The Well (34 page)

Lucien was in that impossible state, over-excited and over-exhausted, wide awake and half asleep at the same time, so I decided to abandon the normal bedtime routines and I left him in Mark’s green jumper, pulled off his trainers, untied the knot on the leather band which held his little wooden rose around his neck and placed it carefully on his bedside table, then pulled the duvet snug around him and kissed his forehead. One kiss. One last kiss. A Judas kiss. He was restless, so I read the Noah story, with just the nightlight
on, letting the rhythm of the two-by-two fold its pattern over the night and put in order the day that had gone and present the rainbow as hope for the day to come. Then when his breathing had slowed and his beautiful eyes had closed, I asked for the Rose’s blessing on Lucien and crept from the room. I pulled the door so it was almost shut, as usual, and that was how I left him. I know that was how I left him. I left him.

I went to have supper with Mark because Lucien had made it. And maybe because I was exhausted and needed something physical to hold me to the ground, after the slip-sliding week I had just experienced. And I felt worried for Mark, because there was something desperate in his face that night; a part of me loved him because he had come back – and remember, I had loved him for a long, long time. And it looked like an olive branch, even if now I see it in my mind’s eye as a crown of thorns.

We sat like a couple in a rented holiday cottage who suddenly find they have too much time and too much silence on their hands. Mark and Lucien had made parsnip soup, which I sipped, feeling it sit uncomfortably on my shrunken stomach. I tried to resist the wine he had brought back with him; he took a great gulp as if he was summoning courage.

‘A while ago,’ he said, ‘you tried to persuade me that we should sell up and get out while we could and I said no. But I was wrong, Ruth. Yes, I came back because of Lucien on the phone, but I wanted to come back and talk anyway. And what I want to say tonight is yes, let’s do it, let’s take what we can and go and start again somewhere else. Maybe it’s not too late.’ He looked up from his glass, vulnerability in his eyes and pain in the way in which he closed them to hear my answer.

‘It is too late, Mark,’ I said, ‘I can’t leave now.’

We gave way to the silence again, aware of not only our differences, but of the history of our closeness, living up here as attendants in our own theme park.

Mark started clearing the table, creating noise with the plates
and knives, returning to the same question that seemed to plague him. ‘Is this it, then?’ he asked. ‘You will stay here at The Well forever? With her? Nothing will take you away?’

‘Only if that is what the Rose wants.’

‘The Rose? Or Amelia? That’s it? You’ll let her erase twenty years of love just like that. Gone.’

‘The Rose!’ I repeat.

‘And Lucien?’ He spoke with his back to me.

‘The Well will always be here for Lucien and Lucien for The Well. He is the future. The Rose is close to him, I feel it.’

‘You think Angie will agree with you?’

‘Leave her out of it,’ I screamed at him.

Crashing the frying pan into the sink, Mark turned to face me. ‘You are kidding yourself. Whether or not your Rose is real, I don’t know. But what I do know is that you are fooling yourself. The Sisters don’t believe that about Lucien. Sister Amelia hates him, really hates him – you saw it yourself this evening down at the spring. Sometimes I wonder what she might do to him, she’s such a religious freak. Face it. A male inheritance is not part of their vision. Your grandson is nothing but an obstacle on the road to their fucking paradise.’

My lips were dry. I looked over my shoulder at the door.
He has done it before
, said Voice.

‘Don’t walk out now,’ he ranted, but then he backed away, holding his hands out as if I were a vampire. ‘Don’t push me too far, Ruth,’ he said. ‘You push people too far . . .’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You put us together, me and Lucien, and pull us apart as if you’re a puppet-master. I love you too much, Ruth. I love him too much. It’s all gone wrong and there’ll be no going back now. Just like before.’

‘I don’t understand, please . . .’

‘You can’t understand anything any longer, I’ve said it before. You can’t have it all.’ Suddenly the threat was gone and he was
crying, great gasps shaking his body, and I went to him, held him, put my head on his juddering chest. All I could do was pray and the Rose filled the room with petal-scented peace in much the same way that some people say ghosts do.

He held me tighter and I felt him hard against my thigh. ‘One last night?’ he sobbed. ‘After so many years of loving you, just one last night. Please.’

Twisting my body, I left his embrace and shook my head.

‘Enough!’ he said and moved away from me also. ‘Go. Things will be clearer in the morning.’

As I was almost at the door, he suddenly shouted. ‘No, stop. You’ve got to stay.’ He opened the oven and presented an apple cake to me. ‘Lucien would never forgive us for forgetting his surprise. We’ve got to eat it, for his sake.’

That was my last supper, the cake that Lucien made. Had I known, I would have taken an eternity to break off the corner with my spoon, to scoop the warm yellow custard onto the sponge and rest it on my tongue; I would have sold my soul for the lightness and the sweetness; I would have invited the eggs and the flour, the sugar and the apple to become part of me, dissolved into my body, mingled with my saliva, digested by my enzymes, transported by my blood until this cake that he had made was indistinguishable from each individual cell of my body.

I didn’t know. Voice asked me what I was doing eating so much. I smeared it around my plate and left some lumps under my spoon, offering to wash up before Mark could notice. I scoured the pan in which it was made, letting the water run over it and wash away all trace of his small hands, the wooden spoon he had held, the tongue which had licked it. Mark wiped the table clean and I let the washing-up water carry all traces of him away.

When I got back into the cottage, I pulled the back door behind me. I did not lock it; I never did. Having put a large log on the wood-burning stove to keep it going until the morning and turned out the lights, leaving just the sudden flare of the flames in the black
room, I crept upstairs, went into the bathroom and noticed the bath where the water was now grey with a slight film of soap and a few strands of my hair. I didn’t drain it, knowing the noise might wake Lucien next door and I left the pile of wet clothes on the floor. I was so tired that I decided to sleep first and wake early to answer the prayers of the faithful and finish the blog for the penultimate day of our week of worship, so I clicked in the top right-hand corner of
theSistersoftheRose.com
and watched it shrink to nothing in far less than a second and confirmed that I wanted to shut down.

The last thing I did, in a way the last thing I ever did, even after I had taken one final look at the full moon, even after I had closed the shutters in my bedroom, even after I had knelt and thanked the Rose for the day and blessing for the night to come, the last thing I did was to tiptoe onto the landing and peer through the half-open door to Lucien’s bedroom. His nightlight was on and the curtains, although thick, were allowing a slit of moonlight to cross the floor and catch the glint of the mirror on the opposite wall. I didn’t go in. I never did. I stood stock-still as always, riveted by the magic of a sleeping child, listening for the rhythmic rise and fall of his breath, watching for the slight shuffling of the duvet, the sucking of tongue on thumb. Then I went to bed and slept as I had not slept for a long time. It is because I know now what can happen while you sleep that I will never sleep again.

T
here is no such thing as waking these days, just a blurring of different ways of being alive; after that morning, there would never be another awakening.

That day, my resolution had been to get up at 4 a.m. to answer the prayers and prepare the readings which I had failed to do the evening before. Why did I sleep through that deadline that night? Maybe because my body had been busy, working with the devil in the bleakest hours of the night and I had not long been in bed. Sometimes I want to rip my skin apart just to see inside the real me and know what I am made of, but I lack the talons and have to make do with surface scratches on my arms, which barely bleed.

I woke late. Too late. I had already missed dawn worship, but if I hurried I could get to the Sisters for the readings. There was no sign of Lucien, but the day before had been long and these dark mornings smudged the edges between night and day. I was grateful to be able to get dressed in peace, Lucien had become so attention-seeking recently. I knelt briefly to pray. That day became a catalogue of firsts and lasts – this was the last time I prayed in faith rather than
desperation. Downstairs, despite my clattering in the kitchen, Lucien had still not come down. I called upstairs; the last thing I wanted was to have to get Mark to look after him again and give him the excuse to summon Angie or the excuse to stay longer. The radio was on with its tedious catalogue of drought-fuelled misery, so I turned it down and called again and getting no reply, went halfway up the stairs and called again, then up to his room. I pushed open the door. The nightlight was still on, the curtains still closed. His bed was empty.

‘Lucien?’ I shouted, although where I thought he could be in a tiny two-bed cottage with only one staircase, I don’t know. I looked in the bathroom where last night’s water looked stagnant but undisturbed, and my gown lay to one side like a sodden shroud. At least he had not fallen in. I looked in our bedroom, pulling back the duvet, waiting for him to boo out on me. My chest tightened, but at the same time I told myself to breathe deeply and calm down: this was something all mothers felt at some point, the flutter of the unthinkable, that they had lost their child. But they never had – hardly ever.

Back into the kitchen, as if somehow against the law of nature he could have come downstairs and got himself to the table and started his cereal without me having noticed him on the stairs. He was not there. It was obvious that he’d woken up early, when I was still asleep, and slipped outside. His brown coat and wellington boots were still in the back passage, as were his shoes, but I didn’t put it past him going out in bare feet even on such a day as this. The back door was unlocked and outside seemed to me a strange place, as if the frosted oak was an illustration and the pheasants a soundtrack. Of course, he would have gone to Mark! I could not deny he had been so pleased that Mark was back. I knocked and pushed the barn door simultaneously. Inside the main room, Mark had tidied a bit, the washing up put away, the colouring paper with all the Ms was gone, presumably into the wood-burning stove. Lucien’s jeans were still on the clothes horse, but Mark’s coat was not on the peg and it was only when I went outside again that I realised the Land Rover was gone. Logic. Rewind. Lucien had got up early, found me still asleep and gone over
to the barn. Mark must have needed something in Middleton and taken Lucien with him for the ride. That was how it must be.

I scanned the field in front, feeling its bleakness, the sheep huddled around the hay, two crows fighting off the buzzard over the Hedditch cover. I was cold, very cold, and the ground was hard beneath my feet. I went back inside, dithering and ineffectual, his mobile went to answerphone, but it would if he had just gone into Middleton, the reception was dreadful there. Overhead, a huge heron lazily flew up from the direction of the pond and headed towards the lane and away from The Well. Then I understood. The naked boy, the last laugh, the ‘pushed too far’. Something terrible had happened; he had taken Lucien from me and gone.

You are all alone now
, said Voice. I started to run up the empty track.

‘Come back!’ I screamed and then, there it was, the Land Rover coming towards me. I felt so foolish for thinking what I had thought. I stopped, watching as the car swung up onto the gravel and Mark got out of the driver’s seat, carrying a newspaper: I remember thinking how he’d never gone to buy a paper in the morning before, how he had hated the media ever since the problems at work, even more since we moved here. Later I thought, why would he have gone into Middleton, faced all that all over again, just for a paper? But at the time it seemed irrelevant why, all that mattered was that he was going to go round and open the door for Lucien.

‘Why didn’t you tell me you had Lucien?’ I went towards the car to get him myself, because he had to be in the car, there was nowhere else he could be. ‘I’ve been worried sick.’

‘What are you talking about?’ he asked.

‘Where is he, Mark?’ I shouted, opening the rear door and seeing a back seat that had nothing more than a heap of wood and nails and mallets. ‘What have you done with him?’

The logical solutions were all gone. I started to run, just to run. Down the slope towards the lambing barn – he must be there, perhaps he’d made a house out of hay – but the lambing barn was
all settled dust in the half-light and undisturbed. So I ran on to the tractor shed, he must be there, sitting on the tractor in his pyjamas, hands on the wheel, but I’d forgotten the tractor was down by the hay. So I shouted to Mark, I’m going down to the tractor, and started stumbling over the rutted mud.