Sacred Country (46 page)
Authors: Rose Tremain
I’d say: ‘Tomorrow, I will do something about Mary.’
I’m fifty-five.
I sit down at the table in my room.
It’s a September evening, getting dark.
In front of me is one of the home-made greetings cards I made with Cord. We never sent them to anyone. I brought them here to distribute among the sherpas and the air traffic controllers.
This card has scabious on it and poppies and lucerne and grass.
It’s easier to write a greetings card in the mind than it is to actually write it. The message in the mind can always be altered. It can go through any number of invisible revisions. It could be metaphorical or fantastical. It could mention the heart of the onion, the explosion in the sky. It could be poetic or ironic. It could describe the search by torchlight, by tilleylight in the forest, the success of a conjuring trick in mid-afternoon in summer…
But once the message is there, written down with the green-ink pen, it has the appearance of something a bit lame, a bit pathetic. The act of writing it has changed it. It isn’t really what you meant to say. It isn’t even a greeting.
I stare at it.
I read it again and again and again, until the words have no meaning at all:
Dear Martin,
Please forgive me. I hope you can.
From your mother, Estelle.
It gets so dark, I can hardly see it, but still I go on staring at it.
At least the writing is quite neat.
That’s something.
It doesn’t look as though it’s been written by a mad person but only by a woman with no imagination.
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Epub ISBN 9781446450284
Published by Vintage 2002
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Copyright © Rose Tremain 1992
Rose Tremain has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in Great Britain by Sinclair-Stevenson 1992
First published by Vintage in 2002
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099422037