The Well (21 page)

Boy sits down on the other end of the log. ‘I’m really sorry about that. I hope you don’t think I’d ever take advantage of the fact that you’re . . .’

‘A prisoner? And you’re my guard?’

Boy shrugs and kicks his boots against the wood to get the mud off, his face flushed. I turn away to collect myself and then look him in the eye. ‘I didn’t mean that. I don’t think you’re like that at all, Boy. It was an amazing moment for me, in all sorts of ways you won’t understand until you’re old and grey and nodding by the fire. But it’s over. Don’t worry.’ I try a laugh for size. ‘I’m not a predatory woman.’

‘If you write again,’ Boy says, ‘this time, I will make sure it is posted. I promise.’

‘Don’t, you don’t need to.’

‘I do. The way you’ve been treated, by the government, I mean, legally it’s not right. I’ve always been an activist so I’m not going to just stand by. I want to help you, but you’ll be confined to the house and I’ll be posted if Sarge has any more evidence. So I have to be distant. We have to be careful.’

I look back into the wood. ‘What are you doing in there?’

‘Just keeping the branches off the electric fence. I’m working down here alone until Adrian comes on duty. Should be about ten minutes. He doesn’t care anyway. And Sarge has gone to Middleton.’

My back is stiff from sitting on the log and the sun has moved behind the tall pine at the edge of the forest, placing me in the shade.

‘There are things lost in these woods, Boy. A carved rose, a green jumper. If you want to help, keep your eyes open when you’re working down here. Answers, that’s all that matters to me now.’

A woodpecker, somewhere out of sight, taps out its indecipherable code. The valley is loud with other voices; the earth is unstable when I stand.

‘And I will write to Mark again, then. Post it if you can, if it’s safe for you.’ I walk away, look back to thank him and see him arming himself again with his helmet, visor and his gauntlets. I make my way unsteadily up the field. The Land Rover is coming towards me, bumping over the grass towards the felling. Three is driving.
My heart races. Did Boy lie to me about that? It’s always been a problem at The Well, knowing who to trust.

Take that, Boy, and post it, if you want to save the world.

I go to bed and Mark is in the bedroom, sleeping with me, the shape of him haunting me with an ache of equal grief and fear.

I
took to making supper earlier so I could go and join the Sisters sooner. Initially, we would carry our plates and drinks to the old card table under the trees at the top of the garden (drinks – by which I mean a glass of water for me and most of a bottle of our homemade cider for Mark). The earlier routine suited Mark because he said farmers needed the lengthening summer evenings; he spoke as if I wasn’t a farmer any longer. He would come in off the field, wash up for supper, and go back out again. His mind would be on balers and making the lean-to rainproof for when he got the hay in, or, if he had got to his e-mails, composing a response to the next legal challenge for keeping the government off our land. We were now agreed, although for different reasons, that moving was not an option. My mind was somewhere, but never on the food. I was eating less and less, dividing the omelette unequally, slipping the chips into the bin. I preferred to pray on an empty stomach and then later, lightheaded from long meditation, I was all spirit and had no appetite.

‘You haven’t finished.’

‘You’re getting too thin.’

‘You’ll make yourself ill, you know.’

My evening journey from one world to another developed its
own rituals. I would stand with my back to the house, my eyes focused on the path ahead. When I started walking, I would start counting in fives. Five times five paces, and at the end of each five times five, I would pray one line from the Dedication of the Rose.

It was very hot one week, impossibly hot. In the outside world, the relentless rise in the temperature at last made the drought look like a drought, with no more of these grey, quietly stubborn skies and temperatures average for the time of year, but the stuff of the build-up in apocalyptic films. There were disasters in tunnels on the London Underground, the elderly died of heatstroke and neighbours traced them only through the smell seeping under the tower-block doorways. There was sporadic rioting in simmering cities and photos of reservoirs like drained baths, the line of scum and residual hair all that was left of the comfortable past.

At The Well, ours was a more traditional heat wave. Mark and Lucien spent the mornings stripped to the waist, repairing the old shed; Lucien, brown-backed and thrilled to be useful, passing up the tools, sorting out the nails by size. Sometimes he wandered up to the Sisters with me, but was shy with them, often peeping out from behind the oak halfway up the field rather than coming down into the camp. He got heatstroke and we were plagued by wasps at lunchtime; my shoulders were sunburned and the strap of my cotton top rubbed against the flesh. I hadn’t slept well for several nights, pulling the thin sheet up to cover my nakedness, tossing it off to find relief from the sweat. Next door, I would hear Mark getting up for a glass of water, then listen to the footsteps going back to the little bedroom. The Sisters’ caravans were torture chambers for them; Sister Amelia told me she was taking her mat outside and lying under the stars, often joined by Eve and Jack, who never slept easily. Awake in the cottage, I ached to join them.

One night, the prayers started like any other evening – sitting in a circle, joined hands, eyes closed. Jack was on my left. Her hand was clammy and slid against my wedding ring as we felt our fingers into place. On my left, I was aware of Dorothy adjusting her
position, straightening her back. I remember the flints in the ground sticking into my ankles, but not feeling able to move as the group found its lung, exhaled its tension, inhaled its inspiration, until the body was at ease with itself and the silence.

Sister Eve led our meditation.

‘My beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of En-gedi. Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes. Behold, thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant: also our bed is green. The beams of our house are cedar, and our rafters of fir.’

When the verses had settled with the sun, the Sisters spoke or sang as the spirit moved them and I joined in the responses, feeling my way tentatively around the dark waters of their worship, holding on to the edge. I don’t think I made any contribution that evening (I rarely did), nor do I remember Jack leading, but when Sister Amelia held the Rose high I was with them as the circle closed in, all self-consciousness melted away as I felt hands around my waist, bodies pressing my body, my fingers entangled in Amelia’s beautiful hair. Each of the Sisters’ unique invocations mingled like a million languages, cadences rising and falling in counterpoint, vowels and consonants meeting and parting and making space for expressions so guttural they were barely words, yet contained in them was meaning – I was sure there was meaning. And when this happened, as it did happen sometimes, the chaos of the individual orisons would somehow, like sand in the wind, be blown into form and before we knew how or why, we were in unison.

Suddenly, the unity of the limbs of the great body was shattered by an arm flinging itself violently into the air. Jack’s clenched fist caught me hard under the chin. I staggered backwards. A high-pitched screech of agony scarred the evening and there was Jack, tearing at her grey shift, ripping at the cotton until it fell from her jerking shoulders onto the stamped ground. I watched as if this was a film. A near naked woman throwing her head back at such a crazy angle, her eyes must surely fly from their sockets, arms as wide as if they
were no longer connected to her collar bones, which in turn must surely dislocate from her neck, all limbs unleashed from the core. The others froze too, motionless figures on a painted backdrop against the urgency of the fit. Jack slumped. For a second it seemed as if the hard ground must crack apart her exposed ribs and spine and splinter her skeleton. She writhed, the screaming transposed into an ululating, a sound thrusted from deep within the throat which was at the same time language and not-language.

Looking at the slathering beast at my feet, fear and a sense of impotence paralysed me, until I heard a voice telling me to quiet her. My nausea deserted me and I saw myself stepping forwards as if in a trance, falling to my knees alongside her body and taking her spluttering head in my hands until the rasping gasps become music which passed through my palms into my soul, and all I felt was lightness and all I heard was the song and the voice. That voice which was not recognisable to me then and yet was more familiar than anyone I have ever listened to and that voice was telling me that this was the beginning.

We sat for a long time, Jack with her head in my lap, me stroking her hair, the Sisters emptied and uplifted by the visitation, lying like exhausted children in the long grass, already damp with dew. Jack remembered almost nothing of her experience, except a great sense of peace, deeper than she had ever known, coming in like the sea over the rocks in summer.

‘That peace came through you,’ Sister Amelia said to me later. ‘You were the channel for the Spirit of the Rose.’

‘Not just me,’ I protested, ‘it was all of us.’

Eve agreed. ‘No one person is special. It’s the strength of our sisterhood,’ she said. ‘The power of our communion.’

But in my head, the voice was with Amelia on this. She disagreed with Eve. ‘No, this was you, Ruth, you alone. This is just the beginning.’

I want to think about Voice, but I do not know if I dare, because it may be to think about Voice will be to invite her back and I do not have a spare room. Three marches into the kitchen, a handful of letters in his hand. I am wringing out my knickers in the sink. He stands in the doorway and I push them under the soapy water, but even so he grins pointedly. ‘Your priest is not coming today.’

Clasping my hands under the water, I resolve not to cry in front of him, nor will I risk speaking, nor will I ask him about the letters he has put face down on the table.

‘Did you hear? I said the priest is not coming. Not today. Maybe not next week either. Maybe never again, who knows? Still, if you insist, I expect we can always find another. One priest must be much like another, I imagine, and the whole country’s overrun with religious maniacs nowadays.’

He makes some comment about coming back later to talk about the permissions and steps out into the daylight. The letters are still on the table. I dry my hands.

He returns. ‘So sorry, I forgot these.’

Pulling the plug on the water in the sink, I realise that I had forgotten to tap five times. If only I had tapped, Hugh would be here. I had planned to talk to Hugh about Voice.

In the orchard I spend the rest of the morning making a chain, threading daisies, buttercups, dandelions; campion, cow parsley and Queen Anne’s lace. I slit their stalks with my thumbnail, noticing the beads of sap seep onto my skin. It makes for an uneven chain: the weaker stalks of the buttercups cannot bear the penetration of the dandelions; the whites, yellows and pinks make no sensible pattern, it does not know how to end. I lift my chain letting the links drop onto each other, mute manacles.

I was sure Hugh was going to bring me information from the internet today. The Rose of Jericho has flowered, after last night’s rain; I wanted to show him the Rose. Three didn’t say why he wasn’t coming. He wasn’t well last time. Or maybe we said something about the internet which was caught on camera. Do they have some
way of monitoring what we talk about, even out here in the orchard? I rip at the unruly grass which was growing wild up the bench, convinced that they have hidden their tracking devices amongst weeds and the willow herb. I snatch at the nettles with my bare hands and they blister white at the sting and I think to myself that these are the hands of a madwoman who has done mad things and even the priest realises she is beyond his help. Voice would have agreed with that.