The Well (31 page)

In the past hour alone – 1,115 prayers for rain. Yet still it did not rain in the rest of the country. When it rained at The Well during stream worship, the worshippers flooded the site: sitting in their dry kitchens, overlooking their sterile river beds and festering canals where the shopping trolleys stuck up from the mud like the skeletons of parched amphibians; gathered in their prayer circles in churches where the graveyards sprouted plastic flowers and the headstones leaned to one side, the ground subsiding beneath them; clicking again in the middle of the night, listening to the wind banging on the front doors which had been locked to keep out burglars, rattling the empty rabbit hutch at the end of the garden. In their thousands, they selected the link which allowed them to listen to the rain hammering on the tin roof of the barn, the rain gurgling from the gutters down the drains, the rain marking time, drop by drop into the bucket left out for the scraps, as the shower eased. If we could have let them smell the rain, if we could have sent its wetness down the wires, we would have done.

Create a shortcut to
The Rose
, we urged. Just click on the
icon
.

As we received more government notices, Sister Amelia scanned them in and posted them on the campaign link on our website. The Sisters and I tweeted our followers about every new official communication. We urged them to write to the MPs and they wrote. We urged them to march and they marched. We organised a day of peaceful prayer for the protection of The Well and they gathered outside town halls and offices, on Whitehall and at war memorials, with live footage of worship at The Well on large screens, to pray for The Well, for rain, for the Sisters. In the barn, Mark phoned the solicitor who we could no longer afford and who no longer believed we could win.

Increasingly, Lucien joined me in everything I did and filled my day. Voice was very quiet at that time and easily challenged and it was Lucien I listened to. I wrote about him in my blog, contemplating the innocence he represented in my online meditation for the day. I tweeted what he wrote underneath his picture of a rainbow for
one of our lessons: ‘The Well is like a miracle because things happen here that only God can do.’ When Angie called, she said someone who was a follower of the Rose up in Scotland had told her about the tweet. In answer to my worry, she said she didn’t mind at all, she thought it was rather special, but what about Sister Amelia?

‘What about her?’

‘I just remember her saying how it was better if Lucien was kept away from things.’

‘I didn’t know the two of you had talked.’

‘Yes, she used to come up to the camp every now and again.’

I didn’t know that and couldn’t quite understand why it mattered to me that I didn’t know, but Angie was right about one thing. Sister Amelia did not agree with the tweet.

‘Eve’s been showing me some of the comments on the forum,’ she said. ‘Our worshippers worry about Lucien. Look, she’s printed out some of their prayers and comments for us to discuss.’

I closed the lid of the laptop. ‘There are some sick and misguided people out there, Amelia. You know that.’

‘If they worship the Rose, they are on the road to true knowledge – anything else is a blind alley.’

She asked me, at the very least, to leave him behind when I worshipped, not to mention him in my public prayers or blog because
it wasn’t helping our cause, but more importantly, I needed to be planning for his leaving The Well if I was to be true to the Rose.

‘And not be true to myself?’ I asked.

‘It is autumn, Ruth,’ she said. ‘Let the leaves that don’t belong on the tree fly in the wind and be gone. Be true to the Rose. To the Sisters,’ she said, then took me in her arms, her breath like a cloth on my bare neck. ‘Be true to me, that is enough.’

November was indeed a bitter month across the country. Most trees had been skeletal for months and the ground hard, but still it rained at The Well and leaves blustered in the gales in our autumn. I was both attached and detached from the way things were beyond our sanctuary: connected through the incoming stream of helplessness that flooded the Rose site, but disconnected from what that was like, day in, day out, for nearly all of the people, nearly all of the time. Mark, I think, was going out more at night, I guessed to illegal drinking dens where home-made booze was cheap, but maybe there were other attractions out there. Or if he was not out, he was alone in the barn, perhaps listening to music, perhaps flicking through the twenty-four-hour news on the internet, or other sites, who knows. What I do know is that he continued to work obsessively during the short daylight hours.

One such day he was chopping logs. I was loading some in the wheelbarrow for my fire and he was throwing some towards the barn for his.

‘Can you imagine what it would be like if we had to pay for heating?’ he said, clapping his hands together against the cold. ‘It was minus six last night in London.’

‘We couldn’t do it,’ I said, pausing from loading for a moment, thinking how easily we could talk like this, in the no man’s land between the house and the barn, in the middle territory of wood and winter wheat and how to store parsnips. ‘We don’t know how lucky we are.’

He raised his eyebrows.

‘Oh, you know what I mean,’ I said.

‘It doesn’t just happen, Ruth. We might live apart, but I can’t do all the farming on my own. If we’re going to live here and stay warm and feed ourselves and Lucien, you’ve got to do your part.’

The logs rumbled out of the wheelbarrow into the porch and I thought – they can stay there, in a heap, I can stack them later. I made some coffee and took out a mug out to Mark as well. He took off his gloves, propped himself up on the saw bench and hugged the cup, steam rising and merging into the low winter cloud which had hung over us for days.

I sat on an upturned round of ash. ‘I’m sorry I’ve been so wrapped up in things. Lucien and the Rose. There’s a lot to do.’

‘I know. That’s what I’m trying to say.’

The words between us were tightening again and I tried to ease the pressure. ‘OK. Perhaps if you told me something specific which I could do, then I could make sure I did it. Otherwise I feel I’m always treading on your toes or doing it all wrong.’

‘I’ve started the ploughing,’ Mark said, ‘so that’s fine and I’ve repaired the fence so we can run a new batch of piglets in the woods. Some of the root crops need pulling and storing. Have I told you – I thought we, I thought I might dig a willow trench, since we could grow that here, no one else can. It would be quite lucrative if it worked . . .’

‘And the ewes?’ I asked, encouraged by his things-to-do list.

‘What about them?’ He chucked the rest of the coffee onto the ground and picked up the axe.

‘The mating?’ I struggled for the right word. ‘The, what do you call it, the tupping?’

He brought the axe down hard and the log split, splintering into two pieces. ‘No, I haven’t done that.’

‘You haven’t done that? What, you mean there won’t be any lambs next spring? Why not?’

He stressed the personal pronoun bitterly in his reply. ‘
I
haven’t done it because
I
couldn’t see the point of looking that far ahead.’

No lambs, then. I would have to tell Lucien there were going to
be no lambs. What sort of a spring is that? It was so unlike Mark to have given up on part of the farm. It was as if he was a model, coming apart in my hands. I had to put him back together, the man I thought he was, so I bit my lip and swallowed my instinctive reply and asked again what I could do to help.

‘I’ll dig the vegetable garden over,’ he said, ‘but it would be great if you could clean out the greenhouse. If we don’t do that, we’ll get diseases in the seedlings next year.’

It might not be lambs, but it was something. ‘OK. I promise I’ll do that in the next couple of days. Promise.’

‘Thank you,’ he said, resting his axe on the wood, loading the next barrow-load for me.

How do I account for hours spent at The Well? Here, of all places, the seasons continued to matter. Dusk and dawn were our touchstones. But days themselves merged without names until they became weeks, and nights, whole nights could not be accounted for in the ledger book of how I spent my time other than in dreams and delirium. So it was probably about four or five days later that I thought I heard a sound like breaking glass, but the weather outside was extreme, lurid sunlight competing against clouds purple in the face and threatening and the wind had been battering for hours, so it was hard to distinguish what was going on. At the same time, Lucien ran down the stairs crying. Mark was smashing things in the garden, and he could see him from his bedroom window.

‘Stay inside, Lucien!’

Hail stung my face and hammered on the roof of the derelict car, but that was just the snare drum to the base thump of the mallet swinging again and again and the discordant chords of the shattering glass. Mark, in only a T-shirt and jeans, was destroying the greenhouse, blow after blow, his feet crunching on the broken panes, shards sticking out from the splintered skeleton of the frame and ripping his clothes, piercing his skin, blood trickling down his brown arms, dripping onto the false snow of the lying hail. Cowering behind the hedge, I could only watch until he was spent and all that was
left was a low concrete wall and a shell of a structure of squares and rectangles of metal, sticking crazily into the air like a bombed-out building. The storm moved on, the wind dropped and the hail eased; the garish light illuminated the man, looking at the blood on his hands.

‘I kept my word,’ he sobbed. ‘Look!’ He swung round, pointing at the recently dug raised beds. ‘You said you’d clean out the greenhouse and I believed you. You promised.’

There was nothing I could say.

‘I used to say you’d have to choose one day between me and Angie. But I was wrong. You had to choose between me and her. Amelia. And now I know, you’ve chosen.’

He stumbled past me; he had tried to wipe the tears but in doing so had smeared his face with blood.

‘Stop, Mark! Where are you going?’

‘I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m going, Ruth, I’m leaving.’

Later when I went to the barn to stare at the mess inside it, the emptiness of it, the dark stains on the handles and on the washbasin, the absence of a coat on the peg, I realised – he had left The Well.

L
oss and the human condition. I think I read a book about that once, or heard a lecture on the radio, maybe driving to work in the rain, in another country, at another time. The relief guards have arrived. I notice that it’s never a woman now, although I don’t know if that is just chance. Boy will be gone for a week, returning to the dry lands, to what I imagine is the bitter struggle going on out there, the battle for jobs, water privileges, petrol, space, sky, hope. In theory, I should be pleased to see the back of Three, but he has his place in this ecosystem I call home: he gives me something to hate. I can’t oppose the buzzards, the kitchen sink, the dandelion clocks disappearing on the wind, or the greying of the dusk. Accommodate, reconcile, compromise, navigate, capitalise. I can and must do all those things to hold territory, but there are no punch bags here except myself or the logs waiting to be split – and Three. I will even miss Anon, head down below the parapet, all camouflage and blending in. In some ways, of all of them I would like him to go and not come back because I cannot stand the idea that anyone can walk this land and not be in some way changed by it.

Boy’s leaving is a wrench. How much better to be chained in a cellar, the tiny gap carved in the old stone high above my head,
letting in the smallest light sufficient only to mark the days, but nothing of the world outside, nothing to torture you with what you cannot have, the honest touch of another person, for instance, the possibility of relating. It must be another truth of the human condition that the other man’s prison is always greener. This is half my thinking. There is another half that I hardly dare recognise. I take it as a sign of my increasing resilience that I can watch Boy and Anon standing under the thick-leaved oak in their shirtsleeves, holdalls slung over their shoulders, chatting to the new arrivals, knowing they are leaving, believing in their coming back. I will be allowed outside again. I have even been thinking of suggesting that the guards keep hens. ‘An Anatomy of Hope’ – that was another title, but if not, perhaps I could write it myself one day.

Interestingly, there seems to be some argument between Three and Boy – Anon has moved away, of course; it appears that Boy loses because with bad grace he dumps his case, takes a piece of paper from Three and comes towards the house. I run downstairs to meet him, singing a stupid song from my childhood, all too aware of Three just yards from the back door.

‘Ruth, for God’s sake, stop it.’

He wants to be off. Well, let him go. ‘So sorry to hold you up. Did you pop in for a reason?’

‘Sarge told me to give you this.’ He hands over yet another piece of paper which I can’t even be bothered to read. He reminds me of a sulky pupil handing in inadequate homework.

I toss it into the bin. ‘Can’t you précis it for me? I am tired of the small print.’