degree,’ he tells me. ‘This is my payback year. They were asking for science graduates and then when they found a bunch of us, they pulled out the ones who would be no good on active service and came up with us three. The blind, the deaf and the dumb.’
‘And you are?’
‘The blind. Lenses – very strong. Adrian – Anon as you unkindly insist on calling him – he’s asthmatic. Mind you, it’s hard to find anyone who isn’t nowadays, with the dust and everything.’
‘His weight can hardly help,’ I add. ‘So that makes Three the dumb one.’
Boy looks away. ‘Hardly,’ he says. ‘He was already in the Volunteers apparently, so one step ahead as always. He was telling us how he’s already had experience policing the demonstrations as a reservist. So I told him I was probably one of those marching.’
‘What were you marching about? Not me, I hope.’
‘I’m afraid not. I’m not religious. Other stuff. Human rights mainly. I think there have to be ways to manage a drought without chipping away at all our civil liberties. And the land, of course, the way we’re messing up the climate. Have messed up, past tense for all we know. I’m not a geographer for nothing.’ He glanced at the camera. ‘Anyway, I got the rest of my degree in footie and beer.’
I would have liked a son. I turn away and pour the remains of my drink down the sink.
Sitting outside, my back to the stone wall at the rear of the house, inviting the spring sun to repair my prison-pale face, my heart is beating a little faster in the knowledge that today I will have a visitor. I wait, half in hope, half in fear, counting the minutes. Then, through the haze, I spot a black lumbering shape at the top of the drive. For a split second I think a Friesian has got loose, before remembering that there are no cows around here any longer. A few moments later the cow becomes a man wearing a dark suit, a black hat and a billowing black raincoat and carrying a white plastic bag. He must be the only person in England who still possesses a raincoat. The man is limping slightly, inching along the track and like most people, when he reaches the crest of the hill, he stops and looks around him, but he stays there much longer than most, sitting on the raised verge beneath the turbine for a few minutes before getting up heavily, brushing down his trousers and picking up his bag and continuing on towards the house. Here is my priest. Enter The Reverend Hugh Casey.
God knows the last thing I need is another persuasive religious, let alone a male version. This distrust of men is the legacy of Amelia and her sisters, I tell myself: you should rid yourself of this prejudice. On the way into the house, I pick some daffodils from the wilderness of weeds straggling along the edge of the drive, stick them randomly in a redundant milk jug and put them in the middle of the table; it isn’t something I’ve done since I returned here, but today I am entertaining.
Boy announces the priest’s arrival like a maître d’. ‘Ruth, meet The Reverend Hugh Casey. Come on in, sir.’
‘No, no, I’ll wait for the good lady of the house to invite me in.’
It is a polite, cultured voice with a hint of an Irish accent. The body which accompanies it is large and the face is flushed, although whether that is from the walk or embarrassment I don’t know. I play my part and greet him; he takes my one thin hand in his two warm palms and holds it slightly longer than I am prepared for. In the kitchen he introduces himself again, takes off his coat and hat and hangs them over the edge of the chair.
‘Not your local man, I’m afraid. They dug me out of retirement for this. I can only suppose it’s because I live relatively close and many years ago used to be the chaplain at a military hospital. Hardly guaranteed secure, but that’s the way their minds work, I suspect.’
‘Well, thank you for coming anyway.’ I offer him a cup of tea.
‘Ah. Now, that’s where I can make myself useful,’ he says and rummages in his plastic bag. He pulls out a Bible, which was to be expected, a small wooden box with a cross on it which he says contains the holy sacrament and a little flask. ‘I gather you have the water,’ he says, ‘I can provide the milk.’
This is proper milk, milk that we drank as children in great gulping mouthfuls, milk that we poured onto cocoa on bonfire night. The smell of it spills over my mind and I am drunk on the memory.
‘I have my own cow,’ he pronounces. ‘A Jersey, Annalisa by name.’
Giggling in church at Christmas was always my forte when I was small and something about the priest in my kitchen is making me revert to childish ways. That or hysteria. I stick my head in the drawer, ostensibly rummaging for a spoon.
‘I’m sure you’d love her. She is particularly beautiful. I have to say that she is the love of my life.’
‘They let you keep her?’ Now I am really hunting for sugar, because although I am not familiar with the clergy, he looks like the sort of vicar who takes sugar – a lot of sugar.
‘Let them try and stop me, that’s what I said. Truth be told, I played the holy card. Said that the priest of the village had ancient rights to graze one cow on the common land and if they tried to remove her, I’d take it up to the House of Lords. God seems to be exempt, you see, from the effect of their emergency powers and it would have been a frightful nuisance for them, so they went away like most bullies do in the end.’
Interesting though this line of thinking is, I want nothing to stop me savouring the taste of tea with real milk, so we sit at the table together, sipping in silence like connoisseurs. As predicted, he adds a lot of sugar and gazes around the kitchen expectantly. I wonder if he is expecting cucumber sandwiches and bourbon biscuits arranged in a circle on a porcelain plate, because he is not only old, but old-fashioned, a sort of living anachronism. It has to be a possibility that he, too, is not what he seems. I pick up the thread of his conversation.
‘I didn’t know that. I’m surprised no one suggested the ecclesiastical legal route to me for The Well. After all, it had become a religious place of sorts by the time I was arrested.’
‘Not the same at all, my dear, not in their book. God forbid anyone might start accessing eternal life by any means other than the C of E. Now, are you going to show me round?’
Having explained the limitations of my imprisonment, we set off, past the back gate (‘This must be where you got the daffodils,’ he says, ‘such a wonder to see a vase of real flowers on a kitchen table nowadays’), on through the budding orchard and then down through First Field. He apologises for repeating himself, praising God like it was Easter Day all over again. ‘But you must see the wonder of it for me, can you not see the wonder of it, the green of the grass and that pink colour you get when the trees are in bud?’
Once he calms down, we walk slowly and we talk freely. We talk about varieties of tomatoes, we talk about dust, we talk about the Holy Land and about water and a shared childhood experience of swimming off the coast of Exmoor, where the pebbles gang up with the waves to drag you under. He describes being a prisoner of war and we share an understanding of freedom based on barbed wire and spotlights. We find ourselves, inevitably I suppose, looking down at Wellwood, and he says, so is that where it all happened, and I say, yes, that is the place, but I don’t go there, and he asks me if I mind if he prays. He closes his eyes and bows his head and his prayer is silent; mine is written in dried leaves floating on the surface of the water out of sight, under the trees. I appreciate the way he asks no questions, offers no answers. Making our way back up the hill to the house, I am conscious that I am emaciated and unfit, but that
