The Well

by Catherine Chanter

  Boy drags me from the kitchen.

  ‘He wants to talk.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have stopped me.’

  Boy has brought me into the orchard and sat me on the stone bench. Some time has passed – I am not sure how much. It is incredibly hot and the sweat is inching down my shivering back.

  Boy suggests we move into the shade – mad dogs and Englishmen – but I am rooted to the bench by my failure. He takes a deep breath as if he is trying to keep control of himself. ‘For the past six months you have said that all you want is answers. The truth. Mark must have a reason for coming and you won’t talk to him.’

  This is a pointless argument. Disguised, the answer walked into The Well this afternoon, all wrapped up in self-pity and excuses. It is my failure that the answer will drive away again.

  ‘Ruth, you could have killed him. I’d never forgive myself if it was because of what I said the other day.’

  ‘Don’t apologise, that was very helpful.’ If it is possible, I am both frozen still and shaking.

  ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here when he came.’

  ‘I didn’t need you for this, Boy. This has nothing to do with you and I wish you hadn’t shown up. If you hadn’t interfered it would all be over now.’

  ‘Listen. I’m not going anywhere now. You’ll be OK. I’ll stay here with you, if you’re frightened of him . . .’

  ‘Frightened?’ I burst out laughing. ‘The only thing we’re ever truly frightened of in life, Boy, is the unknown. What have I left to be frightened of? I have finally allowed myself to think the impossible. You’re too young to know.’

  In this heat, nothing moves. No wind rustles the branches, there are no birds; in the field even our lovely cow cannot be bothered to eat, but stands sleeping in the shade. Flies. I can hear flies. There must be something dead, somewhere.

  A car engine starts somewhere over by the house.

  Boy jumps up. ‘We’ve got to stop him, Ruth. He’ll report what’s happened.’ He pounds across the orchard. ‘Mark, wait!’ he is shouting, crashing through the gate, before he disappears. A moment later the engine is turned off and I move towards the house like an automaton, directed there, with no conscious purpose possible. Boy is standing beside the car, the driver door open. Anon is hovering by the barn, looking up the drive. He will want Three to come back and rescue him from the out of the ordinary. Inside the car, Mark has his head on the wheel. There are scuffs and smudges all over the back of his shirt and his elbow is grazed like a child who has been in a fight in the playground. When he lifts his head, he notices blood on his cheek and touches it.

  ‘I knew this would be pointless. I said I was never coming back to you and I should have stuck to that.’ Mark wipes his hands on his trousers, then puts them back ready on the steering wheel, pushes back against it until his arms are straight, relaxes them again, puts his left hand on the gear stick, while his right reaches for the key.

  He looks straight at me. ‘I never knew you hated me that much.’

  I hold onto the door handle to prevent him from going.

  ‘Turn it off. Let’s go inside.’ Boy is young enough to believe in solutions.

  ‘You guys OK?’ Anon.

  Mark puts the car violently into reverse. Boy pulls me out of the way just in time as it swings round towards the drive. Then Mark leans out of the window. ‘If you want to know the truth, I only came today because Angie said she was coming too and she wanted us all to be together.’

  ‘Angie?’

  ‘It didn’t occur to me then it was Lucien’s birthday. But I don’t think that was all. She said she was coming because she had news and something she wanted to show us.’

  ‘Angie? Coming here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say?’

  ‘I tried to say, Ruth, but – what a surprise – you weren’t listening.’

  The engine revs and I grapple my way round to the front of the car, my hands spread-eagled on the bonnet.

  ‘You should have said straight away.’

  ‘I didn’t want to say because I didn’t want to raise your hopes in case she didn’t show up. And I was right. A leopard doesn’t change its spots.’

  ‘Don’t go. What was she going to show us?’

  He takes his foot off the accelerator. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps we’ll never know. Perhaps it was nothing in the end.’

  The suspended moment, engine idling, the heat, it is all ripped in half as the alarms suddenly sound behind us, the high-pitched pulse which indicates a break in the perimeter fence.

  ‘What the hell’s that?’

  ‘I’ll get that sorted!’ shouts Anon, heading off towards the control panel in the barn. They go off all the time and he is relieved, not worried, a deer caught on the wire, branches down on the junction box, but the wail sends my pain out over the hills and I am breathless with the panic of confusion and chances sliding away from me.

  Mark gets back into gear. ‘This place really is an asylum.’

  ‘Ask her to get in touch with me,’ I plead, stumbling alongside the car. ‘Will you come again?’

  ‘Turn that thing off, Adrian,’ yells Boy.

  Mark slows the car. ‘Not now I know what you really think of me. What you called me. Don’t ever try to get in touch with me again. Ever.’ He pulls away, careering crazily over the drive, looking back at me out of the window. ‘I mean it this time, Ruth.’

  ‘Intrusion in Wellwood, boundary three!’ Anon calls from the barn and runs back out, radio in hand, armed. ‘Not a false.’

  ‘Mark,’ I scream after him, tripping on the stones, ‘Mark!’

  The car bounces up the track, dust clouding out behind it, and stops at the top of the hill. Now that he is going, I will him to come back, flooded with an incoherent sense of compassion, as if all the kindness he ever showed to me was carried out on the tide which has now turned and is coming in again, washing over me. I would call him, I would run after him, but he is too far away. He must just have been taking one last look at his love, The Well, because the car is moving on, almost out of sight now, gone. Mark is gone. I am full of fear for what he might do.

  Boy turns to me. ‘I’ve got to go with Adrian and check this out. I’ll be five minutes, no more. Don’t do anything stupid.’

  The fence takes my weight, then I sit heavily on the stile and stay there, the whine of the siren now reduced to an intermittent beeping, scrambling my thoughts. Staring at the scuffed gravel and tyre marks, I see the forensic evidence of a story of leavings and loss, unresolved. In his absence, it was easy to believe it might have been him, but now I am sure it was not Mark. The women, then, that leaves the women who did it.

  It looks like a woman being brought up the field between Boy on the right and Anon on the left. They are not holding her; she walks freely with a bag over her shoulder and her hands in her pockets, her boots scuffing the ground beneath a long skirt. You’ll wear your shoes out, I used to say, take your hands out of your pockets, hold mine. As Angie gets closer, she raises her right hand as if in greeting. I have heard voices, seen things, so I am not ready to believe it, and even as she reaches me and stands within touching distance of me, but does not touch me, I remember the last time I saw her she was weeping by the side of a grave. I hold tight to my doubt for fear of waking up.

  ‘Our intruder,’ says Boy.

  ‘Not sure what to do about the paperwork here,’ Anon prattles on like a voice at the end of a line in a call centre. ‘But I guess we could put it down as a false. After all, you did have permission, Ma’am, you just came about it the wrong way.’

  ‘Hello, Mum,’ she says.

  There is no reply good enough. She is my daughter, but how can I claim to be her mother, this withered wreck of a woman who turns all flesh to dust.

  No words come, but she lets me take her hand in mine. I lift it to my cheek, breathe in the years of her, the birth of her. ‘Angie.’

  She takes her hand back, but gently, and
I find my voice. ‘Mark said you were coming, but he’s gone, Angie, he’s gone and he won’t come back. He said you hadn’t shown up, so he left.’

  ‘Unreliable Angie,’ she mimics, ‘I can hear him saying it now. How long has he been gone?’ Her eyes trace the path of the drive up the hill.

  ‘Minutes, that’s all,’ I tell her.

  ‘I got Charley to drop me off. I wanted to walk up through the wood, I’d summoned up the courage to visit the Wellpond and, well, take some time there, that sort of thing. I didn’t realise it would be wired like this,’ she explains. She gestures around her at the barn, the antennae, the paraphernalia of imprisonment and that seems to jolt her out of her daze. ‘You’ve got to get him back, Mum.’

  I am shaking my head and crying as I realise the truth. ‘He won’t come back, Angie, not after what I’ve done.’

  ‘Call his mobile,’ she urges, ‘someone must have a phone.’

  Boy hands her his mobile. She checks the signal, calls, cancels, calls again. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ she says, ‘answer the phone!’

  ‘I have said some awful things, Angie. He’ll never forgive me.’

  ‘The person you are calling is unavailable. Please try later,’ she repeats.

  I have felt this lurch of fear before. ‘What shall we do?’

  ‘Never mind,’ says Angie, ‘I wanted us all to be together for this, but if it has to be just us, then that’s how it has to be. You look dreadful. Let’s go and sit down.’

  She has news, answers maybe – something about her has changed. I allow myself to look at her eyes, but they are sunk deep and black-ringed with exhaustion, dark pools which swallow any hope I was feeling. Boy suggests we sit in the orchard, saying he’ll fetch some water. He has grown up; he recognises something is happening which he cannot be a part of, or change. He and Anon leave and I walk with my daughter between the trees, where the hard green apples are forming on the boughs, where the scent of the wild honeysuckle has drugged the birds to silence. We sit on the bench, just the two of us, as mothers and daughters do, but not quite like that. I am terrified of her, that she is the mother of Lucien who died, and I want to hold her, but I am afraid she will disintegrate when I touch her and this moment of sitting alongside each other will be gone. She reaches into her embroidered bag and pulls out a butterfly. For a second, I think it’s real, I can’t believe how big it is, how still it rests in her palm, then I notice the texture of the silk thread woven in circles of peacock blue for each of the eyes on the symmetrical wings and the sparkle of sequins sewn onto the thorax.

  ‘A sort of birthday present for Lucien,’ she says. ‘I was going to leave it at the Wellspring, but then the alarms went off and I didn’t get the chance. And this as well.’ She shows me a simple penny pipe and blows the first few notes of ‘Happy Birthday to You’ on it. ‘This was the Christmas present I promised him. I’d already bought it when . . .’ The thrush behind us takes up the song, which is good because neither of us can speak. ‘I’ll take it to his grave instead.’

  Then Angie pulls a third gift out of her bag, a large brown envelope. ‘And this,’ she says, ‘is for you. Open it, go on.’

  ‘Do you know what’s in it?’

  ‘This part, yes. It’s OK. Open it.’

  With difficulty, I try to separate the seal without tearing the paper in case it should need to be closed again, but my hands are slippery. Inside there is another white envelope and a small parcel, wrapped up in blue tissue.

  ‘Open the parcel, but be careful what you handle when you unwrap it,’ says Angie.

  The fragile layers open like a flower, petal by petal, in my thick fingers, unfolding from the centre outwards until revealed in my hand is a small, carved wooden rose threaded with a cord, the knot intact, the leather severed. I move to pick it up, but Angie stops me, hand on my arm, shaking her head. Instead, I lift the rose in its paper cradle to my face – it is Lucien at bath time, talcum powder and clean towels, hot blackcurrant and bees and buttercups. I have searched without ceasing for this relic. Who was the last person to touch this? Me?

  Wrapping the rose up again, I notice how the damp traces of my fingerprints have marked the fragile paper. ‘Who had this?’ I ask at last.

  Angie is crying quietly and the name is hard to hear at first. ‘Sister Jack,’ she says.

  The name drifts out of reach in my mind. ‘Sister Jack? No, it can’t have been Jack. She was my friend, Angie.’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know everything.’

  ‘Have you spoken to her?’

  She wipes her eyes, smudging black mascara onto the hem of her white top. ‘I tracked them down. I had to do something. I lost it really, but Charley made me pull myself together and we set about finding them. Anyway, we went to Norfolk and found the Sisters. There weren’t many of them. I’d guessed as much from the internet, the site gets hardly any hits now, like people have given up believing. There were a few new women, who I didn’t know, and that cow Amelia didn’t want to talk to us so it seemed like a wasted journey.’

  ‘So how did you get this?’

  Angie is on her feet now, restless. ‘Eve, surprisingly. She was still there. I never quite got what was in it for her, but then there she was, coming out of Amelia’s caravan and I suppose it made sense. Anyway, she recognised me, caught up with me just as I was leaving the camp, said how sad she was about Lucien and she believed you were innocent and all that crap and then she told me that Jack had been sectioned and how hard that had been for the Sisters because none of them believed it could have been her, not until then.’

  ‘So it was Jack.’ Until now, it has never occurred to me that the truth might be equally, impossibly hard, whoever was guilty.

  ‘Just wait.’ Angie moves away from me, breaks a twig from the tree and snaps it. ‘Listen to me for once. I went to visit Jack. She’s in a women’s psychiatric unit, not a prison, she hasn’t been charged – not with, not for what happened here anyway – but she was in a bad state, has to have a nurse with her all the time because of self-harming. Her arms . . . you think mine are bad . . . hers are grouted, sliced to pieces.’

  I have been there, in that place, literally and metaphorically, and my instinctive reaction is that Jack is at best an unreliable source of the truth and that Angie has pinned her hopes on the messages of a madwoman. I try to say so, but Angie is strong in her rebuttal.

  ‘She seemed pretty sane to me. She asked me to come back the next day, said she had things to sort out, and when I went back this envelope was waiting for me with a note telling me to bring this to you. She wouldn’t see me again. But she gave me the rose, Mum. And she wrote you this letter.’

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘It is to you. I haven’t read it. I opened the rose, of course, she told me what that was, how we mustn’t handle it, but I haven’t read the letter.’ She sits down next to me, trembling. ‘That’s what we have to do now.’ She corrects herself. ‘That’s what you have to do now.’

  The white envelope lies on the bench in the gap between us, with just the one word, ‘Ruth’, on the front. It is a thing. An object. A noun. But to open it?

  ‘It could say anything, Angie,’ I pick it up and hold it in two hands, by the corners. ‘You read it, I can’t.’

  ‘You have no choice.’

  Dear Ruth,

  I do not know where to start. I am so sorry. I didn’t know what to do. No one was ever going to believe me, no one ever does, even if I kill myself and leave a note, they’ll say I was mad. Nobody believes that I know the truth. I am the only one who knows the truth, but I know you will believe me.

  The writing is ill-formed, it loops irregularly over the first of the two pieces of A4 lined paper which have been torn raggedly from a pad. At times the red biro has gone through the paper, such is the ferocity of the feeling behind the words. Her voice is recognisable to me from her writing and so, I fear, is her illness. Angie is full of anticipation next to me, but this is all paranoia and
delusion. It is my territory; I know it when I meet it.

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘I don’t know about this, Angie,’ I say. ‘She’s obviously not well.’

  ‘Just read it to me, for Christ’s sake.’

  So I read it to Angie, finishing with three words which stand alone, underlined.

  ‘I am guilty.’

  Silence from both of us. Angie speaks in a tone which reminds me of the terrible years, dipped in bitterness; she doesn’t look at me, her hair covers her face, she is picking at the flowers on her skirt. ‘Well, go on then,’ she says finally.

  While you were asleep, I was the one who crept up the stairs.

  I tiptoed past your door

  I woke him up

  I told him sshh

  I tied his laces

  I fastened the Rose around his neck

  I led him downstairs

  I took him out into the night

  That was all me, Ruth. I am so sorry.

  Each ‘I’ is circled. It is written like a list or some bizarre rhyme. ‘Don’t believe this, Angie.’

  ‘What else is there?’

  The letter is shaking in my hand, the lines below full of signs and symbols and hieroglyphics which blur and re-form before my eyes. The curving vowels wrap themselves around my neck and strangle my breathing, the straight lines of the unforgiving consonants pierce me. I dare not even look at my daughter, at the girl who lost her son.

  Amelia was waiting for us outside the cottage under the oak tree just like we had planned. Do you remember when Lucien was so upset at the Wellspring because no one had shown him the magic and Amelia said to me then, you and me, let’s bring him here tonight, and I thought that was a good idea, so I did what she said and told him and said what she told me to say which was that it was our secret and you and Mark weren’t to know or the magic wouldn’t work. He was so excited. He trusted everyone.