The Well (13 page)

Mr Borden's thanks were lost in the roar of his departure.

‘Well, if that don't bear out what I've been telling you, Miss Hester,' Mr Bird's pale eyes were watery with reproach. ‘Borden doesn't keep cash in the house,' he said, ‘if he did, it would all have gone too.'

‘I really must go and get ready,' Hester said.

‘Anything you'd like me to do before I go?' Mr Bird roused himself from inner reflections. Hester felt sure he could see the terrible theft from her own kitchen. He seemed disinclined to give up. ‘What about that teapot?' he said. ‘Why don't I see to the kettle while you just finish up on your clothes. A drop of tea, set us all right for the day.' He accompanied Hester towards the house. ‘Place is looking very nice,' he said as if Hester was inviting him indoors. He seemed to be unaware of her lack of enthusiasm towards his visit. ‘Oh! Ho!' he said, ‘I see the old well cover's shifted. Wait on, I'll shove it back. Wind must a been strong in the night, especially here, I'll bet!' He leaned down and tried to pull the heavy framework across the hole. Hester, watching, saw his neck flush red and then darken to a deep purple as he tried, with all his strength to move it.

‘Please Mr Bird,' she said, ‘don't bother. We don't mind it being like that. It's always been like that,' she spoke quickly. Mr Bird, having failed, stood upright. Anyone but Hester would have felt sorry for him.

‘Not as young as I was,' he mumbled, panting and wiping perspiration from his forehead. He needed to wipe his eyes too Hester noticed. She turned away. ‘Mr Bird,' she said, ‘I do have to go to town straight away, if you don't mind.' She paused.

‘If you're sure, then, there's nothing I can do for you?' he put away his handkerchief.

‘Quite sure,' Hester replied, ‘absolutely nothing.'

‘Orright. Good day to you Miss Hester, Gooday.' Mr Bird, as if ashamed now of his physical weakness, made his way back across to the fence.

Hester hurried to the house. It made her feel sick to think that someone, a thief, had been in the kitchen. As she opened the door she thought that she could smell the intruder. Perhaps every room and corner of the house was tainted. These thoughts and the knowledge of what lay at the bottom of the well took away any wish for the tea which was brewing in the patient teapot. She supposed this was what fear was.

Speeding along the long road to the town Hester thought of Katherine nervously sweeping the rooms and then, with thin tremulous fingers, moving and dusting the ornaments. She would do this and afterwards prepare the vegetables for the evening meal because she had been told to. ‘Wash the spinach,' Hester had said. ‘Be sure to get the sand out of it,' as she had often said. ‘We'll have Eggs Florentine.' Katherine would, from habit, be very careful with the water and she would be sure to wash the fresh green leaves with a thoroughness equal to Hester's. Afterwards she would lie down on her bed because, as she left, Hester had said to her to lie down and have a nice sleep. The day, she said, was just an ordinary day.

As she increased the speed Hester tried to think of Katherine serene at home busy with simple household work. She tried to think of Katherine singing and dancing from one part of the small house to another. And she tried to picture her curled up asleep, possibly for comfort, in the middle of the larger bed which was Hester's.

Instead she knew the house was full of little sounds, footsteps and rustlings; someone breathing heavily; Katherine lying stiff with fear trying to hide flat under the tartan rug …

Hester felt hot. It was an unbearable heat. It was as if thinking gave her a pain. Her face flushed, burning hot. She rolled down the window swerving from one side of the road to the other. She felt a chill spread down her back. She knew that Katherine at home would be lying on her bed listening to the silence in the house. She would, very quietly, lean down reaching for her shoes and, with stealth, slip her feet into them and very slowly she would walk outside knowing that the house was empty because she has been through it with her little dustpan and brush and her cleaning rags. She has never before minded being left alone. Mostly she accompanies Miss Harper everywhere. Once when she was unwell … Hester smiled at the memory. Once when Katherine was unwell and had to stay in bed, Miss Harper, going off alone, had come back with the most darling duchess set. The dainty brush and comb and hand-mirror – Katherine still had them – were small and backed with hand-beaten silver.

‘Oh Miss Harper, dear, wherever did you get them? They're so cute!'

‘I found them,' Hester explained then, ‘in that funny old shop, you know, near Mr Bird's place. The antique-furniture shop – the other end of town.'

‘Oh Miss Harper, dear, they must have been terribly expensive!'

‘Yes, but pretty Kathy, and I like you to have pretty things, especially if they are of good quality.' Hester smiled again. During the years they often tried to imagine the previous owner of the set.

‘She must have been a princess, Miss Harper, dear, or a famous movie star.'

‘Yes a princess or a film star. We do have them here in the wheat.'

Hester, still smiling, looked with approval at the familiar countryside. It appeared to be quite unchanged. How could paddocks, she thought, know when land changed hands. It was a fine day. If she stopped the car and walked perhaps she would feel safe and comforted. She always felt no harm, could come to her once she was on her own property. Now the property was reduced but the feeling of safety could persist, she felt, if she walked low down, small, on the gravel edge of the road with only the immense sky above her. But there was no time to walk. She increased her speed. The man on the track could mean that there was another. The other might be looking for the one … She tried to look with the interest of the landowner at the paddocks. It was not the same now. Perhaps, she thought, Katherine is out of doors, pleasantly warm in the yard watching the tiny clouds coming up from the west knowing that Miss Harper, who loves clouds, can see them too.

Without meaning to Katherine might go to the well, she might put her hand on the coping, from habit, to see if it is pleasantly warm to sit on …

No. No. No! Not the well! Hester's own voice in the car frightened her. No – Katherine! she croaked, come away from the well. Powerless and tormented with vivid pictures of Katherine standing beside the well, she thought of her alone and frightened; frightened at what they had done; Katherine alone hearing a sound from the well. Often there are sounds, soft soft noises, a rushing of wind and the drip drop of water when there is no water. Often they think they have heard water. They think they do hear water somewhere far down, drip drop, the soft sound of water, cool sweet water under the earth when they know there is no water. The well is dry. Katherine could be afraid that someone, a stranger is behind her; she might be afraid to look and, having to look, might glance round uneasily, peering squinting all round the yard.

Hester groaned aloud. She knew how unconcerned the poultry, busily scratching in the earth, would be. The geese, with nothing disturbing them, are quiet. They usually stand in little groups eyeing each other; lifting and stretching first one leg and then the other. They twist their strong sinewy necks and push their heads against their folded wings to smooth them. With efficient beaks they preen their feathers.

Hester, thinking of the geese, approved of them. It was a sign that they were healthy if they looked after themselves well. Katherine knows this; she reassured herself. All this wisdom and knowledge had been passed on to Katherine, she told herself. Katherine knew too that if a stranger came, an intruder, the geese would make a noise.

Hester bit her lower lip. She could not know whether the geese were silent or not. ‘I will try,' she said aloud, ‘to count my blessings. I must discipline my thoughts. One blessing is that the truck is not damaged. He could have come up and through the windscreen but he didn't. We might all have been cut and bleeding.' There was no blood. It was a miracle, she thought and wished for a greater one. If only the whole thing had never happened. But it had. If only the whole thing could be done with. Finished. The man, whoever he was, Hester did not care, must have been caught on the edge of the bar. The better thing would have been if he had not been there at all.

Hester bared her teeth in a bitter smile remembering the flourish with which she had driven earlier from the yard sounding her horn and raising a cloud of dust in the track as if to obliterate for ever, for Katherine, every memory of the night before. She thought of Katherine alone standing by the well listening as if there was a singing and a moaning sounding from the depths. It would be easy to imagine a long drawn-out far-away sighing as if the wind stirred deep down in the earth and the sigh would be echoing a low voice from the well.

Hester gripped the steering wheel till her knuckles whitened. She clenched her teeth and tried to notice unmistakeable signs and details of other people's failure on their land. Anything out of order which she could pounce on to take her mind off what remained uppermost in it. Oh God! Katherine! She moaned aloud sure that Katherine would be too frightened to move away from the well. She tried by the force of her thought to make Katherine turn away from the well and to walk through the woolshed where the bagged poultry feed was neatly stacked next to the cheerful little stock of sweet-smelling hay. Katherine would walk on through the shed and out on to the track.

‘Go back home, Katherine,' Hester said in the car, her face yellow in the rear mirror. ‘There may be someone hiding in the saltbush.'

She must have been mad, she told herself, to leave Katherine by herself especially since they had no idea if the man had been alone. She wondered whether to turn back at once. She was more than half way to town. She thought of the rope. The rope and the money. The money. She must have the rope. Once they had the rope and the money the whole thing could be put out of their minds. It was only a question of not thinking, not remembering. She did not turn back. She studied the sky ahead. She tried to be pleased that there were clouds, even if they were thin, they were clouds and clouds were clouds even without the immediate promise of rain. ‘Go home,' she wanted to shout across the paddocks to Katherine. ‘Go in the house and close the door Katherine.' She knew it was not possible to walk far along the track. The saltbush pressing in on both sides would make Katherine feel she could not breathe and irresistibly she would be drawn to the open space of the yard and she would retrace her steps to the well.

Hester looked at her watch. It was only eleven. Katherine, if she did take a walk, would stay out only for a few minutes. Ten minutes would pass and it would be ten past eleven. The day stretched endlessly ahead.

It would have been better, Hester thought, to have taken the shorter way across her property. No, that was not right. Across Borden's land. She shook her head. That way she would have overtaken Mr Bird. She wanted to avoid him. It was not possible, she reflected, to avoid people in the country. Even where there were no people, people were about. The Bordens and Borden's men, they were bound to be somewhere between the dog-leg and the town. It was better to be on the road even if the journey took twice as long.

She tried to think of the dancing. She held somewhere in her head the exact music and the rhythm of the beat. She knew if she tried to sing she would only make a vague croaking sound lacking everything she wished for. She remembered Katherine's animated movements and the ripple of the light-yellow dress. She groaned. The dance was for her the only physical manifestation of physical love. Hester did not feel guilty about the feeling. It was private. She pulled off onto the gravel for a few precious minutes alone on the edge of the great emptiness.

Afterwards, in her weakness, she cried a little and remembered again, all too quickly, the crazy ride, the dreadful thud, the man's body lifeless and Katherine's pitiable weeping. She wondered if there were marks in the yard which would give everything away. She should have told Katherine to sweep the gravel with the stiff broom. The body, though, had not touched the ground so there would not be drag marks.

The only marks would be those of the tyres unusually close to the coping of the well. ‘I should have told you to sweep the yard Katherine.' Hester, again in her mind, saw Katherine loitering near the well as if drawn there by the sighing and moaning which they usually laughed about when they sat there together. If there was no sound from the well Hester knew, because they often did it, that Katherine would lean over the opening, which was larger now and more hideously ragged, and she would listen and, leaning still more, would strain to listen.

‘Oh Katherine! Come away from the well,' Hester cried out as the truck rattled onto the road bridge. The river, far below, was undisturbed. The brown water had no ripples; it was low below the banks and stagnant. She drove straight to Grossmans. She would be as quick as possible.

Hester toying with the idea of a chain, never mind the expense, was told that it would have to be ordered and might take up to a week or ten days. She settled for a rope which had been her idea in the first place, the chain having only suggested itself as she drove down the High Street. A rope, she said to herself. There must be no delay.

‘Ours not to reason why,' Mrs Grossman said to Mr Grossman in the back shed when she went out to ask him for a double length of rope, ‘spliced extra strong', and to tell him that Miss Harper would wait for it.

Hester, weary on a little bentwood chair in the Grossmans' store, listened to the latest news embellished with more details with every retelling, about the robbery at Borden's Place. So it is Borden's Place, she had to tell herself. She seemed to have floating black spots in front of her eyes. Her hands almost strangled her emaciated purse.

Without immediate money she was obliged to go to Grossmans where she had an account. In any case she did not want to drive further. Her main concern was to get what she needed and then to set off for home as quickly as possible. In her reserved way she did not explain what the rope was for though she was afraid Grossman would send down from the shed to ask so that he would know exactly how much she required.