Sacred Country

by Rose Tremain

  Then he told me he knew, as much as one could ever know for certain, what Billy had been before: he had been a wrestler. He had died of his own weight. In seconds. He had fallen down and his contact with the earth had killed him. He said: ‘I didn’t really want Billy. But Billy wanted me and Irene. He was hungry to be reborn.’

  When I got back to Swaithey, it was dark. I’d lost track of time. I thought, those Morrits could be in bed already, squelching together. The rain had stopped, but you could still feel the wind and winter right behind it, impatient to arrive.

  My hunger had come back. I hoped Miss McRae had made some parsnip soup. And I hoped she had lit a fire, so that I could get dry and warm after my stupid day.

  But I went into the cottage and there was a terrible smell and on her knees in the little entrance hall was Miss McRae scrubbing at the lino with a bucket of Dettol. There was no smell of a fire or of soup simmering, only the Dettol smell and this other stench that was unendurable.

  ‘Ah, Mary,’ said Miss McRae.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

  ‘You look a wee bit bedraggled, dear. What about a good hot bath?’

  ‘What’s this smell?’

  ‘You go along and have your bath, while I just finish off here. Then I’ll tell you what happened.’

  I did what she instructed. This was part of my life with Miss McRae: obeying her.

  But I lay in the bath too long. I let it get cold. My skin was bright pink, but I was cold again and while I tried to warm myself with the towel, I started to feel afraid. I thought, something horrible has happened. I can feel it now.

  We sat in the dark parlour with the one-bar electric fire on. I wore an old dressing-gown of Cord’s with eiderdown pockets. Miss McRae held a lace hankie to her nose. The smell of Dettol was so powerful, it felt more comfortable not to breathe at all.

  Miss McRae spoke in a grave, frightened voice. She told me my father had come to the cottage. He was blind drunk. He wore no coat. He had a three-day beard. He had forced his way in, to try to find me. He began bawling out my name. He said he’d come to get me because I was a witch. I was putting spells on his land. I was poisoning his hens. He’d come to deal with me, once and for all.

  He pushed Miss McRae against the wall and shook her. He accused her of hiding an evil person, a black magician. She was afraid, but she remembered her upbringing in the lighthouse and all the storms she’d endured and she stayed calm. She said: ‘Mr Ward, you are utterly mistaken. Mary is an ordinary girl.’

  Ordinary!’ he screamed. Ordinary is what she is not! She’s a perverted witch and I’ve come to put an end to it all!’

  I asked whether he had a weapon, a knife or a hammer or something. Miss McRae said: ‘No, Mary. Just his hands.’ She made two fists at the ends of her thin arms and held them up like a shadow-boxer. One of them still clutched the hankie. She was almost seventy years old. I thought, I will never forget her. Never.

  She told me what occurred next: Sonny vomited all over the hall. That was the stench: the mess in my father’s stomach. Then he left. He just turned and walked away into the night. If I had returned ten minutes earlier, he would have been there. The slowness of the country buses had saved me from him. This once. Or, when you thought about it, it was Lindsey who had saved me by getting married to the podge on this particular day. I imagined her laughing and saying: ‘Well, just this once I did. Lucky for you, Mary.’

  I was trembling very violently. My teeth were clicking. I wanted to put my arms round the electric fire.

  Miss McRae got up. She said she would go and make us some Horlicks. I told her I felt a bit sick, it was probably the Dettol.

  Then when Miss McRae had gone to make the hot drink, I felt it arrive in my mind: the feeling of an ending. I’d planned to stay one more year in Swaithey, to retake the A-levels I had failed because of my insane love for Lindsey and then to try for a university far away from Suffolk and far away from everyone I’d ever known. And now I saw that I had to leave straight away. Not that actual night, wearing Cord’s old camelhair dressing gown, but as soon as I could, as soon as something could be found for me – a place to live and a job with the post office or in a shop or in a factory making gliders, it didn’t matter what. I had to transmigrate. Not my soul, which I knew would probably stay behind, hiding in the Suffolk lanes or in a ditch like my old tennis ball, but my body. I had to move it, or it would die right here. Not even Miss McRae would be able to save it.

  Part Three

  CHAPTER TEN

  1966

  ‘Far from Crep’

  The last feature in the old landscape that Mary saw was Cord’s face at the train window. He was weeping from one eye, his palsied one. His Beatles moustache looked yellow, but his mouth was trying to smile. Then the train took her away towards London and Mary closed her eyes.

  She got a job in a coffee bar, washing cups. The sink she had to use was old and deep, like Estelle’s sink at the farm. The cups were made of glass. It was the era of ice-pale lipstick. Hundreds of cups had this little half-moon frill of candy pink near the rim. Mary had dreams of beautiful pale-lipped girls in short skirts and white boots.

  Cord had said: ‘Earl’s Court used to be the place to find a room, Martin. Try there, old chap.’

  The room she found was at the back of a six-storey mansion block. It was described as a bed-sitter. It looked out onto a tiled well of windows and fire-escapes on which the sun never fell. Remnants and echoes of other lives came up into the airwell, things that were not meant to be heard. And Mary liked this. She liked it when people screamed and cried and swore. It made her feel less lonely – as though she’d found herself on a great shipful of people, a ship of fools, and they were all together, safe and alive, out on a big ocean.

  The walls of her bed-sitter were green. It wasn’t Mary’s favourite colour. She wished she had some brass rubbings to cover them with or some of her old sheets of marbling. She wondered whether she would be thrown out of the room if she painted it white and grey.

  The bed in it was quite large, big enough for two people. It had polished mahogany ends and a mattress with a sag in the middle. In the first month she lay on one side of it. Then she moved over and occupied the sag. She thought, from now on, I will take possession of things and make them mine.

  She bought two tins of paint, one grey and one white. She knocked on the door of her nearest neighbour across the landing and asked whether he owned a ladder. He said: ‘No, girl, I don’t.’ He was South African, but his face was whiter than the sky. He enquired: ‘What do you need a bleddy ladder for?’ Mary told him about the painting she planned to do. He told her his name was Rob. He was young and thin with sandy hair. Mary said: ‘What are you doing in London?’ Rob said: ‘I live here.’ The word ‘live’ sounded like ‘luf’. He said: ‘Right now I’m running a poetry mag.’

  Mary said: ‘Oh that’s good.’ She thought the only person in Swaithey ever to have heard the words ‘poetry mag’ would be Miss McRae.

  Rob said: ‘Sorry about the no ladder.’

  Mary said: ‘That’s all right. When I’ve painted my room I’ll invite you for coffee. We get free packets of coffee sometimes where I work.’

  She did the room standing on a pile of books on a chair. She painted two walls white and two walls grey. When she’d finished, all four walls looked the same. It was the sombre quality of the light.

  Mary bought a pair of jeans. She put them on. She hurled all the skirts she owned out of her window into the sooty airwell. She could see them lying there, yards below: suicided skirts.

  She bought the jeans from a shop in the King’s Road. It was filled with hot light and music. In the communal changing room, long-legged girls pouted at their reflections. No make or style of jeans was right for Mary: she was too short. But the hard feel of the denim in her crutch was potent. She felt bigger than she was. She chopped off six inches from the legs of the jeans. She had seen people wearing them like this, with the ends fra
yed. When they needed washing, she lay in the bath with them on, soaping them all over. While doing this, she let herself dream of the pale-lipped black-eyed girls in their sleeveless sack dresses and with their sculpted, scented hair. They gave her their dark nipples to suck. They said: ‘Let’s have fun, Martin.’

  She still hadn’t seen the Tower of London. Only parts of the city were known to her. The rest was there somewhere, waiting for time to bring her to it. She bought postcards of the places she hadn’t been: the Royal Mint, the Greenwich Observatory, Carnaby Street, Petticoat Lane, and stuck them up on the grey-white walls. She supposed you could live in London a whole lifetime and never go to these places.

  She wrote letters to Miss McRae and to Cord. She thought, it’s odd that the only two people who care for me are both aged seventy-one. In two of these letters she said: ‘The main thing I first noticed about London is that the people here are mostly young. I don’t know where all the older people have gone. I expect they may have moved to Suffolk or to High Wycombe. The only old one I see every day is the newspaper seller at Earl’s Court tube station. He’s been calling out a two-syllable word for so long that it’s become another completely different two-syllable word, like in a game of Chinese Whispers. What the word was that he started with I don’t know, but when I get more courage, I might ask him. Then he could return to it. And sometimes the things you first say have more meaning than things you think up later.’

  Cord wrote back: ‘At a fair guess’ Martin, your paper chap was originally saying News and Standard – so you see, four syllables can become two without anyone doing anything: it’s called the Americanisation of the English language.’

  Miss McRae wrote back: ‘I was very struck by your thoughts on the paper man, Mary. Why not try to write a poem about him that your South African friend might publish?’

  She began to hate her job, its repetitiousness, the futility of it, the smell of the water, being alone all day except for the coming and going of the waitresses with their trays of crockery. And one night, mainly out of her habit of obedience to Miss McRae, she sat at her table and wrote a poem about this – not about the paperman’s Chinese Whisper, but about all her endless days and evenings spent at the deep sink. She called it ‘Prisoner of Brown’. It was not until the next morning that she saw that what she had written, quite by mistake, was a protest poem.

  A few days later, she ran into Rob, the South African, on the stairs. He was carrying a plastic wardrobe. She said: ‘Would you like to come for coffee one evening?’

  He balanced the plastic wardrobe on the last but one step. He looked round it at Mary. She could see him assessing her: flat face, short hair, short body, spectacles … She said: ‘I’m not trying to get you to like me. I don’t like men. I wrote a bad poem, that’s all.’

  She could see it was the word ‘bad’ that interested him. If you tell someone a thing’s bad, they want to see it, to decide for themselves.

  He said: ‘What’s it about?’

  She said: ‘It’s about being trapped in things.’

  He said: ‘I’d better warn you, I don’t like much poetry. Most of what we get sent is crep.’

  She said: ‘This is crap.’

  And that made him smile. He said he would come for coffee on Wednesday at nine.

  The poetry magazine was call Liberty.

  Rob said: ‘It’s meant to be a consciousness-raising mag. All the material in it is meant to have something to say about political repression, but the trouble is there just aren’t enough good poems on this subject, so we sometimes have to fill in with stuff about graveyards or Kafka or Leeds.’

  Mary’s poem, ‘Prisoner of Brown’, was never published in Liberty. ‘It’s far from crep, Martin,’ Rob said when he’d read it and when he’d learned her name, ‘but you can tell it’s a first-time thing, hey? You’re not at ease with the genre, not yet.’

  Mary didn’t mind. She’d only written the poem for Miss McRae, and as a kind of protest against the monotony of her job in the coffee bar. She didn’t want to become a poet.

  But she became, as she had somehow predicted, Rob’s friend. She repainted his room. The colour he chose was red. They ate supper together occasionally in a Greek café. She told him about her love for Lindsey. He told her about his love for his country, to which he might never return. She described Lindsey’s wedding. He described the summer sky above Cape Town. They sat opposite each other in the Greek café, staring at their separate pasts, and then one night Rob said: ‘Give up the coffee bar. Come and work on Liberty. We need someone to help out. And we’ll let you make the coffee, not just wash up the bleddy cups!’

  Liberty was housed in a two-room office above a hairdressers. The hairdressers played music all day long: the Hollies, Marvin Gaye, Dionne Warwick, the Beatles. The stairs above stank of peroxide. Sometimes there were shrieks, whether of delight or horror, it was hard to tell. A sign on the hairdressers’ door read: This is the entrance to ‘Comme il Faut’ Salon. Liberty is on the first floor.

  In letters to Cord and Miss McRae, Mary described the Liberty office and her role in it. She wrote:

  I work with Rob and his partner, Tony, who is Australian. The magazine is international but not many nations have heard of it. I think we have more contributors or would-be contributors than readers. I am in charge of subscriptions. My desk is a drinks trolley that was here when Rob rented the office. I have taken off its wheels. I have been told to have a subscriptions drive.

  Rob and Tony are very nice to me. They call me Mart. Tony has yellow hair in a pony tail. He would rather be a poet than a poetry editor and sometimes we publish poems of his. They are about ‘Abos’ and lost land. The ‘Abos’ of Australia and the blacks of South Africa are the two groups Liberty is trying to help. Rob and Tony say the middle classes in England have to be woken up to the plight of these people. And I needed to be woken up to it, too. I knew about South Africa, but I didn’t know – for all the years I lived in Swaithey – that the Abos were in a plight.

  I wouldn’t say this to Rob or Tony, but I think the magazine is in a plight. I found a printer’s bill for £ 197.3s on Monday and past contributors write letters all the time demanding the £5 we pay for every poem published. I said to Tony: ‘What are we going to do about all these bills and demands?’ He didn’t seem flustered. He said: ‘Stay cool, Mart. Sit down and knock off a few stalling letters, okay?’

  I like working here. I like coming in in the morning and opening the window near my trolley and watering the weeping fig plant and putting on the kettle for coffee. I like the smell of paper that is with us all the time because of the piles of unsold past editions of Liberty that wait in my corner of the room for new international readers. I like learning to type. I like opening the brown envelopes containing the poems of hopeful contributors and trying to decide, before I pass them on to Rob or Tony, whether they are any good. One came last week that I enjoyed very much. It was about an elephant trapped in a concrete pit in the middle of the Serengeti plain. It raised my consciousness of what elephants need to live their lives. But Tony said it was sentimental and Rob said it was crep. So it was sent back, with quite a few others we received between Monday and Friday. Liberty is too poor to put stamps on its rejection letters.

  It is also too poor to pay me very much. I get £11 a week and three of this is my rent for my room. What I eat is mostly tins of tomato soup, but we still go to the Greek café. And it’s a strange thing, but it’s in the Greek café, which is called Zorba’s, that I have this strong sense of being in London and not just in it any more but becoming part of it.

  *

  Mary lay in bed, hearing the fragments of other lives in the dark well outside the window and she thought, I am as near as I have ever been to happiness. She knelt up on the bed and opened her window and leant out into the well and looked down. Long ago the dead skirts had been cleared away but she thought now that the start of her happiness had been there, when her skirts had thrown themselves out into
the void.

  One evening, when Mary got home from the Liberty offices, she found a letter from Cord. It said: ‘There’s good and bad news to tell you, old thing.’ The handwriting was small and shaky. There were brown blobs on the paper, stains of tea or Wincarnis.

  Cord wrote:

  The good thing is my eye has stopped blubbing on its own and seems to be back in line with its partner. No one has a clue why. Not the doctor. Not me. But that’s the way of the times. No one has a clue about anything. Do you listen to that Bob Dylan chap? He has a whining voice but sometimes a whine can be just the thing you want to hear. He says all the answers are blowing in the wind and he’s damn right.

  Now the bad. Your mother is back inside Mountview. She took herself there. It is called a voluntary admission. I went to see her of course (and selfishly wished you had been with me) and she seemed calm and quiet. We took a walk round the gardens, which she admires. I said, Est, tell me why you put yourself in here, and she said, this is home, my second home.

  I had a word with a person in a white overall. He looked like a senior type. He told me that your mother’s kind of depression is like an illness, no different from Beri-Beri or measles. And they are going to try ECT as a cure. You know what this is, don’t you? Electric business. So I said, I’d rather you didn’t do that. I lost my wife in a glider; I don’t want to lose my only child. But he said, It’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s the best answer. I refrained from mentioning the Bob Dylan fellow. I came away, because there was nothing else to do.

  Mary folded Cord’s letter and put it away. She walked out into the evening traffic. She had no idea where she was walking to. She was glad of the noise and the fumes and the neon light.

  She went into a basement bar. She’d passed its sign hundreds of times. It was called Ethel’s. The steps down to it smelled of seaweed. She sat down on a high plastic stool and looked around. The place was painted black, but lit brightly with thin pencil-beams of white light. Music was playing: Joan Baez singing ‘Copper Kettle’.