Sacred Country (10 page)

On a day in October, two people sat in Gilbert Blakey’s waiting room. Neither of them was reading a magazine. Both were in pain. The two were Mary Ward and Walter Loomis. Neither had been to a dentist before.

They talked. Fear had misted up Mary’s glasses and, to her, Walter looked damp, like a person sitting in a Turkish bath. His face was red, as if from all the steam. She said: ‘Are you frightened, Walter?’

He ran his big hands through his thick curly hair. ‘Shouldn’t be,’ he said, ‘not at my age. Should I?’

‘I’m frightened,’ said Mary. ‘Boys are, sometimes.’

Next door they could hear the whine of Gilbert’s drill, a whine like a gnat. Often, pain had no sound, but today it did. It was better to talk of anything than listen to it.

‘I heard your mother was away, poorly,’ said Walter.

Mary rubbed her misty glasses with her fist. ‘Yes,’ she said.

‘We were all sorry for that. We were all sorry in the village.’

‘Do you live in that trolley bus, Walter?’ asked Mary.

Walter smiled. Smiling seemed to add to his pain and to his fear. ‘I like that old bus,’ he said. ‘It’s Pete’s, not mine. He’s got a kitchen where the driver used to sit.’

‘When were trolley buses invented?’ asked Mary.

‘Invented?’

‘Yes. 1892, for instance.’

‘You’re a strange one. Who’d know a thing like that?’

‘Someone would. Everything had a time when it wasn’t there.’

‘Except the land.’

‘What?’

‘Except the earth: Swaithey. That’s always been there. It’s in the Domesday Book.’

‘You still can’t say “always”. There’s a time before “always”, even.’

Walter nodded. At home, his parents referred to Mary Ward as ‘that poor plain little mite’. ‘I heard you’re going to Weston Grammar School, Mary,’ he said.

‘If I pass the exam.’

‘You will, I reckon.’

‘I’d like it to be over.’

‘The exam?’

‘No. The drilling.’

Mary was the first to go in. She felt guilty to be leaving Walter alone with his fear. She thought of him sitting there and hearing her pain through the wall. She wondered whether he would pick up a copy of
Needlework for Beginners
and try to read it.

Gilbert Blakey was drying his hands when Mary came into the surgery. He smiled his charming, toothy smile. He wore a white gown tied at the back with tape. Mary was surprised by how gentle he looked.

He told her to sit down in the complicated chair and tilt her head back. Her head was meant to come to rest on a hard leather pad, but she was too short for the chair, so her head rested on nothing. She wished Cord were here. Cord would say: ‘This doesn’t look right to me, Martin.’

There was a nurse standing by. She put a pink pellet into a white enamel mug of water, where it began to dissolve, staining the water mauve. The nurse was old and didn’t smile. She wore a starched thing on her head, fastened to her hair with kirbygrips. She didn’t look at Mary, but kept her eyes on some distant point in the room, and this distant point stared back at her, hardening up her look. Mary thought, if all the nurses at Mountview are like this one, my mother will die.

Gilbert finished drying his hands and came to the chair. He lowered the leather pad and Mary felt it arrive behind her head and give her courage. The Miralux lamp shone in her eyes. She thought, this is a complicated kind of light, showing up things that no one noticed were there.

‘Well?’ said Gilbert. ‘Let’s have a look, shall we?’

The nurse passed him a tray of metal instruments, like somebody offering a selection of biscuits. He chose two and the nurse put the tray down. Then the two faces bent over her and stared at her: Gilbert’s face, with its sweetness, and the nurse’s, as unforgiving as time. Mary held on to the metal arms of the chair and wished one of them was Cord’s hand. ‘Steady as we go,’ Cord said in her mind.

Gilbert, helped by the clever light, found the source of Mary’s pain and probed it, and the probing, for Mary, was like an electrocution and all memory of no-pain vanished and became the past, to which there was no return. And then, beyond the two faces and beyond the light, beyond the lost past and beyond the absence of Cord, Mary rediscovered her old ally – suffering. She had forgotten its power. In her fear, she had obliterated her belief in its magic. But now, once again in its company, she let herself yield to its transforming properties. She let go her grip on the chair. She stopped wishing for the touch of Cord’s medal-ribboned hand. Her thoughts were clear and hard. As Gilbert began to drill into her decaying tooth, she felt Mary annihilated a little more each second, Mary becoming fragments, pulp. Martin reaffirming himself.

‘Amalgam,’ said Gilbert to the nurse.

The nurse disappeared from Mary’s vision. Gilbert’s face, near to Mary’s, smelled of Eau de Cologne and his breath of sweetcorn. Behind him, at a great distance from him and from the centre of her pain, she could hear the nurse grinding some substance in a mortar and she thought, this substance is new and is part of Martin Ward.

By the time Walter was called into the surgery, he was dazed with fright. He sat down in the leather and metal chair and held onto it. His large hands were wet and limp.

Gilbert turned from washing his white hands for the eighth time that day and saw steam rising from his patient’s head. Beneath the steam, there were wiry black curls, the soft eyes of an animal, a fleshy mouth very pink and moist. The infinitesimally small but telltale feeling of bruising on the inner
thighs that accompanied desire made Gilbert turn quickly back to his little sink.

Gilbert Blakey’s dreams of young men remained dreams. He never touched them, except in his mind. He believed that by touching them he would make his life fall away bit by bit, like the cliffs of Minsmere into the sea.

As Gilbert finished drying his hands and approached Walter, the telephone in his small office began to ring and the nurse slipped away to answer it, leaving Gilbert and Walter alone face to face.

Gilbert smiled. He asked Walter to describe his pain and point to where it was. He selected a probe and a dental mirror from the tray. He heard Walter say that his pain was everywhere, filling his whole face. He adjusted the head-rest until Walter’s head seemed comfortable on it. Then he put down the probe and touched Walter’s lips with his fingers. ‘Open, please,’ he said.

Walter closed his eyes. Behind his closed eyes everything was getting dark, everything was in front and becoming small and retreating …

Gilbert’s face was close to the thick hair, to the curled lashes on the wet cheek. He steadied his hand. He thought of his mother’s house safe and sound and far, yet, from the advancing precipice. The probe lighted unerringly on an occlusal cavity in the lower right pre-molar five, visible lesion and surrounding opacity …

Gilbert saw the pallor come into Walter’s face.

He shouted for the nurse. He let the instruments drop. He pulled Walter towards him, into his arms, for a moment so brief he was able to deny to himself that it had ever existed, then tipped his head down to his feet where he noticed for the first time the heaviness of Walter’s shoes. He crouched by Walter. His hand was on Walter’s neck, one thumb just beneath the frayed collar of his woollen shirt.

The nurse strode back into the surgery. She was too old to run. Her measured step gave her authority, she thought. It was her firm, measured step, more than her hard look, which said
to the world, I am to be relied upon; I am always here watching everything that happens.

Edward Harker’s house had never been cleaner. The leaves of plants were polished. Every morning, as soon as Harker had gone down to the cellar and Pearl had left for school, Irene put on her flowered apron and took the Min Cream down from its shelf and a clean duster from its drawer and went to work.

Harker had told the village: ‘I am taking Mrs Simmonds in as my housekeeper.’ The term had a respectability about it that moved Irene. She had been taken in. Now, she would keep the house. The house was not hers and never would be, but because she lived there, everything in it became precious to Irene. Harker was a person of taste. He knew how furniture should look. He knew that the feet of a table should have claws, that a wooden washstand could be a thing of value. Irene knelt by the Carolean day bed in the sitting room. She polished the wicker. She took down the china dogs from the mantelpiece and looked at them. Blessed with sudden good fortune, she was able to see some beauty in almost everything. She wrote to her sister in Ipswich: ‘I am learning the names of things and where they come from. Mr Harker is an excellent teacher.’

In the daytime, as instructed, she addressed him as Mr Harker. ‘Simply out of prudence, my dear,’ he said, ‘to ensure against malicious gossip.’ And, really, it was as Mr Harker that she still thought of him, but at night-time she had a different set of instructions; in bed, she was to call him Edward. ‘Say Edward,’ he would whisper neatly packing himself inside the billowing firmament of her body. ‘Say Edward, I want you.’

Sometimes the names escaped their boundaries. In Loomis’s one Saturday morning, she let an Edward slip loose. She saw it arrive in Mr Loomis’s startled eyes. Then, in the night, now and again, moved by the fervour with which her breasts were
being caressed, she would murmur: ‘Go on, Mr Harker. Don’t stop, don’t stop.’

Pearl’s father, the printer from Dublin, was being obliterated from Irene’s consciousness. She could no longer recall the taste of dye on his hand, his hard, bony back, his moustache as thin as a line of writing. She was in love. Her desire for her elderly lover grew. Sometimes she went down to the cellar in broad daylight and sat in the amber shadows watching him work. The atmosphere in the oil-scented room would become charged. Often she would leave with just a glancing kiss on his white head. Occasionally, when she felt brazen and as syrupy as a bee, she would remove her knickers.

She had her own room. Harker had insisted on this. He did not want Pearl to tell the children at school that her mother slept in her employer’s bed. But sometimes after Harker had made love to Irene, he went instantly to sleep. He was getting on, after all. Sleep came to him as easily as a leaf falling and settling on the earth. And now he did not know whether Pearl might not have seen him there like that, sleeping with his arm across Irene’s breast. He did not know that she hadn’t come into the room and stood there staring at him, before tip-toeing away. He thought, meticulous as I am, I have become careless in this one regard.

They were careless in other ways. On a night of soundless snow Irene said: ‘Did you know, Edward, that I am going to have your child?’ She had rehearsed this line. She thought it sounded beautiful, as if it were being spoken by Celia Johnson. She waited for the shock that it was going to cause. She hoped Edward did not have a faulty heart he had not been honest about. He was silent for some minutes. Irene listened to the quiet that was the snow falling. Eventually Harker said: ‘Well. There it is.’

Harker considered leaving Swaithey. He had a night of pessimism. During his night of pessimism he mourned the loss of his solitary, orderly life. Respectability, too, had been important to him. Now, he had put himself among the
outcasts. His standing in the village would drop. Orders for his bats would decline. He had a dream of himself as an ancient Bedouin, pricked by sandstorms, with no shelter and no destination.

He woke early and went to his cellar. A new shipment of willow had recently arrived. He sat down at his desk and took out a sheet of the thick vellum on which his drawings were made. He designed a crib.

At noon, with the drawings finished, he went upstairs. He found Irene brushing the carpet under the Carolean day bed. He sat her down on the polished wicker and asked her to marry him. He showed her the design for the crib. She put her arms round his neck. ‘Edward,’ she said, ‘I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.’

They were married in Swaithey Church. Irene wore a blue costume and a blue hat with a veil.

Estelle was driven over from Mountview. Her hair was turning grey. The hymn they had to sing made her weep.

Sonny wore a black suit like a mourner.

Most of the village came out of respect for Harker. Ernie Loomis’s gift was a crown of lamb decorated with cutlet frills. The Misses Cunningham smiled the apology they felt should have been on other faces.

Estelle got drunk in what seemed to her to be a matter of moments. She felt vomit rise in her throat. She let Mary lead her to the waiting car. She said to Mary: ‘They’re hiding something. Even from me. It’s probably in the cellar.’

The sight of her mother had destroyed Mary’s happiness for Irene. She had looked forward to seeing Estelle, but when she did see her, she wished she hadn’t. Estelle had been wearing a polka-dot dress, too young for her, the material too thin for the cold December day. Mary had never seen this dress before. She knew that it must belong to one of the women sitting under the stalactites. This woman would have said: ‘You can’t go to a wedding in your old skirt, Estelle. You’d better wear my lovely polka dot dress.’

After her mother had been driven away, Mary didn’t want to go back to the party. She found the door to the cellar. She had never been down there. She knew this was where Harker worked and that his work made him famous in places Swaithey people never thought about. It was peculiar to imagine fame, which seemed like something made of air, coming from an old cellar with its feet in the dark.

Mary switched on the row of parchment-shaded lamps and looked at what their yellowy light revealed. The place was so crowded with machinery and tools and wood and paper and dust that there seemed to be no room in it to make anything. It smelled of glue and resin and linseed oil, and the smell was so thick it made breathing peculiar.

Mary moved cautiously. She wondered if her mother was right about something being hidden here. It seemed to her a place of infinite confusion where it would be difficult to distinguish between one thing hidden deliberately and another hidden by mistake. You couldn’t tell whether what you saw was what you were allowed to see or whether one small thing in your line of vision was supposed to be invisible to you. At school, at Easter, coloured eggs were concealed around the playground for the infants to find. The playground was grey and the eggs bright so the infants found them without any difficulty. But this was not like that. Here, everything was different and everything the same. You could hold a hidden thing in your hand and not know it.