Sacred Country (17 page)

‘Two hits. No prize,’ said the stallholder. ‘I mean passed on into the sky.’

Walter drove the van home. He avoided going past ‘Meadows’. He wondered whether Cleo’s spangled spectacles had been put on her face in the coffin and what had become of the rayon sheets. He thought of her real name, Gladys, and how this somehow suited her better now, lying in a graveyard swept by the east wind, than it had when she was alive and selling spells at rising prices. Then he parked the van and put
his head on the steering wheel. He thought, someone keeps drawing a line through bits of my life, cancelling me out.

In his imagined life with Sandra, he abandoned everything to live with her on a moving barge. He sang to her as she hung out her personal washing.

Now, he was in the shop for eight hours a day and seven hours on Saturdays. His mother stared at his clumsy hands as he worked. He had to wear a white overall and a straw hat. He had to make decorations out of fat for saddles of lamb. He hated the sight of himself. He was twenty-six and he had no future except the present. Life had hired him and that was all.

He listened to the first Beatles songs. They were not songs about log-train engineers or honky-tonk women. Someone had drawn a line through hillbilly music as well as through everything else.

Pete had a favourite saying: ‘If life gives you a lemon, make lemonade.’ Walter thought hard about this, but found that he couldn’t remember what the ingredients of lemonade were. He assumed that sugar would be one. He looked all round his life for something sweet and all he could find was that feeling of sliding away from the world of hard things that drinking whisky gave him.

His late-night visits to Pete increased. Some nights he got so drunk that he passed out on the floor of the bus or fell over in the field as he tried to stagger back to the house. The next day, his hands would tremble as he cut and weighed the meat and his head hurt and he couldn’t look his mother in the eye.

She was ashamed of him. Snivelling, she said: ‘People are starting to notice, Walter. I see them watching you.’

He wanted to say, Well, my life is a lemon. It’s bitter. But all he said was: ‘I’m twenty-six and I’ll take a drink sometimes if I want to.’ Her life was bitter, too. She’d loved Ernie and relied on him and every morning for thirty years he had made a cup of tea and brought it up to her.

But Walter shared her shame. He saw how awful his drinking was, how repulsive he was becoming. He thought of
the clean, sober vet and his wife smelling of talcum powder. He was putting himself further and further from them, changing himself, making their kind of future an impossibility for him. And he was searching now, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes with all the power of his muddled brain, for one thing, one single act of degradation, that would put them and everybody like them beyond him forever. He knew that soon enough he would find it and it would be committed and then he would be lost to Sandra forever and headed to another place entirely.

In Walter’s dreams, Arthur began to divest himself of his clothes. He appeared first without his apron, then minus his bow tie, then wearing no shoes. The buttons of his shirt were undone and wisps of grey chest hair poked through. He was also losing weight and the stench of him was becoming so terrible that the dreaming Walter had taken to wearing a balaclava made of oiled wool, such as he imagined mountaineers to wear on their arduous, pointless journeys.

There were two bedrooms in Miss McRae’s cottage. The one I slept in felt as if it had never been inhabited by any living thing ever before. The floor of it was stone and the bed was as narrow as a tomb. The only decoration was a collection of cowrie shells in a green saucer. It was downstairs and looked out at a hedge and the hedge took away all the light.

For a long time, I had nightmares in that room. They were dreams of killing. Miss McRae told me I screamed, ‘screamed like a banshee, Mary’. The word ‘banshee’ was new to me. After the screaming, I would sit up in the tomb and let Miss McRae put a crocheted shawl round my shoulders. Sometimes she made Horlicks in coronation mugs and we’d sip this and discuss Miss McRae’s life-long desire to visit the great chestnut
forests of Corsica, and the murders I’d committed in my sleep would vanish.

I discovered that Miss McRae was a person who hardly slept at all. She would take the pins out of her bun and let her grey hair down in preparation for her night and then seem to forget that night had come. She listened to the World Service. She read
Little Dorrit
and a book about butterflies. In the morning, I would find her in her chair, dozing a little, with her arms folded. When I asked her whether she was tired, she would reply: ‘No, no. Certainly not.’

After that night of my arrival with my hockey stick, she told me I could stay as long as I needed to. The phrase she used was: ‘Until better times come, Mary,’ and I told her better times would never arrive while my father was alive. And this was one of the things I was waiting for in the depths of my mind: for my father to die and for the farm to fall into ruin with Martin Ward the only person capable of saving it.

At school, we had a debate entitled ‘What Makes a Good Leader’. Everyone in our class – including Lindsey, who was secretly engaged to Ranulf Morrit and had entirely given up studying in order to dream about him full time – was expected to contribute to it and so I asked Miss McRae what her views on the subject were.

Miss McRae cooked plain and tidy meals, mushroom pie cut into squares, toad-in-the-hole with the sausages in a line, and while we ate these we talked about Leaders. Miss McRae put a lot of salt on her plate. She said: ‘In this kind of discussion, Mary, there is the literal response and the acceptable response and it is important for you to understand the difference.’

I went to the debate armed with all her wisdom. I told no one that my thoughts weren’t mine. When I asked to put forward my choice of person in the category of Good Leader I said: ‘Hider’, and the whole room fell silent and Miss Gaul began pushing kirbygrips violently into her plait to stop it jumping away from her head. She said: ‘As chairman of this debate, I have to remind you that certain conclusions have already been
reached and agreed: namely, a Good Leader is a man who acts for the public good, a Good Leader is one who shows farsightedness and mercy, a Good Leader has respect for his enemies.’

Lindsey was sitting next to me. She wore pink nail varnish to school. She smelted of flowers and milk. Her hair was tied in a tartan ribbon. I didn’t let her nearness to me distract me or make me faint-hearted. I stood up. I said: ‘There is another definition of “Good Leader” and this is the one we haven’t talked about and this is why I mentioned Hitler. And this definition is a literal definition.’

‘That’s enough, Marty. Thank you. You may sit down.’

‘I’m just pointing out, Miss Gaul, that – ’

‘Sit down, dear. You have taken this discussion off at a tangent and it is very important to learn, in debate, that tangential excursions serve only to waste time and confuse your listeners. Now. Lindsey, we have not heard very much from you. Perhaps you would like to give us your choice of Good Leader and then we can proceed to a summing up.’

I sat down. My feet were burning where I had stood on them. Lindsey did not look at me, nor did anyone in the room. Lindsey said: ‘Well, I would choose Sir Winston Churchill,’ and Miss Gaul nodded and put her hands together in a kind of prayer position and a little applause clattered out very softly from around the class.

That night, I thought about the great silence that had fallen when the word ‘Hitler’ had come out of my mouth. Miss McRae hadn’t reminded me that literal answers – if they are the ones not expected – can evoke fear and loathing. She expected me to remember that for myself.

I remembered it now and it helped me to see something else. My own literal answer to the debate entitled ‘Who Am I?’ was: ‘Martin Ward. A boy.’ The set answer, the one that everybody knew and expected, was: ‘Mary Ward. A girl.’ I had never ever in sixteen years dared to give the literal answer because I was afraid to be loathed. I’d tried to tell Miss McRae and then at
the last moment I’d run away from the words. To be hated by my father was enough for me. I was too cowardly to risk being hated by the whole world and to hear only silence falling all round me and then a voice of authority telling me to sit down.

Some subjects are not supposed to be debated, and this was one. I thought of Miss Gaul’s jumping plait. I thought of Lindsey looking up from the ornate initials, R.M., she was drawing on her debating notes and giving me a stare of horror. And then I thought, perhaps the one person I could tell would be a stranger, someone who didn’t resemble a tree, who didn’t smell of flowers, who did not make cricket bats, who did not sit in the darkness watching Fanny Cradock. Someone impartial. Someone whose loathing and fear were of no consequence to me.

The person I chose as my tellee was the vicar of Swaithey, the Rev. Geddis. He was someone I had refused to get to know and so he qualified for the category of stranger. Also, he was a man who reminded me of a woman. He had a soft voice and he held his white hands very still.

I chose a Friday evening. I hoped there’d be no choir practice. Miss McRae and I had eaten a supper of mince and boiled carrots, followed by baked apples. It was early May. Miss McRae had finished
Little Dorrit
and started on
Bleak House
. That morning, she’d seen a swallow swoop over the bird bath. She said: ‘A. E. Housman was fond of swallows. They gave him hope.’

I went into the church and sat down in a pew. I remembered Ernie Loomis’s funeral and all his sisters weeping and Walter looking lost, like a panda in a zoo. I stared at the chunks of different-coloured light coming through the window known as the Sower Window because it depicted the parable of the sower, with his words falling on stone.

I didn’t want to talk to Geddis at the rectory, sitting in a proper room with a three-piece suite and anti-macassars on the chairs. I wanted to be in a place which felt as though extraordinary things could happen in it, like Wembley Arena or the Cheddar Gorge, a place where someone could go and say things he’d never said before and listen to the echo of them.

Swaithey Church, with its one stained-glass window and all its rafters being eaten away by Death Watch beetle, wasn’t an ideal location, but odd things had happened there, like a sighting of the first Sir John Elliot, ancestor of the present Sir John, kneeling at the altar with his arms around a willow sapling. And in church – this is what I thought – Geddis wouldn’t be able to turn me away. I was part of his flock.

I waited a long time. The sun went down and the Sower started to fade. I’d imagined that the Rev. Geddis did the rounds of his church every evening to make sure that no one was swiping the hymn books or playing ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ on a portable gramophone by the bell ropes. But he didn’t come.

I thought, I’ll wait until I can’t see any light at all behind the Sower and then I’ll go. I had waited sixteen years to tell somebody my secret. I could wait another day or even until Monday, a slack day for vicars.

Then the church door opened. I picked up a hymn book and held on to it like a float made of cork. I didn’t turn round. I thought, have I confused the words ‘literal’ and ‘imaginary’? Am I deluded? Is there a tempest in my mind or a tumour in my brain?

A voice said: ‘Mary?’

I turned. In the dingy light, I saw a halo of bright hair. I thought, I have met an angel unexpectedly.

The angel was carrying a bucket of lilac. It was Pearl.

She put the bucket down. She said: ‘What are you doing here all alone?’

I didn’t tell her that I was waiting for the vicar to come. I said I’d come here to think.

‘Think about what?’ asked Pearl.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘What are you doing with that mass of lilac?’

‘Mum sent me. It’s for the church flowers.’

‘I thought you were an angel.’

Pearl giggled. Her laughter had always been a light and bright thing. I began to ask her about her swimming lessons. I had rescued her from drowning so many times in my dreams
that it had exhausted me. I’d begun to worry I wouldn’t have any strength left for the real thing.

She came and sat down in the pew beside me. She was eleven. She must have been the most beautiful eleven-year-old girl on earth. She said she dreaded the swimming lessons. She said when she got into the water she went cross-eyed. She said being frightened could do this, make your eyes go wonky.

She put her thin little arm through mine. She said: ‘You don’t come to see us so often, now, Mary.’

‘I know,’ I said.

‘Why don’t you?’

I told her that I had a lot of homework. I warned her that if she went to Weston Grammar she would have to work very hard, too. She said that she didn’t want to go to Weston. She said that when she grew up she wanted to be a dentist’s nurse. She wanted to wear a white, starchy hat and put the dissolving purple pellet into the mug of water. I said: ‘That’s a very peculiar thing for an angel to want to do,’ and we both laughed and then I looked up and saw that the Sower had turned to blank, empty lead and that we were sitting there in the pitch darkness.

I had to wait a week before Geddis came into the church. I went there every evening, except on Sunday, after supper. I took a roll of sugar paper and some black crayons. I started to do a brass rubbing of the first Sir John Elliot, Knight of the Garter, 1620–1672.

When I saw Geddis come in at last, I said: ‘You don’t come here very often, do you?’ as if we were guests at a posh party, at the kind of party Ranulf Morrit would give, with food cooked by Ramona the Spanish cook.

Geddis said: ‘Mary Ward, isn’t it?’

He said if I wanted to talk to him privately, we could go into the vestry, where we wouldn’t be overheard. I looked round the church and there was no one in it but us. I thought, this is a farce. And I remembered my mother saying this word at Mountview. ‘Meals are a farce,’ she’d said and Cord had knelt down and said: ‘Don’t, Est!’