to disappear in a puff of smoke. ‘Well?’ he asked.
‘You first,’ I replied.
‘No, you.’
‘Granny R, you go first.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s incredible. Look at it. It’s got everything we’re looking for.’
‘Everything,’ repeated Mark. ‘Talk about the land of milk and honey.’
‘Yes, it’s beautiful,’ I continued. ‘And the land is just what we want. And the view is out of this world. It’s just that . . .’
‘And nobody would know us up here. Know me. No looks in the supermarket, no sniggers from kids on the bus. A clean sheet, Ruth.’
‘That’s probably right . . .’ I admitted.
‘You think it’s too good to be true?’ suggested Mark.
‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’ The place was breathtaking, I too was dizzy with its beauty, but I needed space to think. I got to my feet, stepped away from the rug and looked over the wooden gate leading into the field. If someone was looking to escape to the country, then they would be unlikely to find anywhere better than this. ‘If,’ I started.
‘If what?’ said Mark.
His hope was warm on my back; I did not even need to turn around to see it on his face. I counted the cost of what I might lose if we moved here and that only added up to things that could be maintained or replaced – job, connections and surely my friendships were strong enough to survive the distance. So then I counted the cost of what I might lose if we stayed in London. Mark. And The Well – I’d lose this one-off miracle of a place, this Well.
‘It feels like such a responsibility.’ I looked at my grandson, sitting on the edge of the rug and poking ants with a stick in the gravel. ‘What do you think, Lucien?’
‘I think it’s the best place in the world,’ he said.
We put in an offer on the Monday morning, some way below the asking price, as if there was a part of us that couldn’t cope with the dream coming true. ‘Offer accepted,’ said the agent and I sat on our front doorstep – mobile in my hand, smelling the exhaust from the cars trapped by the city heat, hearing the plane overhead circling for Heathrow, watching the old man opposite scooping up his dachshund’s crap from the pavement with a blue plastic bag – overwhelmed with a ridiculous sense of loss. What’s done cannot be undone. By the time Mark came home, I had pulled myself together for his sake and we toasted the future like newlyweds. We played old favourites, Mark did his dad-dance around the kitchen, and we got ridiculously drunk. The cottage was taken off the market and the self-timer photo we had taken that day was uploaded and greeted by a chorus of envy from our fellow suburban sufferers.
‘Hope you’re having a going-away party, because you’re sure as hell never going to come back,’ was one comment.
We pinned the picture up next to the toaster in the kitchen in London, as a reminder. It moved with us, graduated to a frame, propped up on the half-moon table in the sitting room.
I creep downstairs and approach it like a communicant, hold it up to the light. In the beginning was The Well.
One week. One summer. One night. One week is all that it has taken for all my good intentions to come to nothing. I was going to stand strong against their assault on my freedom, but in truth, I am a sloth, lying in bed for hours and hours, subdued. One summer was all it took before our dream started to curl at the edges and stain like picked primroses. One night is enough to swallow a lifetime of lives.
Outside is a space now devoid of human landmarks. Inside, this is a sentence with no punctuation. Nobody comes. Nobody goes. Nothing happens. I have christened the guards: Anon, Boy and Three. They own the present tense: recording, monitoring, signing. That leaves me with just the past and the leaden weight of what might have been, the grammar of the human condition.
The reality of house arrest sinks in. I lie here, my sheet a shroud, wondering how long it will be until the end. I will not write. Music slaps like the tide on my mind. To start with, I was wandering a lot, understanding a little more about why caged animals pace, picking at the food my keepers left on the table, but now I stay in bed. I do not take my medication. Drifting through these days on a river of memories, rarely pulling into the bank, sometimes a light flickers in the distance reminding me that I need supplies to stay alive, but it all seems a long way inland and I push off again and rejoin the current of the past.
Yesterday I saw a local newspaper that one of the guards had chucked out. ‘Welcome Home for Well Worshipper!’ read the headline, with a picture of women with roses lining the Lenford Road and a white prison van passing. I scrutinise their faces, none of the Sisters are there. We had one year here before The Well made the headlines for the first time. Our first year, my blue remembered hills and one remembered summer.
We sold our house so easily, it slid through our hands to a couple like us, pregnant with plans for the future – only half our age – and spent our last Christmas there with Angie, who was, as they say, ‘in a good place’, if sticking to your script can be described that way. We gave Lucien the blue bike, telling him we would take it with us to The Well so he could play with it there when he came to stay. It must be rusting in the barn, unless the police took it away as part of their investigations. The last Christmas, the last day of term and the last day of work. And then the stupid lasts: the last book club; the last night in with a takeaway from the Balti House and the ten o’clock news on the television, in the sitting room which had been the stage set for so many acts; the last night out, roaring drunk and hysterical with laughter, with the girls at the George and Dragon (because the girls had stuck with me through it all and what was I going to do without them?). The last of the obscenities spray-painted on the garage door and the last of the headlines in the local press and the last of the sideways glances in the queue at the checkout. Swings and roundabouts.
As we worked our way through the house preparing for the move, we sorted out the last twenty years. The books, for a start: Mark’s unloved law manuals; novels I used to teach at school which had seemed cutting edge at the time and now looked dated and pale; travel guides to places where we had been on holiday with Angie – in a baby carrier in Morocco, in a pushchair in Granada, on the seat on the back of a bike in Normandy, nowhere to be seen in Rome. There were books on how to adopt, which we never did, and how to manage difficult children, which we never mastered, and how to stay married, which somehow – goodness knows how – we did. I showed that cover to Mark, who had come down from the loft with a boogie board and a moth-eaten sleeping bag.
‘Shall we keep it?’ I laughed.
‘We’ve made it this far and God knows against the odds,’ he said. ‘Bin it.’
As a teenager, working as a waitress in a hotel as a holiday job, I used to be able to recognise the couples who had finally managed to leave work on time, get a babysitter, find the money, make a reservation and get out for a night together. They would sit at one of the highly prized tables for two, looking out over the famous view of the gorge, having survived everything the day could throw at them separately, totally at a loss as to how to make it through the evening together, their hands touching across the white tablecloth, seeking the reassurance that they still loved each other. Well, I thought to myself as I sealed the boxes with tape, took the black bags to the dump, we have
