Sacred Country Read online

  The afternoon grew hotter and hotter, as if all of June and July were being crammed into this single day. At the tombola Estelle won a chocolate cake which began to melt, so she told Mary and Tim to eat it. There was no breeze to make the home-made bunting flutter.

  Towards two o’clock, Irene took Pearl to the shade of the chestnuts to give her a drink of rosehip syrup and to change her nappy. Mary asked to go with her. The heat and the smocking had made her chest itch so much she had scratched it raw and now little circles of blood were visible among the silky stitches. She wanted to show Irene these blood beads. Being with Irene was, for Mary, like being inside some kind of shelter that you’d made yourself. It was quiet. Nobody shouted.

  Irene examined the blood on the smocking. She undid Mary’s dress and bathed the scratches with the damp rags she carried for cleaning up Pearl.

  ‘There’s hours of work in smocking, Mary,’ Irene said.

  ‘I know,’ said Mary.

  They said nothing more. Irene fastened the dress again, kneeling by Mary on the cool grass. She held her shoulders and looked at her. Mary’s glasses were dirty and misted up, her thin hair lay damp round her head like a cap. Irene understood that she was refusing to cry. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘now we have to get Pearl ready to be beautiful.’

  She handed Mary a clean square of white towelling and Mary laid it carefully on the grass. She smoothed it down before she folded it. Irene took off Pearl’s wet nappy and laid Pearl on the clean folded square. She took out of her bag a tin of talcum and powdered Pearl’s bottom until the shiny flesh was velvety and dry. Mary watched. There was something about Pearl that mesmerised her. It was as if Pearl were a lantern slide and Mary sitting on a chair in the dark. Mary took off her glasses. Without them, it seemed to her that there were two Pearls, or almost two, lying in the chestnut shade, and Mary heard herself say a thought aloud, like her mother did. ‘If there were two,’ she said to Irene, ‘then there would be one for you and one for me.’

  ‘Two what, Mary?’

  But Mary stopped. She attached her glasses to her ears. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what I meant. I expect I was thinking about the cake Mother won, because you didn’t eat any.’

  ‘It’s hot,’ said Irene, fastening the safety pin of Pearl’s nappy. ‘It’s going to be sweltering in that tent.’

  The mothers crowded in. There were far more mothers than chairs, so some had to stand, faint from the burning afternoon and the weight of the babies. The judges’ opening remarks could hardly be heard above the crying. Lady Elliot from Swaithey Hall, neat in her Jacqmar scarf, said she had never seen such a crowd of pretty tots. She said: ‘Now I and my fellow judges are going to pass among you and on our second passing we will give out rosettes to the final five.’

  There was laughter at the idea of the rosettes. The babies were hushed by this sudden ripple of noise. Estelle, with Mary and Tim, stood by one of the tent flaps, praying for a breeze and for the unknown to arrive in Irene’s lap. Mary had her eyes closed. She felt a sudden sorrowful fury. She didn’t want there to be a contest after all.

  The judges barely looked at Pearl. They walked on with just a glance and the only thing that came to Irene waiting patiently on her chair was a waft of French perfume as Lady Elliot passed.

  The competition was won by a Mrs Nora Flynn. The unknown became a trug and trowel, and Mrs Nora Flynn laid her baby, Sally Mahonia, in the trug, like a prize cabbage.

  On the way home in the cart, Irene seemed as content as if the day had never been. Timmy was silent, pale from an afternoon like a dream, tugged here and there and seeing nothing but shimmer. Estelle said bitterly that a trug and trowel could not be classified as ‘unknown’ and she drove the pony at a slow, disappointed pace.

  Mary said: ‘I didn’t clap when that Sally Mahonia won. I didn’t clap at all.’ And then, tired out from scratching her chest and eating cake and wanting Pearl to be recognised as the Most Beautiful Baby in Swaithey, she fell asleep in Irene’s lap.

  Pearl, unvisited by any thoughts, slept near her on the barley sacks, softly snoring.

  Mary:

  I can remember way back, almost to when I was born.

  I can remember lying in my parents’ bed, jammed between them. It was an iron bed with a sag in the middle. They put me into the sag and gravity made them fall towards me, wedging me in.

  Our land was full of stones. As soon as I could walk, I was given a bucket with a picture of a starfish on it and told to pick stones out of the earth. My father would walk ahead with a big pail that was soon so heavy he could barely carry it. I think he thought about stones all the time and he tried to make me think about them all the time. I was supposed to take my starfish bucket with me wherever I went and have my mind on the stones.

  I can remember getting lost in a flat field. It was winter and the dark came round me and hid me from everything and swallowed up my voice. The only thing I could see was my bucket, which had a little gleam on it, and the only thing I could hear was the wind in the firs. I began to walk towards the wind, calling to my father. I walked right into the trees. They sighed and sighed. I put my arms round one of the scratchy fir trunks and stayed there, waiting. I thought Jesus might come through the wood holding up a lantern.

  My parents came and found me with torches. My mother was sobbing. My father picked me up and wrapped me inside his old coat that smelled of seed. He said: ‘Mary, why didn’t you stay where you were?’ I said: ‘My bucket is lost on the field.’ My father said: ‘Never mind about the bucket. You’re the one.’

  But when I was three, I was no longer the one. Tim was born and my father kept saying the arrival of Timmy was a miracle. I asked my mother whether I had been a miracle and she said: ‘Oh, men are like that, especially farmers. Pay no heed.’

  But after Timmy came, everything changed. My mother and father used to put him between them in their sagging bed and fall towards him. When I saw this, I warned them I would kick Timmy to death; I said I would put his pod through the mangle. So my father began to think me evil. I’d go and tell him things and he’d say: ‘Don’t talk to me, Mary. Don’t you talk to me.’ So I stopped talking to him at all. When we went stone picking together, we would go up and down the furrows, up and down, up and down, with each of our minds locked away from the other.

  My vision began to be faulty soon after Timmy was born. I would see light bouncing at the corner of my eye. Distant things like birds became invisible. People would separate and become two of themselves.

  I tried to tell my mother how peculiar everything was becoming. She was going through a phase of needing to touch surfaces all the time. Her favourite surface was the wheel of the sewing machine and her long, white thumb would go round and round it, like something trapped. When I told her about people becoming two of themselves, she put her hand fiercely over my mouth. ‘Ssh!’ she said. ‘Don’t. I’m superstitious.’

  So it was my teacher, Miss McRae at the village school, who discovered my faulty vision. She told my mother: ‘Mary cannot see the blackboard, Mrs Ward.’ Which was true. The blackboard was like a waterfall to me.

  I went with my mother on a bus from Swaithey to Leiston to see an oculist. The bus had to make an extra stop to let some ducks cross the road. I ran to the driver’s window so that I could see the ducks, but all I could see were five blobs creeping along like caterpillars.

  A week later I got my glasses. Timmy laughed at me with them on, so I hit his ear. I hoped I’d hit him so hard his vision would go faulty too. ‘How are they, then?’ asked my father crossly, holding Timmy.

  ‘They are a miracle,’ I said.

  Miss McRae looked like a person made of bark.

  Her back was as straight and as thin as a comb. Her nose was fierce. Her long hands were hard and freckled.

  Every child in that school was afraid of Miss McRae when they first saw her. They thought, if they went near her, they’d be scratched. But when she spoke, her Scottish voice brought a feeling o
f peace into the room and everyone was quiet. She began every day with a story of something she’d done when she was a girl, as if she knew she looked to us like a person who had never been a child. The first words I heard her say were: ‘When I was a lass, I lived in a lighthouse.’ And after that I liked Miss McRae and began to tell her some of the things I refused to tell my father.

  That summer, sometime after the Beautiful Baby Contest, Miss McRae said to us: ‘Now, class, on Monday, I want you each to bring something to school. I want you to bring in something that is important or precious to you, or just something pretty that you like. And then I want you to tell me and the other children why you like it or why it is precious to you. It can be anything you like. No one need be afraid of looking silly. All you have to remember is to be able to say why you’ve chosen it.’

  On the way home from school, I began to think about what I would take as my precious thing. When I’d been born, my mother had given me a silver chain with a silver and glass locket on it. Inside the locket was a piece of Grandmother Livia’s hair and my mother had said recently that I should treasure this locket for always and that, if I ever wore it, I should touch it every ten minutes to make certain it was still round my neck. I used to look at it sometimes. It made me wonder what Grandma Livia had been wearing round her neck when she got into the glider. I thought it was the kind of thing Miss McRae would like and I could hear her say approvingly: ‘What a pretty wee thing, Mary.’ But it wasn’t really precious to me. And if a thing isn’t precious to you then it isn’t and that’s it; it won’t become precious suddenly between Friday and Monday.

  When I got home from school, I looked around my room. I thought I might find something precious I’d forgotten about. But there was hardly anything in my room: just my bed, which had come out of a cottage hospital sale, and a table with a lamp on it and a huge old wardrobe, in which I kept my sweet tin and my spelling book and my boots. The tin had a picture of a Swiss chalet on it. It contained at that time two ounces of sherbert lemons and three Macintoshes toffees. I got it out and put a sherbert lemon into my mouth. I thought the little burst of sherbert might wake me up to the preciousness of something, but it didn’t and then I had this thought: no one has ever told me where Grandma Livia was going in that glider. Was she just going to Ipswich or was she going to the Tyrrhenian Sea?

  By Sunday evening, after looking in my mother’s sewing basket and in her button box and in all the crannies of the house where an important thing might have hidden itself and finding nothing, I decided that I couldn’t go to school the next day. I would walk a long way from our farm. I would find a hayfield coming to its second cropping and I would sit in it and think about my coming life as a boy. I would examine myself for signs. Or I might climb a tree and stay there out of reach of everyone and everything, including all the stones in the soil.

  For my mid-day dinner, my mother made me pickle sandwiches and a thermos of lemon squash. In the winter, the thermos had tea in it and the taste of the tea lingered over into the summer and came into the lemon squash, tepid and strange.

  At the bottom of our lane, instead of turning left towards Swaithey and school, I turned right and began to run. I kept running until I was beyond the fields that were ours and then I stopped under a signpost and sat down. It was very hot there, even in that early morning sun. I drank some of my lemon squash. And then after about five minutes I got up and began tearing back the way I had come. I had remembered my precious thing.

  I was late for the class. I had had some trouble on the way with Irene, who said: ‘What are you thinking of, Mary Ward? Whatever are you like?’

  ‘Please, Irene,’ I begged. ‘Please.’

  I was in Mr Harker’s house, where Irene worked. Mr Harker had turned his cellar into a factory where he made cricket bats. The smell of wood and oil came up into all the rooms. A painted sign on his gate said: Harker’s Bats.

  ‘It’d only be for half an hour,’ I pleaded.

  ‘No,’ said Irene. ‘Now run along to school.’

  But I got her in the end: Pearl, my precious thing.

  I carried her like a big vase with both my arms round her. Miss McRae took her glasses off and frowned and said: ‘Whatever in the world, Mary?’ Lots of children giggled. I opened my desk top and laid Pearl down in my desk with her head on my Arithmetic book. I closed my ears and my mind to everybody laughing.

  Pearl gazed at me. She looked frightened. I don’t suppose she’d ever been in a desk before. I gave her a little wooden ruler to play with but she hit herself on the nose with it and began to cry.

  ‘My, my,’ I heard Miss McRae say, ‘this is very irregular, Mary. Will you tell me please what this baby is doing in my lesson?’

  I had to pick Pearl up to stop her crying. The boy who sat next to me, Billy Bateman, was laughing so hard he asked to be excused. I looked over to his desk and saw that he’d brought in a stamp album, all mutilated and falling apart, as if it had belonged to Noah. When I’m a boy, I thought, I’ll be a more interesting one than him.

  ‘Mary?’ said Miss McRae.

  I felt my heart jump about inside my aertex blouse. I felt thirsty and very peculiarly sad. I thought I might cry, which was a thing I never did, but sometimes you cry with your face and your mind isn’t in it, but somewhere else, watching you. It was like that. It was my face that felt sad.

  The thing was, I didn’t know what to say about Pearl. I didn’t understand why she was important to me, except that I thought she was very beautiful and I still couldn’t see why she hadn’t won that contest.

  I held her awkwardly. When Timmy was born, my mother had tried to show me how to hold a baby, but I’d refused to listen. I thought, I must say something before Pearl slips out of my arms.

  ‘Is this baby your precious thing, Mary?’ asked Miss McRae kindly.

  I nodded.

  ‘I see, dear,’ she said, ‘well in that case, perhaps you will be able to tell the class why?’

  Pearl, at that moment, let her head fall onto my shoulder, as if she wanted to go to sleep and start snoring. Her hand was still on my cheek, holding on to it. I said: ‘Her name’s Pearl. I was going to bring this locket with some of my grandmother’s hair in it.’

  ‘Yes, dear?’

  ‘But.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It wasn’t precious.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. It wasn’t.’

  ‘But Pearl is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And I wonder if you can tell us why, Mary?’

  ‘Some things are.’

  ‘That’s quite true.’

  ‘But you can’t say it properly. Like my mother can’t. If you asked her to bring in a thing, she’d have maybe brought in her sewing machine.’

  Miss McRae waited. After a bit, she understood that I couldn’t say anything more so she nodded gravely. My face was boiling red. I thought I might be going to explode and see my insides splatter out all over my desk and all over Billy Bateman’s stamp album. I asked if I could sit down and Miss McRae said yes, so I sat and watched the next child go up with her precious thing. It was my so-called friend, Judy Weaver. She’d brought an ugly little salmon-coloured doll, dressed as a fairy. I’d seen this doll standing on the window sill in her parents’ bathroom. It was a toilet-roll cover. You stuffed the doll’s thin legs down the cardboard tube and her gauzy skirt went over the paper, hiding it from view.

  After that day of the Precious Things, I didn’t want Judy Weaver as a friend any more. I didn’t want any friends. None.

  The Blue Yodeller

  For four generations, the Loomis family had lived in Swaithey. Their shop, Arthur Loomis & Son, Family Butchers, had opened in 1861. A faded photograph of old Arthur, wearing a long apron and holding a tray of dressed game, now hung in the shop window above the pork joints and the skinned rabbits and the bowls of tripe. Smiling and plump, with a thick moustache, he looked like a man fattening himself up for eternity. All the generations of sons
who followed him and kept the business thriving had heard Arthur Loomis speak to them in their sleep. It was as if every one of them had got to know him in time. Ernie Loomis, the present proprietor, born twelve years after Arthur had died, could describe his voice. ‘Nice and slow,’ he said it was, ‘and nice and gentle.’

  Behind the shop was the cold room and behind this, hidden from sight by a high wall, was the slaughtering yard. The animals were strung up by their hind legs on a pulley. Their blood flowed into a gully and from there into a drain which debouched into a soakaway under the very field the heifers grazed in summer.

  In one corner of this field lived Ernie Loomis’s brother, Pete. His home was a converted trolley bus, its roof pitched and thatched. Between Pete’s living room and his cramped kitchen was a sign which read: Push button once to stop bus. Nobody much except the family knew Pete Loomis. He worked in the slaughtering yard or in the fields, never in the shop. The iris of his left eye wandered, so that he could seldom look square at a person, yet at the moment of a slaughter his eyes aligned themselves and he slit with precision. He had no wife or child. He’d spent some time in the American South. There were rumours of a long-ago crime. In the village drapers, where he bought his underwear, the Misses Cunningham referred to him as ‘a most uncustomary man’.

  Yet he was a boon to Ernie. Ernie had never liked the yard. His art was in dead meat. The gentry of East Suffolk knew him by name, as he knew them. His voice, like his ancestor’s, was quiet, his fingers nimble. He was diligent, ordered and clean. Every morning, he got up at five and brought his wife, Grace, a cup of tea and kissed her forehead, moist from her night. By six he was at his block and at eight the shutters of the shop went up. All day long, while Ernie passed between block and counter, Grace sat in a little booth with her cash register and her book of accounts. When there was no one in the shop, Ernie would talk to her through the glass.