Sacred Country (16 page)

She hauled her neck free of the choking wrist, pushing her head against Sonny’s chest. His breath began to mist up her glasses. He was breathing hard from his exertions. She could smell his body which had never touched hers since she was a little girl in his arms. She felt a sickly sorrow, like a dose of poison going into her and spreading all through her.

She started to cry. This was a thing she never wanted to do and never wanted him to see as long as she lived. Not crying was what had given her hope. Now she was sobbing and she couldn’t stop. She begged him to let go of her. Screamed and begged.

When he’d cut through the wedge of bandage, he pulled back her shirt. He held her breasts in his hands. He pushed them up, showing them to her. He said: ‘Look at them. Go on. You look at them!’

She had her eyes closed. The tears came out and ran down her face and fell onto Sonny’s hands. She thought, this is the worst moment of my life. This is worse than my mother at Mountview.

Sonny pushed her away and she fell onto the gritty paments of the kitchen floor. She struggled to find the two sides of her shirt and close it. Sonny kicked her thigh. ‘You’re an abomination,’ he said. ‘That’s what you are.’

He kicked out again with his boot, then Mary heard him walk out of the kitchen and slam the door behind him.

She thought, now it’s over. Except that it isn’t. It’s now that it all begins.

She packed her suitcase.

She had more to put in it than the time she’d gone to live at Cord’s. She had books on the English Civil War and a copy of
King Lear
. She had her magic props and her favourite sheets of marbling. She had a hockey stick and a Baby Ben alarm clock and a box camera.

She trembled. She took out her photographs of Lindsey. She wanted Lindsey to walk out of the little black and white snaps wearing an angora jersey and to put her arms round her.

She washed her face. Her cheek was grazed and her eyes stung. She threw away the cut bandages. They stank of fear. She threw away the shirt that Sonny had torn. It was five o’clock in the afternoon and a smell of Irish stew came up into her room. She thought, I will never sit round the kitchen table with them again and eat what they’re eating. There will be just the three of them for always.

The suitcase was a cheap thing. Grandmother Livia had owned bottle-green luggage trimmed with pigskin and with her initials, L.C., engraved between the clasps, but this case seemed made of metal and board. Mary thought, if you know who you are, if you have a name you love, you can travel with green luggage and shout for a porter over the heads of other people. If you are Martin Ward and you have white breasts, you pack your life up in cardboard and carry it away, always away, always on and never knowing where.

The sight of her room made her pause as she was about to leave it. It was the only thing she didn’t want to abandon. She felt sorry for the room. Nobody would go into it to turn on a light or draw the curtains against the dark. When it rained through the holes in the lath and plaster roof no one would set out a line of bowls.

It was an autumn evening, full of the scent of fires. From the sitting room came the sound of television laughter. ‘Laughter,’ Edward Harker once said, ‘is our postponement of death.’

When Mary walked out into the yard, two shadows went in front of her – her own shadow and the shadow of the suitcase. They kept on going and Mary followed them and they did not look behind and no one called to them to stop.

She had no plan.

The money she possessed was five shillings and eight pence.

She remembered when she’d run away to Irene’s and told Pearl stories about Montgolfier and the universe. She didn’t think there would be any time for her in Harker’s house at the moment. And this was what she wanted, for somebody to give her time.

Her first thought was that somehow, by changing buses, she would get to Gresham Tears. Cord wouldn’t comment on her heavy suitcase. The Albertine roses round the door would still be in bloom. Cord would say: ‘Room’s ready. Bed’s made up. Ginger beer’s in the larder.’ But then what? They would sit by the wireless. She would try to tell Cord things that he would not be able to believe. She would do him harm. He would blow his nose to conceal his shock and his sadness. He would murmur: ‘Damn rum show,’ into his hankie.

She reached the end of the lane. She put the case down and took out the hockey stick, which was making it heavier than she could bear. She carried the stick like a rifle over her left shoulder. She thought how comforting it must be to be a soldier and to have a regiment you could be proud of and which was proud of you.

She abandoned the idea of going to Gresham Tears. She
knew that before it was dark, and before the suitcase got too heavy to be borne, she would arrive somewhere else, and she did.

She arrived at Miss McRae’s.

Miss McRae was eating a lone supper of kippers. She had retired from teaching. She was growing old in the brown darkness of her cottage. When she saw Mary with her suitcase, she thought, now I can be of use again. Good.

She removed her half-eaten kippers and made a pot of tea. She handed Mary a fine china cup and saucer and Mary asked: ‘Did you have this china in the lighthouse?’

‘I don’t remember, dear,’ said Miss McRae, ‘and that is the most vexing thing about getting old – not remembering.’

Mary found it difficult to drink the tea. She wondered if Sonny had made a dent in her gullet.

Miss McRae said: ‘Take your time, Mary. Take your time.’

Mary said: ‘Now that I’m here, I’m afraid to tell you. I’m afraid to tell anyone.’

Miss McRae said: ‘Well, I see from the stick that you’ve been playing hockey. Would you like to talk about that? What position on the field do you take?’

‘I’m a winger,’ said Mary. ‘I can run very fast.’

‘You always could. That I can remember.’

Mary looked round the room. The ceiling was very low, too low for Miss McRae, who didn’t diminish like some elderly people, but kept on being upright and tall like a fir. And she looked, now, as if she were unable to bend, as if she were petrified inside her clothes. When she sat, her body made a stiff but perfect right-angle in the chair.

After a while, when she’d drunk a little of the tea, Mary said: ‘I’m never going home again.’

‘No,’ said Miss McRae.

Then Mary said: ‘Someone has to help me.’

There was a long silence. Mary took off her glasses and cleaned them on the sleeve of her blazer. Miss McRae sat perfectly still and straight, waiting.

Mary thought, perhaps after all it was Lindsey I should have told. That night in my room, or after that. Perhaps, after all, she wouldn’t have hated me and would have helped me somehow. But now here she was face to face with Miss McRae, in a low space that smelled of kippers.

A sense of such shame began to grow in her that she could feel herself aching to disappear, to be dead and forgotten.

The silence went on. Mary replaced her glasses on her nose. She thought, in a minute I’ll get up and leave and go nowhere, just sleep out in a beanfield or under a stack.

‘Mary,’ said Miss McRae, ‘do you know what my name is?’

‘What?’ said Mary.

‘My name is Margaret. Margaret McRae. And perhaps you never knew what it was and thought it must be a secret. But it isn’t. It’s no secret from anybody. I am Margaret McRae. So you see, sometimes we consider to be secret certain things which need not be …’

‘This is secret. My thing is a secret.’

‘Then, if it’s not too heavy to bear, you must keep it. It’s only if –’

‘It
is
too heavy to bear!’

‘Then, that’s why you’re here, Mary. Because it’s got too heavy. That’s all. It’s like your suitcase. Too heavy. There comes a moment when you have to lay it down.’

The silence crept back. Mary didn’t want it back, but back it came.

Then she had an idea. She thought, if I get up and go to the window and turn my back on her, I might be able to say it. I might. If I don’t look at her, but out at her front gate and her bird bath and at night coming on, then it might be easier.

She went to the window. She tried to imagine that Miss McRae was an actual fir, without sight or hearing, sighing gently behind her.

But this didn’t work. Nothing could, now. Miss McRae had told her her name. You couldn’t reveal to a person who had been kind to you and who told you her name out of sympathy for you that you were an abomination.

Mary held on to the window. She saw a bird fly through the dusk and settle on the rim of the bird bath. ‘I’m here because of my father,’ she said. ‘He hits me and knocks me down.’

‘I was afraid that might be it,’ said Miss McRae.

‘I don’t want to go back. Ever.’

‘No.’

‘Can I stay here?’

‘Naturally, you can, Mary.’

She continued to look out at Miss McRae’s front garden. Silence came again. Or not-quite-silence. Trees in a wood, long ago, swaying, sighing. Then somebody, far off, calling Mary’s name, her old name Mary.

She turned.

‘Someone has to help me, Miss McRae,’ she said again.

Miss McRae nodded. ‘Yes, dear,’ she said. ‘Well, as you know, I am a person of some limitations. I have never visited the shrines of Ancient Greece. I have never walked arm in arm down the Champs-Elysées. The music of Elvis Presley is entirely lost on me. But I shall try to be the one.’

After the death of Ernie Loomis, irrevocable change had come to Walter’s life.

He had been warned. His ancestor, Arthur, had begun to smell. He had sat by Walter’s bed, stinking the room out. He had said: ‘I’d better mention, in passing, Walter, that your dreams for your future were very inaccurate.’

Walter worked in the shop now. Grace stared at him critically through the glass of her booth. Pete struggled on by himself in the yard. Grace had said: ‘This is a family business and that’s how it’s going to stay. I’m not taking on a hired man.’

But this wasn’t all. The other thing was the loss of Sandra. She got married to a young vet. Every attempt that Walter had made to arrange more boating outings with her had failed. The card of condolence containing the factory-made words, ‘With deepest sympathy for Your Recent Loss’ was the last and only communication he received from her. She had never sat down under a tree and listened to his songs.

He was going bald at the crown. His head felt cold where once it had steamed. He lay in bed with one hand on the area of white scalp and remembered Sandra’s lively eyes and the way she had covered her knees with her skirt. He could understand why a girl of her kind might want to marry a man who nursed animals in preference to one who slaughtered them. The vet
was handsome and showed no sign of baldness and in every respect Walter thought Sandra’s choice a sensible one. What he couldn’t seem to dispense with was his own devotion to her and the peculiar habit of imagining that one day she would somehow be his.

She still worked at Cunningham’s. Nobody said what had happened to her ambition to be a stenographer.

Walter would go into the shop and pretend to examine woollen scarves, but not really look at them. He would be braced for the sight of the marmalade hair and if it came he would send Sandra an anxious smile. She would look away, as if Walter were a stranger, as if she had no memory of the varnished boat and the bottle of Tizer.

One day, Amy Cunningham said to him: ‘I’d be very obliged, Walter, if you would make up your mind about which scarf you want and then leave this display in peace.’ The display she referred to was a line of plastic heads and necks on which hats were placed and scarves tied. They were male heads. They regarded Sandra working two counters away, fitting ladies’ gloves onto smooth severed hands.

He didn’t spend his days with Pete any more. Nor could he spend his evenings singing songs in the bus because Grace didn’t like to be alone for long, it made her feel ‘fidgety’. But sometimes late at night, when Grace was asleep, he would go and drink whisky with Pete and tell him about the stench that had begun to come from Arthur’s ghost, and about his love for Sandra that refused to lie down and die.

Pete was getting older. His nose was very purple and thick. He said he had dreams about a Memphis storm. He said to Walter: ‘I’ve seen your precious Sandra. She’s a dry pole. Forget her. When June comes, go and see Gladys and you’ll feel better.’

It was a bond between them, this referring to Madame Cleo by her real name, Gladys. It made Walter feel mannish and proud. Every June when the fair came to Leiston he spent a single afternoon (always a Wednesday, half-day closing at the shop) in Gladys’s caravan, tangled in pink rayon sheets,
hearing himself pant and gasp like a runner in the murky candlelight, eating lipstick, while the fairgoers shrieked and screamed outside. Her price went up. The skin on her thighs felt loose, as though she had taken to wearing thigh gloves. Otherwise the experience didn’t change from one year to the next.

In June of 1962 word went round the village that Sandra was expecting a child. She left Cunningham’s. The vet’s house was called ‘Meadows’. Sandra stayed at home at ‘Meadows’ and baked thin-crusted pies and ironed her husband’s Viyella shirts. Walter walked by the house and saw her inside, her back turned, standing absolutely still. Her name was now Mrs David Cartwright.

He went off to the Leiston fair. Cleo’s caravan was always parked in the same place, at the end of a line of vans behind the big wheel. Sometimes there was a little queue at it. The sign
Fortunes Told
seemed to be one that people couldn’t easily pass.

The caravan wasn’t there. Walter walked up and down the line several times. Then he wandered the whole fairground in search of it. He noted how swiftly a year had passed.

He stopped at a little rifle range. The targets were tin swans. He told the stallholder that he was looking for Madame Cleo and the stallholder said: ‘Sorry mate. Cleo’s passed on.’

Walter paid a shilling to have six hits at the swans. His father had been a good shot, but Walter wasn’t. He said: ‘Do you mean passed on somewhere else?’