that was all.
It was a Keatsian autumn for us. With their roots starved of moisture, trees across the country were brought down in the battering winds, but in our orchard the only things that fell were apples and plums and damsons and pears and we stumbled on the cookers lying unharvested in the long, wet grass because we simply didn’t have enough space to store them. In high spirits, we got tickets for the village harvest lunch. This was the sort of event which we thought epitomised the rural community spirit we had signed up for. Mark and I sat down at one of the long trestle tables, but as everyone else arrived, they sat somewhere else. I was furious and told Mark that it was ridiculous that we were treated like lepers, after all my attempts to get involved.
‘Do you think it’s because of . . .?’ I took a large swig of cider and immediately regretted saying what I had been thinking.
Mark met my gaze full on. ‘Because they think I’m a paedophile? No actually, Ruth, I don’t. I think it’s because we have water and they don’t. So leave it,’ he said, ‘it won’t get you anywhere.’
But I crossed the hall to the table where over a dozen of our closest farming neighbours were squashed onto a table of eight. The men looked up, stone-grey, embarrassment flickering over the red faces of their wives. One or two of them at least managed a hello, before straightening the cutlery.
I said they looked pretty squashed and there was plenty of room on our table. ‘We’re not infectious,’ I said.
‘Some of us wish you were,’ said Maggie. Someone had told me that she had won Local Farming Entrepreneur of the Year only a few years ago for her parsley farm. Now she was bankrupt. I couldn’t think of anything to say.
I watched Mark, taking his drink outside. Other tables fell silent, and then people resumed talking just that little bit too loudly to make it look as though they weren’t listening. The locals stared at the menus, designed by the children at the village school where Jean’s sister was the secretary, run off on the photocopier at the post office where Alice Pudsley ran the counter, laid out on the tables along with the corn wreaths made by the Altons who lived at the end of our drive and turn left, and the flower posies arranged by the Clardles, who used to run the pub and were now retired, Perry taken up with the largely redundant role of Chairman of the River Lenn Fishing Association. I wanted to tell them that we’d done nothing to either deserve or receive or create this fertile land: we’d added nothing to the fertiliser, we were not diverting their streams, we had no way of dragging the clouds to our hill and emptying their leaden sacks of rain on our earth. Somewhere, underneath it all, they were logical people and they knew that must be the case. The vicar gave thanks, the ladies carried in the trays with bowls of steaming parsnip soup and homemade bread, the cider flowed, and Mark and I left. Our harvest was the most prolific, but it seemed we had the least to celebrate. We walked back along the river, where the exhausted salmon hurled themselves from the shallow pond against the dribbling weir, again and again, until the heron picked off their flapping bodies from the dry stones on which they landed.
We knew what it was like to be ostracised. Try having your husband accused of keeping child pornography on his local authority laptop for a pretty swift introduction to the paranoid world of the outcast. But given what has happened since, it’s clear that we didn’t even know the meaning of the word. We so wanted to believe that we had left the plague behind us in London, and that The Well was the cure, that we minimised the symptoms of its return. True, Tom still helped Mark with the autumn ploughing and sowing of our first winter wheat; we bought the ten ewes in lamb from him as well. But it must have all stuck in his gullet as one evening when we called him for some help with the driller, we left a message on the phone, but he never rang back. In retrospect I can plot the course of our fall from local grace through incidents like those, although they were just the skin-deep symptoms of far more serious disease.
Christmas, which now will always be the bleakest of festivals, was then still glitter and stars. The barn was just about habitable, the wood-burner was put in just in time and our first and last guests were friends from London who’d stuck with us through the allegations and we put on a good show, as if to thank them. There they were with their talk of short-time working and escalating crime, concreted gardens and milk shortages, of reduced services on the Underground and half-empty shelves in the supermarkets, while we delivered a lunch of our own chicken, our own potatoes and our own broccoli, parsnips, cranberry sauce and everyone toasted The Well and agreed we’d got away just in time. Then, just as they left and I was staring at the blank pages of my new diary, Angie showed up again without warning, this time with Lucien and a guy called Des, who spent the short days helping Mark fence the woods ready for the piglets he planned to run in them in the spring and the long nights drinking too much cider.
‘This is fucking paradise, this is, Angie. Why don’t you stop here? You and Lucien. He’d be growing up in heaven,’ Des said.
‘Then there’d be nothing for him to look forward to, would there?’
She always had an answer, Angie. Her teachers used to say she was clever, but lacked concentration. I called her a dreamer. Then a rebel. Then an addict. Sometimes, a daughter. January became February and they stayed on and I wasn’t lonely any longer because this was my Lucien winter: Lucien, running after the pheasants and yelling with delight at the power he held over them, forcing them to heave their heavy bodies over the hedges and flap laboriously into the frosted woods; Lucien, sitting on Mark’s second-hand tractor, all gloves and woolly hat and scarf, driving to the ends of the world and back; me sawing logs, Lucien carrying them one by one to the wood pile, staggering under the weight and falling asleep on my knee, in front of the fire, long before bedtime. It was a physical existence for all of us and it felt so good, to be tired, to ache, to feel the new-found roughness of Mark’s hands on my breasts, because we made love again that year, night after night. My body felt good once more; even the drunken Des hit on me in the kitchen one night: ‘you could be my Mrs Robinson’, he slobbered. I told Mark and we laughed and he ran his hands up under my jumper, humming the theme tune to the film.
I can only assume that Angie overheard Des, because all of a sudden she had come over from the barn and was packing Lucien’s things.
‘Are you off?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Both of you?’
‘Of course.’ She was stuffing Lucien’s clothes into a well-travelled holdall, nothing folded, nothing counted.
‘If you want to travel again, you could leave Lucien here, you know.’
‘Why would I want to do that?’
I had bought him some slippers and I held these out to her. ‘You would be more free and Lucien could go to school here, make friends.’
She snatched the slippers. ‘Like you’ve got such good relationships with the villagers that they’d all be asking him round to play, would they? Haven’t you noticed, Mum, none of them want to be around you any longer?’
‘I don’t think that’s totally true.’
Angie left the room and I could hear her crashing around the bathroom. ‘Because you don’t want to. But I hear stuff. You’re up here with your green fields; they’re all going out of business. They think something’s not right,’ she shouted through the wall and then came back into the bedroom. ‘What the fuck’s he done with his toothbrush.’
The room felt too small for both of us. I moved out of her way and looked out of the window. ‘You’re going away from the point, Angie. I was just offering Lucien a bit of stability. He loves it here. All this could be
