The Well (5 page)

Hester and Katherine were comfortable together in the stone cottage. The rent money gave Hester the pleasant feeling of pocket money. She had good men working for her and Mr Bird continued to advise her.

Often she felt she did not need advice. She had the reputation of being a quick-witted business woman, quite hard headed, they said at the sales. She understood the rain clouds, the east wind, the movements of the sun and the varying conditions of the soil. Water, she told Katherine, moves unexpectedly and the changing colour from one end of a paddock to the other tells you where the water is and how far down it is. For some years she had been resting on her reputation and her knowledge and she continued without thinking much about it to do so.

Mr Bird called at intervals. One day, taking Hester on one side, he warned her in a roundabout way not to trust any person too completely. ‘Any person, Miss Hester,' he said, ‘as you are not acquainted entirely with, I mean, what's in their lives, what's gone before and such.' Not noticing Hester's increasingly stormy frown he continued, ‘You being good hearted don't have the knowing of the bad sides of people.' Irritated, Hester told him to mind his own business and to confine his remarks to the running of the farm. ‘What I am saying concerns just that,' he said in a low voice. They were walking cross the yard near the old well.

‘Well cover's a bit loose Miss Hester,' he changed the subject as they paused between the disused woolshed and the well. Once more Hester told him not to interfere. The well she said was useless and was nothing to do now with the farm and whether the cover was repaired or not was her own private affair. She said she hoped that Mr Bird would not raise either subject again.

The well had become for Hester and Katherine a place where they liked to sit sunning themselves. On bright hot days, where they could see a little way into it, the inside of the well seemed cool and dark and tranquil. Mysterious draughts of cold air seemed to come from somewhere deep down in the earth. If they bent their heads close to the unclosed part of the cover they thought that, even though the well was dry, they could hear from its depths the slow drip drop of water.

Hester even thought she could smell water but dismissed the thought, knowing that there could not be any. Some days the wind sang in the empty well shaft and, on other days, their voices seemed to echo and reverberate as they sat together on the generous coping talking to and fro contentedly to one another.

Inside the well going down into the blackness were stout metal rungs. This ladder of spaced-out rungs was set firmly into the structure of the well. The rungs were very close to the stone work and anyone climbing up or down would have to place the toes of his boots carefully and rely on being able to hold the rungs above. It was clear too that it would be impossible to avoid grazing the knuckles on both hands, first one and then the other, as the hands grasped the rungs, one after the other, either going down or coming up.

Hester explained to Katherine that the rungs went only a short way down, not much more than the height of a tall man and then it was a sheer drop. She did not know, she said, why the rungs were there and, being there, she did not know why they did not go all the way down. She thought that perhaps at one time the water had been up to the lowest rung.

Sometimes they threw small stones into the well and though they sometimes hit the sides of the shaft they never heard them reach the bottom.

Hester often threw broken or badly burned dishes down the well. She had come, she said, to disliking spending too much time on washing up. There's a fortune,' she said, ‘in bits of antique crockery down there.'

To amuse themselves they pretended that someone lived in the well. A troll with horrible anti-social habits had his home down in the depths. They invented too an imprisoned princess, the possession and plaything of the troll. She was later changed to a prince as Katherine felt it would be more exciting and ‘more
trewly
romantic Miss Harper, dear,' if a prince on a white horse came out from the well one fine day.

‘Oh yes, instead of a princess,' Hester readily joined in, ‘who would require looking after and who would only mess up the bathroom with her endless cosmetics. The prince,' she agreed, ‘would be more useful about the place and a horse, especially a thoroughbred, would be lovely!' There was the stable with the door open all ready … She laughed.

‘Oh Miss Harper, dear,' Katherine said, ‘how would we get the horse up?'

‘We'd have to use the block and tackle.' Hester turned her head to regard the ancient equipment which jutted on a rusty railing from the end of the old shed; high up in a position of once-held power.

‘The prince,' Katherine said, ‘must be taller than me.'

‘Than I,' Hester, as was her habit, corrected. Taller than I am Kathy,' she said.

‘Yes, taller than yew Miss Harper, dear,' Katherine said. ‘Men should always be tall, the man should always be taller than the woman.'

‘Yes,' Hester agreed, feeling it right that the man should be tall, taller than the woman, but knowing that once again she had failed to make the grammatical point.

‘And older,' Katherine persisted.

‘Oh yes,' Hester again agreed though knowing that in the farmyard young roosters, smaller than the hens, mated with their own sisters, mothers and grandmothers. She reflected on Naomi asking her daughters-in-law if they wanted to wait until she bore more sons. She, for a moment, tried to consider the stick-like limbs of the newly born boys in their cradles, it would never be possible to offer these to the fecund bodies of the two youthful and possibly buxom widows. She felt sure, she said, dismissing the ancient mixture of manipulation and devotion, that the troll would be the best person to haul up from the bottom of the well. ‘Imagine!' she said, ‘how easily he would carry the firewood indoors on his bent back. I don't suppose your prince, however tall, would want to spoil his white velvets.'

Katherine, sighing, replied that she supposed she would have to sit up nights sewing overalls for him.

In the winter, when it was cold, they did not think of the well. The mechanical rhythmic rattling of the iron cover on windy nights had a soothing quality rather like the sound of a big clock ticking when one is accustomed to the gentle regularity. Certainly in winter the stone coping did not invite them. They kept within doors, burning wonderful fires, cooking good meals and eating them and enjoying their reading and sewing and their home-made music and singing.

Sometimes Hester ordered clothes and patterns and materials from big shops in the city but ordinarily they drove into the town for provisions. Because of tourists, the town having buildings which were described as splendid reminders of the past and, because of city people caught in the everlasting dream of going back to the land and being wealthy enough to take up small parcels of sub-divided land, the town had an air of being busy with a pleasant market-day atmosphere.

Mrs Grossman, taking advantage, had enlarged the stock in her general store to include axe heads and mattock handles, hats with wide brims and fly veils and those relics which people like to have as ornaments on their recently acquired properties; things like brightly painted, metal-bound cart and carriage wheels, milk churns, ancient and now illegal rabbit traps and battered discarded road signs. She had taken over the empty butcher's shop next door (the other side from the hotel), and she quickly filled the window with cracked vegetable dishes, cruets, gravy boats, empty sauce and pickle bottles, black iron kettles, black preserving pans – too heavy to lift, wooden wash tubs and candle sticks of brass. She even had some knives and forks of the sort which need cleaning daily and she had the butcher's chopping block freshly salted and scrubbed and priced. Some enthusiast would be sure to want it in her kitchen. She hoped too to get a couple of pews from the Holy Trinity Anglican Church, it being declared in a handbook as one of the oldest churches in existence. People, it seemed, liked to sit in pews for a barbecue. Very fitting, Mrs Grossman said, since barbecues were often on a Sunday.

At the convent, Katherine told Miss Harper, there was a one-armed woman who did the ironing, not all of it as the girls did ironing every day, and this woman had a boyfriend who, one night in a fit of pique, cut off the other arm – it seemed because of her only having one arm – making her less attractive than ever.' She bled something awful Miss Harper, dear, out by the toilets there she was in a pool of blood. They said he hanged himself after cutting off his own arms.'

The journey into town provided a time for the retelling of items from old newspapers which, as time went on, became legends, believed by them both. The town was not large. Hester knew the district well and though she could not quote the population she knew how many head of cattle every farmer owned. She was sympathetic to misfortune and helped a great many people but itinerant workers bowed down with personal tragedy she refused to have on her property, saying quite bluntly that she had to prosper and would only be held back by the down and out and the feckless.

As they crossed the road bridge into the town Hester would always remark on the low level of water in the river which lay very still and wide far down beneath the long bridge. The bridge was the entrance to the town and it was also the way of escape from the town. Hester, without fail, felt an excitement as she drove on to the bridge to start the homeward journey.

For years the river had been low. ‘Needs a good flushing out,' Mrs Grossman said repeatedly in an accusing tone as if some weekend customer was to blame. A newcomer, one of the new hobby farmers on five useless acres of salt flat, timidly asked Mrs Grossman for a square plastic bowl so that her husband could wash his feet. ‘My husband is a bank manager,' she explained.

They don't come square,' Mrs Grossman replied, still preoccupied with the state of the river as if Miss Harper, with the power of the large land owner, could alter it. A creek in a deep ravine on the western side of Hester's land fed the river. In summer the pits and gullies in the creek bed were dry but when the rain came water flowed swiftly rising and flooding in a few minutes, only to recede as quickly. Hester, though she did not bother to tell Mrs Grossman, thought that the water must flow away in underground streams. Sometimes during the very hot dry weather she wished she could reach this good water which was somewhere a long way down under the earth pouring itself away, wasted.

Mrs Grossman never kept Miss Harper waiting in the shop. Sometimes Mr Grossman and Mrs Grossman together attended to Miss Harper's needs and carried her shopping out to her car and then stood respectfully in the street leaving the other customers in the shop waiting till Hester had taken off with a roar in the direction of the bridge.

‘You ought to keep a coupla dogs,' Mr Bird, refusing to learn from previous experience, advised one day when he brought a parcel which had come by rail to his office in town. ‘Your father, Miss Hester, always had dogs,' he said. ‘Never was seen without a bluey or a red cloud at his side. You would do well to do likewise.'

‘Yes I know,' Hester pretended to dash a tear from the side of her long nose. ‘Poor father!' she said. ‘Of course I shall never forget his dogs.'

Hester had no intention of keeping a dog. ‘It's too much work feeding them,' she said to Katherine almost before Mr Bird's dust had settled. ‘I don't care if we are alone here,' she said. ‘Dogs don't save people if strangers come. They often fawn on the most sinister-looking individuals.' She went on to describe how a dog she'd known of jumped in the truck being stolen by thieves and went off for the ride. ‘And,' she added, ‘they bark madly in the night, so that you think someone's prowling round in the dark. In any case, before the end I got heartily sick of father's dogs. Father forgot that his dogs had fillet steak every day while the rest of us could live on boiled wheat for all he cared. And do you remember how we had to chop up celery and lamb's fry for Floss? That disgusting old hearth rug. What a mess she made everywhere. I know it wasn't her fault really but we simply couldn't go through that again!' They both forgot the advice about a dog and took the parcel indoors.

There were geese about the place and Hester knew that an intruder might well be frightened of the flock. There were four white ganders with strong flexible necks. They were powerful birds and their blue eyes were cold and steady. In any case she knew she could protect herself and Kathy. She had a gun somewhere. She was not sure now where it was. It was bound to be somewhere; mislaid, she thought, during the move. She meant to find it and put it on top of her wardrobe but in an uncharacteristic way, she let the gun and its much-needed meticulous care slip from her mind.

They tore off the crackling wrapping papers as soon as they were in the house and quickly tried on the new underclothes and the slippery silky nightgowns Hester had ordered for them. With little yelps and screams of excitement they paraded, Hester on her stick heavily, in front of some new full-length mirrors purchased a few weeks earlier. Since they were so far from any other dwelling they could make as much noise as they liked. Hester, when really roused and excited, was capable of making sounds like a fog-bound ship knowingly approaching a rocky harbourless coast. This night she brayed like an enthusiastic donkey.

‘Oh my dear!' she gasped between a series of long drawn-out fog horns. ‘
Pour une femme troublante, passionée – sophistiquée!
What a splendid label!' Her fingers ran crookedly up and down the piano keys as she fumbled for a tune, and Katherine, crooning, swaying her hips and clicking her fingers, modelled the new clothes. She paced forward and, swinging round, she posed. She froze, legs and arms caught in the middle of a movement, completely still, transparent like long icicles faintly rosy, apricot coloured, as if formed from water dripping slowly over a rusty gutter. Several times she went through this little intimate routine displaying the feathery black fragments of clothing, taking them off and putting them on and, sometimes, pausing to fold or to unfold each item carefully with little thoughtful twists and shakings.