Sacred Country (35 page)

Her boyfriend, Clive, was in Durham, studying tree surgery. He wrote her letters in beautiful writing like calligraphy. He told her that dreams of her hair sometimes stopped him concentrating on the trees.

Pearl liked these letters more for the handwriting than for the actual words. And she was enjoying his absence. She preferred his absence to his presence, just as she preferred thinking about him to touching him.

During her journey home, the sun went down and the green on the fields took on a peculiar whiteness, like frost. And it was during this alteration to the colour of things that Pearl decided,
if he asks me, I’ll say no. Because it isn’t him I’m waiting for. I’m waiting for someone or something else.

Pearl wrote to Mary and asked whether she could come and stay for a night. She thought Mary might be able to help her compose a letter to Clive that would tell him she didn’t love him and that she never had dreams about his hair.

In the household, Edward referred to Mary as Martin but Irene had said: ‘I’m not capable of this, Edward. I’m just not.’

In Pearl’s mind, Mary was between names. The old Mary, walking around in Miss McRae’s clothes, was still visible to her, yet getting fainter. The new Martin, small and lean and with his soft beard, stood to one side, waiting. Pearl thought, part of me wants to keep her like this: almost invisible. Part of me doesn’t want to have to see Martin close to.

But then, when she saw a sky full of stars and she remembered Montgolfier and the universe, she knew she didn’t want to let Mary disappear, whoever she was trying to become. For one thing, Mary loved her. For another, she seemed to know about the world – about Greek food wrapped in leaves, about South African homesickness, about the map of South East Asia, about the sounds that came out of an airwell in the darkness, about the dances of Aboriginal tribes. She could recite The Words of Hakluyt Upon Reaching Moscow. She had spent a hundred hours in a room illuminated by fish. She knew her way to Twickenham.

Mary wrote back to Pearl very quickly. The letter was typed on
Liberty
stationery. It said: ‘Bring a swimming costume. For years I’ve worried about you drowning so now I’m going to teach you to swim.’ It was signed Mary Martin. When Irene read it, she said: ‘There was an actress called that. Or still is? Sometimes you don’t hear when a person’s died, do you?’

They went to the baths at Marshall Street.

Pearl said: ‘Timmy used to come here.’

Mary said: ‘Oh yes?’

She had bought some red inflatable arm bands. She made
Pearl put her arms into them. Pearl’s swimming costume was turquoise, the colour of the water, and in the light of the baths her limbs looked shining white. Mary wore khaki shorts and a black T-shirt under which her breasts hardly showed now. She made Pearl sit on the side of the pool and put her legs into the water. She said: ‘Almost every living thing can swim. Even an elephant. Look at the water and imagine it holding you up.’

Pearl said: ‘It doesn’t do any good. I’m still afraid.’

At the other end of the baths, which looked a long way away to Pearl, a solitary high diver was practising.

Mary got into the water and swam a width, then came back to Pearl. She stood in front of her holding on to her hands. She said: ‘Pearl, be sensible. You’re my precious thing. I’m not going to let you come to any harm, am I?’

She pulled Pearl gently into the water. It came up above Pearl’s waist and the ends of her hair got wet. She was trembling. Her mouth looked thin and mauve.

‘Right,’ said Mary, ‘I’m going to keep holding your hands and I want you to lie down in the water and let your legs come up behind you. Then I’ll just gently pull you around.’

‘I can’t,’ said Pearl.

‘Yes, you can,’ said Mary. ‘Remember the fish of the Great Coral Reef. Imagine you’re one of them.’

‘They were puppets,’ said Pearl, ‘they had strings holding them up.’

‘So do you,’ said Mary. ‘I’m your string.’

So Pearl lay down in the water. Her hair fanned out around her head like weed. Her blue eyes looked dazzled, as though by extraordinary news. Mary walked backwards, crouching a little, pulling Pearl along.

After they’d gone round the shallow end several times, Mary put Pearl’s hands onto the bar and held her feet and then made her kick her legs. She said: ‘Imagine your future now: surfing, water polo!’

Pearl managed to smile. The kicking was warming her up and she felt a tiny particle of her fear fly away up into the glass roof and stay there, looking down at her.

‘Now,’ said Mary, ‘I’m going to guide you along again, like before, but this time I’m hardly going to pull you. You’re going to propel yourself with your kicking. Try to push me backwards. Imagine you’re trying to push me away.’

So they progressed round and round the shallow end of the baths. A group of children arrived and stared at them: a young man wearing clothes in the water and a girl with mermaid’s hair who couldn’t swim.

After two hours they were tired, but they felt happy. The swimming lessons had taken Pearl’s mind off the letter to Clive that still had to be composed and it had taken Mary’s mind off everything in her life except Pearl. She remembered a feeling she’d sometimes had long ago in Swaithey – that she was a person sitting on her own in the dark and Pearl was a lantern slide.

That evening in Mary’s room, Pearl said: ‘I’ve got an exam at Easter. Do you mind if I read some revision notes aloud?’

Pearl was in Mary’s bed and Mary was lying on the end of it, looking at their swimming clothes hanging on the fireguard and dripping onto the floor. She said: ‘No.’

Pearl was wearing scarlet pyjamas. She’d tied her hair back with a white ribbon.

She said: ‘Do you know what transillumination is?’

‘No,’ said Mary, ‘but I could try to guess. It’s something hidden in the past which suddenly becomes clear?’

‘No,’ said Pearl. ‘It’s a method of detecting a mesial or distal cavity. Less reliable than an x-ray but quite successful. A very bright light is placed against the crown of the tooth and the cavity is revealed as a dark shadow.’

‘Oh,’ said Mary. ‘I see.’

She found Pearl’s foot, with the blankets on top of it, and held on to it. She said: ‘Tell me about Clive.’

Pearl put her revision notebook down. ‘He has beautiful handwriting,’ she said.

‘Does he want to marry you?’

Pearl ignored this. She said: ‘The thing I really love about him is his handwriting.’

They were silent for a long time. Then Mary said: ‘That’s one of those statements that sounds callous at first and then later not, because a person’s handwriting can be the most beautiful – or the most ugly – thing about him.’

Pearl stared at Mary. She thought, I won’t write the letter. Not yet. All I’ll do is to remember what Mary just said in case it becomes vital in the future.

Then Pearl said: ‘Changing the subject, have you ever understood what the Battle of the Bulge was?’

‘Yes,’ said Mary. ‘I saw a film about it. Starring Robert Culp.’

‘And?’

‘I can’t remember. I think it marked a turning point in the war.’

Later, when Mary was almost asleep on her floor cushions and the lives in the well were quietening down, Pearl said: ‘Mary, I’m going to call you Martin from now on, I promise. The last time I call you Mary will turn out to be now.’

Sonny sat alone in the kitchen.

He was trying to remember what date it was, but he couldn’t. It was April, he knew this. He just didn’t know which bit of April the world was in.

He was drinking stout, as usual, but not with any enjoyment. For some time, in fact, the taste of stout had sickened him, yet he still sat there, night after night, drinking it.

The dog, Wolf, lay at Sonny’s feet. It was sleeping. Human beings complained if you talked to them in their sleep. The world of their dreams was more precious to them than anything you could ever say. But dogs didn’t give a damn. They woke up and maybe walked round in a circle a few times and then lay down again, listening.

Sonny rested his damaged ear on his hand. Since Timmy’s
leaving, it had ached more. Also, it gave him dreams about Timmy, if he slept on that side. He had to remember this and turn his head the other way, towards the blue wall.

There had been no letters from Timmy. Unless he wrote secretly to his mother and she hid the letters away. Months had passed. It was April. Each month had come and gone with no letter in it anywhere. ‘It’s unendurable,’ Sonny said aloud to Wolf. ‘It’s unbearable. It’s worse than the war.’

The dog got up and shook itself, then went to its bowl and lapped water. It returned to Sonny and lay down again, with its head on Sonny’s feet.

Sonny reached down and stroked its head. ‘I don’t know why I stopped the van,’ he said. ‘I did it, bang, like that. I just did it and then it was done.

‘I should have relented. I should’ve driven back and picked up the boy and said, Get in lad, go on, get in.

‘I’ve been pig-headed from birth. Proud. No one knows why.

‘I should’ve thought, if I do this, I won’t be forgiven.

‘And who can stand that – not to be forgiven by your only son? I can’t. No one could.

‘So what’s to be done? I can’t write a letter. I can’t spell the word April.

‘What’s to be done, Wolf?’

Hearing its name, the dog gave a whine. Sometimes, late at night like this, Sonny and Wolf went for walks down to the river and Sonny would piss in the water.

Sonny refilled his glass, which was nearly full anyway. He took a disgusted sip of the beer. It was trying to kill him, but he wasn’t going to let it.

‘She’ll have to write, that’s all,’ he said. ‘She’ll have to explain I wasn’t well at that time. Disappointment can affect the things a man does. She’ll have to explain that.

‘And then Timmy’ll write back. He’ll write to say what he misses is the land – the harvest and the ditches and the whole of everything going on under the sky.’

Sonny stopped speaking. His heart felt lighter now that he’d decided what had to be done.

But he wanted it done now, tonight. He looked round the kitchen, as if he expected to find Estelle there. He knew she wasn’t there and he looked round and round the room just the same.

He couldn’t remember where she was. He had a feeling she wasn’t in the house so he got up and whistled the dog to his side and went out into the spring night, calling Estelle’s name.

She was in Pete’s bus. He was playing records so old they didn’t look like records; they looked like a crunchy thing you could eat. Now and then, in the conversation Pete and Estelle were having, he stopped in mid-sentence to grin at some old incomprehensible line of a song.

They were drinking whisky. They did this quite often now because neither of them had much else to do with their time. Pete had been sacked from his job in the slaughtering yard by Grace. She paid him a little pension instead. She said: ‘You forfeited your share of the business in ’38, when you went slumming round America, and now your sight’s faulty. We’ve got to call it a day.’

It was true about his sight. It was as if his wandering left eye used to be guided into alignment with the right by his nose and, after the piece of his nose was cut away, it had nothing to fix on.

He didn’t care about the loss of his job. It had been a terrible job, when you thought it. What he cared about was being alive.

He spent a lot of his time ransacking the bus to find dollar bills to send to Walter. He had moved all the furniture around. He had been through every old box and drawer and tin and jar and pot. He had made four cuts in his mattress. He had now posted to London a total of one hundred and nine dollars, thirty cents. He thought there might be more, but he didn’t know where else to look.

He looked forward to Estelle’s visits. He sat her down in his one comfy chair and poured her a slug of whisky and told her she still reminded him of Ava Gardner. Sometimes, he stroked her arm. Mostly, he just talked to her and played her Country songs.

She said: ‘Sometimes I want to say things. Then at others I don’t want to say a word. It could be determined by the moon.’

Once or twice, they danced. They held each other correctly, like old-fashioned dancers, but then they just stood in the middle of the bus, swaying.

On the night when Sonny went out into the dark calling Estelle’s name, she and Pete were dancing. The song they danced to was called ‘Knoxville Girl’. It was about a crime, and without meaning to Estelle found herself saying: ‘There used to be rumours about you, Pete. That you’d done a criminal thing in America.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Well?’ she said. ‘You can tell me. I was going to commit a crime in 1966. I was going to steal a baby.’

‘It was never what people imagined,’ said Pete. ‘Because no one in Swaithey could imagine anything like that.’

‘I can imagine anything on earth. The last time I was at Mountview I shared some of my time with an air traffic controller. He wore rubber gloves. He made signals to the air.’

‘I wouldn’t even call it a crime really,’ Pete went on. ‘But I paid in a way. It was 1939.’

‘Tell me,’ said Estelle. ‘Then we could have another dance.’

The song ended, but the record still went round and round.

Pete took the needle off it. He refilled their whisky glasses. He said to Estelle: ‘Telling doesn’t matter now, now that I’m not part of Loomis’s. I used to keep everything quiet out of respect for that.’

Then he sat on a hard chair opposite Estelle and started straight into his story. Estelle lit a cigarette. The Tilley lamp hissed like a jet of water.

Pete: ‘It was when I was in Memphis, working as a church gardener. I met a girl at a honky-tonk.’

‘What’s a honky-tonk?’ asked Estelle.

‘Oh, we don’t have them,’ said Pete. ‘Little bar kind of place where Country musicians play. You can do most things there: sing, dance, whistle, cry your eyes out, clap and scream. I loved them.

‘So anyway, I met a girl there in ’38. Name of Annie. Worked for this old guy, Webster Wills, who had a pawnshop. In those days, this is what Memphis had most of, after singers: pawnshops.