The Well (30 page)

‘It, Mark? Or her?’

‘I can call the police, get you evicted, you and all your she-devils . . .’ Mark was reaching for his phone.

‘Don’t, Mark.’ I spoke deliberately, slowing my pace, my hand out for the phone.

He stepped away from me, shaking his head, a cornered animal, those with the nets closing in around him, turning between Amelia at the front door and me, this way and that.

‘You see. Ruth has invited me in,’ smiled Amelia, her hands held open in the sign of the peace.

Mark lunged at her, grabbed her loose cotton top which ripped in his hands. I pulled at him – stop it, stop it, you’ll regret it – anything I could think of saying, anything, but it was as if he couldn’t let go of her, his fists clenched around the cloth. I prised them off, one by one, little finger first to ease the release of the rest and then he fell back and Amelia was left standing, upright and unshaken, her pale breast just visible through the rip in her clothing. Lucien was trembling at the gate, his face half hidden in the tartan rug.

Mark kept himself to the barn and to the farm after that. Amelia came often and we settled into a pattern of living – work, worship, friendship. The only role I had which she resented was the one she
could not control: I had not only become a mother again, but a teacher also and I loved every single, separate, precious moment of both of my jobs.

I had promised Angie I would try to get Lucien into school, but I didn’t even bother to try. He was a long way behind, not just because his attendance had been so poor. As a teacher, I knew that if he went to school they would find labels for him – ADHD, SpLD– and they would put him on lists and on stages on those lists and fill in the boxes with comments about alcohol and drug use during pregnancy and developmental delay. Lucien only needed one label: grandson. The Well was for him an idyllic school and the Wellspring the best classroom of all. He was fascinated: we built an ant farm; we captured the rain which fell in the night-time and studied evaporation in the daytime; we wrote poetry describing the sunsets; we did the maths for the number of eggs we should have collected by Christmas. One morning we were down at the Wellpond studying mushrooms, poring over my field guide to identify the Prince and field mushrooms, honey fungus and penny buns when Amelia appeared.

‘What’s happening here?’ Her horror was audible. ‘This is a sacred place.’

‘Granny R is teaching me all about mushrooms,’ said Lucien. ‘Some of them are really, really evil!’ he added with the glint in his eye of a boy who had recently discovered the cartoon world of superheroes and villains.

‘I’ve been telling him about the Death Cap,’ I explained. ‘They were growing under this oak tree last year. They’re the really tricky ones, because you eat them, get really ill for twenty-four hours or so, but then you feel better without realising they’re destroying your liver.’

Lucien broke in with ghoulish delight. ‘And this,’ he said, running over to some bushes, ‘this is really, really poisonous. It’s called deadly nightshade and if you even touch the berries, you die! Like this!’ Lucien put his hands around his neck and fell to the ground with a
suitably impressive death-rattle. He jumped up, laughing, but then turned more seriously to Amelia. ‘I thought you said this was a holy place. Why’s it got so many bad things in it?’

‘Who is to say what is good or bad, Lucien. Every living thing has its purpose, according to the Rose,’ said Amelia. ‘It’s just that we don’t always understand it.’

‘You mean like the magic?’ Lucien was full of questions about The Well and its magic, as he called it.

‘I wouldn’t call it magic myself, Lucien, nor would your grandmother. We would say it is the work of the Rose. Praise her!’

‘How do you know?’

‘Sometimes I have been here and seen her.’

‘With your own eyes?’

‘With my spiritual eyes.’

‘Do I have spiritual eyes?’

‘A boy’s eyes are different from a girl’s eyes. One day, one night, I will bring you here and we will wait and we’ll see if you can feel the magic for yourself.’

‘Please! Tonight? How about tonight?’

‘Oh no. It will be one night when you’re least expecting it. I’ll call up to your window and we’ll creep downstairs and come to The Well by the light of the moon and – well, let’s see what happens then.’

‘With Granny R?’

‘If she wants to. But it could be our adventure – just the two of us.’

Lucien took my hand.

‘Why not?’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t that be something?’

It is surely impossible, unthinkable.

T
hat is the question I put to Hugh.

‘Impossible? Who is to tell what is impossible. This is impossible, Ruth. Look out of your window at the impossible taking place before our very eyes. Unthinkable, now that’s a different thing altogether.’

We are sitting at the kitchen table and through the open window we can smell a soft rain falling and hear its fingertip percussion on the roof of the Land Rover.

‘I don’t think about the rain much anymore,’ I tell him.

‘I do,’ he replies. He takes my hands across the table with unexpected strength. ‘I pray a lot about this rain, about what it means, about the Lord bringing me to you and what I am meant to be offering.’

‘Answers?’ I suggest.

‘And there are plenty of those in the good book.’ He releases my hands and takes his Bible from the ubiquitous plastic bag, passes it to me and I can see its wafer-thin pages are bulked out by a folded piece of writing paper. Hugh catches my eye, glances towards the camera and with difficulty inches his way around the table so he is standing between me and the lens. ‘Read on,’ he says loudly.

The letter is addressed to Hugh, from a Catholic priest in a town
about twenty miles from here. It thanks him for his enquiry and confirms that yes, Dorothy Donnelly, one of the Sisters of the Rose of Jericho, did indeed approach him for confession shortly after the terrible events at The Well. My hands are shaking so badly that I have to follow the words on the page with my finger.

The signature is illegible. Hugh folds the letter, slips it into his pocket and limps slowly to the window, holding onto the counter to steady himself. I want it for myself, to re-read it, to keep it in a tight fist and arm myself with the hope it offers: that Dorothy is innocent is no news, that she knows something about that night may be something or nothing, but my rapid heartbeat tells me that this is the beginning of the end of my search and that from the confines of my prison, I am reaching out and closing in.

‘Here.’ I hold out the Bible.

‘That’s for you. You can keep that,’ he says. He knows full well
that I would swap this bestseller for the note in his pocket, but does not rise to the bait. ‘You’re always saying you want answers, Ruth. Well, you could do a lot worse than start with the good book.’ I assume he is playing to the gallery, but he continues in a serious tone. ‘I have marked the occasional passage to get you going – no, not now, later when I am gone.’

Too late. I have already started to flick through the pages to where a red thread bookmark lies. Isaiah: Chapter One. ‘Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.’ I look up at Hugh. His hand may tremble, his leg may be unsteady, but he meets my gaze without flinching.

‘Repent.’ I struggle to recall the last line of the priest’s letter to Hugh, something about those who truly repent. ‘Repent,’ I repeat. ‘You are like him. You think it was me?’

‘We all have need of forgiveness, Ruth, all of us.’

‘So you come here week after week for my confession? That’s it. A government-appointed priest – I might have guessed. And perhaps you’ll get a convert thrown in for good measure.’ I slam the Bible onto the table, get up and throw open the back door, holding it wide for his exit, watch as slowly, painfully, he gathers up his bag, his hat, his coat and silently moves towards me. At first, I think it is because his breathing is laboured, but then I realise he is weeping, an old man weeping and the room itself seems to heave with sadness and even the rain outside is crying quietly. I close the door against the lamenting world.

‘I am so sorry, Hugh,’ I begin. ‘I didn’t . . .’

‘And so am I,’ he replies. ‘I am also sorry. I’ve got this all wrong.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What am I doing, on a wild goose chase for hints and red herrings . . .’ He stops, blows his nose and laughs. ‘That’s a dreadful mixed metaphor if ever there was one. Seriously, though, there is a terrible irony in a priest Googling for the truth, don’t you think?’ I look away as he continues. ‘All I’ve been doing is avoiding the truth,
not wanting to go there as the young say, for fear of you telling me to stay away. I’ve been a little bit bewitched by you myself, Ruth.’

‘Next time . . .?’ I begin.

‘Next time, no more sins of omission for me. We’ll start all over again.’ He puts his handkerchief away, takes my hand and says, ‘The peace of the Lord be always with you.’ And also with you – that is the required, familiar response, but those words have no place on my tongue and remain unspoken. The priest, who is a wise man, believes I have sinned. Enough. I have no right to offer anyone peace. Does he know what I have done, or is he just guessing? I think he knows, but I don’t know how, just as deep down I know what I have done, but I don’t know how.

When Hugh has gone, all that is left of him is the black book. Present blessings unspoken; truths offered unread.

I was a truth-broker once, dealing in shares on the manic futures market which swept the country parched of certainties; I put in long hours at the office, using my ex as a childminder – not so different from women the world over then. Our worship was still streamed live at dusk, lit by flares and candles, and I thought of them all at their screens, the office staff, working late, ready to minimise the page when the boss came round, the mothers slipping up to their bedrooms while their partners watched the news, old ladies in their armchairs, teenagers with their friends, all over the country. Because that’s what the figures told us. I spent time with Amelia and Eve in the hub, the gas heater on, the air thick and fuggy in the caravan, typing up the blog with my words from the morning, adjusting the website, checking the accounts. Eve was someone who somehow managed the impossible, living immersed in the Rose at The Well and operating as a member of the real world, even if at arm’s length. Her work in the States had given her an unshakeable conviction that there was nothing
incompatible between faith and profit and that every venture needed to invest to secure its future and its lateral diversification. Dorothy said the Rose had a purpose for everyone and everyone had a language to describe that purpose: hers was painting, mine was words, Jack’s was the language of tongues, Eve’s was the language of finance. And Amelia’s? Charisma, said Dorothy, Amelia speaks through her charisma.

My role as wordsmith for the enterprise was onerous and draining. With Lucien safely asleep next door, I would spend most of the night awake in my room, relying on the stove downstairs and the thickest fleece to keep warm, wearing fingerless gloves as I worked on my laptop, responding to the prayers of the thousands who now worshipped the Rose. Sister Amelia would quite often have selected those which needed a response from me, others she would answer herself, on my behalf. The cries of loneliness and sadness flashed up on the screen like a roll call at the gates of purgatory, from all over the UK, increasingly from all over the world.

The hours passed in a mesmerising blur. Sometimes I would wake in the morning, on the floor not in my bed, and have no recollection of the night passed, the only evidence being the trail of messages on the internet history. As one prayer was answered, another appeared, the virtual candles lit and flickering on the screen, begging attention.