Sacred Country

by Rose Tremain

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said the doctor. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I’m saying that although in some respects I’ve got a girl’s body, I have never felt, I mean not for one hour or one day or one minute, that I was a proper girl or that I’d grow up to be a woman. I have always felt male. And the older I get – ’

  ‘You have breasts.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Presumably you menstruate?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You know what menstruation is?’

  ‘Yes.’ I thought about Lindsey. Lindsey used to bleed and bleed. She used to swoon from her loss of blood.

  ‘You have no menstrual cycle?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And because of this, you’ve come to believe you’re not a girl?’

  ‘No. Not because of this. I’ve always believed it. Always. Since I was six. Since the King – ’

  ‘What does the King have to do with it?’

  I stopped and looked at this doctor. If we’d had a debate entitled ‘What Makes a Good Doctor?’ I would have said: ‘Patience is one thing.’

  The doctor had a smile on his lips that he was trying to hide. I thought, when I am a man, I will not resemble him in any way; he is a loathsome person.

  He wrote down a few words on a pad. He said the most important thing to establish was why my periods had not begun. I told him it was because I had no womb. He shook his head again.

  He took a sample of blood from my arm. He asked me to show him my breasts, which I still kept bandaged up. I unwound the crepe. It felt icy in his room. Lindsey had told me that at the mere sight of her bosoms Darling Ranulf lost control of himself, but this doctor did not lose control of himself at the sight of mine. He looked away and I was glad. All I wanted then was to get out of there.

  I was about to leave when the doctor said: ‘Wait a minute. I’m going to give you a prescription.’

  ‘A prescription for what?’ I asked.

  ‘Some tablets. They should bring on your bleeding. Your delusion is probably allied to hormone deficiency. Once your cycle is established, I’m sure it will disappear.’

  I took the prescription and walked out. I did not say, Thank you, Doctor. I just left without a word.

  I sat down in the main street of Swaithey, on a bench by the horse trough. I tore up the prescription and scattered the pieces onto the water, where they floated like white petals. I thought, the medical profession has turned me into a litter lout.

  Later in the year, after the summer had come and I had received an invitation to Lindsey’s wedding, I went to see Edward Harker. It was the day of the village gymkhana. Pearl sometimes liked to pretend she was a pony. She sneezed and whinnied and tossed her lemon mane. She let Billy sit on her shoulders and slap her arm with a willow wand. So I knew that Pearl and Billy and Irene would be at the gymkhana and that Edward, who suffered from hay fever, would probably be alone in his cellar.

  I realised after my visit to the doctor that telling somebody about myself wasn’t as hard as I’d imagined. I just said some words and there it was, over. Except that it wasn’t, because the words had not been believed. I might as well have said, ‘I am the Virgin Mary.’ I was thought to be suffering from a delusion. My mother told me she had a friend at Mountview who thought she was a chicken. And this was why this person was locked up there. No one examined her for feathers. No one offered her a worm. I thought of writing to her: ‘This country is afraid of the unusual,’ but then I found that I didn’t relish the idea of writing a letter to a hen. I was as narrow-minded as everyone else.

  So the question of belief began to torment me. I made a parade in my mind, like an identity parade, of everyone I knew and I passed slowly down it, telling them one by one. Only my father was absent. I told Cord and he began staring at the sky. I told Timmy and he said: ‘I have to go to a swimming lesson now.’ I told Lindsey and she laughed. She said: ‘Does this mean you can’t be one of my bridesmaids?’ I told my mother, but she wasn’t listening. She was trying to remember the words of a Perry Como song. I dismissed the parade and they all walked away without a backward glance.

  And it was after this that I remembered Edward Harker saying to me on the day of his wedding: ‘Everything in nature is resurrection,’ and I thought, a person who believes in previous lives is the person to tell, and he has been there all the time …

  He was oiling a bat. He wore a grocer’s apron. The arrangement of light in his cellar hadn’t changed since I was a child. The smell of linseed oil was heavy, like incense. He caressed the bat with his oil-soaked hand. He said: ‘I hope I’m not losing my touch, Mary.’

  I said: ‘You can keep a secret, Edward, can’t you?’

  I used the same kind of words I’d used in the doctor’s surgery. I said: ‘There has been a mistake somewhere, Edward, and it won’t ever be put right or made more bearable if no one believes what I’m saying.’

  ‘I believe you,’ he said quickly.

  And we both sat down where we happened to be standing. I sat on the iron head of a belt-driven lathe and Harker sat on his desk and knocked over one of his lamps. Neither of us spoke for quite a while and the silence marked the passing of something: it marked the passing of my isolation.

  I watched Harker’s hand go towards the lamp and right it and set it down again exactly in the place that it had been.

  CHAPTER NINE

  1964

  Marshall Street

  Every Thursday morning, Timmy Ward was driven to Saxmundham Station in Sonny’s van and put on the early train to London.

  His destination was the Olympic swimming pool at the Marshall Street baths. He was fifteen. His voice had broken and he could no longer sing in Swaithey Choir. He missed his singing. He missed the purity of his own sound. Swimming seemed to be the only beautiful thing he had left.

  A talent scout, a former member of the British Olympic Swimming Team of 1956, had been invited to Timmy’s school. He had worn his Olympic track suit, very faded with eight years’ washing.

  The sports teacher had said to him: ‘That’s the one to watch, the thin lad with the silly smile in Lane 2.’ Timmy had swum three lengths of butterfly and the talent scout had been so impressed he’d felt his heartbeat quicken. He said to Timmy: ‘I’m going to pluck you from Fenland obscurity, Timothy.’ Timmy said: ‘This isn’t Fen country, Sir. That’s over above Cambridge.’

  ‘Wherever it is,’ said the scout, ‘I’m plucking you from it.’

  The group Timmy joined was called The Otters. They had three hours of intensive swimming coaching from ten o’clock till one. They had to bring their own lunch. From two till three they were taught diving. Every week, they were told that their country would be proud of them one day.

  Timmy was the smallest member of The Otters. His fear of the high board was acute and his dread of the day when he would have to dive from it intensified as the weeks passed. To make a long vertical line downwards with his body was, in his spiritual imagination, a fearful thing to do. He thought it unfair that, when swimming was what he excelled at, this other, terrible endeavour was expected of him. Even Estelle kept saying: ‘I hope you’ll learn diving, Tim. That’s the thing I’m waiting to come and see.’

  He hoped she would have to wait a long time. He said: ‘All I’m good at is butterfly.’ She smiled her far-away smile and said: ‘Strokes have such funny names – crawl, butterfly. Who thought them up?’ Timmy told her he didn’t know. He didn’t know the answer to any of Estelle’s questions. Can you mime tap dancing? What are dreams? When did history begin? The questions just floated away, unanswered, into the air.

  The Marshall Street pool seemed vast. There was a steep bank of seats for spectators on one side. Light fell onto the water from a long way up. The shouts of Mr McKenzie, the Olympic coach, echoed, as in a cathedral. If it had not been for the high diving board, Timmy would have found it a marvellous place. At the start of a butterfly race, three lengths, one hundred metres, when he stood, ready to spri
ng, on his starting block waiting for Mr McKenzie’s gun, he felt more fond of existence than at any other time. The way the surface of the pool (no matter how much it had been disturbed by previous swimmers) returned to a glassy calm seconds before the race began never failed to impress him. He loved this about swimming: you left no trace of yourself, no footprint, no track. You described a horizontal line. It moved ahead of you, always ahead, with nothing remaining behind.

  Mr McKenzie reminded The Otters quite regularly of the pride England could one day feel on their account if they exerted themselves. ‘Timothy,’ he would say, ‘we have to strengthen your legs or the Union Jack will never be run up for you.’

  On the long journeys to and from Marshall Street, Timmy would examine the idea of future glory. He found that he wanted it not so much for himself as for Sonny. Sonny’s life was going down, it was a runaway thing, on a falling curve, like a dive. The combine was rusty. Parts for it were ordered on credit and never paid for. Fields were left fallow because Sonny didn’t have the will to plough them and drill them. Thistles seeded themselves everywhere. The whole farm was blighted with thistles and Sonny did nothing. Timmy hated the sight of all the thistledown blowing like cotton above the ground.

  He had a recurring dream: Sonny came to Marshall Street, wearing a suit and tie. He saw Timmy win two butterfly races. He stood up and cheered and waved a handkerchief with joy. They went home together on the train, father and son. As the fields began to move past the carriage windows, Sonny said: ‘That’s how everything’s going to look from now on, flat and tidy and neat. And it will be because of you.’

  But then there was the wretched question of the diving. Both his parents would keep on mentioning that. It was as though they saw all the swimming as an apprenticeship for this other, greater thing, this moment when Timmy would put his body into the air and they would watch it fall.

  One Sunday

  Gilbert Blakey had taken delivery of his new car, an MGB Convertible with wire wheels, on the day Kennedy was murdered. He heard about the assassination on the car radio. He felt so shocked that he had to pull over into a lay-by and sit still. The black, leather-scented interior of the car, until a moment ago an entirely marvellous thing, now seemed to Gilbert like a soft chamber of death. He had difficulty breathing. He wound down the window to let in the sharp November air. He laid his head on the steering wheel.

  The car frightened him from then on, just enough to make him drive more sedately than he would have liked. The winter was bitter and the Suffolk roads icy. Gilbert dreaded turning the MG over onto its vulnerable soft top. He imagined his own head turned to pulp, like Kennedy’s. He longed for spring. He wanted to believe that all he had to do was survive the winter and then everything would become gentle again: the weather, the behaviour of the world, the beat of his own heart. And part of him knew that this was a fond expectation. No moment in time can ever be revisited.

  He’d continued to treat Walter’s gum disease. He told Walter that he wished to see him regularly until every manifestation of decay had been eradicated. He said that if his teeth weren’t saved now, he would have none left by the time he was thirty-five. He said: ‘It was profoundly important, Walter, that you came to see me when you did.’ By January, Walter’s mouth was pink and clean again, his breath sweet. He said: ‘So is that it, Mr Blakey, for now?’

  ‘No,’ said Gilbert. ‘Monthly check-ups must continue, until the spring.’

  He told Walter he’d bought a new car, an MGB. He didn’t say that it made him afraid. Walter said: ‘I’m envious, Mr Blakey. If there’s one thing certain about my life, it’s that I’ll never own a sports car.’ Gilbert replied that nothing was certain in any life and they laughed and Walter noticed for the first time Gilbert’s resemblance to Anthony Eden and felt flattered by it, peculiarly flattered to have seen it.

  From this moment they told each other odd details of their lives. Because Walter couldn’t speak for most of the time he spent in Gilbert’s adjustable chair and because Gilbert preferred not to talk while he was drilling or scaling, small details were all they had time for. So Gilbert learned that Walter’s uncle lived in a trolley bus in a field. So Walter found out that twelve times a year Gilbert’s mother went out with an eighteen-foot measure and measured the distance between her front door and the Minsmere cliffs. They found these details strange and absorbing. Walter was surprised to discover that he was not the only person in Suffolk living a solitary life in his mother’s house. Gilbert thought, the uncle in the bus is unconventional and this makes Walter less ordinary than I’d presumed.

  Walter was pleased with the change in himself. He hadn’t enjoyed smelling like Arthur Loomis’s corpse. When he opened his mouth, now, and saw his pink gums and white, shining teeth, he had the thought that he had been saved from something, perhaps even from dying. One man had saved him: Gilbert Blakey. And not only from his own decay – from his nightmares also. Because Arthur began to leave him alone. When he did appear, he didn’t stink any more, he wasn’t naked or waving his prick about, he was wearing clothes and his butcher’s apron.

  Walter felt a grateful relief and an admiration for Gilbert that bordered on worship. Eden had stepped forward into the present and smiled on him. In exchange, the ghost of Arthur had returned to a pre-Suez state of quietude. The next bit of Walter’s life could now begin.

  But what next bit? There was no change to any part of his daily routine. There was only spring slowly unfolding around everything and light coming and showing white on the marble counter and on the cold room floor. Grace celebrated her fifty-third birthday. Her sisters came to stay for a weekend and talked in whispers as they had done after Ernie’s death. In their soft voices, they congratulated Walter on doing well in the shop. He poured sherry for them and nodded but didn’t thank them.

  He was sent out to buy Eccles cakes and at the baker’s there was Sandra with the prawn. And the prawn wasn’t lying down asleep but kneeling up in the pram, pink and squeaking, and Walter thought, the prawn will soon be walking and starting to have its own human life, and still nothing will have happened to me. Then Sandra will have another of the vet’s babies, a second horrible shrimp in a salmon bonnet, and all that will have been given to me will be the passing of time.

  He brought the cakes home and put them on a plate. He took them into the front room where the sisters were. Their voices reminded him of the wind blowing along the river and lifting the skirts of the willows. He saw Sandra in the varnished boat. He rowed. She covered her knees with her skirt. He helped himself to a cake and ate it quickly and greedily. He thought, everything good is in the past. Even things that were only half-good – they’re in the past too. Things like that day with the bottle of Tizer, never drunk. And all my songs. And my half-yodel. Everything.

  A hot Sunday came.

  Walter told his mother: ‘Mr Blakey has invited me to go for a ride in his car.’

  ‘Go for a ride?’ said Grace. ‘Why would you want to do that, dear?’

  ‘It’s a sports car,’ said Walter. ‘Convertible.’

  ‘Convertible?’ said Grace. ‘What does it convert to?’

  ‘It’s a term,’ said Walter. ‘Convertible is a term for something.’

  He wished he’d told Grace nothing about it. She made it seem like a babyish thing to want to do. Little boys went for rides in cars, not men in their late twenties. But he didn’t care. He was looking forward to it, to moving along familiar roads very fast. And then arriving at the sea. Because the sea was their destination. Mr Blakey had said: ‘I’m conservative in this way, Walter. I like every trip to have some purpose to it.’

  It was the first hot day of the year, a Sunday in May. Gilbert had washed and polished the car and the wheels shone. The black canvas hood was folded down. As Walter got into his warm leather seat, Gilbert smiled at him, his Eden smile, and Walter felt pleased with this, as if he had been sent a greetings card with an authentic message inside it.

  The sun caught Gilbe
rt’s teeth and made them glisten. He wore a blue shirt with a sleeveless fairisle jersey like a little waistcoat and a red silk tie. Walter had never seen him in anything but his white coat. And he had never been alone with him before. He felt suddenly breathless. He thought, it’s like being alone with someone famous. There’s a difference between them and you which makes breathing awkward.

  They drove towards Aldeburgh. There was a brightness in the air that Walter couldn’t remember seeing ever before.

  They talked about the murder of Kennedy. Gilbert told Walter how he had had to stop the car in a lay-by and put his head on the steering wheel. Walter told Gilbert that he had heard about the assassination from Pete, who had come into the shop, crying. Talking about Kennedy seemed to create a bond between them. They were silent for a bit and the sound of the car’s marvellous engine was the only thing to be heard. And then Gilbert took his left hand from the metal steering wheel and laid it gently on Walter’s knee.

  Walter didn’t move. He looked down at the hand as though it were a thing that had landed on him from outer space. He saw that it was a pale hand, lightly freckled with soft blond hairs on the back of it. The fingers were very long and the nails perfect and shiny.

  Walter wondered whether he should say something. He wanted to ask, Do you want me to say anything, Mr Blakey? He turned his head, just fractionally, so that he could see Gilbert’s face and his expression. Gilbert was staring ahead at the road. It was as though the hand that he’d put on Walter’s knee didn’t belong to him, as though he hadn’t noticed that it was there. Walter thought, in a moment or two, he’ll take his hand away and we’ll start a new conversation about some ordinary thing, not Kennedy, and this moment will not have happened. It will be like everything else; in the past and not there.

  He had an erection. He didn’t often get them. Not since Sandra and the death of Cleo and the sight of the prawn. He wanted Gilbert’s hand to stay and the erection to stay. He didn’t want these things to disappear into time. So he put his own wide, cumbersome hand on Gilbert’s slim one. Touching it was like touching a meteorite, just as extraordinary. He moved the hand up his thigh. He felt a wild, hot happiness.