The Well (10 page)

Despite the afternoon sun slanting through the canopy, the water looks black and the reflections of the surrounding trees blur as three or four mallards dip their heads for food in the thickening sludge. Sister Amelia would not have liked the brash dominance of the male birds, their harassment of the muted females on her reservoir of femininity. There is a flash of blue over yellow as the kingfisher takes flight over and is gone, then it is still and quiet apart from the intermittent warnings screeched by the vulgar crows in the treetops. The water level is low and parts of the old moss-covered stones are exposed, but they hold in their memory the marks showing where the surface usually lies. Matter holds memory they say, in which case these are sad stones. I approach the pond, kneel down and dip my fingers in, feel the coolness, cup my hands and wash my face and let the drips run down the front of my shirt, trace their way down the veins of the inside of my arms. Staring into the dark mirror, it is as if I can see his face, as if he is about to say something.

With my eyes closed, I can banish the spectre of the Sisters encircling the water and pray. No. It is not a prayer. It is rather a saying out loud of things which need to be said, but I do not anticipate being heard or answered.
Tell me how he died.

There is a time to cast stones and a time to gather. I pick three flints from the dust-dry floor of the forest. I toss the first into the water and watch the ripples in perfect circles pulse towards the reeds which are just breaking the surface with their lurid spring-green confidence. Screeching, the ducks take flight, heaving into the air with a gross flapping and a pandemonium.

It could have been the Sisters.

I throw the next flint, a little harder; it falls off centre, creating
cavorting waves which cross the paths of the ripples and revel in the anarchy.

It could have been Mark.

The third flint fits my hand. I draw the sharp edge across the thin transparent skin of my wrist until a red weal rises up, with just the smallest beads of blood, congealing, not spilling.

It could have been me.

I stand and hurl the last stone into the pond. Water does not forget either. The blackness makes my head swim and, feeling faint, I grope towards the log where I used to meditate, staying there long enough to regain some sort of equilibrium and for the ducks to alight on the water again as if nothing has happened there. As I retrace my steps back to the house, the breeze swings to the southwest and the horizon, far beyond Edward’s Castle and Cadogan Top. Clouds gather, great shafts of light ruling lines of fool’s gold across the forests on the other side of the valley.

Last night I slept. This morning I wake and it has rained. I went to the Wellspring. It rained. It just depends which conjunction you choose to link the sentences. For me, it is a sign that The Well will give up its answers to me one day, but for others it is a justification of the paraphernalia which has been ploughed into this place. A convoy shudders down the drive. Government officials get out and crawl all over the fields with their probes and electronic gauges and high-tech equipment, while members of the press are invited to take photographs of the crops. Three is in his element, marshalling the parking like the science teacher at sports day. Boy and Anon are children, jumping in puddles.

‘Is this what it was like before?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Just some rain, falling here and not anywhere else. Everything else went from there.’

‘Did you know it was going to rain?’

‘Will it rain again?’

I have a question of my own: can there be rain without visions and voices? That would be something worth having.

There is one last emotion, though, which I have not anticipated. I am feeling smug. There, you thought you were just guarding a middle-aged crank who had delusions of grandeur, but now you’ll have to think twice, smart-arse.

Rain, rain, go away. Come again another day.
I dance like a witch-doctor around the sitting room.

Boy sticks his head around the door, looks a little taken aback and I fall onto the chair, laughing. ‘I forgot to tell you,’ he says. ‘We go off duty tomorrow. One month on, one week off.’

Rain comes. Duccombe burns. Boy goes. I stay. World turns. I skulk off to my bed, out of control once more.

Three relief guards have arrived, ill at ease. One of them is a woman and I am not sure what to make of that. I spy on her through the upstairs window, notice how her hair is scraped back off her face and pinned under her cap, how her feet look as big as the men’s in the regulation boots. She is sour-faced and brusque when she comes into the house to complete the battery beep test on my tags and I am relieved by her monosyllabic responses to my attempts at conversation. I thought I was ready for a bit of female company, but I was wrong. All three of them keep to the barn when they are not on duty, and when they are on duty they adhere to rigid routines, patrolling the boundaries, testing the alarms, inspecting the house. It is not enough to be known by three soldiers, male or female. I used to have friends, a family; I had neighbours, I had followers, for God’s sake – no irony intended. I was a person in the middle of a web. But all that was cut with one stroke of the knife, and here I am alone, my very own living Gordian knot. The worst is that I don’t know if anyone has tried to contact me or not. I grow more and more suspicious of this regime; someone out there must be thinking of me.

Sometimes I hear people, a lorry reversing somewhere on the lane and someone shouting directions. Once I heard shots and then saw two men walking alongside the hedge which runs between the Great Nunton Lane and the old parsley farm. They had guns and
every now and again they stopped and took aim and the valley cracked as they fired. Without beaters, the birds have no reason to fly, so I don’t know what they hoped to kill. Today, I can hear wedding bells ringing in the village. We didn’t have bells. We got married in a registry office, with our favourite duet from Porgy and Bess playing on a CD in the corner of the soulless room, vows and the weight of his mother’s lifelong absence sitting on Mark’s suited shoulders. I overheard Mark’s uncle saying how they had always thought Mark would take over their farm because he loved it so much as a child, spent all his holidays there with them, and then my dad agreeing with him that there was no money in farming and being a lawyer, that was the way forward for a man with a kiddie on the way, the two of them standing outside the hotel, stamping their feet and flicking the red ash into the slush.

It snowed at our wedding, a desultory sort of snow that fell from the aimless sky that day as if it was just a way of getting rid of the leftovers, and I realised that everything Mark had ever planned was being suffocated in white.

The peal continues to ring across the valley, but even that song is not strong enough to bring me to prayer. Births, marriages, deaths. Angie was born three months after the wedding and three years after that we sat in another soulless room hearing it confirmed that Mark would never be able to have children of his own. Neither a farmer nor a father be. They made a lot of that during the investigation, as if not being able to have your own son would make you more likely to abuse other people’s, or murder other people’s, I suppose. It seemed a ridiculous theory then, but what happens to a man who loses his dreams, not just once or twice, but over and over again?

The bells have stopped. The silence cannot hold. It is replaced by the relief guards conducting the weekly alarm test, the siren sending the crows circling and screeching over the treetops. Even the birds fight over our fields – the robins attacking the dunnocks, the rooks nipping the wings of the buzzards in flight – but none of
them can take on the helicopters. The beating of their metal blades whip up my day-sleep memories.

The eggs were warm and perfect spheres in my cold hands. We had spoken about marking our first anniversary at The Well, but the time for celebration seemed to have passed. Even so, in my head I was planning soufflé as a special dinner, for a surprise or a salvage operation, I’m not sure which. The sound of blades slicing the morning sky made me look up and there was a helicopter hovering, a man with a camera leaning out at an angle. It made me jump, I think, and as I grabbed the post from the washing line to steady myself, I smashed the eggs, I do remember that. Then, moments later, in the kitchen, washing my hands and sponging down my trousers, Mark came in and flung the paper on the table.

‘Wonder Well. For Christ’s sake, look at this headline, Ruth, look at it!’

I still have that cutting. It looks small as things of import often do when you revisit them.

Wonder Well? It was an aerial colour photo. It needed to be, because its sole purpose was to highlight the difference between our land and that of the surrounding countryside. The land of milk and honey vs. the land of Sodom and Gomorrah. Our house was in the centre of the photo, tilting slightly and you could see the drive carving between the two top fields, although the gradient isn’t clear from above. The Land Rover is parked up by the chickens for some reason; it never was usually. I don’t know what was going on to make that
necessary, maybe we’d been lugging some new posts up for the fencing because we’d lost a lot of hens to foxes around that time.

‘What on earth . . .?’ I stared at the photo. ‘What’s it about?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t read it yet. No need to go running to your precious government adviser now, is there? The whole world will be fascinated by our back garden.’

‘How did the press . . .?’

‘The same way it always does. By sticking its snout in the gutter.’ Mark left, the door slammed and moments later I could hear the whir of the chainsaw and the scream as it bit into the logs. Mark had taken about as much as he could with the media coverage of the tribunal and this would be more than he could cope with. Although I felt keenly for him, I was also wondering how many more of his last straws I could carry before this camel’s back broke. I spread the paper on the kitchen table and began to read. The caption said that only two weeks after the disturbances at Duccombe, their investigative reporter revealed another place mysteriously unaffected by the drought: The Well. It referred readers to the full article on pages 4 and 5.

Then the phone rang.

It was the first of a relentless barrage of calls:
The Mail
,
The Express
, the
Scotsman
,
Figaro
, the
New York Times
, the
Phnom Penh Post
. The e-mail inbox filled as I watched it, the bold black type of the unread messages pouring down the page like an oil spill. The answer machine lived its own existence in the corner of the kitchen, dutifully recording old friends, the press, weirdos, PR agencies, until the messaging service was full. Eventually, I stormed around the house ripping plugs from their sockets, watching the blinking green lights of communication with the outside world flicker and go dead. We turned the mobiles onto silent and then when their crazed vibrating dances drove us mad, we turned them off completely. Outside, the helicopters continued to drone overhead. Mark shouted at them to fuck off and they nodded and bobbed in acknowledgement before leaving in their own time.