The Well Read online

  Under the civil jurisdiction of the Emergency Drought Protection Orders, it is confirmed that the property known as The Well shall remain the principal domiciliary residence for Ruth Ardingly, but that under the terms of the Occupation Order 70/651, Ruth Ardingly agrees for the said property to be temporarily used for the purposes of research and development, including, but not limited to: soil sampling; the planting, management and harvesting of crops; the drilling and sampling of, but not extraction of, bedrock water as defined under the Extraction for Use Act (amended); the collection, sampling and testing (but no distribution of) rainwater run-off.

  Despite the small print of my Faustian pact, they don’t own The Well – I won that much. It is still mine; underneath the wire and the helicopters and the men in brown, The Well is still mine. Half mine. It is not clear to me what has happened to Mark’s share.

  ‘That’s the legal status. Have you got any questions?’ he asks.

  Sinking a little, I shrug. He hands over the file to the fat, anonymous man who is apparently going to deal with the ‘nitty-gritty’ of house imprisonment. He reads haltingly, finding it hard to make sense of the interminable regulations. It is as if I am listening to a foreign language, but the broad message is clear. They are my guards. This is my home. Words slide across the paperwork and set off randomly around the room, sliding down the sink, fluttering up the cold chimney, trying to crawl their way out like wasps from a jam jar. The photo we took of Heligan Gardens in the spring and hung to the side of the kitchen window is tilted and this makes it look as if the lake is flowing over the banks and about to trickle down the cream walls and onto the vegetable rack, empty except for the brittle brown flakes of the outer layer of an onion.

  Curfew

  Bread

  Electronic

  Rights

  Request

  Exercise

  A sort of Kim’s Game, by which a large number of disparate things are being laid out before me and named in expectation that when they take the tray away, I will remember them.

  ‘No need to worry about all of this tonight.’ That is the first time the thin one with glasses has spoken since we sat down. He is also the only one who has looked me in the eye.

  ‘I won’t,’ I reply.

  ‘Goodnight then,’ he says, for apparently it is bedtime.

  ‘Goodnight,’ I reply.

  I stare after them. ‘I’m sorry, where did you say you were sleeping?’ I ask.

  The small one stops at the door. ‘We didn’t,’ he says and he and Mr Anonymous leave.

  The thinner, short-sighted one lingers for a couple of seconds. ‘We’re in the barn,’ he says. ‘Not far away.’ He is just a boy. I shall call him Boy.

  Little did I know when we ploughed our time and money into renovating the barn that we were building a barracks for my own guards. They’re not the first to move in there and try to control me; they are following in Mark’s footsteps and his footsteps went out of the gate and straight on till morning and I haven’t seen him since. I doubt the guards will forget me so easily.

  These guards of mine, what will they do all day? What do they eat? What do I eat? Now their commands have receded, questions appear in their place: thousands of questions about blankets and the internet and food and telephones and children and tomato plants and sheep and baths and books and cutting the grass and, oh my God, everything. I am a toddler again. I want to run after them and hold onto their legs and ask them why, when, how, who. I am in my own house, but I have no idea how I am going to live.

  Bedtime. It seems I am going to have to force myself to go upstairs. My fingers remember where the light switches are, but I prefer the dark. I find my way to my bed and, still fully dressed, slide stiffly between the sheets and the duvet which do not smell of prison, but do not smell of home either. Even though it is cold, I leave the shutters open just so I can see the moon over Montford Forest. I will lie here and ask The Well what it thinks of the day just gone and we will reach our conclusions. I will count the sheep I have lost as a way of avoiding sleep, because sleep avoids me. I will compose letters to the ones who are no longer here, because they are no longer here. They no longer hear. I like that pun. I will allow myself the pleasure of the occasional pun. Mark, for instance. I say his name very loudly to confirm his absence. Mark my words. Marking time. And despite the silence, despite the fact that only a wall separates me from the fathomless emptiness of a dead child’s bedroom, I am suddenly knocked sideways with happiness because I am back.

  I wonder if it will rain.

  Stiff in my stale clothes, I wake. I could lie here all day, all week, all year and the hairs on my skin would grow through the wool of my sweater, like the tendrils of ivy through a green knitted jumper, dropped in a wood. The sun would make its rounds, from the fairground picture above the bed, to the chest of drawers, to the blue, painted mirror and back again and I would still be here, thinking and getting thinner, until one day I would have found the answer, but by then there would be nothing left of me, just an imprint, the shell of a tall woman as brittle, straight and empty as the hollow stalks of the Queen Anne’s lace that lines the drive in summer . . .

  Your search has found 83 matches.

  Click. ‘A little piece of paradise on the banks of the Severn . . .’

  Click. ‘Want to get away from it all? Look no further than this 3 bed, 2 recep . . .’

  Click. ‘Looking for a project? Turn this barn into your castle and be lord of all . . .’

  That’s how it started. Mark and I in London, hunchbacked slaves to the laptop, squabbling over control of the mouse, believing that the bricks and mortar and land just a virtual second away would eradicate the bickering and divisions which had increasingly become our coat of arms after twenty-two years of marriage.

  ‘It can’t be that hard to find somewhere,’ said my colleagues at school.

  ‘With the price you’ll get for this . . .’ said our neighbours.

  Moving out of London, living off the land, that was the dream. It always had been Mark’s dream, but he had mortgaged it for me and, although he never put it this way, he was calling in the debt. He had paid out for so long and now he was bankrupt, whereas I had been investing and accumulating in people and work and ways of living that to sell out now seemed, at the very least, daunting.

  Standing like a child on tiptoe at the edge of the diving board, I wanted to jump and yet was terrified of jumping; I wanted to grasp the handrail and walk back down and yet the cold concrete world at the bottom was also slippery with fear. To plunge into a new, freshwater pool, live with a different energy in a world unpolluted by hatred, to come up for air at last, like Mark I was in love with the idea of getting away from it all and starting again in the country. But if we slipped, it would be a long, long way to fall and we would be far away from anyone familiar who might throw us a lifeline. As far as Mark saw it, it was the right thing to do at the right time. I was an inarticulate advocate and found it strangely hard to voice my worries in the face of his enthusiasm, not to mention his desperation. His central thesis was convincing; he might have had a fair hearing at the tribunal, been found innocent, but he had no hope of an unprejudiced future if we stayed. He had things to get away from; I had things to stay for. And whose fault was that, I thought, when I was at my lowest, even though that was neither true nor reasonable.

  Mark had further supporting arguments in his brief: there may have been a lack of rain for a while, but these cycles had a habit of correcting themselves, didn’t they? Money wasn’t an issue; the sale of our semi in the suburbs covered the price of a cottage in the west with land and some to spare, and his pay-off for his unfair dismissal from the local authority plus what I had inherited from my father was going to give us enough to live on for a bit; we had savings. Angie had turned out to be the cheapest of teenagers: hers was the one problem you cannot throw money at and the NHS, Social Services or HM Young Offenders had spent more time looking after her than we did. We spoiled
our grandson Lucien, of course, but as I think of that word, I regret its double-edged meaning. Anyway, the theory was we would be fine for a couple of years, if we were careful, until we knew whether we could make a go of it. It, ostensibly, being the smallholding. It, in reality, being our relationship.

  We almost didn’t bother to get the details of The Well. There was no video link and anything that wasn’t instantly accessible online seemed like too much hassle. We wanted to be able to view heaven now, without an appointment.

  ‘It’s got to be worth a real look,’ Mark said.

  ‘Only if there are two or three to see on the same day,’ I replied.

  There were, but one was sold two days before and the other was taken off the market, so that left The Well. We argued about it, but went anyway. Lucien was with us. He had been staying for two or three weeks while Angie tried yet again to sort herself out. He must have been four at the time. ‘He’s a lucky little boy to have grandparents like you.’ That’s what our friends said, whenever we took him on again. I don’t expect it’s what they’re saying now.

  It was an unnaturally hot autumn day, a sort of savage last stand by the sun after what had been yet another dull, dry summer following yet another dull, dry winter – dry, that is, according to the statistics the weathermen had then. The various restrictions in the southeast had already been extended to the rest of the country, even by April, and the serious papers carried editorials on the introduction of compulsory water meters, while the tabloids alternated between the threat of Armageddon and close-ups of celebs wearing very little in the sweltering heat. No one knew then where the downward trajectory of the rainfall graphs would eventually take us.

  The map was magnetic. The Well was on one of those pages where the red and yellow lines of the roads skirt around the edge, and everything else is white space with lanes pencilled in: lanes which skirt the boundaries of private estates of long-dead lords of the manor; lanes which make long detours seeking out old stone bridges, following the packhorse routes, from market to market. Mark preferred the satnav, but as we got close to our destination it let him down.

  ‘Where the hell are we? You’ve got the map.’

  ‘Don’t shout at me. This was your idea, traipsing around the middle of nowhere looking for a bolthole!’

  Silence.

  Me. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean that.’ I turned the map upside down and squinted. ‘I think it’s back the way we came.’

  Mark attempted a three-point turn in a gateway with a ditch on either side. He wasn’t an angry person when I met him – purposeful was how other people used to describe him – but the allegations which had led to his dismissal had really got to him and his fuse was shorter, even by then. We crawled slowly back up the hill until we saw the footpath sign with just the symbol of a man with a pack on his back and a stick in his hand and no named destination.

  We turned in and Mark stopped the car, took his hands off the steering wheel and held them in the air, like a priest. There was no sight of the cottage itself; it was not that, rather it was the circle of the world running in a blue rim around us which left us breathless. Far in the distance, hills upon hills shadowed each other to the north and the west until somewhere, far out of sight, they sank into the Atlantic. The closer ridges on the other side of the valley were forested and in that heavy autumn light, the conifers were charcoal etchings, smudged against the dust gold of the recently harvested fields below them. To the east, the amber land was mainly scorched pasture, hedged and squared by centuries of farming and behind us, the bleak scree of the Crag.

  ‘Have we arrived yet, Granny R?’

  ‘Yes, Lucien, we have arrived.’

  The track ahead of us was a dotted line awaiting our signature. There it is, we said to each other, as we spotted first the barn, then the mottled red brick chimneys rising up from the Victorian stone cottage, and suddenly we were children together, going on holiday and the squabbling in the back seat suddenly stops as the cry goes up from the first one to see the sea. There it is! Look at it! We’re here! We signed up the moment we stepped out of the car, but we didn’t know what for.

  The estate agent was waiting for us, propped up against a bright red 4x4 and smoking.

  ‘Shouldn’t do that really,’ he said, squashing the cigarette under his deck shoes, ‘not with the fire risk nowadays.’

  We shook hands. He seemed to me to stare a little too long at Mark, then withdraw his hand a little too quickly. I felt the familiar increase in my heartbeat; there had been times during the Mark’s hearing in London when I had been very afraid of what people might do. There had been other cases like his in the press, in other towns when the public had forgotten the concept of due process and taken things into their own hands. I looked over my shoulder, back up the drive. Maybe there is nowhere to run to, I thought.

  But the estate agent had turned his attention to his car and the moment was gone. ‘You’ll need one of these,’ he joked over-loudly, stroking the bonnet, apologising for the state of it, what with the car washes closed and the hosepipe ban.

  Breathing deeply to control my voice, I humoured him. ‘Think we’re more likely to get a donkey. What per cent did they say petrol had gone up this year?’ I asked.

  ‘One hundred and twenty!’ He called the words as if it was a darts score.

  Mark engaged in manly talk about clearance room and low ratio gears; I could see he was impatient to look around, but he was good like that, putting himself out to make other people feel at ease and his charm was dismissing whatever doubts the estate agent might have had. That was what he did with me when we first met, the morning after a party, in the last term of the last year, exams over and the future waiting somewhere beyond the overdraft and cleaning the fridge to get the deposit back. I was sleeping in an armchair, someone else’s overcoat covering my bare shoulders, and when I woke up there was a tall, dark, slightly foreign-looking gentleman offering to get me a coffee. He came back and never left me again. We spent that night together, we spent the rest of term together, and we altered our plans and spent the summer together. Four months later I was five months pregnant and we were at the registry office. We went from young to old very quickly.

  The slam of a door brought me back. The estate agent was getting the details out of his car, disturbing a lone, white butterfly which had settled on a late-flowering buddleia by the gate. Everything is out of season this year, I thought, and where has the time gone, I wondered, all caught up in the past, and look at us now, moving to the country as middle-aged people do. In some odd, instinctive gesture, I put my hand on my stomach. ‘I love children,’ I remember Mark saying when I told him I was pregnant.

  Lucien climbed out of the back of the car, smelling of crumbling chocolate and hot skin. Still sleepy, he held my hand and pointed to a grey squirrel, skulking up the trunk of the great oak tree. Our eyes followed it up through the branches until we lost it amongst the gilt-edged leaves, light falling like dappled water on dry ground at our feet. A police car or ambulance was making its way up a main road somewhere over towards Middleton.

  ‘You can’t always hear the road,’ said the estate agent, keen to market the dream. ‘It depends on the wind.’

  ‘But that must be westerly,’ I concluded, taking my evidence from both the sun and the Welsh hills.

  ‘Westerly? Probably,’ he conceded. ‘That’s certainly where the prevailing wind comes from. But I bet you can hear a pin drop at night.’

  Screech owls, I thought, and barking foxes.

  I asked where the nearest neighbour was. Oh, he was saying, miles away and can’t see another house; but in truth, I was already feeling the distance between this place and the rest of the world and wondering if I could manage that. Maybe I looked to him like someone who wanted to escape. Much later, Sister Amelia would certainly reach the same conclusion the moment she met me.

  A heavy velvet curtain hung inside the front door, which the agent held to one side for us, like a stagehand. It di
dn’t take long to look around. There was the back passage, the kitchen and Rayburn unchanged since the 1960s, Mark’s study – well, the room that he made into his study – and the little sitting room with a wood-burning stove, the one which we had to replace after the chimney fire. From there, we went upstairs and crowded into the small bedroom and the tiny bathroom and then in here, the main bedroom with the view, this alchemy of a view. Well trained, the estate agent left us to it and Mark felt for my hand and pulled me closer, kissed me once, slowly, on the cheek and I felt him breathe in deeply, as if he could taste oxygen for the first time in a very long while.

  ‘Just about enough room for Angie and Lucien,’ I said to Mark as we stepped apart. We both knew my daughter well enough to know that our home would always need to be big enough for both of them, and not just physically.

  ‘I love it,’ said Mark. I hadn’t heard him as enthusiastic about anything since before the tribunal. ‘A place to start again,’ he said.

  Lucien loved it too, running up and down the creaking staircase, opening cupboards in the kitchen, peering into the fireplace. The sunlight coming through the bay window was showing up the cracks in the banisters, the stains on the carpet, the damp patches on the ceiling, but the place itself felt solid as though it could contain whatever we poured into it.

  ‘Ready to take a look outside?’

  We followed the agent up to the ‘Stone outbuilding with electricity and water, currently used as a garage/barn. Scope for development’. If the old lady had owned a car, it was clear she had never put it away in there, jumbled as it was with stepladders and spades, broken sun-loungers and coal buckets without handles. No problem to upgrade it for a holiday let, we agreed; no problem to convert it into temporary accommodation for displaced family.

  Along one side of the barn were neatly stacked and recently split logs.

  ‘How long had the old lady lived here?’ Mark asked.