by Rose Tremain
‘Move on where?’ I asked.
‘America,’ said Walter. ‘Nashville. That’s where my life’s going to end up.’
I went to see him late one night, after the tube had closed down.
I walked over Battersea Bridge. There was a high wind and things were swirling about in the orange London sky, dead leaves and old pamphlets.
He lived in a basement in a row of little houses that were disintegrating one by one. Above the row was the power station, blotting out the moon and stars. Before he’d got up to answer the door, he’d been sitting on a hard chair, strumming. There was nothing in his room except this one chair and a bed with no cover and a juke box. Walter said: ‘It works. It plays two songs, “Only You” and “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling”.’
I sat down on Walter’s bed. The room smelled of unwashed clothes. He said: ‘There’s a kitchen as well.’
I wasn’t wearing my suit. I was wearing jeans and a leather jacket. Walter said I looked more recognisable in these. He was still dressed as a cowboy. His boots had metal studs on them. His hat was hanging on the back of the door. He said there was a Country and Western Society that met once a week in a pub in the Latchmere Road and that he’d ordered these clothes from them. ‘They’re made in Tennessee,’ he said, ‘they’re the genuine thing.’
He offered me some whisky. It’s a drink I’ve tried to like and failed, but it was all Walter had, so I accepted it. When he handed me the glass, he said: ‘No one else in the world knows where I am, except Pete.’
It wasn’t warm in the room. Walter said he didn’t mind. He was acclimatising himself. He said it fell to seventeen below in a Tennessee winter, that the trees looked as if they were made of glass.
I said: ‘How will you pay to get there, Walter?’ and his look became confused.
He said: ‘Pete sends me dollars when he finds them. He hid them away in the bus years ago and now he can’t remember where. But they turn up from time to time. I hope they’re still valid. Sometimes he turns up a twenty.’
He didn’t seem very interested in what or who I was becoming. His mind was on himself, on staying alive in London and getting to Nashville. I asked him whether he knew anybody there.
He said: ‘You don’t need to. I read this in the memoirs of a Grand Ole Opry star. If you can sing and play, you just start doing it and someone hears you sooner or later.’
I asked: ‘Where do you do it, Walter?’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘there are some names of bars I’ve got. You go in there and hang around. People are kinder there.’
‘Why?’
‘Why are they kinder? Because they’re country people.’
‘Swaithey people are “country people”.’
‘It’s not the same. Swaithey people think they know things. They think they’ve got everything mapped out. Country Music isn’t about knowing things, it’s about knowing nothing and discovering everything for the first time and then writing about it. Jimmie Rodgers, who was the first hillbilly singer I heard, used to have a thing he said to his audience. He used to say: “Hey, hey, it won’t be long now,” and no one really knew what he meant by that, but I know. He was talking about how he felt in his soul – that one day he’d find the answer to everything and that day wouldn’t be long in coming, but at the same time it might never come, so the best thing to do while waiting was to write songs and sing them.’
‘Is that how you feel, Walter?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And I’m thirty-five. I should know a lot by now and I don’t, but I think the day’s coming when I will. And at least I knew enough not to stay.’
‘In Swaithey?’
‘Yes. Except now I think of her, every morning. Getting up at five. Making tea. Going down to open the shop. It kills me. Here.’
He hit the area of his heart. It was protected by the suede fringes of his jacket.
‘That’s no use, Walter,’ I said.
‘I know. And I couldn’t have stayed on. I couldn’t have. I’d be dead by now.’
‘I never think back,’ I said.
‘I don’t believe that,’ said Walter.
‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s true. Never.’
He asked me then what had happened to make me look like a youth that was small for his age. I thought, poor old Walter will believe anything, he hasn’t got a clue about what is possible and what is not, so I said: ‘This is a thing that happens to a minute percentage of people. They cross from one gender to another. It’s in the Talmud. In the Bible, even. It’s been known since time began. In certain African tribes such people are venerated as possessing wisdom. In the mountains of Tibet many men have ended their lives as women and they think, there, that it may have something to do with the brightness of the air.’
Walter drank his whisky. In the unshaded light of the room, I noticed a shiny bald spot on his head. I thought, he’s too old to be trying to get to America.
He said: ‘You expected this to happen then, did you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Always.’
I told him about the two-minute silence. I had retold this moment so many times now – to Sterns, to Edward Harker, to Pearl – that I could see it and feel it and hear it perfectly, as if it had occurred yesterday. At the same time, I found myself thinking, did it occur at all or did I invent it?
Walter seemed quite affected by this. He said: ‘I wish I’d had one moment like that. When I knew what I was.’
‘You’re a singer, Walter,’ I said.
‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘That or nothing.’ Then he said: ‘D’you know Hank Williams?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t know any Country Music.’
He picked up his guitar. He began to sing a song called ‘Alone and Forsaken’. It was one in the morning. He had no thought for all the other people asleep in the shadow of the power station. In the middle of the song, he stopped and said: ‘This was the first song I found with the word “whippoorwill” in it. Nobody English even knows it’s a bird.’
He resumed his singing. I’d always thought of Walter Loomis as a person who would never be good at anything and here he was singing like Glen Campbell.
The grass in the valley is starting to die,
And out in the darkness the whippoorwills cry.
From the Battersea darkness, a man yelled at him to shut the fuck up. He laid his guitar down with a sigh.
‘London’s a terrible place,’ he said. ‘In Tennessee, it isn’t like this.’
‘What is it like?’ I said.
Walter said he didn’t really know except there was a shine on everything. He started reciting the names of Tennessee trees: Live Oak, Hickory, Red-Bud, Slash Pine, Magnolia, Pecan …
If I’d been Rob or Tony, I would have reminded him about all the years of black slavery and segregation in the South, about freedom marchers who were killed in the middle of the road. But this was pointless. If you live in Swaithey for thirty-five years, as Walter had done, you come to believe that every bit of bad news from the rest of the world is over by the time it reaches you and so you don’t have to think about it unless you’re interested in History. All that concerns you is the state of your own earth: the good in it or the stones.
I asked Walter where he would live when he got to Nashville. He said he didn’t know and didn’t care. He said he could only imagine a small space, like a boxcar.
‘This is 1971, Walter,’ I said. ‘The age of boxcar living is over, isn’t it?’
He ignored this. He said: ‘I’d like to own a dog and have it with me.’
I thought, as I left and walked back across the bridge, he hasn’t got one clue about anything except his singing. He’s going to an imaginary place and he’ll die there.
I felt very tired. I barely knew Walter Loomis, but now he had added his name to the list of people I had to try to protect from harm.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
1972
Transillumination
Edward Harker was inspectin
g wood with his illuminated magnifier. He was standing under the Harker’s Bats sign.
Another cricket season was about to start. There was spring sunshine in the street. Upstairs, he could hear Irene hoovering. He remembered the day he’d tried to sack her while eating a Battenberg cake, and how, on his solitary holiday in France, he had thought of nothing but her.
He looked round the cellar. He wondered, without self-pity, what Irene would do with it when he’d gone. He decided that she would tidy it up a little and then leave it as it was and in time it would resemble a museum. Irene would come down the steps, once in a while, and stand at the door with her arms folded and look at it and think of him. Then she would go back up the stairs and put kettle on or water her cactus, and that would be all. Except that by then she would be growing old.
He resumed his inspection of wood grain. He thought, in my life as a nun, I used to stare at wood – at the back of a pew, at the door of the confessional box – in a concentrated way.
Pearl was sitting in a classroom at college, listening to a lecture entitled ‘Caries and Civilisation’. The room was almost empty. There didn’t seem to be a queue of people in the world wanting to be dental nurses.
Pearl made notes all the way through lectures because it wasn’t always possible to know during a lecture what was vital and what wasn’t. You only discovered the vitalness of something later on. She thought that wars might be like this for the people fighting them. They learned afterwards which battles were important and then gave the battle a name. The Americans who fought in the Battle of the Bulge, for instance. They didn’t know that was what they were doing. No general came and said to them: ‘Now, men, this is the Battle of the Bulge and it is going to be vital.’ They just fought and died or fought and survived and later the name ‘Bulge’ was given to what they’d done and the word ‘vital’ attached to it.
This was the last lesson of the day. Pearl wrote: ‘To summarise – in primitive or so-called “uncivilised” diets only raw and natural foods eaten, needing considerable amount of mastication. Mastication = secondary function = cleaning the teeth (e.g. raw carrot, a hard apple). Primitive societies = little or no food debris left on teeth. Incidence of caries is less than in civilised world.’
Pearl got on her train back to Saxmundham and thought about the word ‘civilisation’. She stared at the pale green fields and the finches and sparrows flying up from them as the train passed. The thing that preoccupied her was what her contribution to civilisation was going to be. She wondered whether being a dental nurse and helping to maintain calm and order in the surgery was going to be enough, or whether something else was waiting for her. Something more vital.
Her boyfriend, Clive, was in Durham, studying tree surgery. He wrote her letters in beautiful writing like calligraphy. He told her that dreams of her hair sometimes stopped him concentrating on the trees.
Pearl liked these letters more for the handwriting than for the actual words. And she was enjoying his absence. She preferred his absence to his presence, just as she preferred thinking about him to touching him.
During her journey home, the sun went down and the green on the fields took on a peculiar whiteness, like frost. And it was during this alteration to the colour of things that Pearl decided, if he asks me, I’ll say no. Because it isn’t him I’m waiting for. I’m waiting for someone or something else.
Pearl wrote to Mary and asked whether she could come and stay for a night. She thought Mary might be able to help her compose a letter to Clive that would tell him she didn’t love him and that she never had dreams about his hair.
In the household, Edward referred to Mary as Martin but Irene had said: ‘I’m not capable of this, Edward. I’m just not.’
In Pearl’s mind, Mary was between names. The old Mary, walking around in Miss McRae’s clothes, was still visible to her, yet getting fainter. The new Martin, small and lean and with his soft beard, stood to one side, waiting. Pearl thought, part of me wants to keep her like this: almost invisible. Part of me doesn’t want to have to see Martin close to.
But then, when she saw a sky full of stars and she remembered Montgolfier and the universe, she knew she didn’t want to let Mary disappear, whoever she was trying to become. For one thing, Mary loved her. For another, she seemed to know about the world – about Greek food wrapped in leaves, about South African homesickness, about the map of South East Asia, about the sounds that came out of an airwell in the darkness, about the dances of Aboriginal tribes. She could recite The Words of Hakluyt Upon Reaching Moscow. She had spent a hundred hours in a room illuminated by fish. She knew her way to Twickenham.
Mary wrote back to Pearl very quickly. The letter was typed on Liberty stationery. It said: ‘Bring a swimming costume. For years I’ve worried about you drowning so now I’m going to teach you to swim.’ It was signed Mary Martin. When Irene read it, she said: ‘There was an actress called that. Or still is? Sometimes you don’t hear when a person’s died, do you?’
They went to the baths at Marshall Street.
Pearl said: ‘Timmy used to come here.’
Mary said: ‘Oh yes?’
She had bought some red inflatable arm bands. She made Pearl put her arms into them. Pearl’s swimming costume was turquoise, the colour of the water, and in the light of the baths her limbs looked shining white. Mary wore khaki shorts and a black T-shirt under which her breasts hardly showed now. She made Pearl sit on the side of the pool and put her legs into the water. She said: ‘Almost every living thing can swim. Even an elephant. Look at the water and imagine it holding you up.’
Pearl said: ‘It doesn’t do any good. I’m still afraid.’
At the other end of the baths, which looked a long way away to Pearl, a solitary high diver was practising.
Mary got into the water and swam a width, then came back to Pearl. She stood in front of her holding on to her hands. She said: ‘Pearl, be sensible. You’re my precious thing. I’m not going to let you come to any harm, am I?’
She pulled Pearl gently into the water. It came up above Pearl’s waist and the ends of her hair got wet. She was trembling. Her mouth looked thin and mauve.
‘Right,’ said Mary, ‘I’m going to keep holding your hands and I want you to lie down in the water and let your legs come up behind you. Then I’ll just gently pull you around.’
‘I can’t,’ said Pearl.
‘Yes, you can,’ said Mary. ‘Remember the fish of the Great Coral Reef. Imagine you’re one of them.’
‘They were puppets,’ said Pearl, ‘they had strings holding them up.’
‘So do you,’ said Mary. ‘I’m your string.’
So Pearl lay down in the water. Her hair fanned out around her head like weed. Her blue eyes looked dazzled, as though by extraordinary news. Mary walked backwards, crouching a little, pulling Pearl along.
After they’d gone round the shallow end several times, Mary put Pearl’s hands onto the bar and held her feet and then made her kick her legs. She said: ‘Imagine your future now: surfing, water polo!’
Pearl managed to smile. The kicking was warming her up and she felt a tiny particle of her fear fly away up into the glass roof and stay there, looking down at her.
‘Now,’ said Mary, ‘I’m going to guide you along again, like before, but this time I’m hardly going to pull you. You’re going to propel yourself with your kicking. Try to push me backwards. Imagine you’re trying to push me away.’
So they progressed round and round the shallow end of the baths. A group of children arrived and stared at them: a young man wearing clothes in the water and a girl with mermaid’s hair who couldn’t swim.
After two hours they were tired, but they felt happy. The swimming lessons had taken Pearl’s mind off the letter to Clive that still had to be composed and it had taken Mary’s mind off everything in her life except Pearl. She remembered a feeling she’d sometimes had long ago in Swaithey – that she was a person sitting on her own in the dark and Pearl was a la
ntern slide.
That evening in Mary’s room, Pearl said: ‘I’ve got an exam at Easter. Do you mind if I read some revision notes aloud?’
Pearl was in Mary’s bed and Mary was lying on the end of it, looking at their swimming clothes hanging on the fireguard and dripping onto the floor. She said: ‘No.’
Pearl was wearing scarlet pyjamas. She’d tied her hair back with a white ribbon.
She said: ‘Do you know what transillumination is?’
‘No,’ said Mary, ‘but I could try to guess. It’s something hidden in the past which suddenly becomes clear?’
‘No,’ said Pearl. ‘It’s a method of detecting a mesial or distal cavity. Less reliable than an x-ray but quite successful. A very bright light is placed against the crown of the tooth and the cavity is revealed as a dark shadow.’
‘Oh,’ said Mary. ‘I see.’
She found Pearl’s foot, with the blankets on top of it, and held on to it. She said: ‘Tell me about Clive.’
Pearl put her revision notebook down. ‘He has beautiful handwriting,’ she said.
‘Does he want to marry you?’
Pearl ignored this. She said: ‘The thing I really love about him is his handwriting.’
They were silent for a long time. Then Mary said: ‘That’s one of those statements that sounds callous at first and then later not, because a person’s handwriting can be the most beautiful – or the most ugly – thing about him.’
Pearl stared at Mary. She thought, I won’t write the letter. Not yet. All I’ll do is to remember what Mary just said in case it becomes vital in the future.
Then Pearl said: ‘Changing the subject, have you ever understood what the Battle of the Bulge was?’
‘Yes,’ said Mary. ‘I saw a film about it. Starring Robert Culp.’
‘And?’
‘I can’t remember. I think it marked a turning point in the war.’
Later, when Mary was almost asleep on her floor cushions and the lives in the well were quietening down, Pearl said: ‘Mary, I’m going to call you Martin from now on, I promise. The last time I call you Mary will turn out to be now.’
