The Well (32 page)

‘It’s to do with alterations to the permissions for a visiting priest.’

This I cannot believe. This I will fight. They have no right to stop Hugh coming and I do have the right to a priest, it was established at the beginning, and now my last tenuous fingertip connection is being removed.

‘No, Boy. Surely not.’ I reach out to grasp his arm. ‘Hugh won’t agree, you know, he’ll come anyway.’

‘He won’t, Ruth.’

‘He’ll take it up with the authorities; he won’t take this lying down.’

‘He won’t because he’s dead.’

The horn blares outside and Anon shouts something about missing a train. Three’s shadow falls across the doorway. ‘Soldier! Get in the transport now!’

Boy prises my fingers from his sleeve. ‘I’ll be back,’ he whispers.

‘Now!’

In front of the house there is some sort of handover salute between Three and the senior soldier of the new guard, then Three gets in the driver’s side, revs the engine and swerves out of the gateway. I can only assume Boy climbed in the back. The relief soldier comes to the door and says something about revisiting and clarifying permissions with me later this afternoon, since things seem to have changed since he was last here. I close the door.

He won’t. He won’t because he’s dead.

The news fits me so badly, it occurs to me it is not my news at all and belongs to somebody else. I pick the print-out from the bin and lay it on the table. As I thought, most of it is indecipherable jargon, but the second paragraph down confirms what Boy has told me:

Casually, in a cheap biro running out of ink, someone has scrawled Hugh’s name across the top space, misspelled his surname, left out The Reverend: they have reduced all his visits here to a single circle around the word religious. Then it appears they have started to write ‘dead’ and thought better of it, for a form such as this, and turned the ‘a’ into ‘c’ and the ‘d’ into an ‘e’ and declared Hugh deceased. They could not have seen the irony in bowing to bureaucracy by underlining the word ‘permanent’, nor the irony of giving me the right to appeal against the death of a good man.

Hugh and I had talked about my insomnia a lot and he had given me advice which I had been following, especially since being confined
to the house. Together we had devised a routine – Hugh’s routine, I called it – and slowly, night after night, it had worked its magic and darkness had fallen like a blanket around my shoulders, rather than the hood over my head. Hugh’s routine went like this. When I finished supper – usually eggs or soup, cooked and eaten without enjoyment or ceremony or company – I would close the curtains in the sitting room and turn on the reading lamp behind the pink sofa and play the
10 Classics
CD all the way through, once. When the final notes of the
Nunc Dimittis
sung by the Choir of King’s College relinquished their hold on the room, I turned out the lights downstairs and, like a child, went upstairs, cleaned my teeth, folded my clothes, read one psalm and turned out the light. Sleep and I were becoming reacquainted. Don’t worry, said sleep, the next ten hours will pass without you counting, you will not know you even lived them. In those hours you can neither commit any new crimes nor remember any old. You will be merely carrying out your obligation to live, but having to endure none of the pain of doing so. Your lifespan will be passing and when you wake, another fraction of it will have been accounted for and the debt paid. You need never live those hours again.

But Hugh is dead, he has taken with him his routine; he offered me his blessing and now it is too late to accept it or return it. The only visit which ended in recrimination was the last. After such progress, regression; sleep is impossible once more. Again, I am in a poisonous relationship and condemned to share my bed with a flickering partner who hovers in the corner of my eye, who lifts the covers and invites others to come creeping between the sheets with icy hands and colder memories in the early hours of the morning. The soundtrack to the visions is played on the wind-up gramophone I inherited from my great-aunt, the tunes and voices slowing and distorting as the handle winds down, the heavy claw scratching the vinyl with its single fingernail as it grinds its way across the recording of my failures.

There is no one left. Angie gone. Mark gone. Boy gone. Hugh
gone. Listen to the tolling of the bell. Gone. Gone. Gone. I have only myself and I forge a new routine all of my own. This is a routine devised for a world in which there is neither day or night, no hours, no minutes, no life or death. All is sameness. The knack is to lie like a rug on the floor and let time wipe its feet on your face. Lucien gone.

Outside, around me The Well exhausts itself with growing, cells multiplying in the ivy grappling up the trees, the grass growing taller and taller until it can barely sustain the weight of each ambitious blade, flowers opening wider and wider until the petals can no longer hold on to the core and float to the ground. The fledglings have left without saying goodbye, the deer move out from the shadows of the woods and crop the fields systematically, moving on in watchful ranks and beneath the feet of the booted guards, ants, horn-backed beetles and pinking worms, woodlice, daddy longlegs, maggots, false widow spiders, caterpillars, slugs and the brown-lipped snails who take their house arrest with them when they travel. And I do nothing.

I have watched many sunrises. More sunsets probably, but also many sunrises and one thing does not change: the unexpected ordinariness of the arrival of the day. The sun is like a guest. You are sure it is him, you can see him coming from far away, dressed for an occasion of great splendour, you recognise the shimmering gown and he is bearing a gift wrapped up in gold foil, your name on the card. As he comes over the hill, there is a red ripple of excitement, he extends his hands and the light flashes off the rings on his fingers as he hands you the present, but then he takes off his cloak and as it is thrown over the back of the chair, you see the underside of the embroidery, all loose threads and no pattern; and you unwrap the parcel and the paper is gold on one side only and flat and white underneath, the next layer is brown paper and string, the next is yesterday’s newspaper scrunched up in a ball around the twelve hours of bleach-white living which we call day.

I get up from my floor and stand against the window, remembering how I used to kneel to pray at sunrise not so long ago. I can
hear Sister Amelia’s voice leading me out of myself and into the curling mist:

Hope will never come my way again. Hugh is dead. Here we are, me and the day sitting together in the kitchen with not much left to say to each other, both tired already, even though we have only just got started. At some point I have doodled names on the piece of paper and surrounded them with flowers with long tendrils and twisting stems. I am not alone. I can feel it behind me, breathing. Then it touches me. This touching is too complicated for daylight. He slips away. I know the leaving of his hands, the weightlessness of where his head has been, the chill on my cheek where he is gone. I am not lonely while I have my phantoms beside me. Sometimes it is Mark: he leaves his paperwork at the desk and comes over to pull me to my feet, but just as I rise, he is gone and I fall back down again. And Voice, Voice keeps me company again, reminding me that Lucien is playing in the lambing shed, can’t I hear the bales falling, or that Lucien is drowning in the bath and can’t I hear the taps running, or that Mark has taken Lucien and can’t I hear the Land Rover, leaving without me? Angie doesn’t come often and Hugh not at all. He is dead, Ruth. He won’t because he is dead.

Pray for us now and at the hour of death.

Now is the time to go to that place in the past. There will be no better time, or worse time. There is a time for everything and now is the time to think about the dead and the dying.

H
eal thyself. That’s what they say, isn’t it? I don’t know if I could have healed myself, but I do know I could barely have recognised myself by the end of that week, the final week. Sister Eve told us we needed to ‘refocus to retain the energy and forward momentum of our online campaign’ and we decided that there would be eight days of retreat and meditation, starting on 8 December with the Feast of the Immaculate Conception and culminating with the saint’s day for Santa Maria di Rosa on the 15th. It was agreed she was the perfect new emblem for a new look.

With the planned week of worship drawing near, I no longer had the option of asking Mark to keep an eye on Lucien and I became a nun with a childcare problem. He had been gone almost a month and after being initially disconcerted by his absence, Lucien seemed to believe my lies and we settled into our routine like an old married couple; Voice was quieter then; and Amelia was often around and even seemed to be winning Lucien over, bringing him owl feathers to add to his collection in his room and holly with bright red berries to help him decorate the house for Christmas.

‘Is Amelia your best friend, Granny R?’ Lucien asked, standing on a chair to poke the glossy sprigs behind the pictures.

‘Do you know, I think she probably is. Be careful on that.’

‘She’s not mine,’ he said jumping down. ‘I haven’t got a best friend at the moment.’

I thought I was enough; I didn’t really listen to him. He stayed in the cottage when I went to dusk worship and he never seemed worried to be on his own and I never worried about him, but the week of commitment was going to demand all of me, all of the time. When Mark had been around, he had frequently said that if I couldn’t prioritise Lucien then next time Angie called I should tell her to come and get him. I worried that he was at that moment seeking her out and I would return to the house to see Lucien with his backpack, getting into the back of Charley’s van, waving goodbye, but the fear was not enough to conquer the mad, mounting hysteria of those days, because I was ringmaster, trapeze artist and clown in my very own circus, while Lucien sat in the audience swinging his legs and sucking his thumb.

The opening act was on the Thursday night and Friday morning, with the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Online activity had been feverish, the number of hits higher than ever, The Rose chat rooms loud with the conversations of the faithful. It had taken a drought to drain the materialism from Christmas, but most of the country had no idea which religion to turn to in its place and I don’t think the Rose was the only one experiencing a surge of interest – news reports showed even the leaking Victorian churches in city centres filling up to the brim.

Dawn was late, dusk early in the dying days of the year, but the mornings were medieval blue and gold and our first worship of the day was streamed live to the accompaniment of mallards in flight. Above our vespers, swirls of starlings converged and separated against the sunset before settling on the Douglas fir and Scots pine, drawn in black ink against the evening. I passed the Friday night at home, checking on Lucien’s soft breathing in the room next to mine, before kneeling on the rough wood, naked and freezing cold, trembling with exhaustion. Saturday, day three of our extravaganza, saw us worshipping the mistletoe, taking our webcam to the gnarled trunks and leafless branches of our beautiful apple trees. Followers were able to
buy sprigs of mistletoe online which were supposedly from The Well and I waxed lyrical about the plant’s Druid history while Sister Amelia drew attention to the berries: ‘the female which fruits when everything around her is bare and barren for winter’.

On the fourth day, we created the page for the Christmas Rose, Eve leading the singing of medieval lyrics exalting Mary long into the darkness, our praying hands and shrouds lit by the flares which represented in flame the pattern of our sacred flower and we saw that it was good. When I got back to the cottage that night, I branded myself with the Rose. I do not remember the burning.

Did the days know where their relentless march would take them? Day five, exalted spiritually, exhausted physically, we held high the life of our Lady of Guadalupe and sat huddled in the warmth of the hub caravan, watching the links spread to Mexico and prayers in Spanish scroll through the site.

And so it was the sixth day came. The thirteenth of December. Lucien woke me. There would never be a seventh day, never be a day of rest. It was late. I had been up all night praying, writing and had been to worship in the morning. It was colder, the wind had swung round to the north and the blue skies had been replaced by steel grey; beneath our feet there was ice for puddles. I think it was the cold, as much as the tiredness, which had finally driven me to my bed when I got back and for the first time in days I had fallen asleep. The faint tugging I felt on my arm was a reminder of a physical world which I had abandoned, but I rolled over and there was Lucien. He climbed into bed with me, snuggled up tight to me.