Authors: Catherine Chanter
The Well (46 page)
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.
Lucien – with his duck, in bed that night. ‘I’ve got so many secrets Granny R . . .’
I wanted to make him happy, I really did. Then his laces came undone and I tied them up again twice and he said he was cold and I said I’d get him a coat and Amelia said he didn’t need a coat because he had a great big man’s jumper on and the magic would warm him up, but then she noticed he didn’t have the little wooden rose you had carved for him around his neck and she was hissing at me in the darkness about the rose and I had to go back for it, back to his room. My fingers were too cold to tie the knot and she took it from me and she did it. We walked across First Field with me on one side of him and Amelia on the other and it wasn’t that dark. He showed me Orion’s belt because he said you’d taught him all the stars and Amelia said the moon had come out to show us the way to the magic and he said he wasn’t scared at all and I don’t think he was. I think he was excited and I was happy too, swinging him, me on one side and Amelia on the other, because I thought it would be amazing at the Wellspring and how this might be the end of all the trouble between you and Amelia about Lucien not belonging at The Well. I wanted that for you and for the Rose.
This is possible, what she is writing. It sounds real, but it doesn’t make sense. ‘What do you think happened, Angie?’ I whisper. ‘If there was some awful accident at the Wellspring, why didn’t they say at the time?’
Angie still doesn’t reply. Struck dumb. We must have used
that expression for such trivial things in the past, but now I am worried that she is stricken. But to touch her, to awaken her now? I do not need to. Almost robotically, she takes the letter from me, tucks her legs underneath her and sits cross-legged on the bench, then takes over the reading. I cannot listen with my eyes open.
And then we got to the stile into the Wellwood and Amelia told me to go. I didn’t understand but she said the Rose wanted just her and Lucien for this special thing and I could see that Lucien didn’t want me to leave and he wouldn’t let go of my hand but I just took her word for it and told him it would be fun and I helped him get over the stile and then he turned round and waved me goodbye.
Angie’s voice snags like wool in barbed wire.
Twice he turned round to wave me goodbye.
This is a photograph in my mind’s eye: a small boy, captured in black and white at night, halfway into a forest, a pale face half-turned back towards us, a hand half-lifted to say goodbye. Lucien. Jack’s story is both compulsive and irrelevant: it may explain everything, but change nothing. I open my eyes. Angie slowly, silently, spreads the letter in front of both of us; she is no longer able to read out loud.
There was a voice in my head saying don’t leave him like this. We talked about voices once, I should have listened to that one. But I didn’t. I listened to Amelia instead.
Angie repeats the name as if it is the first time she has ever heard it. ‘Amelia! Amelia!’
I am at the bottom of the page now. ‘Finished?’ Angie nods. She clutches a handful of my shirt and clings on tight. I turn over. On the back, Jack’s writing is more legible and coherent, as if in the very process of putting events in order she has found some relief.
I don’t know how long she was gone. I didn’t know what she expected me to do at the caravans. I couldn’t sleep. I got in a state, kept hearing things, seeing things. By the time she got back, I was so relieved to see her. She was ecstatic. None of us could say no to her when she was like that, could we? We went into her caravan, lit the candle, but she was wired like a tiger and even her shadow was overwhelming. I pulled her wet robe over her head, made her sit by the gas fire, stood behind her and brushed her long, damp hair. I even knelt in front of her and dried her feet. Then she told me the green jumper was outside and I should get rid of it. I asked her why, I asked her where Lucien was. She said he was with the Rose and I still didn’t really know what she was talking about. I remember asking, did he get wet too and did he put his pyjamas on and had you woken up when they got back and things like that, even though I think I was beginning to realise something terrible had happened. I just kept talking and she sat there, electrified, then suddenly she grabbed my wrists so tightly she left marks and she said we had done the right thing.
We. That’s what she said. We.
I asked if he was dead and she said yes. I asked again, do you mean you have killed him and she said, he is at peace with the Rose, the way is now clear for the Rose, for The Well.
For this place. For these brambles scratching my ankles, for the squirrel gnawing the bark from the trees, for this watery
wasteland – she killed him. ‘I asked if he was dead and she said yes.’ Now there is nothing left to know. Angie’s red eyes are moving left to right, left to right. I was a teacher once in London, in a cold Portakabin, keeping an eye on my class during silent reading, noticing who had got to the end. I am not here, anywhere but here, now, reading this, please
God
, anything but this.
So I knew he was dead, but it was like it was something happening somewhere else. Amelia was exhausted then. We sat together in front of the heater, as if there was nothing wrong, as if we were sharing a mug of tea after worship. She tugged a loose thread on the green jumper and it started to unravel, so she pulled on the wool, hand over hand, and I wound it round my fist, round and round, until we had unknitted the green jumper and there was nothing left of it at all. I think she kept a bit in her pocket, but the rest we burned in the fire.
She hung the little rose around her own neck and I lifted her long auburn hair and I was the one who tied the knot to secure it. She never took it off after that. Never.
She had me then. She knew if it was my word against hers, people would believe her. I believed her. I did not know what to believe. But I did know. I knew she had murdered Lucien.
We have reached the bottom of the second page.
Angie turns it over and back again. ‘Do you believe her, Mum?’
I always thought the truth would at least be clear. He did it. She did it. I did it. But this is a mess, everything has been a mess for so long and I cannot see a way of it ever becoming clear and honest. ‘I’ve no idea what to think.’ Her fingers are still clutching at my shirt. I release her grasp and take her hand in mine. ‘It might be true. Or it might have been Jack and she is making all this up
about Amelia because she’s scared. It might all be made up.’ The sun is behind the chimney now, the other side of the hedge I can hear the steady crunching of the cow working her way through the long meadow grass, and I remember Jack on afternoons like this, soaking the lentils, reading out loud from Sylvia Plath, showing Lucien how to whistle through grass. ‘She was ill, you know, but she wasn’t violent. Sometimes I thought she was the wisest of all of us.’
‘There is still one more page,’ says Angie. The second page is in black ink and it looks as if it has been written more slowly, maybe added on later.
Re-reading this, I know you will probably find it hard to believe. I always knew that would be the problem. She was my keeper. I could have run away when we moved to Norfolk, but that would not have been any good. I know from what has happened to me in the past, that it’s not enough just to say it’s happened, just to have the marks. Nobody believes you, all they’ll say is that you need evidence. I needed evidence that Amelia killed him and I waited until I could get it. What you are holding in your hand is the evidence. That is why you must not touch it. Look closely.
Angie puts the letter down, reaches down and takes the little tissue-paper parcel out of her bag, unfurls its leaves, lets it rest on her knee. We study the wooden rose, the leather thong, and then Angie gasps. ‘Look at the knot, Mum, look at it.’
Threaded through the curled and twisted leather are several long strands of auburn hair. The focus is lost on everything else – the words on the paper, Angie’s face, the rose itself – all blurred. I have run my fingers through hair such as this.
All at once Angie seems calmer than me, more methodical. She wraps the rose again in the tissue paper, puts it very carefully on
the bench and takes up Jack’s letter one more time, her voice a little steadier.
This is Sister Amelia’s hair. I cut the Rose from around her neck while she was sleeping. Eve was with her. She woke up, saw me with the scissors and they called the police. That was how I ended up sectioned. They thought I was trying to kill Amelia, but I did not want her dead. I wanted her convicted, but I did not tell them that. I had to wait until someone who believed me came to find me. I have kept the rose necklace a secret all this time, waiting for you to find me. I told myself I would live that long. Amelia has tried to visit me, I know what she wants, but I have refused.
Angie moves close to me now. ‘That’s true, I saw her there, waiting outside in a car when I collected this letter.’
‘You saw Amelia?’
‘But I didn’t speak to her. I don’t know if she saw me. Let’s finish it.’ Angie holds the letter so we can both read it, our hands either side of the page, our faces so close our breath becomes one as it leaves us and meets the softness of the orchard air.
I hope this is enough to lock her away forever. It will convict me as well, but I will be glad of that. She knew Lucien wouldn’t go with her. He never liked her. So the witch used me to get him. She had planned it all. I did not mean to kill him, but I killed him all the same. But please know that I loved him, he was the sweetest boy I’ve ever known and if this had not happened, he would have been the kindest of men.
I don’t know about Eve, but she could never have spoken out against Amelia. I don’t think she is as powerful as she looks. Dorothy suspected something. She lied for me about that night but only out of kindness.
I am not mad as I write this. Our only madness was to believe.
You once held me in your arms when I was frail and this is how I have repaid you.
I hope it sets you free.
Jack
Angie finally starts to sob, shuddering, almost hysterical sorrow sucking the air from her lungs and drowning her in tears. The letter slides onto the grass, rests on the clover, forcing a bee to new flowers. My arms are wide, suspended in fear and hesitation for the shortest of moments and then they remember what the arms of mothers do, so I wrap her up and hold her together and we sit like this for a very long time, entangled in the horror and grief and relief of knowing. Intermittent questions, re-readings, repetitions flutter in and out of the silence, but none of them makes any difference to the weight of the knowledge.
‘Mark!’ she chokes finally. ‘I need to get to him, Mum, he needs to know as well.’ She gets up as to leave, but I persuade her to take time, not to rush off in the state she’s in. I could not count the number of times I have said that in the past, but this time she agrees. She blows her nose with what’s left of her last tissue, then rolls a cigarette, her hands shaking and the tobacco sprinkling onto the bench, while I sit beside her, numb.
‘Are you all right, Mum?’ she asks.
I nod, that’s all I can do.
‘Are you sure? You look really pale.’
‘I don’t get out much,’ I manage to joke. I know she needs to go, I know I need to make it possible for her.
It is as if my attempt at a joke has jolted her back into her surroundings. ‘This place is so weird now. I don’t expect you even realise how weird it is.’ She shakes the buddleia behind the bench and two or three cabbage whites spiral up from the purple flowers. ‘Fucking paradise, that’s what I called it once, didn’t I, when we
were arguing? I remember that. I said I wasn’t going to leave Lucien in your fucking paradise.’
Closing my eyes against the words, I can hear her voice collapsing again, but she regains some control. ‘I’ll get things sorted, Mum. I will be back, I promise.’
A hug, a kiss, half-choked words about loving her and a leaving. From the rise and fall of her shoulders as she walks away, I can see she has taken a deep breath. Then, just before the gap in the hedge, she turns. She has forgotten the butterfly.
‘I could take it down to the Wellspring for you,’ I offer. ‘For him. Today.’
She nods. ‘Thank you. I can’t do that now,’ she whispers, almost inaudibly. ‘And I’m so sorry, Mum, I’m so sorry that I ever thought it was you.’
It was me, of course. None of this would ever have happened if it was not for me. And yet it was not me. She is gone, but this parting gift is priceless. It is only because I believe she will come back that I can let her go – because I love her, I do love her. Charley loves her too, I am so glad she has him – it is something to be cherished. The way she was standing when she was under the buddleia, her hand on her belly, her skirt a little tight, I even wondered if she was pregnant. She has taken the envelope and will go to the police – she is so strong now, so purposeful in her grief. I try to picture it, Sister Amelia tall and unrepentant at the door to her caravan, the police at the bottom of the steps with questions. Will I ever meet her again to ask her why, to ask her, was it worth it? She kissed me, on more than one occasion, she said she worshipped me as a chosen one, but it was all, always, the other way around.