Sacred Country (11 page)

Mary inspected Harker’s workbench. She picked up a chisel and was surprised by the weight of it. Above the bench was a brass plate screwed to the brick wall. On the plate were the words
Harker’s Bats. Estb. 1947
. She stared at it and smiled. It made Harker heroic to her, to be placed in the ranks of Montgolfier and Galileo.

She moved to Harker’s desk and sat down on his stool. She switched on another lamp. On the desk were Harker’s designs for cribs. There were standing cribs and cribs on rockers and cribs that swung from a bar. There were solid cribs like mangers and open cribs like cages. Mary took a breath and
covered her mouth with her hand. Dear Mother, she wrote in her mind, I have found out the secret. You were quite right, it is in the cellar. It is a baby.

She heard the door open and she turned. Harker was standing there. His nose was a little red, his white hair a little wild. He said: ‘Well, now, Mary.’

‘I’m not meant to come in here, am I?’ she said.

‘It’s not holy ground, only a place of work. I heard somebody go down.’

‘I saw the cribs, Mr Harker.’

‘So you did.’

‘I won’t tell anyone.’

Harker sat down on a wooden chair he was half-way through mending. He remembered the chair’s precarious state and stood up again. He took out a red handkerchief and blew his nose.

‘I promise,’ said Mary.

‘Let me sit down a minute,’ said Harker.

She made way for him at the desk. He sat down gratefully. He felt like a runner who needed to catch his breath. Mary thought how terrible it would be if he suddenly died right there near the sign that said
Estb. 1947
and took all Irene’s happiness away with him into the grave.

‘I promise I won’t tell,’ she said, ‘not even my mother.’

‘Very considerate of you,’ said Harker, ‘but after today it doesn’t much matter any more. And people will know soon enough.’

‘They’re very beautiful cribs,’ said Mary.

‘Thank you,’ said Harker.

‘I like the rocking one best.’

‘You do?’

‘Is it going to be a boy or a girl?’

Harker had recovered his breath. He looked up at Mary. His face had a serene smile on it, like the smile of an angel bringing tidings.

‘A more pertinent question to ask,’ he said, ‘is, “Who has it
been?
”’

‘What?’ asked Mary.

‘Well, we’ve all been here before, you know. As Voltaire said – though you won’t know Voltaire of course – “Everything in nature is resurrection.”’

‘I haven’t been here before.’

‘Yes, you have. Not as you, of course. As someone else. Even some
thing
else.’

‘Have I? What as?’

‘You may discover. Something may give you a clue. Or you may die not knowing.’

‘Were you here before?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Who as?’

Harker sighed. ‘I’ve had a few goes at it, but I still don’t feel positive that I know. I am fascinated by hidden places, cloistered places, so I think I may have been a nun. Good at knitting, probably. Very tidy with my food.’

‘Nuns are women.’

‘Yes.’

‘So?’

‘Souls have no gender. You could have been a man, Mary. Or again, you may have been a marmoset.’

Mary’s round face behind her glasses regarded Harker as gravely as the moon.

People tell anything to children, she thought. They think you know nothing about the world and have never heard of Hakluyt.

‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ said Harker.

‘No,’ said Mary.

‘Well, there is no certain, incontrovertible proof; only signs, things which fit too well or don’t fit at all. And many different people, all over the earth, believe in this kind of resurrection. The Chang-Nagas of Assam believed that those with good voices returned as cicadas and those who couldn’t sing as dung-beetles.’

Harker thought Mary would smile at the mention of dung-beetles, but she didn’t. He went on. ‘In parts of Brittany, do you know what they believe, Mary?’

‘No.’

‘That if a child dies unbaptised, it will return again and again as a sparrow, again and again, until judgement day.’

Mary was quiet, still staring at Harker.

‘Who else believes this?’ she asked.

‘Well, even in the Bible, you know, in Ecclesiastes, it says: “there is no new thing under the sun”.’

‘Does Irene think her baby has been someone else?’

‘She understands that it is very likely.’

‘When you die, do you become your next person or next thing straight away, or is there a gap?’

Harker smiled. He sounded pleased with this question when he said: ‘There’s a fascinating story to come out of Cornwall on the subject of gap. A certain Parson Jupp died in the vicarage of St Cleer. He was a very good man, loved by everyone and especially by his staff who mourned him for a long time. A year or so passed. And then one morning, one of the housemaids, who had been particularly fond of Parson Jupp, found a spider in her broom cupboard. She was afraid of spiders and was about to kill it with a broom. And then she stopped. She was filled with a feeling of peace and joy – the same feeling she used to get kneeling in Parson Jupp’s parlour for evening prayers –and she felt certain that here was her old master, in the body of this spider. And after that no one in the household could kill a spider, in case they were killing Jupp. But the odd thing was a year had gone in which there was no sign of the parson. So here there does seem to have been a gap, and of course there are hundreds of other stories where there seem to be gaps, too.’

Mary looked down at her feet. She was wearing white ankle socks and brown sandals. One of the things she was hating about this day was how stupid her feet looked.

She was about to say: If I was anything before, I wasn’t a girl, when she heard Irene call down the steps: ‘Edward, are you there?’

Harker stood up. He smoothed his white hair. He told Mary she could stay and mooch around in the cellar, but he had to
return to the party. He said: ‘It’s
my
party, in this new life o mine.’

That night, Mary began to construct her previous life.

She had been a magician, known as ‘The Great Camillo’. His hair had been black and shiny. He had been clever and good-looking. His speciality had been cutting and restoring rope. He’d had a brilliant future, but it had never arrived. A jealous rival called Timothy had strangled him with a line of knotted silks.

He had been born again as Mary. Someone had decided that to be the grandchild of a person who had died in a glider would be suitable. No thought had been given to anything but that. Not even to lack of height and short-sightedness. It was like the Charge of the Light Brigade. There had been a blunder.

They came and told me, You are a great deal better, Estelle. We think you can go home.

I said goodbye.

Goodbye, they said, and take care of yourself, dear.

I said goodbye to Alice, the Chicken Woman.

She said, Oh, no, oh no …

Sonny collected me in the muddy van, with its old smell of sacking and seed. As we drove away, I turned round and saw Alice running behind the van, calling to me.

‘That is Alice,’ I told Sonny, ‘and she is happier as a hen than as a woman.’

He said: ‘You’d best make an effort to be yourself again, Estelle. Unless you want to fetch back here.’

Sonny’s face was purple-red. His damaged ear looked very dark and inflamed. I thought of him sitting alone at the kitchen table with bottles of stout lined up in front of him like skittles. England is full of men who drink alone.

I didn’t want to go home. At Mountview, my room was high up and I could look down on the world. I could see the gardens and the tarmac paths, nice and neat. I had beautiful dreams.

In the evenings, we did not stare at a candle or stare at the dark; we watched television.

We sat in the day room with the lights turned out and our
chairs in two rows and the light from the television flickered over us like snow. The programme we liked most was
What’s My Line?
People come on and perform a little mime of the job they do in life: glass-blower, lamplighter, taxidermist, deckchair attendant, bailiff, Keeper of the Queen’s Purse. Then a panel of famous people asks the person questions such as, Does your job require water? or, Are you mainly sitting down? until they’ve guessed the answer and everybody claps and the person says, You are quite correct, panel: my line is I am a brush salesman.

Who invented this
What’s My Line?
How did it come into his mind?

The staff at Mountview decided that we would all play our own
What’s My Line?
I said, You can’t have a panel, there is no one famous here. And they said, No, there is no need of a panel, everyone can ask the questions.

A man called Fred Tulley, who used to be a jockey until he fell on his head at Chepstow, said, You can’t call this game
What’s My Line?
, because at Mountview no one has a line any more; you’ve got to call it
What
Was
My Line?
But they said, Oh no, Fred, Mountview is a refuge and you will all of you one day go back into the world and take up your lines again. Fred said, Excuse the language but bollocks, Doctor, I’ll never get on a horse no more, if I live to be ninety. We all, except Alice, laughed. Alice made her chicken noise and Fred Tulley started to cry. On the wall of his room, he had a photograph of himself in the winners’ enclosure at Newbury. The horse he had ridden was called Never Say Never.

We began the game. A lot of people at Mountview did not understand the meaning of the word ‘mime’. When it was the turn of a man who had been a tram conductor he began to say, Hold tight, hold tight now. I thought, it is odd, after my beautiful childhood in Gresham Tears, that I am in a place with people who believe themselves to be birds and who do not know the meaning of the word ‘mime’.

We were not good at
What Was My Line?
The only person we guessed was a tap dancer because you cannot mime tap
dancing. On the other hand tap dancing
is
a kind of mime, a mime of an internal music no one hears but you.

Another thing. None of the women, including me, had ever been anything. We’d never had a line. Being a mother and a wife is not a line. You cannot mime those thing. Only Alice. She had been a cleaner at the Stock Exchange. The floor of the Stock Exchange measures eighteen thousand five hundred square feet and all these thousands of feet have to be cleaned every night and Alice told me it was the vastness of this floor that had made her long not to be human any more.

I explained to her the idea of mime. So she had a go at it. She got down on her knees and mimed a bucket and then a rag and people shouted out straight away, ‘Cleaner!’ ‘Skivvy!’ ‘Mrs Mopp!’ ‘Cinderella!’ Then she started picking up imaginary things from the floor and examining them and nobody knew what this could be, so they gave up. On the real
What’s My Line?
the panel do not give up. They are famous. If you are famous, you cannot say, I give up.

I said later, What were you picking up, Alice? First she said, Straw, seed, pellets, worms, all her chicken things. Then she had one of her memories as a human being and she said, Oh you wouldn’t believe, Estelle, what was dropped there, what was brought in or fell from the roof. She said, I used to find silk handkerchiefs and casino chips. I found a cowrie shell and a sparking plug and a dead pigeon. I found a diamond bracelet and a crocodile card-case and quite a few rubber johnnies, used and un.

I said, No, I would not believe, Alice.

The tap dancer’s name was Joseph. One night, after the television was turned off and we sat in our two rows blinking as the lights were switched on, Joseph got up and began to dance. He’d put on his tap shoes which were black and shiny like Fred Astaire’s. Everybody went silent.

Alice put a claw over her beak.

He shut us all up, even the nurses and doctors. Snickety-snick, clickety-click. On he went. It was the best moment ever to happen at Mountview. When he stopped for breath, we
clapped and stamped and screamed and knocked over all the hard utility chairs.

Now I am home.

Dear Alice, [I write.]

How are you? I am at home now and my father has come to stay. He is teaching Mary how to do marbling on sugar paper. All the walls of her room are covered with the sheets of marbling. There are at least thirty. In the bottom right-hand corner of each one she has written the name, Martin W.

Sonny is saving to buy a combine harvester. He showed me something in a farming magazine, a photograph of a man called Roland Dudley on his farm called Linkenholt Manor Farm, near Andover. He said, Roland Dudley has been using combines since before the war, Estelle, and look at what he says: ‘When the engineer rules the harvest there are no sheaves to be set up in the field, no pitching into wagons, no threshing in the autumn.’ And I said, Well Sonny, don’t drink the combine harvester money away …

Timmy is nine now. He has started singing in the church choir. His voice is so high and sweet you could cry. He is very thin. His little shoulder blades stick out under the white lace thing he wears for service. He asked me the other night, Is Jesus everywhere or are there some places where He isn’t? I wanted to say, There are a thousand places where He isn’t. He’s not in the dark with me when I lie beside Sonny; He’s not at the river gathering watercress; He has never been seen on
What’s My Line?
But all I said was, I really do not know, Tim.

Did I tell you, Alice, my mother was a glider pilot? She liked to see England from above, neat and flat, like a map of itself. And this is how everything seemed to be, in the end, at Mountview, once I got used to it: far away below me and quiet as summer.

I hope you are well and still enjoying
Dixon of Dock Green
.

I didn’t like it when you ran behind the car, calling out Estelle.

With best wishes from

Estelle Ward

Elm Farm
Swaithey
Suffolk
England
The World

March 1958

I was the only boy at Weston Grammar.