Free The Well by Catherine Chanter Page B

says contains the holy sacrament and a little flask. ‘I gather you have the water,’ he says, ‘I can provide the milk.’
    This is proper milk, milk that we drank as children in great gulping mouthfuls, milk that we poured onto cocoa on bonfire night. The smell of it spills over my mind and I am drunk on the memory.
    ‘I have my own cow,’ he pronounces. ‘A Jersey, Annalisa by name.’
    Giggling in church at Christmas was always my forte when I was small and something about the priest in my kitchen is making me revert to childish ways. That or hysteria. I stick my head in the drawer, ostensibly rummaging for a spoon.
    ‘I’m sure you’d love her. She is particularly beautiful. I have to say that she is the love of my life.’
    ‘They let you keep her?’ Now I am really hunting for sugar, because although I am not familiar with the clergy, he looks like the sort of vicar who takes sugar – a lot of sugar.
    ‘Let them try and stop me, that’s what I said. Truth be told, I played the holy card. Said that the priest of the village had ancient rights to graze one cow on the common land and if they tried to remove her, I’d take it up to the House of Lords. God seems to be exempt, you see, from the effect of their emergency powers and it would have been a frightful nuisance for them, so they went away like most bullies do in the end.’
    Interesting though this line of thinking is, I want nothing to stop me savouring the taste of tea with real milk, so we sit at the table together, sipping in silence like connoisseurs. As predicted, he adds a lot of sugar and gazes around the kitchen expectantly. I wonder if he is expecting cucumber sandwiches and bourbon biscuits arranged in a circle on a porcelain plate, because he is not only old, but old-fashioned, a sort of living anachronism. It has to be a possibility that he, too, is not what he seems. I pick up the thread of his conversation.
    ‘I didn’t know that. I’m surprised no one suggested the ecclesiastical legal route to me for The Well. After all, it had become a religious place of sorts by the time I was arrested.’
    ‘Not the same at all, my dear, not in their book. God forbid anyone might start accessing eternal life by any means other than the C of E. Now, are you going to show me round?’
    Having explained the limitations of my imprisonment, we set off, past the back gate (‘This must be where you got the daffodils,’ he says, ‘such a wonder to see a vase of real flowers on a kitchen table nowadays’), on through the budding orchard and then down through First Field. He apologises for repeating himself, praising God like it was Easter Day all over again. ‘But you must see the wonder of it for me, can you not see the wonder of it, the green of the grass and that pink colour you get when the trees are in bud?’
    Once he calms down, we walk slowly and we talk freely. We talk about varieties of tomatoes, we talk about dust, we talk about theHoly Land and about water and a shared childhood experience of swimming off the coast of Exmoor, where the pebbles gang up with the waves to drag you under. He describes being a prisoner of war and we share an understanding of freedom based on barbed wire and spotlights. We find ourselves, inevitably I suppose, looking down at Wellwood, and he says, so is that where it all happened, and I say, yes, that is the place, but I don’t go there, and he asks me if I mind if he prays. He closes his eyes and bows his head and his prayer is silent; mine is written in dried leaves floating on the surface of the water out of sight, under the trees. I appreciate the way he asks no questions, offers no answers. Making our way back up the hill to the house, I am conscious that I am emaciated and unfit, but that for him this is really hard work, he is definitely overweight and rather purple in the face. I am no doctor, but it’s not hard to diagnose high blood pressure and to hazard a guess at a root cause: too many years