LITMIR.BIZ

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to a neighbouring farmer, who had also been lending a hand, with the wood, that sort of thing. ‘They’re a tight-knit bunch round here, but the Taylors, they’d always help you out if you were in a fix, I’m sure.’

      The synonyms for tight-knit must be interesting, I thought. Introspective, xenophobic? At what point does tight-knit become hostile? The agent was explaining that the letting agreement ran out on 31 March the following year.

      ‘Thirty acres of field and woodland. Just the right size,’ Mark commented, as if there was such a thing as a right size for a piece of paradise. It sounds small, thirty acres, for the havoc it has caused. We visited the orchard, picking up apples and pears which were feeding the worms, wondering at the old fruit cages hung like discarded hairnets over strands of growth, sticks leaning at odd angles like old-fashioned hairpins. The vegetable garden showed signs of more recent work.

      ‘Look at this, Mark.’ Lucien had his small hands clasped around a fat marrow which had obviously continued swelling all summer, oblivious to the death of its planter. With a huge tug, it broke off the plant and he fell backwards. ‘Can we take it home? Can we eat it?’

      ‘It’s not ours, Lucien,’ I said.

      ‘It’s a good size, considering how little rain there’s been,’ said Mark.

      ‘Who’s going to mind? Give it a good tug and Mummy can carry it for you,’ said the agent.

      It was a familiar error, which Lucien corrected. ‘This is my granny. My mummy’s away at the moment.’

      ‘Well, your granny certainly doesn’t look old enough to be a granny,’ smarmed the agent.

      Lucien stared at him, crossly. ‘Well, she is,’ he insisted. ‘Everyone’s always doing that,’ he said to me, as hand in hand we went over to join Mark who, like an art lover in a gallery, was drinking in the burnished woods, mentally clearing brambles, thinning poplars, planting Spanish chestnuts where the pines had fallen in a strong wind, like spilled pencils in a dark classroom.

      We told the estate agent that if it was OK with him, we would eat our sandwiches there, under the oak tree. We promised to call, and he talked the talk about quick sales and all the usual nonsense in a housing market dried out by a lack of faith in the future.

      Mark called after him; there was just one thing he had forgotten to ask. ‘What about the water?’

      ‘It’s got its own supply. It’s not connected to the mains and doesn’t need to be. A well has kept this place going for a couple of hundred years. I can’t see it failing now.’

      I pointed out that now might be just the time it would fail, since there had been so little rain for so long.

      ‘Obviously,’ he conceded, ‘you need to get a professional opinion. But it’s not called The Well for nothing.’ He went on to tell us about the water table. That was what made the land so good. Look at it. In fact, as far as he was concerned, we were probably better off here with our own supply than being linked up to the mains and suffering all the shortages and standpipes and allocations everyone had had to put up with for the last couple of summers.

      ‘Anyway,’ he gesticulated away to the west where the wind was bullying the clouds, ‘most forecasters think the drought’s coming to an end. This winter will be one of the wettest on record, they reckon.’

      We believed him because we wanted to.

      The dust hung in the air long after he had disappeared. I got a bag out of the back with some sandwiches and crisps we had bought from the service station. We sat on a rug, Lucien cross-legged and upright and Mark struggling as always to organise his long legs which had been forced to live under a desk for almost twenty years. We passed a bottle of water from one to another, sipping judiciously, listening to the repetitive sheep and the blackbird warning us off, and then suddenly, spontaneously, we both burst out laughing.

      ‘I can’t believe this.’ Mark rubbed his eyes and looked up again, as if it was all going to disappear in a puff of smoke. ‘Well?’ he asked.

      ‘You first,’ I replied.

      ‘No, you.’

      ‘Granny R, you go first.’

      ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s incredible. Look at it. It’s got everything we’re looking for.’

      ‘Everything,’ repeated Mark. ‘Talk about the land of milk and honey.’

      ‘Yes, it’s beautiful,’ I continued. ‘And the land is just what we want. And the view is out of this world. It’s just that . . .’

      ‘And nobody would know us up here. Know me. No looks in the supermarket, no sniggers from kids on the bus. A clean sheet, Ruth.’

      ‘That’s probably right . . .’ I admitted.

      ‘You think it’s too good to be true?’ suggested Mark.

      ‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’ The place was breathtaking, I too was dizzy with its beauty, but I needed space to think. I got to my feet, stepped away from the rug and looked over the wooden gate leading into the field. If someone was looking to escape to the country, then they would be unlikely to find anywhere better than this. ‘If,’ I started.

      ‘If what?’ said Mark.

      His hope was warm on my back; I did not even need to turn around to see it on his face. I counted the cost of what I might lose if we moved here and that only added up to things that could be maintained or replaced – job, connections and surely my friendships were strong enough to survive the distance. So then I counted the cost of what I might lose if we stayed in London. Mark. And The Well – I’d lose this one-off miracle of a place, this Well.

      ‘It feels like such a responsibility.’ I looked at my grandson, sitting on the edge of the rug and poking ants with a stick in the gravel. ‘What do you think, Lucien?’

      ‘I think it’s the best place in the world,’ he said.

      We put in an offer on the Monday morning, some way below the asking price, as if there was a part of us that couldn’t cope with the dream coming true. ‘Offer accepted,’ said the agent and I sat on our front doorstep – mobile in my hand, smelling the exhaust from the cars trapped by the city heat, hearing the plane overhead circling for Heathrow, watching the old man opposite scooping up his dachshund’s crap from the pavement with a blue plastic bag – overwhelmed with a ridiculous sense of loss. What’s done cannot be undone. By the time Mark came home, I had pulled myself together for his sake and we toasted the future like newlyweds. We played old favourites, Mark did his dad-dance around the kitchen, and we got ridiculously drunk. The cottage was taken off the market and the self-timer photo we had taken that day was uploaded and greeted by a chorus of envy from our fellow suburban sufferers.

      ‘Hope you’re having a going-away party, because you’re sure as hell never going to come back,’ was one comment.

      We pinned the picture up next to the toaster in the kitchen in London, as a reminder. It moved with us, graduated to a frame, propped up on the half-moon table in the sitting room.

      I creep downstairs and approach it like a communicant, hold it up to the light. In the beginning was The Well.

      One week. One summer. One night. One week is all that it has taken for all my good intentions to come to nothing. I was going to stand strong against their assault on my freedom, but in truth, I am a sloth, lying in bed for hours and hours, subdued. One summer was all it took before our dream started to curl at the edges and stain like picked primroses. One night is enough to swallow a lifetime of lives.

      Outside is a space now devoid of human landmarks. Inside, this is a sentence with no punctuation. Nobody comes. Nobody goes. Nothing happens. I have christened the guards: Anon, Boy and Three. They own the present tense: recording, monitoring,

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