Sacred Country (29 page)

His mind was all on this, on the Road Campaign, on protest and bravery, so that the normal things of life didn’t seem important any more. They seemed a bit futile, in fact. Cord sat in his garden thinking and dreaming and the summer weeds grew high everywhere and he didn’t notice them.

Then Timmy came to see him and remarked on the weeds. Cord looked at Timmy and then at them. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Well, everything in its season, that’s the thing.’

Timmy seldom came. It was as if he knew Martin was the one Cord liked best. But now he had come and Cord could suddenly see that Timmy looked frightened. He stopped talking about the new season of bravery and said: ‘What’s up, old Tim?’

‘Everything,’ said Timmy.

‘Everything how?’ said Cord.

‘The farm. It’s finished.’

‘Don’t say that. It’s your father’s life.’

‘Yes. But not mine.’

‘It’ll be yours one day.’

‘I don’t want it. I hate it. That’s why I came to see you.’

‘Hang on, Tim …’

‘That’s why I came. To tell you that I’m going to leave the farm.’

‘Hang on …’

‘Don’t say I can’t. You’ve just been talking about protest. I’m protesting, too. I loathe and detest the farm. The only thing or person or life I want is God.’

‘Wait a minute …’

‘Stop saying hang on, wait a minute. I’ve come to ask your help.’

‘Help with what?’

‘I want you to tell my mother and father.’

‘Tell them what?’

‘That I’m leaving. I’ve applied to theological college. I’m going into the Church.’

Cord took out a handkerchief and wiped his left eye. This was a habit left over from his palsy time. He stared at Timmy. The boy sat on the very edge of his chair, holding tight to its arms, blinking.

‘Relax, Tim,’ Cord said kindly. ‘I was given a bottle of sherry by the Residents to thank me for organising the letter to the M.O.T. Let’s have a sip of that and talk about it all calmly.’

‘Okay,’ said Timmy. ‘But don’t think I’m not serious. Don’t think you can talk me out of it.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of thinking that,’ said Cord. ‘My respect for the individual increases day by day.’

Cord poured the sherry into two tumblers. These days, he felt reckless about almost everything. He had a sudden ache of envy at the thought of Timmy’s youth and all the years lying ahead of him. He thought, if I were young I wouldn’t choose the Church. Oh, no. I’d take Livia to Paris and hurl stones into the air. I’d run with her along the Quai des Invalides and watch her hair flying …

‘All right?’ said Timmy.

‘All right what?’

‘Are you listening?’

‘Yes,’ said Cord, ‘I’m listening. Go ahead.’

Timmy leaned back into his chair. He didn’t look at Cord, who was taking large sips of sherry, but tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling.

He began to describe his 90° angle. He said: ‘The shape of it is like the sties we make for the pigs out of corrugated iron. It’s completely black and cold in there. It’s mud. It’s shit. And I can’t stand up, even.’

‘How long have you seen it all like this?’ asked Cord.

Timmy explained about the two sides or arms of the angle and what they had once been. He said: ‘No one can live their lives without light. Without the miraculous.’

‘You’d be surprised,’ said Cord.

‘I can’t, anyway,’ said Timmy. ‘I can’t. I’d rather be dead. But my father won’t understand. He’ll think I’m letting him down. He won’t understand any of it.’

‘And your mother?’

‘She would. She will. I don’t know. But it’s my father who’ll stop me, not her.’

‘How can he stop you, if you’ve made up your mind?’

‘He will, somehow. Kill me, maybe.’

‘Don’t talk bunk, Tim.’

‘He’ll kill someone. One day. I’ve thought it for years. I never used to think it could be me.’

There was a long silence. Outside, in the weed-choked garden, all the summer birds were singing.

‘Listen to that,’ said Cord after a while. ‘You won’t hear the racket the thrushes make if we get the road.’

‘No,’ said Timmy.

‘I hate blight,’ said Cord. ‘Wherever it turns up. And if you feel your life’s blighted, old Tim, I’ll do what I can to help you. All right?’

The subscriptions to
Liberty
were increasing. It had thirteen readers in Gibraltar. It ran political essays now and jokes and pen and ink drawings done by Mary to illustrate the poems. A lot of the poetry was about the Vietnam War. Mary didn’t trust herself to draw faces. She drew the backs of people, running. She drew machinery and flames.

Her salary had increased. She was given a desk to replace the drinks trolley. Her drawings were signed ‘Martin Ward’.

On Friday evenings, she, Tony and Rob would drink in the Drayton Arms. They would order a bottle of Bulgarian red wine and talk about foreign films and the beauty of Jeanne Moreau. Sometimes the wine made Rob think about his lost South Africa, about bioscopes and milk bars and Jacaranda trees. His sadness disgusted him. ‘Sorry, Tony,’ he’d say, ‘sorry, Mart. Just ignore me. Talk about something else. Discuss Harold Pinter.’

Mary broke off her relationship with Georgia. She despised Georgia for desiring her. She tried to explain to her that she could only love women who loved men, not women who loved women.

Georgia threw a lamp at her. It exploded against the wall. Georgia began to scream and cry and her make-up dribbled in inky lines over her chalk-white face.

They were in Georgia’s flat. It was still nicely situated but its owner was elsewhere in her mind. She swooped on things like a bat. She took her lime-green suit out of the wardrobe and tore at the seams with her teeth. She ripped it to pieces. She came from a family with strong teeth and strong hands. She even got one sleeve out of its socket. She flung the mutilated costume at Mary’s chest. Then she started on her pillows. She stabbed them with scissors. She ripped open the holes and took out fistfuls of feathers and sent them flying around the room like thistledown on the wind.

Mary backed out of the room, but Georgia dived onto her. ‘No one leaves!’ she screamed. ‘No one fucking leaves me. I’m D’Esté Defoe. I fucking leave
them
! I’m the one who does the leaving!’

Mary tried to take hold of her flying hands. She was much shorter than Georgia. One of the hands hit her face and she fell backwards into the sitting room with its pleasant south-facing view.

Being hit was the thing she feared most. It reminded her of Sonny. She had dreams about it.

She got to her feet and ran. She kicked the flat door shut in Georgia’s face. She took the stairs two at a time. In a race, she
knew she could outrun Georgia. She was wearing running shoes.

Letters from Georgia arrived. They were sorrowful and calm. They attempted little grieving jokes: ‘I was Snow White, but I drifted.’ ‘You’re a person of rare gifts; you never gave me any.’

Mary put them in a drawer. It seemed cruel to throw them away. Then she threw them away. They embarrassed her. She felt glad she’d never written any self-pitying letters to Mrs Ranulf Morrit.

Georgia started sending money. Mary returned it. It kept coming. It went to and fro like an unwanted thing. In the end, Mary sent ten pounds to Cord for his ‘Residents Against the Road’ Fund and sent a postcard of Jeanne Moreau to Georgia. On the back, she wrote: ‘Your money has gone to charity. Anything more you try to give will take the same route.’

After that, there was nothing from Georgia. She was there in the magazine, of course. The advice of D’Esté Defoe poured out to her million women readers, week by week, but Mary wasn’t one of them.

Her visits to Dr Beales continued. One day, he uncovered her first lie.

She had told him she never menstruated. He had looked at her suspiciously. He had written on his pad: never menstruated(?). But her first period had come soon after she’d thrown her skirts into the airwell, soon after she’d announced to herself that she was happy. She’d stared dumbly at the blood. She had never believed she possessed the womb from which it could come. Now it was here, a punishment. The misery of her years in Swaithey had kept it at bay. Happiness had allowed it to arrive. That was how fickle her body was.

She endured the monthly bleeding by disowning it. She never looked at it. She inserted and extracted tampons with her eyes shut. She told herself that this small flow was nothing compared to the tides that used to stream from Lindsey’s body. She took aspirin round the clock for four days and nights so
that no flicker of pain reached her. She pretended nothing was occurring.

Dr Beales saw it in her altered pupils.

She said: ‘No, you’re quite wrong. It couldn’t be. There’s no womb inside.’

He stood up. She had only been there for ten minutes but he told her the session was at an end.

She said: ‘Dr Beales, it takes me an hour and a half to get here.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Well at least you’ll be spared the journey in future.’

She gaped at him. She felt sick from aspirin and now from dread.

‘Since you are not telling me the truth, Marty, I am bringing this session and this whole line of enquiry to an end.’

She had to plead with him. She admitted the lie about her periods. She explained to him that it was a lie she herself still wanted to believe, that she had dreams of cutting out her womb and burying it in Antarctica. She swore it was her only lie and that all the rest was truth.

‘What about your adopted parents?’ said Beales. ‘Have you told me the truth about them?’

‘Yes,’ said Mary. ‘And I wrote to my father, telling him you might want to see him.’

‘And your mother? The person you described as a “good woman”.’

Mary took a handkerchief from her jeans and held it to her mouth. She felt icy. She could taste grey aspirin vomit in her throat. She excused herself from the room and was sick in Dr Beales’s toilet. The thought of all the lies that were going to come and going to need guarding and watching made her feel so tired she wanted to lie down on the lavatory floor and sleep. But she returned to Dr Beales.

He offered her a Glacier Mint. He said: ‘We’ll leave it there for today. Next time, bring your father.’

*

Edward Harker wasn’t fond of London. He believed the French understood how to set out a city and the English did not. But he came there for Mary. It was a hot June day and he arrived at Liverpool Street Station wearing his panama hat. His face was tanned from games of cricket in the back garden with Billy. He looked sprightly among the arriving passengers.

He and Mary rode the tube to Richmond. Harker gave Mary a letter from Pearl, which she put in a back pocket, to read later, when this day was safely over. She said to Harker: ‘If you
had
been my father, this might not have happened.’

Harker smiled. He said: ‘I’m pretty sure I know what Billy was in his previous life, did I tell you?’

‘A wrestler.’

‘No. An Indian princeling.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s in his cricket. He bats with marvellous disdain. Like old Ranjitsinhji.’

They laughed. They got on a bus to Twickenham. In the sun, Twickenham seemed a nice place. The river had a shadow of blue on its surface. They were early for Beales so they sat on a bench admiring the water, pretending it was clean. After a while, Mary said: ‘I hope you’re not going to mind telling lies, Edward?’

Harker took off his panama and gave it a shake. He sometimes had the feeling, when he wore this hat, that there was a rodent trapped inside it that would start biting his head any minute. He examined the interior of the panama. There was nothing in it. He put it back on and said: ‘I don’t mind lying to your psychiatrist fellow. The thing that’s going to get difficult is lying to Irene.’

‘Well,’ said Mary. ‘Dr Beales keeps mentioning Irene. He keeps saying he will have to talk to her as well as you.’

Harker shook his head. ‘I could try to explain it to her,’ he said, ‘but you know what she’ll want to know, don’t you? She’ll want to know the
why
of it. And none of us really knows the why of it. Not you, not me, not the doctors. So that would be the hard bit.’

‘I
will
know why. At some moment in the future. That’s what I think. It’ll just come into my mind in the middle of a silence. That’s what I believe.’

‘Maybe,’ said Harker. ‘Or maybe not. The world is packed with mystery, you know. We tend to forget this, but it’s still packed tight with it, like water in stone.’

Dr Beales greeted Harker warmly. His secretary brought in cups of coffee. Mary didn’t look at the two men, but out of the window, at the vacant blue sky.

The discussion seemed to go well for a while. Harker told Beales that, being a believer in the transmigration of souls, he had no difficulty understanding Mary’s conundrum. But he was a little nervous. He embarked on an unasked-for description of one of his former lives. He told Dr Beales that as a lutenist at the court of the Danish King Christian IV he and his fellow musicians had to play by candlelight in a damp cellar underneath the state rooms. An open trap door above them allowed the King to hear the music, but when he tired of their playing he would kick the trap door shut and then the musicians’ candles would blow out and they would be left in pure darkness.

Beales didn’t seem interested in this story. He ignored it, in fact. He said to Harker: ‘You say you understand – and I take this to mean an intellectual understanding – Marty’s predicament. What I need to know is whether you are going to give your support to the journey of physical change and reconstruction she may eventually undertake.’

‘Yes,’ said Harker. ‘I am. Mary, or Marty as you call her, had a difficult early life and I have always hoped –’

‘You say she had a difficult early life. Why was it difficult?’

‘For reasons she’s probably outlined to you. Her belief that she wasn’t, in her true essence, a girl, made everything difficult for her.’

‘In what ways?’

‘Well. In what ways? Well. The behaviour we expect of girls is different from the behaviour we expect of boys, and so the –’

‘Describe it.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Describe the difference between the two sets of behaviours or the two sets of expectations.’