There is a time to cast stones and a time to gather. I pick three flints from the dust-dry floor of the forest. I toss the first into the water and watch the ripples in perfect circles pulse towards the reeds which are just breaking the surface with their lurid spring-green confidence. Screeching, the ducks take flight, heaving into the air with a gross flapping and a pandemonium.
It could have been the Sisters.
I throw the next flint, a little harder; it falls off centre, creating cavorting waves which cross the paths of the ripples and revel in the anarchy.
It could have been Mark.
The third flint fits my hand. I draw the sharp edge across the thin transparent skin of my wrist until a red weal rises up, with just the smallest beads of blood, congealing, not spilling.
It could have been me.
I stand and hurl the last stone into the pond. Water does not forget either. The blackness makes my head swim and, feeling faint, I grope towards the log where I used to meditate, staying there long enough to regain some sort of equilibrium and for the ducks to alight on the water again as if nothing has happened there. As I retrace my steps back to the house, the breeze swings to the southwest and the horizon, far beyond Edward’s Castle and Cadogan Top. Clouds gather, great shafts of light ruling lines of fool’s gold across the forests on the other side of the valley.
Last night I slept. This morning I wake and it has rained. I went to the Wellspring. It rained. It just depends which conjunction you choose to link the sentences. For me, it is a sign that The Well will give up its answers to me one day, but for others it is a justification of the paraphernalia which has been ploughed into this place. A convoy shudders down the drive. Government officials get out and crawl all over the fields with their probes and electronic gauges and high-tech equipment, while members of the press are invited to take photographs of the crops. Three is in his element, marshalling the parking like the science teacher at sports day. Boy and Anon are children, jumping in puddles.
‘Is this what it was like before?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Just some rain, falling here and not anywhere else. Everything else went from there.’
‘Did you know it was going to rain?’
‘Will it rain again?’
I have a question of my own: can there be rain without visions and voices? That would be something worth having.
There is one last emotion, though, which I have not anticipated. I am feeling smug. There, you thought you were just guarding a middle-aged crank who had delusions of grandeur, but now you’ll have to think twice, smart-arse.
Rain, rain, go away. Come again another day. I dance like a witch-doctor around the sitting room.
Boy sticks his head around the door, looks a little taken aback and I fall onto the chair, laughing. ‘I forgot to tell you,’ he says. ‘We go off duty tomorrow. One month on, one week off.’
Rain comes. Duccombe burns. Boy goes. I stay. World turns. I skulk off to my bed, out of control once more.
Three relief guards have arrived, ill at ease. One of them is a woman and I am not sure what to make of that. I spy on her through the upstairs window, notice how her hair is scraped back off her face and pinned under her cap, how her feet look as big as the men’s in the regulation boots. She is sour-faced and brusque when she comes into the house to complete the battery beep test on my tags and I am relieved by her monosyllabic responses to my attempts at conversation. I thought I was ready for a bit of female company, but I was wrong. All three of them keep to the barn when they are not on duty, and when they are on duty they adhere to rigid routines, patrolling the boundaries, testing the alarms, inspecting the house. It is not enough to be known by three soldiers, male or female. I used to have friends, a family; I had neighbours, I had followers, for God’s sake – no irony intended. I was a person in the middle of a web. But all that was cut with one stroke of the knife, and here I am alone, my very own living Gordian knot. The worst is that I don’t know if anyone has tried to contact me or not. I grow more and more suspicious of this regime; someone out there must be thinking of me.
Sometimes I hear people, a lorry reversing somewhere on the lane and someone shouting directions. Once I heard shots and then saw two men walking alongside the hedge which runs between the Great Nunton Lane and the old parsley farm. They had guns and every now and again they stopped and took aim and the valley cracked as they fired. Without beaters, the birds have no reason to fly, so I don’t know what they hoped to kill. Today, I can hear wedding bells ringing in the village. We didn’t have bells. We got married in a registry office, with our favourite duet from Porgy and Bess playing on a CD in the corner of the soulless room, vows and the weight of his mother’s lifelong absence sitting on Mark’s suited shoulders. I overheard Mark’s uncle saying how they had always thought Mark would take over their farm because he loved it so much as a child, spent all his holidays there with them, and then my dad agreeing with him that there was no money in farming and being a lawyer, that was the way forward for a man with a kiddie on the way, the two of them standing outside the hotel, stamping their feet and flicking the red ash into the slush.
It snowed at our wedding, a desultory sort of snow that fell from the aimless sky that day as if it was just a way of getting rid of the leftovers, and I realised that everything Mark had ever planned was being suffocated in white.
The peal continues to ring across the valley, but even that song is not strong enough to bring me to prayer. Births, marriages, deaths. Angie was born three months after the wedding and three years after that we sat in another soulless room hearing it confirmed that Mark would never be able to have children of his own. Neither a farmer nor a father be. They made a lot of that during the investigation, as if not being able to have your own son would make you more likely to abuse other people’s, or murder other people’s, I suppose. It seemed a ridiculous theory then, but what happens to a man who loses his dreams, not just once or twice, but over and over again?
The bells have stopped. The silence cannot hold. It is replaced by the relief guards conducting the weekly alarm test, the siren sending the crows circling and screeching over the treetops. Even the birds fight over our fields – the robins attacking the dunnocks, the rooks nipping the wings of the buzzards in flight – but none of them can take on the helicopters. The beating of their metal blades whip up my day-sleep memories.
The eggs were warm and perfect spheres in my cold hands. We had spoken about marking our first anniversary at The Well, but the time for celebration seemed to have passed. Even so, in my head I was planning soufflé as a special dinner, for a surprise or a salvage operation, I’m not sure which. The sound of blades slicing the morning sky made me look up and there was a helicopter hovering, a man with a camera leaning out at an angle. It made me jump, I think, and as I grabbed the post from the washing line to steady myself, I smashed the eggs, I do remember that. Then, moments later, in the kitchen, washing my hands and sponging down my trousers, Mark came in and flung the paper on the table.
‘Wonder Well. For Christ’s sake, look at this headline, Ruth, look at it!’
I still have that cutting. It looks small as things of import often do when you revisit them.
Wonder
