Sacred Country

by Rose Tremain

  A voice said: ‘Mary?’

  I turned. In the dingy light, I saw a halo of bright hair. I thought, I have met an angel unexpectedly.

  The angel was carrying a bucket of lilac. It was Pearl.

  She put the bucket down. She said: ‘What are you doing here all alone?’

  I didn’t tell her that I was waiting for the vicar to come. I said I’d come here to think.

  ‘Think about what?’ asked Pearl.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘What are you doing with that mass of lilac?’

  ‘Mum sent me. It’s for the church flowers.’

  ‘I thought you were an angel.’

  Pearl giggled. Her laughter had always been a light and bright thing. I began to ask her about her swimming lessons. I had rescued her from drowning so many times in my dreams that it had exhausted me. I’d begun to worry I wouldn’t have any strength left for the real thing.

  She came and sat down in the pew beside me. She was eleven. She must have been the most beautiful eleven-year-old girl on earth. She said she dreaded the swimming lessons. She said when she got into the water she went cross-eyed. She said being frightened could do this, make your eyes go wonky.

  She put her thin little arm through mine. She said: ‘You don’t come to see us so often, now, Mary.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘Why don’t you?’

  I told her that I had a lot of homework. I warned her that if she went to Weston Grammar she would have to work very hard, too. She said that she didn’t want to go to Weston. She said that when she grew up she wanted to be a dentist’s nurse. She wanted to wear a white, starchy hat and put the dissolving purple pellet into the mug of water. I said: ‘That’s a very peculiar thing for an angel to want to do,’ and we both laughed and then I looked up and saw that the Sower had turned to blank, empty lead and that we were sitting there in the pitch darkness.

  I had to wait a week before Geddis came into the church. I went there every evening, except on Sunday, after supper. I took a roll of sugar paper and some black crayons. I started to do a brass rubbing of the first Sir John Elliot, Knight of the Garter, 1620–1672.

  When I saw Geddis come in at last, I said: ‘You don’t come here very often, do you?’ as if we were guests at a posh party, at the kind of party Ranulf Morrit would give, with food cooked by Ramona the Spanish cook.

  Geddis said: ‘Mary Ward, isn’t it?’

  He said if I wanted to talk to him privately, we could go into the vestry, where we wouldn’t be overheard. I looked round the church and there was no one in it but us. I thought, this is a farce. And I remembered my mother saying this word at Mountview. ‘Meals are a farce,’ she’d said and Cord had knelt down and said: ‘Don’t, Est!’

  I told Geddis that I’d changed my mind. I didn’t want to talk to him after all. He looked relieved. Behind his wispy head, the flower arrangement of lilac and tulips was wilting from lack of fresh water. In the vestry, I knew that I would see Timmy’s surplice hanging on its peg. I knew that there would be no echo.

  I showed the Rev. Geddis my brass rubbing of Sir John, only half-completed. I said: ‘There’s just one question before I go.’

  He put his white hands into a knot. ‘Always happy …’ he said.

  ‘Do you think that men ever, you for instance, ever believe that … inside them they’re not men, but women?’

  Geddis’s mouth went very slack. I imagined him putting a Communion wafer into it.

  He fumbled for a handkerchief and put his whole face into it, pretending to blow his nose. Through the handkerchief he said that questions like this come from the sewers of the mind. He said: ‘All I can think is that you have had access to the News of the World.’

  ‘I don’t mean it literally,’ I said. ‘I don’t want a literal answer. All I meant was, could a man ever feel this, like saints used to feel peculiar things, in a kind of vision?’

  He shook his head violently. Side to side. Side to side. He said there was a fee for brass rubbing. Five shillings per rubbing. To go towards the Roof Fund.

  In One Place

  On a late September evening, Thomas Cord saw a flock of geese pass in perfect V-formation over Gresham Tears. The sight of them first moved him (this faultless alignment in the air) and then confused him (were they coming or going, arriving or departing, he could not remember).

  That night he couldn’t sleep. He felt a trembling in his left eye. He had a memory of his honeymoon in Brighton: Livia in a taffeta dress, dancing at the Grand; a walk with Livia along the shingle, their feet slipping and sliding and the surf rattling the stones like change. He tried to console himself with his remembered love.

  He woke up at seven. He had thought he hadn’t slept at all and then that he had woken from something which must have been sleep. The trembling in his eye had not gone away, it had spread down the left side of his face and into his jaw bone. He put his hand up to his cheek. He knew that something peculiar had happened to him. As he put on his woollen dressing gown and walked to the bathroom, he whispered aloud: ‘I’ve stayed in one bloody place too long, that’s why. And now I’m too old to leave it.’

  In the grey, northerly light of the bathroom Cord saw that the left side of his face, the trembling side, had been incomprehensibly altered. It had been pulled downwards, or else had suddenly refused to hold up any longer. Whatever the cause, it had fallen. His eyelid was rolled down like a collapsed awning. One side of his mouth tilted away from the other. His own image, in the glass of the medicine cabinet, was now an unrecognisable thing. He thought, the geese came and went and are now miles away, feeding among wheat stubble somewhere, and I’m left in ruins.

  He felt shocked and sick. He sat down on the bathroom stool which doubled as a washing basket and into which, years ago, Livia used to drop her silk cami-knickers and her insubstantial brassieres. He put his altered face in his hands. He wasn’t normally a vain man.

  After a while, he went downstairs and telephoned the doctor. He was told to come to the doctor’s surgery. He informed the receptionist that for reasons he couldn’t describe he was unable to leave his house. He said the matter was urgent. He said that otherwise he would not have bothered the doctor at all. He was told to wait. He was glad that, while he waited, no one was looking at him. The receptionist returned and informed him curtly that the doctor would come at mid-day, after morning surgery.

  The doctor examined him. It was a bright morning by now, the sky a bird’s-egg blue. Normally, Cord might have been out in the garden, raking the first leaves.

  The doctor listened to his heart. He pinched Cord’s cheek for evidence of feeling. He rolled up the fallen eyelid and shone a torch into the eye. Cord disliked having the doctor’s face so close to his. He thought how nauseating and smug doctors were. He longed to be left alone, to begin on his horrible changed life without any prying or interference. He knew he had had a stroke.

  But then the doctor surprised him. The doctor said he had at first suspected a stroke but was now inclined to believe, from the normal aspect of the pupil, that Cord had been struck by what he called ‘a reactive palsy’. This, he said, was in some cases an irreversible condition and in some others a temporary syndrome. It was impossible to say which.

  Cord stared at the doctor with his one alert eye. Even as a child, he had not liked having his hopes raised. He said: ‘Are you telling me I could get back to normal?’

  ‘I’m telling you,’ said the doctor, ‘that in some cases the palsy is temporary and in some others it is not.’

  ‘And you can’t say which this is?’

  ‘No. I can’t. I’ll send you to Ipswich for tests.’

  After the doctor had gone, Cord remembered the word ‘reactive’. He had meant to ask about this. What had the left side of his face reacted to? Was there a single case, in all of medical history, where a man had been paralysed by a passing flock of birds?

  Winter came on, ferocious in the vicinity of Gresham Tears, giving the retired
residents dreams of tea in Le Touquet.

  Every morning, Cord got up and put on his cherry woollen dressing gown and went to the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror of the medicine cabinet. And every morning, finding his face unchanged, he returned to his bedroom and took off the dressing gown again and went back to bed and lay there, just lay there, trying not to think and not to be.

  He had bought a second wireless. He was told it was called a transistor. It was as small as a box of Edinburgh rock and fitted easily onto his night table. He would reach out and turn it on. Instead of listening to the Home Service, as he always used to do, he would move the dial about, so that he got different stations broadcasting illegally from ships in the channel or reaching him from Luxembourg and Monte Carlo. All these stations played Beatles songs. Cord knew the words to several of them.

  He saw no one at all. Bridge and chess no longer interested him. His palsied eye wept for itself on its own. When he went shopping in the village he put on his reading glasses. Now, he could read the prices on tins and packets in the grocery shop, but couldn’t see the grocer himself, and so sustained the illusion that the grocer couldn’t see him either. In this way, he did not starve.

  Snow fell in early December. Cord had let his moustache grow very long. He had got the idea from a photograph of the Beatles in the Radio Times. The moustache almost covered the corner of his mouth that had collapsed. He looked out onto the snow and decided he would do one thing, just the one, to lessen his loneliness: he would invite Martin to stay with him for Christmas.

  There had been letters from an address in Swaithey. ‘Dear Cord, I’m staying with my old teacher, Miss McRae, for the time being. She is helping me a lot with my A-level work.’ ‘Dear Cord, I’m still at Miss McRae’s and I’m getting a lot of work done. Have you read Bleak House?’ ‘Dear Cord, I miss you. Here I am still with Miss McRae and we often read King Lear aloud in the evenings. I am Lear. Miss McRae is Regan and Goneril. I’m Edmund. Miss McRae is Gloucester. Neither of us likes being Cordelia.’ ‘Dear Cord, Thank you for the money to buy a transistor. I’m going to get one immediately that is as small as a box of rock. Yes, I like the Beatles in a way. I’d like to come from Liverpool and be a star. Instead, I have merely taken up brass rubbing.’ So now Cord sat down and wrote:

  Dear old Martin,

  With all this snow, I’ve been thinking about Christmas. Did you know that your Grandmother, Livia, used to make tree decorations out of horsehair? I still have some horsehair angels somewhere.

  Are you going home for Christmas? Or spending it with Goneril? It would cheer me if you would come to G. Tears. And how.

  I’ve been in a terrible funk. Never seeing a soul. Will you come? We could stuff a capon with chestnuts, make some paper chains, play some Rummy. We could read Hamlet aloud, if that would please you, and I would let you be he.

  Do geese go away in winter, or return? You’d know a thing like this. Write to me with your answers to a) Christmas and b) the migration of water-birds.

  From your loving Grandfather,

  Cord.

  Cord made a shopping list. When the snow thawed, he drove the Hillman Minx to Norwich and parked it by the market and walked about blindly, wearing his reading glasses, peering into shop windows, looking for something to buy Martin that would be precious to her. Beatles music was coming out of some of the shops. Nobody stared at him – or not that he could see. He felt some of his old self return.

  He went into a sports shop and looked at a ski-ing anorak trimmed with fur. He said to the shop assistant: ‘My granddaughter’s good at all sports.’ And he thought, this might be a thing Martin Ward would like more than anything she’s liked in her life – to take a cable car up a mountain and come flying down it on skis, scorning danger. And he wished that this was what he could give her, the chance to fly down a mountain very fast and the chance to look out and away from England into another world. Because staying in one place disfigured you. Your eyelid wearied of the view and refused to admit it any longer to your sight. Your mouth went down in a sulk. It was obvious now.

  Livia had understood this. She spent her money on clothes and luggage. On a walk, she would throw her head back and stare longingly at the sky. And she would do this even on grey days when there was no sign of the sun.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  1963

  Estelle:

  The world reached Christmas.

  We did not seem to have died. The bomb did not seem to have fallen.

  Alice, the Chicken Lady, sent me a postcard showing the sands at Whitby. ‘Phew,’ she put, underlined three times, ‘I think my yard is safe.’

  I watched everything happen on the television. I’d never realised Cuba was near America. I thought it was miles from anywhere, out in a sea of its own.

  For a month we thought the end of the world was coming. No one knew where the first bomb would fall or how long anything would survive after it had fallen. We had no idea if wheat would die. We imagined a cloud expanding. I said to Irene: ‘I’ve never known what was in ordinary clouds or why they’re there, or why they don’t fall.’ Irene said: ‘Men have a better grasp of these things.’

  I tried to add up everything that was in England. I began with churches. Then the stones that the churches were built from. Then the timber that made the roofs and choir stalls and the pews. Then the trees that had been cut down to provide the timber. Then the number of years that the trees had been growing. And then, last of all, everything inside the churches such as hymn books and the hassocks and the fonts and the bell ropes and the crosses and the candlesticks and the handwritten flower rosters pinned up in all the porches. I did not try to count prayers or singing or breaths. I concentrated on things and on time. And the answers I got were so enormous that my brain stopped being able to imagine stone quarries and forests and seasons and started only to see numbers. So then I thought, this is probably what Khrushchev is doing now, he is stopping seeing or imagining America. He is deliberately forgetting that there are cars called Oldsmobiles, that on days of rejoicing people hurl pieces of paper out of high windows, that Doris Day is a lovely woman. He is looking at maps, perhaps, at lines and names and symbols and altitude figures. Or maybe someone has told him that in the city of Los Angeles alone there are more than half a million lawn sprinklers and this is what he has chosen to see in his mind. He stands at a window in the Kremlin, a window I have seen on the television news, and he says aloud in Russian: ‘I am only going to bomb a number of lawn sprinklers.’

  But it didn’t happen.

  Sonny hired a digger. He said he would build us a fallout shelter. He told me to buy rations – dried pears and packets of raisins. The beets stayed in the ground and their tops went to seed like spinach while he concentrated on the shelter.

  It was Timmy that he wanted to save.

  He wasn’t clever with the digger and he had no one to help him. He dug an oblong pit like a swimming pool or a mass grave. I thought of us lying in it and being set alight. He knew it was no good. He’d done drawings of an underground home with a portable toilet and a gas cooker and bunk beds, but it bore no resemblance to these.

  On the television news, they showed us the great grey American fleet sailing towards Cuba and then, later on, sailing away from it. Ships and the sea and Cuba have no colour in my mind. And I thought at the time, I’m pleased this is all black and white, as if it were already part of history.

  When it was actually over, Sonny was more relieved about not having to finish his fallout shelter than about the saving of the world. Since the loss of half his ear, he and the world have not been happy together. If the world had had to choose between an empty fallout shelter and Sonny, it would have chosen the shelter.

  There were three bunks in Sonny’s drawing. Not four.

  I go into Mary’s room and look at what has been left behind. I try to guess her line from the little that is there. She was a cloud artist, once. Then she began to manufacture weapons against us. She bec
ame the enemy.

  I tear down her pictures of clouds. In a dusty cupboard are a pair of wellingtons which may have been the ones she wore to the ballet show. There is a tennis ball, ditchwater green, split at the seam. There is a Dictionary of Inventions which belonged to Livia. There is a kitchen knife, missing for a year. It makes me shiver to touch things that were lost.

  Since she left, I’ve begun to dream of her. We can’t choose our dreams. They choose us. We are always at a railway station, Mary and I.I am younger. My hair is black and thick. I get onto the train and I’m relieved to be going, to be leaving Mary behind on the platform – her flat face so unlike mine, her peculiar body.

  But she makes me lean out of the train window to say goodbye. She makes me lean down, out of the open window, to kiss her. And then my hair falls round her neck like a noose and, at that moment, the train starts to move and I try to push her away, but she’s held in the noose of my hair and she has to start running along the platform to keep up with the train, to stop her head from being pulled off.

  I scream for someone to help us but there is no one on the carriage and no one on the platform. And then the platform ends and Mary hangs by her neck from my hair and her weight pulls me half-out of the train, but I hold on, keep holding on, knowing that soon she will fall and be left by the line and then I will be free of her and ready to sit down and get out my sandwiches and my thermos of tea and enjoy my journey. But I don’t enjoy my journey. I wake up. I cannot survive this dream without waking.

  I say to Sonny: ‘I had my dream about Mary.’ He says: ‘She’s gone now. Forget her.’

  I’m trying to find a way to forget her.

  I have distempered the walls of her room grey and painted the windows white. I have put it all into the past. Like Cuba.

  Now, in this New Year, something new has come into my mind.