The Well (43 page)

‘Stop it.’ I am going to go inside, shut the door on his logic.

Boy puts his foot in the way. ‘Why?’

‘Because, I don’t know why, I just want you to stop.’ Of course, I
have thought about whether it was Mark, but Boy is right, hearing that suspicion voiced out loud is something different and I put my hand out to get my letter back from him, but he keeps it out of my reach.

‘I’m not saying it was him. But if it was, then what better way of covering things up than making you mad all over again, convincing you of your own guilt? It’s obvious no one is going to pin it on the Sisters.’ He turns his back to the barns and gives me back my letter. ‘I’ve never the met the man, Ruth, but you’re always defending his memory and no man is that good; we’re a jealous breed.’

I allow myself a day in bed to think about Boy’s unthinkable premise, to re-read the letter, trying to find the sub-text; I was so good at analysis of language when I was paid to teach it, but now, looking for a different sort of remuneration, I am not up to the job. I loved Mark. For a very long time I thought he was a good man, even when others disagreed. He wasn’t the sort of man to hurt people, although he did. He hurt me for a start. He had an alibi, but people can do all sorts of things with computers and rarely get caught, which he knew only too well. I loved him. The reason it is unsayable is this: if it was him, if the laptop accusations were true and that was him, I have lived with and loved a pervert, I’ve been so embroiled with him that I myself cannot have escaped contamination. Easier, in a way, for it to be anyone but him. Easier, even, in some strange way, for it to be me.

Outside, I can hear banging. Looking out of the window, I can see Boy has taken up my idea of keeping chickens and is mending the henhouse, bent double, hammering the wire to the frame, his collar turned up against the dry wind whipping up the dust, surrounding himself with the paraphernalia of the dream of the smallholder. No man is that good.

T
oday is 15 August. Exactly this time, one year ago, I was making a cake. I will make a cake again today as an act of remembrance. I will take the large yellow mixing bowl from the bottom of the dresser. Perhaps when I am finally released I can write a celebrity book called
The House Arrest Cookbook
. The first thing it will say is to make sure you have enough small things: saucepans for one, half-pint mixing bowls, casserole dishes designed for one chicken leg only, although it may be worth keeping one large yellow mixing bowl big enough for mixing a six-year-old’s birthday cake, just in case. With some foresight, I have ordered ahead.

Anon queried the shopping list. ‘Some kind of special occasion?’ he asked.

He is not inquisitive enough to be promoted. Anon will go through life knowing enough and no more, which is one way of living – maybe a good one – but whatever he thought of my request, he brought back what he could. Food interests him; he is probably the only person in the UK to have put on weight during the drought. Flour is still easily obtained, if expensive; sugar, providing you are happy to take unrefined, is also not a problem; and hens are quite happy scratching a living from dust and bare earth, so we are now apparently a nation of free-range egg eaters.
I have made an attempt at making my own butter from Annalisa’s lovely milk.

The ingredients are laid out on the table, reminding me of cookery lessons at school, when we had washed our hands (how casually we must have washed our hands), tied the stiff, plastic aprons behind our backs with uneven bows and read through the recipe written up on the whiteboard. Diana Reid was my cooking partner. We lost touch long before we moved here. I wonder if she read about me in the press and said to the people in her office, I used to be her cooking partner at school, you know. And everyone would think, I work with someone who went to school with someone who knows that weird woman who thinks she’s the chosen one and who killed her grandson in the pond. They would all experience a little frisson of having come so close to madness and got away with it.

I take a spoon and scoop off a block of butter and scrape it into the bowl. There are no scales so I cannot be weighed and found wanting. I use a tablespoon to measure out the sugar: flat across the top for sugar, heaped for flour – that made twenty-five grams, my mother taught me. Actually, she would have said ounces, I think, but I am making things up. I can’t hear her voice any longer. Much as we had our differences, I am glad she never lived to see this: her daughter baking birthday cakes for the dead.

Creaming butter and sugar is hard work. The muscles which I used to pin down the sheep for shearing and balance the wheel-barrow full of stones for repairing the orchard wall, have withered long ago and I find myself softening the butter on the Rayburn to make the task easier and swapping the wooden spoon from hand to hand to alleviate my aching arms. The creaming done, I crack the eggs into a bowl and whisk them lightly before adding them slowly to the cake mixture. At first it is beautiful, full of air and a consistency which reminds me of the Cornish cream the old ladies used to serve at the fete with dollops of jam and crumbling scones and wasps. How full of memories I am today. But then I add the egg too quickly – slapdash Ruthy – and it curdles into slimy islands
which slop their way around the bowl and refuse to bind. The flour rescues it, but I don’t have baking powder and now I think this cake will be airless and lifeless like biscuit. In a second, it has gone from a work of love to an object of hate and I am close to hurling the yellow mixing bowl and its separating mixture of survival and grief against the wall.

Then Lucien is standing on the chair besides me. He smells of clean laundry. If he could be there, if he could only be there, beautiful on the chair beside me, wanting to put the eggshells back together again and lick the spoon, then I could carry on. I uncurl my hands from their rigid grip on the bowl and breathe deeply, resume folding in the flour, first this way, then that, and slowly it starts to come right again. I resolve not to throw it away. I spoon the mixture into the greased cake tin and put it in the oven, then stand by the sink and watch the wheat unharvested ripple and fly in the hot wind and I think of his hair. The pheasants, fat and unaware of their good fortune, pecking in the straggling grass by the gatepost remind me of him windmilling down the drive, clapping his hands and watching them take off, heavy as jumbo jets. I run my own finger around the bowl and lick it, once for me, once for him, and once for what? For good luck?

Three invades my house.

‘What do you want?’ I am brave, here in my kitchen, ready to defend my cake against any imposter.

‘For once, I thought you would be pleased to see me. But if I’m interrupting something . . .’

Putting the spoons and bowl into the sink, I work hard to manage my expectations. I run the water to wash up. ‘What is it you wanted to say?’

‘It was to inform you that a section 9 visitor’s permit has been granted for this afternoon. Fourteen hundred to sixteen hundred hours.’

He has played his trump card and he knows it.

‘Today?’

‘I said this afternoon, fourteen hundred to sixteen hundred.’

‘You must have known about this and you’re telling me now. You are a sadistic bastard!’ I smash the bowl onto the draining board.

‘You must be aware I have the authority to rescind the permission if you are not in a fit mental state.’ Three plays with the piece of paper in his hand.

Breathing very deeply, I dry my hands on a cloth, over and over, and manage just the one word more. ‘Who?’

Three slaps the form on the table and I seize it, read it, there are no names, just small print and dates and timings. ‘Tell me who.’ I scream at him as he disappears up the drive, beyond my limit. ‘You must know who!’

Back inside, the clock moves towards 1.05 p.m. The official slip gives nothing away, no matter how many times I re-read it. Boy would have told me if he knew, or if it was anyone interesting. That’s the thing about Three, he would break the news like that just to torture me with the hope that it was Angie, or Mark, knowing all the time it was some dreary official or a doctor. The hope that it is someone I love thunders inside me, but I hold tight to more rational explanations – Sam, for instance, come to see how the cow is – maybe she felt sorry for me and that leads me to think this might be a substitute priest they have dug up from somewhere.

If somebody comes, what will I do with the cake?

The smell of the baking cake fills the kitchen, makes me wonder if I might not one day bake again for somebody else, for children, someone else’s children, I don’t know whose. I could have cooked more with Angie and worked less and maybe it would have all turned out differently. It might be Angie. In some ways, I think I could manage if it was Angie. I know what I have to do when I see Angie again. But what if it’s Mark – the Mark I love or the Mark I hate?

The timer sounds. I jump, but it is the cake, not the visitors. Bending down and opening the oven door, I take out the cake with shaking hands and, trembling, put it on the table. Perfect. It has risen, golden-topped, cracked but only enough to reveal the moist,
steaming sponge inside. Even as it cools, it doesn’t collapse. There is plenty of jam left; damson, plum, apple jelly, crab-apple jelly . . . some are labelled
Year 1
or
Year 2
as if we might lose count. Lucien would have wanted strawberry jam, but that was never on offer. Mark made our first batch of damson jelly; Angie, she was a peanut butter kid so that is no good. I choose damson, I don’t know why, and back in the kitchen slice the cake horizontally in two. At last they have allowed me a decent knife. I pointed out to them that the sheds are full of beams to hang myself from or scythes or shears which I could steal in the night and creep up behind them and slit their throats with, so the lack of a decent kitchen knife seemed somewhat futile. I spread the jam over the cake. It crumbles slightly because I haven’t been able to wait for it to be ready, but thick with lumps of fruit I sandwich it together again, then run my finger along the blade and lick it, leaving my skin stained purple and crimson. Damson. Mark’s favourite.

It is 1.45 p.m. The visitors are due in fifteen minutes. Scrutinising the paper again, I try to remember whether Three said visitor or visitors. What a difference a plural might make – when two or three are gathered – and then I realise it could be the Sisters. Would they really have given permission to Amelia to come back here, if she asked? There is no sign of anyone arriving down the drive. Anon is out there now, dealing cards for himself in the shade. I cannot imagine what I would say to Amelia. Sweat pours down my face, I lose focus and the room swims in the heat and my mind gasps for knowledge in an anarchy of unknowing.

‘Anon!’ I call from the doorway. ‘Do you know who is coming to visit me?’

‘I’m afraid I’m not party to that information, but I’ll sure let you know as soon as someone turns up. I’m the one on duty. Sarge has gone up to the experimental plots for some top-secret security update, or something like that.’

The Land Rover is not there and Anon confirms that Boy has headed into town.

Our hedge by the gate has blackberries. I pick some, to commemorate blackberrying and Lucien. I arrange them on the icing with care, angry that I am at risk of losing sight of him in the midst of this impending invasion. I had not really thought what I was going to do with it when it was finished, but now I am faced with the prospect of sharing it. Some lines from Proverbs come to mind uninvited. ‘If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water.’ I shared them with Mark a long time ago, in a different context, in what seems like another country. I am trying to remember how the proverb ends when the buzzer sounds in the barn.

‘Looks like they’re here,’ calls Anon.

They?

An unfamiliar blue car bumps down the drive, does a three-point turn under the oak so it ends up parked facing away from the cottage as if ready for a quick getaway.

Who wants to come to such a birthday party as this, with no invitations, no balloons, no birthday boy left to blow out the candles?

The car door opens.

The answer is Mark.

The fact that it is Mark means that it is not Angie. Not Amelia. Not any of those other possibilities. It is Mark. Who it is and who it is not are equally debilitating.

Back inside, I stare from the window, frozen like the doe deer at dusk that sees the marksman raise his rifle but cannot run. Part of me thinks that time has fragmented and reformed like a kaleidoscope and that Mark standing by the five-barred gate, looking up at the cottage, is quite normal and that he is about to come into the cottage, unpack his shopping and I will call down, how are things in town, and he will say, I’ll be up in a minute. Another part of me thinks that this is Mark, but at some point in the future, and I am the ghost come back to visit old haunts, to inspect the ruins.

Whichever way I try to rationalise it, it cannot be now, unless of course he has changed his mind and he loves me again; unless he
has news, unless he has evidence to share which will prove beyond doubt that it was me. Or him. Or her. It cannot be a mistake that he has chosen this day for his return; it used to be in Mark’s favour that he never forgot birthdays. He must know I am sad, but I have been sad for a long time and it has not prompted him to comfort me. Mark. Just to hold him, imagine that, for him to say I’ve come back, I can’t live without you. Suspicion corrupts that soft-focus picture. The truth is he has stayed away for far too long, does not love me, has not stopped punishing me, so again the question repeats itself: why come back here now? My mind is rapid cycling, rushing between the conscious thought and the hard-wired memories, trying to make sense of this unforeseen appearance. Slowly, an alternative reading of events occurs to me. A piece of received wisdom: that people are drawn back to the scene of their crimes. That special days act like a magnet to the murderer. Perhaps there is sense in this madness after all. It was Boy who said it out loud. Why don’t you ever think it was him?