The Well (47 page)

My thoughts are interrupted by Anon shouting from the house that Sarge is on his way and they need to repair the breach in the boundary fence. I listen to Boy calling back, the slam of a door, something forgotten, then quiet. They have gone. I am alone with these revelations again; they make for strange company.

It was Sister Amelia. Not me. It being me has been part of me for so long that I am not sure who I am without it. Not Mark, either. But there is the legacy of even having entertained the thought that it could have been him. That cannot ever be unthought; it is one drop of poison in a well.

The Well. Lucien has two graves. Angie will go to the churchyard with her penny-whistle, and later, when the guards have finished down there, I must find it within myself to go again to the Wellpond with the butterfly, knowing now what I know.

It seems to take them a long time, although I don’t know why. Maybe it is just that time is going so slowly, waiting. When Boy finally returns from resetting the electric fence, he finds me settling Annalisa for the evening. She has been hard to milk, but now I am feeling a relief of sorts in swatting away the droning thunder-flies and shaking out the straw. I ask him how it was in the Wellwood.

‘How do you mean?’ he says.

‘I don’t know what I mean. It’s silly, I thought it might be different down there, now that we know.’

‘Can you tell me?’ he asks gently.

I can. I take him through Jack’s letter, it helps me believe it, saying it out loud and his questions and comments help me clarify things in my own understanding.

‘I always knew it wasn’t you,’ he says when I have finished and I let the lie rest.

‘Anyway, that’s what I meant,’ I repeat, ‘when I asked you what it was like in the Wellwood.’

Boy fills the stable bucket and then turns off the tap, but the chime of the dripping water counts us through the quiet, a mantra in this early evening full of flighting thoughts.

After some minutes, Boy lifts the bucket over the stall and places it near the cow. ‘If you want to know, it was weird,’ he says.

‘Weird?’

‘I’ve always felt OK down there, even though I knew that was
where Lucien was found. But this evening,’ he struggles for words, ‘it almost felt like someone was watching me.’

There is a new restlessness about tonight, I think. Outside the stable, it is dusk and darkening and the rooks are writing across the silver sky in a sweeping hand, full of the loops and flourishes and strange characters of a foreign alphabet which I cannot understand. I will go to The Well and put things right.

T
here are differences. For me, the August evening is heavy with heat and even the dew feels warm, but for him it must have been white-cold. And this is a summer sky, just the hint of stars, the promise of the Plough in the north-west, but for him, Orion’s Belt would have been sharp as steel, low on the horizon. Each step of the familiar path to the Wellwood is now different. What must he have felt, holding tight to the large hands of these women in the middle of the night, the smell of their thighs, the stubble scratching his legs. And here, at this stile, how frightened must he have been, waving goodbye to Jack, not once, but twice. I stop at the fence as if it is here that I also saw him for the last time because everything beyond here, everything that took place on the other side of this fence is conjecture, except how it all ended. I am not sure I can go in, but I cannot turn back now, not when I have made a promise, not when he had no choice but to go on. Behind me, over the field, there is still a sense of the daylight only just taking leave, the glow is slowly fading from the mottled clouds above Montford Forest and a huge moon is cresting the horizon. In front of me, night has pulled the curtains closed and the wood seems black beyond belief. I stand between two times. I climb the stile unsteadily and follow the questions between the trees towards the
pond, my eyes growing used to the silhouettes and shadows, and when I get there, light is polishing the silver water – the last of the sunset or the first of the moonbeams – I don’t know which, but it is like it has always been – and different.

I had thought that now the story was out, the water itself would thrash and moan, but no, it is still beautiful. Still. Beautiful. The mallards have tucked their heads into their wings and are sleeping on the bank, somewhere in the leaves and branches around me the dragonflies and water boatmen hold tight to their half-life and even the trees themselves seem to breathe more slowly. So I find my way softly to my sitting log, so as not to wake the quiet wood. Just to be here is a start, to remember the other times: Lucien on his tummy with a jam jar full of tadpoles; Lucien trying to catch a damsel fly with his hands; Lucien squatting beneath the fat oak with his book of poisonous plants, look at this one, Granny R, this one must be really deadly! I take the silk butterfly from my pocket. What I would do to have him, if I could, if he could still be, but he is not, will never be again. The hot, honest clamp of grief presses on my head and the tears come again and I want to let the butterfly float on the Wellspring, but I cannot let it go, so I sit in the darkness and hold hands with its loveliness, close to prayer.

Screeching of ducks. Flapping of unseen wings above my head. Rustling. I can’t see clearly in this half-light. The dry muffle of weight on dead leaves. Something larger than a squirrel or a fox. I am on my feet and as watchful as a blind man. A glimpse of something pale against the charcoal trunks – and then it is gone and there is no sound and I struggle to think of what there is so white in a wood such as this at night: a badger, the tail of a roe deer, an owl? Whatever it is, it is still there, the other side of the pond and it is moving again, unevenly, stealthily, but crashing now, snapping branches, brazen, advancing towards me. I am reaching for a stick, brandishing it in front of me, looking behind me, whether or not to run, where to hide. I am right to be afraid. It is Amelia.

A rough beast slouching out of the thicket, breaking free of the
thorns clutching her back, standing upright in the clearing opposite me, a wild and bedraggled thing, Amelia, her long white robe mud-stained, her auburn hair tangled, but I can make out her face and it is the face of a woman I know, Amelia. The clearing is in uproar, with every living thing taking flight. With both hands I lift the stick while stepping back, tripping on the log, trying to keep my balance. I have never met a murderer before and I am afraid, rapidly processing information, response, hypothesis, reaction: she is a killer, she probably knows I know she is a killer, she may want to hurt me, she looks unwell, I can run faster than her, I can get help, she will be caught, I will be safe.

‘Ruth. My Ruth, you have come at last.’ She speaks my name as she always has, so that it lasts a long time, so quietly it draws me closer.

And for all that fight or flight, she is still Amelia, my Amelia.

‘Ruth. You can’t think that I would ever want to hurt you. You, you’ve meant everything to me.’

She would never have wanted to hurt me.

She is coming slowly towards me. I lower the stick and it falls from my hands so they are free to embrace her. We hold each other for a long time. My eyes are closed, I feel her hair, her hand is hot against my back, our breath heaves heavily together, slows, steadies. We step apart, she is smiling, thanking the Rose; I am bewildered by what I have just done. I cannot make sense of myself or of her, the state she is in, the fact that she is here at all.

‘How did you get in here?’

‘The same way as before. Your daughter let me in.’

Angie hadn’t mentioned her. I shake my head at her. ‘That must be a lie, Amelia. Don’t lie to me, please.’

‘I’ve never lied to you, Ruth. The truth is all that has ever mattered to me. The truth and the Rose, they are indistinguishable.’

The Rose. After all that has happened, she is still talking about the Rose. I move away from her, sit back on the log, feel myself rocking, staring at the mud and the moss at my feet. I cannot make
anything out of it. ‘Then how?’ is all I manage to say and I wait for her reply, but I do not look at her.

‘I didn’t know if I would be let in if I came on my own, I didn’t know if you’d see me, so I followed Angie. She took me by surprise, breaking in through the wood, but she was always was so irrational, wasn’t she? As soon as I slipped through the breach in the fence after her, I knew that I wouldn’t go up to the house, I would let her tell you her stories and I would just wait for you here to tell you the truth. I knew you would come eventually.’ I hear her move and then see her, kneeling down and splashing her face with the water of the Well pond. ‘All I had to do was wait and pray,’ she says.

‘That was hours ago.’ I am aware that my body is shaking even if my voice is not. The thought that she was here at The Well without my knowing turns my earth to quicksand.

‘I wasn’t going to come at all, I was weak. I was tested and I almost failed. But I was helped by a friend, the Rose spoke to me through her and she persuaded me it was the right thing to do.’

‘Who?’

Still kneeling, Amelia is pulling something slowly from the front of her robe. ‘She never really understood the internet, the blog, the Twitter account – all that went over her head. Hers is an old-fashioned faith, but no less strong for that,’ she says.

I don’t know who is she talking about. Her riddles always caught me and even now she reels me in.

‘Sister Dorothy,’ she says, getting to her feet, holding up a blue airmail envelope.

I stand as well. ‘Let me read it. I have been waiting so long for a letter from her.’ After all this time, Dorothy wrote to Amelia and not to me, and I am once again the outsider, on the edge of their worship circle. It seems unlikely, but here she is, Amelia, and here it is, a letter. Not unlikely – unbearable. A thought occurs to me. I hold out my hand over the distance between us. ‘It’s addressed to me, isn’t it? Give it to me, Amelia.’

‘No, she didn’t reply to you, Ruth. I think she was worried about
the men you had surrounded yourself with. It was right she wrote to me instead.’

Amelia’s face is impossible to read in this funeral parlour of a wood. ‘I tried to get in touch with her. I thought she might help me . . .’ I begin.

‘She told me all about your desperate search for answers. Priests. Ruth, the Rose was always there for you, you shouldn’t have forgotten that. But she said, how did she put it . . .’ Now Amelia is fumbling behind the tree, her hands find a small sackcloth bag which rattles as she reaches inside, then there is the rasp of a match striking a box and she lights a candle; she was prepared to worship and to wait. The flame flares up and illuminates her eyes, which seem huge, and it catches beads of sweat on her cheeks as she reads. ‘
The Sisters of the Rose believe in the power of telling the truth
.’ No, don’t interrupt, Ruth, let me get to the end of the letter.’ The light cowers away from her as she speaks, then steadies itself. ‘
I could reply to Ruth but all I could give her would be the further agony of suspicion and unreliable evidence. You, Amelia, are the only person who can free her from the pain of unknowing because you are the only one who knows the truth
.’ She moves towards me, as if to let me read it for myself. ‘She still believes, Ruth, until I read that I had almost forgotten who I was. But Dorothy reminded me. I am the one who knows the truth.’

Amelia holds the candle to the letter, the flames reach her fingers and then she drops it so it falls to the ground where it curls up and dies. I am dizzy, I cannot see properly. I have not felt darkness more impenetrable than this and then I feel her touch as she stops me from falling and guides me back to sitting. I can smell her, the familiar lavender on pillows, but something else, something sour like the sheets stripped off the bed from a sick child, and when I raise my head she is standing very close to me.

‘You think she still believes?’ I am wondering out loud, taking Dorothy’s words apart, trying to read the meaning and the purpose in them.

‘Of course she still believes. We all do, you too, Ruth. This is just your time in the wilderness.’

She towers over me. I have to look up to her to ask. ‘And did Dorothy know what happened here?’

‘Don’t torture yourself. Dorothy loved you, respected you. If she could have helped you, she would have done. She didn’t need to know everything about Lucien.’

His name, spoken by her. Her tongue has seduced me in many different ways and I have my guilt to own in that. But to hear it now, curled around his consonants, lingering over his vowels, the time has come to cut it out. ‘But I do need to know, Amelia. Even if I hate you for it, I need to know.’

A barn owl screeches from deep within the Wellwood; somewhere, maybe in Hedditch or further away, a rival answers back. She sits down beside me. ‘Hate, love, the back of the same circle, Ruth. You are shivering. It’s getting cold. Let me hold you.’

‘Don’t come any nearer, I can’t trust myself.’

‘You never could. It’s not me you’re trusting, trust the Rose. Take my hand.’ Grandmother’s footsteps, blindman’s buff, her hand lifts slowly towards my face, filthy nails stretch towards my cheek, the palm turns outwards and she strokes my skin with the back of her clammy fingers, once, twice. I flinch, turning my head away, and feel the fondling feather-light and razor-sharp; my eyes close at the pain of it which is hollowing me inside out. She leans in to whisper to me, that hand now following my neck, tracing the line of my collarbone. Those same hands. I do not consent. Suddenly, all thought is gone. I am no more and no less than a somatic nervous system, the hippocampus knows this woman well and every nerve in my body screams no. Legs push me to standing, hand hits her, slaps her, arms push her, teeth would bite her if they could, eyes see the shape of her rise, fall, stumble and ears register the slump of her onto the dead ground.

She lies motionless for so long, I wonder if I have really hurt her. The candle and her body transform this meeting into a wake. That
would be her parting gift. Her body lies face down amongst the dull leaves. I creep forward, my heart loud in my head, I crouch down and there, yes, I can see the rapid, shallow rise and fall in her shoulders and in the silence of the overheated night, I can just hear the rasp of breath. Finally, like some mythical animal, she wakes. With one arm at a time, she places her wrists bent against the mud and pushes her body back onto her haunches, rocks a little, kneels up.