The Well Read online

  When other people talk of my conversion, they have in their minds that picture, with the rainbow, the one that someone once described, without a trace of irony, as iconic. For me, the process started twenty-four hours before that moment. I had become somewhat addicted to the Sisters’ company, finding my own unreliable and the unpredictable presence of Voice disconcerting, so I went down to the caravans so as not to be alone. Things that day seemed different. There was no clatter of plates or smell of fresh bread, no T-shirts and jeans, no chatter. The Sisters were hushed and drifting in grey robes, shadows in the shade of the oaks. Sister Amelia came out of her caravan, barefoot, light and smiling at me, and I was a teenage girl with a crush all over again. She explained that the next day’s worship would be special and would be held at the Wellspring. The Sisters knelt, bowed their heads and Sister Amelia wound long strips of white cotton sheet around their eyes. Finally, she beckoned me over and held the one remaining piece of material out to me.

  ‘You must leave us now,’ she said. ‘Prepare as best you can. Fast. Come wearing white. Come barefoot. Come alone.’

  The silence at the cottage seemed the loudest silence I had ever heard, except now I know there is a silence louder than the lack of speech. Mark was out all that day, hoping to pick up a horsebox at a farm auction; he hated pecking around in the remains of bankrupt farmers’ tenancies, like a chicken in a scrap yard, but money was tight and he said we needed it to take the lambs to the abattoir. That made it easy to observe the vow of silence; we weren’t exactly overrun with people dropping round for tea. In the bedroom, I tied the sheeting around my own head, a child playing blind man’s buff with herself, and sat on the wooden floor, facing the open window, feeling the heat of the sun on my face.

  Initially my thoughts were sparrows, flighty and easily scared. I was so hot, my back ached, my aloneness felt a punishment rather than a privilege, but after some time – and who knows how long – I felt a dampness in the room which was followed by a coolness, then I could see, and what I could see was an old-fashioned brown leather briefcase on the floor in front of me. I had never seen it before or since, but it was so real I could trace my initials engraved on the lid, weigh the tiny key in my outstretched hand, feel the stiffness of the catches against my thumb. Inside was a jumble of old pictures of varying sizes, in different frames. The first was a miniature, depicting in exquisite detail a woman in the desert carrying an earthenware vessel for water. In the second painting, in a cheap, metallic frame, another woman, this one in poor, dull clothes and with unkempt hair, slumped on the end of an unmade bed, cowering in front of a golden pillar of light. The third was a rolled canvas, so big I had to stand up to be able to hold it, and as I did so, the oil paint cracked and the room was full of the flaking gold and blue of disintegrating angels taking flight from a woman in white kneeling in a peeling garden, the thrust of their thundering wings threatening to crush me. I ripped at the blindfold, flailing my limbs heavily on the floor, screaming at my voice trapped in a constricted throat.

  It is as clear to me now as it was then and as inexplicable.

  Someone was calling me. There was no briefcase. I was aware I needed words, struggled to find some, held tight to them.

  ‘Up here!’

  Mark had come home. I heaved myself up onto the bed just in time as his head loomed around the bedroom door. Looking away, I said I felt ill and when he came closer to the bed to kiss me, I retched. I said I didn’t feel like supper and was sorry I hadn’t made anything for him, but that I just needed to lie quietly in the bedroom with the shutters closed. It was the sun, he said, it had lost its capacity to be gentle with us. Anyone who stayed out too long would get heatstroke. He lay beside me for a while, on his back with his hands behind his head. I wanted to turn over and for him to earth me, but as I turned towards him, the other inside spoke to me and I withdrew. The moment was past.

  The day drifted into night, although the heat clung on. I was not hungry any longer; I sucked on the darkness like a baby on the end of his muslin. The next morning I did not wake until late. Mark had left me water and an apple by the bed and a note saying he was repairing the barn and would be back to check on me at lunchtime – that he loved me. I sipped the water, feeling it settle in the cracks on my lips and left the fruit untouched.

  The strip of cotton lay on the floor and I picked it up, tempted to blind myself again and was weaving it in and out of my fingers, staring out of the window when I saw them: four tiny figures in white, processing through the corn. They are going without you, Voice warned me, and you are the fifth. In theory, I had a choice, but in practice the soles of my feet pushed me upwards, the joints in my knees locked me steady as I descended the stairs, the strength of my spine held me upright as I walked through the fields and the magnetic poles held my eyes on the horizon. I do not know where my mind was.

  The heat was unbearable that day, its weight a blanket thrown over a cage to silence a shrieking parrot. The buzzards were saving their energy for dusk and the sheep hugged the thin line of black shade that ruled down the side of the hedges. Angie and all the travellers had gone to a festival and Mark was treating the barn doors with preservative, so the place felt deserted.

  Some things I recall. Sitting on the doorstep. It must have been a halfway house, a point where turning back was still possible. Ants, trailing steadily across the gravel, a wren inching its way up the cooler side of the oak, pecking for parasites, the drone of a hornet going in and out of its nest in the wall – small things, making their presence felt in that vast, constipated wilderness. And in the dip between George’s Wood and the Hedditch, a slow, silent procession of women in white.

  I wore a white cotton sundress. White, Sister Amelia had said. And barefoot, I remembered, the stones on the drive scorching my feet like hot coals.

  Did Mark hear the slam of the back door up at the house when I left? Perhaps he put his brush down and thought to himself that I must be feeling better, up and about. Maybe he hoped I might be coming down with a drink, like I used to, when we were in it together or maybe he picked up the brush and wondered why he was bothering at all to preserve a rotting stable when he did not envisage another winter at The Well, with cows steaming in the straw and the hay in the manger.

  Leaving the glare of the field behind, I entered the forest, the sudden darkness like the interior of a foreign church on a hot day. As light and sight found their natural equilibrium, I thought I saw a flicker of white and then there was a young roe deer in the shadows, quivering, staring straight at me, its entire being wired for flight. But it did not run, rather it gently picked a path through the undergrowth down to the water. I followed. When I arrived at the water, the doe had vanished. There, a softer gleam poured liquid gold through the black pines and the Sisters were spread evenly around the edge of the pond, motionless, mesmerised by their own perfect reflections. I joined them. We waited, the heat on our heads feeding off our hunger until we all swayed slightly in our lightness.

  Look at me, standing in a stained sundress in the middle of a wood, about to join four women who I hardly knew for a baptism into a belief I hardly understood. Even then I did not fool myself that this was some spectator sport, a tourist visiting a temple, inhaling the jasmine and tasting the smoke from pyres before walking out into the traffic and taking a cab back to the hotel. No. Although it was never named, this was all about me, as I knew in my heart of hearts it was going to be. The Sisters encircled me, as the limbs of one body, one unbuttoning the eight tiny pearls down the front of my sundress, another taking the hem and drawing it over my head, a third releasing my hair where it caught on a hook. I looked to Sister Amelia for reassurance, but her eyes were one-way mirrors. They led me into the water and I did not resist. On the surface the caddis flies and alder bugs took flight and hid themselves in the reeds, the newts eased between the weeds; beneath our feet the sediment stirred, disturbing the gastrotrichs and protozoa, the hydra, crustaceans and caddis fly larvae. Sister Amelia raise
d her hand and they waited for the water to settle around the translucent dresses clinging to their legs. Sister Amelia lowered her hand and the Sisters lowered me into the water, my body arched and gasping, one at my head, two at my waist, one at my feet; then they raised me up again with a rush of water draining from me, running down my face, trickling over my chest, swirling between my legs. Again they lowered me and raised me. I arched. Then a third time they raised me and lowered me, and the fourth found me elsewhere in the way that only the dying or the transported are absent.

  On the fifth and final occasion, they withdrew, slipping out from me and I felt that leaving like an exhalation. I lay, arms and legs wide, like a child in the sea, head back, eyes closed, hair like silk. The Sisters leant forward and cupped the water in their hands and sprinkled it over me, showering down through the sunlight until I saw a rainbow had formed over me and knew that the Rose had come.

  The weeping women led me, drained and exhausted, from the water, all of us lurching and slipping on the sucking mud. Sister Amelia watched me shivering and moaning amongst the fungus at the foot of the ancient oak, hugging my knees, with the twigs and the dead leaves clinging to my wet body, and then she started to sing and the others joined in, their gasping finding form in their song of praise of the Rose of Jericho, louder and louder, deeper and deeper their ecstasy.

  ‘Behold, she blossoms with a thousand white flowers.

  Behold, the Rose of Jericho.’

  Finally, I was laid down like a slack-stringed puppet with disconnected joints, my sagging breasts and loose stomach strewn with wood anemones and white violets.

  ‘You are a chosen one,’ said Sister Amelia.

  The Sisters picked the woodland relics from my skin, dressed me, fastened my buttons, tied back my hair and then stepped away from me. I lifted my head with a new strength.

  ‘I am ready,’ I said.

  Back through the forest to the wooden gate, on out into the sunlight, across the field of corn I walked with them.

  ‘Behold the Rose of Jericho,’ the Sisters sang, their hands outstretched to the rain-swollen sky.

  Mark would not have heard us, working with the radio on. The travellers didn’t get back until late. I imagine the policeman at the gate, clocking off, satisfied that the sightseers were gone for the day and only the usual two or three were gathered in their pop-up tents on the verge, still waiting for the day of revelation, no idea that inside one of those tents the screen on a phone was lighting up. One Message Received. Click. Sisters, behold the promise of the Rose of Jericho. One Image Received. Click. A rainbow over a woman floating in a pond. Forwarded around the country in minutes. She is come. That woman was me.

  The first of the writings came to me unsolicited when I got back to the cottage – strange episodes of unknowing, leaving behind pages which varied between lyrical and hysterical, often scrawled in coloured crayons. I hid the notebook in the box of fishing things, knowing that Mark would never look there again and that is where I find it now, on top of the broken tumble-dryer in the back passage. I take out the top tray of flies and hold them between my thumb and finger, naming them as if at a memorial service for the river: gold ribbed hare’s ear, the coachman, woolly bugger and blue wing olive. Beneath that, there are the reels, gut, line, knife and priest and, beneath them, the notebook.

  What was I when I left my house this morning?

  An empty vessel discarded in a desert of alien corn.

  clay chipped, glaze dulled, unfilled, unheld.

  How does it hold me up this water?

  The Rose holds me up.

  How do I not drown in this water?

  The spirit of the Rose is my lightness.

  How do I love this water?

  I float on the love of the Rose.

  How do I see in this water?

  With the water comes light.

  What am I when I rise from the water?

  Myself streams away from me

  And I am gone.

  What was this foreign language, this unauthored poetry, written in an uneven hand that I cannot believe was my own?

  I can speak, but in an unheard music

  like rivers in the evening rolling over pebbles,

  like the sigh of the black peat serenading the spring,

  like the quiet rain dripping from ash bough to pool

  or waterfalls in summer, rainbowing the rocks,

  like the low lure beneath the silence of the Wellspring.

  Months, that’s all it took – a few months to transform that birthing pool into a grave and write a different story.

  It is eight o’clock precisely. I have been awake for a while, watching a brash red fox strut the hedge. No hunt now, no shotguns; even the slamming of the barn door does not make him run. He looks over his shoulder and saunters off into the labyrinth in the wood. Three comes into view, followed by Boy. Pulling on a jumper, I run downstairs, hope and fear as always fighting it out in conflicting hypotheses. Boy and Three are already in the kitchen; the creases in Boy’s trousers are sharper, the buckle on his belt shines just that little bit brighter. Three does not even remove his cap. He hands over to Boy, as he puts it, and Boy in a voice which I do not recognise delivers the news that I have been dreading: that I am once again to be confined to the house. There was no point in asking why, but Three commands Boy to explain anyway.

  ‘The original terms of the House Arrest Order specified under section 3 (f) that if anyone thought . . .’

  ‘Language, soldier, language. Read from it if you can’t resist the temptation to render everything civilian.’ Three hands Boy a printout, with a section highlighted, then props himself up on the table as Boy begins to read through the pages of the fine print.

  ‘In circumstances where the senior officer in charge, or in his absence, such officer as may have been temporarily delegated the role of the senior officer or any other officer taking on those responsibilities as part of duties as described in the Armed Services (Drought Emergency Amendment) Act, whether that Officer or soldier be a member of the Armed Forces, or the Territorial Services or Her Majesty’s Emergency Drought Relief Community Conscripts . . .’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake!’ I make to leave the kitchen and go back upstairs, but Three blocks my way.

  ‘You’re not leaving.’

  ‘Get off! I’ll do what I want.’ I try to push past, banking on the belief that Three will not physically intervene, but I am wrong. He seizes my right arm, bends it round behind my back and pushes me onto a chair and holds onto my flesh just a little too long. ‘Nice. I see what you mean, Boy.’

  ‘You can’t do this!’

  Boy does not meet my eyes. Three lets go of me as if I was infectious. ‘This is just the problem, isn’t it, Ruth? That you have come to forget that you are a prisoner of Her Majesty’s Government, that you were tried and convicted of serious crimes. That in a time of national crisis you sought to manipulate the water supply for your own benefit and that you are still under suspicion for the murder of your own grandson . . .’

  ‘That is not true.’

  ‘That you are under house arrest and that you cannot, I repeat, cannot do what you like. That is the whole point of locking people up. That and letting the rest of us sleep easy in our beds. Soldier, continue reading the prisoner the amended terms and conditions of her house arrest.’

  There is no sign in Boy’s voice that he is anything other than a conscript – it is a pilotless drone. When they have left, I stand in the shower and try to wash Three’s fingerprints from my wrist, and then I return to bed. There is nowhere else to go.

  What price a night on a bench, star-gazing with a teenage guard? Six pieces of silver. An orchard, a field, a forest, a sky.

  Twenty-four hours in bed and now I expect Three will send for the shrink again, that will be his next kick. Twenty-four hours makes it Sunday. I dress, but get back into bed to wait. At last I hear him. Hugh is back. He finds me mentally frail, I find him physically weak; combined we
are human. With characteristic understatement, he describes his stroke as a minor blip, says his daughter is fussy and grumbles that nobody nowadays knows how to milk a cow. Now I am downstairs with him, me curled up like the old woman I am on the sofa, him in his armchair, I realise how deeply pleased I am to see him, how unconditional his visits are.

  ‘The vegetable garden is looking good,’ he offers. It seems he has not been told.

  ‘I found out it was Boy’s work,’ I explain. ‘Apparently he wants to be a landscape gardener when he grows up so he’s landed on his feet. Come to the only place in the country where you can still choose that as an apprenticeship.’

  ‘I’ve seen some beautiful gardens in the desert,’ says Hugh, reaching for the mug, then, after something of a pause, ‘What made you change your mind?’

  ‘About the gardening?’

  ‘About the gardening.’

  ‘I hadn’t changed my mind. I didn’t garden. Now, even if I wanted to, I can’t. I’ve left it too late. They’ve changed the perimeters and I’m not allowed out of the house.’