Sacred Country

by Rose Tremain

  I thought, this letter on this day is a sign. Cord has got his victory and that means that I will have mine.

  I waited. My veins were fed a new substance. I thought, I must be nimble in my mind now, like the darting fish. I must be watchful and alert, but all I felt was an unreasoning terror.

  Then came a day that I’d hoped for.

  Pearl arrived in London. She brought a small case, so that she could stay one night with me. In the case were a white nightdress, a spongebag in the shape of a heart and a Handbook for Dental Nurses. She laid these things out on the floor. I said: ‘Pearl, I want you to sleep in my bed and I’m going to sleep on some cushions and we can talk about Australia and the night sky.’

  She is eighteen. She is studying A-level Biology. She tints her eyelashes blue. She wears her hair in two bunches tied with ribbons. Her voice has a Suffolk lilt. She hugs me and I hug her back. When I hug her, I want to cry.

  She has never been to London before. She says: ‘Mary, don’t let me get lost, will you?’

  It is Saturday. The sun is shining on the litter of the Earl’s Court Road. We walk down the street arm in arm on our way to the Natural History Museum. Pearl looks all around her in wonder, as if she’d landed on the moon.

  We go into the museum and stand by the plaster dinosaur skeleton, Diplodocus carnegii. Large things like this make me feel solemn but Pearl says: ‘They were ridiculous, weren’t they? One theory is they were frozen out of existence.’

  I’ve never been in the museum before and nor has Pearl of course, but it’s she who leads me around and points things out to me. There is Biology all around. Pearl’s little nose gets scarlet with excitement. Heaven, for Pearl, would be full of flying frogs and milkweed butterflies.

  The things we learn in a single afternoon remind me that we live on the planet of the unexpected. I now know that a centipede can run faster than a cheetah. I know that in Peru there is a snake that milks cows. I know that the Giant Sequoia tree of California can live for fifteen hundred years. I know that the Natterjack toad and the lime tree appeared in England ten thousand years ago. I know that things believed to be extinct can suddenly reappear and that eminent biologists can die in their laboratories from surprise. I know that species can cross the world’s oceans hidden in crates of bananas or bales of rubber and that such a one is the treefrog from the rainforests of Honduras which has colonised a forest near Canterbury.

  I say to Pearl: ‘It gives me hope, to realise all this.’

  ‘Hope for what?’ she says.

  She is wearing a short pink skirt and long white socks to her knees and white shoes that fasten with a pink button. The other visitors to the museum stare at her as she passes.

  ‘In what is possible,’ I reply.

  The last thing we see is a display of fishes. The living fish swim around the coral reef of Australia, but these are models, hung from the roof in a glass case on pieces of thread. You aren’t meant to notice the threads, but you do.

  A child wearing a plastic policeman’s helmet says to his father: ‘Are they puppets?’ The father doesn’t know how to reply. After a while he says: ‘No.’

  Pearl says: ‘Look at their fantastic names.’

  Carpet Shark. Leafy Sea Dragon. Moonish Idol. Flying Gumard …

  We stand together and read all the names out. We sound very serious, as though we’re reciting the names of the dead on the fields of France. Then we laugh and I remember Pearl’s laughter in the continent of long ago and think, it crossed over to me on a ship, hidden in a fruit crate.

  We have supper in Zorba’s. The Greek waiters, Nico and Ari, treat Pearl as though she were Melina Mercouri. They kiss her hand.

  She eats a mountain of kebabs. She doesn’t seem to notice how many. I eat some vine leaves with rice and watch over her.

  Suddenly she realises how much she’s eaten and stops. She says: ‘Tell me about your life, Mary.’

  I feel a chill coming into my arms, a kind of cramp or stiffness.

  I talk about Liberty. I tell her that it survives because of the Vietnam War, that it sells in Amsterdam and Luxembourg and Toronto. I describe Tony and Rob and the indoor plants and my old desk, the drinks trolley. I tell her I’m lucky to be working for Liberty and to have the chance to draw.

  After a while, when Pearl has eaten a sweetmeat full of honey, she says: ‘When Edward came to see you that time, he said he was going to help you make changes in your life. Did you make them?’

  I massage the tops of my arms. I say: ‘Yes.’

  She takes one of the bows out of her hair and it falls softly round her face. She says: ‘They were secret, Edward told me. You never used to have secrets from me.’

  I sigh. I call Ari and order some coffee. Ari says to me: ‘Your friend, Mart. Launching a thousand ships, eh?’

  ‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘At least a thousand.’

  Pearl smiles, then lowers her eyes. Earlier she’d told me: ‘There’s only one boy I like at school. His name’s Clive. He wants to be a tree surgeon.’

  When the syrupy coffee arrives, I say to Pearl: ‘Do you think we could always be fond of each other, no matter what?’

  ‘You can’t say “no matter what”,’ she replies. ‘You don’t know what the “what” could be.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I say. ‘You don’t.’

  There’s a silence for a minute and then Pearl asks again: ‘Was it a secret?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘But later, I might tell you it. When we’re at home. Before we go to sleep.’

  ‘You said “home”,’ she says. ‘Don’t you still think of the farm as home?’

  ‘No,’ I say.

  She gets into her white nightdress. She takes a sponge out of her heartshaped spongebag and washes the blue mascara off her eyelashes. She cleans her teeth very meticulously. I undress in stages, hiding every bit of my body.

  She gets into my mahogany bed and I put some cushions on the floor and lie on them and cover myself with a blanket. Pearl says: ‘Shall I read you a bit from my Handbook for Dental Nurses?’

  It feels quiet in the building, as if everyone else were elsewhere.

  I say: ‘Yes. Go on.’

  ‘I’ll start at the beginning,’ she says.

  ‘Fine,’ I say.

  She reads: ‘The dental nurse, or the dental surgery assistant as she is properly termed, is normally the first person to receive a patient. This is an important occasion, as the patient’s confidence in the dentist himself will be influenced by the appearance and manner of the dental surgery assistant.

  ‘She should therefore be smartly dressed. Attention to personal hygiene is essential, not only as it affects appearance, but also to ensure good results and prevent infection in the surgery.

  ‘A calm, courteous and sympathetic manner, combined with a cheerful disposition, is an obvious necessity when dealing with anxious patients. The dental surgery assistant must ideally keep cool under all conditions and cope with any emergency which may arise …’

  After a while I turn out the light.

  We lie in the dark in my ship of fools. Down below in the airwell we hear someone scream.

  I let time pass. My heart is beating.

  Then I begin to tell Pearl about my life: about the day of the two-minute silence, about my jealousy of Timmy and my hatred of Mary. I tell her about Dr Beales and the dirty river and the lies. I don’t mention Lindsey Stevens or my affair with Georgia. I pass on to describing my ally, Sterns, and his killer axolotl and his untroubled voice. Last of all, I say: ‘With the injections I’m having now, my time as Mary is going to come to an end.’

  Pearl is so quiet I being to wonder whether she’s still there or whether I’m talking to an empty room.

  Then, I hear her crying.

  ‘Listen, Pearl,’ I say. ‘It’s no stranger than millions of other things on earth. Don’t despise me for it. You don’t despise a tree for living for fifteen centuries or a treefrog for turning up in Kent. These things are just quirk
s of place and time, and this is what I am and have always been.’

  She doesn’t reply. She just goes on weeping.

  ‘Pearl,’ I say. ‘Say something.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she says, ‘I feel so sad.’

  ‘Listen,’ I say, ‘if you never want to see me again, I’ll understand. I expect I’ve disgusted you. But even if I don’t see you, even if we never eat another Greek meal together or ever again mention Montgolfier, you’ll always be precious to me – my precious thing. Nothing will alter that.’

  ‘It isn’t that,’ she says.

  ‘Isn’t what?’

  ‘Isn’t that I’m disgusted. Not really. It’s just that …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was Mary I cared about. And you’re killing her.’

  ‘I know,’ I say, ‘but I can’t not do it, Pearl. I can’t. Even for you.’

  The night sails on and we talk all through it. Pearl says she’s too frightened to sleep. Frightened of the world.

  The next day she goes home. Her white shoes look scuffed. There is no blue on her lashes. And when I put a kiss on her cheek in the corridor of the train, she turns away from me. She says: ‘It’s so sad, Mary,’ and she doesn’t look back.

  Facing West

  Two women sat alone in their houses and looked at the future. One of the women was Margaret Blakey. The other was Margaret McRae.

  In the time since Gilbert’s departure, the distance between Margaret Blakey’s house and the Minsmere cliffs had decreased by three feet and two inches. The winters had been fierce. Hurricanes had come dangerously close. Margaret Blakey had read in the National Geographic Magazine that, all over the world, the edges of places were falling into the sea.

  But she no longer minded. With Gilbert gone, it seemed like a thing of no significance. She sometimes thought it would be perfectly acceptable to be swept away in the middle of the night. She imagined it, in fact: the house leaning and moving in the wind, the sandstone crumbling like cake, her photographs of Gilbert falling off the walls and exploding, her bed starting to fly.

  He wrote to her every week. He was making money. He sent her peculiar presents: an African mask, a coil of springs you were supposed to throw from hand to hand, a teatowel imprinted with a picture of Hampton Court. He said in one letter: ‘The nearest I will get to paradise is Flood Street,’ and this, too, she considered very odd. She assumed there must be a new Gilbert replacing the one she’d known. And he inhabited a new world, a world in which people liked to spend time throwing a steel spring from hand to hand. Clearly, he preferred this kind of world to the old kind. It wasn’t unreasonable. He was still young. He’d got tired of living on a precipice.

  Margaret Blakey decided to stop measuring the distance between her house and the cliff edge. And she did something else. She moved out of her bedroom, which was at the front of the house, and into the back bedroom that had no view of the sea. From here, she could see fields and a wood and beyond the wood a church spire. She liked this landscape. She could imagine the rest of England spreading out and on beyond the spire. Out and on.

  She said to her few friends: ‘I think, as one gets older, it’s perfectly all right to turn one’s back on certain things.’

  Miss McRae was making plans.

  Her cottage was up for sale. She had finally succumbed to her homesickness for Scotland. She was going to live with her sister Dorothy near Oban. On Miss McRae’s mantelpiece was a snap of Dorothy’s bungalow. It was called Shepherd’s Rest. It had a garden of marigolds and fruit cages. It looked out over Seal Sound, where colonies of mussels clung on at low tide. From its small patio you could watch the sun go down behind Seal Island. At night you could see the distant flash of the Oban lighthouse.

  She was seventy-seven. She seldom gave death a thought. What she thought about were the walks she and her sister would take, through forests and over heather. She thought about the sound of curlews and gulls and the smell of the sea. She said, more than once: ‘I have had a fortunate life.’

  She had bought her cottage in Swaithey for £300. The estate agents told her it was now worth £7,000.

  A young couple from London said they had fallen in love with it. They agreed to pay £6,500.

  Miss McRae took up her knitting and thought about all this money. She knew that she and Dorothy would live simply. They would make stews and eat them slowly, making them last several days. They would grow their own vegetables. She would knit them sweaters and gloves. Shepherd’s Rest was a small place, not expensive to light, heated by electricity that turned itself on when you were asleep.

  She put her knitting aside and sat down at her desk. She took up her fountain pen. She saw from the way other people wrote that fountain pens were becoming artefacts of the past. She thought, on the west coast of Scotland the gulf between past and present is not as wide as it is in England.

  She wrote a letter to Mary. As she wrote, she remembered sitting by the electric fire with her and reading King Lear aloud. She remembered that one night a storm had rolled in over Swaithey and that Mary had said to her: ‘I believe in all this. Don’t you, Miss McRae?’

  ‘All what, dear?’ she’d asked.

  The lightning had come in long and short flashes, like signals from a ship.

  ‘In Lear,’ said Mary. ‘That all these things could happen.’

  Miss McRae put on her glasses.

  My dear Mary, [she wrote]

  I was pleased to get your last letter and to know that Liberty now sells in Adelaide. Thank you also for your very fine sketch of Lambeth Bridge. You draw so well now.

  As you know from my last of 2nd August, my plans for my return to Scotland are far advanced and despite my long years in Swaithey, I have no regrets about leaving. Am I being sentimental when I say that I think the place where one is born remains obstinately in one’s heart for all time?

  Now, the real business of this letter. I have been very fortunate to sell this cottage for a large sum to some nice young people from Putney. Dorothy and I will live quite happily in Shepherd’s Rest on our pensions. (Dorothy, you may well recall, was a stenographer at the M.O.D. and enjoys a generous Civil Service old age stipend.) And so, dear, I am going to be in the fortunate position of being able to send you some money. I have in mind £1,000 and I would like you to know that it gives me enormous pleasure to make this gift. You are the nearest thing I have to a child of my own and your years with me in Swaithey were most happy ones for me – years I will never forget.

  I know only too well that you don’t like accepting presents, but I shall be very saddened if you do not accept mine. Life is a precarious business, as we understood from all our readings of Shakespeare! One does not know what the future holds. Perhaps you will never need to make use of the £1,000, but then again the day might come when it would seem like a gift from the sky. May I suggest you invest it in a Building Society so that it will be safe until such a day arrives?

  I will look forward to hearing from you and to receiving what I believe is called the ‘go-ahead’.

  With affectionate regards,

  Margaret McRae

  She read through her letter several times and then sealed it. She went to bed. She took up a volume of Thomas Hardy’s poems that she had bought at the Swaithey Bring-And-Buy for a shilling. She knew Hardy was unfashionable and that he’d treated both of his wives rather badly but this didn’t prevent her admiring most of his work.

  She lay in her narrow bed with the sheet very tight across her frame, memorising bits of Hardy and feeling perfectly at peace. She remembered saying to Mary: ‘It is worth learning things by heart. Then they’re there later, when you’re ready to understand them.’

  She heard an owl call out from the line of beeches that sheltered the village from the north winds. She thought of Dorothy asleep on her hillside above the sea. She thought of her beginnings in the Oban lighthouse and of her end, looking at Seal Island and at Mull beyond. She thought about the circularity of nature and the sym
metry of her own life. She pitied Hardy – his head buried in one place, his heart in another. She put his body back together again and sat him down in a Dorset field to watch and listen and record:

  These are brand new birds of twelvemonths’ growing,

  Which a year ago, or less than twain,

  No finches were, nor nightingales,

  Nor thrushes,

  But only particles of grain,

  And earth, and air, and rain.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  1971

  As Far As It Goes

  Teviotts Theological College stood on windswept Sussex downland five miles from Brighton and the sea.

  The Principal of Teviotts, Dr David Tate, was a large man with flabby lips and a hesitant walk. He used a bitter-smelling hair oil. He was a high churchman with a distaste for the new spirit of liberalism – or what he called ‘Pick ’n’ Mix Theology’–afflicting Anglicanism. He was regarded as old-fashioned, eccentric and vain but his influence on the lives of the Teviotts seminarians was profound. He selected them not on their knowledge of theology but on the fierceness of their faith. He claimed to be able to discern, on the fragile basis of a half-hour interview, whether a candidate’s faith was built upon granite or upon chalk. He never took his eyes from their faces. ‘I excavate them,’ he was fond of announcing, ‘I go into their skulls and then I find it: an unshakeable thing or a thing with no real root. It’s quite simple.’

  In Timmy Ward, Dr Tate saw granite. To complaints from his colleagues assembled round the interview table that the applicant knew no Hebrew and only a dozen words of Latin, David Tate replied: ‘These can be learned. Belief in the sacred cannot be taught. This candidate – Ward, Timothy – must come to us.’

  It was fortunate for Timmy that he found himself in front of David Tate. He’d been turned down by three other colleges and had begun to hover on the edge of a vertiginous despair. He had tried to disguise it from Sonny and Estelle, but on a visit to Cord he had sat like a ghost by the fire and Cord had understood the depth of his misery. He’d handed him a tumbler of sherry. ‘Tim,’ he said, ’have you ever thought God might be a wrong turning?’