The Well (22 page)

‘Miss Harper's order coming up!' Mr Grossman, staggering on bent legs, came round the open end of the counter. ‘Under the tarp? As usual Miss Harper?'

‘Yes please,' Hester struggled to her feet grasping her stick. Hesitating she nodded to her new friend and followed Mr Grossman out into the street where the freshly washed Toyota was parked.

‘We could have – us both, Mr Grossman and I, been raped and worse in our beds.' Mrs Grossman's voice followed them. Theft and double rape was the next item it seemed. ‘Three tyarias gorn from Bordens. Mrs Borden will never see them again that's for sure. My own dyamontey tyaria too!' Mrs Grossman, in the short interval of time had evidently amassed a jewelry collection of her own. One of the gifts of theft. A legacy from a thief. A tiara for Mrs Grossman. If she had had it in time, Hester thought without meaning to think, Mrs Grossman could have worn her tiara at her wedding.

Hester and Katherine, redolent of a particularly powerful tar shampoo left over from the days when Hester, regularly on Sundays, furiously lathered her father's ancient dogs, drove on down the High Street to the post office. Their joint hair washing had been the final act of a merciless cleaning programme in readiness for the coming of Joanna and, in part, as a sort of celebration of the closing of the well.

Mr Borden, as good as his word, had sent two men and the necessary materials soon after daybreak. Hester saw them arrive as if from outer space across the great distance of the paddock. In the silent kitchen she, as quietly as possible, prepared a breakfast which she ate with a good appetite. Approaching the sofa she gently shook Katherine saying, ‘Kathy wake up! Everything's cleared up in the yard. The men have practically finished. Wash your face! I'm calling the men in for tea and scones. I've baked scones, Kathy, time to get up.'

Katherine, puffy about the eyes, drank her hot tea and tossed her tangled hair in reply to some joking remark from one of the men. The rain brought out jokes from the men Hester remembered. It brought out bold remarks too.

‘You, Kathy, you coming to the dancing?' one of the men, the older one, asked. ‘There's dancing at the fête next week. There's disco and a barn dance. I saw you at Borden's show, you like the dancing? eh?' He whistled a tune through his teeth and moved his shoulders, first one and then the other. He tapped his foot on the kitchen tiles making muddy marks Hester noticed. Katherine pouted and narrowed her eyes. She squinted at him sideways and tossed her hair again.

‘Katherine has a friend coming to stay,' Hester said.

‘Great! See you both there!' He scraped his chair back from the table. ‘Thanks for the tea Miss Harper.' He put his cup on the draining board. The younger man, following, muttered his thanks adding a mumbled, ‘See ya at the dance then,' to Katherine.

During those few days, during the relentless cleaning of the rooms, the relining of the scrubbed-out cupboards with fresh shelf paper, the airing of more blankets and the sewing of yet another frilled quilt for Joanna's bed, Hester was sure Mr Bird would come. She looked frequently across the paddocks to the rise to watch for his cloud of dust and then remembered, as if stepping into another world, that the rain had come and there would be no dust. The steady drone of the tractors, sometimes near and sometimes far off, as they crossed and recrossed ploughing the rain-softened earth, enhanced the emptiness and the isolation.

But Mr Bird did not come. Hester dressed two ducks and a boiling fowl. Though their immediate pantry needed restocking they had a good cupboard of their own preserves. Hester opened bottled carrots, beans and tomatoes and, as a special treat, she brought out a vintage cherry jam made by her grandmother. Together they dug over their own vegetable plots using their light forks. Hester, leaning on her fork, declared the ground ready after the rain. She was, she said, obliged to do more leaning than digging.

The two women sat in the Toyota outside the post office to look at their letters. Hester's were all requests for money for worthwhile, she hoped, charities and relief organizations. Katherine had a letter on blue pages with scalloped edges. Every page was decorated with a golden cross, the scallops were also gilded. The general effect was pretty.

‘It's from Joanna,' Katherine said when Hester questioned.

Katherine had developed a different way of speaking. Her voice was flat and often she did not look up when she replied to anything Hester said.

Hester understood that Katherine was tired. She tried, a few times, to reason with her that the well was completely covered – hadn't she seen for herself? – the men finishing off all that needed doing when she, Hester, had told her breakfast was ready. Hester, at the back of her mind, wondered whether it was possible to really close off the incident in this simple way. If she brought it all into normal circumstances (two men working at the well, repairing the cover, when Katherine unravelled herself from the tartan rug) then Katherine had no tale to tell, nothing to blurt out, because Hester had to believe that Katherine would believe that the two men working so diligently would know by now all there was to know. So, Hester said to herself, what had Kathy to tell? It seemed all so simple. She hoped it was the end of the horrible affair. All she had to do now was to suppress, to squash her own miserable knowledge, pull her bedclothes over her head as she had on the night of Hilde's pain, and get through, first the visit from Joanna and then whatever was to come after that.

She would concentrate on the jam and pickle shed. This would keep them busy. They could start with the quinces. The fruit would keep for a few more days. Making quince jelly would probably be a new experience for Joanna. Hester tried to look forward to the pretty little jars glowing in neat rows on the kitchen table.

‘Joanna's just sent me her train arrival time which we know already,' Katherine replied. Hester listened anxiously for some kind of change in her voice.

‘Is that all?' Hester peered across at the pages. ‘There's more than that surely.' Katherine seemed to read the rest of the letter as if she had not read it just before. ‘She, Joanna's into religion,' she said, her voice beginning to lift. ‘She's an evangelist. Oh, Miss Harper, dear,' she said with more life, ‘she wants me to be an evangelist too. Isn't that cute? There's a college in America … where …'

Hester, scanning the pages quickly, saw the glittering crosses, like Christmas decorations, on the pages and the tiny gold writing, very curved and ornamental, a text, above the heavy rounded handwriting of the future visitor.

She supposed it was the same text on every page.

‘Oh yes,' Katherine said, ‘it would cost too much, wouldn't it, to have writing paper with different things on every page. Evangelist!' she said. ‘Isn't that just Great! America! Great!'

‘I'll drop you outside the markets,' Hester said pulling to the side of the road. ‘You can buy a new pillow for the spare bed and have a little look round. I'll be back here in half an hour or so when I've been to see Mr Bird. See if there's something you fancy, something you fancy to eat this evening,' she added, knowing that she was, against her principles, pandering to a sudden capriciousness in Katherine's appetite. She had eaten hardly anything during the last few days since the well had been sealed with the repaired cover. Diligently she had prepared everything as usual, taking great trouble with the preserved vegetables and fruit and, serving for them both the usual attractive helpings and then, without any explanation or apology, had either refused or been unable to eat. Hester trying to be calm felt an overwhelming tenderness for Kathy as she drove away seeing her in the rear mirror white faced and delicate at the entrance to the busy market. She would have liked to hold her close to say comforting words but she was afraid to break the calm and she was not sure what words to say. Kathy had mentioned a college. There was Joanna and the college. She could not think of Kathy going away, not just yet. Not yet. Not ever.

Mr Bird's house which was also his office had a piece of rough lawn surrounded by a cyclone wire fence with white painted posts and rails. It was set back from the road, the shaggy grass patch sloping up to the house. At the back of the house was a stockfeeder's barn and a loading ramp. As she drove into the yard Hester saw that the barn was closed.

There were no trees or flowers though a passion vine still clung to a trellis which hid, Hester remembered suddenly, a shed and an outside lavatory. It was a long time since she had visited Mr Bird. Everything looked the same in spite of the passing of years. The only difference was that no one was about. Nothing was being loaded or unloaded, the barn looked strange with its usually gaping doorway closed.

There were never any children at Mr Bird's house when she went there as a child with her father. But there had been, all by itself in an accessible corner of the shed, an old wooden dolls' pram. It was handmade and heavy and had not been painted. It had round wooden wheels and when Hester pulled it out from the shed and pushed it on Mr Bird's path it had rumbled and bumped along as she imagined a prehistoric pram would have done – if prehistoric people had had prams. Hester pushed the pram up and down the path while her father discussed things with Mr Bird.

It was disturbing now to remember the pram, the only toy at Mr Bird's place. She had never wondered till now how he came to have something that could be played with. She wondered now if he had made it himself and, if so, why. Perhaps today she would ask him and perhaps even thank him for sending her cards for both birthdays at school. She would thank quietly, of course, for she had to speak to him today very carefully. She must ask him to help her to rearrange her investments as she needed money. She had to consider and decide on the best way of talking about this as she naturally could not disclose to him the terrible loss. She had to endure that second to the other thing she must endure on her own. She must never speak about either.

The wooden pram did not have any covers or any pillow and once when Hester put her doll, brought on purpose to have an outing in Mr Bird's pram, into the pram it had slipped down into the deep well of the pram in a most awkward way. Hester tried to rescue the doll but it was wedged somehow. She poked at the small round head of the doll marking and scratching, without meaning to, the sleek shining paint which the doll had for hair. Not wanting to tell anyone, she had pushed the pram back into the shed upset by the offended and hurt look the doll seemed to have on its red-cheeked face. Neither her father nor Mr Bird noticed the emptiness in Hester's arms when it was time to leave.

Mr Bird's small house was extremely plain and dull Hester thought as she limped round the side. She had always imagined it to be filled with filing cabinets and spikes packed with yellowing papers, bills and receipts and records of sales and purchases long forgotten. She knew that there were people who could never throw away such papers. She needed some tea and wondered if Mr Bird, after her last churlish behaviour, would offer her some. She supposed he could make tea somewhere in his house. He might even have a tin of biscuits. She could not remember ever having anything to eat there. He must have some meals, she thought, that were not in other people's houses.

It was so quiet Hester had to realize that Mr Bird was not at home. She should have known he would be out, away visiting properties and sales. She was so out of touch she did not know what would be going on at present. It was strange too that the stock-feed barn was closed.

The office door was open. There was a girl in the small room bent over a pile of envelopes, sorting them.

‘I suppose Mr Bird is out.' Hester broke into the silence, at the same time remembering the small-scale yards at the forthcoming fête. Mostly the show was for domestic and farm-yard animals and poultry. There would even be a section for children's pets. Mr Bird, thin and distinguished looking in tweeds and his best hat, would be at every suitable elbow his eyes narrowing towards the flanks of some innocent sow.

‘Yes he is.' The young woman looked up. ‘Is there anything I can do for you Miss Harper?'

‘When will he be back?' Hester was annoyed and worried.

‘I don't know.' The woman, Hester saw now when she got up from behind the tidy desk, was not young, only her face was youthful. Hester recognized her as the wife of the man who worked in the stock-feed barn. The office was airless and very neat. ‘He's had to go to hospital,' she said, ‘not here in town. He's been taken away to the city. Frank went with him. He was taken ill during the night … they might be able to do an operation … The office,' she smiled at Hester, ‘is really closed but if there's anything … I can get fowl pellets if that's …'

Hester, leaning on her stick, swayed and sat down on one of the wooden chairs placed along the wall. She had never considered the possibility that something might happen to Mr Bird. She felt as if she was on the edge of a black hole. She, in spite of a great fear and dread, managed to utter something which bordered on a sound of sympathy and, no, it was not layer pellets she wanted.

‘We don't know what's wrong exactly,' Frank's wife said, ‘but it wasn't altogether sudden, he's had some bad spells and then apparently a big haemorrhage, internal – you see, he's alone here at night. Frank,' she indicated with a jerk of her head, the barn, ‘Frank found him first thing in the morning. They wouldn't keep him at the hospital here – said he must go at once … he'd had a few bad spells, Frank knew that, but we didn't know how bad.' She paused. ‘Is it your books you want to see Miss Harper?' she asked. ‘They are all here if you want them. Mr Bird keeps everything so people can see what's what. He has them locked in here. I can get them for you … He's got everyone's affairs safe in here.'