Sacred Country

by Rose Tremain

  Back in ’39

  Sonny sat alone in the kitchen.

  He was trying to remember what date it was, but he couldn’t. It was April, he knew this. He just didn’t know which bit of April the world was in.

  He was drinking stout, as usual, but not with any enjoyment. For some time, in fact, the taste of stout had sickened him, yet he still sat there, night after night, drinking it.

  The dog, Wolf, lay at Sonny’s feet. It was sleeping. Human beings complained if you talked to them in their sleep. The world of their dreams was more precious to them than anything you could ever say. But dogs didn’t give a damn. They woke up and maybe walked round in a circle a few times and then lay down again, listening.

  Sonny rested his damaged ear on his hand. Since Timmy’s leaving, it had ached more. Also, it gave him dreams about Timmy, if he slept on that side. He had to remember this and turn his head the other way, towards the blue wall.

  There had been no letters from Timmy. Unless he wrote secretly to his mother and she hid the letters away. Months had passed. It was April. Each month had come and gone with no letter in it anywhere. ‘It’s unendurable,’ Sonny said aloud to Wolf. ‘It’s unbearable. It’s worse than the war.’

  The dog got up and shook itself, then went to its bowl and lapped water. It returned to Sonny and lay down again, with its head on Sonny’s feet.

  Sonny reached down and stroked its head. ‘I don’t know why I stopped the van,’ he said. ‘I did it, bang, like that. I just did it and then it was done.

  ‘I should have relented. I should’ve driven back and picked up the boy and said, Get in lad, go on, get in.

  ‘I’ve been pig-headed from birth. Proud. No one knows why.

  ‘I should’ve thought, if I do this, I won’t be forgiven.

  ‘And who can stand that – not to be forgiven by your only son? I can’t. No one could.

  ‘So what’s to be done? I can’t write a letter. I can’t spell the word April.

  ‘What’s to be done, Wolf?’

  Hearing its name, the dog gave a whine. Sometimes, late at night like this, Sonny and Wolf went for walks down to the river and Sonny would piss in the water.

  Sonny refilled his glass, which was nearly full anyway. He took a disgusted sip of the beer. It was trying to kill him, but he wasn’t going to let it.

  ‘She’ll have to write, that’s all,’ he said. ‘She’ll have to explain I wasn’t well at that time. Disappointment can affect the things a man does. She’ll have to explain that.

  ‘And then Timmy’ll write back. He’ll write to say what he misses is the land – the harvest and the ditches and the whole of everything going on under the sky.’

  Sonny stopped speaking. His heart felt lighter now that he’d decided what had to be done.

  But he wanted it done now, tonight. He looked round the kitchen, as if he expected to find Estelle there. He knew she wasn’t there and he looked round and round the room just the same.

  He couldn’t remember where she was. He had a feeling she wasn’t in the house so he got up and whistled the dog to his side and went out into the spring night, calling Estelle’s name.

  She was in Pete’s bus. He was playing records so old they didn’t look like records; they looked like a crunchy thing you could eat. Now and then, in the conversation Pete and Estelle were having, he stopped in mid-sentence to grin at some old incomprehensible line of a song.

  They were drinking whisky. They did this quite often now because neither of them had much else to do with their time. Pete had been sacked from his job in the slaughtering yard by Grace. She paid him a little pension instead. She said: ‘You forfeited your share of the business in ’38, when you went slumming round America, and now your sight’s faulty. We’ve got to call it a day.’

  It was true about his sight. It was as if his wandering left eye used to be guided into alignment with the right by his nose and, after the piece of his nose was cut away, it had nothing to fix on.

  He didn’t care about the loss of his job. It had been a terrible job, when you thought it. What he cared about was being alive.

  He spent a lot of his time ransacking the bus to find dollar bills to send to Walter. He had moved all the furniture around. He had been through every old box and drawer and tin and jar and pot. He had made four cuts in his mattress. He had now posted to London a total of one hundred and nine dollars, thirty cents. He thought there might be more, but he didn’t know where else to look.

  He looked forward to Estelle’s visits. He sat her down in his one comfy chair and poured her a slug of whisky and told her she still reminded him of Ava Gardner. Sometimes, he stroked her arm. Mostly, he just talked to her and played her Country songs.

  She said: ‘Sometimes I want to say things. Then at others I don’t want to say a word. It could be determined by the moon.’

  Once or twice, they danced. They held each other correctly, like old-fashioned dancers, but then they just stood in the middle of the bus, swaying.

  On the night when Sonny went out into the dark calling Estelle’s name, she and Pete were dancing. The song they danced to was called ‘Knoxville Girl’. It was about a crime, and without meaning to Estelle found herself saying: ‘There used to be rumours about you, Pete. That you’d done a criminal thing in America.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Well?’ she said. ‘You can tell me. I was going to commit a crime in 1966. I was going to steal a baby.’

  ‘It was never what people imagined,’ said Pete. ‘Because no one in Swaithey could imagine anything like that.’

  ‘I can imagine anything on earth. The last time I was at Mountview I shared some of my time with an air traffic controller. He wore rubber gloves. He made signals to the air.’

  ‘I wouldn’t even call it a crime really,’ Pete went on. ‘But I paid in a way. It was 1939.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said Estelle. ‘Then we could have another dance.’

  The song ended, but the record still went round and round.

  Pete took the needle off it. He refilled their whisky glasses. He said to Estelle: ‘Telling doesn’t matter now, now that I’m not part of Loomis’s. I used to keep everything quiet out of respect for that.’

  Then he sat on a hard chair opposite Estelle and started straight into his story. Estelle lit a cigarette. The Tilley lamp hissed like a jet of water.

  Pete: ‘It was when I was in Memphis, working as a church gardener. I met a girl at a honky-tonk.’

  ‘What’s a honky-tonk?’ asked Estelle.

  ‘Oh, we don’t have them,’ said Pete. ‘Little bar kind of place where Country musicians play. You can do most things there: sing, dance, whistle, cry your eyes out, clap and scream. I loved them.

  ‘So anyway, I met a girl there in ’38. Name of Annie. Worked for this old guy, Webster Wills, who had a pawnshop. In those days, this is what Memphis had most of, after singers: pawnshops.

  ‘She was a sweet girl. Young and sweet and poor. She worked in the backroom of the shop, cataloguing what came in and what was redeemed. Anything worth a dime came into her hands at one time or another: instruments, of course, but a lot else. Weights, radios, wedding rings, brushes and combs, lockets full of hair. You name it.

  ‘She’d stared at me in the bar. I talked to her to stop her saying something. I thought she was going to say how ugly I looked.

  ‘She took me home to her place, where she lived by herself with this little dog, Pixie. It was a griffon. It was the size of a squirrel. She said: “Pete, meet Pixie,” and held its paws up for me to shake. Then she said: “Pixie’s alone all day and he likes to be with me at night. I hope you don’t mind?”

  ‘What could I say? I said nothing. I started kissing the girl and the only thing that was on my mind was getting inside her and letting go.’

  Pete took a drink of whisky. He said: ‘Shall I stop? Am I shocking you?’

  ‘No,’ said Estelle. ‘Nothing shocks me. What did she look like, Annie?’

&
nbsp; ‘Oh, pretty and not. Mousy. Grey eyes. But lovely in all the important places. And so something started between us and I kept on seeing her. And it was all fine and sweet. Everything was fine and sweet except the dog.

  ‘I used to say, “Annie, put the damn little dog out somewhere while we do this. Lock it in a cupboard.” But she wouldn’t. She liked it there, climbing all over us. She said: “Dogs are the only loyal creatures on God’s earth.”

  ‘Then one night – and we were in ’39 by then and war in Europe was coming – when I was in bed with Annie, I felt this awful little Pixie scrabbling onto my arse. I looked behind me to push it off and then I saw its little red thing out, the size of a beanshoot, and it was doing something against me.

  ‘And I went crazy. It was so damn disgusting I didn’t give a thought to Annie’s feelings. I grabbed that disgusting Pixie by its scrawny throat and strangled it with one hand!

  ‘I shouldn’t’ve done it. I should’ve just got angry with Annie and made her put the dog somewhere else. But I was so angry, I wasn’t rational. It happens, doesn’t it? I killed the dog and threw its body on the floor.’

  Estelle opened her mouth and laughed. She tipped back her white throat and choked with laughter. She said: ‘Oh sometimes, the world is a scream.’

  Pete said: ‘This wasn’t a scream. I was a murderer to Annie. And to me, because I destroyed her and me in less than twenty seconds and I never saw her again. I used to walk past the pawnshop, but not go in. And I was sick with misery, somehow. And after a little while I thought, it’s over in Memphis, Pete. It’s over. And what happens to you now is the war.’

  Estelle was still laughing. Then she stopped. ‘Is that what happened to you?’ she said. ‘The war?’

  ‘Yes. I came home and joined up. All I ever told Ernie was there’d been a bit of trouble with a girl and the word “trouble” got turned into the word “crime”. I don’t know how. It must have gone round Swaithey in a whisper and come out Chinese.’

  Pete seemed very tired after the telling of this story. Giddy with drink and laughter, Estelle pulled him to his feet and walked him to the bed, where he lay down. She covered him with an old quilt he always claimed was his only proper souvenir of the American South; that and the hundred and nine dollars and all his memories of scarlet birds and scarlet trees.

  She wandered home. She heard Sonny calling her name.

  Corpus Debile

  Towards the end of Timmy’s first year at Teviotts, he fell ill.

  The infirmary was on the top floor of the main building, right under the roof. From its windows you could see the sea. It faced south and was a bright, airy place. The founders of Teviotts had believed that most illness was caused by despair and that light had curative powers.

  David Tate climbed the narrow stairs that led up to the infirmary. He was accompanied by the Matron, who led him to Timmy’s bedside. In a dream, Timmy had smelled Dr Tate’s hair oil and then, when he woke, there was the man sitting on a chair looking down at him. He blinked and David Tate smiled. The Matron adjusted her starched cuffs and walked away.

  Timmy knew why he was ill. He was ill because he couldn’t keep up with what Teviotts was trying to teach him. He was ill because Teviotts expected him to be clever. He was ill with struggling with Latin and Hebrew. The other students all seemed to be good scholars and Timmy was miles away from being a scholar at all. So he had fallen ill. ‘Fallen’ was the word. He had got up on a Wednesday morning and stood by his bed and fallen over. He heard someone scream and that was all that he remembered until he woke up again in the infirmary and saw a luminous brightness all around him.

  When he saw David Tate sitting by him he tried to haul himself up the bed. He felt boiling hot from his sleep. His hair was damp. Dr Tate said: ‘Stay still, Timothy. Stay and rest.’

  His illness had been diagnosed by the doctor as a virus. Tate said: ‘You have a virus. “Virus” is a useful word.’

  Timmy tried to nod. He seemed to have no control over his heavy head.

  ‘You don’t have to talk,’ said Tate. ‘Let me talk to you for a bit, then I’ll leave you in peace and you can go back to sleep.’

  David Tate took off his glasses and polished them on his sleeve. Then he said: ‘The curriculum at Teviotts is reasonably harsh. Men who go into the Church must at least know the Scriptures. The Church also considers a knowledge of Latin and, to a lesser extent, Hebrew to be valuable. This is rational and right. You have three years here. Two remaining. This is time enough in which to get to grips with these disciplines, as best you can.

  ‘The Church is also at a cross-roads. It has become more secular and more liberal and this is good in many ways. It has shown itself able to resist petrification and embrace change. But.’

  He stopped here. He turned slightly and stared out at the sky. He let several silent seconds pass.

  ‘But,’ he continued, ‘there is a paradox at work. The Church has sought to re-define itself in order to counter the argument that it is no longer relevant to the needs of people in this very troubled century and yet in doing so it has also re-defined belief – thus undermining its primary relevance to all human existence. It has put belief on a vector. It has given belief gradations. It has made quantifiable that which cannot be quantified. And this I abhor. To me, belief is or it is not. You believe in Christ’s resurrection or you do not. It is central to faith.

  ‘And so I come to you, Timothy. When we had you in front of us at interview my colleagues were disposed to reject you on the grounds of academic weakness. I persuaded them to let us take you because what I saw in you was someone for whom God seemed to be as essential as air and water. I knew you would struggle with your studies. I knew you would do poorly at examinations. But I knew also, and I think I’m not wrong, that you will be a very good churchman. You will be one of the few with a vision and that vision will help people and bring them comfort. I’m not wrong. I know I’m not.’

  Timmy turned to stare at Dr Tate. He saw him sitting there very calmly, his head slightly raised, as though he were watching a film in broad daylight. Timmy tried to say: ‘You’re not wrong, Dr Tate,’ but the words would let themselves only be thought and not said aloud. Nothing could be said aloud. This virus was a virus of silence.

  *

  On his last day in the infirmary, the Matron brought Timmy a letter. It was from Estelle:

  Dear Tim,

  Why don’t you write to me? I know that letters can get to and from institutions as easily as weather.

  We miss you so. I am making a flag. I will tell you about this. It is my only thing, my work of art.

  Sonny has been begging me to write. For weeks and weeks, he has been begging.

  He wants me to say he is sorry for what he did. He didn’t mean to do it, to leave you on the road. Often we do what we don’t mean. He wants me to say, please forgive him and come to see us. Even a dog is no substitute for a person.

  My flag is a Union Jack. I am making it all in silk. I have to make it twice and then stitch the two sides together to make one.

  It is far bigger than the table. It is a present for Colonel Bridgenorth whom I met at Mountview, of the Royal Artillery. He was once a hero and now he believes he is a Sherpa. He thinks he’s on Everest. The flag is for him to plant on the summit. The Union Jack is the most complicated flag under the sun.

  Must go. Hawaii Five-O is almost on. I love it. I love it when Jack Lord says: ‘Book him, Danno!’ It sounds so final. That’s why I like it. ‘Book him, Danno!’

  Please write, dear Tim.

  With love from your

  MOTHER

  Elm Farm,

  Swaithey,

  Suffolk.

  Timmy folded the letter away. He felt weak, yet clear-headed. He thought, it’s as if none of us is anchored on the earth: Livia, Estelle, me. We’re genetically insubstantial. This is what Mary was fighting and fighting. She was trying to keep herself on the ground. She was fighting the air.

  When the
term ended, he returned to Swaithey.

  Sonny met him at the station. He said: ‘There you are, then,’ as though he’d been looking for him in the barn and found him somewhere else.

  Tim said: ‘How are you?’

  ‘Alive,’ said Sonny, ‘if you can call this living.’

  The dog was in the van, whining. Then when Timmy got in, it began to bark.

  ‘Shut up, Wolf,’ said Sonny, but the dog kept on barking so he said to Timmy: ‘You’re a stranger, that’s why.’

  They drove the seven miles to Swaithey more or less in silence. The dog lay down and was quiet. Tim said: ‘How’s everything with the farm?’

  Sonny took a long while to reply. Then he said: ‘House is mortgaged.’

  Timmy looked out of the van window that was speckled with mud. It was a dark day with low cloud. The hedgerows looked drab.

  Timmy said: ‘I’ll help you with the harvest.’

  ‘There isn’t a harvest,’ said Sonny. ‘Only sugar beet.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No combine. Things have a life-span. Everything does. Even the fucking Empire had a life-span.’

  Sonny laughed and the laugh turned into a cough. He slowed the van. The dog stood up and scrabbled round in a circle.

  Timmy thought, something has to be said, something that will make the coming weeks bearable. I will never make a good priest if I can’t console my own father.

  But the thing that needed saying remained obscure. He didn’t even know how to begin it. It might as well have been a piece of Latin. And now it was too late: they were at the farm.

  Estelle was at the open front door. She was wearing a summer dress and a grey cardigan and when the van pulled up she drew the cardigan round herself, protecting her breasts and her sides.

  Timmy got out and embraced her. Her cheek felt cold or his own lips too hot, one or the other.

  ‘The house is mortgaged. Did Sonny tell you?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Tim.

  ‘It wasn’t our fault. Things just happen.’