Sacred Country

by Rose Tremain

  Smoke collected in the light-beams and hung suspended in them. The faces Mary could see beyond the smoke were all women’s faces. She ordered a half-pint of Guinness and drank it quickly, like Sonny drank it. And then she began to stare at her surroundings, letting the place fill her mind so that there was no room in it for a vision of Mountview or for any vision of the past. And the women stared back.

  She ordered another drink. She saw how the black and white of Guinness matched the black and white of the place. She thought, no one in Swaithey could imagine that a bar like this exists, not even Edward Harker.

  At the end of the bar was a woman on her own, older, smartly dressed in a lime-green suit. She was watching Mary like a lioness watching her prey. When Mary caught her eye, she got down from her stool and picked up her drink, which was a cocktail of some kind, and sat down next to Mary. She smelled of perfume. Her hand, holding the cocktail glass, had long, pearly nails. She said: ‘My name’s Georgia.’

  They sat very still, side by side. They breathed the scented air. Mary thought, Georgia is a beautiful name, more beautiful even than Pearl. She said: ‘I’m called Marty or sometimes “Mart”, as in Exchange and Mart.’ Georgia said: ‘I’ll call you Marty, can I?’ Mary said: ‘Names are important. Don’t you think so?’ Then she looked intently at Georgia and saw that the name was more beautiful than the woman.

  Georgia said she would take Mary to dinner in Soho. They rode in a taxi. Georgia took Mary’s hand and put it on her left breast. The restaurant she chose was Russian. There were flickering red candles on the tables and gold icons on the walls. Georgia and Mary sat on two velvet banquettes and Georgia leaned towards Mary and smiled, showing her large teeth. She said: ‘Don’t look now, but in that far corner over there is Darryl Zanuck.’

  They drank vodka in small glasses. Mary felt the anxious part of her mind – the part affected by Cord’s letter – fall in on itself and vanish, like a Black Hole.

  She stared and stared at Georgia. She didn’t resemble the ice-lipped girls of her dreams. She had no real grace. But it was enough that she wanted Mary. Quite enough. No one had wanted her before, but Georgia did. She was flirting with her eyes. Her foot touched Mary’s under the table.

  Mary thought, being wanted gives you power – just for a while. And this feeling of power is something magnificent. As Rob would put it, it is far from crep.

  Estelle:

  Sonny gave me a dog. He couldn’t give me the baby I’d longed for ever since I held Billy Harker on my lap, so he thought I would be capable of loving a dog instead. It was an Alsatian puppy. Sonny put it into my arms and said: ‘It’s called Wolf.’ I suppose he expected me to swoon with happiness and cradle the dog’s head against my breast. But I felt nothing for it, zero, as they say on Top of the Pops. I let it drop out of my arms. Sonny swore. He’s forgotten he ever had any manners and once held his cap in his hands and stood with his head bowed. I walked away. Then I turned and watched him. He picked up Wolf and sat down and put him on his knee.

  He is the one capable of loving a dog, not I.

  I came to Mountview because I was about to commit a crime. I planned it. In my dreams and out. I was going to take the train to Lowestoft and take a suitcase full of the things I’d need … But I see the magnitude of it now. I see the terror and pain I was going to cause. I saw all of this just in time.

  And I have been rewarded. I am in love. My love is far away and never speaks to me but this is the way of the world. He is Bobby Moore, the captain of England. His hair, on the TV screen, is white. He has a dimpled smile. All that I care about now is his destiny and the destiny of what he calls the ‘squad’. And that is all any of us at Mountview cares about: football. We have forgotten our lives and what was in them. They are filled up with dreams of England’s glory. We sit in the dark and chant with the crowd: ‘England! – England! England! – England!’ And we have new enemies: their names are Pelé and Jairzinho and Eusebio and de Michele and Weber and Beckenbauer. It is summer outside but we hardly notice it. And even the nurses, with nothing to be cured of and with nothing to try to forget, you see them sidling into the room and standing still and watching and you know their heads are emptying themselves of everything but football. They forget time. They forget to remind you to go to Ops Wing for your treatments. They’re sliding away. We’re all sliding away fast. And we don’t want it to end.

  England are in Group One. We drew nil-nil with Uruguay. We beat Mexico two-nil and France two-nil. My love and my hero, Moore, is a visionary captain, so the commentators say. He knows how to read the game, how to turn defence into attack. Only his head is suspect, so they say. He is suspect in the air. So I want to write a girlish letter: ‘Dear Bobby, We have this one and only thing in common: our heads are not to be relied upon …’

  My head took me to a caravan site. I could see it clearly: old caravans with peeling paint waiting in the hot sun. I could see the families occupying their little bits of ground and all the things they left lying about, tricycles, blankets and anoraks. And prams. Sometimes the prams were empty and sometimes they were not. Sometimes they were parked in the square of caravan shade, with a stretched white net over them, and under the net there was a baby, sleeping.

  I know, that if I had gone there, this place would have been exactly as I’d seen it in my mind. My head is not suspect in this way; I can see things in advance of seeing them and know precisely how they are going to be. I was going to steal a child. I was going to buy tins of milk for it and nappies and castor-oil cream. I was going to take it to Scotland, to a wilderness where I would not be found. I knew this was a criminal act, but I also knew that I was going to do it. I didn’t think about what would come after.

  The quarter-finals are coming. Oh God. If Bobby and the squad lose, there is going to be weeping here. Even among the nurses. So I say to Sister Matthews: ‘Have ready all the medication. Have stuff that will send us to sleep for four years until the next World Cup. And in this way, you will save on time and on tea and on the cost of laundry.’ I laugh and Sister Matthews laughs. She looks at me approvingly. The staff at Mountview think if you can make a joke, you are almost well again, almost ready to be sent back to wherever you came from.

  The place I came from has changed, changed. Even Grace Loomis has started to complain that the weeds on our land seed themselves in her fields. It is harvest time and Sonny and Tim and the combine and the dog, Wolf, are alone with it and it is beyond what they can manage. I said to Sonny, on the morning he drove me here: ‘Sell the land. That’s the best hope. Sell to the Loomises and then we can all rest.’ He drove and said nothing. He’s fifty, but he looks like an old man. At the gates of Mountview, he said: ‘Never.’ Then we stopped and he got out and handed me my suitcase and he said it again: ‘Never, Estelle.’

  We are playing Argentina. They have beaten Spain, West Germany and Switzerland. We are told they are football-mad. In all the slums and back alleys of their cities, day and night, winter and summer, their lunacy goes on. When they line up on the Wembley turf and their national anthem is played, they cross themselves. Like Timmy, they believe in a Creator. But their Creator doesn’t save them from a header by Hurst. Their goalkeeper kneels on the ground. He wishes he was not here but far away in his own country, in some hot street hung with familiar washing.

  On the day of the final, England v. West Germany, I was due for one of my treatments, but I didn’t want to go. Because, after a treatment, you wake and you feel nothing, no anger, no joy, no longing, no sadness, nothing. All the love you had for anything has gone. You are still and empty and white. You have no desire. You cannot believe you ever stood up in the TV room and shouted: ‘England! – England!’

  I went into one of the greenhouses and hid. Tomatoes were being grown in it and they scented the moist air. I sat in a sliver of shade by the water tank. I felt afraid for England and for Bobby Moore and his smile. My mother was a person who dreamed of glory and she passed those dreams to me. I’d wanted Tim
to be a high-diver. I never noticed he was afraid. And now I was waiting in a greenhouse for the hour of England’s trial to arrive. I thought, the worst thing to happen would be a power cut. Not to see this, not to suffer it, would be worse than seeing it and seeing it lost. For it is only infrequently that I am able to care, one way or another, about something in my life.

  I had cared about the child. I had the room waiting – Mary’s old room – painted blue and hung with mobiles made out of balsa-wood and glass. For two years, I endured Sonny’s attempts at impregnation, until I saw they were futile. Then I planned my crime. The only thing that stopped me from committing it was a memory. It concerned Mary. It was a memory so distant, it seemed to belong in another life, not mine. It was a memory of losing Mary in a field, in darkness. She was lost for three hours – one hour for every year of her life – and Sonny and I were in despair.

  So I remembered how it was going to be for the mother of the stolen baby. I saw her come to the pram and find it empty. I saw her snatch up the little pram quilt and hold it to her mouth. I saw the ugliness of it all and the terror. I sat down and picked up our black telephone. I dialled the doctor’s number. I said: ‘I want to go to Mountview. I want to have my old room, please, with its view of the garden.’

  They came and found me in the greenhouse. They were understanding. They said I could have my treatment another day. They asked me kindly whether I had eaten many tomatoes. I replied that I’d eaten none because I was so sick with fear for the squad. And they said: ‘Well, come along, Estelle. It’s nearly time.’

  Now, we’re into ‘extra time’. The score is two-all. ‘Extra time’ is a different quality of time, hung with doom, as if the whole world were about to end. There is suffering in the room. There are no more cries of ‘England – England!’ There is a smell of urine and sorrow. An old man who used to be a postman says: ‘They’re finished. Look at them.’

  But I can see that Bobby is still urging them on. He shouts at them. His face is streaming with sweat, his socks are down, but he still wants them to attack. And they haven’t given up: Jackie Charlton, Bobby Charlton, Nobby Stiles, Martin Peters, Ray Wilson …

  I turn round to say to the man from the GPO: ‘They’re not finished. Not yet.’ And in that second, while I have turned away, Geoff Hurst scores. His shot has hit the bar and dropped behind the line. A cheer goes up, round Wembley and round the room. A cheer and then a hush. The goal is disputed. The Germans appeal against it. On the faces of Haller and Weber and Beckenbauer there is a petrified look. The goal is allowed. Another, mightier cheer goes up. In the room, Sister Matthews is weeping. The postman has climbed onto his chair and is waving his arms in the air. And we see it come towards us again: glory.

  We are at the end of what we can endure. ‘Extra time’ passes more slowly than ordinary time. Extra is short for extraordinary. I say aloud: ‘They should resume normal time.’ Someone screams at me not to speak. I put my fingers over my eyes exactly as I remember doing when I was told that Livia had died in the sky.

  Then it’s over. In the dying seconds of it Hurst scores again. It is won. It is safe. My love, Bobby, and his England are at the pinnacle of the world and all the mad of the shires and the counties and the cities are shouting and weeping their hearts dry.

  I want to hurl myself, like Livia, into the clouds. I want to dissolve and become suspect in the air.

  A Nose for It

  Walter felt confused. His own feelings confused him. They weren’t what he’d expected.

  He’d thought, on that Sunday in Tunstall Forest when Gilbert Blakey had first touched him, and then later in the room next to the surgery, the room with a sign on it saying Waiting Room, he’d thought, I’m letting all this happen only in order to become an outcast, to separate myself from the world of polite front rooms and babies in salmon bonnets. He waited to feel the self-loathing that would follow.

  What followed wasn’t loathing, but elation and a feeling, at last, of being grown up. And here was the confusion: Walter felt happy. He hadn’t expected happiness.

  When he looked at Gilbert – every single time he looked at him – he found him entirely beautiful. Compared to him, Sandra had been pretty only, pretty like a gift-box of assorted marmalades, never for one instant beautiful, not even on the day in the boat with the bottle of Tizer.

  He now saw his feelings for Sandra and his afternoons with Cleo as maladies of his late adolescence. He’d known nothing, only craved romance and then mistaken it for love. But it wasn’t love. This was love: Gilbert. This was Eden.

  But then – and this was why the happiness he felt began to slip away – he began to realise that his love for Gilbert wasn’t returned. Something was returned, but it wasn’t love. And so his confusion was compounded. Gilbert had started it all: he’d bought the convertible car, he’d talked about Kennedy in a personal way, he’d put his slim hand on Walter’s thigh, he’d leaned over and kissed his mouth. These things Walter recognised as a kind of courtship, a carefully planned prelude to a love affair. And the affair was of long duration. Gilbert referred to it, after a while, as ‘necessary’. But there was no love in it. Only what Walter felt. And now when Gilbert kissed him, Walter had a feeling of choking.

  One evening, he tried to describe this to his lover. Gilbert was lying naked on the waiting room couch with his head turned away. Walter was kneeling beside him. Without moving his head, Gilbert said: ‘It’s because you let yourself feel things. Try not to feel. Try just to be.’

  Walter couldn’t not feel. He could slaughter a heifer without feeling or empty a chicken of its bowel and heart. But just to see Gilbert was to feel. He ached with him everywhere, behind his eyes, in the stoop of his shoulders, in his heavy feet. What he lived for was to be touched by him. It was not logical. He’d expected revulsion and an ending and neither came. Passion came and stayed. It wouldn’t leave. A new summer started and passed. There were no drives in the MGB. There were only the meetings in the waiting room and Walter’s obstinate, confusing love.

  And he could tell no one about it. Not even Pete. Once, he would have tried to write a song about it, but a country song didn’t seem appropriate to someone of Gilbert’s class and sophistication. And lately, Gilbert had even started to complain about life in the country. He said Suffolk people were narrow in their hopes, he said they had no vision, he said it might soon be time for him to be moving on.

  Walter’s thirtieth birthday was coming. Sandra Cartwright had two children now. A hired man, with the word ‘Mother’ tattooed on his neck, had been taken on to help Pete in the slaughtering yard. Aunt Josephine came to stay in the house for long periods of time, scenting it with talcum powder, boiling milk in the middle of the night. Walter endured these things, but felt the awfulness of them.

  He said to Gilbert: ‘Couldn’t we go away somewhere?’

  Gilbert said: ‘Where?’

  Walter said: ‘I don’t know. I don’t know the world.’

  Gilbert said: ‘No, you don’t. If you did, you wouldn’t have asked the question.’

  Once every six months, Walter had to have his teeth scaled and polished by Gilbert. He sat, tilted backwards, under the Miralux lamp. The nurse crackled and sighed somewhere to the left of him. Gilbert’s face was near to his, yet upside down, unrecognisable, as though Gilbert were wearing a mask. The touch of his fingers was familiar enough, though, and his clipped, lisping voice criticising the way Walter neglected his mouth. And these quarter-hours in the dentist’s chair confirmed to Walter that he was at the mercy of something he would never fully understand.

  Meanwhile, the ghost of old Arthur had stopped visiting him. Walter was grateful for this. The sight and smell of him had been grotesque. Yet sometimes Walter found himself thinking that it might have been possible to confide in his ancestor and that this ghost, with its rude behaviour, would not have died a second, astounded death from shock. The need to confess his love to someone was growing very strong.

  Margaret Blakey noti
ced changes in her son’s behaviour and in his habits. She thoughts he was attempting to conceal change from her and that he’d forgotten she had a nose for such things. They’d lived together a long time. Forty-seven feet of cliff had fallen in that mass of years. A woman who lived on a precipice was sensitive to alteration. But Gilbert seemed to have let this slip from his memory.

  He was restless. He stayed at his surgery very late some evenings. He talked condescendingly to her, like someone returned from a far place that she would never visit. He appeared to her as a person on the edge of catastrophe. He had begun to dye his hair and his moustache. They were a brighter yellow, like sherbet.

  She said to him one evening: ‘I know you don’t like me to say things like this.’

  ‘What things?’ he said wearily.

  ‘I’m worried about you,’ she said. ‘I can’t put my finger on it, but you’re not your old self.’

  He couldn’t bear the way his mother so often spoke in clichés, as though she had never really learned how to use the English language.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean by my “old self”,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, you do,’ said Margaret. ‘When you were calm and content.’

  ‘I don’t know when that was,’ said Gilbert.

  Margaret sniffed. ‘If something’s happened,’ she said, ‘I think you owe it to me to tell me what it is.’

  Gilbert was silent. He let the silence last. In it, they could both hear the sound of the sea. Gilbert allowed himself to imagine the silence that would arrive when he finally left the house and began his life again somewhere else. It made him feel both exhilarated and afraid.

  ‘Nothing’s happened, Mother,’ he said. ‘Only time passing.’

  On a November evening, after their hour in the surgery waiting room, Gilbert said to Walter: ‘I’d better tell you, I’m winding up everything here in Swaithey. I should have done it years ago. I was too cowardly. But this decade is different.’