Sacred Country (33 page)

In Timmy Ward, Dr Tate saw granite. To complaints from his colleagues assembled round the interview table that the applicant knew no Hebrew and only a dozen words of Latin, David Tate replied: ‘These can be learned. Belief in the sacred cannot be taught. This candidate – Ward, Timothy – must come to us.’

It was fortunate for Timmy that he found himself in front of David Tate. He’d been turned down by three other colleges
and had begun to hover on the edge of a vertiginous despair. He had tried to disguise it from Sonny and Estelle, but on a visit to Cord he had sat like a ghost by the fire and Cord had understood the depth of his misery. He’d handed him a tumbler of sherry. ‘Tim,’ he said, ’have you ever thought God might be a wrong turning?’

Timmy had looked at him in horror. His frog’s eyes were filled with tears. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘Never. Not since I gave up butterfly.’

When he was told that he had been accepted at Teviotts his mind emptied itself of his old and present life and filled up with the life to come. He thought about Teviotts for sixteen or seventeen hours out of every twenty-four. He saw the Main Building, the lonely grandeur of it out there in its treeless surroundings. He saw the ancient Chapel crouched at its back and just beside it the line of brown and white prefabricated buildings which provided living accommodation for first-year students and where, on a day in late September, he would unpack his new clothes from Cunningham’s and his
Hebrew for Beginners
and look out at the clouds above Sussex.

Estelle baked a cake for him. She wrote ‘Good Luck’ on it in chocolate icing. It had a sag in the middle. They sat in the kitchen, the four of them, Estelle, Timmy, Sonny, and Wolf, trying to eat it. Timmy said: ‘It’s a good cake. It is.’ Sonny took one mouthful then gave his plate to the dog who sniffed the slice of cake and walked away from it and sat down by the stove, watching.

After a while, Estelle said: ‘One mustn’t stand in a person’s way. That’s one thing I know.’

Sonny said nothing. He filled a pipe and lit it. When the pipe went out, he threw it down on the table. He stood up. He said to Timmy: ‘All I wish, son, is that those fucking Germans had shot away my heart.’

The following morning Estelle stood by the Rayburn in her frayed dressing gown with her grey hair hanging down to her
waist. She was stirring porridge, opening a sliced loaf for toast. Tea had been made.

Sonny fidgeted by the kitchen door, chewing matches, wearing his farm coat. It felt cold in the house. The light on the fields could have been the light of December or January.

They ate the porridge. Sonny ate his standing up. The toast burned and filled the room with a charcoal smell. Sonny swore and went out to get the van.

The train Timmy was to catch was the same train from Saxmundham that used to take him to swimming lessons at the Marshall Street baths. In London he would get a train from Victoria to Brighton.

When it was time to leave, Estelle clutched on to the stove for warmth. Timmy kissed her cheek. Her face smelled of Pond’s cream and her hair of the charcoaled toast. She said: ‘Home is here, Tim. Try not to forget that, like one sometimes can.’

He went out carrying his heavy case. He wore a tweed coat, too large for him, that Cord had given him and a green scarf.

He put his case in the back of the van, where the dog travelled.

They set off. Sonny at the wheel, Sonny’s cheek with a crop of white stubble growing on it, Sonny’s hands red and hard, like the old weathered hands of John Wayne. The dog stood on its hind legs with its front paws on Sonny’s shoulders. Timmy could smell the dog – its oily coat, its rotten breath.

A drizzle now fell. Timmy stared at early morning in Swaithey – at the awning going up over Loomis’s butchers, at the silent church – and longed for his arrival at Teviotts where the sun would be shining.

They drove in silence. Timmy recognised it as a silence that couldn’t be broken. It was pointless to try.

They came onto the main A12 road and the drizzle turned to rain. Lorries passed them, hurtling towards London.

Sonny slowed the van and stopped in a lay-by. They sat there with the engine still turning. The dog started scrabbling to get out.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Timmy.

‘Nothing,’ said Sonny.

‘Why are we stopping?’ said Tim.

‘This is it,’ said Sonny. ‘This is as far as it goes.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Timmy.

‘I mean what I say,’ said Sonny. ‘This is as far as the van goes.’

They were a mile or more from the station. There was a smile on Sonny’s mouth and no smile in his eyes.

‘Go on then,’ said Sonny. ‘Get out.’

Timmy imagined the leavetaking of the other Teviotts entrants. He saw the tender smiles of mothers standing on gravel driveways. He saw fathers, fighting back tears of pride, turning the ignition keys of expensive cars.

He said: ‘I’ll miss the train.’

Sonny shrugged. ‘Up to you,’ he said.

Timmy got out. He opened the back doors of the van and held on to the dog to stop it jumping out onto the road. He tugged out his suitcase. He looked at the back of Sonny’s head and his shoulders inside the coat. He said: ‘If I never come home again, it will be your fault, not mine.’

He closed the van doors. Sonny drove off without looking back, without a word.

Timmy walked through the rain, drenched by it and by the spray from the heavy traffic. With his left hand he carried the case. With his right he made a hitch-hiking signal. Every thirty or forty yards he had to put the suitcase down and rest. The hour of his train neared. He asked God to give him fortitude.

No one had stopped for him and he missed the train.

He arrived at Teviotts late, in the dark, in a Brighton taxi he couldn’t afford instead of in the college mini-bus.

Dr Tate was standing alone in the cold echoing hall. He held out his hand. He said: ‘Welcome to Teviotts. No one else was worried but I.’

Change didn’t age Mary. It seemed to take her back in time.

This was the first thing she noticed – that she looked younger. Her body lost bulk. Small as she was, she began to look lanky, like a youth of thirteen or fourteen. And the hair that grew on her upper lip and in a little line around her jaw was like the hair of puberty, a faint brown fuzz.

She’d expected her breasts to shrivel. She’d imagined them looking like the breasts of an Indian woman of the Amazon forest she’d seen in a photograph at the Natural History Museum. The woman’s age was thought to be ninety-nine. Instead, Mary’s breasts got harder and smaller. They looked like the breasts of Lindsey Stevens three years before she had met Ranulf Morrit.

She felt light, almost weightless. She had a desire to run. The slowness of people in the street amazed her. She had dreams of her green tennis ball, how she used to hurl it away from her and run after it. In her lunch hours, she ran all the way to Hyde Park, then along the Serpentine to the boathouse. It was autumn in London. There were hardly any boaters.

One day, the boat attendant said to her: ‘Want to take one out, lad?’

She went to see Sterns.

‘Well?’ he said.

She described her running, her feelings of weightlessness. She looked at the fish and saw them all flying and darting among their pieces of coral, as though her words had disturbed the water.

Sterns sat and smiled at her. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘This is working benevolently. Creatively, one could say.’

‘Will I grow?’ said Mary. ‘Boys of fourteen grow.’

Sterns tipped his head back and laughed. His voice was gentle, but his laugh was loud.

‘No,’ he said, ‘but you may grow in spirit.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Mary.

‘I’ve seen this,’ said Sterns, ‘in most of those I’ve helped – usually males who wish to become female, but one other like yourself. It has to do with being always a little outside the world. When you are apart from something it is easier to be wise about it.’

‘I don’t want to be “apart from the world”. That’s what I’ve felt all my life.’

Only because you have felt divided – apart from yourself, if you like. Now, soon, your two selves will be better integrated but your status in the world will still be a special status because you will have seen the world from two different perspectives. I needn’t remind you that this isn’t possible for most of us.’

She told Sterns about the boat attendant. She said: ‘The word “lad” stabbed me with pleasure.’

Irene came up to London on a Saturday Day Return. She didn’t recognise Mary at the train barrier. She said: ‘I didn’t recognise you, duck. I knew I wouldn’t.’

She said she needed a cup of tea. She sat in the station buffet, weeping. Her hankie was too small for the size and quantity of her tears. Mary held her hand.

After a while, Irene said: ‘I’m not crying because of what you’ve done.’

‘Are you crying from shock?’ asked Mary.

Irene replied that she was crying because Mary hadn’t trusted her. She said: ‘You trusted Edward and you trusted Pearl, but not me.’

There were paper napkins stuck into an ice-cream sundae glass on the buffet table. Mary took out one of these and handed it to Irene, who blew her nose in it.

‘It isn’t that I didn’t trust you,’ said Mary. ‘I was afraid you’d be shocked, that’s all.’

‘Well, it is shocking,’ said Irene. ‘It isn’t normal, is it?’

‘No.’

‘But what hurts is that you thought I’d be too shocked to love
you any more. You didn’t trust me to go on caring for you, did you?’

‘I don’t know, Irene,’ said Mary.

‘I do,’ said Irene. ‘You thought a person like me wouldn’t be able to come to terms with it.’

Mary said: ‘I hope you can forgive me.’

Irene said: ‘I can forgive most things, love. You know that.’

It was a cold morning, but Irene wanted to see the Changing of the Guard. She said this would cheer her up. She said she’d been taken to see it once, long ago, before she met the printer from Dublin, and that it had given her dreams of marrying a scarlet soldier.

They arrived too soon and stood in the cold, holding on to the palace railings. Irene’s nose was red from her crying and from the raw October air. Mary noticed that she looked older than when she’d last seen her and yet rather fine, as though she were at the peak of her life.

‘How’s Billy?’ asked Mary.

‘Oh,’ said Irene. ‘He’s a Boy Scout now. He can start a fire with a magnifying glass.’

They laughed. There were French people all around them, pointing things out to each other in an animated way: ‘Tu vois le drapeau? Tu vois les deux factionnaires? Ah, le soleil, tu vois?’

They were right. The sun emerged and shone on the Guards, making their swords and buckles gleam. Mary remembered Cord once saying: ‘The English are damned nifty at drill. Drill is in us, like dancing is in the African. No one can say why, but it’s true.’

But Irene was disappointed with the ceremony. She thought it would take longer. In her memory, there had been more Guards, more saluting, more marching as one. She said: ‘I suppose everything lasts longer in the mind.’

She wanted to see where Mary was living. She stood in the lightless room and looked at Mary’s drawings on the wall. She said: ‘You’re good at doing helicopters, love.’

She didn’t like the airwell. She said: ‘I’d keep wondering what was down there.’

Mary was going to make Nescafé, to show Irene some hospitality in return for all the days and nights she’d spent in Irene’s cottage and all the hours she’d spent in Edward’s house. But she found she was afraid. She imagined Irene stirring sugar into her mug of coffee and saying: ‘What am I going to say to Estelle, Mary?’ If this question had to be asked, she wanted it to be asked somewhere else. She said: ‘I expect you’re hungry after standing out in the cold, aren’t you, Irene?’

Irene said: ‘You know me, pet. Or shouldn’t I call you pet any more?’

Mary said: ‘None of that matters. Your being here’s the thing.’

‘I don’t know what to call you, though. Not Mary, should I?’

‘The name I’ve chosen is Martin.’

‘But no one calls you Mary any more, do they?’

‘Pearl did, when she came to see me.’

‘But in time, she’ll have to learn, won’t she?’

Mary put on her tweed jacket. ‘I’ve told you, Irene. That isn’t the thing that matters.’

‘It matters to me,’ said Irene, ‘but I often get upset by the wrong things, despite having Edward’s brains in the house.’

‘Let’s go out,’ said Mary. ‘I’m starving. Let’s talk about everything over spaghetti.’

Irene was impressed with the Italian restaurant. She liked the way they’d hung straw bottles from the ceiling and put a plaster saint up on the white wall. She said she’d never have thought of either of those things:

She ordered chicken with a surprise stuffing. She didn’t want to ask what the surprise was and spoil it. Mary saw that she was trying to begin to enjoy her day.

They ate minestrone with thick white rolls. After a while, Irene said: ‘Timmy’s gone. I don’t suppose you knew that?’

‘Gone where?’ said Mary.

‘Left home,’ said Irene. ‘Gone to some Church school place in Sussex. I don’t know what it’s done to your mother.’

Mary stared at Irene. She felt shocked to think of Estelle on her own with Sonny.

‘You see,’ said Irene, ‘she’s got no one in the house now. Sonny’s barely there. Talks to the wretched dog, not to people any more. And I’m afraid he’s going to drive her back to – ’

‘She used to tell Cord she was happy at Mountview,’ Mary said quickly.

‘You went there,’ said Irene. ‘You saw what it’s like.’

‘Yes.’

‘So you know. It’s no place to spend half your life.’

‘It’s no good talking to me about it,’ said Mary. ‘Talk to me later. I don’t know when. In a few years. Later. When something can be done.’

The surprise in Irene’s chicken was garlic butter. She said she would never have thought of this either, that the day was full of things she hadn’t imagined.

Mary said: ‘Tell me about Pearl and Billy.’ She wanted the subject of Estelle to be abandoned.

Irene smiled for the first time. She said: ‘Pearl’s young man is called Clive. Trees are what interests him. I said, Pearl, dove, if you marry him, you’ll wind up living in a tree house most likely, but she didn’t laugh and just gave me one of her stares. And as for Billy, what he’ll do or be, no one can say. He says he wants to be an explorer. I said, there aren’t many left, Bill. He said, no, but some. And I said what would you explore then, and he said the world. How would you travel, I said, what in? And he said, rickshaw, camel, steamer, canoe, anything. Elephant. It was when he said elephant that Edward shrieked with laughter. Shrieked and shrieked. And I was pleased really. Laughter keeps you young. That’s what I think.’