The Well Read online

  ‘Stay inside, Lucien!’

  Hail stung my face and hammered on the roof of the derelict car, but that was just the snare drum to the base thump of the mallet swinging again and again and the discordant chords of the shattering glass. Mark, in only a T-shirt and jeans, was destroying the greenhouse, blow after blow, his feet crunching on the broken panes, shards sticking out from the splintered skeleton of the frame and ripping his clothes, piercing his skin, blood trickling down his brown arms, dripping onto the false snow of the lying hail. Cowering behind the hedge, I could only watch until he was spent and all that was left was a low concrete wall and a shell of a structure of squares and rectangles of metal, sticking crazily into the air like a bombed-out building. The storm moved on, the wind dropped and the hail eased; the garish light illuminated the man, looking at the blood on his hands.

  ‘I kept my word,’ he sobbed. ‘Look!’ He swung round, pointing at the recently dug raised beds. ‘You said you’d clean out the greenhouse and I believed you. You promised.’

  There was nothing I could say.

  ‘I used to say you’d have to choose one day between me and Angie. But I was wrong. You had to choose between me and her. Amelia. And now I know, you’ve chosen.’

  He stumbled past me; he had tried to wipe the tears but in doing so had smeared his face with blood.

  ‘Stop, Mark! Where are you going?’

  ‘I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m going, Ruth, I’m leaving.’

  Later when I went to the barn to stare at the mess inside it, the emptiness of it, the dark stains on the handles and on the washbasin, the absence of a coat on the peg, I realised – he had left The Well.

  Loss and the human condition. I think I read a book about that once, or heard a lecture on the radio, maybe driving to work in the rain, in another country, at another time. The relief guards have arrived. I notice that it’s never a woman now, although I don’t know if that is just chance. Boy will be gone for a week, returning to the dry lands, to what I imagine is the bitter struggle going on out there, the battle for jobs, water privileges, petrol, space, sky, hope. In theory, I should be pleased to see the back of Three, but he has his place in this ecosystem I call home: he gives me something to hate. I can’t oppose the buzzards, the kitchen sink, the dandelion clocks disappearing on the wind, or the greying of the dusk. Accommodate, reconcile, compromise, navigate, capitalise. I can and must do all those things to hold territory, but there are no punch bags here except myself or the logs waiting to be split – and Three. I will even miss Anon, head down below the parapet, all camouflage and blending in. In some ways, of all of them I would like him to go and not come back because I cannot stand the idea that anyone can walk this land and not be in some way changed by it.

  Boy’s leaving is a wrench. How much better to be chained in a cellar, the tiny gap carved in the old stone high above my head, letting in the smallest light sufficient only to mark the days, but nothing of the world outside, nothing to torture you with what you cannot have, the honest touch of another person, for instance, the possibility of relating. It must be another truth of the human condition that the other man’s prison is always greener. This is half my thinking. There is another half that I hardly dare recognise. I take it as a sign of my increasing resilience that I can watch Boy and Anon standing under the thick-leaved oak in their shirtsleeves, holdalls slung over their shoulders, chatting to the new arrivals, knowing they are leaving, believing in their coming back. I will be allowed outside again. I have even been thinking of suggesting that the guards keep hens. ‘An Anatomy of Hope’ – that was another title, but if not, perhaps I could write it myself one day.

  Interestingly, there seems to be some argument between Three and Boy – Anon has moved away, of course; it appears that Boy loses because with bad grace he dumps his case, takes a piece of paper from Three and comes towards the house. I run downstairs to meet him, singing a stupid song from my childhood, all too aware of Three just yards from the back door.

  ‘They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace!

  Christopher Robin went down with Alice!

  Alice is marrying one of guards,

  A soldier’s life is terribly hard, said Alice!’

  ‘Ruth, for God’s sake, stop it.’

  He wants to be off. Well, let him go. ‘So sorry to hold you up. Did you pop in for a reason?’

  ‘Sarge told me to give you this.’ He hands over yet another piece of paper which I can’t even be bothered to read. He reminds me of a sulky pupil handing in inadequate homework.

  I toss it into the bin. ‘Can’t you précis it for me? I am tired of the small print.’

  ‘It’s to do with alterations to the permissions for a visiting priest.’

  This I cannot believe. This I will fight. They have no right to stop Hugh coming and I do have the right to a priest, it was established at the beginning, and now my last tenuous fingertip connection is being removed.

  ‘No, Boy. Surely not.’ I reach out to grasp his arm. ‘Hugh won’t agree, you know, he’ll come anyway.’

  ‘He won’t, Ruth.’

  ‘He’ll take it up with the authorities; he won’t take this lying down.’

  ‘He won’t because he’s dead.’

  The horn blares outside and Anon shouts something about missing a train. Three’s shadow falls across the doorway. ‘Soldier! Get in the transport now!’

  Boy prises my fingers from his sleeve. ‘I’ll be back,’ he whispers.

  ‘Now!’

  In front of the house there is some sort of handover salute between Three and the senior soldier of the new guard, then Three gets in the driver’s side, revs the engine and swerves out of the gateway. I can only assume Boy climbed in the back. The relief soldier comes to the door and says something about revisiting and clarifying permissions with me later this afternoon, since things seem to have changed since he was last here. I close the door.

  He won’t. He won’t because he’s dead.

  The news fits me so badly, it occurs to me it is not my news at all and belongs to somebody else. I pick the print-out from the bin and lay it on the table. As I thought, most of it is indecipherable jargon, but the second paragraph down confirms what Boy has told me:

  ...that visiting rights granted to .........................(complete name of visitor as requested on permission form HMP (PR) iii).

  Under category ................................(complete category under which permission was granted, i.e. medical/religious/humanitarian/asylum).

  Have been rescinded for the following reason(s): .................................(complete giving full details for reasons for rescinding of permission and state whether temporary or permanent).

  And that the detainee has been informed of their rights under the Drought Emergency Regulations Act (Detainees) Amendment Act (section 4) to appeal against said decision, the timescales if applicable and any assistance, legal or otherwise, which may be available under the Representation of Detainees (DEPA Amendment Act (section 4).

  Casually, in a cheap biro running out of ink, someone has scrawled Hugh’s name across the top space, misspelled his surname, left out The Reverend: they have reduced all his visits here to a single circle around the word religious. Then it appears they have started to write ‘dead’ and thought better of it, for a form such as this, and turned the ‘a’ into ‘c’ and the ‘d’ into an ‘e’ and declared Hugh deceased. They could not have seen the irony in bowing to bureaucracy by underlining the word ‘permanent’, nor the irony of giving me the right to appeal against the death of a good man.

  Visits.

  Kindness.

  Link to the outside world.

  Yellow roses.

  Anticipation.

  Future tense.

  Milk.

  A link to Dorothy.

  Jokes.

  Prayers.

  These things are gone now.

  Hugh and I had talked about my insomnia a lot and he had gi
ven me advice which I had been following, especially since being confined to the house. Together we had devised a routine – Hugh’s routine, I called it – and slowly, night after night, it had worked its magic and darkness had fallen like a blanket around my shoulders, rather than the hood over my head. Hugh’s routine went like this. When I finished supper – usually eggs or soup, cooked and eaten without enjoyment or ceremony or company – I would close the curtains in the sitting room and turn on the reading lamp behind the pink sofa and play the 10 Classics CD all the way through, once. When the final notes of the Nunc Dimittis sung by the Choir of King’s College relinquished their hold on the room, I turned out the lights downstairs and, like a child, went upstairs, cleaned my teeth, folded my clothes, read one psalm and turned out the light. Sleep and I were becoming reacquainted. Don’t worry, said sleep, the next ten hours will pass without you counting, you will not know you even lived them. In those hours you can neither commit any new crimes nor remember any old. You will be merely carrying out your obligation to live, but having to endure none of the pain of doing so. Your lifespan will be passing and when you wake, another fraction of it will have been accounted for and the debt paid. You need never live those hours again.

  But Hugh is dead, he has taken with him his routine; he offered me his blessing and now it is too late to accept it or return it. The only visit which ended in recrimination was the last. After such progress, regression; sleep is impossible once more. Again, I am in a poisonous relationship and condemned to share my bed with a flickering partner who hovers in the corner of my eye, who lifts the covers and invites others to come creeping between the sheets with icy hands and colder memories in the early hours of the morning. The soundtrack to the visions is played on the wind-up gramophone I inherited from my great-aunt, the tunes and voices slowing and distorting as the handle winds down, the heavy claw scratching the vinyl with its single fingernail as it grinds its way across the recording of my failures.

  There is no one left. Angie gone. Mark gone. Boy gone. Hugh gone. Listen to the tolling of the bell. Gone. Gone. Gone. I have only myself and I forge a new routine all of my own. This is a routine devised for a world in which there is neither day or night, no hours, no minutes, no life or death. All is sameness. The knack is to lie like a rug on the floor and let time wipe its feet on your face. Lucien gone.

  Outside, around me The Well exhausts itself with growing, cells multiplying in the ivy grappling up the trees, the grass growing taller and taller until it can barely sustain the weight of each ambitious blade, flowers opening wider and wider until the petals can no longer hold on to the core and float to the ground. The fledglings have left without saying goodbye, the deer move out from the shadows of the woods and crop the fields systematically, moving on in watchful ranks and beneath the feet of the booted guards, ants, horn-backed beetles and pinking worms, woodlice, daddy longlegs, maggots, false widow spiders, caterpillars, slugs and the brown-lipped snails who take their house arrest with them when they travel. And I do nothing.

  I have watched many sunrises. More sunsets probably, but also many sunrises and one thing does not change: the unexpected ordinariness of the arrival of the day. The sun is like a guest. You are sure it is him, you can see him coming from far away, dressed for an occasion of great splendour, you recognise the shimmering gown and he is bearing a gift wrapped up in gold foil, your name on the card. As he comes over the hill, there is a red ripple of excitement, he extends his hands and the light flashes off the rings on his fingers as he hands you the present, but then he takes off his cloak and as it is thrown over the back of the chair, you see the underside of the embroidery, all loose threads and no pattern; and you unwrap the parcel and the paper is gold on one side only and flat and white underneath, the next layer is brown paper and string, the next is yesterday’s newspaper scrunched up in a ball around the twelve hours of bleach-white living which we call day.

  I get up from my floor and stand against the window, remembering how I used to kneel to pray at sunrise not so long ago. I can hear Sister Amelia’s voice leading me out of myself and into the curling mist:

  The flowering of the day,

  Like the flowering of the Rose,

  is welcome.

  Sun like faith over the horizon, welcome.

  Mist like hope along the river, welcome.

  Hope will never come my way again. Hugh is dead. Here we are, me and the day sitting together in the kitchen with not much left to say to each other, both tired already, even though we have only just got started. At some point I have doodled names on the piece of paper and surrounded them with flowers with long tendrils and twisting stems. I am not alone. I can feel it behind me, breathing. Then it touches me. This touching is too complicated for daylight. He slips away. I know the leaving of his hands, the weightlessness of where his head has been, the chill on my cheek where he is gone. I am not lonely while I have my phantoms beside me. Sometimes it is Mark: he leaves his paperwork at the desk and comes over to pull me to my feet, but just as I rise, he is gone and I fall back down again. And Voice, Voice keeps me company again, reminding me that Lucien is playing in the lambing shed, can’t I hear the bales falling, or that Lucien is drowning in the bath and can’t I hear the taps running, or that Mark has taken Lucien and can’t I hear the Land Rover, leaving without me? Angie doesn’t come often and Hugh not at all. He is dead, Ruth. He won’t because he is dead.

  Pray for us now and at the hour of death.

  Now is the time to go to that place in the past. There will be no better time, or worse time. There is a time for everything and now is the time to think about the dead and the dying.

  Heal thyself. That’s what they say, isn’t it? I don’t know if I could have healed myself, but I do know I could barely have recognised myself by the end of that week, the final week. Sister Eve told us we needed to ‘refocus to retain the energy and forward momentum of our online campaign’ and we decided that there would be eight days of retreat and meditation, starting on 8 December with the Feast of the Immaculate Conception and culminating with the saint’s day for Santa Maria di Rosa on the 15th. It was agreed she was the perfect new emblem for a new look.

  With the planned week of worship drawing near, I no longer had the option of asking Mark to keep an eye on Lucien and I became a nun with a childcare problem. He had been gone almost a month and after being initially disconcerted by his absence, Lucien seemed to believe my lies and we settled into our routine like an old married couple; Voice was quieter then; and Amelia was often around and even seemed to be winning Lucien over, bringing him owl feathers to add to his collection in his room and holly with bright red berries to help him decorate the house for Christmas.

  ‘Is Amelia your best friend, Granny R?’ Lucien asked, standing on a chair to poke the glossy sprigs behind the pictures.

  ‘Do you know, I think she probably is. Be careful on that.’

  ‘She’s not mine,’ he said jumping down. ‘I haven’t got a best friend at the moment.’

  I thought I was enough; I didn’t really listen to him. He stayed in the cottage when I went to dusk worship and he never seemed worried to be on his own and I never worried about him, but the week of commitment was going to demand all of me, all of the time. When Mark had been around, he had frequently said that if I couldn’t prioritise Lucien then next time Angie called I should tell her to come and get him. I worried that he was at that moment seeking her out and I would return to the house to see Lucien with his backpack, getting into the back of Charley’s van, waving goodbye, but the fear was not enough to conquer the mad, mounting hysteria of those days, because I was ringmaster, trapeze artist and clown in my very own circus, while Lucien sat in the audience swinging his legs and sucking his thumb.

  The opening act was on the Thursday night and Friday morning, with the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Online activity had been feverish, the number of hits higher than ever, The Rose chat rooms loud with the conversations of the faithful. It ha
d taken a drought to drain the materialism from Christmas, but most of the country had no idea which religion to turn to in its place and I don’t think the Rose was the only one experiencing a surge of interest – news reports showed even the leaking Victorian churches in city centres filling up to the brim.

  Dawn was late, dusk early in the dying days of the year, but the mornings were medieval blue and gold and our first worship of the day was streamed live to the accompaniment of mallards in flight. Above our vespers, swirls of starlings converged and separated against the sunset before settling on the Douglas fir and Scots pine, drawn in black ink against the evening. I passed the Friday night at home, checking on Lucien’s soft breathing in the room next to mine, before kneeling on the rough wood, naked and freezing cold, trembling with exhaustion. Saturday, day three of our extravaganza, saw us worshipping the mistletoe, taking our webcam to the gnarled trunks and leafless branches of our beautiful apple trees. Followers were able to buy sprigs of mistletoe online which were supposedly from The Well and I waxed lyrical about the plant’s Druid history while Sister Amelia drew attention to the berries: ‘the female which fruits when everything around her is bare and barren for winter’.

  On the fourth day, we created the page for the Christmas Rose, Eve leading the singing of medieval lyrics exalting Mary long into the darkness, our praying hands and shrouds lit by the flares which represented in flame the pattern of our sacred flower and we saw that it was good. When I got back to the cottage that night, I branded myself with the Rose. I do not remember the burning.