The Well

by Catherine Chanter

  So I told him about the Sisters. I lied for the first time that morning and said that it was me who had let the nuns in and given them permission to stay, not Angie. He said he thought I was mad, that he could scarcely get his head around it. Just before he slammed the door, he asked if I’d checked the sheep and I replied of course, indignantly, and wondered how I could possibly have forgotten.

  Up at the travellers’ camp, I found Angie and some of the others had taken the offer of a day’s work shifting some rotten straw from a barn and had left early that morning. Charley had stayed behind and he explained to me how his damaged leg restricted the physical work he could do. It turns out that he’d jumped from a multi-storey car park, thinking he could fly when he was high as a kite.

  ‘Lucien’s gone too,’ he said.

  Furious, I told him I thought it was totally irresponsible taking a small boy to do bale-loading where he could get squashed.

  ‘You mustn’t worry so much. Angie’s a great mum you know. People change,’ he added.

  He made tea and I sat with him on one of the logs they had dragged from the woods. He continued sewing, large hands on the ends of scarred arms holding the needle gently, mending the tear in the tent with surprising deftness.

  ‘People do change,’ he repeated. The repair was neat – tiny, almost invisible stitches in a carefully matched cotton re-attached the zip to the tent lining, evenly spaced, evenly taut. He checked his work by running the zip carefully up and down. ‘Mended.’

  ‘Will it hold?’ I asked.

  ‘As long as someone keeps an eye on it, yes.’

  Charley limped with me as far as the track. ‘Tell me about these nuns of Angie’s,’ he said.

  ‘You can’t see them from here,’ I told him, ‘they’re down in the dip.’

  ‘I know that, but what do they believe?’

  Good question.

  ‘Do you think they’ll stay long?’ he asked.

  ‘No idea,’ I replied. ‘And you, and Angie and Lucien? How long will you stay?’

  ‘No idea either,’ he laughed. ‘But we’ll need to move on at the end of the summer, find somewhere warmer to live, like the birds.’

  I could not risk another encounter with Sister Amelia, not without losing all the glue, safety pins and drawing pins which had kept everything together this far, but nor could I face the day in front which seemed to show me in all its emptiness what it would be like when Lucien and all the swallows were gone. Back at the cottage, I picked up a bucket of cleaning things and found a new packet of bicarbonate and thought how old-fashioned we’d become as a society, the smiling faces of the 1940s housewife being the new chic, gracing adverts on everything from vinegar to powdered milk and exhorting us to summon up that wartime spirit as the nation faced its new enemy. Suitably armed, I went to the barn, determined that Angie would never have an excuse to leave. No one had slept in it for a long time – friends who might have come and stayed had stayed away instead and tourists were the last thing on our minds, although I am sure we could have let it out for a fortune if we had chosen. ‘One week in Paradise – only £150 self-catering.’ The only problem would be getting people to leave; The Well had been a story of entrances and exits, but there is no logic as to who leaves and who stays.

  The guards have changed the barn, of course, enlarging the living quarters and putting up partition walls, adding another toilet and putting in a whole load of electronic gadgets. Not so much a barn now as a barracks.

  That day, I cleaned the barn, scrubbed the sink, threw out the sliver of soap left on the basin and poured cleaner into the toilet which had been unflushed for so long that it had left a brown rim around the bowl. I chipped away at the blue mould between the shower tray and the wall which was blotching the white tiles until they looked like old slices of bread at the bottom of the packet.

  With clean sheets from the airing cupboard, I made the bed, running my hands over and smoothing the fresh pillowcases, wondering about Angie and Charley and imagining them setting up home here. Then I lay on the bed, aching with the awareness of my solitude, half hearing a line from a poem on the edge of my memory. The glacier knocks in the cupboard, the desert sighs in the bed. That was it. Auden. I had taught that in London and wondered then how the throbbing adolescents before me were meant to understand the bleakness of the sexually impoverished marriage. Back then I had understood by proxy, through shared intimacies from friends with failing partnerships, but after a year at The Well, I knew it for myself. I spoke the rest of the verse out loud into the silence: ‘And the crack in the tea-cup opens a lane to the land of the dead.’

  I undid the top button of my jeans and slid my hand between my legs, letting the sharp urge catch my breath. As my finger worked its method, my eyes fixed on the whitewashed ceiling until I saw a spider, spinning a web down from the cracked oak beam above my head, its bulbous body turning and turning in the shaft of light, closer and closer. Suddenly the fear of the touch of its legs on my face made me scream and I tore my hand from my jeans and scratched frantically at my face, not knowing where the spider had gone. The moment was over. I stood up, buttoned my jeans, straightened the duvet and left, unsatisfied.

  Outside the smirking day made me feel filthy and restless. There were things that needed doing, there always were. Things that I had begun to think of as tedious, like clearing the nettles from the young trees or weeding the herb bed, but the only respite I could think of was visiting the Sisters. As time went on, I fought the desire like an addict closes the door and leans against it to shut out the dealer, but on this occasion I went back inside the barn and counted the knives, forks, spoons, mugs, cups, saucers, dinner plates, side plates and bowls which were kept in the bottom of the dresser ready for the fictitious holiday guests. That way, I got as far as lunch.

  By suppertime, another domino had fallen. I told Mark I’d cleaned the barn in case Angie and Lucien should want to stay. He said he’d been up to the nuns’ camp and had a quick word. He thought they looked harmless enough. There might even be benefits, he joked; there would be extra pairs of eyes to keep a lookout and anyway, it would be a brave man who wanted to break into The Well now that it was occupied by two of the nation’s most reviled groups: travellers and religious nutcases. I laughed along and when he said he’d even promised them a hose attachment for the water trough tap by the hedge, I offered to take it up to them. Peace was breaking out all around us, but founded on pyrrhic victories and hasty attempts at reconciliation. I found the hose adapter in the barn and stuck my head around the back door before I went to the Sisters.

  ‘So you’re really not going to make them leave?’ I called.

  Mark was working at his desk. ‘Not for now!’ he shouted back.

  I turned the small plastic nozzle over and over again in my hand, hesitating, half in, half out of the cottage. ‘It’s just that . . .’

  ‘What do you want?’ he called from the study.

  ‘Nothing! I’m fine!’ I said and headed up the track, where I could make out the travellers’ tents and vans and hear children calling. One of the voices was Lucien’s, I’d recognise it anywhere. A year later, I would spend twelve hours listening for it and never hear it again. I could also make out a faint glow from the dip where the caravans were. Lucien’s raucous screams versus the singing of the Sisters: I chose the Sisters. They were standing in a group and it was as if they knew I had arrived even without seeing me, because each of them took a silent step backwards, enlarging the circle just enough to make a space for me.

  ‘Come and join us, Ruth,’ said Amelia.

  The older woman smiled reassuringly. ‘We’re probably not as odd as we seem. It’s just like evensong really.’

  I hesitated, and then joined their vespers. Sister Amelia was leading the chanting again.

  Behold the Rose of Jericho.

  Behold the Rose of Jericho.

  Behold the Rose!

  A handful of dust – that is what the Rose of Jericho looked like
to me the first time I saw it. Sister Amelia lifted it, kissed it and passed it on to the older woman on her left; she in turn repeated the gesture and passed it to a girl who looked about Angie’s age, with crimson cropped hair and black eyes. It was coming round towards me just like the reading out loud goes around the class at school and I had no idea what I was going to do when it reached me. The girl kissed it, turned and looked at me. I copied, held out my hands and received the Rose. I couldn’t have done anything else. I raised the bundle of dry sticks to my mouth and pretended to kiss it. When I opened my eyes, Sister Amelia was smiling at me. I may have left after the last Amen, but I never really went away. I had taken part.

  The next time Hugh comes, he asks if I still have a Rose of Jericho. He is intrigued. I have, as it happens. When it was all over, I kept one, as a reminder of what not to believe. Now I fetch it, going down on one knee in front of Hugh before proffering a handful of dead twigs in the palm of my hand, bark flaking like dandruff onto the carpet.

  ‘Behold, the Rose of Jericho.’

  Hugh leans forward, reaching out his hands tentatively as if unsure whether to take it or not.

  ‘Hold it. It’s pretty indestructible. That’s the whole point.’

  ‘This is the Rose of Jericho? Would you believe it? It doesn’t look enough to launch a religion, but I suppose five loaves and two fishes weren’t much to write home about either.’ Gently, he breaks a twig off from the clump and snaps it in two.

  ‘Not an ounce of sap in it, no roots, but you say it’s alive?’

  ‘It is a miracle plant. It does what it says on the tin. You can find it dead as a dodo on the dried bed of the Red Sea, half buried by sand in the deserts in Egypt – no roots, nothing, until one day’ – I pause for effect and look up at the sky – ‘it rains.’ He follows my gaze and I continue. ‘The rain brings it back to life. Each of these dry little sticks unfurls until the whole mess of dead twigs is transformed by green shoots and hundreds of tiny white flowers.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘Until the rain stops.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘It dies again. Or at least reverts to looking dead.’

  ‘That’s what I’d heard, but I’ve never seen one.’ He weighs it, as if he too finds it hard to believe that something so feather-light can hold such heaviness. ‘It is a beautiful thing, Ruth. I am glad you have kept it.’

  ‘You can have it if you want it. Or if the Sisters are still going, you can order one online. They sourced a good little supply route from Syria. £14.99, if I remember correctly. Cheap at the price, for a miracle.’

  Hugh holds the Rose back out towards me, but I am sitting on my hands.

  ‘Come on, humour a man in his dotage. Let’s put it outside again. I’d love to see it flower in the rain.’

  Anon calls through the door that it is time. I help Hugh to his feet, holding out my arm and feeling his weight as he pulls himself up. He takes a few seconds to steady himself, fumbling for his stick. We make our way slowly outside, him with stick in one hand and Rose in the other. Anon looks bemused, to say the least.

  ‘This is a wonderful plant, Adrian. Some people call it the Resurrection Plant. We can all learn from this plant.’

  Anon peers doubtfully at the clump of dead twigs. ‘If you say so, sir.’

  ‘I do. Now, how about here?’ He indicates a large flowerpot which stands at the corner of the house. We planted it up the first spring, but now it contains only the earth, brown and redundant, sunk some inches below the rim. ‘Ruth, even you can’t count this as gardening.’

  Hugh stoops with difficulty and lays the Rose of Jericho on the bare earth and there it sits, as though a small boy has found a deserted bird’s nest and wishes for eggs.

  ‘When I trashed the house,’ I explain to Anon, ‘this was what I was looking for.’

  If there was speculation that Mark had always been a pervert, there was equal speculation that I had always been a religious fanatic, at least that’s what was implied in the press and online. The candles I kept on the mantelpiece at home in London became the paraphernalia of a religious obsessive (according to a close neighbour); my visits to small country churches when on holiday in Devon were evidence of a compulsive need to worship (according to a vicar who didn’t want to be named); even the Christmas cards I sent with an image of the Virgin Mary were incontrovertible proof of my desire to follow in her footsteps (according to an old school friend). But the truth is I’d never been a regular churchgoer and I was very much the novice when I first joined the Sisters’ evening devotions. Prayer moved in me then like the nursery rhymes I used to know by heart, or which I later sang to Angie, or so recently read to Lucien, the rhythmic recitation reducing meaning to feeling until I was wrapped up in a blanket of bland reassurance. Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home, your house is on fire and your children are gone. That will haunt me now, go round and round the garden, like a teddy bear . . . one step, two step, knife you under there.

  Of course, it wasn’t just about the worship. The nearest I can come to describing those early weeks was that it was like a sort of book club. In the space of little more than one day, I went from being acutely lonely to having the ready-made company of unconventional, but intelligent women, 24/7 on my doorstep. It was London all over again, without the exhaust fumes and the dog shit. If Mark was doing his man thing, slouched on the sofa, watching TV, laughing at comedians as if the great maternal BBC could pacify the thirsty with a diet of childish, outdated repeats, then I could pass hours among the civilising company of women. Amelia was always an enigma from the first time I saw her, and Eve, well, she was like a lot of women I’d known and not particularly liked as casual acquaintances in London – all spin, style and shoulder pads and curiously out of place in this wellington boot of a convent. The money was hers of course – I did not know that then – but that can’t have been all that mattered to her.

  Jack and Dorothy, despite being poles apart, were both my kind of women. Three women meet at a well: a sixty-something Canadian widow, a forty-something back-to-the-land grandmother and a twenty-something victim of domestic violence with a personality disorder – the start of yet another joke. And yes, we did make each other laugh and we could talk for hours about anything: men, the meaning of life, The Well. And, of course, we talked about their faith, what Dorothy called ‘their curious feeling that something special was happening’ when they all first met in Wales and how they knew now they had been called by God to bear witness to the Rose and bring the hope of salvation to a people parched of faith in a time of drought. I listened, challenged, questioned and did not always agree, not then. Did they call themselves Christians? This was a new Christianity. Why just women? The Old Testament was male, the New Testament was transitional and this is the Testament of the Rose, which is the witness of women. I did attend their so called ‘evensongs’, but if anything, it was almost an intellectual game on my part, although I underestimated many things: the stakes, for a start; the gradual erosion and replacement of the rules; the fact that no game is ever won or lost on logic alone; and above all, the power one player can hold over the outcome.

  Angie joined our debates sometimes, dismissing my occasional cynical moments, saying I just needed to learn to submit to a higher power. My habit would have been to retort that she’d spent a lifetime in unhealthy submission to stronger forces, but my habits were undermined already and I loved her for her readiness to listen. She really felt like my daughter on those occasions, just as I used to see other mothers and daughters in London, stopping for semi-skimmed lattes in shopping malls, leaning towards each other over small round tables in coffee shops, bags at their feet, physical features mirrored in each other in the subdued lighting. Every now and again, some of her friends from the community would come with her, but I would be watching her, cross-legged and skinny on the grass and daring to feel proud of her – of her passionate contributions to our arguments about climate and capitalism, of her compassionate list
ening when Jack shared her traumatic story, proud of the confident way she rolled up the sleeves of her fleece to peel potatoes. Lucien and Henni came with her, somersaulting down the slope behind us, begging permission to poke around the caravans which were a source of perpetual fascination, and Jack in particular was kind, allowing the boys to play house in her van. Sister Amelia came out one evening, watched them cart-wheeling and asked me what my granddaughter’s name was.

  ‘Grandson,’ I corrected, laughing.

  ‘Oh. I thought her name was Lucy.’

  ‘Lucien. But don’t worry, it’s the hair, I think. He could easily be mistaken for a girl.’

  ‘So when you said that all this will pass to Luce one day, you were referring to him. To a boy.’

  ‘Of course. Why?’

  ‘Only that I believe this is a woman’s land, Ruth. It should pass from woman to woman.’

  Nothing in life had prepared me for Sister Amelia.

  It was not just me. She held the attention of everyone who stood in her shadow. I was not surprised to learn that it was Sister Amelia who had been the leader in Wales, gathering together this disparate group of women who were all retreating from something, offering them a way forward, the seductive scent of a calling.

  ‘I gave up everything for the Rose,’ Sister Amelia told me in her low voice, which meant people always had to get close to her to hear. ‘I had things to go back for, people, possessions, but I knew there was a higher purpose for me. Even if no one had joined me, I wouldn’t have done anything different.’

  ‘Extraordinary, when you think about it,’ I said to Mark one evening, trying to explain what the Sisters were all about. ‘She sacrificed everything for this calling. You know, she’s a really intelligent woman, incredibly well read and yet she has such conviction. She did what most of us just talk about. She gave it all up and came here to The Well because she believes it’s the right thing to do.’