Sacred Country (25 page)

Then it’s over. In the dying seconds of it Hurst scores again. It is won. It is safe. My love, Bobby, and his England are at the pinnacle of the world and all the mad of the shires and the counties and the cities are shouting and weeping their hearts dry.

I want to hurl myself, like Livia, into the clouds. I want to dissolve and become suspect in the air.

Walter felt confused. His own feelings confused him. They weren’t what he’d expected.

He’d thought, on that Sunday in Tunstall Forest when Gilbert Blakey had first touched him, and then later in the room next to the surgery, the room with a sign on it saying
Waiting Room
, he’d thought, I’m letting all this happen only in order to become an outcast, to separate myself from the world of polite front rooms and babies in salmon bonnets. He waited to feel the self-loathing that would follow.

What followed wasn’t loathing, but elation and a feeling, at last, of being grown up. And here was the confusion: Walter felt happy. He hadn’t expected happiness.

When he looked at Gilbert – every single time he looked at him – he found him entirely beautiful. Compared to him, Sandra had been pretty only, pretty like a gift-box of assorted marmalades, never for one instant beautiful, not even on the day in the boat with the bottle of Tizer.

He now saw his feelings for Sandra and his afternoons with Cleo as maladies of his late adolescence. He’d known nothing, only craved romance and then mistaken it for love. But it wasn’t love.
This
was love: Gilbert. This was Eden.

But then – and this was why the happiness he felt began to slip away – he began to realise that his love for Gilbert wasn’t returned. Something was returned, but it wasn’t love. And so his confusion was compounded. Gilbert had started it all: he’d
bought the convertible car, he’d talked about Kennedy in a personal way, he’d put his slim hand on Walter’s thigh, he’d leaned over and kissed his mouth. These things Walter recognised as a kind of courtship, a carefully planned prelude to a love affair. And the affair was of long duration. Gilbert referred to it, after a while, as ‘necessary’. But there was no love in it. Only what Walter felt. And now when Gilbert kissed him, Walter had a feeling of choking.

One evening, he tried to describe this to his lover. Gilbert was lying naked on the waiting room couch with his head turned away. Walter was kneeling beside him. Without moving his head, Gilbert said: ‘It’s because you let yourself
feel
things. Try not to feel. Try just to
be
.’

Walter couldn’t not feel. He could slaughter a heifer without feeling or empty a chicken of its bowel and heart. But just to
see
Gilbert was to feel. He ached with him everywhere, behind his eyes, in the stoop of his shoulders, in his heavy feet. What he lived for was to be touched by him. It was not logical. He’d expected revulsion and an ending and neither came. Passion came and stayed. It wouldn’t leave. A new summer started and passed. There were no drives in the MGB. There were only the meetings in the waiting room and Walter’s obstinate, confusing love.

And he could tell no one about it. Not even Pete. Once, he would have tried to write a song about it, but a country song didn’t seem appropriate to someone of Gilbert’s class and sophistication. And lately, Gilbert had even started to complain about life in the country. He said Suffolk people were narrow in their hopes, he said they had no vision, he said it might soon be time for him to be moving on.

Walter’s thirtieth birthday was coming. Sandra Cartwright had two children now. A hired man, with the word ‘Mother’ tattooed on his neck, had been taken on to help Pete in the slaughtering yard. Aunt Josephine came to stay in the house for long periods of time, scenting it with talcum powder, boiling milk in the middle of the night. Walter endured these things, but felt the awfulness of them.

He said to Gilbert: ‘Couldn’t we go away somewhere?’

Gilbert said: ‘Where?’

Walter said: ‘I don’t know. I don’t know the world.’

Gilbert said: ‘No, you don’t. If you did, you wouldn’t have asked the question.’

Once every six months, Walter had to have his teeth scaled and polished by Gilbert. He sat, tilted backwards, under the Miralux lamp. The nurse crackled and sighed somewhere to the left of him. Gilbert’s face was near to his, yet upside down, unrecognisable, as though Gilbert were wearing a mask. The touch of his fingers was familiar enough, though, and his clipped, lisping voice criticising the way Walter neglected his mouth. And these quarter-hours in the dentist’s chair confirmed to Walter that he was at the mercy of something he would never fully understand.

Meanwhile, the ghost of old Arthur had stopped visiting him. Walter was grateful for this. The sight and smell of him had been grotesque. Yet sometimes Walter found himself thinking that it might have been possible to confide in his ancestor and that this ghost, with its rude behaviour, would not have died a second, astounded death from shock. The need to confess his love to someone was growing very strong.

Margaret Blakey noticed changes in her son’s behaviour and in his habits. She thoughts he was attempting to conceal change from her and that he’d forgotten she had a nose for such things. They’d lived together a long time. Forty-seven feet of cliff had fallen in that mass of years. A woman who lived on a precipice was sensitive to alteration. But Gilbert seemed to have let this slip from his memory.

He was restless. He stayed at his surgery very late some evenings. He talked condescendingly to her, like someone returned from a far place that she would never visit. He appeared to her as a person on the edge of catastrophe. He had begun to dye his hair and his moustache. They were a brighter yellow, like sherbet.

She said to him one evening: ‘I know you don’t like me to say things like this.’

‘What things?’ he said wearily.

‘I’m worried about you,’ she said. ‘I can’t put my finger on it, but you’re not your old self.’

He couldn’t bear the way his mother so often spoke in clichés, as though she had never really learned how to use the English language.

‘I don’t know what you mean by my “old self”,’ he said.

‘Yes, you do,’ said Margaret. ‘When you were calm and content.’

‘I don’t know when that was,’ said Gilbert.

Margaret sniffed. ‘If something’s happened,’ she said, ‘I think you owe it to me to tell me what it is.’

Gilbert was silent. He let the silence last. In it, they could both hear the sound of the sea. Gilbert allowed himself to imagine the silence that would arrive when he finally left the house and began his life again somewhere else. It made him feel both exhilarated and afraid.

‘Nothing’s happened, Mother,’ he said. ‘Only time passing.’

On a November evening, after their hour in the surgery waiting room, Gilbert said to Walter: ‘I’d better tell you, I’m winding up everything here in Swaithey. I should have done it years ago. I was too cowardly. But this decade is different.’

Walter felt as though he’d swallowed a stone. It was about the size of a potato. Its surface was smooth but its weight enormous. It was lodged above his heart.

He dressed himself. He watched Gilbert put on his trousers. He thought, the real Eden died from failure and shame, but this one is alive and sailing forwards. He will never give this moment another glance.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked. His voice was faint, impeded by the stone.

‘London,’ said Gilbert. ‘I’m joining a practice in Flood Street.’

‘Where’s Flood Street?’

‘In Chelsea. The swinging part of London.’ Then he smiled his dreamy smile. ‘It’s time to swing before I’m too old. Don’t you think?’

Walter had never been to London. He thought of it as a red and black place: red buses, black churches, red guardsmen, black gates, red telephone boxes, black water. He knew this image was inadequate, childlike. He said: ‘What I think isn’t of any importance.’

Gilbert took out a comb and began combing his hair, that he now wore much longer than before. He said: ‘Perhaps it’s better if we put an end to these meetings, is it? It’s you I’m thinking of, mainly.’

Walter sat still, without blinking or moving any part of him. The stone was weighing him down. And he felt half-blind, as if there were murk behind his eyes or in his head; smog somewhere. After what seemed to him a long time, he said something. He said: ‘What will happen to my teeth?’

He heard Gilbert laugh. Then the laughter died. Walter imagined it re-surfacing again in London, on the top of a red bus. Gilbert stood beside him, very tall-seeming, and touched the bald space at his crown with one of his long caressing fingers. He said: ‘All of that is up to you, Walter. Everything is up to you.’

Walter dragged his stone-weighted body out of the chair and then out of Gilbert’s waiting room and out into the black evening. The air hurt him. He felt his windpipe freeze. He wished he had had the final word. He wished the final word had been a curse. He cursed now, silently, yet knowing that Gilbert was far beyond reach: beyond reach of his words and beyond reach of his power – such as it had ever been – to touch or wound.

When he got home, he told Grace he was feeling poorly, with a pain in his chest. She threw him a fearful glance. ‘It’s not that thing you had before, Walter, is it?’ she asked.

‘What thing I had before?’

‘That vocal thing. In your throat, after that Rose Marie business?’

‘No,’ said Walter. ‘No.’

He said he didn’t want anybody to fuss. Grace put her hand on his forehead. It felt cool, cold even. She said she would bring up a hot-water bottle.

Walter got into his pyjamas. He could still smell Gilbert’s body on his hands. He lay on his back in his bed like a corpse, with his arms crossed over his chest.

Grace brought the bottle and gave it to him. She kissed his head. She said: ‘At least you can sleep late, love. Tomorrow’s Sunday.’

He lay in the dark, weeping. He heard his mother and Aunt Josephine come upstairs and go into their bedrooms and then later he heard Aunt Josephine get up again and go down to the kitchen to boil her milk. She had told him that night starvation could kill you when you were old. You could wake and find yourself on the ceiling, looking down at your own corpse.

His weeping dried up and he closed his eyes. He felt faint with tiredness. He waited for sleep to enfold him, like a lover.

The following evening, he went to see Pete. He didn’t mention Gilbert. He said: ‘I’m in a life I don’t understand. Nothing makes sense to me.’

Pete made strong coffee. The night outside the bus was silent. The white whisper of the Tilley lamp was the only noise.

Pete said: ‘Anything in particular?’

‘No,’ said Walter. ‘Only everything. I don’t know where I’m going or why.’

‘You’re not alone there,’ said Pete.

‘I’m serious,’ said Walter.

‘So am I,’ said Pete. ‘Shall we put on some early Elvis?’

These days, the old gramophone looked like something that belonged in a museum. The sound it was capable of getting was old sound; it felt thin, night-starved. Walter wanted to give Pete a proper record player, but there was no electricity in the bus and Pete said he was happy without it. He said it was a mistake to believe you needed something only because others did.

They listened to a song called ‘Workin’ on the Building’. It was a Spiritual. Elvis had hired a backing group of gospel singers. Pete knew the words and sang along:

I’m workin’ on the building,
It’s a true foundation,
I’m holdin’ up the bloodstained
Banner for my Lord.

Pete shook one of his wide, grimed hands in time to the beat, as if he were holding an imaginary tambourine.

Well, I’ll never get tired of
Workin’ on the building.
I’m goin’ up to my Heaven,
Getting my reward!

It was while Pete was singing, when he leaned forward nearer to the gramophone and his features were harshly illuminated by the lamp, that Walter noticed for the first time the change to Pete’s nose. One side of it had put on flesh. The flesh was pocked and fat. It looked stuffed, like a chicken’s arse. Walter stared at it. It horrified him. It looked as if it contained something that was going to burst out.

Pete stopped singing and Elvis began a melodic number.

In the early morning rain
With a dollar in my hand,
And an aching in my heart,
And my pockets full of sand …

Walter said to Pete: ‘What’s happening to your nose, Pete?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ Pete said. ‘Nothing.’

‘One side of it’s grown bigger.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well?’

‘That’s what a nose can do, grow irregularly. It’s the only bit of us that doesn’t stop growing. Knew that, didn’t you? The rest of us shrivels but the nose expands – even in the grave.’

‘Someone ought to look at it, Pete.’

‘Why?’

‘In case there’s something wrong.’

Pete began singing again: ‘Out on runway number nine/Big 707 set to go …’

‘Are you listening to me?’ asked Walter.

‘Yes,’ said Pete, ‘I’m listening, Walt. But there’s nothing wrong. It’s just my nose doing what it’s doing.’

Walter felt moody, defeated. He’d come to the bus to talk, not specifically about Gilbert, but about the way things confused and astounded him, about his inability to predict how anything was going to turn out. And now, with this fat nose of Pete’s visible above the Tilley flame, he found himself confronting yet another mystery. He drank his coffee and was silent and Pete sang on, ignoring his sulking. Walter thought, it’s
cause
I never understand. Cause and effect. I haven’t the least idea why I wanted to marry Sandra. I have no answer to why I feel love for Gilbert and not loathing. And if I can’t understand cause, then of course I don’t understand effect.

Then he said suddenly to Pete: ‘I want to write a song. I want to go back to that. Can you help me?’

Pete nodded. He stood up stiffly and went to his small kitchen to fetch some whisky. He had the feeling that this was going to be a long night.

My lover, Georgia Dickins, was thirty-nine. She worked for a weekly magazine called
Woman’s Domain
. She ran the Problem Page. Her nom de plume on the Problem Page was D’Esté Defoe. She thought this a wonderful name, far superior to Georgia Dickins. And her readers liked it. Especially the barren readers. They sometimes put, as a kind of footnote to their Problem: ‘I hope you do not mind my saying that if God is good enough to give me a beautiful baby daughter I shall christen her D’Esté.’