Sacred Country

by Rose Tremain

  While the thistledowns clustered behind a thin curtain waiting to come on, Mary left the group and returned to the cloakroom where her coat hung on a peg. She took off her pink ballet shoes and put on her wellingtons. She imagined each of them as a cardboard cylinder and her legs as the salmon-coloured plastic legs of Judy Weaver’s doll. She puffed up her net skirt round the boots. Now, she thought, I am a living toilet roll cover.

  She returned to the group, shivering by the curtain. You cannot walk lightly in a wellington. The thistledowns turned, as if in one, synchronised movement, to stare at Mary. They drew in an anxious breath. They held on to each other. Their shivering intensified. The strongest of them put their hands to their mouths, stifling laughter.

  The thistledown music came. Out they streamed, puff, puff, up and away, things of no substance, chaff and prayers. Mary followed, striding and leaping. The squeak of the wellingtons was louder than anything the class had heard. The buttercups gaped. The pimpernels huddled down in shame. From the two rows of parents came a muttering and whispering like voices in a dream. Then Mary felt Miss Vista’s hand on her arm. She stopped dancing. She smiled as she was led away. She couldn’t see her parents. The parents were a blur. What she saw were two Miss Vistas, both of them fragile and neither of them a dancer.

  Sonny said, after this incident: ‘We must watch her all the time, Estelle. Day and night. Now, there’s no knowing what she can do.’

  There was no knowing. Mary did not know.

  When they got home after the thistledown show, Sonny hit Mary on the ear eight times with the flat of his hand.

  She covered her ear with a grey mitten. She thought it would turn to coral. Without speaking, she said to her father: When I’m a man, I will kill you.

  Estelle did not protect her or comfort her. Estelle went out and stared at her bantams in their compound, trying to hear contentment somewhere. Timmy followed her and put his hand in hers.

  On Christmas afternoon, Sonny and Estelle went to the sagging bed. They smelled of the cheap port they’d drunk with the pudding. Sonny had his arm round his wife’s neck and his hand on her breast, fondling it like money. He told Mary and Timmy to go out and play and not to come in until dark.

  Mary threw the green ball at Timmy. She threw it several times but not once could he catch it. She thought, this is why Estelle is in despair, because Timmy can’t catch a ball, because he walks about with his fingers over his eyes, because he has no stars on his class star-chart at school. ‘You’re barely human,’ she said as he dropped the ball yet again, ‘you’re killing our mother.’

  He began to cry and run towards the house but Mary remembered the smell of port on her parents’ breath and the skewed look in their eyes so she ran after him and picked him up. He struggled in her arms and she hated the feel of his limbs. She dumped him in the tyre swing and pushed him till the sun went down behind the hedge and a green twilight hung over them. And all the time she was pushing she counted the things that Timmy could not do for himself and which were driving Estelle into her own unreachable world. He couldn’t tie his bootlaces; he couldn’t read a simple word like ‘thing’; he couldn’t get through three consecutive nights without wetting his bed; he couldn’t learn his tables; he couldn’t remember the words of ‘In the Bleak Mid-Winter’; he couldn’t eat a meal without spilling it; he couldn’t feed the bantams without throwing the grain up into the air. He was beyond hope. It would be better if, one morning in his saturated bed, he did not wake up. He would be buried in a little grave, nice and neat with a stone angel kneeling above him making sure he stayed where he was. Estelle would mourn. She would take flowers. She would go and stare at the angel. Then she would recover. She would no longer say thoughts out loud or sit in a trance, stroking her sewing machine. She would abandon her walks to the river. She would come back from wherever it was she’d been.

  Mary decided to kill him that night, Christmas night, 1955.

  She kept herself awake by hitting her ear, still bruised from Sonny’s slapping.

  Her head ached. She wanted everything to be over. She thought, I know now why Grandma Livia went up in her glider; she was tired of every single thing except the sky.

  When she heard Sonny’s snoring start, she went barefoot down the stairs and into the cold kitchen. She opened the door of the larder and took down the insect spray kept there for the summer flies. It was called Flit. She liked the word. She thought, this is how you kill: you have a weapon and a word you say. You use both. Flit. ‘Flit.’

  She came back up the stairs. She didn’t feel afraid, only tired, so that her legs were heavy.

  She knelt by the door to Timmy’s little room and opened it only wide enough to put her arm in and point the Flit gun at the bed. As a precaution against her own death she’d brought a handkerchief and she held this over her nose and mouth.

  She began to pump. The nozzle of the gun bubbled and fizzed. There was no sound from inside the room. A Flit death was a peaceful one. You breathed the sweet-smelling poison and you slept. And in the morning you didn’t wake.

  Sonny had woken at midnight with a drink headache and a thirst. On his way to the bathroom, he’d found Mary crouching by Timmy’s door.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he said.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Mary.

  But Sonny could smell the Flit. He pushed Mary aside and went into Timmy’s room and saw his son sleeping peacefully under a cloud of poison.

  He shouted for Estelle and she came running, in her stained nightdress, and gathered Timmy up and put him by the window of her room and made him breathe the freezing air of Christmas night. She didn’t look at Mary, nor at Sonny. She closed her door.

  Sonny went to work with his hands. He took down Mary’s pyjamas and hit her buttocks and the backs of her thighs.

  When she didn’t cry out or make any sound, he punched her ear, the same ear he had slapped after Miss Vista’s show. The force of this blow knocked Mary to the floor. Sonny pulled her up by the arms and hit her head again and then again and again until he had no more strength to haul her to her feet.

  He left her lying and walked away. He stood in the cold bathroom, drinking a quart of water.

  Mary remembered no morning or returning day. She lay in a pit. She knew she was deep down in the earth, where no one could find her.

  Sounds came and then passed, came and passed. One of the sounds that came was the voice of Miss Vista. ‘Light, children!’ it whispered. ‘Light, light!’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1957

  Mary:

  My grandfather – Livia’s husband – was called Thomas Cord. We knew him as Grandpa Cord. He was sallow and small and fond of history. He was addicted to Wincarnis. When he talked, he closed his eyes, as if seeing and speaking at the same time were too difficult for him. He loved four things in the world. One of these was his remembered Livia. Another was the face and voice of an actress called Mary Martin.

  He wrote sayings out in green ink on little cards and pinned them up over door lintels. Some of these were in Latin. His favourite one was Ama et fac quod vis. He would stop at this one sometimes and say: ‘True, true. All too true.’ Some of the sayings were faded. Grandpa Cord said: ‘Green ink perishes, Mary. As can wisdom. When a saying is faded, it might be time to take it down. Or it might not.’

  He lived eleven miles from our farm, in a village called Gresham Tears. His house was flint and brick and square and dark. This was the home where my mother had lived as a child. There were twin holly trees at the gate, their heads shaped into cones by Grandpa Cord’s shears. His address was Holly House, Gresham Tears, Suffolk and he thought this address very marvellous and cheering. It was the third thing that he loved in his life.

  I had thought that I would never really know Grandpa Cord. I had thought I would always see him on short visits and he would pour me ginger beer and tell me about King Ethelred the Redeless, and then he would die. But I was wrong about that. In the summer of 1957 I was sent to live with
him. I left the farm and my address became Holly House, Gresham Tears, Suffolk. I took all my clothes and my school books and my Dictionary of Inventions and my green tennis ball. My father said: ‘We’re sending you for the coaching. Grandpa Cord will get you through the Eleven-plus.’

  On my first night, Grandpa Cord showed me a theatre programme for a show called South Pacific. It had a picture of Mary Martin in it and Grandpa Cord said: ‘What do you think of that?’ I thought people looked dead in photographs, like they were ancestors of themselves, long departed, but I said the name Mary Martin was a good name and that I would call myself that from now on. And this amused Grandpa Cord. He slapped his old corduroy knee. He said: ‘No one told me you were a good sport, but I can see that you are!’

  So I began to live there and to be called Mary Martin. After a week I said: ‘Much as I like Mary Martin as a name, it is rather long, Grandpa Cord. So I think you can just call me Martin.’

  ‘Plain old Martin?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Very well. A bit peculiar, but who cares? And you call me Cord, Martin. “Grandpa” makes me feel I should have lumbago. Is that a deal?’

  I said it was a deal. We shook hands. The skin on Cord’s hands had the feel of medal ribbon, ribbed and silky. He closed his eyes and said: ‘Scouts honour, as they say.’

  So then I thought of us as a firm, Martin and Cord, Limited. We were a firm of dreamers. Cord specialised in the past, the long-ago past of Ethelred the Redeless and the middle past of the Battle of Marston Moor and the near past of Livia wearing a shawl from Madagascar and playing Liszt. My department was the future, the future spinning towards me, of Weston Grammar School and the loss of Miss McRae, and the future that sat still, waiting for time to get to it, the future of Martin Ward. Cord supplied me with green ink – the only kind he bought – and in it I wrote out my new name hundreds of times in different writing.

  No one told me the real reason for my leaving the farm, but I knew it.

  Irene, who now lived with Pearl in Mr Harker’s house, had said to me twice: ‘The day may come, Mary, when your mother will have to go away for a bit. Just Until.’ So I understood. I was being sent to Cord’s because Just Until was coming. Because I couldn’t stay alone at the farm with my father and Timmy.

  I didn’t want to think about where Estelle was going. On the other side of Leiston there was a place called Mountview Asylum which we had sometimes passed on the way to the sea in Sonny’s van. I whispered once to Timmy that this was a loony bin where boys got sent if they couldn’t learn multiplication. Instead of cringing with fear as I’d hoped, he looked at the place, which was a converted stately home with red walls and flying turrets, and said: ‘Which bit of it is the actual bin?’ And we all laughed. Even Estelle. This is the only time that I can remember us all laughing together – like a proper family in an Austin with a picnic hamper – when Timmy asked the question about the Actual Bin.

  But now I had dreams about Estelle in a metal bin, being hurled about and hurt as the bin spun round. In the dreams, I was a knight. I had armour. I jousted with the bin and stopped it turning. I put my mother on my grey charger and rode away. The dream never said where I rode to or where or if I set my mother down. I just rode out of the dream and woke up in Cord’s house in my room that was wallpapered with scenes of boating. I said to the boaters: ‘I refuse to think about what’s happening.’ And then I’d put on my glasses and open one of the History books Cord had given me and read a thing like ‘Thomas Wolsey was the son of a butcher and cattle dealer of Ipswich’ or ‘Early death was common in medieval times’ and wait for my day to begin.

  *

  Cord started his day with Yoga. His mat was a bath mat with all its thickness worn away by time and the mangle and Livia’s wet feet long ago. Yoga was the fourth thing he loved in his life. He’d learnt it in Ceylon, in the house of a man called Varindra. He said Varindra had taught him how to put the world away and how to move inwards instead of out all the time and that this ‘moving inwards’ had kept him breathing and alive when the news came of the glider crash. I didn’t understand what ‘moving inwards’ meant and Cord said: ‘Well, no, I don’t expect you to, Martin, not at your age, but later when you’re in your proper life, you will.’

  I said: ‘Do you mean, when I’m Martin Ward?’

  ‘You are Martin Ward,’ said Cord.

  I thought, I shall tell him one day soon. He will be saying something like ‘John Davis made three further attempts to find the North-West Passage, but he failed to notice the Hudson Strait and was driven back by ice,’ and I will say: ‘I have made three attempts to tell somebody that I am not a real girl,’ or he will say: ‘Life on board a carrack was full of hardship,’ and I will say: ‘Life as Mary is full of confusion.’ And then, once this is said, we won’t just be a firm of dreamers but a firm of surveyors and planners.

  I trusted Cord. I began to like being with him, old as he was. I thought he would agree with me when I said I was a boy inside.

  I thought a lot that was wrong. I thought the whole summer would pass at Holly House without any word about Estelle coming to disturb us. I thought we would just go on doing our history and listening to The Brains Trust and drinking Wincarnis and ginger beer. I thought we were being allowed to step out of the world, being given the knack of it, like old Varindra in Ceylon in 1924. But then one morning, after Cord had made us bacon and fried bread and we were listening to Brenda Lee he said: ‘Listen to me, Martin, we’re going to see your mother today and I suppose we’re also going to have to be brave about what we find.’

  ‘Is she at Mountview?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. That’s it. But not for long, I don’t expect.’

  ‘Only Just Until.’

  ‘Yes. Just Until. And it won’t be long coming.’

  I thought of my dream of the bin and the jousting. ‘I’m sorry!’ sang Brenda, ‘so sorry!’

  It was a bright August morning in Gresham Tears. The flints of the houses opposite looked polished. Cord’s Hillman Minx sat waiting in the sun to take us to Mountview. I thought, names are often wrong: Minx for a little slow car; Mountview for a place not near any mountain. I thought, people just decide things without giving them any attention and Miss McRae would not approve.

  Then I went up to my bedroom to get ready. I stood and looked at the boaters and decided that I would not be capable of going into a room full of mad people and finding my mother there. I tore a page out of my History exercise book opposite a very bad drawing of Vasco da Gama and wrote her a letter:

  Dear Mother,

  I am writing this very quickly, as we have to leave in five minutes to come and see you.

  I hope you are getting better. I hope everyone is kind to you. I hope you can have your sewing machine.

  I am having a nice time with Grandpa Cord. I am learning about explorers, including Hakluyt. He went to Russia. He said, ‘their streets and ways are not paved with stone as ours are’. In the evenings, I have Ginger Beer.

  I hope you are getting better. I want you to get better now, this moment, and not be there when we arrive.

  love from Mary

  I did not put Martin. Miss McRae once said to me: ‘Living in a lighthouse taught me that not all wisdom comes from others, Mary. Some comes from oneself, if one can but hear it.’ But I had on my Martin clothes, my aertex shirt and my grey shorts and my plimsolls, Blanco’d white. I stuffed my letter into the pocket of my shorts and we got into the Minx and drove away. We sang all the way. We sang ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘Bye bye, love’. Someone had told us a rumour that Brenda Lee was a child of my age or younger than me, but we didn’t believe it.

  When we turned into the drive of Mountview, Cord said: ‘Rum show, Martin, eh?’

  I said: ‘Was this once a house?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Cord, ‘Jacobean, 1618. Peacocks on the lawn, cold woodcock for breakfast, that kind of nonsense. Became a hospital in the ’14–’18 war. A lot of shrieking then, I dare
say, soldiers and peacocks all screaming.’

  Now, you could tell it was a bin and not a house because of a huge chimney, like a factory chimney, they’d built behind it and some little huts like prefabs they’d put on the lawn and signs that said Car Park and Laundry and No Visitors Beyond this Point.

  Cord was trembling. He kept saying: ‘Rum show, damn bad show.’ I could tell he didn’t want to be there but back in Gresham Tears pouring himself another glass of Wincarnis. His sallow face looked a kind of custard colour and his eyes bruised and heavy, like prunes in the custard. He held my hand. I thought, this is more than we can stand.

  We went in and stood on a polished floor, waiting. There was a smell of Dettol and of something sweet and living but terrible, like brains. People passed us but didn’t seem to see us or else saw us and looked away. We didn’t know where to go or how to be. I thought we should go back to the Minx and sit in it and think and then maybe drive away and pretend we’d never tried to come there at all. But then Cord went up to one of the people, a person in a white overall, and spoke in a firm voice, as if he were Hakluyt asking the way to Moscow. So we followed the man through an enormous room with a ceiling moulded into square roses and upside-down pinnacles that looked like stalactites about to form. Men and women sat about under the stalactites all silent and grave, waiting for the first icy drips to fall on them, and it was their brains that were smelling and their plastic chairs that were swabbed with Dettol.

  The man in the white coat walked very fast, so Cord and I had to run and Cord detested running more than almost anything in life.

  We dashed down a long corridor made of something like stone and then up some stairs covered in coconut matting. Out of the windows on the stairs you could see the chimney, with black smoke coming out of it. And then we were on a landing, a shadowy place with lots of doors with numbers on them and I knew my mother was going to be there, behind one of these doors, so I got out my note, ready to give it to Cord to give to her. But Cord still held my hand clenched in his. I tried to pull it free but it was difficult to get my hand out, and then Cord farted twice, out of fear and exhaustion, and I thought, I can’t abandon him while he’s farting, I must be Martin and strong.