Sacred Country
Page 36
Where was I?
Where were we?
‘Talking about your father’s death,’ says Linda.
‘Was I?’ I say.
‘Yes,’ says Linda.
‘Well,’ I say, ‘I don’t want to talk about that.’
And I don’t. It was the saddest death of all.
It was after that that I had to come here because all I was doing was eating and staring out of the window. There was no room in my mind for anything except those two activities. I ate and looked out at the garden and when the darkness covered everything, I looked at that.
I say to Linda: ‘One can endure it when certain things are in the past, but when almost everything is in the past, the present is too lonely.’
‘Very well,’ she says. ‘Let’s talk about the present. Who is in the present?’
‘I am,’ I say. ‘But not for long. I’m being closed down. I’m not allowed to buy a swimming costume …’
‘Estelle,’ she says, ‘we’re not talking about this.’
‘Why not?’ I say. ‘We should be. Where will I go when I leave here?’
‘That’s what I’m asking you. Who is there? Who is still part of your life?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I have no idea. I can’t think of anyone.’
‘Timmy?’ she says.
‘Tim?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well,’ I say, ‘the part of my life that he’s in takes place in Shropshire, but I hardly go there at all.’
‘Why not?’ she says.
I don’t know how anyone can imagine this kind of interrogation can make a person well. My mother used to say: ‘Try not to quiz people, Estelle. It’s very rude, darling.’
‘Why not?’ says Linda again.
I say: ‘Well, Shropshire’s a long way from Suffolk. But that’s not the point. The point is, in the old days here at Mountview, we were just allowed to be. We watched football. We played panel games. We walked in the gardens …’
‘These are not the “old days”,’ she says.
‘I know,’ I say, ‘but what are they? What kind of days are they?’
She looks confused for a moment, like some participants look on Question Time. Then she says: ‘This is a new decade.’
I’m trying to remember all the new things.
There is going to be a new President of the USA. He was once married to Jane Wyman, friend of Ava Gardner.
There is a new kind of murderer in Yorkshire, in the area round Leeds.
There has been a new earthquake in Algeria.
We have a new Olympic gold medallist. He is a swimmer, younger than Timmy.
Japan has been given a new panda by China. Its name is Wong-Wong. Someone tells us that pandas encourage better relations between nations. Japanese children sing a song of welcome: ‘Oh Wong-Wong, we’ve been waiting for you so long,/Let’s play together amicably …’
Japanese songs do not have to rhyme.
In my next interrogation session, I say to Linda: ‘What else is new?’
She says: ‘There’s going to be a new postage stamp, in honour of the Queen Mother’s eightieth birthday.’
I say: ‘I remember when her husband died. King George VI. On the day of the funeral we stood in a potato field, trying to have a silence.’
‘Yes?’ says Linda. ‘Tell me about that. Who was there?’
‘Well,’ I say, ‘the four of us. Sonny and me. Timmy and …’
‘And who?’
‘And Martin,’ I say.
‘I don’t know anything about Martin. Who is Martin?’
‘My other child,’ I say. ‘He lives in America. He’s not in my life. I haven’t seen him for twenty years.’
‘Why?’ says Linda.
I say, ‘God, you’re tiring us out with all this questioning. We won’t be able to stand, let alone walk out of here and back into the community.’
‘When you’ve answered this, you can go,’ she says.
‘I don’t know the answer,’ I say.
‘Then we have to find it,’ she says, ‘don’t we, Estelle?’
When a questioner says ‘we’, he or she means ‘you’.
How can anyone amass all the knowledge we need to stay alive in the world?
I get up out of my chair and lie down on the floor of the Counselling Room.
Linda orders me to get up. She says I am one of the most obstructive people she has ever met.
When she says ‘met’, she means ‘questioned’.
She is tired of me.
I am tired of everything.
But she lets me go to my room. It’s the same room I’ve always had here, and I’ve grown attached to it.
It’s like a train compartment. When I’m in it, I’m always trying to travel somewhere in my mind.
It’s not time for supper. I think I will go down and watch the new earthquake on television. Except that now that I’m up in my room alone I start wishing I was back with Linda.
I lied when I said that all I could see out of the window after my father died was the garden and then the night. I saw Mary in the garden. When the night came, I still saw her there. She stared back at me. She threw a tennis ball at the glass.
I would like to tell Linda this.
I have to tell her.
I go running down the corridor. I hate running. I’ve never liked it.
I push my way past a man on the stairs. He’s an out-and-out lunatic. He sings, ‘Goodnight, Campers,’ all day long. His vocal chords are breaking.
I go rushing to the Counselling Room, calling Linda’s name. I open the door. There’s another woman in there, being interrogated. I say: ‘Linda, there’s something I have to say!’
‘You’ve had your hour, Estelle,’ she says.
‘I know,’ I say, ‘but I have to tell you this one thing. Please!’
‘No,’ she says. ‘This is Marjorie’s hour. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
Tomorrow was the word I kept using.
I’d say: ‘Tomorrow, I will do something about Mary.’
I’m fifty-five.
I sit down at the table in my room.
It’s a September evening, getting dark.
In front of me is one of the home-made greetings cards I made with Cord. We never sent them to anyone. I brought them here to distribute among the sherpas and the air traffic controllers.
This card has scabious on it and poppies and lucerne and grass.
It’s easier to write a greetings card in the mind than it is to actually write it. The message in the mind can always be altered. It can go through any number of invisible revisions. It could be metaphorical or fantastical. It could mention the heart of the onion, the explosion in the sky. It could be poetic or ironic. It could describe the search by torchlight, by tilleylight in the forest, the success of a conjuring trick in mid-afternoon in summer…
But once the message is there, written down with the green-ink pen, it has the appearance of something a bit lame, a bit pathetic. The act of writing it has changed it. It isn’t really what you meant to say. It isn’t even a greeting.
I stare at it.
I read it again and again and again, until the words have no meaning at all:
Dear Martin,
Please forgive me. I hope you can.
From your mother, Estelle.
It gets so dark, I can hardly see it, but still I go on staring at it.
At least the writing is quite neat.
That’s something.
It doesn’t look as though it’s been written by a mad person but only by a woman with no imagination.
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Copyright © Rose Tremain 1992
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First published in Great Britain by Sinclair-Stevenson 1992
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