Читать книгу The Well - Catherine Chanter - Страница 9

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, understanding 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.

‘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.