Sacred Country (2 page)

In April that year, Sonny lost eleven lambs to freezing weather. Anger always made him deaf. The more angry he grew, the louder he shouted.

Part of his left ear had been shot off in the war. He’d seen a small piece of himself floating away on the waters of the Rhine. What remained was a branching bit of cartilege, like soft coral. In his deaf rages, Sonny would gouge at the coral with his thumb, making blood run down his neck.

Sonny took the frozen lambs to his neighbour, Ernie Loomis, to be butchered and stored in his cold room. On Sonny’s farm nothing was allowed to go to waste. And he couldn’t bear the way Estelle was becoming careless with things in the house, so absent-minded about everything that sometimes she forgot what she was holding in her hands. He wanted to hit her when this happened, hit her head to wake her thoughts up. That day when she’d sewn her hair to the piece of silk, he’d made her
unpick the seam, stitch by stitch with a razor blade, until all the hair was out.

In a silver frame on the kitchen mantelpiece Estelle kept a photograph of her mother. She had been a piano teacher. The photograph showed her as she’d been in 1935, a year before her sudden death in a glider. She had belonged to the Women’s League of Health and Beauty and this was how she remained in Estelle’s mind – healthy, with her hair wavy and gleaming, beautiful with a gentle smile. ‘Gliders, you know,’ Estelle had once told Mary in the whispery voice she used when she talked about her mother, ‘are also, in fact, very beautiful things.’ And it was suggested to Mary, even after she began wearing her glasses, that she had some of Grandma Livia’s looks. ‘I think,’ Estelle would murmur, ‘that you will grow up to be quite like her.’

Mary was fond of the photograph of her grandmother. She looked quiet and peaceful and Mary was fairly sure she hadn’t said thoughts out loud. And when she thought about her death in the glider, she didn’t imagine it crashing into a wood or plummeting down onto a village; she dreamed of it just drifting away into a white sky, at first a speck, white on white, then merging into the sky, dissolving and gone. But she had never been able to imagine herself growing up to be like Grandma Livia. She knew she would not become beautiful or join the Women’s League, whatever a Women’s League might be. And after the day of the two-minute silence, she knew she would not even be a woman. She didn’t tell her mother this and naturally she didn’t tell her father because since the age of three she had told him nothing at all. She didn’t even tell Miss McRae, her teacher. She decided it was a secret. She just whispered it once to Marguerite and Marguerite opened her beak and screeched.

After the death of the lambs, some warm weather came. In May, the community of Swaithey held its annual fête in a field outside the village, well shaded by a line of chestnut trees. These fêtes always had as their main attraction a competition of some sort: Best Flower Arrangement, Child’s Most Original Fancy Dress, Largest Vegetable, Most Obedient Dog, Most
Talented Waltzer and Quickstepper. Prizes were generous: a dozen bottles of stout, a year’s subscription to
Radio Fun
or
Flix
, a sack of coal. This year there was to be a competition to find Swaithey’s Most Beautiful Baby. Entry coupons were three-pence, the prize unknown.

Estelle’s faulty imagination was tantalised by the idea of an unknown prize. The word ‘unknown’ seemed to promise something of value: a visit to the Tower of London, a Jacqmar scarf, a meeting with Mr Churchill. She had no baby to enter, yet she refused to let this precious unknown elude her altogether. She bought an entry coupon and took it to her friend, Irene Simmonds.

Irene lived alone with her illegitimate baby, Pearl. The father had been Irish and worked ‘in the print’ in Dublin. ‘He tasted of the dye,’ Irene had told Estelle, but the taste quickly faded and was gone and no word, printed or otherwise, came out of Dublin in answer to Irene’s letters. She was a practical woman. She had an ample smile and a plump body and a heart of mud. For a long time, she dreamed of the Irish printer but her dreams never showed. All that showed was her devotion to Pearl.

When Estelle came with the threepenny coupon, Irene was feeding Pearl. Her white breasts were larger than the baby’s head. They could have nourished a tribe. Pearl’s little life was lived in a sweet, milky oblivion.

Estelle sat down with Irene and put the entry ticket on the kitchen table. ‘The unknown,’ she said, ‘is always likely to be better.’

Irene filled out the coupon, in the careful handwriting she’d perfected to try to win the printer’s devotion:
Entrant: Pearl Simmonds, Born April the 22nd, 1951
. While she did this, Estelle took Pearl on her lap and looked at her, trying to imagine herself as a judge of Swaithey’s Most Beautiful Baby. Pearl’s hair was as pale as lemonade. Her eyes were large and blue and liquid. Her mouth was fine like Irene’s, with the same sweetness to it. ‘You must win, cherub,’ Estelle instructed Pearl, ‘our hopes are on you.’

Sonny refused to go to the fête. He had no money to spare on trifles, no time to waste on fancy dress of any kind.

Estelle went in the pony cart with Mary and Tim. It was a hot day, a record for May, the wireless said. The lanes were snowy with Damsel’s Lace. Mary wore a new dress made from a remnant and hand-smocked by Estelle. In the pony cart she began to detest the feel of the smocking against her chest and kept clawing at it.

They stopped at Irene’s cottage. Pearl was sleeping in a wicker basket, wrapped in her white christening shawl. They laid the basket on some sacks that smelled of barley. After a bit, Pearl began to snore. Mary had never heard anyone snore except her father, let alone a baby.

‘Why is she?’ Mary asked Irene.

‘Oh,’ said Irene, ‘she’s always been a snorer, right from the off.’

Mary knelt down in the cart and looked at Pearl. The snoring entranced her so, it took her mind off the smocking.

The Beautiful Baby Contest was to be held in a large green tent, ex-army. The mothers would line up on hard chairs and hold their babies aloft as the judges passed. From thirty-six entrants, five would be selected for a second round. There would be one winner and four consolation prizes. All the way there in the cart, Estelle thought about the word ‘consolation’ and how she didn’t like it at all. Things which promised to console never did any such thing.

The afternoon grew hotter and hotter, as if all of June and July were being crammed into this single day. At the tombola Estelle won a chocolate cake which began to melt, so she told Mary and Tim to eat it. There was no breeze to make the home-made bunting flutter.

Towards two o’clock, Irene took Pearl to the shade of the chestnuts to give her a drink of rosehip syrup and to change her nappy. Mary asked to go with her. The heat and the smocking had made her chest itch so much she had scratched it raw and now little circles of blood were visible among the silky stitches. She wanted to show Irene these blood beads. Being with Irene
was, for Mary, like being inside some kind of shelter that you’d made yourself. It was quiet. Nobody shouted.

Irene examined the blood on the smocking. She undid Mary’s dress and bathed the scratches with the damp rags she carried for cleaning up Pearl.

‘There’s hours of work in smocking, Mary,’ Irene said.

‘I know,’ said Mary.

They said nothing more. Irene fastened the dress again, kneeling by Mary on the cool grass. She held her shoulders and looked at her. Mary’s glasses were dirty and misted up, her thin hair lay damp round her head like a cap. Irene understood that she was refusing to cry. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘now we have to get Pearl ready to be beautiful.’

She handed Mary a clean square of white towelling and Mary laid it carefully on the grass. She smoothed it down before she folded it. Irene took off Pearl’s wet nappy and laid Pearl on the clean folded square. She took out of her bag a tin of talcum and powdered Pearl’s bottom until the shiny flesh was velvety and dry. Mary watched. There was something about Pearl that mesmerised her. It was as if Pearl were a lantern slide and Mary sitting on a chair in the dark. Mary took off her glasses. Without them, it seemed to her that there were two Pearls, or almost two, lying in the chestnut shade, and Mary heard herself say a thought aloud, like her mother did. ‘If there were two,’ she said to Irene, ‘then there would be one for you and one for me.’

‘Two what, Mary?’

But Mary stopped. She attached her glasses to her ears. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what I meant. I expect I was thinking about the cake Mother won, because you didn’t eat any.’

‘It’s hot,’ said Irene, fastening the safety pin of Pearl’s nappy. ‘It’s going to be sweltering in that tent.’

The mothers crowded in. There were far more mothers than chairs, so some had to stand, faint from the burning afternoon and the weight of the babies. The judges’ opening remarks
could hardly be heard above the crying. Lady Elliot from Swaithey Hall, neat in her Jacqmar scarf, said she had never seen such a crowd of pretty tots. She said: ‘Now I and my fellow judges are going to pass among you and on our second passing we will give out rosettes to the final five.’

There was laughter at the idea of the rosettes. The babies were hushed by this sudden ripple of noise. Estelle, with Mary and Tim, stood by one of the tent flaps, praying for a breeze and for the unknown to arrive in Irene’s lap. Mary had her eyes closed. She felt a sudden sorrowful fury. She didn’t want there to be a contest after all.

The judges barely looked at Pearl. They walked on with just a glance and the only thing that came to Irene waiting patiently on her chair was a waft of French perfume as Lady Elliot passed.

The competition was won by a Mrs Nora Flynn. The unknown became a trug and trowel, and Mrs Nora Flynn laid her baby, Sally Mahonia, in the trug, like a prize cabbage.

On the way home in the cart, Irene seemed as content as if the day had never been. Timmy was silent, pale from an afternoon like a dream, tugged here and there and seeing nothing but shimmer. Estelle said bitterly that a trug and trowel could not be classified as ‘unknown’ and she drove the pony at a slow, disappointed pace.

Mary said: ‘I didn’t clap when that Sally Mahonia won. I didn’t clap at all.’ And then, tired out from scratching her chest and eating cake and wanting Pearl to be recognised as the Most Beautiful Baby in Swaithey, she fell asleep in Irene’s lap.

Pearl, unvisited by any thoughts, slept near her on the barley sacks, softly snoring.

I can remember way back, almost to when I was born.

I can remember lying in my parents’ bed, jammed between them. It was an iron bed with a sag in the middle. They put me into the sag and gravity made them fall towards me, wedging me in.

Our land was full of stones. As soon as I could walk, I was given a bucket with a picture of a starfish on it and told to pick stones out of the earth. My father would walk ahead with a big pail that was soon so heavy he could barely carry it. I think he thought about stones all the time and he tried to make me think about them all the time. I was supposed to take my starfish bucket with me wherever I went and have my mind on the stones.

I can remember getting lost in a flat field. It was winter and the dark came round me and hid me from everything and swallowed up my voice. The only thing I could see was my bucket, which had a little gleam on it, and the only thing I could hear was the wind in the firs. I began to walk towards the wind, calling to my father. I walked right into the trees. They sighed and sighed. I put my arms round one of the scratchy fir trunks and stayed there, waiting. I thought Jesus might come through the wood holding up a lantern.

My parents came and found me with torches. My mother was sobbing. My father picked me up and wrapped me inside his old coat that smelled of seed. He said: ‘Mary, why didn’t you stay where you were?’ I said: ‘My bucket is lost on the field.’ My father said: ‘Never mind about the bucket. You’re the one.’

But when I was three, I was no longer the one. Tim was born and my father kept saying the arrival of Timmy was a miracle. I asked my mother whether I had been a miracle and she said: ‘Oh, men are like that, especially farmers. Pay no heed.’

But after Timmy came, everything changed. My mother and father used to put him between them in their sagging bed and
fall towards him. When I saw this, I warned them I would kick Timmy to death; I said I would put his pod through the mangle. So my father began to think me evil. I’d go and tell him things and he’d say: ‘Don’t talk to me, Mary. Don’t you talk to me.’ So I stopped talking to him at all. When we went stone picking together, we would go up and down the furrows, up and down, up and down, with each of our minds locked away from the other.

My vision began to be faulty soon after Timmy was born. I would see light bouncing at the corner of my eye. Distant things like birds became invisible. People would separate and become two of themselves.

I tried to tell my mother how peculiar everything was becoming. She was going through a phase of needing to touch surfaces all the time. Her favourite surface was the wheel of the sewing machine and her long, white thumb would go round and round it, like something trapped. When I told her about people becoming two of themselves, she put her hand fiercely over my mouth. ‘Ssh!’ she said. ‘
Don’t
. I’m superstitious.’

So it was my teacher, Miss McRae at the village school, who discovered my faulty vision. She told my mother: ‘Mary cannot see the blackboard, Mrs Ward.’ Which was true. The blackboard was like a waterfall to me.

I went with my mother on a bus from Swaithey to Leiston to see an oculist. The bus had to make an extra stop to let some ducks cross the road. I ran to the driver’s window so that I could see the ducks, but all I could see were five blobs creeping along like caterpillars.

A week later I got my glasses. Timmy laughed at me with them on, so I hit his ear. I hoped I’d hit him so hard his vision would go faulty too. ‘How are they, then?’ asked my father crossly, holding Timmy.

‘They are a miracle,’ I said.