LITMIR.BIZ

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could be my Mrs Robinson’, he slobbered. I told Mark and we laughed and he ran his hands up under my jumper, humming the theme tune to the film.

      I can only assume that Angie overheard Des, because all of a sudden she had come over from the barn and was packing Lucien’s things.

      ‘Are you off?’

      ‘Yeah.’

      ‘Both of you?’

      ‘Of course.’ She was stuffing Lucien’s clothes into a well-travelled holdall, nothing folded, nothing counted.

      ‘If you want to travel again, you could leave Lucien here, you know.’

      ‘Why would I want to do that?’

      I had bought him some slippers and I held these out to her. ‘You would be more free and Lucien could go to school here, make friends.’

      She snatched the slippers. ‘Like you’ve got such good relationships with the villagers that they’d all be asking him round to play, would they? Haven’t you noticed, Mum, none of them want to be around you any longer?’

      ‘I don’t think that’s totally true.’

      Angie left the room and I could hear her crashing around the bathroom. ‘Because you don’t want to. But I hear stuff. You’re up here with your green fields; they’re all going out of business. They think something’s not right,’ she shouted through the wall and then came back into the bedroom. ‘What the fuck’s he done with his toothbrush.’

      The room felt too small for both of us. I moved out of her way and looked out of the window. ‘You’re going away from the point, Angie. I was just offering Lucien a bit of stability. He loves it here. All this could be his one day.’

      ‘You can stuff your middle-class idyll. This is all about you. You always wanted another kid. You always wanted a boy. Actually, what you always wanted was Lucien . . .’

      I turned back to face her. ‘Angie. You were barely seventeen. If we hadn’t stepped forward, you wouldn’t even have had Lucien, the state you were in. Adoption, that’s what social care were talking about.’

      Angie is mouthing the words as I am speaking them. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, like I haven’t heard all this before. And the social workers weren’t so keen when Mark got accused, were they?’ She zipped the holdall closed.

      ‘Angie, don’t stoop that low. You know as well as I do that he was completely exonerated. So don’t you ever, and I mean ever, pull that one again.’

      ‘OK. For God’s sake, don’t get so stressed. Mark’s in the clear. All’s right with the world. Things have changed. I’ve changed.’

      ‘Have you?’ I called after her.

      Sitting on the end of the unmade bed, I tugged the duvet straight. I had never doubted Mark’s innocence, not once throughout the whole sordid affair. I just knew – I thought I just knew – that he could never do anything like that. It would have been impossible to have allowed myself to think any differently. The sound of Angie slamming the back door brought me back to the present. I noticed my broken nails and pressed hard against the blisters on my fingers from the wheelbarrow until they hurt and wept.

      By sunset they were gone, but she had got Lucien to write a note on a page from his farmyard colouring book with huge, irregular letters, half facing the wrong way round. It was her way of saying sorry – that and taking only half the money from Mark’s wallet.

      Dere Grany R Thank you for having us. Look after the lams. Tell Bru I love him. XXXXX Lucien.

      I keep it as a memento mori in the dressing-table drawer I dare not open.

      The second half of Feburary was cold, grey and difficult. It snowed once or twice at The Well, but only after Lucien had left.

      ‘He would have loved this,’ I said to Mark.

      ‘So would everyone else,’ he replied as we stared over our sparkling, sugar-coated plough towards the black fields and forests beyond.

      We saw virtually no one from London or Lenford until the end of the month at the meeting with the spokesperson from the Department of the Environment. The parish hall was crowded out with farmers exhausted from lambing, smelling of sleeplessness, the windows steaming. Patience, like water, was in short supply.

      The chairman of the local National Farmers Union introduced the speaker. ‘I hope he’s going to be our Angel Gabriel and bring us good tidings.’

      But it was clear from the start that the man from the Emergency Committee on Drought Relief (ECDR) had letters after his name, but no wings. His was an exercise in panic-reduction and spin, and the heckling rose.

      ‘What are you going to do about it?’

      ‘What’s going to happen to this country’s food supply?’

      ‘Someone needs to do something about it.’

      ‘What can he do about it?’ muttered Mark to me. ‘He’s not God.’

      ‘And what are you doing about places like The Well? They’ve got enough water to make a fucking reservoir.’

      The official encouraged any such landowners with possible answers to contact the Drought Help and Information Line on 0816 . . .

      ‘Witchcraft,’ interrupted an old woman, standing at the back with a baby on her hip.

      ‘Chemicals.’

      ‘Stealing other people’s water.’

      Our neighbours were not short of suggestions.

      Mark elbowed his way through the crowd and we stumbled across the car park in the dark, me shouting at him to wait. We walked home in single file in silence, went to bed in silence, turned out the light in silence. We made promises when we moved here that we would not let the sun go down on a quarrel; we tried so hard to stick to our resolutions, but like the smoker in the pub on 2 January, the world was full of ways of failing.

      The next morning, I got up first, opened the shutters and looked out of the window. ‘I can’t stand it,’ I said to Mark.

      ‘Can’t stand what?’

      ‘The loneliness. The scent of overnight rain.’

      ‘Then you’re the only person in this wonderful United Kingdom of ours who feels that way,’ he replied, sitting on the side of the bed, pulling on his jeans, shivering. Despite the cold, we had scrupulously avoided touching each other all night, so that when my knee had brushed his back, we had both recoiled like strangers.

      ‘Do you know what? I’ve had just about enough of being on the receiving end of the general public’s accusations. We did that in London and it was no fun. Now, I just want to be like everyone else. I’d actually prefer to be part of their fucking drought.’

      Mark came to me, put his arm around me. I wanted to pull away, but I thought no, if I do that now there will be no going back. He’d asked me one night after a long interview with the police about the laptop, ‘Do you find me repulsive?’ We couldn’t go back to that. But as for The Well – Mark had no answers, just platitudes. It’s not called The Well for nothing. History. Geography. Geology. Logic. The lawyer and the farmer, his alter egos kept each other company, but his schizophrenic platitudes were not for me. I pushed him away, told him to use his eyes, look at our green grass, the snowdrops under our hedges, our tight budding trees. Now look beyond our boundary, at the landscape iron-grey and stubborn in its sickness. That’s not normal, I said. That’s not logical, Mark. Nor is the rain.

      ‘What about the rain?’

      ‘The rain. Like last night, it must have rained. We hardly ever see it rain, we don’t usually hear it rain, but it has clearly rained. And just here. Nowhere else in the whole glorious country has it rained properly for almost two years, but it rained here, last night, again. Here, we have unlimited access to our best friend the Rain God and

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