by Rose Tremain
‘What?’ said Mary.
‘My name is Margaret. Margaret McRae. And perhaps you never knew what it was and thought it must be a secret. But it isn’t. It’s no secret from anybody. I am Margaret McRae. So you see, sometimes we consider to be secret certain things which need not be …’
‘This is secret. My thing is a secret.’
‘Then, if it’s not too heavy to bear, you must keep it. It’s only if –’
‘It is too heavy to bear!’
‘Then, that’s why you’re here, Mary. Because it’s got too heavy. That’s all. It’s like your suitcase. Too heavy. There comes a moment when you have to lay it down.’
The silence crept back. Mary didn’t want it back, but back it came.
Then she had an idea. She thought, if I get up and go to the window and turn my back on her, I might be able to say it. I might. If I don’t look at her, but out at her front gate and her bird bath and at night coming on, then it might be easier.
She went to the window. She tried to imagine that Miss McRae was an actual fir, without sight or hearing, sighing gently behind her.
But this didn’t work. Nothing could, now. Miss McRae had told her her name. You couldn’t reveal to a person who had been kind to you and who told you her name out of sympathy for you that you were an abomination.
Mary held on to the window. She saw a bird fly through the dusk and settle on the rim of the bird bath. ‘I’m here because of my father,’ she said. ‘He hits me and knocks me down.’
‘I was afraid that might be it,’ said Miss McRae.
‘I don’t want to go back. Ever.’
‘No.’
‘Can I stay here?’
‘Naturally, you can, Mary.’
She continued to look out at Miss McRae’s front garden. Silence came again. Or not-quite-silence. Trees in a wood, long ago, swaying, sighing. Then somebody, far off, calling Mary’s name, her old name Mary.
She turned.
‘Someone has to help me, Miss McRae,’ she said again.
Miss McRae nodded. ‘Yes, dear,’ she said. ‘Well, as you know, I am a person of some limitations. I have never visited the shrines of Ancient Greece. I have never walked arm in arm down the Champs-Elysées. The music of Elvis Presley is entirely lost on me. But I shall try to be the one.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
1962
The Hired Man
After the death of Ernie Loomis, irrevocable change had come to Walter’s life.
He had been warned. His ancestor, Arthur, had begun to smell. He had sat by Walter’s bed, stinking the room out. He had said: ‘I’d better mention, in passing, Walter, that your dreams for your future were very inaccurate.’
Walter worked in the shop now. Grace stared at him critically through the glass of her booth. Pete struggled on by himself in the yard. Grace had said: ‘This is a family business and that’s how it’s going to stay. I’m not taking on a hired man.’
But this wasn’t all. The other thing was the loss of Sandra. She got married to a young vet. Every attempt that Walter had made to arrange more boating outings with her had failed. The card of condolence containing the factory-made words, ‘With deepest sympathy for Your Recent Loss’ was the last and only communication he received from her. She had never sat down under a tree and listened to his songs.
He was going bald at the crown. His head felt cold where once it had steamed. He lay in bed with one hand on the area of white scalp and remembered Sandra’s lively eyes and the way she had covered her knees with her skirt. He could understand why a girl of her kind might want to marry a man who nursed animals in preference to one who slaughtered them. The vet was handsome and showed no sign of baldness and in every respect Walter thought Sandra’s choice a sensible one. What he couldn’t seem to dispense with was his own devotion to her and the peculiar habit of imagining that one day she would somehow be his.
She still worked at Cunningham’s. Nobody said what had happened to her ambition to be a stenographer.
Walter would go into the shop and pretend to examine woollen scarves, but not really look at them. He would be braced for the sight of the marmalade hair and if it came he would send Sandra an anxious smile. She would look away, as if Walter were a stranger, as if she had no memory of the varnished boat and the bottle of Tizer.
One day, Amy Cunningham said to him: ‘I’d be very obliged, Walter, if you would make up your mind about which scarf you want and then leave this display in peace.’ The display she referred to was a line of plastic heads and necks on which hats were placed and scarves tied. They were male heads. They regarded Sandra working two counters away, fitting ladies’ gloves onto smooth severed hands.
He didn’t spend his days with Pete any more. Nor could he spend his evenings singing songs in the bus because Grace didn’t like to be alone for long, it made her feel ‘fidgety’. But sometimes late at night, when Grace was asleep, he would go and drink whisky with Pete and tell him about the stench that had begun to come from Arthur’s ghost, and about his love for Sandra that refused to lie down and die.
Pete was getting older. His nose was very purple and thick. He said he had dreams about a Memphis storm. He said to Walter: ‘I’ve seen your precious Sandra. She’s a dry pole. Forget her. When June comes, go and see Gladys and you’ll feel better.’
It was a bond between them, this referring to Madame Cleo by her real name, Gladys. It made Walter feel mannish and proud. Every June when the fair came to Leiston he spent a single afternoon (always a Wednesday, half-day closing at the shop) in Gladys’s caravan, tangled in pink rayon sheets, hearing himself pant and gasp like a runner in the murky candlelight, eating lipstick, while the fairgoers shrieked and screamed outside. Her price went up. The skin on her thighs felt loose, as though she had taken to wearing thigh gloves. Otherwise the experience didn’t change from one year to the next.
In June of 1962 word went round the village that Sandra was expecting a child. She left Cunningham’s. The vet’s house was called ‘Meadows’. Sandra stayed at home at ‘Meadows’ and baked thin-crusted pies and ironed her husband’s Viyella shirts. Walter walked by the house and saw her inside, her back turned, standing absolutely still. Her name was now Mrs David Cartwright.
He went off to the Leiston fair. Cleo’s caravan was always parked in the same place, at the end of a line of vans behind the big wheel. Sometimes there was a little queue at it. The sign Fortunes Told seemed to be one that people couldn’t easily pass.
The caravan wasn’t there. Walter walked up and down the line several times. Then he wandered the whole fairground in search of it. He noted how swiftly a year had passed.
He stopped at a little rifle range. The targets were tin swans. He told the stallholder that he was looking for Madame Cleo and the stallholder said: ‘Sorry mate. Cleo’s passed on.’
Walter paid a shilling to have six hits at the swans. His father had been a good shot, but Walter wasn’t. He said: ‘Do you mean passed on somewhere else?’
‘Two hits. No prize,’ said the stallholder. ‘I mean passed on into the sky.’
Walter drove the van home. He avoided going past ‘Meadows’. He wondered whether Cleo’s spangled spectacles had been put on her face in the coffin and what had become of the rayon sheets. He thought of her real name, Gladys, and how this somehow suited her better now, lying in a graveyard swept by the east wind, than it had when she was alive and selling spells at rising prices. Then he parked the van and put his head on the steering wheel. He thought, someone keeps drawing a line through bits of my life, cancelling me out.
In his imagined life with Sandra, he abandoned everything to live with her on a moving barge. He sang to her as she hung out her personal washing.
Now, he was in the shop for eight hours a day and seven hours on Saturdays. His mother stared at his clumsy hands as he worked. He had to wear a white overall and a straw hat. He had to make decorations out of fat for saddles of lamb. He hated the sight of himself. He was twenty-
six and he had no future except the present. Life had hired him and that was all.
He listened to the first Beatles songs. They were not songs about log-train engineers or honky-tonk women. Someone had drawn a line through hillbilly music as well as through everything else.
Pete had a favourite saying: ‘If life gives you a lemon, make lemonade.’ Walter thought hard about this, but found that he couldn’t remember what the ingredients of lemonade were. He assumed that sugar would be one. He looked all round his life for something sweet and all he could find was that feeling of sliding away from the world of hard things that drinking whisky gave him.
His late-night visits to Pete increased. Some nights he got so drunk that he passed out on the floor of the bus or fell over in the field as he tried to stagger back to the house. The next day, his hands would tremble as he cut and weighed the meat and his head hurt and he couldn’t look his mother in the eye.
She was ashamed of him. Snivelling, she said: ‘People are starting to notice, Walter. I see them watching you.’
He wanted to say, Well, my life is a lemon. It’s bitter. But all he said was: ‘I’m twenty-six and I’ll take a drink sometimes if I want to.’ Her life was bitter, too. She’d loved Ernie and relied on him and every morning for thirty years he had made a cup of tea and brought it up to her.
But Walter shared her shame. He saw how awful his drinking was, how repulsive he was becoming. He thought of the clean, sober vet and his wife smelling of talcum powder. He was putting himself further and further from them, changing himself, making their kind of future an impossibility for him. And he was searching now, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes with all the power of his muddled brain, for one thing, one single act of degradation, that would put them and everybody like them beyond him forever. He knew that soon enough he would find it and it would be committed and then he would be lost to Sandra forever and headed to another place entirely.
In Walter’s dreams, Arthur began to divest himself of his clothes. He appeared first without his apron, then minus his bow tie, then wearing no shoes. The buttons of his shirt were undone and wisps of grey chest hair poked through. He was also losing weight and the stench of him was becoming so terrible that the dreaming Walter had taken to wearing a balaclava made of oiled wool, such as he imagined mountaineers to wear on their arduous, pointless journeys.
Mary:
There were two bedrooms in Miss McRae’s cottage. The one I slept in felt as if it had never been inhabited by any living thing ever before. The floor of it was stone and the bed was as narrow as a tomb. The only decoration was a collection of cowrie shells in a green saucer. It was downstairs and looked out at a hedge and the hedge took away all the light.
For a long time, I had nightmares in that room. They were dreams of killing. Miss McRae told me I screamed, ‘screamed like a banshee, Mary’. The word ‘banshee’ was new to me. After the screaming, I would sit up in the tomb and let Miss McRae put a crocheted shawl round my shoulders. Sometimes she made Horlicks in coronation mugs and we’d sip this and discuss Miss McRae’s life-long desire to visit the great chestnut forests of Corsica, and the murders I’d committed in my sleep would vanish.
I discovered that Miss McRae was a person who hardly slept at all. She would take the pins out of her bun and let her grey hair down in preparation for her night and then seem to forget that night had come. She listened to the World Service. She read Little Dorrit and a book about butterflies. In the morning, I would find her in her chair, dozing a little, with her arms folded. When I asked her whether she was tired, she would reply: ‘No, no. Certainly not.’
After that night of my arrival with my hockey stick, she told me I could stay as long as I needed to. The phrase she used was: ‘Until better times come, Mary,’ and I told her better times would never arrive while my father was alive. And this was one of the things I was waiting for in the depths of my mind: for my father to die and for the farm to fall into ruin with Martin Ward the only person capable of saving it.
At school, we had a debate entitled ‘What Makes a Good Leader’. Everyone in our class – including Lindsey, who was secretly engaged to Ranulf Morrit and had entirely given up studying in order to dream about him full time – was expected to contribute to it and so I asked Miss McRae what her views on the subject were.
Miss McRae cooked plain and tidy meals, mushroom pie cut into squares, toad-in-the-hole with the sausages in a line, and while we ate these we talked about Leaders. Miss McRae put a lot of salt on her plate. She said: ‘In this kind of discussion, Mary, there is the literal response and the acceptable response and it is important for you to understand the difference.’
I went to the debate armed with all her wisdom. I told no one that my thoughts weren’t mine. When I asked to put forward my choice of person in the category of Good Leader I said: ‘Hider’, and the whole room fell silent and Miss Gaul began pushing kirbygrips violently into her plait to stop it jumping away from her head. She said: ‘As chairman of this debate, I have to remind you that certain conclusions have already been reached and agreed: namely, a Good Leader is a man who acts for the public good, a Good Leader is one who shows farsightedness and mercy, a Good Leader has respect for his enemies.’
Lindsey was sitting next to me. She wore pink nail varnish to school. She smelted of flowers and milk. Her hair was tied in a tartan ribbon. I didn’t let her nearness to me distract me or make me faint-hearted. I stood up. I said: ‘There is another definition of “Good Leader” and this is the one we haven’t talked about and this is why I mentioned Hitler. And this definition is a literal definition.’
‘That’s enough, Marty. Thank you. You may sit down.’
‘I’m just pointing out, Miss Gaul, that – ’
‘Sit down, dear. You have taken this discussion off at a tangent and it is very important to learn, in debate, that tangential excursions serve only to waste time and confuse your listeners. Now. Lindsey, we have not heard very much from you. Perhaps you would like to give us your choice of Good Leader and then we can proceed to a summing up.’
I sat down. My feet were burning where I had stood on them. Lindsey did not look at me, nor did anyone in the room. Lindsey said: ‘Well, I would choose Sir Winston Churchill,’ and Miss Gaul nodded and put her hands together in a kind of prayer position and a little applause clattered out very softly from around the class.
That night, I thought about the great silence that had fallen when the word ‘Hitler’ had come out of my mouth. Miss McRae hadn’t reminded me that literal answers – if they are the ones not expected – can evoke fear and loathing. She expected me to remember that for myself.
I remembered it now and it helped me to see something else. My own literal answer to the debate entitled ‘Who Am I?’ was: ‘Martin Ward. A boy.’ The set answer, the one that everybody knew and expected, was: ‘Mary Ward. A girl.’ I had never ever in sixteen years dared to give the literal answer because I was afraid to be loathed. I’d tried to tell Miss McRae and then at the last moment I’d run away from the words. To be hated by my father was enough for me. I was too cowardly to risk being hated by the whole world and to hear only silence falling all round me and then a voice of authority telling me to sit down.
Some subjects are not supposed to be debated, and this was one. I thought of Miss Gaul’s jumping plait. I thought of Lindsey looking up from the ornate initials, R.M., she was drawing on her debating notes and giving me a stare of horror. And then I thought, perhaps the one person I could tell would be a stranger, someone who didn’t resemble a tree, who didn’t smell of flowers, who did not make cricket bats, who did not sit in the darkness watching Fanny Cradock. Someone impartial. Someone whose loathing and fear were of no consequence to me.
The person I chose as my tellee was the vicar of Swaithey, the Rev. Geddis. He was someone I had refused to get to know and so he qualified for the category of stranger. Also, he was a man who reminded me of a woman. He had a soft voice and he held his white hands ve
ry still.
I chose a Friday evening. I hoped there’d be no choir practice. Miss McRae and I had eaten a supper of mince and boiled carrots, followed by baked apples. It was early May. Miss McRae had finished Little Dorrit and started on Bleak House. That morning, she’d seen a swallow swoop over the bird bath. She said: ‘A. E. Housman was fond of swallows. They gave him hope.’
I went into the church and sat down in a pew. I remembered Ernie Loomis’s funeral and all his sisters weeping and Walter looking lost, like a panda in a zoo. I stared at the chunks of different-coloured light coming through the window known as the Sower Window because it depicted the parable of the sower, with his words falling on stone.
I didn’t want to talk to Geddis at the rectory, sitting in a proper room with a three-piece suite and anti-macassars on the chairs. I wanted to be in a place which felt as though extraordinary things could happen in it, like Wembley Arena or the Cheddar Gorge, a place where someone could go and say things he’d never said before and listen to the echo of them.
Swaithey Church, with its one stained-glass window and all its rafters being eaten away by Death Watch beetle, wasn’t an ideal location, but odd things had happened there, like a sighting of the first Sir John Elliot, ancestor of the present Sir John, kneeling at the altar with his arms around a willow sapling. And in church – this is what I thought – Geddis wouldn’t be able to turn me away. I was part of his flock.
I waited a long time. The sun went down and the Sower started to fade. I’d imagined that the Rev. Geddis did the rounds of his church every evening to make sure that no one was swiping the hymn books or playing ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ on a portable gramophone by the bell ropes. But he didn’t come.
I thought, I’ll wait until I can’t see any light at all behind the Sower and then I’ll go. I had waited sixteen years to tell somebody my secret. I could wait another day or even until Monday, a slack day for vicars.
Then the church door opened. I picked up a hymn book and held on to it like a float made of cork. I didn’t turn round. I thought, have I confused the words ‘literal’ and ‘imaginary’? Am I deluded? Is there a tempest in my mind or a tumour in my brain?