Sacred Country (27 page)

He spoke gently. He said: ‘Mary has asked for my help, so that she can make some changes to her life. That’s all I can say. She isn’t “in trouble” as you put it, Pearl. She’s just trying to find the best way through her life.’

That night Irene had a dream about Mary on the hot day of the Beautiful Baby Competition; it was a dream about smocking and beads of blood. She found Edward awake, reading
Gulliver’s Travels
. She said: ‘If there’s anything
I
can do for poor Mary will you be sure to tell me?’

‘Not
poor
Mary,’ he said.

‘Will you tell me, though?’

‘Yes, Irene. Now go back to sleep.’

‘I had a terrible dream. Read me some of your book, will you?’

He began, without comment, to read from Chapter VII of the voyage to Brobdingnag. ‘The learning of this people is very defective, consisting only in morality, history, poetry, and mathematics, wherein they must be allowed to excel. But the last of these is wholly applied to what may be useful in life, to the improvement of agriculture, and all mechanical arts; so that among us it would be little esteemed. And as to ideas, entities, abstractions and transcendentals, I could never drive the least conception into their heads …’

He didn’t have to read aloud for long before Irene had returned to her silent sleep. He knew she hadn’t understood a word.

He put his book down and removed his spectacles. He switched out his light and sat there in the dark, as if waiting for someone or something to arrive.

He couldn’t get Mary’s letter out of his mind. It enthralled him. He was a quiet man with a secret passion for the unexpected, the miraculous. His need for Irene, the birth of Billy – these had been minor miracles. But what Mary was proposing to do was exceptional, quite outside most human experience. He thought, no one here will understand it, perhaps not even Irene, who loves her. Or Pearl.

He lay down and closed his eyes. What remained of Edward Harker’s vanity was flattered to be chosen to impersonate a father. He thought, before I met Irene, I couldn’t have played this part, but now I’ve had these years of practice with Pearl and with Billy. I know what kind of person a father has to try to be.

In her small room next to Edward’s and Irene’s, Pearl was doing Biology revision by torchlight. She was a person who liked to remember things by heart, word for word.

She was memorising the description of an insect called the Brown Water Beetle. In her Biology exercise book, she had written in her round, clear writing: ‘The Brown Water Beetle has a brown, oval body and a yellow line just above the horny wings. It swims quite rapidly about the pond, in search of small flies, which are its preferred meal.’ So now she was reciting this to herself with her eyes closed. She tried to make it sound like poetry or like a song. These things were easier to remember than sentences:

The
Brown
Water Beetle
Has a
brown
oval body …

When she got to the end of it, she tried to imagine eating a meal of flies. She thought of them alive in her mouth, trying to move, trying to buzz, then being swallowed and dying. Biology was peculiar. It was her favourite subject.

She was fifteen. Her lemonade hair had never darkened. People stared at it and at her, but she was indifferent to them. With her clear blue eyes she kept them away. She wanted to choose, not be chosen. And she wasn’t ready to choose. Not yet.

She loved her room, the white curtains Irene had made for her, the pale green walls, her old dolls sitting in a line, her books in a precise order. From it she could see Swaithey church where, every fourth Saturday, she arranged the altar flowers. She was far better at this than Irene had ever been. She could look at a bucketful of greenery and flowers of differing colours and lengths and know straight away the order in which they should go into the vase. She told Irene: ‘Flower arrangement has rules. Everything does.’

Pearl switched off her torch and lay down. Every night, after her revision, she memorised her future. She was going to be a dental nurse. She had already applied to the college in Ipswich where she would train. She was going to wear a brilliant white uniform and fold her long hair into a pleat and attach a nurse’s hat to her head by means of kirbygrips. She was going to be the person who put the mauve mouthwash pellet into the glass of water, who placed a little bib round the patients’ necks, who cleaned them up and kept them calm. She was looking forward to her life. She knew that every life should have a plan and hers did.

But tonight, she found herself thinking about Mary. Edward had said she was ‘trying to find the best way through her life’. And she thought, perhaps Mary, even though she was always clever, has never had a
plan
. And now she’s lost. Her mind’s gone into a black place like a forest and she can’t find any way out again.

The next day, Pearl decided to talk to Edward alone. She waited until Irene had taken Billy upstairs for his bath.

She said: ‘Edward, is Mary lost?’

‘Lost?’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you mean – lost?’

‘I don’t know. Can I see her? Can she come here?’

‘No. I don’t think so. But I shall be going to London. You could write her a letter or a card and I’ll take it.’

‘Can’t I come to London?’

‘No, Pearl.’

‘Why not?’

‘You can’t.’

‘Is she ill?’

‘No.’

‘
Tell
me, Edward!’

‘I can’t tell you. I’ve promised.’

‘Break your promise. Tell me, just me.’

‘No.’

‘Is she hurt?’

‘No.’

‘I think she is. I think something bad has happened, after all the other bad things that happened to her when she was small. And I don’t
want
this to happen!’

Pearl began sobbing. She thought, I’ve been sobbing all day really but it’s just come out now.

Edward put his arms round her. He found a red handkerchief in his pocket that smelled of linseed oil and he gave it to her. He said gently: ‘Listen. Write a letter to Mary and I’ll take it. And I will tell her that you’d like to see her and then, perhaps, in her reply to you she’ll invite you to London, for the day. If she invites you, you can go. She might take you to see the Natural History Museum.’

‘She’s had a horrible life!’ said Pearl.

Irene heard Pearl’s crying and came running down the stairs. Billy came after her, steaming pink like a pudding and trailing a custard-yellow towel.

Pearl felt herself transferred from Edward’s embrace to Irene’s. She was crying so hard, she couldn’t speak and her chest had begun to hurt. She heard Billy begin to howl in sympathy and then she could tell that Irene, too, was weeping. She thought, we’re having a sorrow party. There
are
such things.

She felt calmer then. She decided she would write a letter to Mary and she knew how she was going to begin it. ‘Dear Mary, we had a sorrow party for you on Friday. We all stood at the
bottom of the stairs, crying. I expect, if you had come in and seen us, you would have laughed.’

Timmy thought, what is to be done?

He was eighteen. He had not become an Olympic swimmer. He worked twelve hours a day on the farm and all around him the farm was in decline. He was in a race with ruin. Ruin didn’t keep to its lane, it wore no number, it never tired.

There was no one else in the race. Sonny and the dog, Wolf, spent most days in the barn where the combine sat, covered in sacking against frost and rust. Wolf lay on the earth floor and slept. Sonny patched and mended old broken machinery. He put handles on things. He made plumblines. He sat on a straw bale and talked to the dog.

He was very thin. He hardly ate any more, only drank. In the clothes he wore and with his white stubble coming through, he looked mangy. He said to Timmy: ‘The farm’s yours, every square foot of it. You know that, don’t you? I’ve kept it all going for you.’

Timmy got rid of the hens. Grace Loomis now had three hundred birds laying round the clock in an aluminium shed under bright lamps. Timmy told his father: ‘We can’t compete any more, not at this new low price of eggs,’ and Sonny had stroked Wolf’s head and said: ‘They’re a barmy lot, hens, anyway. Remember the day I saw them all standing still?’ He had forgotten his accusations of witchcraft. At times, he seemed to have forgotten Mary’s existence.

Nothing replaced the hens in their field. Sonny said: ‘Put rape in. That’s the coming crop.’ But the field was simply abandoned. Nettles and horseradish sprang up around the vacant hen houses. Timmy stared at it all. One of his earliest memories was feeding the hens. He and Mary. Mary carrying the heavy pail of grain. The hens running towards them and
clustering round their legs. Mary saying: ‘Imagine if they were people and we were the Shah of Persia.’

One night Timmy remembered how he’d once seen his life as a 90° angle, made by the vertical line of his devotional singing and the horizontal line of his swimming practice. He had never been able to see what filled the 90° between the two arms of the angle, but now he did: he saw it was his imprisonment on the failing farm.

It was late. The house was silent and damp-feeling, as if autumn were seeping into it through the plaster. Timmy put on his dressing gown. He found an old school exercise book and a blunt pencil and a ruler. He made a drawing of his existence.

The sight of himself, a minute pin-man in a one-sided tunnel, choked him. He thought, I’m here because I was afraid to dive. If I could have dared to be a high-diver and not just a swimmer, then my mother would have been enraptured and she would have gone on paying for the lessons at Marshall Street. But swimming wasn’t enough. It didn’t interest her enough. She once said: ‘Butterfly is an ugly stroke, Timmy.’ So she let my father step in and put an end to Marshall Street. I’d seen the horizontal line as infinite, but it has turned out to be short.

He sat there, looking at the angle. He could hear Sonny snoring next door in Mary’s old room where he slept now, the room his mother had made ready for a new child that never
arrived. Sonny snored beneath the baby things, a paper frieze of tigers, the balsa-wood mobile that tinkled like mountain bells. Estelle had offered to take them down. Sonny had told her not to bother. He told her he liked them.

Pity for his parents and rage against them alternated in Timmy. Now, face to face with his angle, he saw
them
as the two lines that held him trapped: Estelle the vertical line with her head in the sky somewhere. Sonny the horizontal, flat as the fields, going nowhere but hopelessly on.

It was the time of the sugar-beet harvest. There was good money in beet. People wanted their food sweet and sugary now. Beet and rape, this was where the money was these days – and in the poultry factories. But Timmy loathed lifting beet. The crop stank, it sat heavy in the soil. It was like gouging up something dead. And the machinery often broke. The conveyor that carried the beets aloft and tipped them into the lorry was a cranky thing. Belts snapped. Individual rollers worked loose and stopped turning despite Sonny’s hours of tinkering and mending. The wheels of the lifter sank into the mud. The November rain had an icy feel.

Estelle was at home. She had entered a period of calm. She never cried or shouted. She spoke politely. She said: ‘It is my intention to watch
Match of the Day
at 10.10.’ No one knew how long this period of calm would last.

Sonny seldom went into the house at dinnertime. He sat on his bale in the barn, scratching the dog’s ears and drinking Guinness from bottles. But Timmy always came and sat by the Rayburn and Estelle put food in front of him. Since Mountview, she no longer baked bread or made meat stews. She liked tinned things and soft sliced white loaves in plastic bags. She was fond of Salad Cream.

On the day following Timmy’s drawing of his angle, Estelle served him a plate of tinned spaghetti. It was too hot to eat. The slimy sauce had a skin on it. Timmy put his spoon down and waited. Estelle was eating radishes. She had spread a slice of bread with Primula. Her grey hair was in a bun. All her
beauty had disappeared and Timmy thought, where is anything beautiful to be found?

His mind returned to Sundays in Swaithey church. He saw and heard the choir and saw the light coming through the Sower Window. And he realised in that moment that his original vertical line might still be in place. He could no longer sing like a girl, but he could pray. It didn’t matter how prayer sounded. It could even not sound at all.

‘What are you thinking about?’ asked Estelle. ‘The hens’ field? Those little houses all still there?’

‘No,’ said Timmy.

That night, Timmy rummaged in the cupboard where all his childhood seemed to have been flung, item by item. He found a little leatherbound book, given to him by the Rev. Geddis when his voice broke and he had to leave the choir. It was called the
Daily Light on the Daily Path
. It described itself as ‘a devotional text book for every day in the year in the very words of the Scripture, with additional readings for special occasions’. One special occasion was headed ‘Disappointed Hopes’. Timmy turned to this and read: ‘Although the fig-tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines, the labour of the olive shall fail and the fields shall yield no meat … yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation.’