Читать книгу The Well - Catherine Chanter - Страница 10

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 the 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.

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 whether I want to remember her or not.

I pull the blanket up over my head and hide.