The Well Read online

  The agent didn’t have the answer to that, but he did know that since her husband died, a lot of the land was let out to a neighbouring farmer, who had also been lending a hand, with the wood, that sort of thing. ‘They’re a tight-knit bunch round here, but the Taylors, they’d always help you out if you were in a fix, I’m sure.’

  The synonyms for tight-knit must be interesting, I thought. Introspective, xenophobic? At what point does tight-knit become hostile? The agent was explaining that the letting agreement ran out on 31 March the following year.

  ‘Thirty acres of field and woodland. Just the right size,’ Mark commented, as if there was such a thing as a right size for a piece of paradise. It sounds small, thirty acres, for the havoc it has caused. We visited the orchard, picking up apples and pears which were feeding the worms, wondering at the old fruit cages hung like discarded hairnets over strands of growth, sticks leaning at odd angles like old-fashioned hairpins. The vegetable garden showed signs of more recent work.

  ‘Look at this, Mark.’ Lucien had his small hands clasped around a fat marrow which had obviously continued swelling all summer, oblivious to the death of its planter. With a huge tug, it broke off the plant and he fell backwards. ‘Can we take it home? Can we eat it?’

  ‘It’s not ours, Lucien,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a good size, considering how little rain there’s been,’ said Mark.

  ‘Who’s going to mind? Give it a good tug and Mummy can carry it for you,’ said the agent.

  It was a familiar error, which Lucien corrected. ‘This is my granny. My mummy’s away at the moment.’

  ‘Well, your granny certainly doesn’t look old enough to be a granny,’ smarmed the agent.

  Lucien stared at him, crossly. ‘Well, she is,’ he insisted. ‘Everyone’s always doing that,’ he said to me, as hand in hand we went over to join Mark who, like an art lover in a gallery, was drinking in the burnished woods, mentally clearing brambles, thinning poplars, planting Spanish chestnuts where the pines had fallen in a strong wind, like spilled pencils in a dark classroom.

  We told the estate agent that if it was OK with him, we would eat our sandwiches there, under the oak tree. We promised to call, and he talked the talk about quick sales and all the usual nonsense in a housing market dried out by a lack of faith in the future.

  Mark called after him; there was just one thing he had forgotten to ask. ‘What about the water?’

  ‘It’s got its own supply. It’s not connected to the mains and doesn’t need to be. A well has kept this place going for a couple of hundred years. I can’t see it failing now.’

  I pointed out that now might be just the time it would fail, since there had been so little rain for so long.

  ‘Obviously,’ he conceded, ‘you need to get a professional opinion. But it’s not called The Well for nothing.’ He went on to tell us about the water table. That was what made the land so good. Look at it. In fact, as far as he was concerned, we were probably better off here with our own supply than being linked up to the mains and suffering all the shortages and standpipes and allocations everyone had had to put up with for the last couple of summers.

  ‘Anyway,’ he gesticulated away to the west where the wind was bullying the clouds, ‘most forecasters think the drought’s coming to an end. This winter will be one of the wettest on record, they reckon.’

  We believed him because we wanted to.

  The dust hung in the air long after he had disappeared. I got a bag out of the back with some sandwiches and crisps we had bought from the service station. We sat on a rug, Lucien cross-legged and upright and Mark struggling as always to organise his long legs which had been forced to live under a desk for almost twenty years. We passed a bottle of water from one to another, sipping judiciously, listening to the repetitive sheep and the blackbird warning us off, and then suddenly, spontaneously, we both burst out laughing.

  ‘I can’t believe this.’ Mark rubbed his eyes and looked up again, as if it was all going to disappear in a puff of smoke. ‘Well?’ he asked.

  ‘You first,’ I replied.

  ‘No, you.’

  ‘Granny R, you go first.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s incredible. Look at it. It’s got everything we’re looking for.’

  ‘Everything,’ repeated Mark. ‘Talk about the land of milk and honey.’

  ‘Yes, it’s beautiful,’ I continued. ‘And the land is just what we want. And the view is out of this world. It’s just that . . .’

  ‘And nobody would know us up here. Know me. No looks in the supermarket, no sniggers from kids on the bus. A clean sheet, Ruth.’

  ‘That’s probably right . . .’ I admitted.

  ‘You think it’s too good to be true?’ suggested Mark.

  ‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’ The place was breathtaking, I too was dizzy with its beauty, but I needed space to think. I got to my feet, stepped away from the rug and looked over the wooden gate leading into the field. If someone was looking to escape to the country, then they would be unlikely to find anywhere better than this. ‘If,’ I started.

  ‘If what?’ said Mark.

  His hope was warm on my back; I did not even need to turn around to see it on his face. I counted the cost of what I might lose if we moved here and that only added up to things that could be maintained or replaced – job, connections and surely my friendships were strong enough to survive the distance. So then I counted the cost of what I might lose if we stayed in London. Mark. And The Well – I’d lose this one-off miracle of a place, this Well.

  ‘It feels like such a responsibility.’ I looked at my grandson, sitting on the edge of the rug and poking ants with a stick in the gravel. ‘What do you think, Lucien?’

  ‘I think it’s the best place in the world,’ he said.

  We put in an offer on the Monday morning, some way below the asking price, as if there was a part of us that couldn’t cope with the dream coming true. ‘Offer accepted,’ said the agent and I sat on our front doorstep – mobile in my hand, smelling the exhaust from the cars trapped by the city heat, hearing the plane overhead circling for Heathrow, watching the old man opposite scooping up his dachshund’s crap from the pavement with a blue plastic bag – overwhelmed with a ridiculous sense of loss. What’s done cannot be undone. By the time Mark came home, I had pulled myself together for his sake and we toasted the future like newlyweds. We played old favourites, Mark did his dad-dance around the kitchen, and we got ridiculously drunk. The cottage was taken off the market and the self-timer photo we had taken that day was uploaded and greeted by a chorus of envy from our fellow suburban sufferers.

  ‘Hope you’re having a going-away party, because you’re sure as hell never going to come back,’ was one comment.

  We pinned the picture up next to the toaster in the kitchen in London, as a reminder. It moved with us, graduated to a frame, propped up on the half-moon table in the sitting room.

  I creep downstairs and approach it like a communicant, hold it up to the light. In the beginning was The Well.

  One week. One summer. One night. One week is all that it has taken for all my good intentions to come to nothing. I was going to stand strong against their assault on my freedom, but in truth, I am a sloth, lying in bed for hours and hours, subdued. One summer was all it took before our dream started to curl at the edges and stain like picked primroses. One night is enough to swallow a lifetime of lives.

  Outside is a space now devoid of human landmarks. Inside, this is a sentence with no punctuation. Nobody comes. Nobody goes. Nothing happens. I have christened the guards: Anon, Boy and Three. They own the present tense: recording, monitoring, signing. That leaves me with just the past and the leaden weight of what might have been, the grammar of the human condition.

  The reality of house arrest sinks in. I lie here, my sheet a shroud, wondering how long it will be until the end. I will not write. Music slaps like the tide on my mind. To start with, I was wandering a lot, understan
ding a little more about why caged animals pace, picking at the food my keepers left on the table, but now I stay in bed. I do not take my medication. Drifting through these days on a river of memories, rarely pulling into the bank, sometimes a light flickers in the distance reminding me that I need supplies to stay alive, but it all seems a long way inland and I push off again and rejoin the current of the past.

  Yesterday I saw a local newspaper that one of the guards had chucked out. ‘Welcome Home for Well Worshipper!’ read the headline, with a picture of women with roses lining the Lenford Road and a white prison van passing. I scrutinise their faces, none of the Sisters are there. We had one year here before The Well made the headlines for the first time. Our first year, my blue remembered hills and one remembered summer.

  We sold our house so easily, it slid through our hands to a couple like us, pregnant with plans for the future – only half our age – and spent our last Christmas there with Angie, who was, as they say, ‘in a good place’, if sticking to your script can be described that way. We gave Lucien the blue bike, telling him we would take it with us to The Well so he could play with it there when he came to stay. It must be rusting in the barn, unless the police took it away as part of their investigations. The last Christmas, the last day of term and the last day of work. And then the stupid lasts: the last book club; the last night in with a takeaway from the Balti House and the ten o’clock news on the television, in the sitting room which had been the stage set for so many acts; the last night out, roaring drunk and hysterical with laughter, with the girls at the George and Dragon (because the girls had stuck with me through it all and what was I going to do without them?). The last of the obscenities spray-painted on the garage door and the last of the headlines in the local press and the last of the sideways glances in the queue at the checkout. Swings and roundabouts.

  As we worked our way through the house preparing for the move, we sorted out the last twenty years. The books, for a start: Mark’s unloved law manuals; novels I used to teach at school which had seemed cutting edge at the time and now looked dated and pale; travel guides to places where we had been on holiday with Angie – in a baby carrier in Morocco, in a pushchair in Granada, on the seat on the back of a bike in Normandy, nowhere to be seen in Rome. There were books on how to adopt, which we never did, and how to manage difficult children, which we never mastered, and how to stay married, which somehow – goodness knows how – we did. I showed that cover to Mark, who had come down from the loft with a boogie board and a moth-eaten sleeping bag.

  ‘Shall we keep it?’ I laughed.

  ‘We’ve made it this far and God knows against the odds,’ he said. ‘Bin it.’

  As a teenager, working as a waitress in a hotel as a holiday job, I used to be able to recognise the couples who had finally managed to leave work on time, get a babysitter, find the money, make a reservation and get out for a night together. They would sit at one of the highly prized tables for two, looking out over the famous view of the gorge, having survived everything the day could throw at them separately, totally at a loss as to how to make it through the evening together, their hands touching across the white tablecloth, seeking the reassurance that they still loved each other. Well, I thought to myself as I sealed the boxes with tape, took the black bags to the dump, we have made our booking.

  We moved on the first day of the cruellest month. Angie and Lucien were meant to turn up on our last morning in London to wave us goodbye.

  I checked my phone.

  ‘She’s not coming. You can never rely on her. Come on, we need to get going.’ Mark, sitting in the driver’s seat, drumming his fingers on the wheel, the packing cases in the vans and me, standing like a plastic figure in an empty dollhouse.

  ‘Two more minutes?’ I pleaded.

  As I was driven away – rather, as we were driven away – I craned my neck. There was still no sign of her and the street was empty as if someone had just wiped our story from the whiteboard.

  That evening, after the removal men had gone and we had done all we could for the first day in our new home, he gave me two presents: the first was the glass heron – even then it seemed impossibly fragile, its beak as sharp as an icicle, its neck a script in italics; the second was a bottle of vintage champagne which we had been given some time ago in London and had agreed we would put away until our silver wedding anniversary.

  ‘You don’t think we’re jumping the gun? We only hit twenty-two last month,’ I laughed.

  ‘Who cares? We’re never going to have a bigger reason to celebrate than this.’

  I wiped my hands on my jumper. ‘A bottle of fizzy piss breaks the bank now. That stuff must be worth a fortune. Besides, I’m not exactly dressed for the occasion.’

  ‘You’ve no idea how beautiful your bum looks in your dust-covered leggings with your particularly appealing unkempt hair,’ he replied, digging out a couple of beer glasses from a packing box.

  ‘Not to mention your unintentional designer stubble.’ He looked gorgeous to me at that moment, in jeans and a baggy sweatshirt covered in grime, the tight-suited man well and truly consigned to the charity shop.

  ‘Come on, outside,’ he called.

  She hadn’t texted. I put the phone down before Mark could catch me checking it.

  He balanced the glasses on the fence post under the oak and popped the cork, sending lambs scuttling out onto the cold hillside.

  ‘To us!’ said Mark.

  ‘And to The Well!’

  It was bitter outside so we finished the rest of the bottle in bed, like we used to when we first fell in love, and suddenly it all felt right, I really believed we had left the worst of it behind and the future, like my screensaver, was green and blue and beautiful. I embraced my reclaimed, revitalised man, my husband, my Mark.

  You have no new messages, the phone said.

  It was the best year, our foundation year. We had spent hours and hours in London timetabling the dream and agreed that we should take year one slowly, learn a little, live the idyll. The Taylors, the neighbouring farmers mentioned by the agent, were a sort of umbilical cord to the unfamiliar world of our new rural community, lending us equipment and expertise with equal generosity. Our first lambs came from Tom Taylor, skidding down the ramp into the field and looking as bewildered by the beauty as we had on our arrival; I was so bewitched by their innocence I almost failed to close the gate in time and Mark, more familiar with office paraphernalia than trailers, struggled to fix the bolts. We were city-weak and street-feeble in those days. Then there was Bru, our beautiful puppy, one of the litter from Tom’s border collie bitch; he became our therapy dog from the moment he bounced into our lives and chewed my gloves until the moment he was gone, taking his healing powers with him.

  This is something I can hardly admit to myself, but there were times in London when the sight of Angie at the door had made me want to close the curtains and pretend I was out, but when we moved to The Well, if I had had a Union Jack, I would have run it up the flagpole to show we were at home in our castle, I would have instructed the guard to throw open the gates for her. She finally came to stay, just for a few weeks before the festivals began, and it was Tom who showed Lucien how to feed the orphan lambs with a bottle, holding on tight with both hands as they tugged at the teats. Getting the hens in at night, that was another of Lucien’s favourites, a lengthy and ridiculous pastime which involved us flapping more than the birds. We got battery hens which needed rehoming, but their experience of prison seemed to have left them wholly incapable of dealing with the outside world; they were decidedly resistant to being shut up and ill inclined to ever lay eggs again. But it was fun.

  Every morning, Mark used to stand in the doorway with his mug of coffee and point at the distant hills. ‘No one,’ he used to repeat like a mantra, ‘no one for miles and miles and miles.’ Company wasn’t much of a problem for Angie, not only because she had Lucien and all over the world children are a passport to conversation, but also because it
seemed that once you had a dealer, you had a whole network of acquaintances. I was the one who was struggling, taking my first faltering steps at building a social life: yoga in the village hall with two enormous women who ran the post office in Lenford and a Portuguese au pair from the large house by the river; cinema club at the Assembly Rooms; a wine tasting at a local vineyard, whose crop was one of the few that didn’t seem to suffer from the lack of rain.

  ‘Give it time’, Mark used to say, when I despaired of ever making new friends, ‘small steps.’

  One such small step was our invitation to dinner at Cudecombe Hall with Lord and Lady Donaldson, apparently a sort of rite of passage for any incomers, so that they could be weighed up – and definitely found wanting in our case. After a lot of braying and barking around the long dining-room table about the state of the gardens in the dry summer and what a hell of a job it was keeping the horses watered, the conversation turned to the forthcoming Lenford Foxhounds Hunt Ball.

  His Lordship turned to Mark. ‘Now, tell me, who do you hunt with?’

  ‘My wife and my dog,’ replied Mark, catching my eye over the table and winking while the other guests tittered in a sort of nervous recognition of what they hoped must be a joke.

  ‘We’ve got to post that,’ I said as we laughed uncontrollably all the way home. ‘I’m sure Lord D. doesn’t use social media.’

  We had set up a Facebook page in the name of The Ardingly Well, mostly as an easy way of keeping in touch with everyone in London, because it turned out we didn’t pop back as often as we thought we might. Our photo album might as well have been entitled ‘An Exhibition on Paradise’, except we were hardly Adam and Eve. Neither of us was strong enough to lift a bale of straw, although actually we were growing upwards and outwards, firming up individually as well as a couple. I noticed it one day when I was standing Lucien against the kitchen doorframe and marking with a pencil and a date how tall he was compared to the first night he ever slept there. As a joke, I stood Mark up against the woodwork and flattened down his now rather wild hair with my copy of the Vegetable Gardeners Handbook.