The Well Read online

  Mark lied for me and about me too. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but that’s the message. I am only the messenger.’

  Did he want me for himself? How could he possibly have wanted me physically those weeks following Lucien’s drowning – I was red-eyed and hysterical, the only bodily contact I craved being that of my own nails scratching my own skin to see my own blood bubble. How could he possibly have wanted a wife who he thought might have murdered her grandson.

  ‘It’s a long time since you needed me,’ he said, helping me to bed.

  ‘She bleeds,’ the Sisters said on the blog. ‘She bleeds for the loss of innocent life.’

  It took me a long time, but I finally put into words the unmentionable question.

  Mark had braved the world outside our gates, driven to a supermarket some way away and replenished our supplies. He was trying to get me to eat a little, but my stomach knotted at the smell of food. Nevertheless I was sitting with him, the warmth of the Rayburn pretending that the kitchen could once again be the heart of a house. Mark had returned to a conversation we had been having earlier, admitting that on the night of Lucien’s death, after I had left, he had written to his solicitor putting his half of The Well in trust and had put the deposit down on a bedsit.

  ‘It’s not good for us – for you – to stay here. You must see that. You’re like a prisoner here. You should leave.’

  ‘Here is as good and as bad as anywhere else.’

  ‘I agree anywhere will be difficult, but away from here there is at least the chance of recovery.’ The word alone was enough to drive me from the room, but he caught me and sat me down again. ‘OK, not recovery. I’m sorry. But at least a space to think.’

  The rubber omelette lay on my plate like a plastic piece of food from a toddler’s kitchen play set. I could not make any connection between it, the eggs that had been broken for it and our hens which had laid the eggs. Someone would need to look after the hens if I went. I don’t know who that would be. Where would I go? But they were all paltry questions compared to the one which ground my cells to dust.

  ‘Do you think I could have done it?’

  ‘Not now, Ruth.’

  I repeated the question, my mouth contorting in an exaggerated fashion as though he was a lip reader. ‘I am asking you if you think I killed Lucien.’

  Mark had finished eating. He got up and stood with his back against the Rayburn, his hands wrapped stiffly around the silver rail that ran the length of the cooker. His prolonged pause was enough.

  I felt the prongs of the fork against the thin skin of my wrist. ‘I take it you do.’

  ‘I don’t know what you want me to say.’

  ‘The truth.’

  So he answered truthfully, or so I thought, using the grammar of comparatives and mathematics of probability. More likely, less likely, unlikely. That the Ruth he knew and had been married to for over twenty years loved Lucien more than anything – he knew that to his cost. Almost more than anything.

  ‘What do you mean by almost?’ I was now the inquisition, fierce in my devotion to unpalatable answers.

  ‘Could you honestly say which was more important to you – Lucien or your Rose?’

  ‘I know now,’ I said.

  ‘But then you were a different woman. So if you are asking me if Ruth could have done this to Lucien, I’d have to ask you, which Ruth?’

  He held my hair back as I vomited.

  He never asked me if I thought he had done it.

  Where should you bury the boy you probably killed, or what is left of the body of the boy after they have taken him and carved him up like a frog on a school bench, as if that could ever explain what had happened? You could take him down from the cross, roll the boulder in front of the tomb and sit there and weep. You could give him to The Well because The Well would water his grave and let buttercups grow on the unnatural mound. Sister Amelia thought the service should be here. It seems she wrote to me every day: songs, prayers, blessings, advice, psalms, poems, parables, letters, but only a few of them slipped past my censor.

  My Ruth,

  We have been praying about Lucien, about how She would want us to mark his passing. Let him be laid to rest with the Blessing of the Rose to remind us that just as the Rose lies in the desert earth, seemingly dead to all who pass a straggle of sticks on a dusty highway, so Lucien seems dead to us, his little body no longer breathing the breath we recognise. But like the Rose, he lives.

  I told you once that everything that blooms on the earth is already written in the bud: believe this and you will find peace. We await your return.

  Amelia

  Texts of all sorts, she wrote, none of them true. Mark found the letter and told me that what Sister Amelia wanted was nothing more, nothing less than a sacrificial burial mound over which she could gloat. I don’t know which was more horrifying – the possible truth in what he said or the fact that he was disturbed enough to even think it.

  In the end it wasn’t my decision – I was not capable of making decisions. I wanted to keep Lucien’s body in my bed until the decay of the rotting bones seeped its poison into my living frame and took me with him. I wanted to burn his body on a fire on the top of First Field and let the ashes drift on the wind across the drought-dried land of this country until we were all nothing but particles of hopelessness and then I would shout at the green well, you are a deceiver of men. I wanted to stand in the bland atheism of a suburban crematorium, as I did for my mother and for my father, and know that there is traffic and deodorant and queues of mourners muddling up their dead and weeds in the gravel of the graves and that is all. I wanted all of these things and nothing. I did not want to bury him at all. I wanted him back. Though you speak with the tongues of men and angels but have not love, you are nothing. Though you bury children with bells and rituals, but have not Lucien, you have nothing.

  ‘I am going to contact Angie,’ Mark told me. ‘We need to talk about the funeral.’

  Mark went to collect her from the station. I waited, looking out of the window at the hateful rain, feeling physically sick. Finally, they arrived. I stood out in the raw north wind, watching the car slewing its way down the track now riddled with puddles and greasy with mud. There was a driver and a passenger. My husband. My daughter. They had been a long time, far longer than it took to drive from Middleton Parkway. They had been talking, about me, presumably.

  Mark got out of the car first and went back to open the door for Angie. She climbed out like an old woman does on coming home from hospital, uncertain that her legs will carry her to the familiar front door or that she will ever be able to resume the life she had before it all went black.

  I fell to my knees. ‘Forgive me; say you’ll forgive me.’

  ‘Please get up, Ruth,’ Mark said. ‘I don’t think we need any more kneeling.’

  Even my kneeling was misconstrued. I got to my feet. Angie froze, inches from me, a blank measureless distance away from me, as if her stare had brought down a glass pane between us. Mark moved to the fence and looked out over the fields where he stood like a visitor – all closeness had vanished in the space of the journey. Angie had homework once, when she was in primary school, all about proverbs. A bird in the hand, watched pots, stitches in time – we were a fount of wisdom, but even then I’m not sure anyone cited the unspeakable: two’s company, three’s none. It came back to me there, standing in the drive, knowing the ‘auld’ alliances had shifted again. Angie started shivering uncontrollably, so Mark led her inside and sat her on the sofa and I could see in her face the bloated dullness of over-medicated grief. And something else, the thing I feared: her eyes were pinprick-black, she licked her lips continuously – they say if you know an addict well enough, you’ll recognise the ticks. When I sat down next to her, I raised the sleeve of her thick, llama wool sweater. But she jerked her arm away and ran from me across the room, pushing the armchair between me and her, shaking in the corner, screaming at me, clawing at the cushions.

&n
bsp; ‘What the fuck did you think I was going to do, Mum? Pray?’

  And . . .

  ‘You killed him. Whatever happened, I will always, always hold you responsible for the fact that the only thing I ever loved is gone.’

  And . . .

  ‘I loved him so much. You’ve no idea how much I loved him.’

  And . . .

  ‘You should have drowned in that fucking pond, it should have been you.’

  And and and . . . before sinking out of sight into the dust and dropped coins in the corner of the room.

  Mark prowled around the silence. He straightened the photo of us on day one at The Well, he adjusted the airflow to the stove so that it roared, he ran his finger along the top of his desk and pulled open and pushed shut the drawers, with their receipts and dried-out biros and old copies of Trout and Salmon. He escorted Angie from her hiding place to the stool in front of the stove where she sat consumed by the flames.

  After a long time, a very long time, she spoke again. ‘I’m sorry, Dad, but I’ve got to.’

  Mark looked at me, and then turned his back on us. ‘I know you have to,’ he said.

  She swallowed, then spoke robotically. ‘On the way back from the station, Dad and I promised each other that all we would talk about would be arrangements for the funeral. Everything else would be too difficult, that’s what I thought.’ Angie sat picking the skin off from her nails until blood trickled down the cuticles and she wiped them on her long skirt. ‘But I can’t stop myself. You need to tell me what happened.’

  Forcing my hands away from my eyes, I shook my head and was about to speak, but she interrupted.

  ‘I know what the police have told me, and Mark and the press and the world and his wife – but you? Nothing.’ The mechanical voice was spluttering. ‘You cut me out. Once you knew I had a phone again, you made one call, screaming like a banshee, like it was your son who was floating face down in a bog, then nothing. Not a word.’ Pause. She hit herself, hard on the head with her fist, again and again. ‘Now, right now. I want to hear it from you. In words of one syllable. You owe me that much. What went on here?’

  I curled up even tighter. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I just don’t believe that. Deep down, you must know something.’

  ‘I don’t. I promise you I don’t. And you never got in touch with me. How was I meant to explain? How do you think I feel? People say I did it, that I did it in a trance . . .’

  ‘She was not asking how you feel. She asked a simple question. This is not all about you.’ As Mark swung round, pointing his finger at me, his elbow caught the glass heron on the half moon table and it smashed, the light from the window picking out some of the shards on the wooden floor like dew on the flints in the plough.

  My mouth watered – I wanted this violence. Voice was telling me that Mark was coming to beat me and I was answering back, yes, beat me so hard that blood pours from gashes across my face and scars me, so that other people will see the stigmata and say, there goes the woman who said she was a saint but has turned out to be a murderer. He had done it once. Don’t let him hold back now. I craved punishment, but my longed-for torturer collapsed in the armchair, all fight gone.

  Silent in a sea of broken glass, I bent down and started picking up the shards one by one. ‘I don’t know what happened,’ I said finally, as I knelt. ‘If I knew, I would tell you. Please believe me. I spend every second reliving that day, that night, trying to find the one moment when I could have done something differently and Lucien, Lucien . . .’

  ‘Would be here now,’ Angie finished my sentence sarcastically. ‘Do you know what, Mum, you never thought I should have had him. You didn’t either, Mark. You thought I should have quietly gone down the clinic like every other teenage pregnant schoolgirl. Well, you’ve got the end you wanted now, haven’t you?’

  It wasn’t true. I loved Lucien from the moment I heard he was going to be.

  ‘And then you thought you could do a better job than me. Don’t worry, Mark’s told me everything, how you drove him out of the house, how he had to look after Lucien, feed him, bathe him, while you prayed for the rest of the fucking world. Everyone else’s favourite holy mother . . .’

  Mark’s eyes met mine. Oh yes, they had been talking in the car.

  ‘And he told me all about how he rang up and Lucien, my son, answered your phone and was crying because he was on his own.’ She started crying herself and that was unbearable and it was almost impossible to make sense of the words. ‘You said you’d choose him. You promised. You said The Well would keep him safe, I remember you saying that, exactly that. You should have told me when I phoned if you couldn’t cope.’

  ‘We should never have let you go without leaving us a contact number . . .’ started Mark.

  But Angie interrupted, anger now providing coherence. ‘Why did I ever think you would do a better job with him than you did with me?’

  ‘Angie!’ Mark moved over and took my place next to her, his hand around her shoulders. ‘Not now, let’s not go there again. Let’s talk about the funeral and then leave. That’s what you came here for.’

  Standing there with a fistful of broken glass in front of the two of them all wrapped together, I couldn’t let it go unsaid, the one truth in all of this. ‘You know I loved Lucien, Angie. When you weren’t well . . .’

  ‘When I was off my face, when I was stoned, when I was fucked . . . say it, Mum, like it is.’

  ‘When you were using, I tried to be like . . .’

  ‘Like a mother to him.’

  The bitterness eventually exhausted itself and curled up in front of the fire. We sat, the three of us, Mark and Angie on the sofa, me on the floor, back against the wall and we whispered our thoughts about the funeral so as not to reawaken it. Mark suggested the church at Little Lennisford.

  ‘The C of E church. It’s the only safe place because it’s the one thing none of us believe in,’ he said.

  Word of the world outside reached me mainly via Mark and the policeman at the door. Apparently, the whole camp of followers of the Rose which had set up all along the verges of the lane – their pop-up tents tied to the hedges, snapping branches off the hesitantly budding hawthorns, the wheels of their camper vans obliterating the early snowdrops – had been cleared by the police. I had seen them, briefly, as I was driven to the police station and they had started the chant when they realised who was in the car:

  ‘Behold the Rose of Jericho!’

  By the time I was driven back a day later, the entrance to The Well looked even more like something from a drug-induced hallucination, crowded with day-trippers some of whom came to the shrine with motorway service station roses, others who fought with the police to bang on the bonnet of the car in order to berate a child-killer. Some, I guess, came simply to dip their toe in the rippling pond of drama in the otherwise flat surface of their lives. To me, in the back of the police car, this was a virtual reality scenario in which I had no avatar.

  They told me about fifty or so online followers had materialised and travelled from across the country to ‘be together at this time of crisis’. They had been given permission to camp in the fields on the other side of the lane and who can blame the farmer who must have hoped that either their magic or their money would rub off on him. On one of the rare occasions I ventured out of the cottage, I saw the flicker of their bonfire and flares in the distance. According to the internet, they weren’t alone. Tiny tented camps had sprung up wherever there was a patch of vacant ground close to a community standpipe. The images showed women standing around braziers, handing out roses to commuters, lampposts strung with banners proclaiming the message: The Rose because It Rains! Some with a picture of the chosen one and the slogan ‘Innocence Personified’ written underneath.

  YesterdayinParliament.com reported that MPs struggled to express condolences, but it was clear that they neither wanted to condone the sect nor offend those caught up in the rising tide of religious fervour in the cou
ntry. Instead, the MPs, while not wishing in any way to prejudice the ongoing inquiry into the tragic death of Lucien Ardingly, asked earnestly whether everything possible was being done to ascertain the reason for the continued fertility of the land at The Well; they put down questions for the Under Secretary of State for Education about the effectiveness of home–school liaison in rural primary schools and provision for the monitoring of the education of traveller children; they demanded data on social services assessments of children in informal kinship care; they asked the Minister for Gender Equality to place on record her opinion of single-sex religious cults; and they quizzed the Home Secretary about the arrangements that were to be put in place to ensure that Lucien Ardingly could be buried with dignity at a private ceremony, as the family had requested. Most of all, they wanted assurances from the Prime Minister that nothing like this would ever be allowed to happen again.

  Dignity. Private. Family. How to achieve such things in those circumstances?

  On the morning of Lucien’s funeral, while it was still dark, diversions were put in place around Middleton. The entire four-acre field between the old Bridge pub and the river had been set aside for the press, who were now parked up in their vans with masts and satellite equipment. Apparently, they broadcast throughout the night. Who for? I asked the policeman stamping his feet on duty at the front door. He told me audiences were very hungry first thing in the morning. Those attending the funeral needed to be on a list of approved mourners. Even the organist needed clearance.

  ‘And are you going to stay the night before the funeral, here at The Well?’ asked the DI with the thankless task of making a cortège run smoothly.

  ‘Does it matter?’ asked Angie.

  ‘It’s just that it’s easier for us to protect you if you’re here – there’s a clean run with an escort down the lane to the main road and straight through to the church. If you’re still staying at the Motor Lodge at Middleton, it makes it a bit more complicated, that’s all. We can’t close the dual carriageway.’