Sacred Country

by Rose Tremain

  Mary looked down at her feet. She was wearing white ankle socks and brown sandals. One of the things she was hating about this day was how stupid her feet looked.

  She was about to say: If I was anything before, I wasn’t a girl, when she heard Irene call down the steps: ‘Edward, are you there?’

  Harker stood up. He smoothed his white hair. He told Mary she could stay and mooch around in the cellar, but he had to return to the party. He said: ‘It’s my party, in this new life o mine.’

  That night, Mary began to construct her previous life.

  She had been a magician, known as ‘The Great Camillo’. His hair had been black and shiny. He had been clever and good-looking. His speciality had been cutting and restoring rope. He’d had a brilliant future, but it had never arrived. A jealous rival called Timothy had strangled him with a line of knotted silks.

  He had been born again as Mary. Someone had decided that to be the grandchild of a person who had died in a glider would be suitable. No thought had been given to anything but that. Not even to lack of height and short-sightedness. It was like the Charge of the Light Brigade. There had been a blunder.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1958

  Estelle:

  They came and told me, You are a great deal better, Estelle. We think you can go home.

  I said goodbye.

  Goodbye, they said, and take care of yourself, dear.

  I said goodbye to Alice, the Chicken Woman.

  She said, Oh, no, oh no …

  Sonny collected me in the muddy van, with its old smell of sacking and seed. As we drove away, I turned round and saw Alice running behind the van, calling to me.

  ‘That is Alice,’ I told Sonny, ‘and she is happier as a hen than as a woman.’

  He said: ‘You’d best make an effort to be yourself again, Estelle. Unless you want to fetch back here.’

  Sonny’s face was purple-red. His damaged ear looked very dark and inflamed. I thought of him sitting alone at the kitchen table with bottles of stout lined up in front of him like skittles. England is full of men who drink alone.

  I didn’t want to go home. At Mountview, my room was high up and I could look down on the world. I could see the gardens and the tarmac paths, nice and neat. I had beautiful dreams.

  In the evenings, we did not stare at a candle or stare at the dark; we watched television.

  We sat in the day room with the lights turned out and our chairs in two rows and the light from the television flickered over us like snow. The programme we liked most was What’s My Line? People come on and perform a little mime of the job they do in life: glass-blower, lamplighter, taxidermist, deckchair attendant, bailiff, Keeper of the Queen’s Purse. Then a panel of famous people asks the person questions such as, Does your job require water? or, Are you mainly sitting down? until they’ve guessed the answer and everybody claps and the person says, You are quite correct, panel: my line is I am a brush salesman.

  Who invented this What’s My Line? How did it come into his mind?

  The staff at Mountview decided that we would all play our own What’s My Line? I said, You can’t have a panel, there is no one famous here. And they said, No, there is no need of a panel, everyone can ask the questions.

  A man called Fred Tulley, who used to be a jockey until he fell on his head at Chepstow, said, You can’t call this game What’s My Line?, because at Mountview no one has a line any more; you’ve got to call it What Was My Line? But they said, Oh no, Fred, Mountview is a refuge and you will all of you one day go back into the world and take up your lines again. Fred said, Excuse the language but bollocks, Doctor, I’ll never get on a horse no more, if I live to be ninety. We all, except Alice, laughed. Alice made her chicken noise and Fred Tulley started to cry. On the wall of his room, he had a photograph of himself in the winners’ enclosure at Newbury. The horse he had ridden was called Never Say Never.

  We began the game. A lot of people at Mountview did not understand the meaning of the word ‘mime’. When it was the turn of a man who had been a tram conductor he began to say, Hold tight, hold tight now. I thought, it is odd, after my beautiful childhood in Gresham Tears, that I am in a place with people who believe themselves to be birds and who do not know the meaning of the word ‘mime’.

  We were not good at What Was My Line? The only person we guessed was a tap dancer because you cannot mime tap dancing. On the other hand tap dancing is a kind of mime, a mime of an internal music no one hears but you.

  Another thing. None of the women, including me, had ever been anything. We’d never had a line. Being a mother and a wife is not a line. You cannot mime those thing. Only Alice. She had been a cleaner at the Stock Exchange. The floor of the Stock Exchange measures eighteen thousand five hundred square feet and all these thousands of feet have to be cleaned every night and Alice told me it was the vastness of this floor that had made her long not to be human any more.

  I explained to her the idea of mime. So she had a go at it. She got down on her knees and mimed a bucket and then a rag and people shouted out straight away, ‘Cleaner!’ ‘Skivvy!’ ‘Mrs Mopp!’ ‘Cinderella!’ Then she started picking up imaginary things from the floor and examining them and nobody knew what this could be, so they gave up. On the real What’s My Line? the panel do not give up. They are famous. If you are famous, you cannot say, I give up.

  I said later, What were you picking up, Alice? First she said, Straw, seed, pellets, worms, all her chicken things. Then she had one of her memories as a human being and she said, Oh you wouldn’t believe, Estelle, what was dropped there, what was brought in or fell from the roof. She said, I used to find silk handkerchiefs and casino chips. I found a cowrie shell and a sparking plug and a dead pigeon. I found a diamond bracelet and a crocodile card-case and quite a few rubber johnnies, used and un.

  I said, No, I would not believe, Alice.

  The tap dancer’s name was Joseph. One night, after the television was turned off and we sat in our two rows blinking as the lights were switched on, Joseph got up and began to dance. He’d put on his tap shoes which were black and shiny like Fred Astaire’s. Everybody went silent.

  Alice put a claw over her beak.

  He shut us all up, even the nurses and doctors. Snickety-snick, clickety-click. On he went. It was the best moment ever to happen at Mountview. When he stopped for breath, we clapped and stamped and screamed and knocked over all the hard utility chairs.

  Now I am home.

  Dear Alice, [I write.]

  How are you? I am at home now and my father has come to stay. He is teaching Mary how to do marbling on sugar paper. All the walls of her room are covered with the sheets of marbling. There are at least thirty. In the bottom right-hand corner of each one she has written the name, Martin W.

  Sonny is saving to buy a combine harvester. He showed me something in a farming magazine, a photograph of a man called Roland Dudley on his farm called Linkenholt Manor Farm, near Andover. He said, Roland Dudley has been using combines since before the war, Estelle, and look at what he says: ‘When the engineer rules the harvest there are no sheaves to be set up in the field, no pitching into wagons, no threshing in the autumn.’ And I said, Well Sonny, don’t drink the combine harvester money away …

  Timmy is nine now. He has started singing in the church choir. His voice is so high and sweet you could cry. He is very thin. His little shoulder blades stick out under the white lace thing he wears for service. He asked me the other night, Is Jesus everywhere or are there some places where He isn’t? I wanted to say, There are a thousand places where He isn’t. He’s not in the dark with me when I lie beside Sonny; He’s not at the river gathering watercress; He has never been seen on What’s My Line? But all I said was, I really do not know, Tim.

  Did I tell you, Alice, my mother was a glider pilot? She liked to see England from above, neat and flat, like a map of itself. And this is how everything seemed to be, in the end, at Mountview, once I got used to it: far away below me and quie
t as summer.

  I hope you are well and still enjoying Dixon of Dock Green.

  I didn’t like it when you ran behind the car, calling out Estelle.

  With best wishes from

  Estelle Ward

  Elm Farm

  Swaithey

  Suffolk

  England

  The World

  March 1958

  Mary:

  I was the only boy at Weston Grammar.

  There were ninety-seven girls and me.

  On the first day, we had to announce our names to the class. The teacher said: ‘If any of you has a nickname by which you like to be called, then tell us what it is.’ She said: ‘My name is Miss Gaul, but I believe I am known as Gallus,’ and everybody laughed except me because I had never learned a word of Latin. I felt stupid and sad. I imagined Miss McRae saying: If you live in a lighthouse, Mary, there are certain things that may never reach you.

  Almost every girl had a nickname. They blushed in turn as they said them. It was embarrassing. The girl next to me said: ‘My name is Belinda Mulholland, but I am quite often actually called Binky,’ and I saw her blush spread right up into the roots of her pale hair and down her scalp and into her neck and I thought, saying a thing you didn’t really mean to say could be like poliomyelitis entering your veins and you could be crippled by it for ever.

  When it came to my turn, I did not blush. I said: ‘My name is Mary Ward, but I’ve never been Mary, I have always been Martin, and I would like to be called Martin, please.’

  Miss Gaul wore her hair in a long plait, fastened around her head like a rope and when I said my name was Martin the rope sprang loose from its kirbygrip and unwound itself.

  She said: ‘Marty? Very well, dear. We shall call you Marty.’

  And because of the jumping plait, I didn’t feel able to contradict her.

  The school was a large, grey building, built in Victorian times. When you opened your desk lid, you could breathe history. The inkwells were made of porcelain. In the corridors there were rows and rows of photographs of Old Girls wearing long skirts and the sweet smiles of the dead. At dinner time, the gravy tasted old, as though some mildewed wine had been poured into it. The kitchen staff were Portuguese, descendants of Vasco da Gama.

  I liked the school uniform, especially the tie which was red and white and like a man’s tie. I looked nicer in my uniform than I’d ever looked in any other clothes and the only bit of myself that I couldn’t stand to see were my bare legs between my grey skirt and my grey socks. So I began to walk with my head held very high and my eyes behind my glasses looking out hungrily. And this new way of conducting myself (as Cord might have put it) was mistaken for an invitation to friendship. On the first morning, three girls came up to me at different times and offered to share their sweets with me. But I refused. I said: ‘No thanks. I don’t like sweets,’ and I walked away. I didn’t know how to be anybody’s friend.

  Then I saw Lindsey Stevens.

  She was the tallest person in our class. She had long, heavy hair, tied back in a ribbon. Her eyes were sleepy and kind. You could tell that there had never been a moment in her life when she had not been beautiful. I stared at her until I was worn out and I remembered Miss McRae once saying that beauty can be tiring.

  I closed my eyes. A teacher called Miss Whyte with a y was giving us our first physics lesson on earth. She was describing to us the principles of the thermos flask. She said: ‘The areas of contact between the inner and the outer wall are minimised to limit conduction of heat and the inner surfaces are silvered …’ and I thought, I will get Lindsey Stevens to be my friend, or I will die.

  I had begun to teach myself conjuring. My imaginary former life as The Great Camillo had given me the idea. Cord had found me a book called Black’s Book of Magic. It was old and heavy and illustrated with woodcuts of men in tail coats who all looked as if they couldn’t move but were waxworks of themselves. In the introduction, the writer put: ‘He who learns to be a magician makes himself master of the seemingly impossible. In his world, the laws of nature appear to be defied. He puts before one’s very eyes that which one never dreamt to behold.’ I thought, my life has been full of things that I never dreamt to behold: Marguerite flying out of the tree and landing on Timmy’s head; steam rising from Walter Loomis in the dentist’s waiting room; the stalactite ceiling at Mountview; Irene in blue silk getting married to Mr Harker; and, now, the exhausting beauty of Lindsey Stevens.

  I practised my first two tricks at home in front of a mirror and then on Cord and on my mother. The tricks had names. They were called the Initial Transfer and the Classic Palm Vanish. ‘The real art of magic,’ said Black’s Book, ‘lies in the way a trick is presented.’ It explained that you had to learn all the ways of distracting your audience, of making them look where you want them to look and not at the place where you are making your secret move. This technique is known as Misdirection.

  Cord was a good audience and my mother a bad one. Her look wandered about. You couldn’t rely on her eyes to be where you wanted them to be. It was as if, all the time, day after day, she was searching for something that wasn’t there.

  Cord noticed this. When I started my patter, when I said: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, you now see a two-shilling bit in the palm of my hand,’ and my mother did not look at it but up at the ceiling, Cord said: ‘Come on, Est, pay attention. Watch Martin’s hand.’ I stopped and waited for her to look at me and then I began again: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, please observe this two-shilling piece …’

  My mother said: ‘Why do you call her Martin?’

  Cord said: ‘Hush, Stelle. It’s only a nickname.’

  I started a third time and now she watched me very intently, as someone might have watched The Great Camillo, and for a small moment – for the seconds that it took to open the fingers of my left hand to reveal it empty of the coin assumed to be in it – I felt warmed by her look.

  I had practised the Classic Palm Vanish in front of the mirror so many times that I could do it quite well. I could amaze. I saw this amazement for the first time on the faces of Cord and my mother. The trick succeeded. They smiled and clapped. And this is what I thought about when I saw Lindsey Stevens; I thought, now I must use my power to make extraordinary things happen.

  She had a friend already. The friend’s name was Jennifer. They went around together, arm in arm. Jennifer had a head full of curls. They did not notice me.

  I went up to Lindsey’s desk at the end of morning lessons. I said: ‘Would you like to see a trick?’

  Lindsey had very beautiful skin. There was no freckle or mark of any kind on it. She said: ‘I’ve got to go, really.’

  I took a halfpenny out of my blazer pocket and I did the Palm Vanish very quickly before she had put her books away. I waited for her look of amazement and it came and I thought, this is the beginning, then.

  She said: ‘Can you do other tricks?’

  I said: ‘Yes, I can. Would you like to see another?’

  She didn’t reply. She turned to Jennifer who had come up to her. She said: ‘Marty does conjuring.’

  ‘Do you?’ said Jennifer.

  ‘My grandfather was a famous magician,’ I said.

  ‘What was his name?’ asked Lindsey.

  ‘He called himself The Great Camillo.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of him,’ said Jennifer.

  ‘No. He died quite young. He was strangled by a rival.’

  ‘Strangled?’

  ‘Yes. With a line of knotted silks, all colours.’

  ‘Weren’t you sad?’

  ‘I didn’t know him. He died when I was in the womb.’

  Other girls had clustered round us. I had become a small centre of attention.

  I said: ‘If someone could go down to the kitchens and get me a sugar lump and a glass of water, I’ll show you some real magic.’

  One of them went off It may have been Binky. I stood at Lindsey’s desk and didn’t move. She and the others
asked me questions about The Great Camillo and I invented things about him on the spot. I said that he always travelled in London by taxi and paid his fare with money plucked out of the air; I said when he dined with friends at the Savoy Hotel he could make their champagne glasses disappear and reappear any number of times.

  When the glass of water came, I put it down by Lindsey’s porcelain inkwell. I gave her a lump of sugar and one of the soft pencils I kept in my blazer pocket. I thought, I’ll do my patter and they will laugh, so I said: ‘Very well, Miss Stevens, now if you would kindly and clearly and for everyone to see write your initials on the sugar lump.’

  ‘My initials?’

  ‘Yes. Write them boldly and blackly on the sugar. L.S.’

  She wrote them and I asked her to show them around and then return the sugar lump to me. She did this and I dropped the sugar lump into the glass with the little flourish Black’s Book advises you to use when performing the movements you want your audience to see. Then I took her hand. I guided it towards the glass. I said: ‘Now, Miss Stevens, I want you to concentrate very hard on the sugar. In a moment it will start to dissolve and I want you to watch it until it has gone, keeping your hand absolutely still above the glass. And then I shall reveal to you something that will astound you.’

  She looked at me and smiled. The ribbon that tied her hair that day was black velvet. I looked down at my hand holding hers. My fingers were stubby like my father’s and hers were long and white.

  We were all silent, watching the sugar. I thought, when the spring comes I will invite her to the farm and we will climb trees together and play French Cricket on the grass with Timmy and Cord, and at night she will sleep in my bed and I will sleep by her on the floor, and I will tell her what I used to imagine about the universe.

  When the sugar had gone I said: ‘Very well. The moment is here! If, when I let go of your hand, Miss Stevens, you would turn it over, you will find, I believe, that the initials you wrote on the sugar have transferred themselves – through my powers of magic – to your palm.’