Sacred Country

by Rose Tremain

  Mary felt a weight come into her chest. She thought this might be how you would feel – just for the tenth of a second – if someone had fired a bullet at you. You would stare in disbelief at your assassin, just as she was staring now at Dr Beales, and then you would fall and cease to be.

  At the station, Edward said: ‘I failed you. It was my fault.’

  ‘No,’ said Mary. ‘He knew the truth all along. Nothing you could have said would have made any difference.’

  ‘What are you going to do now, then?’

  ‘Find someone else.’

  ‘Will that be difficult?’

  ‘It’s all difficult, Edward. I wish none of it was like it is.’

  Harker kissed the top of Mary’s head. Then he got onto the train.

  It sat waiting in dusty light and he sat inside it feeling old and a fool.

  He waved at Mary, who stood on the platform, and she waved back. They waved because they thought the train was moving, but it wasn’t. It was only being shunted a few yards. They felt stupid having this waving rehearsal, so when the train did begin to move they both raised their hands very tentatively, in case this, too, was a false departure and not the real thing.

  *

  Mary went back to her room. She stood in the middle of it and stared at her possessions. For such a long time now she’d been preparing the room for Martin Ward. Her pen and ink sketches of war were taped to the walls. She’d painted the ceiling black. Above the cooker hung a photograph of Jeanne Moreau riding a bicycle.

  She sat down on the bed and lit a French cigarette. She thought of the brightness on the river and the heat in Dr Beales’s room. Her hope and her future had been in those places and she hadn’t truly realised it until now, when they were no longer there and had no existence anywhere.

  There seemed nothing to do but smoke and stare. It was Friday. She would spend the weekend staring at all her black and white things.

  She had no plan. Only the eternal plan of becoming Martin.

  She was in the middle of her third Gitane when she remembered the letter from Pearl. She pulled it out of her pocket and looked at Pearl’s round, childlike writing on the envelope. She felt glad to be staring at something that was going to speak to her and not remain mute like the room. From some previous, dimly lit life she heard Miss McRae ask: ‘What is this baby doing in my lesson, Mary?’ And this made her smile.

  She opened the letter. She wiped her glasses on her sleeve and read:

  Dear Mary,

  I am going to send this letter with Edward. I know something is wrong, but he won’t tell me what. Please write and tell me. I’ve never forgotten Montgolfier and the universe. I don’t want you to be unhappy.

  I’m doing my exams. Biology is my best subject. English is my worst. I have no imagination. For literature we’re reading a book by Joseph Conrad called The Rover which I don’t understand. There are quite a few sentences I don’t understand, even. One of them is ‘Réal’s misanthropy was getting beyond all bounds.’

  Our main things in Biology are called Kingdoms. There is a Fungus Kingdom, for instance. The Animal Kingdom has a sub-kingdom called Protozoa. A fluke is one of these. A fluke leads a life inside other things, e.g. a snail, then a fish, then a human liver. I think this is more interesting than something like ‘Réal’s misanthropy was getting beyond all bounds.’ Don’t you? Think of flukes inside people!

  Edward said perhaps I could come to London for the day and you could take me to the Natural History Museum. Could I? Mum has just said Pearl if you don’t come down now I shall give your supper to Billy.

  (Will go on later.)

  Later

  Here is some news for you.

  I went into Swaithey church one evening to water the flowers and Timmy was there by himself. He was praying. I don’t think he noticed me. (Sorry about new pen.) While I was doing the flowers he started to cry. I went and sat with him and the watering can. He just cried more and more. Then he told me the news, he’s doing Theology in a Correspondence Course. He wants to become a vicar and not die working on the farm. I can’t imagine him as vicar, can you. He’s too small. Your father can’t imagine it either. He thinks Timmy’s just trying to annoy him. He’s told Timmy he will never sell the farm as long as he lives. Timmy said: ‘Pearl, he refuses to imagine what it’s like to be me.’ I said: ‘I expect he wasn’t good at English, like me, and has no imagination, which is why he is a farmer.’ Timmy had no hankie. And I didn’t. He had snot all over his hands.

  I hope I could come to London and go to the N.H. Museum. And see Earl’s Court, where you live.

  I hope you are O.K. Do you like Brian Poole and the Tremeloes?

  Please write.

  love from Pearl

  Mary read the letter again and then another time and then another. She didn’t know why it was comforting. She read it over and over, on and on until she felt sleepy. Then she put out her cigarette and drew the curtains over what remained of evening in the lightless airwell.

  She didn’t undress. She got into bed still wearing her jeans. She put Pearl’s letter on her pillow and placed her head on the round writing and soon slept.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  1970

  Estelle:

  Nothing happens in Swaithey.

  We continue. We listen out for clues to the world. The east wind blows in from Murmansk. Things pass overhead: jet planes; news from Iceland.

  Then one day a tragedy takes place.

  On a Friday evening, Walter Loomis took off the straw hat Grace made him wear in the shop. He hung up the hat and hung up the white meat-stained overall. He had a suitcase packed. Strapped to the case was an old guitar. Grace didn’t know about the packed case and the musical instrument. She sat in her booth doing the week’s sums, knowing nothing.

  He came down, wearing a bomber jacket Grace had never seen. He put down the suitcase. He said: ‘I’m going now. I tried to warn you about this a hundred times, but you were never listening.’

  The shop was closed for just a week. Grace put up a Notice to Customers, apologising for the inconvenience caused.

  During the week, I went on one of my walks to the river. It was a damp day. I saw Grace standing still under a black umbrella, looking at the water. She reminded me of a photograph.

  I asked her into the house for tea. I sat her by the Rayburn. Her eyes were red and dry. She said: ‘Don’t let me interrupt your afternoon.’

  People are seldom too embarrassed to confide their misfortunes to me. It’s because they think mine are worse. They think Mountview is a revolving bin like the Rotor at Battersea Funfair. They think we go flying round in it, damaging our bones, saved from death only by centrifugal force.

  I made the tea. I put some flapjacks on a green plate. Grace put her hands round her teacup. She said: ‘Walter’s gone. My Walter.’

  She described the bomber jacket, the suitcase and the guitar. She described herself inside her glass booth. She said: ‘I forgot where I was with the accounts, Estelle. I had to do the accounts all again.’

  She doesn’t know where he is. He refused to tell her. He said he wanted to be where no one could find him. I immediately thought of a wilderness and old Walter building himself a willow cabin in it. My immediate thoughts aren’t often the appropriate ones to be having at the time.

  I said: ‘What are you going to do, Grace?’ She put her teacup down and picked up a flapjack and looked at it and then replaced it on the green plate. She said: ‘I’ve sent for Josephine.’

  She left soon after. I watched her walk over the fields and out of sight. I have never liked her. I have disliked her without knowing it for almost twenty-five years and now, at this moment of her tragedy, I see it plainly.

  I watched what she did.

  She hired a new butcher from Bungay, a man with a constant smile. His hands are neat and fat. She went back inside her booth as if nothing had happened. The man is called Arthur.

  I moved Walter around in my mind. I pu
t him in Africa, under a thorn tree, singing. Then I moved him to Kansas. He and a gas station with one pump were the only upright features in the flat, yellow world.

  Grace began to expand her egg empire. She built a new hen factory. She put in a thousand birds. One way of overcoming tragedy is to get rich.

  Her sister Josephine moved in. Josephine kept the house. She drew the parlour curtains so that sunlight would not fade the velveteen upholstery. I met her in Cunningham’s. She was buying elastic. When I asked whether there was any word from Walter, she said: ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Ward, but I simply do not discuss that subject!’

  The hen houses remind me of concentration camp huts. I can see them from the window of my room. England was once a beautiful place. Long ago.

  Pete Loomis knows where Walter is, but Walter swore him to secrecy.

  I visited Pete in his trolley bus. The air inside it smells like an old flannel.

  It was evening, not quite dark, but he had his Tilley lamp going. It sighs and whistles. He said: ‘Sounds can catch me off guard. Sometimes I think I’m back in Tennessee and the lamp is a lawn sprinkler.’

  The wound on his face has healed. On one side, he has the profile of a monkey. He used to be large and now he seems diminished, as if he’s trying to embalm himself while still alive. His neck is creased. When he pours whisky for me, his hands tremble. He said, most unexpectedly: ‘You’re still a lovely woman, Estelle. Does anyone ever remind you of that?’

  When you’ve been in a place for a while, you aren’t aware of the smell it had when you came in. I noticed this at Mountview. And I began to like being in the bus.

  I decided to get drunk. It wasn’t an unreasonable decision, considering everything.

  Pete took my hand, the one not holding my glass of whisky, and stroked it. He said: ‘Walter was a day-dreamer. A day-and night-dreamer. If you dream like he did, you have to get out and try things and take the consequences.’

  I didn’t contradict him. I used to dream of arriving at the house of Bobby Moore. It had a bell-chime. He came to the door wearing a ruffled shirt and took me into his well-exercised arms. But it was all reverie. There were no consequences except dreamed consequences of an erotic kind. And I regretted this.

  Nothing happens in Swaithey.

  I stayed in Pete Loomis’s bus for more than two hours. Everything turned a shade of amber. I felt surprised by what I saw and said and heard.

  I rolled out the comedy of my life. I said: ‘We’re losing Timmy. We’re about to lose him. Just as Grace has lost Walter to the wilderness. We’re going to have to give Timmy away.’

  ‘To whom?’ said Pete.

  ‘To no one,’ I said. ‘To a vertical line.’

  Pete didn’t believe me. He thought I had invented this vertical line with the mad part of my mind.

  ‘And Mary?’ he said.

  I said nothing.

  ‘What’s become of her, Estelle?’

  ‘Pete,’ I said, ‘this isn’t the subject any more. Timmy is the subject.’

  ‘If you insist,’ he said. ‘But one day, Mary is going to come back. You know this, don’t you?’

  I said: ‘All I know is that Sonny talks to nobody human now. Not to Timmy. Not to me. He talks to his dog, Wolf. He tells the dog what he wants for his supper. When he goes the toilet, the dog sits outside the door whining with agony.’

  We laughed at that point and refilled our glasses. I said: ‘I told you it was comic, didn’t I?’

  When I left, it was dark. There was nothing amber-coloured about it. It was the deepest, softest darkness I had ever seen.

  Pete didn’t want me to go. He wanted to continue stroking my hand. I told him I would stay another thirty-five minutes if he told me where Walter was and then I would have to leave because it would be time for The High Chaparral on television. I said: ‘I never miss that. I love things set in America, far away, with guns and dust.’

  He said: ‘Go, then. Leave an old man. I’m not breaking my promise to Walter. That’s sacred.’

  I waded through the darkness. There were no stars.

  Earth stuck to my shoes and weighed my limbs down. I made a noise like laughter.

  When the house came into view, there was one light showing in an upstairs window. Timmy’s light. He sits at a desk he made out of chipboard, reading his way into a different life.

  Mary:

  After that letter she wrote me, Pearl got ill. She had meningitis. She was ill for a long time. She lay in her green and white room and had morphine dreams. I wanted to go and visit her, but I don’t think the day will ever come when I can go back to Swaithey.

  I sent her postcards of London and a record by Cat Stevens. Edward wrote me letters reporting on her progress. In one of these, he said: ‘I believe that in her previous life she may have been a creature of the air – a dragonfly or a lark, she is so fragile and light.’

  I remembered the day when I took her to school. I’d nearly dropped her onto my desk she felt so huge and heavy in my arms. But of course she is light now. She has got lighter with time.

  During that winter, I told Rob and Tony about my determination to become Martin. We were in Zorba’s, eating goat rissoles. They both took up their check napkins and wiped their mouths. They looked stunned. I said: ‘Have a sip of Retzina before you say anything.’

  Rob was the first to speak. He said: ‘What’s wrong with being a woman, Mart?’

  I said: ‘Nothing is wrong with being a woman. It’s only that I’m not one. I never have been.’

  Tony said: ‘Heck, Mart. What a destiny! I’m flattened.’

  But they grew acclimatised to it. When they did, they found me more interesting than before, as though I’d become an honorary Abo. They raised my salary. They bought me my own coffee mug with the name Martin on it. They saw me as one of the dispossessed.

  And it was Tony who promised to find me a new psychiatrist to replace Dr Beales. I said: ‘There is one condition: he must not live in Twickenham.’

  Tony said: ‘Don’t be obstructive, Mart. Finding one anywhere isn’t going to be a holiday.’

  The one he found lived in darkness like a coelacanth. His consulting room was off Ladbroke Grove. It was full of tropical fish. This was the only illumination in it, the light from the fish tanks. In one was an axolotl. The man said, out of the green darkness: ‘This is a slayer species.’

  His name was Martin – a coincidence I didn’t like. His second name was Sterns. He said: ‘All my patients address me by my first name, but if you are uncomfortable with this, call me Sterns. It won’t disconcert me.’

  He was small and bearded. He had a melodic voice. He walked about while I talked, staring at the fish. The sighing and whispering of the aeration reminded me of the sea. No particle of daylight ever entered the room where we worked. This was his word – ‘working’. He said: ‘Martin, we are going to work on memory, on lost things, on the past. It will be the hardest work you will ever do.’

  It was difficult to lie to Sterns, even in the dark. He thought my case was so interesting, he agreed to treat me without asking for money. I told him the truth about Sonny and Estelle. I described the day when Sonny cut the crepe bandages off my breasts. I told him about my mother’s room at Mountview and her meaningless piece of knitting. I said: ‘I’m lost to them and they to me. For ever, perhaps. Except that I still have dreams of … when I’m Martin, putting on armour and rescuing Estelle like Sir Lancelot and having her with me and keeping her safe.’

  ‘And you know, of course,’ said Sterns, ‘that this is an unreasonable goal?’

  I said: ‘I know it, but I don’t feel it.’

  ‘I will help you to learn to feel it. Now I want you to start again at the beginning. I want you to describe to me everything that you felt and everything that happened on that day of the silence for the King.’

  I began with that, with the sleet falling, with my prayers for the postage stamp. It seemed far away, in another country. I thought: I’m twenty-f
our; my life is a short one, so the telling of it will be short. But weeks passed and then months. Some of the fish died and floated upwards. Sterns’s beard, lit by the aquaria, seemed to be going grey. And the repetition of my life went on and on and on. Then one day, Sterns said: ‘Very well, Martin. I think it’s time to take the first step. I think it is time to begin a monitored metamorphosis.’

  ‘The male hormone, testosterone, will, when ingested into a body that is female, effect certain changes over a period of time. The most significant of these will be:

  A loss of body fat

  A reduction in breast size

  An enlargement of the clitoris

  The gradual appearance of facial and body hair

  Cessation of the menstrual cycle.’

  This was my voice describing a clinical process to Rob and Tony. We were in the office, eating our lunch of cheese sandwiches. My voice was unrecognisable to me. It was summer again. The Comme il Faut hairdressers underneath us was playing ‘Pity the Poor Innocents’ by Richie Havens. Tony and Rob stared at me for signs of facial hair and saw none. I said: ‘It’ll grow in the dark, like the greying of Sterns’s beard.’

  ‘How long is it going to take, hey?’ asked Rob.

  ‘Months,’ I said. ‘Or a year.’

  I was afraid. I didn’t tell Rob and Tony this. I was afraid that the things I had described to them so expertly wouldn’t happen, that I would wait and watch and my body would stay just as it was. Every night, I took off my clothes and looked at myself. I was Mary. Older than when I threw my skirts out into the London night. Older than when I slept in Georgia’s bed from Heal’s. But still Mary: round face, rounded breasts, roundly hateful in her own eyes.

  Yet on the very day of my first testosterone injection a letter from Cord had arrived. He had won the Battle of the Road.

  ‘Martin,’ he wrote. ‘Go out into the street! Embrace the onion seller or the road sweeper! Remind them that the voice of the small man (and the small woman, come to think of it) can still make itself heard in this country. Tell them that the residents of Gresham Tears would not be moved. And now our water-meadows are safe.’