The Well (35 page)

Mark held my arm like a vice. ‘What’s going on, Ruth?’

‘I woke up and he wasn’t in his bed. He’s gone, Mark. Gone!’

Mark looked shocked – I am sure he was shocked. ‘Well, was he OK last night? Did you check on him when you got back to the cottage?’

‘Of course I checked on him. What do you think . . .?’

‘I don’t understand. Where can he be? He must be somewhere.’

Mark’s composure was gone and when I spoke next it was to reassure him as much as myself. ‘It’s OK. We’ll find him. He’s just wandered off, that’s all. He’s used to doing that, isn’t he? He did that all the time when he was with Angie.’

‘You’re right.’ Mark threw the paper back onto the driver’s seat. ‘We need to be systematic. You need to get a coat, for a start.’

He put his arms around me and held me very tight. His heart was beating fast, loudly, and I could tell from long experience that he was trying hard to control his breathing. Such enforced togetherness. So short-lived.

‘I’m going upstairs to get another jumper,’ I said, but when I got to my bedroom, I fell to my knees.

‘I have done so much for you,’ I said slowly, spitting the words out one by one. ‘I have given up everything for you: my husband, my dream, everything. I have never asked for anything in return, but now I am asking. Find Lucien. Give me back Lucien.’

The echo of my words sounded blackmailing and threatening and Voice said I’d better repent, making demands like that, who did I think I was. Then I was so scared that I might offend this god of the drought who possessed me and about whom I knew so little.

‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I am so worried. I know that you love each and every one of us and that whatever happens is part of your plan. Help me to trust the Rose this morning. Amen.’

The sound of that amen was very loud in the empty room. Where do you go after amen?

I went to Mark. He was on the phone.

‘He wasn’t in his bed when she woke up this morning. We are sure he’s just wandered off somewhere on the farm . . .’

To the police.

‘Why?’ I ranted. ‘He’s just somewhere out in the fields. It’s not like we’re in the middle of London and he’s going to get grabbed by some pervert or get lost. Why did you call the police without asking me? I have prayed.’ I screamed at him, ‘I hate the police snooping around The Well.’

‘This isn’t about you and The Well, Ruth; nothing to do with your sodding Sisters or the Rose or any other bullshit. It’s about finding Lucien, nothing else, no one else and I think the police might just be a little bit more helpful than your prayers.’

For a second, we could hear the clock ticking and the squawk of one of the hens outside. Then he continued in a quieter voice, saying that in these cases it was always better to let the police know sooner rather than later. I agreed, although the whole thing seemed to be escalating into a film which was fast-forwarding without me in it. I told him I was going up to the Sisters, to see if he was with them. Mark was astonished that I hadn’t asked them already.

We set off, calling as we went. Lucien. Lucien. Our voices were loud in the workless, waterless valleys that stretched beyond The Well. Dorothy was already making her way down the track before we reached them.

‘Is something wrong, Ruth? We missed you at prayers.’

We ran to the caravans. It was obvious Lucien was not there. Eve said they had all been up since dawn – Jack hadn’t been well, difficult to manage, so Sister Amelia had moved her from Dorothy’s into her own caravan and it had taken some time to settle her. They would certainly have seen something if Lucien had been around. I’ll check the caravans, Mark said, just in case. Sister Ruth can check the caravans, interrupted Amelia, and Mark kicked the laundry
basket and started back up the hill. Lucien adored Dorothy and Jack, was wary of Amelia and Eve, but loved all their caravans equally: the way the beds folded up into the walls, the way the tops of the bench seats opened up into secret chests, the way the toilet looked like a fridge. So the Sisters and I checked the caravans, with their steamed-up windows and smells of bodies and damp, their mystical writings laid out on the hinged tables and the smoke from the mugs of herbal tea rising up into the winter air. Jack was curled up in a foetal position on the bed in Sister Amelia’s caravan, oblivious to the creak of the opening door and the blast of cold air. Dorothy covered her with a blanket and she didn’t stir.

‘She’s been vomiting,’ whispered Amelia. ‘I’ve given her something to help her get some sleep. We mustn’t wake her. The stress of all this will be too much for her.’ Sister Amelia took a glass from the table and put it in the sink, felt Jack’s forehead with the back of her hand, picked a robe up off the floor and took it outside to dry in the winter sun. ‘She’ll be all right,’ she said and blessed her with the sign of the Rose.

Lucien was not there, but there was nothing else to do but look. Dorothy rang the prayer bell three times and it tolled its unusual call to arms like a death knell over the quiet morning. She said the Sisters should organise themselves to walk the woods and she asked for the blessing of the Rose on their search, but Sister Amelia insisted that Eve stay in the hub and reconfigure the site so that a pre-recorded reading could be shared with the followers expecting the seventh day of preparation.

‘We need everyone to help,’ I said.

‘So does the Rose,’ she replied. ‘I’ll search the Wellwood. The Rose is with us. She won’t let anything happen to Lucien.’

‘What you said,’ I sobbed, ‘about the Rose not letting anything happen. How do you know? You of all people – you said that the Rose doesn’t want men any longer. You want him gone anyway, so why would she save my grandson?’

Sister Amelia laid her arm on mine and spoke quietly. ‘Remember
whatever has happened, it is her plan and it is a good plan. God himself, the first time, lost his only son.’

I remember asking: ‘Do you know something, Amelia? Because if you do, you must tell me.’ And she said, ‘Why are you asking me, Ruth, why aren’t you asking Mark?’ Then she was embracing me and confirming how she loved me, that everything she did and had ever done was because I was her chosen one.

‘He wouldn’t have gone onto the lane, would he?’ asked Dorothy, meeting back at the house, having gone through Smithy’s Holt and found nothing. He wouldn’t have willingly gone anywhere else now. We had looked in all the places he would have gone and he wasn’t there.

‘I drove that way this morning to get a paper,’ said Mark, going on to explain rather elaborately that he’d heard the early morning news and mention of a rainstorm in Yorkshire and he’d wanted the details. ‘It doesn’t seem quite so important now,’ he concluded, adding that he hadn’t seen anything. By which I suppose he meant he hadn’t seen my grandson in his great big green jumper walking down the main road. I was beginning to think that someone might have taken him, someone with a grudge against The Well, or the press, or one of those mad people who wrote to us and offered us millions to sell.

‘He’d still be alive, though, there’d be no point in someone like that harming him,’ I was saying, but Voice was reminding me what the car looked like when they found it – burnt out and mutilated – and what Bru looked like when I found him, saliva and poison dripping from his soft muzzle. ‘They wouldn’t harm him, would they?’ I was asking when we heard the sirens.

Blue lights and sirens across this quiet land. The 360-degree view which had sold us this place started to rotate as evenly as the flashing light, mocking me with its expanse and our irrelevance; we had always been nothing more than fleas crawling on its skin, ever since we first dreamed of owning it.

The arrival of the police made everything real, but unreal. The kitchen became a sort of headquarters, invaded by strangers in boots coming in and going out and making tea, more tea, talking about rustling undergrowth and footprints and broken-down hedges and dropped gloves and the sound of crying that turned out to be the mewing of the buzzards – the words falling all over the floor and being swept into the bin with every other used-up possibility. The policemen seemed huge and black, overwhelming the space with their synthetic voices on the radios and talk of scrambling a helicopter. The rest of the Sisters came back, empty-handed. I went through the morning and the night before with the police over and over again and the more I repeated it, the less I knew that I had ever lived before this moment, that anything was real.

Had I locked the back door?

Why did my husband sleep in the barn?

Did I actually hear him breathing?

Did he usually sleep in a man’s jumper?

What kind of grandmother was I?

Was there anything missing from his room?

I thought not, but I would need to look to be sure. I asked to be left alone in his room, but they said no – for my own protection, for the preservation of the scene – so I tried to work through it methodically. There was the mirror where the moon had been reflected, his toy chest, closed, but with everything in it as usual, the jigsaw pieces, unmade, on the floor, stuffed under the table, along with the incomplete set of felt tips he’d used to write Ms over and over again in the barn. There on the floor by his bed was his special duck. And then . . . I stared at the space, tracing it with my finger. Don’t touch too much, said the policewoman. Is there something missing? Behind her, Sister Amelia had come upstairs and was watching from the doorway. I looked at them both, then back at the table, then I felt on the floor, looked under the bed, and my hand went to my own neck.

‘There is something missing,’ I said. ‘But he’d never have put it on. He couldn’t tie the knot. It was too fiddly.’

‘What’s that?’ the policewoman asked kindly, but her voice was urgent.

‘The Rose,’ said Sister Amelia, but the policewoman ignored her and looked at me.

‘Yes, a rose. A little wooden rose I made, hung on a piece of leather. He wore it sometimes – well, always – but he couldn’t put it on himself, he used to ask me to help him. I took it off for him last night when I put him to bed.’

Was it really last night?

Two other officers were already pounding up the stairs, one of them plain-clothed, pushing Sister Amelia out of the way and saying excuse me.

‘Why did you give him a rose?’

‘It is a sign of the Rose’s love for him.’

‘Was he special, then, to your religion?’

‘He is special. We are all special.’

The officer’s resistance was like a wall. ‘But women are more special than men, am I right – in your religion, I mean?’

‘Different,’ I said hopelessly, my mind too drenched in worry to be able to explain.

‘So this ritual you had yesterday,’ he continued, ‘did that involve the lad? Would he have put the rose on for that?’

You don’t understand, I kept saying, it isn’t like that.

On and on they went, these people with their questions. The police seemed to have multiplied. They were all talking, I was repeating myself. I seemed to have to say everything again and again; I didn’t know if I was imagining it and was just locked in a world where there was no sound but Voice and perpetual echoes. Lucien, Lucien. A little wooden rose. A little wooden rose. Half past eight. Half past eight. My grandson, my grandson. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. Ask Mark, why don’t you ask Mark?

The police found it hard to accept that we had no way of contacting Angie directly, impossible to believe that someone nowadays didn’t have a mobile and that we used to wait for her
to ring us; they were right of course, it was madness that we ever agreed that was all right, but it was how Angie had wanted it. Everything I had ever done seemed in doubt. People moved around me like humans must look to goldfish, distorted and silent.

‘What are you all doing in here, swimming in circles?’ I screamed. ‘Get out, get out and look for him!’

I barged my way out of the kitchen, out of the back door, out, over the stile.

‘No!’ I shouted at Mark, who made to come with me. ‘I want to be on my own.’

Stumbling over First Field, I could hear the policewoman panting behind me. She must have been asked to stay close to me because who knows what I was capable of?

As soon as I reached the brow of the field, I knew I was going to find him. I gathered speed as I dropped off the side of the hill; I could still hear the calling, the occasional whistle, and I wanted to hear someone shouting, we’ve got him, he’s here, he’s safe, and to feel my feet running back up to the house, but I knew I wouldn’t hear that. That was no longer possible. The search could have lasted days, been on the national news with me tear-stained and with a cracked voice appealing for information, and the police finding Angie on her farm in Scotland and driving her down in a police car, on empty motorways. Maybe even the village would have joined in, putting aside their accusations of witchcraft for the sake of a child. But I knew that wouldn’t happen now. I was close to him. My feet were taking me to Lucien. I could feel him calling me. How was it that I knew where he was?

When I reached the edge of Wellwood, I forgot where the little stile was, scrabbling along the barbed wire and brambles, leaving blood from my fingers as I went. In desperation I climbed the fence and my coat caught on the barbs, my legs were unsteady on landing and then I pushed my way through the undergrowth. Roots and strangling brambles tripped me up and above, low-hanging branches from dead trees caught in my hair and yanked me back. But it was just a wood,
an oblivious wood. I found myself back on our pilgrimage path, still narrow but well trodden now; it took me closer to the pond, the dampness suffusing the air. It was almost tropical the way things grew here, even in winter; there was an emerald gleam to the ferns and underfoot the stony soil of the forest, the crunch of nuts and scuttle of dry leaves gave way to a softness, a slight give in the surface of the earth. I slowed down.