Читать книгу The Well - Catherine Chanter - Страница 12

Sitting outside, my back to the stone wall at the rear of the house, inviting the spring sun to repair my prison-pale face, my heart is beating a little faster in the knowledge that today I will have a visitor. I wait, half in hope, half in fear, counting the minutes. Then, through the haze, I spot a black lumbering shape at the top of the drive. For a split second I think a Friesian has got loose, before remembering that there are no cows around here any longer. A few moments later the cow becomes a man wearing a dark suit, a black hat and a billowing black raincoat and carrying a white plastic bag. He must be the only person in England who still possesses a raincoat. The man is limping slightly, inching along the track and like most people, when he reaches the crest of the hill, he stops and looks around him, but he stays there much longer than most, sitting on the raised verge beneath the turbine for a few minutes before getting up heavily, brushing down his trousers and picking up his bag and continuing on towards the house. Here is my priest. Enter The Reverend Hugh Casey.

God knows the last thing I need is another persuasive religious, let alone a male version. This distrust of men is the legacy of Amelia and her sisters, I tell myself: you should rid yourself of this prejudice. On the way into the house, I pick some daffodils from the wilderness of weeds straggling along the edge of the drive, stick them randomly in a redundant milk jug and put them in the middle of the table; it isn’t something I’ve done since I returned here, but today I am entertaining.

Boy announces the priest’s arrival like a maître d’. ‘Ruth, meet The Reverend Hugh Casey. Come on in, sir.’

‘No, no, I’ll wait for the good lady of the house to invite me in.’

It is a polite, cultured voice with a hint of an Irish accent. The body which accompanies it is large and the face is flushed, although whether that is from the walk or embarrassment I don’t know. I play my part and greet him; he takes my one thin hand in his two warm palms and holds it slightly longer than I am prepared for. In the kitchen he introduces himself again, takes off his coat and hat and hangs them over the edge of the chair.

‘Not your local man, I’m afraid. They dug me out of retirement for this. I can only suppose it’s because I live relatively close and many years ago used to be the chaplain at a military hospital. Hardly guaranteed secure, but that’s the way their minds work, I suspect.’

‘Well, thank you for coming anyway.’ I offer him a cup of tea.

‘Ah. Now, that’s where I can make myself useful,’ he says and rummages in his plastic bag. He pulls out a Bible, which was to be expected, a small wooden box with a cross on it which he says contains the holy sacrament and a little flask. ‘I gather you have the water,’ he says, ‘I can provide the milk.’

This is proper milk, milk that we drank as children in great gulping mouthfuls, milk that we poured onto cocoa on bonfire night. The smell of it spills over my mind and I am drunk on the memory.

‘I have my own cow,’ he pronounces. ‘A Jersey, Annalisa by name.’

Giggling in church at Christmas was always my forte when I was small and something about the priest in my kitchen is making me revert to childish ways. That or hysteria. I stick my head in the drawer, ostensibly rummaging for a spoon.

‘I’m sure you’d love her. She is particularly beautiful. I have to say that she is the love of my life.’

‘They let you keep her?’ Now I am really hunting for sugar, because although I am not familiar with the clergy, he looks like the sort of vicar who takes sugar – a lot of sugar.

‘Let them try and stop me, that’s what I said. Truth be told, I played the holy card. Said that the priest of the village had ancient rights to graze one cow on the common land and if they tried to remove her, I’d take it up to the House of Lords. God seems to be exempt, you see, from the effect of their emergency powers and it would have been a frightful nuisance for them, so they went away like most bullies do in the end.’

Interesting though this line of thinking is, I want nothing to stop me savouring the taste of tea with real milk, so we sit at the table together, sipping in silence like connoisseurs. As predicted, he adds a lot of sugar and gazes around the kitchen expectantly. I wonder if he is expecting cucumber sandwiches and bourbon biscuits arranged in a circle on a porcelain plate, because he is not only old, but old-fashioned, a sort of living anachronism. It has to be a possibility that he, too, is not what he seems. I pick up the thread of his conversation.

‘I didn’t know that. I’m surprised no one suggested the ecclesiastical legal route to me for The Well. After all, it had become a religious place of sorts by the time I was arrested.’

‘Not the same at all, my dear, not in their book. God forbid anyone might start accessing eternal life by any means other than the C of E. Now, are you going to show me round?’

Having explained the limitations of my imprisonment, we set off, past the back gate (‘This must be where you got the daffodils,’ he says, ‘such a wonder to see a vase of real flowers on a kitchen table nowadays’), on through the budding orchard and then down through First Field. He apologises for repeating himself, praising God like it was Easter Day all over again. ‘But you must see the wonder of it for me, can you not see the wonder of it, the green of the grass and that pink colour you get when the trees are in bud?’

Once he calms down, we walk slowly and we talk freely. We talk about varieties of tomatoes, we talk about dust, we talk about the Holy Land and about water and a shared childhood experience of swimming off the coast of Exmoor, where the pebbles gang up with the waves to drag you under. He describes being a prisoner of war and we share an understanding of freedom based on barbed wire and spotlights. We find ourselves, inevitably I suppose, looking down at Wellwood, and he says, so is that where it all happened, and I say, yes, that is the place, but I don’t go there, and he asks me if I mind if he prays. He closes his eyes and bows his head and his prayer is silent; mine is written in dried leaves floating on the surface of the water out of sight, under the trees. I appreciate the way he asks no questions, offers no answers. Making our way back up the hill to the house, I am conscious that I am emaciated and unfit, but that for him this is really hard work, he is definitely overweight and rather purple in the face. I am no doctor, but it’s not hard to diagnose high blood pressure and to hazard a guess at a root cause: too many years putting too much Jersey cream on too many scones when it would have been rude to say no.

‘I was surprised you requested a priest,’ he puffs and pauses and puffs again. ‘After all that has happened here with the Sisters of the Rose of Jericho. Who was the one? Sister Amelia, was it? Haven’t you had enough of religion?’

His question reminds me that I had not intended to like him. ‘I wanted a visitor,’ I say.

‘Any old visitor?’

‘I am not spoiled for choice. You were one they couldn’t refuse.’

‘No other reason for a priest then?’

I hesitate, deciding to be economical with the truth. ‘I am haunted,’ I say. ‘I thought you’d bring some answers with you.’

‘Who haunts you?’

‘There are any number of ghosts here. It depends on where I am, what I am doing. There are the Sisters, there are . . .’ I stop myself, I will not name the others. ‘There are others, I’m sure you’ve heard all about it.’ We pause at the top of the hill and look out over the fields and onto the yellow ochre hills beyond and I continue, ‘But here, at this spot, I am haunted by the ghost of a farmer. He was our neighbour, Tom. He was an absolute lifeline for us when we moved in. I don’t know how we would have survived without him, ordinary things, everyday stuff. It’s difficult to explain, but it almost came as a shock to us, his kindness, after everything we’d been through. We could hardly believe it was real.’

His old milking parlour is visible from here; the corrugated iron which patched up the roof is catching the afternoon light. Fool’s gold.

‘Sometimes, if I am sitting out here, I see him walking the hedges, checking the lambs. He had a habit of tying baler twine around the gateposts in a clove hitch. They hung around for ages, the bits of orange string, like those gaudy flowers people tie to lampposts after an accident. Then it seems as though he is coming over to chat to me, but he looks straight through me, walks straight through me. My only visitors are ghosts.’

‘Times have been hard for farmers,’ acknowledges the priest, but I am not listening to him. I am both the storyteller and audience.

‘We did try to help. They used to farm the Well land, you know, before we arrived. Eventually, we offered to run pipes from the Wellspring down through his farm and Martin’s, but they were very suspicious of us by then, wanted to know what was in it for us, pointed out we hadn’t got a licence to supply and then Mark wouldn’t apply for one because he’d never wanted to do it in the first place and the whole idea fell flat.’

‘I’m sure you did what you could at the time.’

‘It wasn’t enough, was it? One night, after supper, with his wife in the kitchen doing the washing up and the brown envelopes piling up on the sideboard, he swapped his slippers for boots, his cardigan for his tweed jacket and pulled on his cap that he kept for market days. Then, it seems, he slipped out of the house, across the yard and wedged the barn door closed behind him with two fifty-pound plastic sacks of chicken feed. I expect he wanted to make sure that only a man could find him, do you think that’s why?’

The Revd Casey half raises his arms, empty-handed; he doesn’t offer an opinion, he doesn’t have answers. ‘I think I know where this story is leading, Ruth, you don’t have to do this.’ He reaches out as if to touch me, but I flinch him away. He is wrong. I do have to do this.

‘It was new rope, you know, brand new, slung over the oak beam and secured around the handlebars of the quad bike. They owed a lot of money on that. Imagine him, taking time to steady himself as he climbs onto the old chair, clutching at the fractured ladderback until slowly, like a tightrope walker, he straightens up and catches the end of the rope and ties the knot. He was very good at knots, did I mention that? He still had his cap on when they found him; that would have mattered to him.’

‘The suicide rate among farmers has been something dreadful, may God rest his soul.’

The priest crosses himself and we sit on the grass in silence. I respect people who are good at silence. I’ve been to two funerals at Little Lennisford; Tom’s was the first. It wasn’t as hard as the second, but it wasn’t easy. Both of them – guilt and grief – hand in glove.

Finally there is a question from the audience. ‘Can you say why you are telling me all this? Were you thinking that I might be an exorcist?’

‘It’s far too late for that. Maybe if you – if any of you – had come along earlier. But you weren’t there when it mattered and I fell for it, the whole religious scenario, and now it’s too late.’ I get to my feet. He takes longer to struggle up and I am torn between offering to help him and watching him flounder.

‘Is it our fault then?’ he asks when he is finally standing.

‘Whose?’

‘Those of us who weren’t there when it mattered.’

I kick at a molehill without replying.

He continues. ‘God was there, somewhere. For you. For Tom. It is never too late to face the ghosts, you know.’ Now he is wheezing in his attempt to keep up with me, breathless by the time we get to the gate. ‘Come on, you wouldn’t expect to invite a vicar for tea and to get away without a sermon, would you?’

‘I became rather used to doing the preaching myself,’ I tell him. ‘I was probably as good as the next charlatan. Because that’s what it is in the end, isn’t it? All lights and mirrors. Besides, I’m not interested in the meaning of life any longer. There is only one question to be answered, as far as I am concerned, only one truth to be found. Nothing else matters.’

‘To not know who killed your own grandson is a terrible thing. I can only imagine the pain of not knowing,’ he says.

Three is waiting for us, ostentatiously checking his watch. ‘Your pass expires at 5 p.m.,’ he says.

The Reverend smiles beatifically. ‘The Lord alone knows when our time is up.’

Church: one – army: nil. I hate to say it, but I like his spirit.

‘I don’t want to outstay my welcome, or indeed jeopardise my chances of coming again, so I’ll be off. If my parishioner and I might just have a moment?’ The Reverend holds the silence and under pressure Three retreats. ‘Now, about the Eucharist . . .’

I put my hands in my pockets. ‘You’ve probably gathered by now that it wasn’t . . .’

‘Exactly as I thought.’ Revd Casey goes inside and through the kitchen window I can see him busying himself with the plastic bag, the Bible, the little box, the flask, while Three and I wait at a distance from each other without talking. The priest comes out and smiles benevolently towards the waiting soldier. ‘Ruth and I have shared a very special time here today.’ He raises an eyebrow quizzically as he looks at me.

It seems I have a choice, an unfamiliar feeling, but it doesn’t take me long to make up my mind. Apart from anything else, I think this old priest could be easily manipulated and will have his uses. ‘Thank you, Reverend,’ I say loudly. ‘I look forward to seeing you next week.’

‘If I’m to come again, then you must call me Hugh. I will be here, same time next week. God bless you both.’

The priest – Hugh, as I must learn to call him – begins his slow walk back up to the road, pausing again at the brow of the hill where I think I see his right hand rise and fall in the sign of the cross, although he may just have been adjusting his hat.

‘A very holy man,’ I comment to Three.

‘I wouldn’t know,’ Three replies.

Nor would I.

The whole house feels different, even the air hangs awkwardly; neither of us is used to visitors. I walk through my garden in the dying light and reclaim it, surprised by how disorientated I am at this contact with another human being. He was right about one thing: there are ghosts to be confronted here. I turn back and go inside, but it takes a long time before I get as far as the landing. I stare at the closed door which separates me from Lucien’s room and strain to hear beyond the silence. My thumb is on the latch, my fingers around the black metal handle. I press and release the catch and open the door, just an inch or two, just enough to check the night-time breathing. Without going in, I reach around the doorframe and fumble for the switch, stepping into the room for the first time since I have been back. It is virtually empty, except for a black bin liner of Lucien’s things returned to us by the police, tied in a knot which I will never be able to undo. The mattress on the bed lies sullen and ugly – no sheet, no duvet, no pillow to grace it. No head on the pillow. No hair on the head. No carved wooden rose hung with a leather thread around his neck. To not know who murdered your grandson is a terrible thing. If only I were to find the wooden rose, I would be one step closer to knowing.

I move the bedside light as if the rose necklace might have just dropped down behind, in the way that in more ordinary times pound coins find the gaps between cushions or earrings rest between floor-boards, but there is, of course, nothing. On my stomach I force my chewed fingernails between the cracks in the floorboards, lie face down with my mouth licking the dust, squinting into the darkness; on my knees I crawl to the bed and drag it from the wall so that the spiders scuttle from the skirting boards. Not this room then, not here, but surely somewhere there is a small rose carved in wood and threaded with leather and if that was found, then the truth would be next.

In the bathroom, the medicine cabinet has been emptied by the guards, all cleaning fluids locked away, but I can still rip up the carpet and tear down the false hardboard wall which conceals the pipes, cutting my arm on the screws sticking out of the plaster. Downstairs, I can claw the curtains from the rails and I do; I can empty the coal dust from the bucket and shower the sitting room black so that it too can be in mourning, and I do; I can pull the emptied drawers from the sideboard and dislocate the sides from the front, the bottom from the sides, the brass handles from the front, and I do. I must, because somewhere is the small wooden rose which my grandson wore and which has never been found and if I can find it, if I can only find it . . . Nothing will stop me searching, nothing, nothing, nothing.

‘Can you speak to me, Ruth?’

There are men on my brittle arms, over my wasted legs, the weight of men on top of me. Sister Amelia warned me about the weight of men, holding you under until you cannot breathe any longer. I am offered a drink in a small, cardboard beaker and I know it is poison from the moment it sleeps my tongue.