Sacred Country (6 page)

‘Well,’ said Irene, ‘it’d only be for the mornings …’

So I began it the following day, taking Pearl to school with me while Irene went to Mr Harker’s and set to work polishing everything for his return from France. I told Miss McRae this was a temporary arrangement, that Pearl could be a silkworm monitor and that if she wasn’t allowed to be there, I wouldn’t be able to come to school. She shook her head, just like Irene had done, turning it from side to side, so that little thin hairpins fell out of her grey bun, but then she found a small chair and desk and put it by hers and sat Pearl in it.

‘Luckily for you, Mary,’ she said, ‘I was born in a lighthouse, or I would not be the kind of person I am.’

I stayed at Irene’s for a week. My father came while I was at school and told her this would be best and gave her ten shillings for my food.

In my life to come, I would sometimes remember it, my week at Irene’s when I couldn’t say the syllables of Marguerite’s name.

I remember the feel of my body, trying to grow its man’s skin between the settee cushions and the green eiderdown.

I remember Pearl’s love of the silkworms.

I remember the marmalade sandwiches.

I remember Irene at the bedroom door, saying: ‘Goodnight, my doves, and dream of princes.’

Learning to yodel was far more terrible than Walter had imagined.

Pete said it was a sound born in the mountains, where a man could hear his own echo. He said it was a shame there were no mountains in Suffolk.

Walter tried to teach himself by copying Jimmie Rodgers. Then, on his parents’ wireless, he heard a Canadian singer named Hank Snow, known as ‘The Yodelling Ranger’, making that same easy, high-spilling sound and he said to Pete: ‘This confirms me in what I’m doing.’ Snow sang a song so sad, it made Walter’s spine ache. The song was called ‘I Don’t Hurt Anymore’.

Customers to the Loomis shop sometimes caught an unexpected burst of Walter’s yodel-practice coming from the yard and the Misses Cunningham, in particular, were not at ease with it. ‘You know, Amy,’ said one sister to the other, ‘I think Loomis must be killing things more slowly, in a way that makes them sound human.’

The task was so hard. Perhaps it would kill him? It was like trying to put fizz into something still. It was difficult for Pete to believe that all this struggle had arisen from a night of rain and booze. He warned Walter not to push himself. He became aware that the boy was running a fever that refused to abate. In the cow-sheds, he could see Walter’s head steaming. His neck,
above the collarless shirt, was plum red.

‘Give that yodel a rest,’ Pete advised, ‘or it’ll burst your brains.’

But he had forgotten Walter’s devotion to things. ‘Of course I can’t give it a rest,’ Walter said, ‘not till I’ve got it.’

But he couldn’t get it. Not quite. He could master a kind of warble, a little trill at the back of the throat. The great swoop up to a falsetto that Rodgers and Snow achieved so effortlessly remained beyond him. He could hear it inside him. In his fever, he sometimes felt that he could even
see
it, as a bouncing light above the trees.

Then he heard a new song on the radio, Slim Whitman singing ‘Rose Marie’.

Pete told Ernie: ‘That’s going to be the death of your boy, that “Rose Marie”.’

Grace advised her son: ‘We’ve all of us got only one voice, Walter, and you’re hurting yours.’

But he’d bought the record now. He wore out four gramophone needles, playing it over and over. The ease with which old Slim Whitman sang it reminded him of a waterfall. He had dreams of mountains. The word ‘whippoorwill’ (its meaning unclear to him) kept patterning and punctuating his thoughts. He remembered Pete’s tales of ice storms and prayed for one to come and cool him. The morning arrived when his fever was so thick and deep that he couldn’t move.

And he couldn’t speak. In answer to the doctor’s questions, nothing came out. The pain in Walter’s throat was so spectacular, he thought an ice-pick must have lodged there. He tried to ask his mother to remove it, but realised he was incapable of the least sound.

He was put into the doctor’s Morris Minor. A blanket was laid round him. On the way to the hospital, he lost track of the seasons and thought autumn had come – autumn known as fall. You lay in the fall, Pete had said, and dreamed. Something came out of that dreaming, but Walter couldn’t remember what. He feared death might come out of it, and silence, for ever. He fought with his blanket, as if death and silence were in that.
The doctor’s Morris kept swerving. Having Walter in the back of the car was like having a sick bull there.

It wasn’t autumn. It was still early spring, grey and chill at its heart.

In the cold hospital ward Walter, clamped to the bed by a damp sheet, saw old Arthur Loomis come to his side and sit down. He was wearing his apron. His face was pink with vitality and health and his beard was crisp and shiny. ‘Walter,’ he said, ‘I’m glad we’ve got this opportunity to talk.’

He seemed to wait for Walter to speak, but Walter could say nothing.

Arthur stroked his moustache. His eyes were brown and gentle, like the eyes of a doe. ‘I think,’ he continued, ‘that this is the right time to remind you that you are alone in your generation, the only Loomis.’

Walter tried to turn his head towards Arthur, but it seemed to him that his ancestor was holding the handle of the ice-pick, pinning him down.

He slept a hot sleep. The words of ‘Rose Marie’ filled it up. ‘No matter how I try, I can’t forget you/Sometimes I wish that I had never met you!’ These words were the narrow bridge to a future life, and everything else – his mother, the yard, the blood gulley, the animals and the sky – belonged to the dead past. When he woke, he thought he would try to tell Arthur that all of this was gone, but he found that Arthur’s voice, so often described by Ernie as ‘nice and gentle, nice and slow’, was speaking to him firmly and could not be interrupted.

‘… known across East Suffolk, boy. Purveyors of fine meats to some of the best houses. A family business. And the name Loomis on it. On the window in gold and blue letters. On the awning, also in gold and blue. On the bills of sale. On the minds of hostesses. Large on shopping lists …’

‘I know,’ Walter tried to say.

‘So there’s the picture,’ said Arthur, ‘you can see it, can’t you, as plain as death. You are the last Loomis and you mustn’t desert the meat.’

Arthur stood up and went away then, without another word. For the first time in a long while Walter felt cold, and from this moment his fever began to die down.

It was convenient, after that, not to be able to speak. He wanted no questions to be asked and no promises to be demanded. In silence, he looked at his future and saw that he might not be able to become a hillbilly singer. Yodelling was beyond him. He had almost died trying to do it. And without a yodel, there would only be an imaginary America, not a real Tennessee with its faithful darkies and its faithful dogs. All of that was shimmer.

He came home and his mother made him broth from marrowbones. The red in his cheeks had faded to a grey mottling; his forehead was a slab of white. He lay in his bedroom and heard the business of the shop going on beneath him, the scratch and thud of the cleaver, the ping of the cash till.

In time, as if oiled by the real coming of spring, the pain in his vocal chords lessened and his voice began to return, a minute thing at first, with no power to disturb his breath and no will to be heard.

The first time it came louder was on a late afternoon at the river, under a fish-scale sky. His mother had sent him there to gather watercress for tea. The river flowed through the fields owned by Sonny Ward into the Loomis pastures.

Estelle was there. She was sitting on the plank bridge Sonny had made on his own in a day. Beside her was a pail of watercress. Her feet were in the water and she was holding on to her shoes.

Walter waved at her. She looked up at him, but didn’t move or make any greeting. So he called out and heard his voice quite strong again, as it had been in the days before ‘Rose Marie’. He called: ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Ward!’ but Estelle didn’t reply and Walter wondered whether the strength he heard in his voice had, after all, been an illusion. He was about to try calling out again when he saw Estelle stand up and walk away, leaving her pail of cress behind.

At tea, Grace said: ‘You don’t surprise us, Walter. But you’ve been ill a longish while, dear, and haven’t heard the things they’re saying in the village.’

They say: Sonny is a good man.

They say: England is a good place.

They say: I don’t know what frightens you so, Estelle.

I can tell them. When I was fourteen, Livia took me to a play. Near the end, the man peels an onion. He is trying to find the onion after all the layers of peel. He gets to the heart of it and there is nothing. How absurd, he says, there is nothing there at all.

Irene thinks she has found the onion. The onion is the old man, Harker. You could die laughing at this.

He comes up from the cellar. Hard as an armadillo, she says. Surprising for his years. She switches off the Hoover. ‘It’s wonderful, Estelle,’ she says, ‘I’d forgotten how wonderful.’

You could die laughing.

If dying were easy. If you could just say, goodnight etcetera. I tried it one night. Sonny lay on his side, facing me. I put my face close to his mouth and breathed his breath, like mustard gas. For I had often thought, the breath of a person you no longer love or respect could be a poison to kill you, and it does. But it kills you slowly. So slowly that it isn’t often you notice you are dying.

I try to tell Irene, I used to caress his coral ear, with my fingers and with my lips. I try to remind her, in her onion bliss, these things are like sunlight and vanish. It can happen at mid-day or happen late. And then, what was possible no longer is or ever will be again.

‘I never met,’ she says, ‘anyone so full of bad-weather forecasts as you, Estelle.’

And I say, well Irene, wait and watch and see if from one
split second to the next, it doesn’t go. Watch and see. You might be on the stairs in just your slip, or you might be somewhere else, lying in the dark. You can’t predict the place or time. Only afterwards will you be able to say, for always, it was then; that was the moment.

‘I know I’m alive again now,’ she says, ‘that’s the point.’

‘Well,
that
,’ I say. And I laugh.

But she’s right that this is what we look for. Despite all the evidence. A desperate search. Grabbing any old thing; even a cricket bat. God’s thigh must have bruises and welts on it from so much slapping. His ribs surely ache. My mother found life in a silent plane, held aloft by currents of air. The things we dream up! She searched in her house for it, at the piano, at her mirror, in my father’s bed, but not a trace of it remained where it once was. She said: ‘It’s not just being alive we seek. It’s the
experience
of being alive.’

‘You’re everything to me, Estelle,’ Sonny still sometimes says. It’s then that I know his breath is killing me. You cannot be everything to a person and still survive. I go to my sewing machine. To me, it is a flawless thing, designed by a mind that did not lie to itself. Its handle is polished by my touch. I let my hair fall round it, blocking Sonny from my sight. Mary will come and stare at me. Her stare is changing. Getting harder and harder. Because it is her that he punishes. You can’t punish the thing that is everything to you; you punish something else. And so her stare says, aren’t you sorry, even? Aren’t you ashamed? And I hide from her more and more. I let her go to Irene or wherever she needs to go to survive. I don’t look. Sometimes, I walk out of the house and pretend I’m going for ever, carrying an empty bucket, as if it were a suitcase crammed with all that I need.

I go to the river. I reconstruct what is past: cause and effect. Cause so swift and foolish; effect so endless.

I was born in a tidy village. Fences round everything; Albertine growing over the porches; a flint church. When I was a child, my mother played the church organ. Odd for those days, a female organist.

I met Sonny in church. For weeks, he came and stared at me, never speaking. He held his cap in his hands. He behaved like someone in a queue, waiting his turn.

I had had another fiancé before the war, a young man who thought staring was rude and common. He was a naturalist who dressed in green corduroy and yellow cashmere and bought his wellingtons in London. His passion was for moths. His kiss was a faint and weak thing. He used to say: ‘I will never take advantage of you, Estelle. That is out of the question.’ And I would reply: ‘Thank you. That is very considerate of you and most reassuring.’

His name was Miles, but he like to be called Milo. Some people do this: they make themselves ridiculous by one small thing of their own choosing. He was killed in the Ardennes and buried in Belgium somewhere. I used to imagine him turning to dust like a moth. To me, moths seem to be
made
of dust, but Milo was made of England and couldn’t have wanted to die where he did. I never mourned him. He had smelled like a Gentleman’s Outfitters. You could have done invisible mending with his thin, silky hair.

When Sonny had stood in his queue long enough and when I stared back at him and he came close to me, I understood that nothing was out of the question. He took me out in his old pony-cart and pulled up in some shade and explored the shape of me with his hands. He said: ‘I’ve been waiting for a beautiful woman all my life.’ I was his onion. He did not know there is nothing at its centre.

Because I came from a smart village, he thought I didn’t understand the countryside. He thought I was as blind and deaf to it as the people who drove out in their Austins to have picnics on family rugs and grab armfuls of wild flowers to stick in vases. The idea of flowers in a vase was repugnant to him. He said women loved too many of the wrong things. He said: ‘To live in the country, you have to have your heart in it. You have to have knowledge.’ I did not say that Livia had had a talent for arranging flowers.