‘It rained, though, didn’t it? And there’s no denying it’s still raining here.’ Hugh takes a sip of water, his hand shaking as he raises the glass to his lips.
‘Well, I wish it would stop fucking raining here.’
‘You should try to understand what it might mean for the rest of the country that it still rains here. Do you really understand what it’s like out there, Ruth? People are struggling. Think of the price of a tin of soup – and the women with the little ones to feed and the old folk trying to find the pennies to keep the budgie that’s their only friend. And it doesn’t just rain here, it drizzles, pours, comes down cats and dogs. Just to say those words, Ruth, that’s a blessing in itself. This is a holy water one way or another, however you look at it.’ He looks at the glass. ‘This is a blessed place.’
‘That’s what the Sisters used to say.’
‘Then they got one thing right.’
The cushion is a mess now; I’ll have to mend it or bin it. I’ve had enough of his preaching. He may not have had news about Mark and Angie, but he hasn’t said anything about what he might have got from the internet about the Sisters. He can’t share it here, not with the camera winking at us. We need to move outside, but he looks settled in for the duration, sagging in the armchair as if he is in the lounge of a five-star hotel after a good dinner.
‘Let’s go outside.’
Hugh nods. ‘As you wish.’ And starts to ease himself forward in the chair with difficulty.
There are many ways to become a monster; I do not know why I feel the need to explore them all.
‘You know, it’s not that nice out there. We’re fine here.’ I perch on the arm of the sofa. I want him to go now. He has brought me nothing and I don’t have the patience for an afternoon with the elderly, but I persevere.
‘Thank you. It is probably easier for me here, today. Now, you wanted to know how I was getting on learning about the internet,’ he continues. ‘I’d say I’m making steady progress.’ He looks up at the camera and back to me. ‘I think there is a great art to searching successfully. Like life, you have to know what you’re looking for, otherwise you get led a merry dance. And to know what you’re looking for, you have to know what you know already.’
All right. We’ll come at the truth this way round.
Breach: a noun which became part of our vocabulary, but an act which had in fact lessened in frequency over the weeks since the article. Mark put this down to his habit of firing off a few rounds over the heads of intruders to ‘get the message out there’ and there was no arguing with him about the legality of this. Breach birth, those are words which come to mind now to describe the arrival of the Sisters.
There was no strange glow above the Hedditch field, no heavenly host on high in the evenings announcing their presence, no sense of peace spreading throughout our increasingly war-torn paradise. But there were four caravans, four nuns and one mission. It sounds like the beginning of a shaggy dog story and, in a way, I suppose it was.
The tyre tracks left the gravel and crossed the grass. Mark had no need to drive that way and the travellers had learned not to incur his wrath by carving up the fields with their vans. I stopped to listen to a cuckoo, the first I’d heard that year. His duplicitous call was echoed by singing. It was a damp heat that evening and the notes clung to the low cloud like scent. It was a chant more than a tune and the lapses and surges suggested that someone, who I could hardly hear, was leading, with others responding. As the cuckoo took to the skies to the east, the music seemed to grow from the valley to the left of the track, its base notes reaching their stems down into the roots of the forests, its treble climbing high over the stave to where the lark flutters like a tremolo. It swelled with the rise of the breeze and dropped as invisibly, moving in unison like wind through wheat. It was an English music, I thought, our history in the breathing in, our future in its exhalation and I was captured in the present moment of it being sung.
There was still no one to be seen even when I reached the hedge which marks the edge of the field. I sat on the stile with my back against the wood, my knees bent, my feet on the ground, but losing touch with the turning world so completely that I was unaware of Angie arriving behind me. She touched my shoulder, I turned, she held her finger to her lips and together we listened. Finally, the singing ceased and there was silence like clear glass; through it you could see in a way you had not seen before. We crept forward until, at the solitary oak in the middle of the field, she motioned for me to stop. Below us there were the caravans and women moving between them, a silent pageant so strange I wondered if it was real at all.
‘I knew you wouldn’t mind,’ Angie whispered.
Now I look back I can see it always was a game of power with Angie and it seems to me she held most of the cards. Three-handed whist we played, Mark, Angie and I, with her calling trumps and splitting our longest suits. I wonder now, did we manage to stay married for so long in spite of Angie, or because of her?
‘You know them?’ I ask her.
‘Yes. No. Well, I know about them.’ Even in her new-found truthfulness, dissembling was still a habit for her. She told me what she knew of their story. These women had all met for the first time on a retreat at a priory in Wales. Their leader had some sort of revelation about a new way forward and they all joined up. To Angie that seemed quite straightforward; I had my doubts, to say the least. Are they Christians? Sort of, she thought. Angie had let them in. Apparently, someone in the village had seen the caravans arriving and had phoned the police who turned up ‘all guns blazing’, as Angie put it. Then there was something of a stand-off until she arrived and told the pigs – ‘sorry, Mum, I meant the police’ – that the nuns were there with our permission. I made some feeble complaint, about it not being her decision and all those tired lines I’d used before when she had invited other sorts of people to sleep on our floors and puke in our bathrooms. But this was different, she insisted, these people have been led here.
‘By whom?’
‘By their god, “The Rose” they call her. You heard it in their music as much as I did. Mum, there’s something special going on here, you can’t deny that.’
I could deny whatever I wanted to, I said. What I couldn’t do was to deny what Angie had done and that it would need to be explained to Mark. I told Angie I was going to talk to these semi-nuns before I made up my mind, and besides, who was looking after Lucien while she was up here being spiritual? How ridiculous that I doubted her ability to look after her son, but I did and I must live with that. She didn’t take offence, she hugged me, told me to go and meet them.
‘You’ll like them,’ she called back as she climbed back up the field, ‘they don’t come empty-handed, they bring something for you. They know all about you.’
By the time I made my way down the hillside, the women had disappeared and the little encampment was mute and a little less awe-inspiring. I hovered in the middle of the circle of caravans, unsure of myself, the wind catching a couple of T-shirts hanging from an improvised washing line. Close enough to peer through the window, I saw inside, obscured by condensation, four pale statues in a tableau around a fold-out Formica table. One seemed to be reading out loud while the others ate. It was the reader who caught sight of me. She passed the book to her neighbour as the other eyes looked up at the window. I half raised my hand in greeting; they bowed their heads, folded their hands and appeared to pray, food apparently no longer of interest to them.
With the click of shoes on metal steps, the reader came round the caravan. I psyched myself up to be assertive, but was left disarmed when the tall woman dropped to her knees, her long auburn hair covering her face, kissed the hem of my shirt while whispering something under her breath, and then stood again with tears in her eyes and her hands open wide. She was imposing, statuesque and, apart from the strikingly erotic hair, curiously androgynous.
‘Ruth!’ she said. ‘Ruth Brigitta Rose!’ And the wind picked up my maiden name and took it aw
ay along with the rest of myself and lost it in the gathering clouds.
Later she said, ‘We have travelled a long way to find you.’
She also said, ‘Welcome. I am Sister Amelia.’
She pulled the land from under my feet. There were some paltry attempts on my part to define ownership and boundaries and explain that Angie had no right to let them in, versus Sister Amelia’s repeated assurances that all this was meant to be, that all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well. Finally I managed to turn away, saying something about getting back, lunch, needing to talk more tomorrow, but I knew already that I would not be asking them to leave. Angie’s words played again in my head. They bring something for you. Pull yourself together, Ruth, and see them as they are: a bunch of weird and hopeless women resorting to mind games. But then, what was wrong with belief? I had to believe in something. Everything else was quietly sliding to nothing.
I have had long enough to think of explanations and have a lifetime left ahead of me to think of more. I have conversed with psychologists, psychiatrists, scientists, priests, psychics and myself. I have consulted the stars and the tea leaves, looked for answers in the shapes of clouds and faces in the bark of trees, strangely wrought. Some people see Jesus in a packet of processed cheese: that would have been as close to the truth as any. Who can blame me for choosing the cheese.
That day, pausing beside the lonely oak on my way back to the house and looking down at what, after all, was nothing more than four tin boxes with four lost souls, choice slipped through my fingers. True, I could have gone up to the cottage, phoned the police with my special URN number and sided with Mark – but when I got back, Mark was out. We never went anywhere, but an old school friend of his had been in touch, doing a valuation at yet another estate selling up about twenty miles from The Well and he had suggested meeting up for a drink. That day of all days, he was not there for me. The phone call from an old friend had been a bright moment in a difficult month for him and I thought it would do Mark good to get out. God knows when he had last seen any friends. This way he could have a few beers, regain a sense of perspective, maybe calm down. He was never much of a down-the-pub type, slightly on the edge of conversations about league tables and play-offs, but Will had been a good mate to him in the past, never wavering, and Mark had gone to meet him, after I reassured him that nothing could go wrong while he was away. Later he rang from the bar, clearly a little pissed, to say he was too drunk to drive and would be staying over and would I be all right on my own at The Well. Yes, I said, I am fine on my own at The Well.
So, for that one evening only, out of all the evenings, I was on my own. The lights from the houses way over the other side of the valley were dimmed by low cloud, shadows of sheep moved out of the mist towards me and away again, and an owl swooped low over the Hedditch where it found a branch and perched, motionless. It smelled of rain. So often, I had woken in the morning to damp grass and puddles, the drip from the gutters into the water butt, the sudden shower when the squirrel shook the oak, but I rarely actually saw it fall or felt it. Upstairs, under my duvet, the wind lifted the latch on the half-open window and drifted me in and out of sleep. It was not unusual for me to sleep alone, but now that Mark was actually away, I craved him, the round of his back, the warmth of him; his absence was a reminder of how well we fitted together.
It was in this half haze of a sleep that I dreamed about the rain: I was trapped in a metal matchbox and the rain was splattering on the tin roof of my miniature home; outside people were dancing to the drums of the raindrops, trying to rouse me; inside, the beating of my fists on the walls was mistaken by them for rhythm and rapture. Half awake, I struggled to divide the dream from the night, but realised they were one and the same thing and, disoriented, I groped my way downstairs and out of the house. There were shapes in the darkness: the oak reaching heavenwards; the night-purple poplars pulling the veil of cloud over their faces and weeping into the brook which ran at their feet; the fields, like me, lying naked the better to feel the rain on their skin; and the outcrops of rock on the Crag washed clean by new streams. The shower slowed and was gone, the diminishing clouds released the moon and allowed her to regain her place, illuminating the silver puddles on the gravel. I had tasted the rain and it was good.
When I woke, it was dawn and I was not sure what had happened in the hours of darkness. Only the trace of footprints, writing in bare feet and mud across the kitchen floor told the story of where I had been. Even more dishevelled than usual after my restless night, I didn’t bother to wash or do my teeth, but pulled on Mark’s dressing gown and retraced those footsteps in an attempt to recapture the night. I went out of the kitchen into the back passage, out through the back door, unlocked as always, then followed the barely visible path through the long grass, ending up at the huge oak at the gate, and there was the woman, the woman with the long auburn hair. She was standing in a rainbow-coloured nightshirt, with the sun just cresting the horizon behind her and the concerto of the dawn chorus around her.
‘Good morning, Ruth,’ she said. ‘Welcome to the first day.’
‘Morning,’ I replied. ‘You’re up very early.’ I sounded absurd, as if I had bumped into someone on the way to catch the 6.45 to Waterloo.
‘I was very excited,’ she said. ‘I haven’t slept, I wanted to know every drop of rain; like you, I wanted to feel it on my skin.’
I didn’t know if I had heard her correctly, or understood her. She was implying that she was with me last night, or at the very least knew where I was and what I was doing. She seemed to know everything about me. I pulled the dressing gown tight around me. I was naked last night. I was on my own then and now. What was this woman doing prowling around my cottage at dawn?
‘Oh yes, the rain, I suppose we’ve become a little blasé about it,’ I lied. ‘No, that’s stupid. What I really mean is that we’ve become used to it and it has brought problems as well as solutions, you know.’
‘Blessings,’ she said.
‘Sorry?’
‘Blessings. Solutions are blessings.’
I wished the dressing gown had not lost its cord. ‘And problems are problems whatever you do with the language,’ I told her. ‘You’ve obviously come here thinking this is some sort of paradise, but actually it’s a bit hellish, stuck up here, no company, hated by everyone around, trying to make ends meet. You need to understand that.’
Amelia came towards me, her arms outstretched, and hugged me, but at the point at which a stranger should have let go, she carried on holding me and at the point at which I should have politely wriggled free, I found my face hidden against her shoulder, her hair smelling of lavender; ridiculously I found myself close to crying. She said that she knew how hard it had been for me, but that she was there for me now, her and all the Sisters, that I wouldn’t be alone any longer. I was going to say that I was not alone, that I had Mark, but I didn’t say that and when we broke apart, she turned and left, diminishing as she crossed the field towards their caravans, but growing larger and larger in my mind.
Mark arrived back mid-morning, hungover and fraught. People are getting desperate out there, he said. He had had a difficult time at the gate: some woman with a kid had run alongside the car holding onto the handle and when he’d got out to undo the padlock, she’d tried to push the little boy into the car, saying that now he’d have to let them in. He hardly paused to dump his bag, before pulling on his boots as he continued to talk.
‘She was crying about how she didn’t have a job, how she’d work for us. It was horrible, Ruth. Horrible. I had to shove her aside and slam the gate. Then the kid started climbing and I thought he’d get an electric shock and I was shouting to her to make him get down.’ He reached for the shed keys.
‘Come and sit down,’ I suggested. ‘It sounds awful.’
He looked at the keys. ‘I suppose it can wait,’ he relented and came back and kissed me. ‘Will was reminding me that I married the sexiest girl at Uni,’ he sai
d.
At the table, he moved on to more ordinary-extraordinary news. The price of beer: apparently it takes forty-five pints of water to make one pint. And Will had then joked that Jesus would be turning wine into water if he was around now, though he’d do better as a dealer: cocaine is cheaper than cider and it seems half the country is permanently stoned. They had been drinking at the hotel bar, because there were hardly any pubs left. We had realised of course that our local, The Bridge, had closed some time ago but had no idea the problem was so widespread.
‘I’ve spent a fortune, I’m afraid. We’ll have to take out a mortgage just to pay for the booze. Still, it was a small price to pay for a bit of escapism.’
Other things he’d noticed: standpipes, boarded-up garden centres, the army in convoys escorting water tankers on half-empty motorways. It crept up on people, he said, that’s what Will and he reckoned. Year after year of below average rainfall, the odd farmer in the south-east going bust, car washes out of order and then before you know it, drought. He wasn’t surprised The Well was such big news.
‘We’ve lost touch with what it’s really like out there,’ he said.
‘You could have let her in,’ I said quietly, ‘the woman and the little boy.’
Mark finished his coffee and chucked the mug in the sink. ‘Oh yes,’ he said sarcastically. ‘Every single one of them who leaves begging notes for jobs pinned to the gatepost. We could let all of them in, couldn’t we? But then there’d be no room for us. You just don’t get it.’
‘Are you interested in my news?’ I asked.
‘Sorry.’ He wrapped his arms around me. ‘Let’s not argue.’
The break had done him good; he even tasted of the outside world – smoke and borrowed toothpaste. Perhaps my news could wait, because in some way I felt I had betrayed him and The Well that morning, with the hug and telling a complete stranger how bad things were, and I wanted to repair that infidelity. Then again, perhaps it couldn’t wait. It was more than likely that he and the nun would meet and she would mention what had happened.
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