Sacred Country

by Rose Tremain

The barge had gone by and was out of sight. The river banks were washed with the brown waves of its wake. I thought, by the time the water is quite still again, my fifty minutes here will be over.

  I said: ‘Is this what has happened in the past?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘To other people like me – that their anguish ceased?’

  ‘It is assumed,’ said Dr Beales, ‘from what they told me. But we are running ahead of ourselves in any assumption about you. Because for all I know at the moment your idea of your maleness could be a delusion or you could be lying. I know nothing yet.’

  I said: ‘I lied about one thing.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘About cricket. I do know its basic rules. My adoptive father, Edward Harker, makes cricket bats and he taught the rules to me and I used to practise bowling in his backyard.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ said Beales. ‘What did you bowl, spinners or bouncers?’

  ‘Spinners,’ I said. ‘I was a spinner and by the time I was twelve Edward was afraid to face me at the crease.’

  There was no way of getting to or from Twickenham by any means of transport, as far as I could see. There was no tube station. It was beyond the end of the line. I never saw a bus pass.

  I had taken the tube from Earl’s Court to Richmond and walked from there, following a map, like a lost tourist.

  When I left Dr Beales’s house, I decided to walk along the river on the old towpath where the horses used to go up and down long ago. I felt like a horse, trying to pull something, trying to pull along the idea that a surgeon could transform me and I would become Martin. The odd thing was that all my life I had thought this would happen one day, I had believed in it without knowing of any means by which it could happen. And now that I knew the means, I had trouble believing it. I think this happens to the human mind: it sometimes finds it easier to believe in the dream of something than in the something itself.

  And I felt afraid. I thought, will Mary be gone utterly? Do I want her gone utterly, or only parts of her? Is there anything about Mary I should remember to save?

  I came to some steps that went down to the dishwater river and I sat on them, watching boats pass. Not far from the steps was an old houseboat slung with tractor tyres as fenders and flying a Union Jack from a metal pole. An area of water between the boat and the bank had been fenced off with chicken wire. In the water, several families of ducks swam in little circles. Duck ladders went up from their pond to the dilapidated deck of the boat. There didn’t seem to be anyone on the boat and I thought, well, maybe no one lives there, only these patriotic ducks. We always think a person must be there, at the centre of everything, and sometimes we’re wrong.

  The sun came out and the water was fingered by an unexpected sparkle. I didn’t know what place I was in. It could have been somewhere called Ham. I put my arms round my knees and held on to them. The shine on everything had made me wonder about love. I thought, will Pearl for instance still be fond of me after Mary has gone?

  The Sorrow Party

  A letter came from Mary to Edward Harker. It was marked ‘Confidential’. Irene recognised Mary’s handwriting on the envelope and said: ‘Is she in trouble, Edward? Is that going to be it?’

  Edward took the letter down to his cellar and read it by the light of the parchment lamps. It asked him whether he would come to London and talk to Dr Beales. It asked him whether he would pretend to be Mary’s adopted father.

  ‘Well?’ said Irene, when he came up.

  ‘Well what?’ he said stubbornly.

  ‘What’s happened to her, Edward? I deserve to know. I used to house that girl when she was little. I was like a mother to her once.’

  ‘I never break a confidence,’ said Edward.

  Later, at supper, Pearl said: ‘Is Mary really in trouble, Edward?’

  He looked at her and at Irene, at their sweet faces. He wanted no harm ever to come to them.

  He spoke gently. He said: ‘Mary has asked for my help, so that she can make some changes to her life. That’s all I can say. She isn’t “in trouble” as you put it, Pearl. She’s just trying to find the best way through her life.’

  That night Irene had a dream about Mary on the hot day of the Beautiful Baby Competition; it was a dream about smocking and beads of blood. She found Edward awake, reading Gulliver’s Travels. She said: ‘If there’s anything I can do for poor Mary will you be sure to tell me?’

  ‘Not poor Mary,’ he said.

  ‘Will you tell me, though?’

  ‘Yes, Irene. Now go back to sleep.’

  ‘I had a terrible dream. Read me some of your book, will you?’

  He began, without comment, to read from Chapter VII of the voyage to Brobdingnag. ‘The learning of this people is very defective, consisting only in morality, history, poetry, and mathematics, wherein they must be allowed to excel. But the last of these is wholly applied to what may be useful in life, to the improvement of agriculture, and all mechanical arts; so that among us it would be little esteemed. And as to ideas, entities, abstractions and transcendentals, I could never drive the least conception into their heads …’

  He didn’t have to read aloud for long before Irene had returned to her silent sleep. He knew she hadn’t understood a word.

  He put his book down and removed his spectacles. He switched out his light and sat there in the dark, as if waiting for someone or something to arrive.

  He couldn’t get Mary’s letter out of his mind. It enthralled him. He was a quiet man with a secret passion for the unexpected, the miraculous. His need for Irene, the birth of Billy – these had been minor miracles. But what Mary was proposing to do was exceptional, quite outside most human experience. He thought, no one here will understand it, perhaps not even Irene, who loves her. Or Pearl.

  He lay down and closed his eyes. What remained of Edward Harker’s vanity was flattered to be chosen to impersonate a father. He thought, before I met Irene, I couldn’t have played this part, but now I’ve had these years of practice with Pearl and with Billy. I know what kind of person a father has to try to be.

  In her small room next to Edward’s and Irene’s, Pearl was doing Biology revision by torchlight. She was a person who liked to remember things by heart, word for word.

  She was memorising the description of an insect called the Brown Water Beetle. In her Biology exercise book, she had written in her round, clear writing: ‘The Brown Water Beetle has a brown, oval body and a yellow line just above the horny wings. It swims quite rapidly about the pond, in search of small flies, which are its preferred meal.’ So now she was reciting this to herself with her eyes closed. She tried to make it sound like poetry or like a song. These things were easier to remember than sentences:

  The Brown Water Beetle

  Has a brown oval body …

  When she got to the end of it, she tried to imagine eating a meal of flies. She thought of them alive in her mouth, trying to move, trying to buzz, then being swallowed and dying. Biology was peculiar. It was her favourite subject.

  She was fifteen. Her lemonade hair had never darkened. People stared at it and at her, but she was indifferent to them. With her clear blue eyes she kept them away. She wanted to choose, not be chosen. And she wasn’t ready to choose. Not yet.

  She loved her room, the white curtains Irene had made for her, the pale green walls, her old dolls sitting in a line, her books in a precise order. From it she could see Swaithey church where, every fourth Saturday, she arranged the altar flowers. She was far better at this than Irene had ever been. She could look at a bucketful of greenery and flowers of differing colours and lengths and know straight away the order in which they should go into the vase. She told Irene: ‘Flower arrangement has rules. Everything does.’

  Pearl switched off her torch and lay down. Every night, after her revision, she memorised her future. She was going to be a dental nurse. She had already applied to the college in Ipswich where she would train. She was going to wear a brilliant
white uniform and fold her long hair into a pleat and attach a nurse’s hat to her head by means of kirbygrips. She was going to be the person who put the mauve mouthwash pellet into the glass of water, who placed a little bib round the patients’ necks, who cleaned them up and kept them calm. She was looking forward to her life. She knew that every life should have a plan and hers did.

  But tonight, she found herself thinking about Mary. Edward had said she was ‘trying to find the best way through her life’. And she thought, perhaps Mary, even though she was always clever, has never had a plan. And now she’s lost. Her mind’s gone into a black place like a forest and she can’t find any way out again.

  The next day, Pearl decided to talk to Edward alone. She waited until Irene had taken Billy upstairs for his bath.

  She said: ‘Edward, is Mary lost?’

  ‘Lost?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you mean – lost?’

  ‘I don’t know. Can I see her? Can she come here?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so. But I shall be going to London. You could write her a letter or a card and I’ll take it.’

  ‘Can’t I come to London?’

  ‘No, Pearl.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You can’t.’

  ‘Is she ill?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Tell me, Edward!’

  ‘I can’t tell you. I’ve promised.’

  ‘Break your promise. Tell me, just me.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is she hurt?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think she is. I think something bad has happened, after all the other bad things that happened to her when she was small. And I don’t want this to happen!’

  Pearl began sobbing. She thought, I’ve been sobbing all day really but it’s just come out now.

  Edward put his arms round her. He found a red handkerchief in his pocket that smelled of linseed oil and he gave it to her. He said gently: ‘Listen. Write a letter to Mary and I’ll take it. And I will tell her that you’d like to see her and then, perhaps, in her reply to you she’ll invite you to London, for the day. If she invites you, you can go. She might take you to see the Natural History Museum.’

  ‘She’s had a horrible life!’ said Pearl.

  Irene heard Pearl’s crying and came running down the stairs. Billy came after her, steaming pink like a pudding and trailing a custard-yellow towel.

  Pearl felt herself transferred from Edward’s embrace to Irene’s. She was crying so hard, she couldn’t speak and her chest had begun to hurt. She heard Billy begin to howl in sympathy and then she could tell that Irene, too, was weeping. She thought, we’re having a sorrow party. There are such things.

  She felt calmer then. She decided she would write a letter to Mary and she knew how she was going to begin it. ‘Dear Mary, we had a sorrow party for you on Friday. We all stood at the bottom of the stairs, crying. I expect, if you had come in and seen us, you would have laughed.’

  Timmy’s Angle (2)

  Timmy thought, what is to be done?

  He was eighteen. He had not become an Olympic swimmer. He worked twelve hours a day on the farm and all around him the farm was in decline. He was in a race with ruin. Ruin didn’t keep to its lane, it wore no number, it never tired.

  There was no one else in the race. Sonny and the dog, Wolf, spent most days in the barn where the combine sat, covered in sacking against frost and rust. Wolf lay on the earth floor and slept. Sonny patched and mended old broken machinery. He put handles on things. He made plumblines. He sat on a straw bale and talked to the dog.

  He was very thin. He hardly ate any more, only drank. In the clothes he wore and with his white stubble coming through, he looked mangy. He said to Timmy: ‘The farm’s yours, every square foot of it. You know that, don’t you? I’ve kept it all going for you.’

  Timmy got rid of the hens. Grace Loomis now had three hundred birds laying round the clock in an aluminium shed under bright lamps. Timmy told his father: ‘We can’t compete any more, not at this new low price of eggs,’ and Sonny had stroked Wolf’s head and said: ‘They’re a barmy lot, hens, anyway. Remember the day I saw them all standing still?’ He had forgotten his accusations of witchcraft. At times, he seemed to have forgotten Mary’s existence.

  Nothing replaced the hens in their field. Sonny said: ‘Put rape in. That’s the coming crop.’ But the field was simply abandoned. Nettles and horseradish sprang up around the vacant hen houses. Timmy stared at it all. One of his earliest memories was feeding the hens. He and Mary. Mary carrying the heavy pail of grain. The hens running towards them and clustering round their legs. Mary saying: ‘Imagine if they were people and we were the Shah of Persia.’

  One night Timmy remembered how he’d once seen his life as a 90° angle, made by the vertical line of his devotional singing and the horizontal line of his swimming practice. He had never been able to see what filled the 90° between the two arms of the angle, but now he did: he saw it was his imprisonment on the failing farm.

  It was late. The house was silent and damp-feeling, as if autumn were seeping into it through the plaster. Timmy put on his dressing gown. He found an old school exercise book and a blunt pencil and a ruler. He made a drawing of his existence.

  The sight of himself, a minute pin-man in a one-sided tunnel, choked him. He thought, I’m here because I was afraid to dive. If I could have dared to be a high-diver and not just a swimmer, then my mother would have been enraptured and she would have gone on paying for the lessons at Marshall Street. But swimming wasn’t enough. It didn’t interest her enough. She once said: ‘Butterfly is an ugly stroke, Timmy.’ So she let my father step in and put an end to Marshall Street. I’d seen the horizontal line as infinite, but it has turned out to be short.

  He sat there, looking at the angle. He could hear Sonny snoring next door in Mary’s old room where he slept now, the room his mother had made ready for a new child that never arrived. Sonny snored beneath the baby things, a paper frieze of tigers, the balsa-wood mobile that tinkled like mountain bells. Estelle had offered to take them down. Sonny had told her not to bother. He told her he liked them.

  Pity for his parents and rage against them alternated in Timmy. Now, face to face with his angle, he saw them as the two lines that held him trapped: Estelle the vertical line with her head in the sky somewhere. Sonny the horizontal, flat as the fields, going nowhere but hopelessly on.

  It was the time of the sugar-beet harvest. There was good money in beet. People wanted their food sweet and sugary now. Beet and rape, this was where the money was these days – and in the poultry factories. But Timmy loathed lifting beet. The crop stank, it sat heavy in the soil. It was like gouging up something dead. And the machinery often broke. The conveyor that carried the beets aloft and tipped them into the lorry was a cranky thing. Belts snapped. Individual rollers worked loose and stopped turning despite Sonny’s hours of tinkering and mending. The wheels of the lifter sank into the mud. The November rain had an icy feel.

  Estelle was at home. She had entered a period of calm. She never cried or shouted. She spoke politely. She said: ‘It is my intention to watch Match of the Day at 10.10.’ No one knew how long this period of calm would last.

  Sonny seldom went into the house at dinnertime. He sat on his bale in the barn, scratching the dog’s ears and drinking Guinness from bottles. But Timmy always came and sat by the Rayburn and Estelle put food in front of him. Since Mountview, she no longer baked bread or made meat stews. She liked tinned things and soft sliced white loaves in plastic bags. She was fond of Salad Cream.

  On the day following Timmy’s drawing of his angle, Estelle served him a plate of tinned spaghetti. It was too hot to eat. The slimy sauce had a skin on it. Timmy put his spoon down and waited. Estelle was eating radishes. She had spread a slice of bread with Primula. Her grey hair was in a bun. All her beauty had disappeared and Timmy thought, where is anything beautiful to be found?

  His mind returned
to Sundays in Swaithey church. He saw and heard the choir and saw the light coming through the Sower Window. And he realised in that moment that his original vertical line might still be in place. He could no longer sing like a girl, but he could pray. It didn’t matter how prayer sounded. It could even not sound at all.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ asked Estelle. ‘The hens’ field? Those little houses all still there?’

  ‘No,’ said Timmy.

  That night, Timmy rummaged in the cupboard where all his childhood seemed to have been flung, item by item. He found a little leatherbound book, given to him by the Rev. Geddis when his voice broke and he had to leave the choir. It was called the Daily Light on the Daily Path. It described itself as ‘a devotional text book for every day in the year in the very words of the Scripture, with additional readings for special occasions’. One special occasion was headed ‘Disappointed Hopes’. Timmy turned to this and read: ‘Although the fig-tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines, the labour of the olive shall fail and the fields shall yield no meat … yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation.’

  Timmy wanted to laugh. He knew that somehow, unexpectedly, he had stumbled upon a source of hope.

  Something Different

  Pete Loomis had said of his altering face: ‘It’s just my nose, doing what it’s doing.’

  What it was doing was growing a cancer.

  It grew the size of a fat strawberry, then the size of a lime. Pete had always thought cancers were internal things. He thought they never showed. He thought anything that showed couldn’t be a cancer, but something else of no consequence.

  He was taken to hospital in Ipswich. The hospital was on a hill and looked down on the ugly town. Pete stood at the window of his ward and thought, what if this is the last view I see?

  To take out the huge cancer, the surgeons had to cut away half of Pete’s nose, including one nostril. They said that by doing this, they had ‘contained’ it. What remained of his nose was wrapped in a bag of bandages. He looked like a snowman with some white vegetable – a parsnip or a turnip – stuck into the middle of his face.