Sacred Country (12 page)

There were ninety-seven girls and me.

On the first day, we had to announce our names to the class. The teacher said: ‘If any of you has a nickname by which you like to be called, then tell us what it is.’ She said: ‘My name is Miss Gaul, but I believe I am known as Gallus,’ and everybody laughed except me because I had never learned a word of Latin. I felt stupid and sad. I imagined Miss McRae saying: If you live in a lighthouse, Mary, there are certain things that may never reach you.

Almost every girl had a nickname. They blushed in turn as they said them. It was embarrassing. The girl next to me said: ‘My name is Belinda Mulholland, but I am quite often actually called Binky,’ and I saw her blush spread right up into the roots of her pale hair and down her scalp and into her neck and I thought, saying a thing you didn’t really mean to say could be like poliomyelitis entering your veins and you could be crippled by it for ever.

When it came to my turn, I did not blush. I said: ‘My name is Mary Ward, but I’ve never been Mary, I have always been Martin, and I would like to be called Martin, please.’

Miss Gaul wore her hair in a long plait, fastened around her head like a rope and when I said my name was Martin the rope sprang loose from its kirbygrip and unwound itself.

She said: ‘Marty? Very well, dear. We shall call you Marty.’

And because of the jumping plait, I didn’t feel able to contradict her.

The school was a large, grey building, built in Victorian times. When you opened your desk lid, you could breathe history. The inkwells were made of porcelain. In the corridors there were rows and rows of photographs of Old Girls wearing long skirts and the sweet smiles of the dead. At dinner time, the gravy tasted old, as though some mildewed wine had been poured into it. The kitchen staff were Portuguese, descendants of Vasco da Gama.

I liked the school uniform, especially the tie which was red and white and like a man’s tie. I looked nicer in my uniform than I’d ever looked in any other clothes and the only bit of myself that I couldn’t stand to see were my bare legs between my grey skirt and my grey socks. So I began to walk with my head held very high and my eyes behind my glasses looking out hungrily. And this new way of conducting myself (as Cord might have put it) was mistaken for an invitation to friendship. On the first morning, three girls came up to me at different times and offered to share their sweets with me. But I refused. I said: ‘No thanks. I don’t like sweets,’ and I walked away. I didn’t know how to be anybody’s friend.

Then I saw Lindsey Stevens.

She was the tallest person in our class. She had long, heavy hair, tied back in a ribbon. Her eyes were sleepy and kind. You could tell that there had never been a moment in her life when she had not been beautiful. I stared at her until I was worn out and I remembered Miss McRae once saying that beauty can be tiring.

I closed my eyes. A teacher called Miss Whyte with a y was giving us our first physics lesson on earth. She was describing to us the principles of the thermos flask. She said: ‘The areas of contact between the inner and the outer wall are minimised to
limit conduction of heat and the inner surfaces are silvered …’ and I thought, I will get Lindsey Stevens to be my friend, or I will die.

I had begun to teach myself conjuring. My imaginary former life as The Great Camillo had given me the idea. Cord had found me a book called
Black’s Book of Magic
. It was old and heavy and illustrated with woodcuts of men in tail coats who all looked as if they couldn’t move but were waxworks of themselves. In the introduction, the writer put: ‘He who learns to be a magician makes himself master of the seemingly impossible. In his world, the laws of nature appear to be defied. He puts before one’s very eyes that which one never dreamt to behold.’ I thought, my life has been full of things that I never dreamt to behold: Marguerite flying out of the tree and landing on Timmy’s head; steam rising from Walter Loomis in the dentist’s waiting room; the stalactite ceiling at Mountview; Irene in blue silk getting married to Mr Harker; and, now, the exhausting beauty of Lindsey Stevens.

I practised my first two tricks at home in front of a mirror and then on Cord and on my mother. The tricks had names. They were called the Initial Transfer and the Classic Palm Vanish. ‘The real art of magic,’ said
Black’s Book
, ‘lies in the way a trick is presented.’ It explained that you had to learn all the ways of distracting your audience, of making them look where you want them to look and not at the place where you are making your secret move. This technique is known as Misdirection.

Cord was a good audience and my mother a bad one. Her look wandered about. You couldn’t rely on her eyes to be where you wanted them to be. It was as if, all the time, day after day, she was searching for something that wasn’t there.

Cord noticed this. When I started my patter, when I said: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, you now see a two-shilling bit in the palm of my hand,’ and my mother did not look at it but up at the ceiling, Cord said: ‘Come on, Est, pay attention. Watch Martin’s hand.’ I stopped and waited for her to look at me and
then I began again: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, please observe this two-shilling piece …’

My mother said: ‘Why do you call her Martin?’

Cord said: ‘Hush, Stelle. It’s only a nickname.’

I started a third time and now she watched me very intently, as someone might have watched The Great Camillo, and for a small moment – for the seconds that it took to open the fingers of my left hand to reveal it empty of the coin assumed to be in it – I felt warmed by her look.

I had practised the Classic Palm Vanish in front of the mirror so many times that I could do it quite well. I could amaze. I saw this amazement for the first time on the faces of Cord and my mother. The trick succeeded. They smiled and clapped. And this is what I thought about when I saw Lindsey Stevens; I thought, now I must use my power to make extraordinary things happen.

She had a friend already. The friend’s name was Jennifer. They went around together, arm in arm. Jennifer had a head full of curls. They did not notice me.

I went up to Lindsey’s desk at the end of morning lessons. I said: ‘Would you like to see a trick?’

Lindsey had very beautiful skin. There was no freckle or mark of any kind on it. She said: ‘I’ve got to go, really.’

I took a halfpenny out of my blazer pocket and I did the Palm Vanish very quickly before she had put her books away. I waited for her look of amazement and it came and I thought, this is the beginning, then.

She said: ‘Can you do other tricks?’

I said: ‘Yes, I can. Would you like to see another?’

She didn’t reply. She turned to Jennifer who had come up to her. She said: ‘Marty does conjuring.’

‘Do you?’ said Jennifer.

‘My grandfather was a famous magician,’ I said.

‘What was his name?’ asked Lindsey.

‘He called himself The Great Camillo.’

‘I’ve never heard of him,’ said Jennifer.

‘No. He died quite young. He was strangled by a rival.’

‘Strangled?’

‘Yes. With a line of knotted silks, all colours.’

‘Weren’t you sad?’

‘I didn’t know him. He died when I was in the womb.’

Other girls had clustered round us. I had become a small centre of attention.

I said: ‘If someone could go down to the kitchens and get me a sugar lump and a glass of water, I’ll show you some real magic.’

One of them went off It may have been Binky. I stood at Lindsey’s desk and didn’t move. She and the others asked me questions about The Great Camillo and I invented things about him on the spot. I said that he always travelled in London by taxi and paid his fare with money plucked out of the air; I said when he dined with friends at the Savoy Hotel he could make their champagne glasses disappear and reappear any number of times.

When the glass of water came, I put it down by Lindsey’s porcelain inkwell. I gave her a lump of sugar and one of the soft pencils I kept in my blazer pocket. I thought, I’ll do my patter and they will laugh, so I said: ‘Very well, Miss Stevens, now if you would kindly and clearly and for everyone to see write your initials on the sugar lump.’

‘My initials?’

‘Yes. Write them boldly and blackly on the sugar. L.S.’

She wrote them and I asked her to show them around and then return the sugar lump to me. She did this and I dropped the sugar lump into the glass with the little flourish
Black’s Book
advises you to use when performing the movements you want your audience to see. Then I took her hand. I guided it towards the glass. I said: ‘Now, Miss Stevens, I want you to concentrate very hard on the sugar. In a moment it will start to dissolve and I want you to watch it until it has gone, keeping your hand absolutely still above the glass. And then I shall reveal to you something that will astound you.’

She looked at me and smiled. The ribbon that tied her hair
that day was black velvet. I looked down at my hand holding hers. My fingers were stubby like my father’s and hers were long and white.

We were all silent, watching the sugar. I thought, when the spring comes I will invite her to the farm and we will climb trees together and play French Cricket on the grass with Timmy and Cord, and at night she will sleep in my bed and I will sleep by her on the floor, and I will tell her what I used to imagine about the universe.

When the sugar had gone I said: ‘Very well. The moment is here! If, when I let go of your hand, Miss Stevens, you would turn it over, you will find, I believe, that the initials you wrote on the sugar have transferred themselves – through my powers of magic – to your palm.’

I released Lindsey’s hand and she turned it round. The initials L.S. were faint but clearly visible on her palm, and she laughed with pleasure.

The other girls, including Jennifer, applauded. Then they began to question me about how it was done, but
Black’s
had warned me that ‘The wise young illusionist does not reveal the tricks of his magic,’ and so I said: ‘I can’t explain it. It isn’t like Physics with set laws. It’s something else.’

I kept myself awake most of that night, perfecting a new trick to show Lindsey the next day. By the time dawn broke, I could pass a plastic beaker through the surface of a table.

Then I lay down on my bed and went to sleep in a second, like Cord could do when he turned off
The Brains Trust
.

I had a dream about Miss McRae. She stood in my room looking at my sheets of marbling. She turned to me and said: ‘Oil upon water. So simple. Yet look what can be done, Mary.’

On a Sunday morning in April, Ernie Loomis woke up very early and looked at the soft light in the bedroom and at Grace sleeping peacefully beside him.

He could hear pigeons murmuring in the yard and other birds singing somewhere in the high beeches behind the barns.

He felt contented, as he could never remember feeling before. He looked at his life and admired it. He thought, everything is good: the acres of land and the acres of sky; Grace in her little booth with her cash register; the grazing animals; Pete safe in his bus; the smart shop with its blue and gold awning; the name Loomis travelling further and wider across Suffolk; even Walter, his sweet nature and his bull’s head and his songs.

Easter was coming. Ernie had an order of two dozen ducks to dress for Swaithey Hall.

After he’d admired his life for ten or fifteen minutes, Ernie got up and, without waking Grace, found his clothes and tip-toed downstairs with them and put them on.

He let himself into the shop. He saw the sun coming up behind the pink colourwashed cottages opposite and knew that the day was going to be fine.

He put on his apron. He sharpened a paring knife and a cleaver. He prepared a clean tray. He went to the cold room and took half a dozen mallard off their hooks. They had been plucked and drawn by Pete and Walter, but their sleek heads were still on, and their webbed feet. He set them down on his block and began work, slicing off the heads and the feet with the cleaver, paring out the tail skin, trimming and tidying and then, with deft, effortless movements, tying the birds up and plumping their breasts before laying them on the tray.

The sun climbed higher and shone yellow on the empty shop-window. Ernie turned and looked at it. He thought of Easter Sunday, of daffodils and forsythia in the church and bowls of primroses picked by the children. He thought, everything is at peace.

He stood very still as he worked. He was forty-nine years old. Since the end of the war he had been entirely happy.

He looked up from the block for a split second. He fancied he had heard, in the midst of the dawn quiet, the shop bell jingle.

His right hand should have paused half-way from his shoulder but it did not. It brought the cleaver down on his three fingers resting on the duck’s neck and sliced them off, just above the knuckles.

He saw what had happened. He saw his three ends of fingers lying on the block and thought, I have done a fatal thing, I have done something that has no ending and no resolution. But then, when the pain came flying at him, he said to himself: It’s perfectly all right: I’ve armed myself against it. This is why I woke when it was barely light with my vision of a beautiful life – it was to arm myself against this. Because these things conquer: the spring sky with no clouds, the Easter bells, the shine on the grass and the innocent pride of the gold and blue lettering,
Arthur Loomis & Son, Family Butchers
. They conquer. This is what they do.

So he didn’t move. He saw his blood soak into the green feathers of the duck’s head and stain them brown. He noticed, after a moment or two, that the duck was lying in a puddle of blood that was spreading across the block and oozing into his apron like warm oil.

His right hand lost all its strength and the cleaver fell out of it and clattered to the floor.

This little noise might have woken Grace, far above, but it did not. Sunday morning sleep was precious and she turned over and sighed and went back to her dreams.

Ernie tried to move now because he looked at the window and saw that there was no sun there. The shadow of his adversary was so great, it was taking away all the light, and for the first time he thought, perhaps I’m not going to win the fight. So he tried to move to Grace’s little booth where, in a wooden drawer, bandages were kept.