The Well Page 22

  ‘Please! Tonight? How about tonight?’

  ‘Oh no. It will be one night when you’re least expecting it. I’ll call up to your window and we’ll creep downstairs and come to The Well by the light of the moon and – well, let’s see what happens then.’

  ‘With Granny R?’

  ‘If she wants to. But it could be our adventure – just the two of us.’

  Lucien took my hand.

  ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t that be something?’

  It is surely impossible, unthinkable.

  That is the question I put to Hugh.

  ‘Impossible? Who is to tell what is impossible. This is impossible, Ruth. Look out of your window at the impossible taking place before our very eyes. Unthinkable, now that’s a different thing altogether.’

  We are sitting at the kitchen table and through the open window we can smell a soft rain falling and hear its fingertip percussion on the roof of the Land Rover.

  ‘I don’t think about the rain much anymore,’ I tell him.

  ‘I do,’ he replies. He takes my hands across the table with unexpected strength. ‘I pray a lot about this rain, about what it means, about the Lord bringing me to you and what I am meant to be offering.’

  ‘Answers?’ I suggest.

  ‘And there are plenty of those in the good book.’ He releases my hands and takes his Bible from the ubiquitous plastic bag, passes it to me and I can see its wafer-thin pages are bulked out by a folded piece of writing paper. Hugh catches my eye, glances towards the camera and with difficulty inches his way around the table so he is standing between me and the lens. ‘Read on,’ he says loudly.

  The letter is addressed to Hugh, from a Catholic priest in a town about twenty miles from here. It thanks him for his enquiry and confirms that yes, Dorothy Donnelly, one of the Sisters of the Rose of Jericho, did indeed approach him for confession shortly after the terrible events at The Well. My hands are shaking so badly that I have to follow the words on the page with my finger.

  I have no need to remind you that I cannot divulge what passed between me and the confessor and that whatever was said lies between us and God. I do not believe, however, that I break that sacred trust if I were to say that, distressed as she was, this good woman had committed no heinous crime herself, but feared rather that she had not witnessed as the Lord would wish. The sister came to me just the once, but she left me an address in Canada, intimating that she intended to shortly return there to rejoin her family in her home country. What I am prepared to do is to write to her there to gain her permission to forward her address to yourself, explaining the circumstances and your reasons for asking and knowing that you ask in faith. Should I receive a reply, I will contact you again.

  We live in strange times and I pray for you and your work with Ruth that she may know the love the one true God extends to all who truly repent.

  The signature is illegible. Hugh folds the letter, slips it into his pocket and limps slowly to the window, holding onto the counter to steady himself. I want it for myself, to re-read it, to keep it in a tight fist and arm myself with the hope it offers: that Dorothy is innocent is no news, that she knows something about that night may be something or nothing, but my rapid heartbeat tells me that this is the beginning of the end of my search and that from the confines of my prison, I am reaching out and closing in.

  ‘Here.’ I hold out the Bible.

  ‘That’s for you. You can keep that,’ he says. He knows full well that I would swap this bestseller for the note in his pocket, but does not rise to the bait. ‘You’re always saying you want answers, Ruth. Well, you could do a lot worse than start with the good book.’ I assume he is playing to the gallery, but he continues in a serious tone. ‘I have marked the occasional passage to get you going – no, not now, later when I am gone.’

  Too late. I have already started to flick through the pages to where a red thread bookmark lies. Isaiah: Chapter One. ‘Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.’ I look up at Hugh. His hand may tremble, his leg may be unsteady, but he meets my gaze without flinching.

  ‘Repent.’ I struggle to recall the last line of the priest’s letter to Hugh, something about those who truly repent. ‘Repent,’ I repeat. ‘You are like him. You think it was me?’

  ‘We all have need of forgiveness, Ruth, all of us.’

  ‘So you come here week after week for my confession? That’s it. A government-appointed priest – I might have guessed. And perhaps you’ll get a convert thrown in for good measure.’ I slam the Bible onto the table, get up and throw open the back door, holding it wide for his exit, watch as slowly, painfully, he gathers up his bag, his hat, his coat and silently moves towards me. At first, I think it is because his breathing is laboured, but then I realise he is weeping, an old man weeping and the room itself seems to heave with sadness and even the rain outside is crying quietly. I close the door against the lamenting world.

  ‘I am so sorry, Hugh,’ I begin. ‘I didn’t . . .’

  ‘And so am I,’ he replies. ‘I am also sorry. I’ve got this all wrong.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What am I doing, on a wild goose chase for hints and red herrings . . .’ He stops, blows his nose and laughs. ‘That’s a dreadful mixed metaphor if ever there was one. Seriously, though, there is a terrible irony in a priest Googling for the truth, don’t you think?’ I look away as he continues. ‘All I’ve been doing is avoiding the truth, not wanting to go there as the young say, for fear of you telling me to stay away. I’ve been a little bit bewitched by you myself, Ruth.’

  ‘Next time . . .?’ I begin.

  ‘Next time, no more sins of omission for me. We’ll start all over again.’ He puts his handkerchief away, takes my hand and says, ‘The peace of the Lord be always with you.’ And also with you – that is the required, familiar response, but those words have no place on my tongue and remain unspoken. The priest, who is a wise man, believes I have sinned. Enough. I have no right to offer anyone peace. Does he know what I have done, or is he just guessing? I think he knows, but I don’t know how, just as deep down I know what I have done, but I don’t know how.

  When Hugh has gone, all that is left of him is the black book. Present blessings unspoken; truths offered unread.

  I was a truth-broker once, dealing in shares on the manic futures market which swept the country parched of certainties; I put in long hours at the office, using my ex as a childminder – not so different from women the world over then. Our worship was still streamed live at dusk, lit by flares and candles, and I thought of them all at their screens, the office staff, working late, ready to minimise the page when the boss came round, the mothers slipping up to their bedrooms while their partners watched the news, old ladies in their armchairs, teenagers with their friends, all over the country. Because that’s what the figures told us. I spent time with Amelia and Eve in the hub, the gas heater on, the air thick and fuggy in the caravan, typing up the blog with my words from the morning, adjusting the website, checking the accounts. Eve was someone who somehow managed the impossible, living immersed in the Rose at The Well and operating as a member of the real world, even if at arm’s length. Her work in the States had given her an unshakeable conviction that there was nothing incompatible between faith and profit and that every venture needed to invest to secure its future and its lateral diversification. Dorothy said the Rose had a purpose for everyone and everyone had a language to describe that purpose: hers was painting, mine was words, Jack’s was the language of tongues, Eve’s was the language of finance. And Amelia’s? Charisma, said Dorothy, Amelia speaks through her charisma.

  My role as wordsmith for the enterprise was onerous and draining. With Lucien safely asleep next door, I would spend most of the night awake in my room, relying on the stove downstairs and the thickest fleece to keep warm, wearing fingerless gloves a
s I worked on my laptop, responding to the prayers of the thousands who now worshipped the Rose. Sister Amelia would quite often have selected those which needed a response from me, others she would answer herself, on my behalf. The cries of loneliness and sadness flashed up on the screen like a roll call at the gates of purgatory, from all over the UK, increasingly from all over the world.

  Pray for us, Mother Ruth, because my partner has lost his job.

  My son has done a bad thing. May the Rose forgive him.

  The Rose is bringing rain. I felt it on my hands this morning. Bless the Rose.

  I am a widow. All I have left now is the Rose. Pray for me in my loneliness.

  The hours passed in a mesmerising blur. Sometimes I would wake in the morning, on the floor not in my bed, and have no recollection of the night passed, the only evidence being the trail of messages on the internet history. As one prayer was answered, another appeared, the virtual candles lit and flickering on the screen, begging attention.

  Click on The Rose as you pray for rain.

  In the past hour alone – 1,115 prayers for rain. Yet still it did not rain in the rest of the country. When it rained at The Well during stream worship, the worshippers flooded the site: sitting in their dry kitchens, overlooking their sterile river beds and festering canals where the shopping trolleys stuck up from the mud like the skeletons of parched amphibians; gathered in their prayer circles in churches where the graveyards sprouted plastic flowers and the headstones leaned to one side, the ground subsiding beneath them; clicking again in the middle of the night, listening to the wind banging on the front doors which had been locked to keep out burglars, rattling the empty rabbit hutch at the end of the garden. In their thousands, they selected the link which allowed them to listen to the rain hammering on the tin roof of the barn, the rain gurgling from the gutters down the drains, the rain marking time, drop by drop into the bucket left out for the scraps, as the shower eased. If we could have let them smell the rain, if we could have sent its wetness down the wires, we would have done.

  Create a shortcut to The Rose, we urged. Just click on the icon.

  As we received more government notices, Sister Amelia scanned them in and posted them on the campaign link on our website. The Sisters and I tweeted our followers about every new official communication. We urged them to write to the MPs and they wrote. We urged them to march and they marched. We organised a day of peaceful prayer for the protection of The Well and they gathered outside town halls and offices, on Whitehall and at war memorials, with live footage of worship at The Well on large screens, to pray for The Well, for rain, for the Sisters. In the barn, Mark phoned the solicitor who we could no longer afford and who no longer believed we could win.

  Increasingly, Lucien joined me in everything I did and filled my day. Voice was very quiet at that time and easily challenged and it was Lucien I listened to. I wrote about him in my blog, contemplating the innocence he represented in my online meditation for the day. I tweeted what he wrote underneath his picture of a rainbow for one of our lessons: ‘The Well is like a miracle because things happen here that only God can do.’ When Angie called, she said someone who was a follower of the Rose up in Scotland had told her about the tweet. In answer to my worry, she said she didn’t mind at all, she thought it was rather special, but what about Sister Amelia?

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘I just remember her saying how it was better if Lucien was kept away from things.’

  ‘I didn’t know the two of you had talked.’

  ‘Yes, she used to come up to the camp every now and again.’

  I didn’t know that and couldn’t quite understand why it mattered to me that I didn’t know, but Angie was right about one thing. Sister Amelia did not agree with the tweet.

  ‘Eve’s been showing me some of the comments on the forum,’ she said. ‘Our worshippers worry about Lucien. Look, she’s printed out some of their prayers and comments for us to discuss.’

  How will the chosen one resolve her dilemma: her heart is with her grandson, her knowledge of the way precludes his inheritance. Pray for her.

  I see how the chosen one worships the boy. Boys become men. Beware!

  I do not think the boy should be allowed at worship. I am sorry if this is a wrong thought.

  For the first time in the history of religion, women have a chance to lead. The existence of a possible inheritor of the blessed land in the form of a male is a pollution at the very heart of The Well.

  I closed the lid of the laptop. ‘There are some sick and misguided people out there, Amelia. You know that.’

  ‘If they worship the Rose, they are on the road to true knowledge – anything else is a blind alley.’

  She asked me, at the very least, to leave him behind when I worshipped, not to mention him in my public prayers or blog because it wasn’t helping our cause, but more importantly, I needed to be planning for his leaving The Well if I was to be true to the Rose.

  ‘And not be true to myself?’ I asked.

  ‘It is autumn, Ruth,’ she said. ‘Let the leaves that don’t belong on the tree fly in the wind and be gone. Be true to the Rose. To the Sisters,’ she said, then took me in her arms, her breath like a cloth on my bare neck. ‘Be true to me, that is enough.’

  November was indeed a bitter month across the country. Most trees had been skeletal for months and the ground hard, but still it rained at The Well and leaves blustered in the gales in our autumn. I was both attached and detached from the way things were beyond our sanctuary: connected through the incoming stream of helplessness that flooded the Rose site, but disconnected from what that was like, day in, day out, for nearly all of the people, nearly all of the time. Mark, I think, was going out more at night, I guessed to illegal drinking dens where home-made booze was cheap, but maybe there were other attractions out there. Or if he was not out, he was alone in the barn, perhaps listening to music, perhaps flicking through the twenty-four-hour news on the internet, or other sites, who knows. What I do know is that he continued to work obsessively during the short daylight hours.

  One such day he was chopping logs. I was loading some in the wheelbarrow for my fire and he was throwing some towards the barn for his.

  ‘Can you imagine what it would be like if we had to pay for heating?’ he said, clapping his hands together against the cold. ‘It was minus six last night in London.’

  ‘We couldn’t do it,’ I said, pausing from loading for a moment, thinking how easily we could talk like this, in the no man’s land between the house and the barn, in the middle territory of wood and winter wheat and how to store parsnips. ‘We don’t know how lucky we are.’

  He raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Oh, you know what I mean,’ I said.

  ‘It doesn’t just happen, Ruth. We might live apart, but I can’t do all the farming on my own. If we’re going to live here and stay warm and feed ourselves and Lucien, you’ve got to do your part.’

  The logs rumbled out of the wheelbarrow into the porch and I thought – they can stay there, in a heap, I can stack them later. I made some coffee and took out a mug out to Mark as well. He took off his gloves, propped himself up on the saw bench and hugged the cup, steam rising and merging into the low winter cloud which had hung over us for days.

  I sat on an upturned round of ash. ‘I’m sorry I’ve been so wrapped up in things. Lucien and the Rose. There’s a lot to do.’

  ‘I know. That’s what I’m trying to say.’

  The words between us were tightening again and I tried to ease the pressure. ‘OK. Perhaps if you told me something specific which I could do, then I could make sure I did it. Otherwise I feel I’m always treading on your toes or doing it all wrong.’

  ‘I’ve started the ploughing,’ Mark said, ‘so that’s fine and I’ve repaired the fence so we can run a new batch of piglets in the woods. Some of the root crops need pulling and storing. Have I told you – I thought we, I thought I might dig a willow trench, since we cou
ld grow that here, no one else can. It would be quite lucrative if it worked . . .’

  ‘And the ewes?’ I asked, encouraged by his things-to-do list.

  ‘What about them?’ He chucked the rest of the coffee onto the ground and picked up the axe.

  ‘The mating?’ I struggled for the right word. ‘The, what do you call it, the tupping?’

  He brought the axe down hard and the log split, splintering into two pieces. ‘No, I haven’t done that.’

  ‘You haven’t done that? What, you mean there won’t be any lambs next spring? Why not?’

  He stressed the personal pronoun bitterly in his reply. ‘I haven’t done it because I couldn’t see the point of looking that far ahead.’

  No lambs, then. I would have to tell Lucien there were going to be no lambs. What sort of a spring is that? It was so unlike Mark to have given up on part of the farm. It was as if he was a model, coming apart in my hands. I had to put him back together, the man I thought he was, so I bit my lip and swallowed my instinctive reply and asked again what I could do to help.

  ‘I’ll dig the vegetable garden over,’ he said, ‘but it would be great if you could clean out the greenhouse. If we don’t do that, we’ll get diseases in the seedlings next year.’

  It might not be lambs, but it was something. ‘OK. I promise I’ll do that in the next couple of days. Promise.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, resting his axe on the wood, loading the next barrow-load for me.

  How do I account for hours spent at The Well? Here, of all places, the seasons continued to matter. Dusk and dawn were our touchstones. But days themselves merged without names until they became weeks, and nights, whole nights could not be accounted for in the ledger book of how I spent my time other than in dreams and delirium. So it was probably about four or five days later that I thought I heard a sound like breaking glass, but the weather outside was extreme, lurid sunlight competing against clouds purple in the face and threatening and the wind had been battering for hours, so it was hard to distinguish what was going on. At the same time, Lucien ran down the stairs crying. Mark was smashing things in the garden, and he could see him from his bedroom window.