The Well (13 page)

‘No, you’re right, I didn’t. If you remember, I was too busy fighting the bigots off to have time to be one myself.’

Change tack, that used to be a behaviour management strategy advocated at school for angry adolescents. ‘Have you had any breakfast?’ He shook his head, so I put some bacon in the frying pan, cut some bread, got the butter out of the fridge, found the honey, talked with my back to him, watching the toaster. ‘I’m sure you’re right, but we don’t lose anything by meeting them. And you never know, it might even be nice to have them around for a bit.’

‘Nice?’

To talk to. To share things with. To change the landscape around here just a little. Two pieces of toast, two plates, two knives – I put them all on the table and thought I could think of a thousand ways in which it might be ‘nice’ to have some company at The Well, but I suggested just the one. ‘Not nice, I didn’t really mean that. I was thinking they might help out, odd jobs that sort of thing, there’s so much to do.’

‘We don’t need help, Ruth. We’ve proved that. We can do it on our own if we work together.’

Sitting opposite him at the table, passing the spoon over the net, receiving the butter on the baseline, I wondered how long this game of singles could go on. I tried one last time. ‘The other thing, though,’ I said, ‘is that we can do without the police coming here again. The last thing we want is to draw any more attention to The Well. We’ve got all those legal letters outstanding and they’ll start asking questions about more than the travellers.’

Game, set and match. Mark agreed I was right. If we could avoid the law, that would be better. I volunteered to go up there, check them out and report back; he said it was probably better if he kept out of the way, given how he was feeling. He’d clear up breakfast and hoover up in the bedroom.

The rest of the bacon was going begging and we had a load of rolls which needed eating, so I heated them up, squirted some ketchup in them and made a thermos of coffee. Just as I was setting off, it occurred to me that they were probably veggies, so I went back and grabbed a handful of apples from the store before heading up the drive. With no news from Angie, I had a sort of karma theory that if I looked after these people, then someone might be looking after her and Lucien. What goes around comes around. The sheep scattered, nagging their lambs as I crossed the field towards the tents and vans which splattered lurid oranges and yellows against the spring grass, reminding myself that if it wasn’t for the wet grass these people, whoever they were, probably wouldn’t be here at all. The tents were arranged haphazardly at the bottom of the field, close to the hedge, as Mark had said. A lurcher appeared from behind a rusty van and ran towards me, howling, followed by a young man also apparently from the 1960s, limping after it.

‘So this is the barking dog,’ I said.

The man grabbed its collar and pulled it back. ‘Sorry, did she wake you up last night? I tried to get her to shut up.’

‘I heard you,’ I said. ‘Is she OK with sheep?’

‘Yeah, she’d never attack anything, just got no manners.’

I made some comment about having lost our dog recently and he said sorry about that, the two of us standing there with my bacon butties dripping and my flask and the dog looking hopeful from a distance.

‘Are those for Angie?’ he asked.

‘Sorry?’

He smiled. ‘You must be Angie’s mum. I’m Charley. I’ll give her a shout.’

Before I had time to understand what was happening, the man had gone over to a small green tunnel tent. It bulged, lurched a little and the sagging guy ropes tightened and loosened and raindrops showered from the door flap and then there was Angie, struggling out, pulling on a jumper over her cotton pyjamas. Her blonde hair, always curly, was a total mess, her nails were black, she smelled of smoke and her jumper had holes, yet I knew the moment I saw her that she was well. It was something about the fact her eyes could meet mine without flinching, the honesty of her hug, how it wore its heart on its sleeve and did not conceal requests for money or loans or ‘just this once’ or ‘I’ll pay you back’; something about the way she didn’t mind looking dirty, because she was not having to pretend to be clean.

‘Angie.’ I found it hard to speak. ‘Dad didn’t say you were here! I didn’t know . . .’

‘Hi Mum!’ She hugged me, she put her arms around me and hugged me.

‘You look so good. So well. I am so . . .’ I couldn’t finish. I stepped away from her and wiped my face on my sleeve. ‘I’m sorry, it’s just that we haven’t heard from you.’

‘Looks like your mum’s brought your breakfast,’ said Charley. ‘Now that’s what I call maternal!’

‘It’ll get Lucien up, for sure,’ said Angie and Charley obligingly left us to it and went over to stick his head in the tent and called to Lucien to wake up. Angie read my thoughts.

‘Usually it’s just Lucien and his friend Henni who sleep in the tent and I’m in the van with Charley, but everything got a bit messed up last night because we got lost and arrived really late and it was dark. We didn’t want to turn the headlights on in case we woke you up and you were freaked out. We didn’t, did we?’

‘Not really, we thought we heard something, but . . .’ There was no point in starting off with an argument, but I did have questions.

How had they got in? It turns out the police had got wind of their arrival without Mark ever having to phone and there was a
police car at the gate when they pulled up at midnight. But it was the same ‘copper’ who had been round to The Well to identimark our farm machinery when we moved in and Angie and Lucien were around. He recognised them and let them in.

Why hadn’t she kept in touch? Apparently they didn’t use phones much, these people she was travelling with; they tried to avoid television and the internet, she said. She didn’t even own a mobile any longer.

‘It helps us focus,’ said Angie.

Focus on what?

‘The important stuff. The land. The community.’

What brought them here?

Word of mouth apparently. When Duccombe went down, everyone was talking about this other place which had been in the paper where it still rained and how people should mobilise to protect it. She didn’t even realise at first that it was The Well they were on about.

You could have written, I wanted to say. The recriminations were rising; I swallowed to keep them under control. Every reunion for the last five years was like that: relief, then shock, joy, resentment, anger, regret, played out over and over again at different intervals and with different emphases, but always the same excuses, the same pain. I was saved this time.

‘Granny R!’

Lucien. I see him now. I see him often. Curly hair, reddish gold like the sun, brown, barefoot. I give him a bun and he eats it, splats of ketchup landing on his bedtime T-shirt with a picture of a bee on it. A bee and a buttercup. Bees and buttercups have an unbearable beauty for me now.

M
ark was furious. Day after day, following the article, we had faced relentless petty incursions onto our land and all the adrenalin aroused in him when he first saw the travellers’ vans turned into bitter accusations for letting Angie turn my happiness on and off like a switch when she chose or chose not to appear in our lives.

‘She can’t just come and visit her parents like any normal daughter, can she? She couldn’t possibly have called ahead. No. She has to arrive in the middle of the night and bring half of La La Land with her, as if we didn’t have enough problems with trespassers.’

His anger was familiar, in part fuelled by relief that she and Lucien were OK and in part by fury that she always turned up with other people in tow, without ever asking. We never dared say no; if we pushed her away, then we risked never seeing her or Lucien again and we owed it to both of them to keep trying.

Angie and Lucien came down to the cottage to say hello and I think it was Lucien who persuaded Mark to come up and meet the travellers. Mark could never resist Lucien. He strode up to the camp, pressing down the ruts where the vans had driven over the field with his heel, picking up a leaflet about benefits which had blown across the drive from the caravan and dropping it
ostentatiously into the fire. Once there, though, I think even he was won over. It was company apart from anything else. We were both starved of company. Bru’s death had deprived us of our one mutual friend and we didn’t feel ready to replace him. We never did. Mark got involved in a long conversation with a couple of the men about the shortage of temporary work and ended up saying he’d probably have some odd jobs around The Well over the next few weeks, as if he’d thought of the idea in the first place. There was a lot of fencing which needed doing if we were going to keep people out, he said. He couldn’t even do his usual rant about parasites and junkies because everyone who travelled with them took a pledge not to use. One of Angie’s friends was telling me how they helped each other keep clean, for the sake of the kids, for themselves, to be true to something and I found myself seduced by their thoughtfulness. I blocked out the distant whine of a siren in the valley and instead relished the prospect of company and conversation which Angie and her travellers brought with them. The siren grew louder. It had turned off the main road and was coming up the lane.

Angie spoke to the group. ‘While we’re all here, I just wanted to thank Mark and Mum for letting us stay and I just want to say to everyone to respect the land, because this is like a working farm with sheep and stuff.’

‘Thank you,’ I mouthed at her across the group, but she was distracted because the siren had become deafening. From the other side of the distant hedge, I could see blue lights on our lane.

Mark jumped to his feet. ‘It’s coming this way!’ he shouted, running towards the gate.

I half stood up. Angie held Lucien tightly by the hand, presumably to stop him following Mark. Everyone stared at him running up the hill, with two kids behind him making nee-naw noises. The men closed ranks, asking each other what sort of shit was this? I moved away from them until I could see Mark talking through the window of a police car that had pulled up in front of our gate. He
looked more at ease talking to the officer than with his daughter. I looked back at the travellers.

‘Go and help him, Mum,’ called Angie.

Out of breath, I caught up with Mark. The two police cars had now been joined by an ambulance and a crowd of people were milling around, like extras in some cheap TV drama, waiting for the action to begin. Mark gesticulated at a line of cars and vans stretching down the narrow lane.

‘Hundreds of them apparently, on their way here from all over the bloody country, thinking we’re the Promised Land. I told you. Enough company for you now?’

The policeman lived in Lenford. I recognised him as Morgan’s brother-in-law.

‘Sergeant Willis, isn’t it?’ I asked.

‘Afternoon, Mrs Ardingly.’

He said they had reinforcements coming down from the north of the county and I said I didn’t think that was necessary, that once people realised they couldn’t camp here, then they’d satisfy their curiosity and be gone.

‘Are you crazy, Ruth?’ Mark was uncoiling barbed wire which he had brought up to the top hedge days ago when he had found a photographer snooping. He had no gloves and it was tearing his fingers, but he didn’t notice. ‘They’re believers, they won’t get fobbed off that easily. Not now they’ve escaped from the asylum and seen the Promised Land.’

His reference to my daughter was unmistakable; his love affair with the travellers short-lived. The sergeant moved away as he talked into his radio and over by the gate a roar broke out from the gathered crowd as they started banging on the doors and roofs of a police van which had just pulled up.

‘Help me move the wire, Ruth,’ Mark shouted.

‘No, wait! Someone just needs to talk to them,’ I called back. Behind me, several of the travellers were lined up, watching, waiting, when a couple of dishevelled young men started to break through
the hedge from the road and aggression agitated the crowd. Mark picked up a fencing stake.

‘Get off this land before I make you!’

Sergeant Willis moved between them, his raised hand lowering the wooden pole. ‘Leave that to us, sir,’ he said.

Mark dropped it. ‘It’s because we’ve let this lot in,’ he ranted, pointing at the group of watching travellers. ‘That’s what the police think. She did this. Word spreads.’

She didn’t even warrant a name, right then. I wanted to argue but it wasn’t worth it. Already explanations and listening were valuable commodities in short supply. Mark set off at a run down the drive to pick up the most recent investment in our smallholding: padlocks, bolts, chains, electric fencing, the stage props of imprisonment. Gradually the police took control, the shouting diminished, the vans manoeuvred onto the verges to do awkward three-point turns and head back to wherever it was they came from. Turning my back on all that, I walked slowly towards Angie and Lucien as Mark hurtled towards the house. I tasted separation in the back of my throat like sour milk and retched. My head swam and when the world stopped turning, Mark had disappeared out of sight.