The Well (11 page)

Not so much a Well as a sieve. We could not keep them out. The first car jolted down the track. It brought a couple from Birmingham on their way to visit their son; set out ever so early this morning, they said, heard it on the radio, had a bit of time to spare, thought they’d come and see what the place looked like and who would have thought it? As they turned round, they met two more cars arriving: one was a local journalist, the other a water-diviner who had driven all the way from Essex, and behind them, more cars. Impotent, speechless, I hid behind the kitchen window watching Mark leaning into the drivers’ windows to talk to them, pointing at the main road and shaking his head. Strangers, all of them. If only one of them had been Angie, or a friend from London, or anyone I knew, who I could talk to, if only I wasn’t so scared of anyone and anything that came from beyond our Well.

By four o’clock we had locked the gate at the top of the drive. The wood was slightly rotten and the bottom bar broke when we yanked it free from the long grass and weeds entangled around it. We padlocked it to the metal post, aware that it was a feeble defence against this new army of the curious. It was the first barricade.

T
he next couple of days were bitter and we lived tense from both cold and the threat of invasion. The stove in the sitting room was working overtime, we were getting through over a basket of wood a day and our last lamb to be born, a weakling, was in a cardboard box in front of the Rayburn, her head heavy compared to her unsteady legs. The ewes were still in the barn; Mark was fretting, wanting to get them and their lambs out onto the spring grass, but he was worried they might not be safe. I liked them there, protected and smelling of vigils with flasks of coffee and torches, nights spent rubbing the lambs into life, seeing our flock give birth to our future. On the third evening after the article, we had been going to relax for the first time, there had been fewer calls, fewer trespassers and we decided to make a conscious effort to toast the success of our first year as shepherds before getting a good night’s sleep.

‘Don’t even think about logging on,’ said Mark.

‘Don’t answer it.’

We did turn on the news – The Well featured briefly, pushed to the end by a fire at one of the British Museum’s warehouses which could not be contained because of the low water pressure. Watching forced us to talk about our new state of siege. I tried to be the
positive one, saying that they’d all go away, that today’s news was tomorrow’s fish and chips, as we had discovered before. Mark said that might be the case if the rest of the world wasn’t dying of thirst and had just discovered their nearest oasis. I told him not to be so melodramatic, he told me not to stick my head quite so far in the desert sand. It sounds like an Aesop’s Fable, the tale of the badger and the ostrich.

I took my own plate to the kitchen to wash it up and stared out through the window into the darkness, my own reflection distorted in the panes and beyond that a full moon making the bare branches of the oak smooth like a skeleton. Turning on the tap, I stood watching the water run in a single stream from the tap to the white sink and down the plug. Perhaps if I left it long enough, there would be a spluttering and a coughing, then the flow would stutter before dwindling to a trickle, a drop, a nothing. Then the phone would stop ringing, we could unlock the gates and be as dry and as desperate as everyone else. But the water ran on.

When Mark had gone to bed, I gave up pretending to cope. I took the bottle out of the fridge and my head out of the sand. I logged on. I learned a lot about online porn addicts when Mark was accused, did research about what sort of men looked at images like that and why, just so I could be doubly sure that it couldn’t be true of him, I suppose. The social science articles told me how impossible such men find it to log off and here I was in the same predicament: the laptop became a puking monster, an excretor of filth, but I could not get enough of the poison.

Condemnationuk. A place, it boasted, where the citizens of the UK could openly condemn those who were ruining society. It was one of the most popular sites at that time, with rants and diatribes about illegal immigrants drinking all our water, videos from homemade CCTV cameras showing the children next door playing with a bucket. I would never have gone there, had it not been for the alert on my screen:

The list was endless. I went to the first.

I felt sick. If the locals didn’t know before, they would now and it wouldn’t matter how loudly we shouted from the hilltops that he was innocent; all anyone ever hears is the accusation, not the acquittal. And God knows, they hated us enough already without more fuel for their fire. I continued clicking.

Then I reached the comment where I overdosed.

Who wrote that? Surely no one who knew us could write that? But if they didn’t know us, then how did they know about
Angie and Lucien? All at once these people were not invisible, they materialised. I could hear them scratching at the keyboard, I could see their faces leering at me through the screen, they were crawling out of the internet and I smelled their threats as they breathed down my neck. So many of them and me on my own: I could not think of one person I could call on for help. Transfixed, I scrolled through my Contacts: Angie, Autorepair, Becky and Richard, on through Mark (office), Sophie (mob), Youth Addictions Support, Zahira . . . I hammered the keyboard with my fists, smashing the letters and symbols for what they no longer offered; over and over again I beat them, beat back the baying crowds.

Mark must have been woken by my hysteria. When he found me, I had thrown the laptop across the room, where it had smashed a mug, but lay still alive on the floor. Between sobs, I tried to tell him that they could not be contained, that these people would get together, they would be here, smashing our windows and slaughtering our lambs – tonight – they were probably out there now and there was no one in the world who could help us. I was hard to hold, but Mark was so strong by then. His pyjama top smelled of shower gel and sleep and as he rested his chin on my head, I could feel the steady beat of the heart of a man who was now physically fit.

‘What do you mean, there’s no one? I’ll look after you,’ he murmured. ‘I love you. You don’t know how much I love you.’

There was a time when I thought the risk lay in the fact that he loved me too much; now, after such a long silence, I know he loves himself more.

Mark turned the laptop back on. ‘This stuff isn’t helpful, Ruth,’ he said. He brought up The Ardingly Well Facebook page and went straight to Settings. ‘There,’ he said. ‘One click, gone. Deleted. We can do without crap like that just making things worse.’

Later he asked me a question. ‘What came over you to trawl
through that sewage? Why didn’t you just log off when you saw what it was like?’

Because there was a quality of connectedness for me when I was online that was both affirmative and addictive, regardless of the voltage. That is the truth. The psychiatrists talked about the third person in our marriage. Sometimes I think that person was the web.

When Hugh comes this week, for my so-called communion, he finds me less jolly company.

‘It smells beautiful here,’ he says, closing his eyes and breathing deeply. He puts his weekly offering of fresh milk on the table and then pulls from his bag a bunch of early yellow roses, losing their petals and smelling of the piano room at home when I was a child. My mother was a piano teacher.
Mrs Alysha Rose. Individual Piano Tuition, Beginners to Grade 8.
The card in the newsagent’s was confident, but my main task as her daughter was to tell the little girls clutching brand new, bright pink music cases and their huffing mothers leaning out of 4x4s to go away because she wasn’t well. Again? they would say. Again. She devoted her life and her health to ‘giving me a little brother or sister’ by whatever means science could offer. At least that’s how she framed her quest. My father devoted his life to her and that meant working every hour God sent to finance her dream. It never happened. She died at fifty from an excess of procedures, breast cancer and a lack of meaning in her life beyond the menopause. I like to imagine her reunited with all her unborn foetuses, happy at last. The smell of rose petals and furniture polish . . . that is all it takes to bring back her unmourned absence.

‘Don’t roses make people happy?’ he comments. ‘If you look in the mirror you might catch yourself smiling.’

‘I smashed the mirror the other night,’ I told him, wiping the cobwebs from a pottery vase and filling it with water for the roses.
‘I kept looking at this gaunt old witch who lives in there. I can’t take my eyes off myself.’

‘If you’ll forgive an old man for his forwardness, you’re a good-looking woman.’

‘You don’t understand. I was becoming like a budgerigar that spends all day on his perch, pecking at his own reflection in the hope of connecting with his own gene pool. I’ve been thinking a lot about connections,’ I add, leading him out into the orchard to the old bench. ‘Do you use the internet?’

‘The internet? Of course.’

He sits; I stay standing.

‘Sorry.’

‘I may be old, Ruth, but I’m not totally decrepit. Why?’

‘I miss it. I miss it and I don’t miss it.’

‘It brought a lot of trouble to your family, I understand.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I had my briefing papers coming here, about you and your husband. Maybe they thought the priest needed protecting against the molester for a change, rather than the other way around.’

I laugh, in recognition of his effort. ‘It was ridiculous. At least I used to think it was ridiculous.’ I pull a bough down towards me and pick some apple blossom. ‘What do you know?’

‘That your husband was accused of having viewed child pornography on his work laptop. That he was suspended, fought the allegations and was found to be innocent.’

‘I stood by him. I thought the whole thing was ludicrous at the time. Mark, for God’s sake.’ I pulled the pink petals off, one by one. ‘But when everything is stripped away, do we really know anyone, Hugh, or is that just your God’s privilege? Omniscience?’

‘There’s no hiding from him in the garden, that’s for sure, unless you happen to have a supply of fig leaves.’ Hugh is doing his best. ‘So why were you asking me about the internet?’

Taking my place beside Hugh on the seat, I lower my voice. ‘I’d like you to find out some things for me. Will you?’

‘Searching is certainly part of the job description. But I’m not convinced the world wide web is a wholly benevolent force, so it depends slightly on what it is you want me to find out.’

‘I just want to know about my family. That’s not too much to ask, is it? I need to know if Angie is all right. And Mark.’

Hugh shifts uncomfortably, fiddling in his pocket for a handkerchief. ‘If you don’t mind me asking, does Angie have contact with her biological father? Might she be with him?’

‘No.’ What else was there to say?

Angie’s father. There was nothing wrong with him, as far as I could remember from the eight hours we had spent together when I was all of twenty-one, but not much right either. By the time Angie came to want to know about him, he was dead and she was angry. We had never pretended, but even so, was that when she changed the vocabulary from Daddy to Mark? Was that the only reason why? She blamed me, of course, although omnipotent as I was for a while I can hardly have been held responsible. Car crash in Kenya, aged twenty-eight. Turns out my one-night-stand nerd was a rally driver, a bit of an adrenalin junkie. Junkie. Maybe that was where she got it from.

Hugh persists. ‘You have no idea then where either of them might be living?’

‘No. But I’m worried about Angie. She could be anywhere, you’ve no idea how low she can get.’ There are nettles now, growing tall alongside the bench. I reach out and grasp one to stop myself crying. ‘Maybe she and Mark are together. I haven’t heard from either of them since . . .’

He waits to see if I can finish the sentence, then replies. ‘I’ll see what I can do, but I can’t see how the internet would be of much help.’