Sacred Country (40 page)

I started counting the things I had left. One of them was Cord. I hadn’t written to him for a long time. I’d been too cowardly to tell him what I’d done to myself. I thought, the sight of me with a wispy beard would be more wounding than the sight of some geese making an arrow in the sky.

But now I wanted to see Cord. He was seventy-eight. I wanted to sit in an armchair opposite him and drink Wincarnis and talk about history. Not the Hakluyt kind of history but my own. I wanted to know the minute-by-minute truth about Livia’s death, where and how she went and why. Because I’d been thinking, it’s not too late to take glider lessons; I still have most of Miss McRae’s money; she may even have known I’d need to get out of this world.

I wrote to Cord. I described myself. I said: ‘I’m more Martin than when you last saw me. I wear horn-rimmed glasses, like Ringo Starr. The hair on my face is brownish. My chest is flat but scarred. The next operation will be to remove my womb.’

He wrote back straight away, using the old green ink. He said: ‘Is it a sad business or is it a happy thing? That’s all I care about. Which is it, bad or good?’

I didn’t write an answer to this. I got on a train to Norwich and Cord met me in his new car which was called an Austin Allegro. He said: ‘I drive it so slowly, I call it the Andante.’

He didn’t comment on my appearance. I expected him to faint when he saw me or run away, as if I were a trunk road arriving to obliterate the water-meadows of Gresham Tears, but he didn’t. All he said was: ‘Martin Ward, I presume?’

During the drive in the Andante, he asked: ‘Is it for the better, then? That’s the thing.’

I looked out at the hedgerows of south Norfolk here and there green, here and there not. I said: ‘Yes. Except that it isn’t finished and never can be, really.’

‘No,’ said Cord. ‘That stands to reason.’

Then a little further on, as we were going through the town of Bungay, he said: ‘We’re all something else inside. Old Varindra explained that to me. But he said it’s a mistake to
think the inner thing is fully formed. It can’t possibly be. Nothing grows properly in the dark.’

When we arrived at Gresham Tears, we had a meal of boiled beef, followed by mandarin oranges from a little tin. Cord was addicted to mandarin oranges. He said: ‘When you grow old you need sweetness in things, heaven knows why. As that Dylan chap used to say, the answer’s blowing about somewhere but nobody finds it.’

After supper we sat by the fire, drinking. I’d brought something to give Cord. It was Livia’s silver locket with a piece of her hair inside. I said: ‘I kept it for all the years I was a girl. Now I want you to have it.’

He put it down on the frayed arm of his chair and stared at it.

‘I remember this,’ he said. ‘It’s not Livia’s hair, you know.’

‘Oh?’ I said. ‘My mother used to tell me it was Livia’s hair.’

‘No. It’s Sophia’s hair, Livia’s mother. Your great-grandmother. Liv had it since she was a child.’

‘Why didn’t my mother know that?’ I asked.

‘I expect she forgot,’ said Cord. ‘What belongs to whom gets obscured by time.’

I was silent for a minute, drinking my drink, warming my feet. Then I said: ‘Livia’s dying has always been obscured by time. I’ve never known about it properly, like where was she going in the glider?’

‘Nowhere,’ said Cord.

‘What d’you mean?’

‘She wasn’t going anywhere. She was just circling. She took off from the field and – ’

‘Which field? Where?’

‘Place called Ashby Cross. Ashby Cross Glider Club. Not far from here.’

‘And?’

‘She was doing a circuit, that’s all. Floating on thermals. Turning.’

‘And then?’

‘She was on her second circuit. She lost height very suddenly. I wasn’t watching, thank God. I wasn’t there. But
she lost her thermal and she started to come down and down. People at the club said she could’ve made it in except for the wires.’

‘What wires?’

‘Pylon wires. Electric. I mean, that’s why I said to those chaps at Mountview, don’t do this electric stuff to my daughter. Once was enough.’

‘She flew into the electric cables?’

‘Yes.’

‘She was
electrocuted?
’

‘Yes, old chap.’

‘Why wasn’t I ever told that?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘I imagined it all wrongly.’

‘Did you? What did you imagine?’

‘An impossible thing: that she just floated into the sky and disappeared.’

‘Well,’ said Cord, ‘there you are. What we dream up is invariably better, eh?’

We had a game of Scrabble. Cord made the word ‘quietude’ on a triple, using all his letters, and scored a hundred and thirty-three in one go. We carried on drinking. I had the letters y, a, a, x, t, l, l, in my tray and was praying to be able to make the word ‘axolotl’ by some miracle when Cord suddenly looked at me and said: ‘Now that you’re here, Martin, I think it’s time for you to go and sort things out with Estelle.’

I didn’t look up. I moved my letters around. ‘Is she at Mountview?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Cord.

I gave up on ‘axolotl’. I put down ‘tilly’.

‘What’s that when it’s at home?’ said Cord.

‘A lamp,’ I said. ‘A gas lamp.’

‘It’s got an e,’ said Cord. ‘T-i-1-l-e-y.’

‘Not always,’ I said. ‘That’s an alternative spelling. I can’t see my mother, Cord. Don’t ask me to.’

‘When, then?’

‘I don’t know. Never, probably. Everybody in Swaithey is in the past. That was another life and it’s finished.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ said Cord. ‘Est isn’t in the past. She’s sitting in the dark, watching television and waiting.’

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I said.

‘She won’t say what she’s waiting for. Perhaps it’s for you. For your forgiveness.’

‘
Don’t
, Cord,’ I said. ‘Don’t say anything more. Quietude, please.’

An awful thing happened then. Cord began to cry. He looked exactly like he’d looked at Mountview, when my mother had wiped her face with her hair.

I wanted to put my arm round him, but I just sat there. I removed ‘tilly’ from the board. I let him cry on.

‘Listen, Cord,’ I said after a while. ‘Tell her I died. Then she won’t wait.’

I went back to Sterns.

I told him that in my dreams I made identity parades of everyone I’d once loved and shot them to pieces with an automatic rifle. Pearl became a thousand particles of matter.

He said: ‘Consider this, Martin. The mind can get tired of both the internal and external landscape. And I believe yours is exhausted with both. I want to recommend that you leave England for a while.’

‘To go where?’ I said.

‘It probably doesn’t matter where.’

‘Do you mean a holiday? Mine isn’t the kind of life you have holidays from.’

‘No,’ said Sterns, ‘I don’t mean a holiday. I mean a long period of time away. I can get you in to have the hysterectomy done as soon as you feel up to it and once you’ve recovered from that I believe you should go and look at another place, another bit of the world. All you’ve ever experienced is England. Buy a globe and look at it, Martin. Remind yourself how small England is and how vast all the rest.’

I didn’t say anything. I felt astonished.

‘Well?’ said Sterns.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ve never thought about it.’

‘Think about it now. You say you want to die because there’s nothing left in England that’s precious to you any more. You’re twenty-seven. Go and find something new.’

I said: ‘The problem is the summer. I don’t want to live through that.’

Sterns made a note on his pad. Beales used to write everything down; Sterns only wrote things down now and then.

‘You can have your surgery in the summer,’ he said. ‘We can cradle you through it in that way. As you know already, surgery alters time.’

That evening I borrowed an atlas from Rob. We knelt on the floor with our bottoms in the air, turning the pages.

‘Trouble is, Mart,’ he said, ‘you know no one anywhere, except Tony in Sydney and he betrayed us for that bleddy Bella and her crazy hair.’

‘Knowing people doesn’t matter,’ I said.

‘Yes, it does,’ he said. ‘You’ve never been an exile. I have. I know what matters and what’s of no consequence.’

We’re having a wedding in Swaithey. It’s going to be on the Fourth of July, Independence Day. I find that ironic. No one else does. They say: ‘Estelle, you see some difficulty in everything.’

There
is
some difficulty in everything. There is difficulty in waking up in the morning. There is difficulty in remembering why you’re alive.

Weddings make me constipated. I have to hold on to myself, hold everything in. But this is the last wedding of any importance: Timmy’s to Pearl. It’s the one we’ll remember till we fade away.

I made it my business to go round to the parties concerned and to try to find out what they were hoping for.

Irene was sewing day and night. She’d bought twenty-one yards of white satin from Cunningham’s. She looked as though a parachute had landed in her lap. In a box were seven hundred tiny pearls, not real but lifelike. Irene said: ‘When I named her Pearl, I imagined this, a bodice encrusted with these.’

I helped her stitch the train. Pearl came and stood on a stool in her bra and knickers while Irene pinned bits of the dress onto her. She stood on her stool and stared out of the window at people passing in the street. She seemed preoccupied, as though she were working out a long and complicated sum.

When Pearl went out I said to Irene: ‘Is it what you want?’

‘Is what what I want?’ she said.

Billy came in. ‘Billy, mind out,’ Irene said before he’d opened the door. Billy is a teenager. He is like Irene, fat and sweet.

He looked down at all the furls of satin. ‘Mum,’ he said. ‘Me and Dad are going fishing.’

‘All right,’ said Irene. ‘Remember the big umbrella.’

It was a scorching day outside. Irene has stopped noticing weather. Her mind is in a new landscape, the landscape of Pearl’s wedding dress. This is all she can see. She talks with pins held between her teeth. She strokes the satin like a lover’s skin. She holds it against her face. She has forgotten my question. She says, still biting the pins: ‘I never had a white wedding of my own.’

I invited Pearl out to the farm. I wore lipstick and put my hair in a French pleat. I provided a lunch of Findus smoked-haddock pancakes served with broccoli. Sonny was away in the barn keeping cool in the dusty shade.

I said to Pearl: ‘You and Timmy, you seem like babes to me. Are you ready for all this?’

‘How does anyone know when they’re “ready”?’ she said.

I thought about Sonny and me; the touching and wanting that went on and on, filling up every minute of time. I said: ‘Could you live without him?’

‘Yes, I could,’ said Pearl, ‘but I don’t want to.’

‘Has he made love to you?’

Pearl blushed. Then she looked at me coldly. She was thinking this was none of my business and she was right. She said: ‘Timmy’s a Christian. He’s going to be a vicar.’

‘I know that,’ I said.

‘But we want children,’ said Pearl. ‘We both do. We’ve talked about it. That’s the day I long for.’

She was sitting opposite me at the kitchen table. A slab of sunlight lay on her shoulder and made her hair shine like spun glass.

I said: ‘You’re so beautiful, Pearl. You could have any man you chose.’

‘I’m tired of being beautiful,’ she said. ‘I’ve been told that all my life. All I want to be now is me, with Timmy. And then a mother.’

‘What about your ambition?’ I asked.

‘What ambition?’ she said.

‘To be a dental nurse. I remember, when we did
What’s My Line
at Mountview, there was one. Or I think that was what she was. Her name was Anthea. Her mime was leaning over and staring down at something. The something was a mouth, but we never guessed it. We thought the something could be the Grand Canyon or a butterfly alighting on a window sill.’

Pearl stared at me. I didn’t like to imagine what she was thinking.

After a moment, she said: ‘As you know, we’re going to get digs in Brighton. I’ll do dental work there until Timmy finishes at Teviotts.’

‘And then what?’ I said.

‘Then, we’ll see,’ she said. ‘Cleaning up people and helping them to stay calm is a good training for motherhood.’

‘Biology was what you used to love,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Pearl. ‘I still do. I’ve told Timmy, I’d like to keep fish.’

On the subject of a wedding, nobody tells the whole truth.

There
is
no whole truth, just as there is no heart of the onion; there are only the dreams of individual minds.

I tried to find out what Timmy was dreaming of. He said: ‘Peace.’

He’s grown since he was at Teviotts. He’s worked so hard, it’s elongated his bones.

‘Do you mean peace of mind?’ I asked.

‘Just peace,’ he said. ‘I didn’t believe I’d find it in a human being. I used to think it was only in things you couldn’t define.’

‘And?’

‘The minute I put my arms round Pearl, that day, I felt it: absolute, perfect calm.’

I smiled at him. He so seldom tells me things. It was my father who came and told me Timmy wanted to go into the Church. Tim didn’t have the courage.

We were sitting in front of the television. A film was on with the sound turned down low. Doris Day began singing almost silently through layers of gauze. Sonny was out in the night walking the dog.

‘Are you a virgin, Tim?’ I said.

He looked away from me. ‘Why are you so interested in other people’s lives?’ he said. ‘Why don’t you get more interested in your own?’

I ignored this. I moved my eyes back to the television. Rock Hudson arrived at the end of Doris’s quiet little song and held out a bunch of roses. I said: ‘You both seem like babes to me, Tim. I don’t want you to get lost, that’s all.’

‘It’s you who are lost,’ he said.

Then he left me to watch the rest of the movie alone. I adore films. Ninety-nine per cent of them end with the future all nicely arranged.

Sonny is trying to rearrange the future. He believes he can.

I told him: ‘If you were at Mountview, Sonny, they’d explain to you about Delusion.’