The Well Read online

  Dere Grany R Thank you for having us. Look after the lams. Tell Bru I love him. XXXXX Lucien.

  I keep it as a memento mori in the dressing-table drawer I dare not open.

  The second half of Feburary was cold, grey and difficult. It snowed once or twice at The Well, but only after Lucien had left.

  ‘He would have loved this,’ I said to Mark.

  ‘So would everyone else,’ he replied as we stared over our sparkling, sugar-coated plough towards the black fields and forests beyond.

  We saw virtually no one from London or Lenford until the end of the month at the meeting with the spokesperson from the Department of the Environment. The parish hall was crowded out with farmers exhausted from lambing, smelling of sleeplessness, the windows steaming. Patience, like water, was in short supply.

  The chairman of the local National Farmers Union introduced the speaker. ‘I hope he’s going to be our Angel Gabriel and bring us good tidings.’

  But it was clear from the start that the man from the Emergency Committee on Drought Relief (ECDR) had letters after his name, but no wings. His was an exercise in panic-reduction and spin, and the heckling rose.

  ‘What are you going to do about it?’

  ‘What’s going to happen to this country’s food supply?’

  ‘Someone needs to do something about it.’

  ‘What can he do about it?’ muttered Mark to me. ‘He’s not God.’

  ‘And what are you doing about places like The Well? They’ve got enough water to make a fucking reservoir.’

  The official encouraged any such landowners with possible answers to contact the Drought Help and Information Line on 0816 . . .

  ‘Witchcraft,’ interrupted an old woman, standing at the back with a baby on her hip.

  ‘Chemicals.’

  ‘Stealing other people’s water.’

  Our neighbours were not short of suggestions.

  Mark elbowed his way through the crowd and we stumbled across the car park in the dark, me shouting at him to wait. We walked home in single file in silence, went to bed in silence, turned out the light in silence. We made promises when we moved here that we would not let the sun go down on a quarrel; we tried so hard to stick to our resolutions, but like the smoker in the pub on 2 January, the world was full of ways of failing.

  The next morning, I got up first, opened the shutters and looked out of the window. ‘I can’t stand it,’ I said to Mark.

  ‘Can’t stand what?’

  ‘The loneliness. The scent of overnight rain.’

  ‘Then you’re the only person in this wonderful United Kingdom of ours who feels that way,’ he replied, sitting on the side of the bed, pulling on his jeans, shivering. Despite the cold, we had scrupulously avoided touching each other all night, so that when my knee had brushed his back, we had both recoiled like strangers.

  ‘Do you know what? I’ve had just about enough of being on the receiving end of the general public’s accusations. We did that in London and it was no fun. Now, I just want to be like everyone else. I’d actually prefer to be part of their fucking drought.’

  Mark came to me, put his arm around me. I wanted to pull away, but I thought no, if I do that now there will be no going back. He’d asked me one night after a long interview with the police about the laptop, ‘Do you find me repulsive?’ We couldn’t go back to that. But as for The Well – Mark had no answers, just platitudes. It’s not called The Well for nothing. History. Geography. Geology. Logic. The lawyer and the farmer, his alter egos kept each other company, but his schizophrenic platitudes were not for me. I pushed him away, told him to use his eyes, look at our green grass, the snowdrops under our hedges, our tight budding trees. Now look beyond our boundary, at the landscape iron-grey and stubborn in its sickness. That’s not normal, I said. That’s not logical, Mark. Nor is the rain.

  ‘What about the rain?’

  ‘The rain. Like last night, it must have rained. We hardly ever see it rain, we don’t usually hear it rain, but it has clearly rained. And just here. Nowhere else in the whole glorious country has it rained properly for almost two years, but it rained here, last night, again. Here, we have unlimited access to our best friend the Rain God and we don’t even beat drums for him.’

  Mark thundered downstairs, without replying, ostensibly for breakfast, but from the little window on the landing I watched him, in that green jumper, standing between the rows of our fledgling winter wheat with Bru beside him, looking up at him with unconditional loyalty. He crouched down and picked up a feather, brushed it across his unshaven face. When he came back into the kitchen, I didn’t know if it was rain or tears on his cheeks, but whichever it was, I wanted to kiss them away, but there was a gap between us and my love didn’t seem wide enough to bridge it.

  Instead, I wiped my own eyes and made a suggestion. Perhaps we should contact the man from the ECDR or go ahead and get a supply licence and run a pipe down to the other farmers, then at least the locals would see we were not just taking our luck for granted.

  ‘Your “locals” were so unbelievably rude last night that they can go hang themselves for all I care,’ said Mark, then he sat down heavily at the table, rubbed his head in his hands. ‘Look, one drainpipe’s not going to solve their drought, Ruth.’ He picked up the spoon as if to start eating, but paused and held it up to his face, studying his distorted reflection for a moment before continuing. ‘It wasn’t what we came here for, a load of prying bureaucrats traipsing all over our land with their measuring equipment and weather stations and forms for this permission and data for that. The next thing you know they’ll slap a compulsory purchase order on the place. We came here to get away from all that crap and we’ve been doing so well, we’ve been doing so well,’ he said, stirring his cereal round and round. Congealed porridge. Hard boiled eggs. Burned toast. I pointed out that the crap seemed to have caught up with us and he pushed his chair back and grabbed his scarf, saying he needed time to think about things. I said fine, take all the time you need, I’m sure it’s not urgent, then fed the toast to the dog, put the eggs to one side for lunch, scraped the porridge into the bin, missed and made a filthy mess because of the rage and the tears and the hair in my face. Couldn’t be bothered to clear it up. Kicked the bin. Threw the bowl in the sink, cracked it.

  The first letter from the Drought Monitoring Watchdog arrived the following morning. Aerial photos showed a higher than normal level of water retention in the soil on our land and they wanted to drill a small, exploratory testing hole. The second letter arrived only three days later. As we had failed to lodge an objection to the first letter, within the specified time limit, the drilling would commence shortly. Third, fourth, fifth, innumerable letters asserted the rights of the state to use, take, drill, occupy, requisition our land. Mark ripped the envelopes into shreds, filed the forms in his desk, the lawyer in him furious at the breaching of proper procedures and the man in him railing at the disregard for his rights. He was going to fight it, he said, fight, fight, fight, thumping the table in time to his rage. Resting my hands on his fists, I tried to still him, pointing out that we could be entering a world where having the letter of the law on our side was not enough.

  Events proved me right, of course. We watched, at first incredulous and then fearful, as events unfolded at a smallholding in Devon called Duccombe, which, like ours, seemed to benefit from unlikely rain. The compulsory purchase order became an eviction order, the eviction order was enacted by bulldozers and bailiffs and the groups of protestors who had camped out at the farm in defence of the old couple who lived there were shown on the news with bloodied heads and placards stamped into the mud, as the riot police moved in. An ambulance was driven up to the house and it was confirmed later that the farmer had apparently died of a heart attack. Two days later, the farmhouse burned to the ground and conspiracy theories swept the internet as violently and rapidly as the flames which had consumed the thatch. The national uproar was deafening. Anyone with an interest in
the environment, human rights, farming, legal aid, signed a petition. Duccombe seemed to act as spark to the smouldering confusion about who was to manage this drought and how. Pent-up fury erupted: fury about profits being made by big businesses trading in water while elderly people’s homes were rationed and non-emergency operations were delayed, if not cancelled; fury about ministers filmed drinking wine on green lawns at Chequers while workers at car plants were put on a four-day week; fury about the exclusion of Westminster from proposed Level 5 drought restrictions, while children in some parts of the southeast only attended school in the morning to save electricity. A march in central London drew half a million people. The government faced a vote of no confidence in its handling of the water crisis. Three people died in clashes with police at a private reservoir on Lord Baddington’s estate.

  ‘What’s going to happen to us?’ I asked Mark, hugging my knees tight as I watched the news. The question was a familiar one; I had asked it before when we were under a different sort of attack in London, but Mark didn’t seem to hear the echo.

  ‘Not that,’ he said, aiming the remote at the television and silencing it. ‘They won’t force us from The Well. They wouldn’t dare now. They’ll be looking for some sort of agreement. We’re in a stronger position, because of Duccombe, even if we have to go all the way to court.’

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ I said. ‘I’m off to bed!’ I damped down the fire, gave Bru a biscuit and kissed him goodnight.

  Mark was partially correct. The official attack on us abated, but the locals were fighting a far more vicious war. Bru had been out hunting and failed to appear for his supper. We stayed out as dusk turned to dark, calling him, banging a spoon against his metal bowl, convinced that any moment now he would rustle up through the brambles, exhausted from hunting, slinking towards us with his tail wagging, expecting a scolding for being out late. We left the back door open for him. Mark said he’d be home, but I slept badly, creeping downstairs in the middle of the night, hoping I’d touch his soft body in the dim light, asleep by the Rayburn, or believing I could hear the click of his paws on the floorboards, coming upstairs to let us know he was safe. Mark felt the emptiness of the cottage as soon as he opened his eyes. He woke me and we dressed quickly in thick jumpers and boots and separated out over the fields to resume our search, our legs making slow work in the heavy mud, our shoulders hunched against the gusting easterly wind. Caught on barbed wire, stuck down a badger set, hit by a car – I went through all the possibilities. I wondered if he could have been shot as a sheep worrier, spotted in the distance, out amongst the pregnant ewes, but it seemed unlikely when the only people out on the land would have been the Taylors and they would recognise him. I beat the boundaries of The Well, praying that we would find him, calling his name over and over and over again. Someone told me later that if you’re searching you should not call relentlessly, because although the frantic clamour might seem purposeful at the time, it’s actually only ever in the silence that you can hear the cries for help.

  It would not have made any difference for Bru. He was lying amongst the sodden leaves and dead wood, camouflaged by the undergrowth and the detritus of the winter wood, soft feathers of a white pheasant resting like snow on the mould and the mulch around him. One front leg was bent at the joint with the soft paw towards me, the other straight, just like they used to be when he was twitching and dreaming in front of the fire. His head was stretched out before him at an unnatural angle, his eyes were open, but there was no love left in them. He was unmarked, undamaged, as perfect as he had ever been. I might have wished he was just injured, prayed that he would lift his head, convinced myself that his ribs were moving with the rhythm that signifies breath, swore blind that there was a twitch in his tail when he saw me – although I might have and I did wish all of those things, there was no point, because he was dead.

  Maybe people do fall on the bodies of those they love and weep into their stiff, cold hair, but I hardly dared to touch him. I shouted for Mark. I ran to the edge of the wood and screamed. He was too far away. I stumbled back, but there was no hurry. Bru was still there, nothing had changed, he was dead. How, it was not clear. Finally, I found the courage to feel the velvet of his ear between my fingers and stroke the long length of his young body, but there was no injury that I could feel. As I cried, I tried to lift him and as I tried to lift him, I cried. He was heavy. Fifteen bags of sugar; I was weighing my dead dog in bags of sugar. And awkward, rigid. He slipped from my circled arms and thudded to the ground and I had to start all over again, trying to be gentle, as though I were trying not to wake him. George’s is a wild wood, long neglected; nobody has thinned the trees for generations and the undergrowth, left to its own devices, has become tight and mean. The brambles pulled their knives and the roots raised their boots to trip me unawares. It was impossible to climb the fence carrying him, so I had to drop him over the wire. He landed as if he was worth nothing. Mark, I called again and again, I’ve found him, I’ve found him. When I was just within sight of the house, he saw me, came running, took Bru and laid him in front of the Rayburn, gently placing his beautiful, black and white head on a cushion and we clung to each other, worldless.

  The vet said it must have been deliberate, almost certainly a dead bird laced with a restricted strychnine-based pesticide, and he advised us to trawl the woods and dispose of any more bait.

  Mark dug the grave in grim silence, forcing the spade into the earth as if he could root out the pain, but I wept, noisily and helplessly. He said we had to wrap his body in plastic so the badgers would not disturb him, although how he knew such a thing about burials I’ve no idea. There were some rolls of polythene in the shed left over from the work on the barn roof, but I could not bring myself to fetch one. Then I struggled to help Mark fold the awkward sheeting over Bru’s stiff legs, couldn’t find the end of the tape to seal it over his dry muzzle, couldn’t control the scissors. I heaved from the bottom of my stomach; I did not know death smelled so rancid. We buried Bru at the top of the garden, the non-judgmental member of our family, who loved us unconditionally and who healed us, just by being between us.

  Bru’s death felt catastrophic to me. Inside the house, in the daytime, on my own, his loss tripped me up at the bottom of the stairs where he used to wait for us in the morning and got under my feet in the kitchen when I was cooking; the loneliness got under my skin when I sat in the silence and listened for him barking to be let back in.

  In the evenings, there were just the two of us again, our only company the unspoken memory of nights in West London with the front door double-locked and the security lights on in the driveway going on and off for no known reason.

  Outside, at night, it was fear which rustled the hedges and slammed the stable door unexpectedly behind me.

  ‘It’s as if someone has poisoned everything,’ I said. ‘Just to know there are people out there who hate us that much.’

  However much they hated us, Mark hated them even more in return. I had never seen hatred in his eyes before that time.

  Someone told me once how quickly it becomes difficult to picture the dead. That has not proved to be the case for me: the dead are with me always – but the living? Angie I can see clearly, her absence is so painful that her presence in my mind is almost tangible. With Mark, I struggle to recall his face. There remains an Impressionist’s portrait of him, or maybe a Cubist version, with disconnected parts of him, lying against each other in conflict on the canvas: the hint of his half-Greek missing mother in the sallow complexion, the thick, dark hair, the straight lips where I used to rest my fingers, those eyes, those deep-set, brown eyes. But these things do not make a face, maybe because he has not visited me once since the funeral, maybe because I fear what I may see reflected in those eyes. I cannot hear his voice either and I dare not imagine what he might say if he were to speak. And then there’s Sister Amelia who I can see and not see. Her hologram is always flickering just out of reach; she conjures herself up wheth
er I want to remember her or not.

  I pull the blanket up over my head and hide.

  Boy stands at the kitchen door and says something about needing to check the monitor. He doesn’t exactly knock, but at least he hesitates – unlike the others. ‘Boyish enthusiasm’ springs to mind, a cliché, but true in his case, I imagine. His eyes smile a lot, even when he is supposed to be looking serious, and he has thin, dislocated limbs a bit like a yearling. He must be over six foot, but even so he can’t quite reach, so he drags a chair across the room to the corner where one of the cameras is mounted, climbs up and removes a wire.

  ‘I thought you might want to know,’ he begins, ‘that the shrink has called. He was asking if your medication needed to be increased.’

  ‘The answer is no,’ I tell him, biting my black fingernails.

  Still on the chair, he looks down at me, the battery in his hand, his head at a ludicrous angle against the beam, squashing his spiky blond hair. ‘It’s just that if they think you’re not taking it, then they’ll move to a patch or injections. You’re still sectioned, and apparently they can do that whether you want it or not.’ He pauses and turns his attention back to the monitor, as if a little embarrassed. ‘I thought it was your right to know, that’s all.’

  He reaches up to reconnect the wire.

  ‘I’d better get washed and dressed then,’ I say.

  He steps down, turns his back to the camera and makes a thumbs up sign. ‘Good idea,’ he mouths and leaves.

  It occurs to me that I smell, but there’s no one here to tell me. Anyway, for some reason, this boy soldier seems to have risked something for this unwashed woman and his warning energises me to take control. I wrestle my mind into logic: I do not want to be medicated or hospitalised because I need to be here and I need to be able to think; I need to stay here, because here is the only place I am ever likely to find out what happened; there are things which were never found here which mattered – like the jumper, the rose, the truth.