The Well (6 page)

We knew what it was like to be ostracised. Try having your husband accused of keeping child pornography on his local authority laptop for a pretty swift introduction to the paranoid world of the outcast. But given what has happened since, it’s clear that we didn’t even know the meaning of the word. We so wanted to believe that
we had left the plague behind us in London, and that The Well was the cure, that we minimised the symptoms of its return. True, Tom still helped Mark with the autumn ploughing and sowing of our first winter wheat; we bought the ten ewes in lamb from him as well. But it must have all stuck in his gullet as one evening when we called him for some help with the driller, we left a message on the phone, but he never rang back. In retrospect I can plot the course of our fall from local grace through incidents like those, although they were just the skin-deep symptoms of far more serious disease.

Christmas, which now will always be the bleakest of festivals, was then still glitter and stars. The barn was just about habitable, the wood-burner was put in just in time and our first and last guests were friends from London who’d stuck with us through the allegations and we put on a good show, as if to thank them. There they were with their talk of short-time working and escalating crime, concreted gardens and milk shortages, of reduced services on the Underground and half-empty shelves in the supermarkets, while we delivered a lunch of our own chicken, our own potatoes and our own broccoli, parsnips, cranberry sauce and everyone toasted The Well and agreed we’d got away just in time. Then, just as they left and I was staring at the blank pages of my new diary, Angie showed up again without warning, this time with Lucien and a guy called Des, who spent the short days helping Mark fence the woods ready for the piglets he planned to run in them in the spring and the long nights drinking too much cider.

‘This is fucking paradise, this is, Angie. Why don’t you stop here? You and Lucien. He’d be growing up in heaven,’ Des said.

‘Then there’d be nothing for him to look forward to, would there?’

She always had an answer, Angie. Her teachers used to say she was clever, but lacked concentration. I called her a dreamer. Then a rebel. Then an addict. Sometimes, a daughter. January became February and they stayed on and I wasn’t lonely any longer because this was my Lucien winter: Lucien, running after the pheasants and
yelling with delight at the power he held over them, forcing them to heave their heavy bodies over the hedges and flap laboriously into the frosted woods; Lucien, sitting on Mark’s second-hand tractor, all gloves and woolly hat and scarf, driving to the ends of the world and back; me sawing logs, Lucien carrying them one by one to the wood pile, staggering under the weight and falling asleep on my knee, in front of the fire, long before bedtime. It was a physical existence for all of us and it felt so good, to be tired, to ache, to feel the new-found roughness of Mark’s hands on my breasts, because we made love again that year, night after night. My body felt good once more; even the drunken Des hit on me in the kitchen one night: ‘you could be my Mrs Robinson’, he slobbered. I told Mark and we laughed and he ran his hands up under my jumper, humming the theme tune to the film.

I can only assume that Angie overheard Des, because all of a sudden she had come over from the barn and was packing Lucien’s things.

‘Are you off?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Both of you?’

‘Of course.’ She was stuffing Lucien’s clothes into a well-travelled holdall, nothing folded, nothing counted.

‘If you want to travel again, you could leave Lucien here, you know.’

‘Why would I want to do that?’

I had bought him some slippers and I held these out to her. ‘You would be more free and Lucien could go to school here, make friends.’

She snatched the slippers. ‘Like you’ve got such good relationships with the villagers that they’d all be asking him round to play, would they? Haven’t you noticed, Mum, none of them want to be around you any longer?’

‘I don’t think that’s totally true.’

Angie left the room and I could hear her crashing around the
bathroom. ‘Because you don’t want to. But I hear stuff. You’re up here with your green fields; they’re all going out of business. They think something’s not right,’ she shouted through the wall and then came back into the bedroom. ‘What the fuck’s he done with his toothbrush.’

The room felt too small for both of us. I moved out of her way and looked out of the window. ‘You’re going away from the point, Angie. I was just offering Lucien a bit of stability. He loves it here. All this could be his one day.’

‘You can stuff your middle-class idyll. This is all about you. You always wanted another kid. You always wanted a boy. Actually, what you always wanted was Lucien . . .’

I turned back to face her. ‘Angie. You were barely seventeen. If we hadn’t stepped forward, you wouldn’t even have had Lucien, the state you were in. Adoption, that’s what social care were talking about.’

Angie is mouthing the words as I am speaking them. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, like I haven’t heard all this before. And the social workers weren’t so keen when Mark got accused, were they?’ She zipped the holdall closed.

‘Angie, don’t stoop that low. You know as well as I do that he was completely exonerated. So don’t you ever, and I mean ever, pull that one again.’

‘OK. For God’s sake, don’t get so stressed. Mark’s in the clear. All’s right with the world. Things have changed. I’ve changed.’

‘Have you?’ I called after her.

Sitting on the end of the unmade bed, I tugged the duvet straight. I had never doubted Mark’s innocence, not once throughout the whole sordid affair. I just knew – I thought I just knew – that he could never do anything like that. It would have been impossible to have allowed myself to think any differently. The sound of Angie slamming the back door brought me back to the present. I noticed my broken nails and pressed hard against the blisters on my fingers from the wheelbarrow until they hurt and wept.

By sunset they were gone, but she had got Lucien to write a note on a page from his farmyard colouring book with huge, irregular letters, half facing the wrong way round. It was her way of saying sorry – that and taking only half the money from Mark’s wallet.

I keep it as a memento mori in the dressing-table drawer I dare not open.

The second half of Feburary was cold, grey and difficult. It snowed once or twice at The Well, but only after Lucien had left.

‘He would have loved this,’ I said to Mark.

‘So would everyone else,’ he replied as we stared over our sparkling, sugar-coated plough towards the black fields and forests beyond.

We saw virtually no one from London or Lenford until the end of the month at the meeting with the spokesperson from the Department of the Environment. The parish hall was crowded out with farmers exhausted from lambing, smelling of sleeplessness, the windows steaming. Patience, like water, was in short supply.

The chairman of the local National Farmers Union introduced the speaker. ‘I hope he’s going to be our Angel Gabriel and bring us good tidings.’

But it was clear from the start that the man from the Emergency Committee on Drought Relief (ECDR) had letters after his name, but no wings. His was an exercise in panic-reduction and spin, and the heckling rose.

‘What are you going to do about it?’

‘What’s going to happen to this country’s food supply?’

‘Someone needs to do something about it.’

‘What can he do about it?’ muttered Mark to me. ‘He’s not God.’

‘And what are you doing about places like The Well? They’ve got enough water to make a fucking reservoir.’

The official encouraged any such landowners with possible answers to contact the Drought Help and Information Line on 0816 . . .

‘Witchcraft,’ interrupted an old woman, standing at the back with a baby on her hip.

‘Chemicals.’

‘Stealing other people’s water.’

Our neighbours were not short of suggestions.

Mark elbowed his way through the crowd and we stumbled across the car park in the dark, me shouting at him to wait. We walked home in single file in silence, went to bed in silence, turned out the light in silence. We made promises when we moved here that we would not let the sun go down on a quarrel; we tried so hard to stick to our resolutions, but like the smoker in the pub on 2 January, the world was full of ways of failing.

The next morning, I got up first, opened the shutters and looked out of the window. ‘I can’t stand it,’ I said to Mark.

‘Can’t stand what?’

‘The loneliness. The scent of overnight rain.’

‘Then you’re the only person in this wonderful United Kingdom of ours who feels that way,’ he replied, sitting on the side of the bed, pulling on his jeans, shivering. Despite the cold, we had scrupulously avoided touching each other all night, so that when my knee had brushed his back, we had both recoiled like strangers.

‘Do you know what? I’ve had just about enough of being on the receiving end of the general public’s accusations. We did that in London and it was no fun. Now, I just want to be like everyone else. I’d actually prefer to be part of their fucking drought.’

Mark came to me, put his arm around me. I wanted to pull away, but I thought no, if I do that now there will be no going back. He’d asked me one night after a long interview with the police about the laptop, ‘Do you find me repulsive?’ We couldn’t go back to that. But as for The Well – Mark had no answers, just platitudes. It’s not called The Well for nothing. History. Geography. Geology. Logic. The lawyer and the farmer, his alter egos kept each other company,
but his schizophrenic platitudes were not for me. I pushed him away, told him to use his eyes, look at our green grass, the snowdrops under our hedges, our tight budding trees. Now look beyond our boundary, at the landscape iron-grey and stubborn in its sickness. That’s not normal, I said. That’s not logical, Mark. Nor is the rain.

‘What about the rain?’

‘The rain. Like last night, it must have rained. We hardly ever see it rain, we don’t usually hear it rain, but it has clearly rained. And just here. Nowhere else in the whole glorious country has it rained properly for almost two years, but it rained here, last night, again. Here, we have unlimited access to our best friend the Rain God and we don’t even beat drums for him.’

Mark thundered downstairs, without replying, ostensibly for breakfast, but from the little window on the landing I watched him, in that green jumper, standing between the rows of our fledgling winter wheat with Bru beside him, looking up at him with unconditional loyalty. He crouched down and picked up a feather, brushed it across his unshaven face. When he came back into the kitchen, I didn’t know if it was rain or tears on his cheeks, but whichever it was, I wanted to kiss them away, but there was a gap between us and my love didn’t seem wide enough to bridge it.

Instead, I wiped my own eyes and made a suggestion. Perhaps we should contact the man from the ECDR or go ahead and get a supply licence and run a pipe down to the other farmers, then at least the locals would see we were not just taking our luck for granted.

‘Your “locals” were so unbelievably rude last night that they can go hang themselves for all I care,’ said Mark, then he sat down heavily at the table, rubbed his head in his hands. ‘Look, one drainpipe’s not going to solve their drought, Ruth.’ He picked up the spoon as if to start eating, but paused and held it up to his face, studying his distorted reflection for a moment before continuing. ‘It wasn’t what we came here for, a load of prying bureaucrats traipsing all over our land with their measuring equipment and weather
stations and forms for this permission and data for that. The next thing you know they’ll slap a compulsory purchase order on the place. We came here to get away from all that crap and we’ve been doing so well, we’ve been doing so well,’ he said, stirring his cereal round and round. Congealed porridge. Hard boiled eggs. Burned toast. I pointed out that the crap seemed to have caught up with us and he pushed his chair back and grabbed his scarf, saying he needed time to think about things. I said fine, take all the time you need, I’m sure it’s not urgent, then fed the toast to the dog, put the eggs to one side for lunch, scraped the porridge into the bin, missed and made a filthy mess because of the rage and the tears and the hair in my face. Couldn’t be bothered to clear it up. Kicked the bin. Threw the bowl in the sink, cracked it.

The first letter from the Drought Monitoring Watchdog arrived the following morning. Aerial photos showed a higher than normal level of water retention in the soil on our land and they wanted to drill a small, exploratory testing hole. The second letter arrived only three days later. As we had failed to lodge an objection to the first letter, within the specified time limit, the drilling would commence shortly. Third, fourth, fifth, innumerable letters asserted the rights of the state to use, take, drill, occupy, requisition our land. Mark ripped the envelopes into shreds, filed the forms in his desk, the lawyer in him furious at the breaching of proper procedures and the man in him railing at the disregard for his rights. He was going to fight it, he said, fight, fight, fight, thumping the table in time to his rage. Resting my hands on his fists, I tried to still him, pointing out that we could be entering a world where having the letter of the law on our side was not enough.

Events proved me right, of course. We watched, at first incredulous and then fearful, as events unfolded at a smallholding in Devon called Duccombe, which, like ours, seemed to benefit from unlikely rain. The compulsory purchase order became an eviction order, the eviction order was enacted by bulldozers and bailiffs and the groups of protestors who had camped out at the farm in defence of the old
couple who lived there were shown on the news with bloodied heads and placards stamped into the mud, as the riot police moved in. An ambulance was driven up to the house and it was confirmed later that the farmer had apparently died of a heart attack. Two days later, the farmhouse burned to the ground and conspiracy theories swept the internet as violently and rapidly as the flames which had consumed the thatch. The national uproar was deafening. Anyone with an interest in the environment, human rights, farming, legal aid, signed a petition. Duccombe seemed to act as spark to the smouldering confusion about who was to manage this drought and how. Pent-up fury erupted: fury about profits being made by big businesses trading in water while elderly people’s homes were rationed and non-emergency operations were delayed, if not cancelled; fury about ministers filmed drinking wine on green lawns at Chequers while workers at car plants were put on a four-day week; fury about the exclusion of Westminster from proposed Level 5 drought restrictions, while children in some parts of the southeast only attended school in the morning to save electricity. A march in central London drew half a million people. The government faced a vote of no confidence in its handling of the water crisis. Three people died in clashes with police at a private reservoir on Lord Baddington’s estate.