The Well (5 page)

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.

I
t was a Keatsian autumn for us. With their roots starved of moisture, trees across the country were brought down in the battering winds, but in our orchard the only things that fell were apples and plums and damsons and pears and we stumbled on the cookers lying unharvested in the long, wet grass because we simply didn’t have enough space to store them. In high spirits, we got tickets for the village harvest lunch. This was the sort of event which we thought epitomised the rural community spirit we had signed up for. Mark and I sat down at one of the long trestle tables, but as everyone else arrived, they sat somewhere else. I was furious and told Mark that it was ridiculous that we were treated like lepers, after all my attempts to get involved.

‘Do you think it’s because of . . .?’ I took a large swig of cider and immediately regretted saying what I had been thinking.

Mark met my gaze full on. ‘Because they think I’m a paedophile? No actually, Ruth, I don’t. I think it’s because we have water and they don’t. So leave it,’ he said, ‘it won’t get you anywhere.’

But I crossed the hall to the table where over a dozen of our closest farming neighbours were squashed onto a table of eight. The men looked up, stone-grey, embarrassment flickering over the red faces of their wives. One or two of them at least managed a hello, before straightening the cutlery.

I said they looked pretty squashed and there was plenty of room on our table. ‘We’re not infectious,’ I said.

‘Some of us wish you were,’ said Maggie. Someone had told me that she had won Local Farming Entrepreneur of the Year only a few years ago for her parsley farm. Now she was bankrupt. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

I watched Mark, taking his drink outside. Other tables fell silent, and then people resumed talking just that little bit too loudly to make it look as though they weren’t listening. The locals stared at the menus, designed by the children at the village school where Jean’s sister was the secretary, run off on the photocopier at the post office where Alice Pudsley ran the counter, laid out on the tables along with the corn wreaths made by the Altons who lived at the end of our drive and turn left, and the flower posies arranged by the Clardles, who used to run the pub and were now retired, Perry taken up with the largely redundant role of Chairman of the River Lenn Fishing Association. I wanted to tell them that we’d done nothing to either deserve or receive or create this fertile land: we’d added nothing to the fertiliser, we were not diverting their streams, we had no way of dragging the clouds to our hill and emptying their leaden sacks of rain on our earth. Somewhere, underneath it all, they were logical people and they knew that must be the case. The vicar gave thanks, the ladies carried in the trays with bowls of steaming parsnip soup and homemade bread, the cider flowed, and Mark and I left. Our harvest was the most prolific, but it seemed we had the least to celebrate. We walked back along the river, where the exhausted salmon hurled themselves from the shallow pond against the dribbling weir, again and again, until the heron picked off their flapping bodies from the dry stones on which they landed.