Sacred Country

by Rose Tremain

  ‘Listen to that,’ said Cord after a while. ‘You won’t hear the racket the thrushes make if we get the road.’

  ‘No,’ said Timmy.

  ‘I hate blight,’ said Cord. ‘Wherever it turns up. And if you feel your life’s blighted, old Tim, I’ll do what I can to help you. All right?’

  Caesar, Waiting

  The subscriptions to Liberty were increasing. It had thirteen readers in Gibraltar. It ran political essays now and jokes and pen and ink drawings done by Mary to illustrate the poems. A lot of the poetry was about the Vietnam War. Mary didn’t trust herself to draw faces. She drew the backs of people, running. She drew machinery and flames.

  Her salary had increased. She was given a desk to replace the drinks trolley. Her drawings were signed ‘Martin Ward’.

  On Friday evenings, she, Tony and Rob would drink in the Drayton Arms. They would order a bottle of Bulgarian red wine and talk about foreign films and the beauty of Jeanne Moreau. Sometimes the wine made Rob think about his lost South Africa, about bioscopes and milk bars and Jacaranda trees. His sadness disgusted him. ‘Sorry, Tony,’ he’d say, ‘sorry, Mart. Just ignore me. Talk about something else. Discuss Harold Pinter.’

  Mary broke off her relationship with Georgia. She despised Georgia for desiring her. She tried to explain to her that she could only love women who loved men, not women who loved women.

  Georgia threw a lamp at her. It exploded against the wall. Georgia began to scream and cry and her make-up dribbled in inky lines over her chalk-white face.

  They were in Georgia’s flat. It was still nicely situated but its owner was elsewhere in her mind. She swooped on things like a bat. She took her lime-green suit out of the wardrobe and tore at the seams with her teeth. She ripped it to pieces. She came from a family with strong teeth and strong hands. She even got one sleeve out of its socket. She flung the mutilated costume at Mary’s chest. Then she started on her pillows. She stabbed them with scissors. She ripped open the holes and took out fistfuls of feathers and sent them flying around the room like thistledown on the wind.

  Mary backed out of the room, but Georgia dived onto her. ‘No one leaves!’ she screamed. ‘No one fucking leaves me. I’m D’Esté Defoe. I fucking leave them! I’m the one who does the leaving!’

  Mary tried to take hold of her flying hands. She was much shorter than Georgia. One of the hands hit her face and she fell backwards into the sitting room with its pleasant south-facing view.

  Being hit was the thing she feared most. It reminded her of Sonny. She had dreams about it.

  She got to her feet and ran. She kicked the flat door shut in Georgia’s face. She took the stairs two at a time. In a race, she knew she could outrun Georgia. She was wearing running shoes.

  Letters from Georgia arrived. They were sorrowful and calm. They attempted little grieving jokes: ‘I was Snow White, but I drifted.’ ‘You’re a person of rare gifts; you never gave me any.’

  Mary put them in a drawer. It seemed cruel to throw them away. Then she threw them away. They embarrassed her. She felt glad she’d never written any self-pitying letters to Mrs Ranulf Morrit.

  Georgia started sending money. Mary returned it. It kept coming. It went to and fro like an unwanted thing. In the end, Mary sent ten pounds to Cord for his ‘Residents Against the Road’ Fund and sent a postcard of Jeanne Moreau to Georgia. On the back, she wrote: ‘Your money has gone to charity. Anything more you try to give will take the same route.’

  After that, there was nothing from Georgia. She was there in the magazine, of course. The advice of D’Esté Defoe poured out to her million women readers, week by week, but Mary wasn’t one of them.

  Her visits to Dr Beales continued. One day, he uncovered her first lie.

  She had told him she never menstruated. He had looked at her suspiciously. He had written on his pad: never menstruated(?). But her first period had come soon after she’d thrown her skirts into the airwell, soon after she’d announced to herself that she was happy. She’d stared dumbly at the blood. She had never believed she possessed the womb from which it could come. Now it was here, a punishment. The misery of her years in Swaithey had kept it at bay. Happiness had allowed it to arrive. That was how fickle her body was.

  She endured the monthly bleeding by disowning it. She never looked at it. She inserted and extracted tampons with her eyes shut. She told herself that this small flow was nothing compared to the tides that used to stream from Lindsey’s body. She took aspirin round the clock for four days and nights so that no flicker of pain reached her. She pretended nothing was occurring.

  Dr Beales saw it in her altered pupils.

  She said: ‘No, you’re quite wrong. It couldn’t be. There’s no womb inside.’

  He stood up. She had only been there for ten minutes but he told her the session was at an end.

  She said: ‘Dr Beales, it takes me an hour and a half to get here.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Well at least you’ll be spared the journey in future.’

  She gaped at him. She felt sick from aspirin and now from dread.

  ‘Since you are not telling me the truth, Marty, I am bringing this session and this whole line of enquiry to an end.’

  She had to plead with him. She admitted the lie about her periods. She explained to him that it was a lie she herself still wanted to believe, that she had dreams of cutting out her womb and burying it in Antarctica. She swore it was her only lie and that all the rest was truth.

  ‘What about your adopted parents?’ said Beales. ‘Have you told me the truth about them?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mary. ‘And I wrote to my father, telling him you might want to see him.’

  ‘And your mother? The person you described as a “good woman”.’

  Mary took a handkerchief from her jeans and held it to her mouth. She felt icy. She could taste grey aspirin vomit in her throat. She excused herself from the room and was sick in Dr Beales’s toilet. The thought of all the lies that were going to come and going to need guarding and watching made her feel so tired she wanted to lie down on the lavatory floor and sleep. But she returned to Dr Beales.

  He offered her a Glacier Mint. He said: ‘We’ll leave it there for today. Next time, bring your father.’

  *

  Edward Harker wasn’t fond of London. He believed the French understood how to set out a city and the English did not. But he came there for Mary. It was a hot June day and he arrived at Liverpool Street Station wearing his panama hat. His face was tanned from games of cricket in the back garden with Billy. He looked sprightly among the arriving passengers.

  He and Mary rode the tube to Richmond. Harker gave Mary a letter from Pearl, which she put in a back pocket, to read later, when this day was safely over. She said to Harker: ‘If you had been my father, this might not have happened.’

  Harker smiled. He said: ‘I’m pretty sure I know what Billy was in his previous life, did I tell you?’

  ‘A wrestler.’

  ‘No. An Indian princeling.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s in his cricket. He bats with marvellous disdain. Like old Ranjitsinhji.’

  They laughed. They got on a bus to Twickenham. In the sun, Twickenham seemed a nice place. The river had a shadow of blue on its surface. They were early for Beales so they sat on a bench admiring the water, pretending it was clean. After a while, Mary said: ‘I hope you’re not going to mind telling lies, Edward?’

  Harker took off his panama and gave it a shake. He sometimes had the feeling, when he wore this hat, that there was a rodent trapped inside it that would start biting his head any minute. He examined the interior of the panama. There was nothing in it. He put it back on and said: ‘I don’t mind lying to your psychiatrist fellow. The thing that’s going to get difficult is lying to Irene.’

  ‘Well,’ said Mary. ‘Dr Beales keeps mentioning Irene. He keeps saying he will have to talk to her as well as you.’

  Harker shook his head. ‘I could tr
y to explain it to her,’ he said, ‘but you know what she’ll want to know, don’t you? She’ll want to know the why of it. And none of us really knows the why of it. Not you, not me, not the doctors. So that would be the hard bit.’

  ‘I will know why. At some moment in the future. That’s what I think. It’ll just come into my mind in the middle of a silence. That’s what I believe.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Harker. ‘Or maybe not. The world is packed with mystery, you know. We tend to forget this, but it’s still packed tight with it, like water in stone.’

  Dr Beales greeted Harker warmly. His secretary brought in cups of coffee. Mary didn’t look at the two men, but out of the window, at the vacant blue sky.

  The discussion seemed to go well for a while. Harker told Beales that, being a believer in the transmigration of souls, he had no difficulty understanding Mary’s conundrum. But he was a little nervous. He embarked on an unasked-for description of one of his former lives. He told Dr Beales that as a lutenist at the court of the Danish King Christian IV he and his fellow musicians had to play by candlelight in a damp cellar underneath the state rooms. An open trap door above them allowed the King to hear the music, but when he tired of their playing he would kick the trap door shut and then the musicians’ candles would blow out and they would be left in pure darkness.

  Beales didn’t seem interested in this story. He ignored it, in fact. He said to Harker: ‘You say you understand – and I take this to mean an intellectual understanding – Marty’s predicament. What I need to know is whether you are going to give your support to the journey of physical change and reconstruction she may eventually undertake.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Harker. ‘I am. Mary, or Marty as you call her, had a difficult early life and I have always hoped –’

  ‘You say she had a difficult early life. Why was it difficult?’

  ‘For reasons she’s probably outlined to you. Her belief that she wasn’t, in her true essence, a girl, made everything difficult for her.’

  ‘In what ways?’

  ‘Well. In what ways? Well. The behaviour we expect of girls is different from the behaviour we expect of boys, and so the –’

  ‘Describe it.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Describe the difference between the two sets of behaviours or the two sets of expectations.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know that I can be precise, but – ’

  ‘Try to be precise.’

  ‘Well. Take clothes, for instance.’

  ‘Clothes?’

  ‘Yes. Mary, always, from a young age, hated to have to wear a dress. My wife told me of one occasion, when Mary would have been six or seven, when the wearing of a smocked dress caused her great distress.’

  ‘You weren’t present on this occasion?’

  ‘No. But –’

  ‘Can you think of an occasion when you were present when your daughter showed similar distress?’

  ‘Well. Many occasions. She used to say she looked ugly, felt stupid …’

  ‘You used the word “behaviour”. Clothes condition behaviour to some extent, but you couldn’t define them as being behaviour. What expectations of certain behaviour in Marty’s childhood caused her unease?’

  ‘Unease? Well. Toys and games, I suppose. We expected her to play with dolls, play at being a mother …’

  ‘And she refused to do this?’

  ‘Yes. She wasn’t interested in this.’

  ‘But you insisted that she continue with this kind of play?’

  ‘No. Not really …’

  ‘Where was the unease, then?’

  Mary glanced at Harker. He took one of his familiar oil-scented handkerchiefs out of his trouser pocket and wiped his face with it. It was hot in Twickenham. Mary felt guilty that he was here in this hot room.

  Beales asked his question again: ‘If you didn’t insist that play be centred on mothering and domestic tasks, where did Marty’s anxiety have its root?’

  ‘We didn’t insist. But I think we went on assuming that she would play with dolls and so forth and be interested in giving pretend tea parties and all the things which Pearl – ’

  ‘Pearl. Your real daughter?’

  ‘Yes. Pearl loved her dolls. She had a pram for them. She tried to wash their hair …’

  ‘So you never played cricket with Pearl?’

  ‘Cricket?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you did with Marty?’

  Harker turned to Mary. His face looked petunia-red. ‘Cricket? Did we, Mary?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mary. ‘Don’t you remember? In the garden. I used to mainly bowl – with that old tennis ball I had.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Harker. ‘So we did. So you did. So we did!’

  Dr Beales was writing on his pad: Cricket(??). Harker blew his nose. Mary tried to remember what kind of bowler she’d told Dr Beales she’d been. She thought this would be his next question, but it wasn’t. He put the top on his expensive pen and turned to Harker. He spoke gravely. He said: ‘On Marty’s first visit to me, she told me that in childhood you tried to annihilate her. What do you think she meant by that?’

  Harker said: ‘Do you mind if I take my jacket off?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Beales.

  As Harker struggled out of his linen jacket, Mary struggled to remember how old she said she’d been when her real parents had died. She thought she’d probably remembered the two-minute silence and said six, but she wasn’t certain. She’d forgotten she’d ever talked about Sonny, ever used the word ‘annihilate’. Always, when she was with Beales, she found herself believing that Edward and Irene were her mother and father.

  She stood up. ‘It wasn’t him, Dr Beales,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ said Beales.

  ‘It wasn’t Edward. It was my real father I was talking about. He tried to annihilate me. Before he died in the Silver City crash.’

  ‘He tried to annihilate you when you were four or five years old?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Beales turned to Harker. ‘You knew about this?’

  ‘Well …’ said Harker.

  ‘You didn’t know about it?’

  ‘Oh yes. I knew there’d been some trouble. Sonny was always –’

  ‘What was meant by the word “annihilation”?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘It’s a very strong word to use, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘But not, of course, a word that a six-year-old child would be familiar with. So what incidents or feelings was Marty referring to that occurred before you became her adoptive father?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly …’ said Harker.

  ‘You’ve been her surrogate parent for fifteen years and you’ve never made it your business to find out what damage was done to her in early childhood?’

  Harker turned to Mary. He wiped his face with his handkerchief. ‘I expect you talked about this to Irene, didn’t you? Not to me.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mary. ‘I don’t think I ever talked about it to you.’

  Dr Beales threw down his pen. He got up and crossed to the window. He stood there with his back to Mary and Harker, looking out. Harker mouthed the words: ‘I’m sorry,’ to Mary.

  There was a fly in the room. Its mad buzzing against the window was the only sound. Mary thought, silence is all right when you know what a person is thinking in it, but not when you don’t.

  She stared at objects. She saw that the label on Harker’s jacket read ‘Milsom and Sands (Norwich) LTD. Men’s Outfitters. Estb. 1895.’ She wished Edward was there in a Norwich clothes shop, free to saunter out into the sunshine whenever he wanted to.

  She looked at the pen and ink stand on Beales’s desk. It was leather and had a matching blotter. She wondered whether the ink well was made of porcelain. It was the kind of possession Georgia might have boasted about, but it appeared rather tarnished by lack of use.

  Several minutes p
assed before Dr Beales came back to the desk. He was smiling a secret smile, as if he had seen something that amused him while looking out at the waters of Twickenham. He looked affectionately at Harker. He rested his elbows on the matching blotter, obscuring his notes. To Mary’s surprise, he returned to the subject of reincarnation. The word ‘annihilate’ seemed to have floated out of his mind.

  He let Edward Harker describe his life as a nun. He appeared to listen attentively while Edward recounted what he could remember of his nun’s routine, his use of Coal Tar soap, his fondness of the Psalms, the bitter cold of his hands. Mary heard Harker’s voice relax. He sat back in his chair. He seemed to think that all the lying was over. But Mary had seen Beales’s smile. He would let Harker ramble and then he would return to the subject of her childhood.

  He didn’t return to it. He continued to listen courteously until Harker could recall nothing more of his life as a Sister and then he got up again and thanked Harker for coming and asked him to go back to the waiting room.

  Harker looked confused. He stroked his creased linen jacket. He started to apologise for his faulty memory, but Beales cut him off. He wasn’t smiling any more. He said: ‘Wait outside, please. Thank you.’

  When he’d gone, Beales sat down. He closed his eyes. With his eyes closed, he didn’t look like a kitten or a fox any more, but like a thin Caesar, waiting to have his head modelled in bronze.

  With his eyes still closed he said: ‘By doing this, you’ve set your cause back six months, maybe more, maybe for all time.’

  ‘By doing what?’ said Mary.

  Beales ignored this. He said: ‘It means that all my notes are worthless.’

  He opened his eyes wearily, took some pages from Mary’s file and scattered them over the desk.

  ‘Why?’ said Mary.

  ‘Why?’ said Beales. ‘You know why.’

  ‘No …’

  ‘Because you’ve been lying, inventing, telling stories. Your parents are not dead. Your parents are John “Sonny” Ward and Estelle Maria Ward, née Cord. They live at Elm Farm, Swaithey in Suffolk. You invented their death; you invented this very likeable father. I conclude that you have therefore invented all or part of every single thing you’ve told me. This invalidates every session we’ve had. I warned you once before about lying. So there it is. You must find someone else to take your case – if you can. I have no more time for you.’