The Well (20 page)

There were a number of things she liked when she was a child; especially there were words;
I challenge thee to mortal combat!
She said it to everyone. Fräulein Herzfeld blinked her slightly bulging eyes. ‘Vot iss ziss?' she said, not understanding.
I challenge thee to mortal combat!
Hester, striking an attitude, waved her umbrella spear.

‘Bott it iss not rainink Hester!' Hilde went on reading and Hester, as usual, thrust her spear into the sofa cushions …

The fire was almost out in the stove. Hester rose with stiff awkward movements and put in some small sticks. She hated a black hearth. The kitchen was cold. She had been, she supposed, thinking of Hilde Herzfeld. Together they had played surprisingly childish games. On going to the boarding school she had had to ‘be her age' as Rosalie Borden would say. With Hilde, Hester felt safe and young and happy. Perhaps now she had been making an extension of this youthful happiness in her attempts to give Kathy a home and to educate her at an age when most people considered themselves, as Kathy and probably Joanna would say, ‘through with school'.

It was still raining. Water levels would rise. Hester thought with satisfaction of the tanks and the dams and dismissed the thought at once since they were no longer hers. She thought of their own tank filling and wished that it was the only thing she needed, during this long night, to think about. Katherine still had not stirred from the dark side of the table. She must have been unable to keep her vigil. The keys were still on their chain. Hester stroked them with cold grateful fingers. She must have fallen asleep for a short time. Katherine, with that youthful ability to sleep anywhere, slept on, her head resting on her arms on the table.

Hester moved on her stick across the kitchen and fetched the tartan rug which she placed gently on Katherine's back and shoulders. Leaving the kitchen once more she felt along the shelf inside her bedroom door, in the dark, and selected a book. She knew without a light which book it was.

The smell of the book reminded her of her room in the old house. Her window there looked out across the pasture which came right up to the house on that side. The sheep were often there especially when there were lambs. Often she sat reading half-hearing lambs bleating and the gargling choking replies from the ewes. Sometimes they were close beneath her window and seemed to be in the room with her …

She took the book back to the lamp light on her side of the table. She began to read.

The Queen and her sons, Hester remembered, were travelling endlessly and endlessly searching. She turned the pages with impatience to find the artist's audacious embellishment of the myth. Of course there were no pictures. In her mind she had made them from the words. She put aside the book and prowled once more alongside the dark shelf. She brought back to the table the shabby copies of
Silas Marner
and
Robinson Crusoe
. She must endure the night. And the day and the next night. Her head felt as if in a tight crown. It was the tight plaiting of her hair. ‘Katherine, the plaits are too tight.' She said the words in a low voice. Her own hair was bringing back her headache.

Usually she felt better when it rained. She would be better in the morning. She wished for a miraculous recovery for Katherine.

Cherishing, safety, human efforts towards love and faith, that was why she liked to read about the lonely old weaver, the miser, an old man caring with tenderness for the motherless child.

The stone hut was made a soft nest for her lined with downy patience
…

She read for a time and then opened the other book. Once, when she was a child, she had killed a meat sandwich. She had then her own pallisade, built by herself of hay in the barn. And every day she went out from there to hunt. She took the hunted sandwich to bed in the pocket of her nightgown and wrote in her diary:
I went out into the island with my gun to see for some food … I killed a she goat
…'

She knew that fate left no margin for choice about islands and survival.

There was a high wind now. It seemed to howl round the cottage. She thought about the safety of her roof knowing that it was well made. The yard too was well fenced, she had insisted on that, and the old woolshed had weathered many gales. At times, behind the noise of the wind she heard the lift and fall of the well cover. As soon as this storm was over, she told herself, she would have that cover replaced and the well closed over properly. She blamed herself for Katherine's present hysteria – for that was what it was.

The fantasy created over the years contained in its invention all that was romantic and beautiful; the fairy-tale lovers and the safe dangers of cosily imagined evil lodged in some distant place. There was the idea of a world of caverns lined with jewels and perhaps the possibilities of magic practices which made wishes come true. There were the sounds too of the rushing wind, the dripping of precious water and the unintelligible murmurings of voices, which could be human, in the depths of the well.

One of the memories of the wind and rain years ago was that carried in the noise of the storm was the human voice. It seemed to cry from the top gables of the house or from some remote corner, a sheepfold long out of use, or from the banks of the creek which had, over the years, carved for itself a gully so deep that it was a ravine down which the black water, in flood, poured.

During a lull in the gale Hester was once more enveloped in her fear. She shivered with an intense cold and she had to clench her teeth against waves of nausea. She thought she heard a voice somewhere outside. She thought someone was calling and calling. She thought of her gun and wondered where it was. The wind rose raging once more and the voice was lost. When the wind dropped more rain fell and all sounds, real or imagined, were engulfed in the noise of the downfall. She sat tense on her chair. Her head throbbed with the remnant of the migraine. She touched her head with tentative fingers; her hair was drawn painfully from her forehead. When she looked at her hands the bones of her knuckles seemed to shine white under her skin.

She stared at the open book without reading. A piece of charred wood stirred in the stove. She jerked round as if to see who had entered the room not in an ordinary way but with stealth. Katherine still slept, her head resting on her arms on the table. When she looked at the clock Hester saw that it was not even midnight. So many hours to wait till morning. In an attempt to control her fear she tried to look forward to the morning, to the sun rising over the storm-washed land. The morning, she knew, would not solve. It could only complicate. She got up slowly to attend to the stove. There it was again, she was sure, the voice in the wind calling. She paused, leaning heavily on her stick, to listen. It could be an animal she told herself. All kinds of birds and animals made human noises, especially sheep when they coughed. There was no sound except the steady pouring of the rain. She finished making up the fire. In the morning, after the storm had blown itself out, everything would seem different. She would be able to smell the wet earth and feel the fresh air on her face. It would all be over, that trouble out there. Whatever was making that noise would no longer be making it. It would all be over, she told herself, knowing that it could not be.

She understood that Katherine, while brushing and plaiting her hair, had hoped to slip the keys from their safe mooring. Her plaits were too tight. She would have to undo them herself even though the exertion of raising her arms would bring back the migraine.

‘Kathy,' she wanted to say, ‘wake up, let's be friends. Undo my plaits please, they are too tight. Kathy please. Please let's forget all this trouble and go on the way we were, Kathy.' She found herself composing explanations; ‘Kathy I thought I was protecting you by doing what I did – but I must tell you – people would have been sorry for you – but I didn't – I don't want people here, I don't want newspaper men and photographers or journalists and sightseers. I don't want other people coming here poking about in our lives. Kathy I want to tell you this so that we can go on the way we were.' How could she say these things to Katherine? ‘Kathy if I hadn't done what I've done we would have the money now.' If she understood herself like this, Hester thought, perhaps she could make Katherine understand too. But there were other things … How could Kathy discuss with a strange man the private things of life, of her life, Hester's, as she had done? It was all right to read about these things in a magazine article which was accompanied by a photograph of a mature and neatly dressed nurse. Hester and Katherine with a wonderful unrestrained freedom discussed together all the problems they read about. Katherine knew a great deal more than Hester. Hester, supposing that the convent education was more comprehensive said so on one occasion. Katherine laughed. ‘Oh Miss Harper, dear,' she said, ‘at the Home they could only think about one thing. They were always looking and sniffing to find out if there was an unwanted baby on the way!'

Hester realized she must have been asleep. The lamp was out and the kitchen was dark except for a small glow from the stove. She could just make out that Katherine seemed to be no longer sitting at the table. She tried to say ‘Katherine,' but her mouth was dry. No reply came in answer to the croaking sound she managed to make. She felt for her keys. They were still under the buttons of her bodice. She felt numb with cold and she found it hard to move her head. Frightened she put both hands up and felt the smooth ropes of hair to be tight and rigid. She knew at once they were wound, in and out, round the struts of the chair back. Cautiously she felt the chair lower down. Her hair was wound round and through and round and through. She was tied by her hair. Terrified by the knowledge of silent and sinister action she tried to get up from the chair but could not.

‘Katherine!' she said in a crackling whisper. There was no reply. She tried again to call out. She had no voice for a cry or a scream. ‘Kathy!' she tried once more.

She woke with a start. With a timid movement she put her hands to her head and to the chair back and knew she was free. Katherine, at the other side of the table, raised her head and blinked at her; then, gathering the rug about her, she moved from her chair to the old sofa. She lay down and pulled the rug round her shoulders and seemed to continue to sleep without really waking up.

Hester limped to the wood box. She would need to go out to the porch for more wood and kindling to relight the stove.

She thought she heard the voice as soon as she opened the door to the shining wet yard. It was still dark though the sky held, low down, the pale light of the approaching dawn. She listened and thought she heard the voice again. The poultry, not properly shut up, were making some commotion. She was not sure about the voice. Katherine had thrown, she said, the torch down the well. Hester had another little one which she fetched. She groped at the top edge of the wardrobe reminded by their fragrance of the ripeness and readiness of the quinces. The gun, she thought, used to be kept on the wardrobe but that was long ago in the other house. The gun, neglected, must be somewhere but would be useless. An intruder had come, a murderer perhaps, and she had no weapon.

With her weak torch she moved slowly across the yard. The air was fresh and cold and there was the sound of water everywhere. Her black polished boots splashed through a small lake. Water trickled and dripped from the gutters of the house and from the eaves of the shed. She thought, at first, that the voice called from the hay in the woolshed. The gun would not have been of any use. She knew it could easily be lost to an enemy for she did have the light in one hand and needed her stick in the other. She twisted her face in the bitter half smile. Perhaps it would be better not to go searching.

The voice, she was not sure now that she had heard anyone call, but the voice partly lost in the running and dripping of water seemed to come from the well. Unwillingly she went to the edge of the coping. There was water in the well. She could smell it. High water, terrifyingly high considering the depths. She turned the pale beam of her torch on the dark surging movement of the water, hardly able to follow the frail light with her look. She was afraid of the water and what its power might have yielded.

She knew how quickly flood water could rise. Bridges and paddocks could become impassable in less than ten minutes.

As her torch flashed again to the water making curious rings and rippling patterns of light on the black surface, she was sure she saw a hand grasping the lowest metal rung, the one which was set in the wall of the well at a greater distance below the other rungs. She thought as the water slapped crazily against the stonework that she saw too a man's head which, because of being drenched, was small, sleeked and rounded.

It is difficult to see anything which is partly and, at times, wholly submerged. Hester knew this as she tried to peer with her feeble light into the strangeness of the changed well. It seemed now that there was no sound other than the unusual sound of water coming from the well. And what she thought she had seen was now completely submerged. Peering, she waited for some sign. To her horror the water seemed to be rising even more. Soon, she thought, it would cover the next rung and then the next.

Hester knew that the quick rising of water was often followed by an equally quick fall of the raised level. Trembling and fearful at the thought of what was now so close to the edge of the coping, she raised her stick and tried to lean into the hole. Supporting herself on the wall she tried, with the slender ash plant, to poke at whatever it was just below the level of the water. Not able to reach she struck wildly and without effect with the stick. He must go down.