boy. Actually, what you always wanted was Lucien . . .’
I turned back to face her. ‘Angie. You were barely seventeen. If we hadn’t stepped forward, you wouldn’t even have had Lucien, the state you were in. Adoption, that’s what social care were talking about.’
Angie is mouthing the words as I am speaking them. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, like I haven’t heard all this before. And the social workers weren’t so keen when Mark got accused, were they?’ She zipped the holdall closed.
‘Angie, don’t stoop that low. You know as well as I do that he was completely exonerated. So don’t you ever, and I mean ever, pull that one again.’
‘OK. For God’s sake, don’t get so stressed. Mark’s in the clear. All’s right with the world. Things have changed. I’ve changed.’
‘Have you?’ I called after her.
Sitting on the end of the unmade bed, I tugged the duvet straight. I had never doubted Mark’s innocence, not once throughout the whole sordid affair. I just knew – I thought I just knew – that he could never do anything like that. It would have been impossible to have allowed myself to think any differently. The sound of Angie slamming the back door brought me back to the present. I noticed my broken nails and pressed hard against the blisters on my fingers from the wheelbarrow until they hurt and wept.
By sunset they were gone, but she had got Lucien to write a note on a page from his farmyard colouring book with huge, irregular letters, half facing the wrong way round. It was her way of saying sorry – that and taking only half the money from Mark’s wallet.
Dere Grany R Thank you for having us. Look after the lams. Tell Bru I love him. XXXXX Lucien.
I keep it as a memento mori in the dressing-table drawer I dare not open.
The second half of Feburary was cold, grey and difficult. It snowed once or twice at The Well, but only after Lucien had left.
‘He would have loved this,’ I said to Mark.
‘So would everyone else,’ he replied as we stared over our sparkling, sugar-coated plough towards the black fields and forests beyond.
We saw virtually no one from London or Lenford until the end of the month at the meeting with the spokesperson from the Department of the Environment. The parish hall was crowded out with farmers exhausted from lambing, smelling of sleeplessness, the windows steaming. Patience, like water, was in short supply.
The chairman of the local National Farmers Union introduced the speaker. ‘I hope he’s going to be our Angel Gabriel and bring us good tidings.’
But it was clear from the start that the man from the Emergency Committee on Drought Relief (ECDR) had letters after his name, but no wings. His was an exercise in panic-reduction and spin, and the heckling rose.
‘What are you going to do about it?’
‘What’s going to happen to this country’s food supply?’
‘Someone needs to do something about it.’
‘What can he do about it?’ muttered Mark to me. ‘He’s not God.’
‘And what are you doing about places like The Well? They’ve got enough water to make a fucking reservoir.’
The official encouraged any such landowners with possible answers to contact the Drought Help and Information Line on 0816 . . .
‘Witchcraft,’ interrupted an old woman, standing at the back with a baby on her hip.
‘Chemicals.’
‘Stealing other people’s water.’
Our neighbours were not short of suggestions.
Mark elbowed his way through the crowd and we stumbled across the car park in the dark, me shouting at him to wait. We walked home in single file in silence, went to bed in silence, turned out the light in silence. We made promises when we moved here that we would not let the sun go down on a quarrel; we tried so hard to stick to our resolutions, but like the smoker in the pub on 2 January, the world was full of ways of failing.
The next morning, I got up first, opened the shutters and looked out of the window. ‘I can’t stand it,’ I said to Mark.
‘Can’t stand what?’
‘The loneliness. The scent of overnight rain.’
‘Then you’re the only person in this wonderful United Kingdom of ours who feels that way,’ he replied, sitting on the side of the bed, pulling on his jeans, shivering. Despite the cold, we had scrupulously avoided touching each other all night, so that when my knee had brushed his back, we had both recoiled like strangers.
‘Do you know what? I’ve had just about enough of being on the receiving end of the general public’s accusations. We did that in London and it was no fun. Now, I just want to be like everyone else. I’d actually prefer to be part of their fucking drought.’
Mark came to me, put his arm around me. I wanted to pull away, but I thought no, if I do that now there will be no going back. He’d asked me one night after a long interview with the police about the laptop, ‘Do you find me repulsive?’ We couldn’t go back to that. But as for The Well – Mark had no answers, just platitudes. It’s not called The Well for nothing. History. Geography. Geology. Logic. The lawyer and the farmer, his alter egos kept each other company, but his schizophrenic platitudes were not for me. I pushed him away, told him to use his eyes, look at our green grass, the snowdrops under our hedges, our tight budding trees. Now look beyond our boundary, at the landscape iron-grey and stubborn in its sickness. That’s not normal, I said. That’s not logical, Mark. Nor is the rain.
‘What about the rain?’
‘The rain. Like last night, it must have rained. We hardly ever see it rain, we don’t usually hear it rain, but it has clearly rained. And just here. Nowhere else in the whole glorious country has it rained properly for almost two years, but it rained here, last night, again. Here, we have unlimited access to our best friend the Rain God and we don’t even beat drums for him.’
Mark thundered downstairs, without replying, ostensibly for breakfast, but from the little window on the landing I watched him, in that green jumper, standing between the rows of our fledgling winter wheat with Bru beside him, looking up at him with unconditional loyalty. He crouched down and picked up a feather, brushed it across his unshaven face. When he came back into the kitchen, I didn’t know if it was rain or tears on his cheeks, but whichever it was, I wanted to kiss them away, but there was a gap between us and my love didn’t seem wide enough to bridge it.
Instead, I wiped my own eyes and made a suggestion. Perhaps we should contact the man from the ECDR or go ahead and get a supply licence and run a pipe down to the other farmers, then at least the locals would see we were not just taking our luck for granted.
‘Your “locals” were so unbelievably rude last night that they can go hang themselves for all I care,’ said Mark, then he sat down heavily at the table, rubbed his head in his hands. ‘Look, one drainpipe’s not going to solve their drought, Ruth.’ He picked up the spoon as if to start eating, but paused and held it up to his face, studying his distorted reflection for a moment before continuing. ‘It wasn’t what we came
