The Well (15 page)

Hester looked forward to surprising Katherine with the new cassette. It was impossible to imagine playing the game of choosing in the presence of Joanna. As she dismissed the ridiculous idea deciding, with her usual practical commonsense, that the game would have to be, as it were, put away during Joanna's visit, another thought crept in. They would not be playing anything in the evening unless the activities with the rope could by an enormous stretch of the imagination, be called a game.

Hester could still hear their argument. Katherine screaming and crying, ‘All you ever care about is money. That's all that matters to you!' Katherine refusing and refusing to carry out Hester's request. Hester's order.

‘The only thing you understand is money, what a thing is worth in money, that's all you care about.' Katherine's thin screaming was high pitched so that her words were almost inaudible, her voice sounding like an insect trapped in an empty lemonade bottle. An insect protesting, trying to say something but able only to produce the fragile whining buzzing sound.

‘Katherine,' said Hester in a cool voice while Katherine was forced to draw breath. ‘Money has its uses and you have shown no wish not to understand these uses. I expect,' she added, noticing that Katherine, after her dreadful screaming, needed even more time in which to breathe, ‘that the double negative is too much for you. What I am saying is that you understand money well enough and that you, like other people, need money. We can't live without money.'

‘I'll die then! I'm not going down there. I'll die!'

It was only hysteria of course. Hester, from her upbringing, knew that in matters of life and death common sense prevailed, especially in the country. Often something had to die so that something else could live and flourish. Like rotten fruit discarded, the dead man at the bottom of the well was not her concern. All they had to get from him was the useful and valuable thing which he had down there with him. The money. For a moment Hester thought of Rosalie Borden's jewellery. A grim little smile sat on her lips. If they found the tiara and the other ornaments they would keep them. That was too dangerous, she reprimanded herself, everything other than the money would be left. ‘For the Troll, for you Troll,' she croaked. What they were about to do was all part of farm management. It was like getting a thoroughbred and possible prize-winning bull calf free from an injured or dying mother.

Hester frowned and swerved. She had the road to herself. She was content with the familiar dome of the sky. The uneasiness she felt in the road house was part of a general uneasiness whenever she had to leave her own landscape. When thinking of travelling with Katherine she knew she would have to make an effort to become acquainted with streets and shops which were not known. The idea of having a meal in a restaurant frightened her. It was something not in her usual routine.

For a time while she drove she amused herself, as she gazed from the stretches of empty road to the surrounding paddocks, with predicting failure for those city people lately drawn to ‘getting back to the land' as they called this buying of hobby farms. These farmlets were selling fast.

Her comfortable contemplation of disaster for other people soothed her and she began to think of the things she would do once her money was recovered.

Dismissing her uneasiness she thought how they would be able to continue with their plans and travel. One of the delightful things about travelling, Hester, dwelling in the past, reflected, was the food. Foreign places, foreign languages and foreign foods. There was a certain glamour attached to two soft-boiled eggs served, without their shells, in a glass delicately wrapped in a white linen napkin. This was how she had eaten her eggs with Fräulein Herzfeld all those years ago. She supposed customs like this did not change. After all, people with whom she had spent her life, had always eaten and still did eat eggs, two at once, fried on both sides and neatly perched on a juicy beef-steak.

In fresh surroundings Katherine would forget this whole horrible and squalid event. Hester smiled. The sturdy little Toyota was flying along, trustworthy and reliable, the distance covered without effort. Driving was a pleasure.

She thought of plays and concerts and the opera. With Hilde she had seen some romantic and beautiful performances. They, she remembered, in the ways of the Viennese had taken newspaper-wrapped parcels of salami and black bread to eat during
The Marriage of Figaro
. Hilde had been very fond of food. Still smiling Hester sustained herself with the thought of Katherine's excitement and pleasure as they were about to enter ancient and ornamental concert halls. She would enjoy too being one of the expensively and fashionably dressed people in the audience.

When Hester listened to music or when she read certain books she was able to forget that she was elderly and ugly and lame.

Sitting in the shop for such a long time had made her legs, especially the lame leg, ache. She had left the shop with her purchase unnoticed as Mrs Grossman was enlarging on her experience to fresh customers adding rape to the dangers she had escaped while in her strategically placed bed. The bald doctor was still in the same corner of the shop turning packets of biscuits over in his hands as if still trying to make comparisons and judgements; an intellectual exercise which Hester wished was hers. It would be easier to choose between biscuits, especially the savoury ones, than to go ahead with the macabre occupation she planned for the evening.

‘I hope you don't mind my asking … After all, it would be nice, wouldn't it, for Katherine to feel she was earning some pocket money.' It was not so much Mrs Borden's voice in Hester's mind now as the implication. What right had Mrs Borden to intrude in this way? Hester did not keep Katherine short, not at all. And then there was the earlier hint that Hester was preventing Katherine from growing up. The later words obliterated the earlier ones but Hester felt the pain of the accusation. She knew too, at this moment, that she did not want Katherine to go away. She loved her and wanted her near always as she was now. The thought of her belonging to someone else, ‘tie the knot,' Mrs Borden said, was unbearable. People, Hester thought, who go to Church always want other people to go too. Vegetarians often tried to convert meat eaters. She supposed it was the same with marriage and childbirth. Women caught tried to ensure that others were similarly trapped.

Hester tried to dismiss Mrs Borden's vulgarity from the landscape. Realizing that she was driving too fast she slowed down and watched the crows flying low across the paddocks. She longed to get home. Part of the journey was this wish for arrival, for the serene peace of the yard and the quiet well-ordered kitchen. She found herself praying to a long-neglected God that Katherine would be reasonable and that tonight the whole horrible thing be dealt with, the money recovered and then put out of their minds.

In the distance she saw the line of trees which, her father always said, must thrive on an underground water supply, and which marked the farthest end of what used to be her property and where the dog-leg was. Seeing the trees even though they were a long way off reassured her. She would feel better once she was home. She needed tea, real tea not the stuff in the paper cup, and a meal badly. Katherine, after a rest and a sleep, would be baking a batch of scones. Her mouth watered. She wanted the sound of the kettle boiling and the warm safe smell of baking, cheese and bacon scones preferably, but mostly she looked forward to being with Katherine. The day had been unusually long. She never went anywhere without Katherine.

‘Katherine!' Hester called on the threshold of the kitchen, ‘A wet floor is not a clean floor. How many times have I told you that! A wet floor is not a clean floor!'

Wet patches amounting to small puddles trailing into one another decorated the usually spotless floor. There was no nicely spread table to welcome the exhausted traveller. Katherine gave no answering call and she did not appear. Hester searched the house calling and calling. This did not take long. She even looked in stupid places like the cupboard under the sink. Katherine was not to be found. Everything was tidy in the house except in the kitchen where it was clear that bread and meat had been cut up, in a hurry evidently, on the edge of the table. Bread crumbs and pieces of white fat, trimming from the meat, littered the floor.

Standing at the kitchen door she called Katherine again, her voice sounded weak and frightened. No answering call came from outside either. She could not remember ever before having felt so helpless, so frightened and so alone. She thought that Katherine, in desperation, afraid of what she had to do because she, Hester, was making her, had run away taking with her the weight of the dead man and the fear of the terrible thing she was being made to do. Where could she hope to run to. Hester regretted bitterly everything she had said.

The thick healthy rope lay in mocking ordered coils on the floor of the Toyota. Hester locked the doors, she had neglected to do this recently but felt strangely compelled now to take this precaution. She limped on her stick across to the woolshed. How stupid she had been! Katherine had gone in there and fallen asleep, tired out after the disturbed night, on the hay.

There was no sign of anyone in the woolshed. As she turned from the open end of the shed she saw Katherine.

Slowly Hester walked towards her. She was sitting, crouched on her heels, beside the coping of the well. She seemed to be huddled there, pressed against the stonework. She was perfectly still, her face turned away from Hester, as if she was listening. She did not appear to be hiding but Hester noticed at once that she seemed to squint sideways as she looked up, screwing up her eyes as a child does when he thinks that, if he closes his eyes, he cannot be seen.

‘Katherine!' Hester moved forward as quickly as she could. There you are! Were you asleep in the sun?'

‘Oh Miss Harper, dear, guess what! I'll give you three guesses. I've got a secret! Three guesses!' Hester, looking at Katherine, thought that she had never noticed before what a small pointed face she had. She was very pale, that was understandable after the events of the night. But this fragile bluish-white paleness was something out of the ordinary. It seemed to Hester that Katherine was illuminated from within in some way and that her paleness was like nakedness in the yard.

‘Secrets?' Hester asked making another cautious movement forwards. She hoped Katherine was not going to be all nervy or go crazy or out of her mind over the whole unpleasant thing. ‘Come into the house at once,' she said, her severe tones following naturally after the great depths of her fear. ‘Come along. Into the house!' She knew it was imperative to be firm if confronted with hysteria. Like a mother who, having found her lost child, slaps him in the relief of being once more united, Hester was angry with Katherine.

‘No kettle on,' she said, ‘no baking done, the stove's black, no fire, nothing at all prepared for our meal. Where's the spinach I told you to wash, eh? What's happened to the cold mutton? What have you been doing Miss?' Hester only used the word ‘Miss' when she was annoyed. ‘Remember,' she said raising her voice from where she stood leaning on the door post, ‘we have urgent work to get done this evening.'

Katherine drawn onwards into the kitchen stood facing Hester's anger; a small smile on her lips and her eyes bright as eyes with secrets are. ‘I'm tired, I'll have you know,' Hester went on. ‘I've not had a meal all day and just take a look at this kitchen. What have you been doing all day.' Because her own nerves were on edge she had to restrain herself from shaking Katherine. ‘Where's the meat? And the eggs?' Katherine's reply shook Hester. Katherine said, ‘I gave the meat to the man and I gave him the bread and …'

‘What man!'

‘The man down the well, Miss Harper, dear. He said he was hungry and anything would do. So hungry he said. So I put up meat and bread and apples in a plastic bag. He said to put it in plastic because of the water, in case he couldn't catch hold he said, in case the bread fell upon the water, he said, it's very damp … there's water down …'

‘Katherine!' Hester's voice was deep with warning. But Katherine, smiling said, ‘Oh, Miss Harper, dear, he isn't dead at all. I heard him. Soon after you'd gone I heard him. I heard him praying. He prayed ‘Our Father' and he called on Jesus to get him out of the hole. Miss Harper, dear, I've been talking to him all day …'

Hester dragged a chair across from the side of the table. The noise stopped Katherine's speech for a moment. Hester sat down. She seemed unable to speak.

‘He told me he was cold Miss Harper, dear,' Katherine said. ‘He wanted blankets and a hot drink. I filled the thermos with tea. Real hot. He says there's water down there, Miss Harper, but trewly it's got salts in it, bitter water, he says, a stream, he called it, trickling through the holes in the rocks. He says, Miss Harper, he's on a sort of rock and earth bank. He says you could call it a bank. And there's caves. He says it's very cold and he wants out as soon as ever you come back. Oh Miss Harper, dear, you do see don't you I didn't kill him after all!' Katherine danced across the kitchen. She filled the little kettle. ‘I'll make us some soup,' she said. ‘We could give him some too; I use the old rope in the shed to lower things down to him. I told him it wouldn't take his weight, that we couldn't risk another fall and that you were fetching a good rope from town. He said he would wait till you got back with the rope. I had a terrible time with him, Miss Harper, as he kept screaming, “Out. I want out”, and I couldn't, for ages, make him hear about your trip to town. He's very bruised, he says, but not too serious he don't think. He might have broke his shoulder he says it's very painful. He can't understand how he got down there. “You're in our well,” I told him. He can't remember where he was going or anything, he says he …'