Sacred Country (20 page)

I began a new year with Miss McRae. She said: ‘Are you making any resolutions, dear?’

The resolution I made was to forget Lindsey. She had left Weston Grammar. She had become engaged to Ranulf Morrit. She behaved as though she had become twenty-five overnight. She said, ‘Darling Ranulf is going to become a chartered accountant.’

Darling Ranulf made love to Lindsey in a forgotten maids’ room at his parents’ house. Ramona the cook slept next door. Spanish people were not supposed to have ears.

When Lindsey began describing all this to me, I wanted to say ‘please desist’, but she held on to me and laughed in my ear and her hair touched my face and all the breath in me seemed to collect at the top of my lungs and become heavier than stone.

She said: ‘I never knew about
giving
myself before, Marty. About, you know, absolutely
submitting
. But this is what’s so fantastic about it. I mean, to have Ranulf on top of me and making me do whatever he wants … and I
want
to, that’s the thing, I mean do whatever he wants, not what I want and when he comes – you know about coming, don’t you? – he always tells me, he says God I’m coming Lindsey, I’m coming and I think God’s he’s coming and I feel so …
privileged
. Do you know what I mean?’

I had to go far away. I walked across the frozen hockey field. I let myself into one of the tennis courts and sat down on the grit and pressed my back into the wire. I could see myself, as if from above, as if I were God or a navigator. I looked like a sack of coal. I could feel my lungs turning black.

I tried to think of tennis and summer. There were no nets on the courts. The lines needed repainting. I thought, I’m seventeen and it will always be winter. My knees were violet with cold. My hatred of Ranulf Morrit had made me a petrified thing. By the time it got dark, I couldn’t even move my eyes.

Miss Gaul found me. A drip from her long nose plopped onto my hand like a waking spell. She made me stand and try to slap myself but I couldn’t straighten up. I walked back across the hockey field bent over, with my arms hanging down, like
Neanderthal Man. I thought it would be nice to go back in time, to an era when no one could talk.

I was taken to the Staff Common Room which was the only room at Weston with an electric fire. It was the end of the school day and the teachers were making coffee and lighting up cigarettes – activities you never thought them capable of. They smiled at me kindly, as if they were a family and I were part of it for half an hour.

That was before my Christmas with Cord. When I got back to school, Lindsey was no longer there. I tried not to imagine where she was or what she was doing. I did not send her the fur from my anorak hood. I was glad I was not Ramona, the Spanish cook. I made my resolution to forget her.

I couldn’t forget her.

I would look in my thoughts for an equilateral triangle and I would find Lindsey instead. She lay in wait for me all the time.

I had been a chaste person. Now, at night, in my coffin bed, I became Martin Ward, Lindsey’s lover. I couldn’t help it. She should not have told me what Ranulf did to her. She made me want it. I laid her underneath me. My breasts become hers. I closed my eyes. She begged me to go deeper into her, to hurt her. She said: ‘Destroy me, Martin.’ And when I was finished, she was bruised, she was crying. I licked her tears. I whispered to the wet pillow: ‘Lindsey, it’s your own fault.’ Before I slept I would think, tomorrow this will be over. Tomorrow I will be able to forget her and get on with my essay on
Hamlet
. And then tomorrow would come and she was not forgotten.

And my longing to confide in somebody came back. I wasn’t little Martin any more. I was a young man in my mind.

I sat in silence by Miss McRae’s fire. She believed I was mourning my home and family. She was knitting an arran jumper for her sister in Oban. She said: ‘Time changes everything, Mary, and not always for the worse.’

I said: ‘I’m ill, Miss McRae. I can’t work. It’s something internal.’

Miss McRae put down her knitting. ‘That’s serious, dear,’ she said.

So I found myself in the doctor’s surgery. I had no memory of walking there.

I sat alone with a line of others all alone on hard chairs. The waiting room was a passage with no light to read by. The others fidgeted and coughed. I was afraid to look round the faces and find my father there, clawing at his ear.

When I went in, the doctor pulled his chair very close to his desk and said: ‘Well?’ He was a doctor I had never seen before. The old one had been called Hodgkin and he’d lived in Swaithey for twenty-seven years. I thought, he could be dead. Even my father could be dead. Because it feels as if a lot of time has passed …

I found an unexpectedly strong voice. It was as if my breath had been saved by history for this moment, ever since the death of Hakluyt. I said: ‘You won’t believe what I’m going to say.’

I held myself very straight and still. I spoke clearly and fluently, like I’d tried to speak on the subject of Hitler in the school debate. I told the doctor that I was seventeen years old.

He said: ‘Yes. Well?’

I felt a silence coming on. I knew that I couldn’t allow this, that my words would fall into it and drown.

I said: ‘I’ve tried to tell people. Twice. But I changed my mind.’

‘Tell them what?’ said the doctor. He seemed in a hurry.

‘Tell them that I’m not really a girl. I never have been. When I was very small maybe, but not since the age of six when the King died. Since then – ’

‘Wait a minute,’ said the doctor. ‘What are you saying?’

‘I’m saying that although in some respects I’ve got a girl’s body, I have never felt, I mean not for one hour or one day or one minute, that I was a proper girl or that I’d grow up to be a woman. I have always felt male. And the older I get – ’

‘You have breasts.’

‘Yes.’

‘Presumably you menstruate?’

‘No.’

‘You know what menstruation is?’

‘Yes.’ I thought about Lindsey. Lindsey used to bleed and bleed. She used to swoon from her loss of blood.

‘You have no menstrual cycle?’

‘No.’

‘And because of this, you’ve come to believe you’re not a girl?’

‘No. Not because of this. I’ve always believed it. Always. Since I was six. Since the King – ’

‘What does the King have to do with it?’

I stopped and looked at this doctor. If we’d had a debate entitled ‘What Makes a Good Doctor?’ I would have said: ‘Patience is one thing.’

The doctor had a smile on his lips that he was trying to hide. I thought, when I am a man, I will not resemble him in any way; he is a loathsome person.

He wrote down a few words on a pad. He said the most important thing to establish was why my periods had not begun. I told him it was because I had no womb. He shook his head again.

He took a sample of blood from my arm. He asked me to show him my breasts, which I still kept bandaged up. I unwound the crepe. It felt icy in his room. Lindsey had told me that at the mere sight of her bosoms Darling Ranulf lost control of himself, but this doctor did not lose control of himself at the sight of mine. He looked away and I was glad. All I wanted then was to get out of there.

I was about to leave when the doctor said: ‘Wait a minute. I’m going to give you a prescription.’

‘A prescription for what?’ I asked.

‘Some tablets. They should bring on your bleeding. Your delusion is probably allied to hormone deficiency. Once your cycle is established, I’m sure it will disappear.’

I took the prescription and walked out. I did not say, Thank you, Doctor. I just left without a word.

I sat down in the main street of Swaithey, on a bench by the
horse trough. I tore up the prescription and scattered the pieces onto the water, where they floated like white petals. I thought, the medical profession has turned me into a litter lout.

Later in the year, after the summer had come and I had received an invitation to Lindsey’s wedding, I went to see Edward Harker. It was the day of the village gymkhana. Pearl sometimes liked to pretend she was a pony. She sneezed and whinnied and tossed her lemon mane. She let Billy sit on her shoulders and slap her arm with a willow wand. So I knew that Pearl and Billy and Irene would be at the gymkhana and that Edward, who suffered from hay fever, would probably be alone in his cellar.

I realised after my visit to the doctor that telling somebody about myself wasn’t as hard as I’d imagined. I just said some words and there it was, over. Except that it wasn’t, because the words had not been believed. I might as well have said, ‘I am the Virgin Mary.’ I was thought to be suffering from a delusion. My mother told me she had a friend at Mountview who thought she was a chicken. And this was why this person was locked up there. No one examined her for feathers. No one offered her a worm. I thought of writing to her: ‘This country is afraid of the unusual,’ but then I found that I didn’t relish the idea of writing a letter to a hen. I was as narrow-minded as everyone else.

So the question of belief began to torment me. I made a parade in my mind, like an identity parade, of everyone I knew and I passed slowly down it, telling them one by one. Only my father was absent. I told Cord and he began staring at the sky. I told Timmy and he said: ‘I have to go to a swimming lesson now.’ I told Lindsey and she laughed. She said: ‘Does this mean you can’t be one of my bridesmaids?’ I told my mother, but she wasn’t listening. She was trying to remember the words of a Perry Como song. I dismissed the parade and they all walked away without a backward glance.

And it was after this that I remembered Edward Harker saying to me on the day of his wedding: ‘Everything in nature is
resurrection,’ and I thought, a person who believes in previous lives is the person to tell, and he has been there all the time …

He was oiling a bat. He wore a grocer’s apron. The arrangement of light in his cellar hadn’t changed since I was a child. The smell of linseed oil was heavy, like incense. He caressed the bat with his oil-soaked hand. He said: ‘I hope I’m not losing my touch, Mary.’

I said: ‘You can keep a secret, Edward, can’t you?’

I used the same kind of words I’d used in the doctor’s surgery. I said: ‘There has been a mistake somewhere, Edward, and it won’t ever be put right or made more bearable if no one believes what I’m saying.’

‘I believe you,’ he said quickly.

And we both sat down where we happened to be standing. I sat on the iron head of a belt-driven lathe and Harker sat on his desk and knocked over one of his lamps. Neither of us spoke for quite a while and the silence marked the passing of something: it marked the passing of my isolation.

I watched Harker’s hand go towards the lamp and right it and set it down again exactly in the place that it had been.

Every Thursday morning, Timmy Ward was driven to Saxmundham Station in Sonny’s van and put on the early train to London.

His destination was the Olympic swimming pool at the Marshall Street baths. He was fifteen. His voice had broken and he could no longer sing in Swaithey Choir. He missed his singing. He missed the purity of his own sound. Swimming seemed to be the only beautiful thing he had left.

A talent scout, a former member of the British Olympic Swimming Team of 1956, had been invited to Timmy’s school. He had worn his Olympic track suit, very faded with eight years’ washing.

The sports teacher had said to him: ‘That’s the one to watch, the thin lad with the silly smile in Lane 2.’ Timmy had swum three lengths of butterfly and the talent scout had been so impressed he’d felt his heartbeat quicken. He said to Timmy: ‘I’m going to pluck you from Fenland obscurity, Timothy.’ Timmy said: ‘This isn’t Fen country, Sir. That’s over above Cambridge.’

‘Wherever it is,’ said the scout, ‘I’m plucking you from it.’

The group Timmy joined was called The Otters. They had three hours of intensive swimming coaching from ten o’clock till one. They had to bring their own lunch. From two till three they were taught diving. Every week, they were told that their
country would be proud of them one day.

Timmy was the smallest member of The Otters. His fear of the high board was acute and his dread of the day when he would have to dive from it intensified as the weeks passed. To make a long vertical line downwards with his body was, in his spiritual imagination, a fearful thing to do. He thought it unfair that, when swimming was what he excelled at, this other, terrible endeavour was expected of him. Even Estelle kept saying: ‘I hope you’ll learn diving, Tim. That’s the thing I’m waiting to come and see.’

He hoped she would have to wait a long time. He said: ‘All I’m good at is butterfly.’ She smiled her far-away smile and said: ‘Strokes have such funny names – crawl, butterfly. Who thought them up?’ Timmy told her he didn’t know. He didn’t know the answer to any of Estelle’s questions. Can you mime tap dancing? What are dreams? When did history begin? The questions just floated away, unanswered, into the air.

The Marshall Street pool seemed vast. There was a steep bank of seats for spectators on one side. Light fell onto the water from a long way up. The shouts of Mr McKenzie, the Olympic coach, echoed, as in a cathedral. If it had not been for the high diving board, Timmy would have found it a marvellous place. At the start of a butterfly race, three lengths, one hundred metres, when he stood, ready to spring, on his starting block waiting for Mr McKenzie’s gun, he felt more fond of existence than at any other time. The way the surface of the pool (no matter how much it had been disturbed by previous swimmers) returned to a glassy calm seconds before the race began never failed to impress him. He loved this about swimming: you left no trace of yourself, no footprint, no track. You described a horizontal line. It moved ahead of you, always ahead, with nothing remaining behind.

Mr McKenzie reminded The Otters quite regularly of the pride England could one day feel on their account if they exerted themselves. ‘Timothy,’ he would say, ‘we have to strengthen your legs or the Union Jack will never be run up for you.’