The Well (29 page)

‘We can’t put this back together again now, can we, Granny R?’ he sobbed, picking at the splintered remains of the eggshell. ‘Was it me who upset Mark? Was it my fault?’

To think that I ever promised to look after him.

I
t wasn’t until it happened that I realised Mark moving out was a relief. The barn was my equivalent of an arms’-length safety plan. A couple of days later, leaning towards the mirror in the bathroom to examine the bruise on the side of my face more closely, I acknowledged to myself that I didn’t miss him. The make-up didn’t conceal anything from Sister Amelia. She pushed the hair from my face, kissed the swelling and whispered in my ear, ‘I told you so, Ruth, he has to go.’ Dorothy was the only one who questioned my reaction to his moving out. Talk to him, she urged, twenty years is a long time to love someone and see it gone in a moment. It must be part of the Rose’s plan, I told her, and Dorothy replied that sometimes it was hard to know the difference between the Rose’s plan, our own agenda, or someone else’s agenda. But I wrote my own sermons in those days. Then, as far as the party was concerned, Lucien was the cause for celebration, Amelia my partner, the Sisters my fellow revellers and Voice the soundtrack to which I danced. What else did I need?

There never is such a thing as total separation in a family and there wasn’t then. Angie kept to her word and did phone, often enough, although by no means regularly despite what I said to her about children liking to know what’s going to happen when.

‘Mummy’s on the phone!’

Listening in, I could hear Lucien telling her he missed her, asking her how long until Christmas, and I would hold my breath, but then he would say that he was very happy, that Granny and Mark were very well, that we were all very busy. Some of that was true, I hope, I pray. Lucien did seem content to be our go-between, trotting between the barn and the cottage with messages or food, or to spend time with Mark if I was in prayer. After the fight, Lucien really did seem to accept our arrangements without question, being used to a veritable thesaurus of ways of living and loving, and he relished the time he spent hanging out with Mark, helping him with the animals, digging and planting and pruning.

‘You can be my dad,’ he said to Mark once.

‘How do you mean?’ asked Mark.

‘I don’t know my dad and Mummy said you couldn’t have children, so you’re not her real dad. But you can be my dad, can’t you?’

Mark told me about that conversation, said it was typical of Angie to load Lucien up with things he didn’t need to know at his age.

I sift through conversations with Mark as if they are a sort of audible photograph album, chucking the ones that are little more than repeats of ordinary views, holding some up to the light the better to make sense of the detail, the doubt.

Lucien and me, wrapped up together on the sofa, watching
Bambi
.

‘Mark says I’m very, very special. What do you think he means?’

Soundscape. Tractor engine. Turned off. Wind. Sheep in the distance.

‘Look at my ploughing, Granny R!’

Mark was planting up First Field with winter wheat, Lucien
sitting on his knee on the front of the tractor, his woolly hat pulled down over his sticking-out ears.

‘Bounce me up and down again, Mark!’

Mark got down, taking the ignition key, leaving Lucien playing with the gear stick.

‘He’s so happy here now, isn’t he?’ I said.

‘Hmm.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I think he misses his mum, that’s all.’

I take a step or two away from the tractor, calling out to Lucien to be careful. ‘What do you mean? Has he said something?’

‘I don’t think he’d want to upset you, Ruth. Yes, he loves it here. But it’s not straightforward, is it? He is safer with Angie.’

Dusk. Coming downstairs and jumping out of my skin, bumping into Mark unexpectedly standing in the half-light in the kitchen. He looked unshaven, smelt unwashed – for all I know he was sleeping in his clothes and drinking too much, like a tramp in a tunnel. I wanted to sit him down, pull his shirt up over his head, hands aloft like a five-year-old and run him a bath. I wanted him to leave.

‘I’ve come to kiss Lucien goodnight,’ he said.

And I let him.

And another time I remember, but it’s all in the wrong order. Dark this time. Mark came over and we talked in the porch under the sensor light, as if he was a door-to-door salesman with a variety of life insurance policies on offer. It can’t have been long after he moved out, because I remember him pushing the hood of my fleece down to look at the bruise on my head and I flinched. He took my hand.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘It will never happen again, whatever goes on between us. I can’t believe I did it.’

Our hands lay loosely with each other, the slightest pressure
would have meant something, but they fell apart, retreated to their owners’ pockets, although I at least was willing them on, aching with the memory of holding hands in other places in other times: in hospital when Angie was born, walking by the sea in Italy on holiday, the day we moved in here.

Mark spoke first, returning to his pitch. ‘What would you do here’, he asked, ‘if I went, if Lucien was gone as well?’

‘You might be going,’ I told him, ‘but Lucien isn’t going anywhere.’

‘You can’t have it all, Ruth. Lucien, Amelia, me . . .’

‘Why not?’

‘As far as I can see, the Sisters believe Lucien should be gone. I think he should be gone too, you think I should be gone. That pretty much leaves you on your own.’

‘Don’t you dare threaten to send Lucien away,’ I threatened. ‘You’re just jealous.’

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I am.’

Jealousy. That was one of the possible motives they ascribed to him, when he was in the frame.

With Mark in the barn, Amelia became a more frequent visitor to the cottage. She didn’t come in, not at first. Initially, our long one-to-ones would take us meandering in a circle through the fields and back to the caravans, then we started to come back via the house and stand and chat outside, with Amelia saying no, she wouldn’t come in, it wasn’t right, then we sat in the garden and then, one day when a keen north-east wind was ripping the leaves from the oak, she came inside.

‘It’s just how I imagined it,’ she said, standing in the way that a prospective purchaser does when they look around the house – as we did I suppose, when we first arrived. I took what she said as a compliment and thanked her, but she corrected me. ‘No. I mean, it is beautiful, just like you’re beautiful, but there’s not enough of you in here.’ She peered into the study.

‘That’s Mark’s study,’ I explained. She looked at me pointedly
and I added that he hadn’t moved his stuff from there into the barn, yet. She stumbled over Lucien’s Lego castle and I found myself explaining that his bedroom was very small.

She examined each of the photos on the wall. ‘Not many of you,’ she commented and I said that I was usually the one taking the pictures. She got out her phone and before I had time to even protest, she said she’d soon put that right, clicked the camera and then leant in to take a selfie of the two of us, laughing like teenagers in a photo booth.

She picked up the glass heron. ‘A present from Mark?’ she assumed.

I took a pile of Mark’s books and fishing magazines from the study over to the barn when he was out and left them by the wood-pile, under the shelter, not wanting to go in. And I printed out the photo Amelia messaged me and blu-tacked it to the mirror in my bedroom, so whenever I looked at myself, I saw myself twice; once in an ordinary way and once as a curiously young-looking, startled woman with electrified blue eyes and a small mouth, half open, as if about to ask a question. A woman seen through the eyes of somebody else. She never sent me the other picture of the two of us; she kept it for herself. The heron stayed where it was, fixing me with its beak.

Amelia hung a spare coat in the back passage and kept some of her tea which she made herself from nettles and elderberries in a screw-top jar in the cupboard, and before too long she had a place where she usually sat. And there, at the table, we spent hours so deeply immersed in our conversation it was if we were together at the bottom of a dark lake, wrapped in water and cut off from the intrusive sky and irrelevant sounds of the outside world.

‘Lucien, will Granny let you play outside? It’s a lovely day.’

‘Why don’t you send Lucien over to Mark? He might like the company.’

We talked a lot about Mark. That is what women do, isn’t it? When relationships go wrong, they talk to each other: analyse,
predict, hypothesise. We used to do it in the pub in London, supporting each other in the way that women do through affairs and divorce, through falling in love and walking away – so that’s what we did, Amelia and I. She had the role of what I suppose a counsellor might call ‘the critical friend’, or that’s how it seemed. She challenged me on my response to his violence.

‘He has only ever hit me that one time, Amelia, that doesn’t make a personality, it doesn’t make a pattern.’

‘I disagree.’ Amelia never ate or drank anything at the table. She sat straight, but earthed like a yoga practitioner, her hands still and joined on her lap, her eyes always focused even when mine slid away. ‘He’s done it once, he’ll do it again. And there’s the incident in Lenford. He hasn’t got his own way and men, like toddlers, resort to tantrums and beating their women with their fists when that happens.’

Amelia’s antagonism towards Mark reached a peak one afternoon when Lucien and I had taken a rug down to the bottom field to read together. Our quiet time was broken by a commotion of some sort in the distance, barking and screeching like fighting foxes. Lucien clutched the book tight. I told him to carry the rug and wait when he got to the gate, then I struggled to run all the way, my heart thudding, rapidly trying to make sense of the scene I could half hear and now half see up at the house.

Mark and Amelia were standing by the front door, a door we never used. Both there, both together, although I had no idea why. Amelia could have been a Spanish
imagen
, the sort they carry through the streets in Semana Santa, motionless and foreboding, carved in white against the wood; Mark was all mud-brown and movement, heavy boots for kicking, pacing, arms flung up and out and fists raised.

Fragments of sentences, but only from him. Amelia’s responses, if there were any, were lost to the air.

Not yours . . .

What, want, what . . .

I can’t see through . . .

Leaving the gate open, I pushed myself to go faster across the last field, knowing I had to get there in time. I called out once – stop it! – but had no power to push the words out. Close enough to see them and their expressions, hear the rest of the sentences, all I wanted was for them both to leave, for them to separate.

‘Go away!’ I screamed. ‘Just go!’

Amelia responded first. ‘You see, Mark, she just wants you gone.’

Near enough now to smell his rage, I could see Mark’s body was wired, the muscles on the back of his shoulders pumping as if they had a life of their own, and his beautiful face snarling, burning. ‘I’m not going anywhere, Amelia. This is my fucking house. I know what you’re up to but you’re not getting it.’