Sacred Country

by Rose Tremain

  The light changed. They were driving along the edge of Tunstall Forest. The sound of the engine changed. They were slowing down. Gilbert took away his hand to shift into third gear. He turned the car into a track in the forest and the tall trees leant over it, curtaining out the sun.

  Walter waited. He felt as if he wanted to scream something out, a word or a sound he’d never made before but which everyone – his mother, Sandra, the vet and the prawn – would hear and be so frightened by they would turn white and open their mouths in disbelief.

  Then he felt Gilbert’s mouth on his. The little moustache brushed his top lip. He thought, once again Mr Blakey has put me in a position where I can’t speak, but now this is probably best. This is the future, but it’s a future without words. Things will be done and never spoken about.

  What Is There?

  Sonny was having difficulty remembering.

  He thought, there are holes in the years gone. Spaces with nothing.

  Irene said to him: ‘Is drink turning your brain to soup, Sonny, or what?’

  He couldn’t stop drinking. Drink was almost all that was left to him of pleasure. He’d lost half an ear for England. England owed him something, a few glasses of something every night. Darn right, as John Wayne would say. Old John Wayne drinking his Black and White whisky, with his black and white horses to ride through the black and white scenery; Sonny was sure John Wayne didn’t have holes in his past, but then he always had some black and white woman to kiss and to ride with into the future. Darn right.

  He went out one morning to feed the hens. He was alone. Timmy wasn’t interested in feeding the hens any more. Sonny saw all the hens standing about in their field, standing absolutely still and not moving. They looked like decoys. Sonny thought, is this a real sight?

  He stood still and didn’t move. He set down the pail of grain. It was early and the sun was low and the shadows cast by the chicken coops were long. Sonny’s head ached. He had a longing to lie down where he was on the stubble.

  He sat instead. The ground was hard and prickly under him. He put one hand into the pail, to reassure himself that the grain was still there. The hens were in shock, that was how it seemed.

  Sonny wondered whether a fox had come in the night and terrorised them. But there was no smell of fox.

  Then he knew what had happened. A spell had been cast on the hens. He saw it clearly. He saw Mary, in the dark cottage where she lived with the Scottish teacher, practising witchcraft. She had progressed from conjuring to real, deadly magic. She was taking her revenge on him. It was Mary who was bringing ruin to the farm.

  Sonny got up. He felt stiff in his knee-joints. He lifted the pail and scattered some handfuls of corn, but the hens didn’t seem to notice and remained stock still, looking at their surroundings, like hens in a painting.

  He knew there were certain steps he should take, certain things that a man with a proper memory would do, but he couldn’t think what they were. He craved, then and there, a long swill of black beer, its sweet-bitterness, its quenching of a thirst which, with the dry winds as his enemy, seemed perpetual.

  His next thought was, I’d better go to that hole of a cottage and see her, that witch-child, and tell her I know her game; tell her if she doesn’t stop putting spells on my land, I’ll lock her up. I’d better frighten her. She’d better remember that I’m her father. She owes me her life and I still have power – power to take her life away.

  Darn right.

  He didn’t go that day. He did nothing that day, and he didn’t tell Estelle about the hens or about the witchcraft. Because for some time now, Estelle had been behaving differently towards him and he wanted this different behaviour to continue. He wasn’t imagining this: her behaviour towards him had changed.

  She asked him to make love to her. She lifted up her nightdress. She wouldn’t let him kiss her. He longed to kiss her mouth and she wouldn’t let him. But she allowed him to stroke her hair and then to lie on top of her and release himself inside her. She took no pleasure herself. She lay there with her eyes closed and her mouth turned away, but at least she let him do this, invited him to do this. ‘Tonight is a good time,’ she’d say, ‘so you can do it, Sonny. I want you to do it.’

  So his old desire for her crept back. As long as he didn’t look at her feet, which used to be beautiful and now looked ugly to him, gnarled by time, he could summon up his old passion for her. Not too much though, he told himself. Don’t let it come back like a flood because then when Estelle gets another crazy spell and starts wandering the fields and won’t let you come near her, you’ll drown.

  He didn’t know, from night to night, what she would do. He’d wait in the big iron bed, hollowed out by all the years. When she had her period she’d move herself to the far bit of her side of the bed and curl up like a child, like someone wounded. Then, when this was past, she would either lie on her belly, turned away from him, or she would take his hand from wherever it was and no matter how much he had drunk that night and push her nightdress up with it and say: ‘You can do it, Sonny. I want you to do it.’

  On the night after he had seen the hens standing still in the field, Estelle turned to Sonny. He thought she was going to take his hand and push her nightdress up, but she didn’t. She lay very still and said to him: ‘Sonny, you know I’ve painted Mary’s room.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You did it grey.’

  ‘Since then,’ she said, ‘I’ve painted it again.’

  He thought, she thinks she can paint Mary out. He was tempted to say, paint isn’t enough, Estelle. It needs something far more terrible than paint because she’s casting spells now. But he kept quiet.

  Estelle said: ‘Will you go and look at the room?’

  ‘All right,’ said Sonny. ‘Tomorrow, I will. What colour have you done it this time?’

  She said: ‘Go and look at it now.’

  He didn’t want to go there and then. He was hoping that what he would do there and then was make love to Estelle, even force her to look at him and let him kiss her mouth. In the long-ago days, before Mary was born, she used to say to him: ‘Kissing is beautiful. Don’t you agree, Sonny?’

  He got out of bed. He’d been drinking stout, quite a few bottles. He would rather not have had to walk.

  He went along the passage. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in Mary’s room. And he realised now that he no longer believed that there was a room there. What he believed was that there was just a door and that the door was a piece of decoration in the wall with nothing behind it.

  He opened the door and switched on the light. There was a room there. It felt chill. It smelled of new paint. Sonny stared at it. The colour of the walls was pale blue like a May sky. Then he saw that everything in it, everything that had remained behind when Mary went, the wooden chest of drawers, the bed, the night table and the chair, had also been painted blue.

  He blinked. He thought, Estelle’s playing tricks on my eyes. She’s laughing at me.

  Then he heard an unfamiliar sound. It was pleasing and delicate. It seemed to come from far away but Sonny knew that it wasn’t far away but in the room somewhere. He looked up and saw that there was something suspended from the ceiling. It was a wooden crossbar, like the wooden handle of a string puppet. Hanging from the bar were pieces of thread and attached to the thread were little oval shapes like honesty made of thin glass. The shapes moved in the current of air made by the opening of the door and when they touched each other they made this tinkling, far-away sound.

  Sonny couldn’t imagine where this thing had come from or why it had been made. He moved the door backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. He stood there for quite a long while, staring and listening.

  When he returned to his room, he said to Estelle: ‘What is that? That thing that makes a sound?’ But she didn’t answer. She lay on the far side of the bed. She was asleep or pretending to be, Sonny didn’t know which.

  Mary:

  Lindsey and Ranu
lf had an autumn wedding. They thought a golden light, like the light in a painting by Samuel Palmer, would bathe the wonderful scene. They forgot that it pours with rain in October and that the east wind comes and slices you in half.

  I went to the wedding by bus. I had to change buses three times. The rain was falling so hard it was putting out the stubble fires. The buses stank of cigarettes and soaking tweed. On the second bus I thought, I’m only enduring all this because I want to see how beautiful Lindsey looks in her dress; in other words, I only want to catch sight of her for a split second and then I will get back on some more buses and go home to my coffin room. It was the stupidest journey I had ever made.

  When I arrived, I looked like a pot-holer just up from a hole. My hair stuck to my head like a bathing cap. My shoes were full of water. There was a smell on my skin of wet earth. I was wearing a long green coat that was Miss McRae’s best coat and it came down to my feet. In the pocket was a packet of confetti. It was called ‘Big Day Genuine Confetti’, made in High Wycombe. I could not remember whether there had been an entry for confetti in my Dictionary of Inventions, so I had made one up to pass the time on the slow bus: ‘Confetti. Rinaldo Confetti. Italian. 1920.’ And this is what I decided: he was a ticket puncher in Naples Station. All the little bits of the punched tickets collected at his feet, multicoloured and weighing nothing. He found them oddly beautiful. He stooped and picked up a handful. He was feeling happy that day. He had just got engaged to Luminata, the girl of his dreams. He decided: from now until the wedding I am going to stand on a blanket at the ticket barrier. At the end of each of my shifts, I’m going to collect up the ticket bits, which will be clean and not spoiled by the dust and dirt from people’s boots. Then on the day of the marriage, when we walk out from the cool church into the hot sun, I’m going to shower my bride with them. She will say: ‘What is all this, Rinaldo mio?’ And I will say: ‘It is the future, Luminata. It is a thousand pieces of love.’

  On the third bus, I saw some lightning far away beyond the flat, dark fields and I remembered who had invented the lightning conductor: Benjamin Franklin. American. 1752. And then I remembered something else, something awful: in the whole of the Dictionary of Inventions, which spanned nine centuries, there was only one woman inventor. Only one! Even the wool-combing machine and the stocking frame had been invented by men. It made me feel terrible, sad as the wind. I thought, when I’ve had my split-second glimpse of Lindsey, I’m going to go home and suggest that we make a little shrine to the one woman who invented something in a thousand years. She was called Miss Glover. Her Christian name wasn’t even mentioned. She made her invention in the year 1841. It was the Tonic Sol-fa.

  In one of my nightmares or waking dreams, I had been a bridesmaid at Lindsey’s wedding, but of course she had never asked me. I didn’t resemble a bridesmaid. She had her sister, Miranda, and her friend, Jennifer, as her maids. They had to dress up in pink satin frocks and carry nosegays and wear floral bonnets on their heads. They looked completely ridiculous. They looked like toilet roll covers. I could imagine their pink-satin feet being stuffed down into cardboard tubes.

  I arrived at the church late. I was the last person to arrive before the bride. Darling Ranulf was already up by the altar, waiting. The toilet roll covers were huddled in the freezing porch, trying to warm their gooseflesh arms with their flowers. Jennifer glowered at me. She had always been jealous of my love for Lindsey. She said: ‘What are you wearing, Marty? It’s frightful.’ I said: ‘It’s what I always put on for pot-holing,’ and went into the church.

  People turned and stared at me. All the woman wore hats and lipstick. You could tell none of them had ever dreamed of rain falling on this day. Nor had they dreamed that someone like me would be invited. One of the ushers came up to me and said: ‘Bride or bridegroom?’ I said: ‘What?’ He said: ‘Which side do you belong to?’ He looked smart, despite the rain. I thought, the elements destroy women faster. They do. I said: ‘I’m on Lindsey’s side. Despite everything.’

  He smirked. He sat me down at the very back and walked away from me as fast as he could. I had a stab of envy for his long, smart legs and for what he carried between them. The bells of the church were pealing like mad, pealing for this joining of the two sides – woman and man. I thought, they’re ringing like they ring at the end of all the wars. They think all the soldiers have come home. They don’t know I’m still out there in the mud, in no-man’s-land.

  When the bells stopped, I knew Lindsey was about to arrive, that I was about to get my glimpse. She came in. She stood by the door for a moment, arm in arm with her father, Mr Stevens. She was trembling. Her long hair was sculpted up into a kind of diamond crown, as if she were a royal princess, and a veil fell from the crown, covering her face. I’d forgotten about veils. I’d thought I’d be able to see her face and etch it on my memory for ever and I couldn’t. I put my hand in my pocket and opened my packet of ‘Big Day Genuine Confetti’. I decided I would wait until I could throw some of this over her – my thousand pieces of love – and then I would walk away and catch my bus.

  I couldn’t hear much of the ceremony. There were only echoes, far away. I wanted to take off my shoes and empty out the water. I didn’t like the squelch sound I could hear every time I moved my feet. I thought, this is the kind of noise Lindsey and Ranulf make together in their ecstasy. This is what Ramona, the Spanish cook, had to hear through the flimsy wall.

  Steam began to come off the shoulders of my coat. And I had a ravenous hunger. I knew that at the reception there would be shrimp vol-au-vents and bits of cheddar cheese and pineapple on cocktail sticks and I thought, this is how life is: we are tempted from our chosen paths by the smallest things. We deserve to die.

  When I looked up again from my squelching shoes, Lindsey and Ranulf were coming down the aisle, smiling. The organ was playing a march. I could see her face now and every one of her brilliant teeth and the bright bloom on her skin. But I could also see Ranulf’s face – for the first time – his beaming face going along next to Lindsey’s, the lace of the man she had married seven times in her Geography book at the age of sixteen. And I was shocked. It wasn’t a handsome face. It was white like suet with narrow eyes and big jowls. It was almost fat. Lindsey had described him as a god. She’d said: ‘That’s how I think of him, Mary, as a Greek god.’ And I never been in a position to contradict her. I had never been able to say: ‘On the whole, Lindsey, the Greeks did not have double chins.’ So I thought now, did she means Romans? Roman Emperors? Because she was never good at History. She thought Michelangelo had lived in the days of the Bible. She thought Queen Boadicea was an invented person, like Mrs Danvers.

  Well, I had had my glimpse. The sight of Ranulf’s stodgy face had taken away my appetite for the shrimp vol-au-vents. I wanted to leave. I took out my packet of confetti and shook a big fistful into my hand. I thought, in the rain, this stuff will turn to pink and yellow slush, to a mess resembling vomit. What Rinaldo the ticket puncher had to do was keep it dry. And so he could, because above him was the glass dome of the station roof and the only thing to fall on him and his invention was light.

  On that day of Lindsey’s wedding my life was going to change. I didn’t know it yet.

  On the last of the returning buses, I began thinking, not about Ranulf, but about Edward Harker’s theories about my previous life. I felt a great longing to be sitting on the lathe head in Harker’s cellar and listening to him quote from the Talmud or from Aristotle or from his favourite writer, Sholem Asch. In the Talmud, it says that the niggardly man is punished by being reincarnated as a woman in his next life. Aristotle believes in the immortality of every soul. He describes the soul’s sojourn in the body as an illness. And Sholem Asch says: ‘If the law of the transmigration of souls is a true one, then these, between their exchange of bodies, must pass through a sea of forgetfulness.’ Harker had come to believe that all my suffering was caused by the Angel of Forgetfulness, who presides over the supposed sea. He said:
‘What has happened, Mary, is this. The Angel of Forgetfulness – every now and again – is himself forgetful. He forgets to remove from our memories every fragment of our previous lives. And when this happens – as it has happened to you – the person is haunted by a belief that he or she is in the wrong life. It makes complete sense, doesn’t it?’

  I said that it made sense. But I said that the sense it made to me did not feel complete somehow. And I could tell that Harker was a bit disappointed. He wanted to help me. He thought that an explanation might be enough. I said: ‘Edward, it’s explained to prisoners how they came to be locked up in a cell with an iron bed and a grey blanket and a bucket. This isn’t enough to make them enjoy prison.’

  But talking to Harker, sitting in a pool of lamplight and telling him about my loathing of my body and my passion for Lindsey Stevens (now Mrs Ranulf Morrit and lost to me for all time) had become the thing that was most consoling to me. Harker was a good listener. Nothing that I said surprised or shocked him. He would work away on some piece of willow and nod and sigh and occasionally sigh and nod both at once and then say to me: ‘Yes, well it all fits, Mary. It all fits.’ And on the bus I thought, Edward Harker has probably saved my sanity. Without him, I might have been sent to Mountview. I might have shared a room with a chicken.

  He told no one else. He swore this to me with his gnarled old hand on the sign that said Harker’s Bats. Estb. 1947. He said Irene knew nothing, not a syllable of any of it, and nor did Billy.

  ‘What about Pearl?’ I asked.

  ‘Nor Pearl,’ he said.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘what do they think we’re discussing down here?’

  ‘Reincarnation, of course. My belief in it, not yours.’