The Well by Elizabeth Jolley

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.

The Well--the second in the set of Australian books I'm reading this month, after Patrick White's Happy Valley--is about an aging spinster, Hester Harper, and her live-in companion, Katherine. Hester is an old homesteader who has never been interested in men; Katherine is a typical young person in love with American films and film stars, yet their arrangement works well: Hester dotes on Katherine, whom she sees as a student and ward, and the orphan Katherine thrives in the cloisters of Hester's home. When Hester, on the advice of an old friend, sells her farm and retires with Katherine to a small outbuilding on her former property, the two become even more entangled.

Hester worries constantly about the possibility that Katherine will tire of her and leave her friendless and without property, yet the arrangement seems robust until one night, coming back from a party with Hester, Katherine hits something, or someone, in the middle of the night with her car. Hester and Katherine take the body--which we are never really permitted to see--and dump it in the well behind their home. Only later does Hester learn that the money she has been hiding in her hat has disappeared, presumably with the thief in the well. This scenario forces a sudden wedge between Hester and Katherine: first, when Katherine refuses to be lowered into the well by a rope to find the money on the dead man's corpse, and then when Katherine begins to insist that the man below is not dead at all, but alive and confessing his love to her.

Has the shock broken Katherine's brain? Or is Hester the one who is broken, refusing to hear the cries of the man below? The Well declines to answer these questions, at least to answer them without ambiguity. The novel never tells us with certainty whether the man is alive or dead, or even whether it was really a man at all. I guess you'd call it a psychological thriller, one of those books whose interest lies in the effects, destabilizing to the psyche and which reduce us to our most primal motives, of great violence. The single most chilling moment in the text might be when Katherine, begging Hester for groceries to feed the man in the well, produces a hundred dollar bill, saying he had sent it up from what he had stolen in a basket. Is Katherine a crazy liar who has stolen the money? Or is she telling the truth? I would have liked to have clearer answers to these questions, quite honestly, or perhaps for the ambiguities to be disposed of in a way that is more satisfying. But they are certainly gripping.

At times, The Well seemed to me a little padded, as if it were milking the main incident by offering lengthy portraits of Hester's inner psychological state. That's probably a little unfair; we come to understand from Hester's memories that her childhood love for her German governess--who betrayed her by carrying, then miscarrying, her father's child--provides the template for her possessiveness over Katherine, and casts it as explicitly queer. The man in the well, then, represents the lurking suitor, the man waiting in the subterranean unknown to emerge and steal Katherine away. He might represent much of what we bury underground, hoping it won't emerge again, fearing that it will.