persists. ‘You have no idea then where either of them might be living?’
‘No. But I’m worried about Angie. She could be anywhere, you’ve no idea how low she can get.’ There are nettles now, growing tall alongside the bench. I reach out and grasp one to stop myself crying. ‘Maybe she and Mark are together. I haven’t heard from either of them since . . .’
He waits to see if I can finish the sentence, then replies. ‘I’ll see what I can do, but I can’t see how the internet would be of much help.’
‘You’ll need it because I also want to know what has happened to the Sisters. To Sister Amelia, in particular. Where she is, what she’s doing, anything relevant about her. Would you search that for me? I have to know more about her, Hugh, if only to discount the possibility that it was one of them that did it. You could print things out and slip them in the Bible – or just in your bag. I don’t think they’ll search that again.’
‘So we didn’t come out here for the sunshine.’ He hands me a dock leaf to press against my nettle stings.
‘No.’
‘Because you are asking me to do something which contravenes the rules of your imprisonment and therefore my visits.’
‘Yes.’
‘And if they find out, my visits will be stopped.’
I hadn’t thought it through as far as that. I look down at the bench and peel off the splinters, finding myself surprised at how thrown I am by the idea that Hugh would not come again. Perhaps he won’t come again anyway now I have asked this of him. There is no choice for me. My hair has grown, and as I look up, I pull it back off my face and fix it with a band so he can see me clearly.
‘Probably, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take. More than that, I’ll risk everything to know the truth.’
‘I will pray about it, Ruth. I can’t promise you more than that.’
Pray for as long as you like, I thought. But Google for longer.
The relief guard is gone, my boys are back: Three conducting the 7.30 a.m. alarm check which wailed across the valley, a cross between an air raid siren and a call to prayer; Anon slumping in front of the bank of screens playing computer games while ‘Sarge is out’; I find myself hoping to catch sight of Boy. Finally, he knocks on the door and I am so very, very pleased to see him.
‘Morning.’
‘You’re back. I didn’t even know the other lot were gone.’
‘Thieves in the night,’ he said. ‘You must be sleeping better. Actually I’ve brought you something. That’s not strictly true. In fact my mum sent you something.’
‘Your mum?’
‘Yes. I was telling her and my dad about you and Mum made up a sort of Red Cross parcel for you.’
Boy hands me a shoebox-sized parcel, taped up. In one corner, in neat handwriting, I read ‘All the best, Andrew and Helen.’
‘Shall I open it now?’
‘Why not?’
I sit on the doorstep and take off the lid.
There was a jar of marmalade, a CD of the Ten Greatest Classical Hits, some bath essence and several packets of seeds.
‘The bath essence isn’t new, but she said she didn’t know anyone else who could use it now, so you might as well have it,’ said Boy. He sits down beside me. ‘It was meant to cheer you up.’
I nod, just about able to speak, and ask him to thank them for me.
This is a terrifying awakening which embraces me like a wave that curls itself around the child at the edge of the beach and sweeps him off his feet. How much easier it is to believe that nobody cares and that I care about nobody, how much harder the truth that Boy matters to me now, and that maybe I matter to him and mothers matter to their children and children matter to them.
‘You’d like Angie,’ I said to Boy. ‘If she ever came back and met you, I think you’d like her.’ If.
‘She was a traveller?’ he asked.
Oh yes, she was a traveller. I nodded.
‘And she sort of came and went?’
Extra-ordinary, the comings and goings at The Well.
Some sort of sixth sense woke me to the fact that we had visitors. Regardless of the age of their children, mothers have a particular way of sleeping, always on alert for the slightest of cries from the cot, the night-terror, the key in the front door and the click of heels on the staircase far later than the time we’d agreed she’d be home by. Tense, I strained my ears to hear what had woken me; I looked into the shapeless corners of the bedroom, nothing; nothing except my heartbeat and the steady breathing from Mark, curled away from me and sleeping soundly. It was constant and familiar, the thick darkness around me and I was on the point of accepting it for what it was when the room changed. A beam of light shone through the gap in the shutters, slowly sweeping the room like a searchlight and was gone. There was really only one explanation: a car at the top of the drive. Then it happened again, a son et lumière illuminating first the picture, then the mirror, then the crack where the wall and the ceiling meet, before leaving me in the audience with nothing but shadows, ill at ease and unsure if the show was over. I gave it half a minute, no more, before I shook Mark.
‘Mark! Mark! Wake up!’
He woke instantly, startled. ‘What the hell are you doing?’
‘There’s someone out there!’
Feeling my way around the end of the bed, I found my way to the window, opened the shutters just an inch or two and stared out into the night. There was no moon that I could see and it seemed as if the cloud must be low because even the trees were strangers.
Mark came up behind me. ‘There’s nothing there, what are you talking about?’
‘Just wait a moment, will you? It was headlights, shining into the room, but I couldn’t hear anything so they can’t have driven down here.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m not making it up, am I?’
‘I don’t know, you’re a nervous wreck sometimes.’
‘I felt safer when we had Bru,’ I said. We stood together in the blackness, close but not touching, waiting. ‘There! What’s that?’
There wasn’t anything or anyone on the drive, but there was an orange glow the other side of the rise in the field between us and the road; it grew, then went out as instantly, as if someone had flicked a switch, then came on again.
Mark opened the window and a gust of cold, damp air blew into the room. A few drops of water fell onto the window sill. It had been raining again.
