Sacred Country (21 page)

On the long journeys to and from Marshall Street, Timmy would examine the idea of future glory. He found that he wanted it not so much for himself as for Sonny. Sonny’s life was going down, it was a runaway thing, on a falling curve, like a dive. The combine was rusty. Parts for it were ordered on credit and never paid for. Fields were left fallow because Sonny didn’t have the will to plough them and drill them. Thistles seeded themselves everywhere. The whole farm was blighted with thistles and Sonny did nothing. Timmy hated the sight of all the thistledown blowing like cotton above the ground.

He had a recurring dream: Sonny came to Marshall Street, wearing a suit and tie. He saw Timmy win two butterfly races. He stood up and cheered and waved a handkerchief with joy. They went home together on the train, father and son. As the fields began to move past the carriage windows, Sonny said: ‘That’s how everything’s going to look from now on, flat and tidy and neat. And it will be because of you.’

But then there was the wretched question of the diving. Both his parents would keep on mentioning that. It was as though they saw all the swimming as an apprenticeship for this other, greater thing, this moment when Timmy would put his body into the air and they would watch it fall.

Gilbert Blakey had taken delivery of his new car, an MGB Convertible with wire wheels, on the day Kennedy was murdered. He heard about the assassination on the car radio. He felt so shocked that he had to pull over into a lay-by and sit still. The black, leather-scented interior of the car, until a moment ago an entirely marvellous thing, now seemed to Gilbert like a soft chamber of death. He had difficulty breathing. He wound down the window to let in the sharp November air. He laid his head on the steering wheel.

The car frightened him from then on, just enough to make
him drive more sedately than he would have liked. The winter was bitter and the Suffolk roads icy. Gilbert dreaded turning the MG over onto its vulnerable soft top. He imagined his own head turned to pulp, like Kennedy’s. He longed for spring. He wanted to believe that all he had to do was survive the winter and then everything would become gentle again: the weather, the behaviour of the world, the beat of his own heart. And part of him knew that this was a fond expectation. No moment in time can ever be revisited.

He’d continued to treat Walter’s gum disease. He told Walter that he wished to see him regularly until every manifestation of decay had been eradicated. He said that if his teeth weren’t saved now, he would have none left by the time he was thirty-five. He said: ‘It was profoundly important, Walter, that you came to see me when you did.’ By January, Walter’s mouth was pink and clean again, his breath sweet. He said: ‘So is that it, Mr Blakey, for now?’

‘No,’ said Gilbert. ‘Monthly check-ups must continue, until the spring.’

He told Walter he’d bought a new car, an MGB. He didn’t say that it made him afraid. Walter said: ‘I’m envious, Mr Blakey. If there’s one thing certain about my life, it’s that I’ll never own a sports car.’ Gilbert replied that nothing was certain in any life and they laughed and Walter noticed for the first time Gilbert’s resemblance to Anthony Eden and felt flattered by it, peculiarly flattered to have seen it.

From this moment they told each other odd details of their lives. Because Walter couldn’t speak for most of the time he spent in Gilbert’s adjustable chair and because Gilbert preferred not to talk while he was drilling or scaling, small details were all they had time for. So Gilbert learned that Walter’s uncle lived in a trolley bus in a field. So Walter found out that twelve times a year Gilbert’s mother went out with an eighteen-foot measure and measured the distance between her front door and the Minsmere cliffs. They found these details strange and absorbing. Walter was surprised to discover that he was not the only person in Suffolk living a solitary life in his
mother’s house. Gilbert thought, the uncle in the bus is unconventional and this makes Walter less ordinary than I’d presumed.

Walter was pleased with the change in himself. He hadn’t enjoyed smelling like Arthur Loomis’s corpse. When he opened his mouth, now, and saw his pink gums and white, shining teeth, he had the thought that he had been saved from something, perhaps even from dying. One man had saved him: Gilbert Blakey. And not only from his own decay – from his nightmares also. Because Arthur began to leave him alone. When he did appear, he didn’t stink any more, he wasn’t naked or waving his prick about, he was wearing clothes and his butcher’s apron.

Walter felt a grateful relief and an admiration for Gilbert that bordered on worship. Eden had stepped forward into the present and smiled on him. In exchange, the ghost of Arthur had returned to a pre-Suez state of quietude. The next bit of Walter’s life could now begin.

But what next bit? There was no change to any part of his daily routine. There was only spring slowly unfolding around everything and light coming and showing white on the marble counter and on the cold room floor. Grace celebrated her fifty-third birthday. Her sisters came to stay for a weekend and talked in whispers as they had done after Ernie’s death. In their soft voices, they congratulated Walter on doing well in the shop. He poured sherry for them and nodded but didn’t thank them.

He was sent out to buy Eccles cakes and at the baker’s there was Sandra with the prawn. And the prawn wasn’t lying down asleep but kneeling up in the pram, pink and squeaking, and Walter thought, the prawn will soon be walking and starting to have its own human life, and still nothing will have happened to me. Then Sandra will have another of the vet’s babies, a second horrible shrimp in a salmon bonnet, and all that will have been given to me will be the passing of time.

He brought the cakes home and put them on a plate. He took
them into the front room where the sisters were. Their voices reminded him of the wind blowing along the river and lifting the skirts of the willows. He saw Sandra in the varnished boat. He rowed. She covered her knees with her skirt. He helped himself to a cake and ate it quickly and greedily. He thought, everything good is in the past. Even things that were only half-good – they’re in the past too. Things like that day with the bottle of Tizer, never drunk. And all my songs. And my half-yodel. Everything.

A hot Sunday came.

Walter told his mother: ‘Mr Blakey has invited me to go for a ride in his car.’

‘Go for a ride?’ said Grace. ‘Why would you want to do that, dear?’

‘It’s a sports car,’ said Walter. ‘Convertible.’

‘Convertible?’ said Grace. ‘What does it convert to?’

‘It’s a term,’ said Walter. ‘Convertible is a term for something.’

He wished he’d told Grace nothing about it. She made it seem like a babyish thing to want to do. Little boys went for rides in cars, not men in their late twenties. But he didn’t care. He was looking forward to it, to moving along familiar roads very fast. And then arriving at the sea. Because the sea was their destination. Mr Blakey had said: ‘I’m conservative in this way, Walter. I like every trip to have some purpose to it.’

It was the first hot day of the year, a Sunday in May. Gilbert had washed and polished the car and the wheels shone. The black canvas hood was folded down. As Walter got into his warm leather seat, Gilbert smiled at him, his Eden smile, and Walter felt pleased with this, as if he had been sent a greetings card with an authentic message inside it.

The sun caught Gilbert’s teeth and made them glisten. He wore a blue shirt with a sleeveless fairisle jersey like a little waistcoat and a red silk tie. Walter had never seen him in anything but his white coat. And he had never been alone with him before. He felt suddenly breathless. He thought, it’s like
being alone with someone famous. There’s a difference between them and you which makes breathing awkward.

They drove towards Aldeburgh. There was a brightness in the air that Walter couldn’t remember seeing ever before.

They talked about the murder of Kennedy. Gilbert told Walter how he had had to stop the car in a lay-by and put his head on the steering wheel. Walter told Gilbert that he had heard about the assassination from Pete, who had come into the shop, crying. Talking about Kennedy seemed to create a bond between them. They were silent for a bit and the sound of the car’s marvellous engine was the only thing to be heard. And then Gilbert took his left hand from the metal steering wheel and laid it gently on Walter’s knee.

Walter didn’t move. He looked down at the hand as though it were a thing that had landed on him from outer space. He saw that it was a pale hand, lightly freckled with soft blond hairs on the back of it. The fingers were very long and the nails perfect and shiny.

Walter wondered whether he should say something. He wanted to ask, Do you want me to say anything, Mr Blakey? He turned his head, just fractionally, so that he could see Gilbert’s face and his expression. Gilbert was staring ahead at the road. It was as though the hand that he’d put on Walter’s knee didn’t belong to him, as though he hadn’t noticed that it was there. Walter thought, in a moment or two, he’ll take his hand away and we’ll start a new conversation about some ordinary thing, not Kennedy, and this moment will not have happened. It will be like everything else; in the past and not there.

He had an erection. He didn’t often get them. Not since Sandra and the death of Cleo and the sight of the prawn. He wanted Gilbert’s hand to stay and the erection to stay. He didn’t want these things to disappear into time. So he put his own wide, cumbersome hand on Gilbert’s slim one. Touching it was like touching a meteorite, just as extraordinary. He moved the hand up his thigh. He felt a wild, hot happiness.

The light changed. They were driving along the edge of
Tunstall Forest. The sound of the engine changed. They were slowing down. Gilbert took away his hand to shift into third gear. He turned the car into a track in the forest and the tall trees leant over it, curtaining out the sun.

Walter waited. He felt as if he wanted to scream something out, a word or a sound he’d never made before but which everyone – his mother, Sandra, the vet and the prawn – would hear and be so frightened by they would turn white and open their mouths in disbelief.

Then he felt Gilbert’s mouth on his. The little moustache brushed his top lip. He thought, once again Mr Blakey has put me in a position where I can’t speak, but now this is probably best. This is the future, but it’s a future without words. Things will be done and never spoken about.

Sonny was having difficulty remembering.

He thought, there are holes in the years gone. Spaces with nothing.

Irene said to him: ‘Is drink turning your brain to soup, Sonny, or what?’

He couldn’t stop drinking. Drink was almost all that was left to him of pleasure. He’d lost half an ear for England. England owed him something, a few glasses of something every night. Darn right, as John Wayne would say. Old John Wayne drinking his Black and White whisky, with his black and white horses to ride through the black and white scenery; Sonny was sure John Wayne didn’t have holes in his past, but then he always had some black and white woman to kiss and to ride with into the future. Darn right.

He went out one morning to feed the hens. He was alone. Timmy wasn’t interested in feeding the hens any more. Sonny saw all the hens standing about in their field, standing
absolutely still and not moving. They looked like decoys. Sonny thought, is this a real sight?

He stood still and didn’t move. He set down the pail of grain. It was early and the sun was low and the shadows cast by the chicken coops were long. Sonny’s head ached. He had a longing to lie down where he was on the stubble.

He sat instead. The ground was hard and prickly under him. He put one hand into the pail, to reassure himself that the grain was still there. The hens were in shock, that was how it seemed.

Sonny wondered whether a fox had come in the night and terrorised them. But there was no smell of fox.

Then he knew what had happened. A spell had been cast on the hens. He saw it clearly. He saw Mary, in the dark cottage where she lived with the Scottish teacher, practising witchcraft. She had progressed from conjuring to real, deadly magic. She was taking her revenge on him. It was Mary who was bringing ruin to the farm.

Sonny got up. He felt stiff in his knee-joints. He lifted the pail and scattered some handfuls of corn, but the hens didn’t seem to notice and remained stock still, looking at their surroundings, like hens in a painting.

He knew there were certain steps he should take, certain things that a man with a proper memory would do, but he couldn’t think what they were. He craved, then and there, a long swill of black beer, its sweet-bitterness, its quenching of a thirst which, with the dry winds as his enemy, seemed perpetual.

His next thought was, I’d better go to that hole of a cottage and see her, that witch-child, and tell her I know her game; tell her if she doesn’t stop putting spells on my land, I’ll lock her up. I’d better frighten her. She’d better remember that I’m her father. She owes me her life and I still have power – power to take her life away.

Darn right.

He didn’t go that day. He did nothing that day, and he didn’t tell Estelle about the hens or about the witchcraft. Because for
some time now, Estelle had been behaving differently towards him and he wanted this different behaviour to continue. He wasn’t imagining this: her behaviour towards him had changed.

She asked him to make love to her. She lifted up her nightdress. She wouldn’t let him kiss her. He longed to kiss her mouth and she wouldn’t let him. But she allowed him to stroke her hair and then to lie on top of her and release himself inside her. She took no pleasure herself. She lay there with her eyes closed and her mouth turned away, but at least she let him do this,
invited
him to do this. ‘Tonight is a good time,’ she’d say, ‘so you can do it, Sonny. I want you to do it.’

So his old desire for her crept back. As long as he didn’t look at her feet, which used to be beautiful and now looked ugly to him, gnarled by time, he could summon up his old passion for her. Not too much though, he told himself. Don’t let it come back like a flood because then when Estelle gets another crazy spell and starts wandering the fields and won’t let you come near her, you’ll drown.