it feels like autumn and blows in with it memories of the day when Angie left and
Lucien stayed behind with us, for safe-keeping. That again was a strange storm, whipping rainless across the country like a November gale at the beginning of September, sending dry trees crashing over pavements, with mothers walking their children for their first day at school, into bedrooms where the unsuspecting unemployed were sleeping away their empty days, onto a couple sitting on a park bench with rings on their fingers and bells on their toes unaware of the crack in the branch above them.

It was against this wind that I struggled up to the track to see Lucien. The sheep that usually came out to follow me held close to the hedge and I followed their example, so it was not until I was quite near that I could tell the camp was preparing to leave. Most of the small sleeping tents were already packed up, reduced to inconsequential packages of nylon, the nights spent in them, the dreams dreamt there, the arms enfolded, all compressed into a convenient size. Four of the travellers were fighting to take down the big store tent, shouting instructions which got blown away and clinging on to the canvas which rampaged in the gale. Elsewhere, people were squeezing the last six months into small spaces: bicycles onto the backs of the camper vans, mattresses onto the roofs of cars, sleeping bags into recycled supermarket carriers, saucepans stacked one into another like Russian dolls, inflatable water carriers deflated. Set to music it would have been a grand chorus scene in an opera, with all the crowd and the minor parts working in unison and it seemed as though any minute they would turn to face the front and burst into song for their curtain call.

As far as I was concerned, Angie was centre-stage, taking down a makeshift washing line, standing on tiptoes to undo the knot which held the rope to the branch of the plum tree in the hedge, her midriff exposed, wearing nothing but a silly little top and a pair of jeans regardless of the weather. She always was a teenager, I thought,
always will be. I scanned the scene for Lucien and heard him before I saw him. Even if he and the other children had been given some responsible role in this communal effort to move on, they had long given up on it. There they were, two at a time on his blue bike, at the top of the slope.

‘Ready, steady, go!’

They were off, hurtling down the hill with screams, the loose tyres skidding off the hillocks, the one on the back clutching on for dear life, the one in the front with his feet on the pedals, knuckles white and tight on bent handlebars. Oh the winning, the winning, emboldened by the maddening wind. And, of course, as soon as they got to the bottom, they were marching back up to the top of the hill and then back down again.

And when they were up, they were up; and when they were down they were down – Angie found me once singing that to Lucien when he was a baby. That’s called the rhyme of the ancient addict, Angie said to me, it’s what we sing when we’re thieving.

‘Look at me, Granny R. Watch me!’ shouted Lucien from the top of the hill.

‘Watch me, Granny R,’ called Henni.

Turning away at the point at which they decided to try three on a bike, I put the bag of potatoes I’d brought with me down next to where Angie and Lucien’s tent had been, now just a rectangle of yellow grass, and went over to help her with the washing line, pulling on the branch so she could reach the wire.

‘Are we the only people in England who have trouble getting the washing dry?’ she laughed above the wind.

‘Why are you taking it down?’ I asked, unnecessarily.

‘Leave only footprints; take only photographs,’ shouted Angie. It takes a certain mentality to move on, to enjoy the space left empty as much as the one occupied.

‘You didn’t say you were leaving.’ I hadn’t had Angie back long, and even then the connection between us had been tenuous. I couldn’t help thinking that it had held this long because she had her
tent and I had mine and because The Well had given us a common cause. Love alone had not been enough for a very long time.

She protested that she wasn’t going to just up sticks and let me come up here with my soup and find a set of tyre tracks and a thank you letter.

I have it still, that second thank you letter, signed by all of them, signed by Lucien. It’s not so much a card as a collage. They had taken a large piece of card and covered it with a geometric design made entirely out of things from The Well: half acorn shells and the petals of wild roses, plaited reeds from the Hedditch brook and five crimson balsam poplar leaves spread out symmetrically like jewels. Some of the pieces have fallen off now. I put my finger in a gap where a beech nut once was and feel nothing but the dried glue which kept it all together once. If nothing else it reminds me that I am imprisoned in a world not only of infinite loss, but of infinite beauty.

Angie’s mind was made up. They had been offered work at a late festival, setting up and taking it down afterwards somewhere in Norfolk. Then they reckoned a friend of Charley’s could get some seasonal work for quite a few of them at a Christmas factory in Scotland, cutting trees, making holly wreaths, that sort of thing.

‘You don’t need to leave here to find work,’ I protested, but she could hardly hear. ‘Let’s get out of this dreadful wind.’

We climbed into Charley’s van and slammed the door, letting the slightly damp warmth calm things down. ‘I was saying you don’t need to go to some hideous Christmas rip-off factory, for God’s sake, making wreaths with plastic berries. We’ve got the real thing here. Every tree in the orchard is weighed down with mistletoe. Harvest it. I can pay you, if you need money. Mistletoe from The Well could spread great thoughtfulness.’ There was me, justifying turning my paradise into a commercial enterprise, for my own profit.

But the Norfolk job would be fun, the line-up was unbelievable and it paid well. The Scottish job had accommodation, two large mobile homes and a barn. She had to admit it was just too cold to
spend the winter under canvas at The Well. I told her I’d thought about that and got the barn all ready for her and Lucien and Charley if he wanted to stay, but she said, ‘We are a group, Mum, we need to stay together, because by staying together then we stay clean.’

Can’t your mother do that for you? That was what I wanted to ask, but the years had already answered that question. ‘We’ll be back,’ she said, jangling the keys in the ignition.

I took a deep breath, preparing to bring out from deep inside me what I had been fantasising about ever since they arrived. ‘Lucien could stay here,’ I offered.

I don’t know if I even expected her to consider it, but suddenly she was saying something about Henni going to his dad’s because he wanted him to go to school properly and learn something and not keep moving around and then there was education welfare, onto them about attendance, maybe Lucien would be lonely, maybe it was a good idea.

I turned sideways in the cramped seat to face her. ‘Would you mind?’

‘I don’t know, Mum Things have been better between us, haven’t they?’

‘So much better.’

She turned to look straight at me. ‘And what about between you and Mark? Lucien’s had enough rows in his lifetime. I want him to know what it’s like to be peaceful.’

‘We’re OK, Angie. Yes, it’s stressful at times, but we’ve come through worse than this . . .’

And she looked away again. I could so quickly lose her. I rephrased. ‘You know what I mean. We’ve managed twenty years of ups and downs. We’re not going to let this defeat us.’

Angie got out her tobacco and started rolling a cigarette. ‘But it’s like Mark says, your head’s sort of somewhere else at the moment, isn’t it?’

I resisted the desire to comment on her smoking. ‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, who would come first? Lucien – or the Sisters?’ She flicked her lighter a couple of times and the flame flickered in the dull light of the van. ‘It’s not that I’d blame you for that choice or anything. But there’s some heavy stuff going on around here, you’re important to all that. You might have to make choices.’

‘Do you think the Rose would make me choose between her and my grandson? Angie, love’s not like that. I’m probably more able to love Lucien now than I ever have been.’

Angie inhaled deeply, opened the window an inch to flick out the ash and the wind rushed in, blowing her hair over her face. ‘And Mark seems better now, don’t you think?’

‘The bruises have gone.’

‘I meant less angry, since the thing in Lenford.’

I didn’t think that, but I wasn’t going to say so because I didn’t want Angie to have any excuse not to leave Lucien with me.

‘And then the Sisters,’ she continued. ‘Dorothy’s great, isn’t she, like a sort of great-granny? So I suppose there’d be loads of you keeping an eye on him.’

She is going to agree, I thought. Please God, let her say yes.

‘What about Sister Amelia?’ she continued.

‘What about her?’

‘Nothing.’ She wiped a space on the steamed-up window to look over to the boys and their crazy game. ‘I don’t know. I just get the impression she’d rather he didn’t exist. It would be different if he was a girl.’

‘You don’t need to worry about her,’ I said. ‘She’s a purist, but she’ll cope.’

‘And in a weird way,’ said Angie, moving on, ‘I think The Well will look after him.’

‘It will,’ I agreed, smiling at her. ‘The Well will keep us safe.’

She stubbed out her cigarette in the little silver ashtray. ‘Let’s ask him what he thinks.’

How clearly that scene plays out before me now. The wind snatches the van door from our hands as soon as we open it and I
fight to close it again. Angie calls Lucien, shouting louder and louder to get herself heard. He looks up, runs over to us, runs fast as if he wants me to see how fast he can run, his thin legs pounding the ground, helter-skeltering down the hill, arrives out of breath and laughing and falls on the grass, spread-eagled. Angie says, ‘Oh what shall we do, Granny R, it looks as though Lucien’s dead!’ And he jumps up and says just kidding. Then he sits cross-legged and listens. Not only are his legs thin, but his face is too. It makes his eyes look bigger. I tell him he looks all skin and bone for someone who’s just turned five. He decides that he’d like to stay with me and Granddad, hugs Angie, says he’ll miss her and will she be back for Christmas and if she does she ought to know that he’s going to ask Santa for a penny whistle. And then he’s gone, back to the bike and Henni and I am so happy I too run madly down the hill to the Sisters to share the good news.

They come out of the caravans, holding their hair out of their faces. Eve chases after a prayer sheet blowing across the grass.

‘Good news!’ I shouted. ‘Good news!’

They hugged me in turn, while Sister Amelia stood slightly apart and then returned to her caravan without commenting. I followed her in, closed the book in her hands and told her to talk to me, not to retreat into silence. She asked me how long Lucien would be staying and I told her as long as he needed to, maybe the winter, maybe forever, maybe one day his children would cartwheel down First Field on a blustery day in early autumn and all this would be his.