The Well Read online

  ‘Has Mark grown?’ asked Lucien.

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because now I have to stand on tiptoe to kiss him. And he’s changed colour,’ I added. Lucien looked particularly puzzled. ‘He always used to look a bit yellow in London,’ I explained.

  ‘But now he’s gone brown,’ observed Lucien. ‘Like me.’

  Our technical competence did not develop as quickly as our tans or our muscles. Mark had no idea how to reverse a trailer, despite having been the parking king of southwest London, and I was caught on film being attacked by a piglet the size of a miniature poodle. Our total incompetence was epitomised by our attempts to build the greenhouse, which was like a flat-pack furniture episode on a grand scale. Mark lost it.

  ‘Don’t just stand there laughing. Look what you’ve made me do!’ He sucked the blood from his finger, trying to stop it dripping onto his white T-shirt.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, I thought you said you’d secured the frame.’

  ‘No, we can’t just get another one because we’ve bent this one. This is costing us money. You live in bloody Never-Never Land, you do, when it comes to money.’

  It went up in the end, the windows never really opened properly and we had to rig up some complicated system by which the door stayed open but the rabbits were kept out; perhaps it knew it was too fragile to last. We posted pictures of us triumphant and reunited in victory with the first pots and seedlings; we didn’t post pictures of the rows it provoked, of course, just witty comments like ‘fallen out big time about the Greenhouse, expect Mark back in the office on Monday’. It all got the thumbs up on The Well page, but despite the good intentions, our friends came to visit less and less, apologetic about the spiralling cost of travel, and our contact with the old world relied more and more on anxious e-mails from them about the price of a pint in our old London pub and the smell of sewage in the streets and, in response, self-deprecating e-mails from us about the wrong sort of chainsaw oil and inedible nettle soup. Increasingly, it seemed wrong to revel in our good fortune and we did what we could not to appear smug. You can do that online: spin, select, make things seem just a little different from how they really are.

  Gradually we explored the countryside surrounding The Well, toddlers venturing out in ever-increasing circles from their mother, picking up fence posts from the timber yard the other side of Lenford, or saplings for the hedge we were planting from the tree nursery which was struggling to stay solvent. Once we saw a notice in the post office from a farmer selling up quite some way away and we drove over on the main road to buy a saw bench and small rotavator from him. He was a nice old boy, and talked in his broad accent about the struggle to make ends meet now everything was expensive and how he’d got rid of the dairy herd because the water meter was costing him a fortune. As we bumped back down his farm track, we were sorry for him, but saw his demise and our ascendancy as the natural order of things and were buoyed up with enthusiasm, our new toys in the back of the Land Rover.

  ‘Let’s go back another way,’ suggested Mark. We took the old road which climbed steadily through the black conifers of Montford Forest and he pulled over into a rather derelict picnic area, the faded walkers’ map on the notice board and the outdated calendar of events testament to the rapidly imploding tourist industry in the area. We quite liked the lack of visitors, but we were ignorant and selfish in those days.

  ‘I reckon if we climb to the viewpoint at the top, we should be able to look back and see The Well,’ Mark said. The climb took us longer than we thought. Bru ran ahead hunting in and out of the larch and we walked hand in hand, only a little self-consciously at first; I remember thinking that it was the sort of thing people do in films. There was no need to talk. It was soft underfoot and silent and we breathed in the pine, noticed the scent where the fox had crossed the path in the night, felt the thud of wings when we disturbed the buzzard. Finally, we broke free from the tight, dry forest and stood in a clearing on the top of the hill, a panoramic view, the great scenery of the world stage spread out on the other side of the valley in front of us, painted in a thousand shades of brown and gold as if it was autumn already. We stood in the gods, getting our bearings, noticing small landmarks by which we now orientated ourselves: the sharp curve in the Lenn where it doubled back on itself at Tanners Pool; the famous white church at Nelworthy, catching the evening light; then from there, following the line of the lanes through the jigsaw of fields and farms and hamlets until we could recognise the orchards in the valley next to the old cider farm in the valley beneath The Well.

  ‘Which means we must be almost directly above there and over to the east,’ I said. Several minutes we spent, pointing, thinking we had it, there, that must be our barn, that must be First Field, then realising no, we were looking too low, too close. In the end, of course, we recognised it not by the one chimney which showed above the rhythm of the contours, nor by the pinprick beauty of the solitary oak, but because it shone – our Well gleamed green like a tiny emerald, pinned to the breast of a tired old lady towards the end of the dance.

  ‘Who needs friends and neighbours,’ said Mark, ‘when we’ve got the whole world on our side.’

  Not us, apparently, because as we found more and more to love about our home and each other, and as we received fewer and fewer invitations from the locals, we went out less and less in company. Mark laughed at me one time, seeing me slipping on the muddy bank coming back from the henhouse – you look as though you’ve got all your eggs in one basket, that was what he said. I think he was right, although neither of us knew it. It wasn’t just the hens on overtime, our vegetable garden was also a lot more productive than our social life. Lucien chose the Magic Porridge Pot story night after night, because we said we had a magic porridge pot of a garden all of our own and no matter how much we took from it, it made more: perpetual spinach, beans, mangetout, courgettes which became marrows because we simply didn’t have mouths enough or hours enough to eat them. Like children, we were amazed by the world we found ourselves in and threw open the window every morning, promising each other that we would never, ever take all this for granted.

  We even won third prize for our basket of mixed produce at the Middleton Agricultural Show in late August.

  ‘Not bad for a couple of townies,’ I joked with Martin who farmed to the south of us.

  ‘You’ve got your own secrets for your success, I suppose.’

  ‘Secrets?’

  ‘Ay. Don’t know what you’re putting on your land, but it’s nothing that the rest of us can buy in County Stores, that’s for sure.’

  The resentment shown to successful incomers was legendary, and real, as I was discovering, but in fact the whole show was tainted by the talk of drought. The dairy section was depleted, although there were still sheep, with the Exmoor mules and other breeds used to picking their way through scrub and moorland proving popular. Everyone said it wasn’t like other years – the numbers were fewer, the jokes flatter and there was not so much money swilling around in the beer tent.

  When we got home that night, Mark said, ‘Come and take a look. There’s something I want you to see.’

  We crossed First Field, went down towards the ancient trees at the edge of the wood and reached the brook which marked the boundary between our land and the Taylors. Like many small rivers, the low level meant it had forked around recently created islands, and on the far side there were no prints in the banks where animals had come down to drink, no wet pebbles glistening in the evening light, just a line of barely connected mud puddles. But all the way down, our side was different. The stream was singing. Above our heads, the ash showed no signs of the stress which was bringing a premature autumn hue to the landscape beyond The Well and beneath our feet in the suppurating bog were worms and flies and larvae and all the microscopic, teeming stuff of life.

  ‘Does it run all the way down to the Lenn?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve tried tracing it,’ he said
, ‘but it goes underground just before the boundary hedge.’

  ‘This is mad,’ I said. ‘No wonder Martin thinks we’re cheats or witches or worse. It doesn’t make sense.’

  It didn’t then. It doesn’t now.

  Mark said it was all down to the spring which surfaced at the pond in Wellwood. We were lucky it was miles from the road and hidden away like that or he wouldn’t be surprised if people tried to siphon water from it. You should take a look, he said, it’s pretty special. It was our turn for a bit of good luck, he added, that was all.

  It was a Keatsian autumn for us. With their roots starved of moisture, trees across the country were brought down in the battering winds, but in our orchard the only things that fell were apples and plums and damsons and pears and we stumbled on the cookers lying unharvested in the long, wet grass because we simply didn’t have enough space to store them. In high spirits, we got tickets for the village harvest lunch. This was the sort of event which we thought epitomised the rural community spirit we had signed up for. Mark and I sat down at one of the long trestle tables, but as everyone else arrived, they sat somewhere else. I was furious and told Mark that it was ridiculous that we were treated like lepers, after all my attempts to get involved.

  ‘Do you think it’s because of . . .?’ I took a large swig of cider and immediately regretted saying what I had been thinking.

  Mark met my gaze full on. ‘Because they think I’m a paedophile? No actually, Ruth, I don’t. I think it’s because we have water and they don’t. So leave it,’ he said, ‘it won’t get you anywhere.’

  But I crossed the hall to the table where over a dozen of our closest farming neighbours were squashed onto a table of eight. The men looked up, stone-grey, embarrassment flickering over the red faces of their wives. One or two of them at least managed a hello, before straightening the cutlery.

  I said they looked pretty squashed and there was plenty of room on our table. ‘We’re not infectious,’ I said.

  ‘Some of us wish you were,’ said Maggie. Someone had told me that she had won Local Farming Entrepreneur of the Year only a few years ago for her parsley farm. Now she was bankrupt. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  I watched Mark, taking his drink outside. Other tables fell silent, and then people resumed talking just that little bit too loudly to make it look as though they weren’t listening. The locals stared at the menus, designed by the children at the village school where Jean’s sister was the secretary, run off on the photocopier at the post office where Alice Pudsley ran the counter, laid out on the tables along with the corn wreaths made by the Altons who lived at the end of our drive and turn left, and the flower posies arranged by the Clardles, who used to run the pub and were now retired, Perry taken up with the largely redundant role of Chairman of the River Lenn Fishing Association. I wanted to tell them that we’d done nothing to either deserve or receive or create this fertile land: we’d added nothing to the fertiliser, we were not diverting their streams, we had no way of dragging the clouds to our hill and emptying their leaden sacks of rain on our earth. Somewhere, underneath it all, they were logical people and they knew that must be the case. The vicar gave thanks, the ladies carried in the trays with bowls of steaming parsnip soup and homemade bread, the cider flowed, and Mark and I left. Our harvest was the most prolific, but it seemed we had the least to celebrate. We walked back along the river, where the exhausted salmon hurled themselves from the shallow pond against the dribbling weir, again and again, until the heron picked off their flapping bodies from the dry stones on which they landed.

  We knew what it was like to be ostracised. Try having your husband accused of keeping child pornography on his local authority laptop for a pretty swift introduction to the paranoid world of the outcast. But given what has happened since, it’s clear that we didn’t even know the meaning of the word. We so wanted to believe that we had left the plague behind us in London, and that The Well was the cure, that we minimised the symptoms of its return. True, Tom still helped Mark with the autumn ploughing and sowing of our first winter wheat; we bought the ten ewes in lamb from him as well. But it must have all stuck in his gullet as one evening when we called him for some help with the driller, we left a message on the phone, but he never rang back. In retrospect I can plot the course of our fall from local grace through incidents like those, although they were just the skin-deep symptoms of far more serious disease.

  Christmas, which now will always be the bleakest of festivals, was then still glitter and stars. The barn was just about habitable, the wood-burner was put in just in time and our first and last guests were friends from London who’d stuck with us through the allegations and we put on a good show, as if to thank them. There they were with their talk of short-time working and escalating crime, concreted gardens and milk shortages, of reduced services on the Underground and half-empty shelves in the supermarkets, while we delivered a lunch of our own chicken, our own potatoes and our own broccoli, parsnips, cranberry sauce and everyone toasted The Well and agreed we’d got away just in time. Then, just as they left and I was staring at the blank pages of my new diary, Angie showed up again without warning, this time with Lucien and a guy called Des, who spent the short days helping Mark fence the woods ready for the piglets he planned to run in them in the spring and the long nights drinking too much cider.

  ‘This is fucking paradise, this is, Angie. Why don’t you stop here? You and Lucien. He’d be growing up in heaven,’ Des said.

  ‘Then there’d be nothing for him to look forward to, would there?’

  She always had an answer, Angie. Her teachers used to say she was clever, but lacked concentration. I called her a dreamer. Then a rebel. Then an addict. Sometimes, a daughter. January became February and they stayed on and I wasn’t lonely any longer because this was my Lucien winter: Lucien, running after the pheasants and yelling with delight at the power he held over them, forcing them to heave their heavy bodies over the hedges and flap laboriously into the frosted woods; Lucien, sitting on Mark’s second-hand tractor, all gloves and woolly hat and scarf, driving to the ends of the world and back; me sawing logs, Lucien carrying them one by one to the wood pile, staggering under the weight and falling asleep on my knee, in front of the fire, long before bedtime. It was a physical existence for all of us and it felt so good, to be tired, to ache, to feel the new-found roughness of Mark’s hands on my breasts, because we made love again that year, night after night. My body felt good once more; even the drunken Des hit on me in the kitchen one night: ‘you could be my Mrs Robinson’, he slobbered. I told Mark and we laughed and he ran his hands up under my jumper, humming the theme tune to the film.

  I can only assume that Angie overheard Des, because all of a sudden she had come over from the barn and was packing Lucien’s things.

  ‘Are you off?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Both of you?’

  ‘Of course.’ She was stuffing Lucien’s clothes into a well-travelled holdall, nothing folded, nothing counted.

  ‘If you want to travel again, you could leave Lucien here, you know.’

  ‘Why would I want to do that?’

  I had bought him some slippers and I held these out to her. ‘You would be more free and Lucien could go to school here, make friends.’

  She snatched the slippers. ‘Like you’ve got such good relationships with the villagers that they’d all be asking him round to play, would they? Haven’t you noticed, Mum, none of them want to be around you any longer?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s totally true.’

  Angie left the room and I could hear her crashing around the bathroom. ‘Because you don’t want to. But I hear stuff. You’re up here with your green fields; they’re all going out of business. They think something’s not right,’ she shouted through the wall and then came back into the bedroom. ‘What the fuck’s he done with his toothbrush.’

  The room felt too small for both of us. I moved out of her way and looked out of th
e window. ‘You’re going away from the point, Angie. I was just offering Lucien a bit of stability. He loves it here. All this could be his one day.’

  ‘You can stuff your middle-class idyll. This is all about you. You always wanted another kid. You always wanted a boy. Actually, what you always wanted was Lucien . . .’

  I turned back to face her. ‘Angie. You were barely seventeen. If we hadn’t stepped forward, you wouldn’t even have had Lucien, the state you were in. Adoption, that’s what social care were talking about.’

  Angie is mouthing the words as I am speaking them. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, like I haven’t heard all this before. And the social workers weren’t so keen when Mark got accused, were they?’ She zipped the holdall closed.

  ‘Angie, don’t stoop that low. You know as well as I do that he was completely exonerated. So don’t you ever, and I mean ever, pull that one again.’

  ‘OK. For God’s sake, don’t get so stressed. Mark’s in the clear. All’s right with the world. Things have changed. I’ve changed.’

  ‘Have you?’ I called after her.

  Sitting on the end of the unmade bed, I tugged the duvet straight. I had never doubted Mark’s innocence, not once throughout the whole sordid affair. I just knew – I thought I just knew – that he could never do anything like that. It would have been impossible to have allowed myself to think any differently. The sound of Angie slamming the back door brought me back to the present. I noticed my broken nails and pressed hard against the blisters on my fingers from the wheelbarrow until they hurt and wept.

  By sunset they were gone, but she had got Lucien to write a note on a page from his farmyard colouring book with huge, irregular letters, half facing the wrong way round. It was her way of saying sorry – that and taking only half the money from Mark’s wallet.