Sacred Country Read online

  Ernie and Grace had one child, Walter. At sixteen, he resembled Pete more than Ernie. He had a dreamy look. His hair was thick and black, like Pete’s. His cheeks had a high colour. His spelling was poor and his handwriting laboured. As a child, he’d grown much too fast and the pain of this growing had been felt in every one of his bones. But now it had stopped. He hoped there wouldn’t be another spurt of it. He let his limbs relax and get ready for life.

  He noticed then, when he could listen to what was outside his pain, that his singing voice was rather fine – so peculiarly fine he felt it couldn’t possibly belong to him. He sang as he worked, sometimes helping his parents in the shop, but more often mucking out the pig sties and feeding the hens or working with Pete in the yard. He didn’t know the words to many songs, only the things he’d grown up with: old soupy ballads such as ‘The Minstrel Boy’ and ‘Barbara Allen’ and some of the wartime favourites his mother loved so, ‘Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider’, ‘Love is the Sweetest Thing’, ‘When They Sound the Last All-Clear’.

  His Uncle Pete taught him to play a banjo. The two of them would sit in Pete’s bus, strumming simple chords. And then Walter would sing and they’d both incline their heads towards the Push button once sign, as if the song might be coming from there. Sometimes, it got dark on their banjo sessions, and cold, and the grazing heifers would cluster round the bus, flanks tightly packed, drawn to the body of the old trolley by the blueish light of the Tilley lamp and by the melody.

  Devotion to things came easily to Walter. Once devoted, he would not be turned aside. In despair about his hopeless schoolwork and the pain of his growing, Ernie and Grace consoled themselves with this devotion of his. Every night before going to his room, he let his mother embrace him and his father give him a comradely pat on the shoulder. He told them he was proud that the name Loomis was known across half the country and that one day the shop would be his. Yet, privately, he had difficulty imagining this. He lacked his father’s skill with the knife and his mother’s head for sums. And he was happiest outside. ‘You and I,’ Pete said to him in the bus one evening, ‘we’re hillbillies, Walter.’ And Walter grinned, liking the sound of the word.

  On a night of heavy summer rain, Pete got drunk on whisky. He lay on the floor of the bus with his head propped up by a chair. His wall eye meandered about, looking for a memory. He began to talk about Memphis. He said: ‘I was a gardener in Memphis in ’38. A church gardener.’

  ‘What’s a church gardener?’ asked Walter.

  ‘Gardener to a church. In this case, Baptist. With three lawns and two beds of annuals and a lot of roses. And what came out of that church was music.’

  ‘What kind of music?’

  ‘Gospel music. Lovely sound, boy. Used to send me trickles up and down me.’

  He told Walter that he never would have left Memphis but for something that happened there. He said happiness was the main condition in Tennessee, despite the Depression and the bad times. Blacks were faithful there. Dogs were faithful. Even the seasons were faithful. Spring came in an afternoon. Winter tore in on an ice storm. ‘And the fall, Walter, well, that lets you lie in it an’ dream, and out of all the fall-dreaming comes the music.’

  He made Walter get up and look for an old record among his collection of 78s in brown-paper sleeves that he kept in a wooden chest with an eiderdown and some mole traps. ‘Jimmie Rodgers!’ Pete announced. ‘The Singing Brakeman, The Blue Yodeller! You put that on the grammy and have a listen …’

  Walter found the record. He got out Pete’s box gramophone and wound it up. The way the heavy, silvery needle arm was moulded to twist over so easily pleased him. He sat down and waited for the scratching of the needle to become song.

  It was a jaunty tune. It had a kind of clip-clopping rhythm. It was called ‘The Yodelling Cowboy’. Pete made clicking noises with his tongue, keeping time. Walter crouched by the record, watching it go round. The words appealed to him: ‘My cowboy life is so happy and free/Out where the law don’t bother me.’ He liked to think of men on horseback riding about in what Pete called the fall with nothing to interrupt their happiness. He imagined the golden light that fell on them and the faithful dogs at their heels. But it was Jimmie Rodgers’s mastery of the yodel that moved him. It was as if the voice had added a second instrument to its own one-note-at-a-time sound. It took the song up into the sky.

  ‘Well?’ said Pete, pouring himself the last of the whisky.

  ‘I like the yodel,’ said Walter.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you? That Rodgers, he could yodel his gizzard off! Play the other side, boy.’

  On the other side was ‘Frankie and Johnny’, a sad number about a man cheating on his love. In this, the yodel was slower and had a sob to it, as if the old singing brakeman were breaking up. The words were easy to remember: ‘He was her man/But he done her wrong,’ and on the second time of playing it, Pete and Walter joined in. ‘He was her man/But he done her wrong!’

  Pete shook his whisky-laden head from side to side, as though in despair at Johnny’s wrong doing and out of the chaos of his eyes fell slow tears like oil. He looked ready to slump down and sleep, but his mind had a last squeeze of sense in it and he kept talking. ‘I saw him sing once, that old yodelling boy,’ he said to Walter, ‘and I never forgot how he talked in between songs. Just saying things. Whatever was on his mind. He’d say to his people on stage: “Play the tune, Mamma!” and then he’d strum a bit and look at us all out there and say: “Hey, hey, hey, it won’t be long now …” And he got known for that. That was his trademark: “Hey, hey, hey, it won’t be long now.” Lord knows what he meant by it, precisely speaking, but when he said that the audience would clap, you see, Walter? You can imagine that, can’t you? Everybody clapping? And thinking to themselves, damn it if he isn’t right! Because, in all probability, it won’t be long, eh?’

  Walter put the record back into its charred-looking sleeve. He closed the gramophone. The rain had stopped and he could see a skin of moonlight on the window ledges of the bus. Pete’s body had yielded to gravity and his head now lay on the dusty floor. Walter felt light, as if the bulk of his life had gone up into the night sky with the yodel. He thought he should drag Pete onto his bed, but the task seemed to be too heavy for his frame.

  He just sat still in his chair and made promises to himself. He would teach himself to yodel. He would practise out in the fields and in the sties where no one could hear. He would save up and buy a guitar. He would sing no more stupid wartime songs. From now on, he would learn hillbilly music. He would try to find the soul of it and lie there, like Pete said you could lie in the Tennessee fall, and dream.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1954

  In Harker’s Cellar

  The colour of the light in Edward Harker’s cellar was amber. He worked under a row of tilting, parchment-shaded lamps. The only bright spot in the room was a white bubble of illumination at the base of the large magnifying lens with which he examined the grain of the willow wood for his cricket bats.

  Harker was exacting about light. A grey or blueish quality vexed him. On days when a pall of flat, shadowless white hung over the village, he would not go out. He sent Irene to do his errands. He refused to look up at the slit of window that gave him air.

  The lamps cast long shadows. They were the shadows of ancient evenings, of deckchair and scoreboard, of dead friends. He was a sentimental man. He stood at his workbench as if at an altar to the past.

  He was sixty-one. His hair was thick but almost white. His face was narrow, with a long enquiring nose. He sneezed frequently, displacing sawdust never swept from surfaces. His only vanity was the daily wearing of a bow tie. Though he seldom talked about God or the universe, he held an unshakeable belief in the transmigration of souls. He was fairly certain that, three centuries ago, he had been a lutenist at the court of the Danish King, Christian IV. In this incarnation, he had been persecuted in a way that he found both absurd and reprehensible. The story of this persecution h
e would tell only to people he trusted to understand its significance.

  His cricket bats were works of sculpture. He fancifully thought of them as shrouded figures or again sometimes as musical instruments. No two were precisely the same, yet the Harker stamp was on them all. Brand new, they seemed already subtly moulded by usage and time. Their sounds against the ball had a gratifying, recognisable sweetness. An industry of one, the name of Harker was known around the cricketing counties. Players came from as far away as Yorkshire to be measured for a Harker bat.

  Married once and long ago divorced, Harker had reached a plateau in his life, what he called ‘level ground’, from which he could see both forwards and behind. He did not expect to be dislodged from this place. Any significant interruption to his routine was unimaginable to him. He told his few friends that the only event of any importance awaiting him was his death and rebirth. He had an affinity with hunted creatures, with dying breeds. He loved woodland. He wondered whether he might not return as a fox.

  And then, in the autumn of 1954, something began to happen to him. Down in the cellar, apparently absorbed at his workbench, among the solid shadows, he noticed in himself a little worm of inattention, minuscule at first, but growing fatter, squirming more uncomfortably inside him with each succeeding day. His mind, his hands, the row of lamps, the wood, the toolbench, the tins of oil – for years these had been as one, a still life. Now, his mind was, almost imperceptibly, leaving the picture, departing upwards and lodging in the rooms above. With Irene.

  He was shocked. He reviled himself. He rose earlier and began his work sooner so that he wouldn’t see her when she arrived at nine. He locked the cellar door. He turned out all his lamps except one. He got out his calligraphy books and redesigned the Harker trademark. He sat very still at his desk. Being motionless was his way of pretending to Irene and to himself that he wasn’t there at all. Only when he heard Irene vacuuming would he allow himself to make a little deliberate noise. He would hum snatches of Bach: ‘Pom. Tiddly-tiddly-tiddly pom. Tiddly-tiddly-tiddly-tiddly-tiddly-tiddly pom pom pom …’ Bach was orderliness and calm. Irene’s hoover was anarchy roaring over his carpets.

  As winter came on and the skies were draped in the flat, grey blanket he so detested, he decided he would go abroad for a month, to Marseilles, and take a room with a balcony in a quiet hotel. He would sit on this balcony and sip Pernod and in the sunshine cure himself of his wandering thoughts. He telephoned Thomas Cook & Son. He booked himself a ferry passage and a wagon-lit from Boulogne to Marseilles. He bought a panama hat.

  Irene came gradually to believe that it was Pearl who was alienating Mr Harker. A man with no children, living like a bachelor, you could understand that he didn’t want a three-year-old in his house: the noise of her feet, the things she sang to herself, her fingermarks on the furniture. And yet there was nothing Irene could do. The school would not take Pearl until she was four and she refused to leave her at home by herself. Both her neighbours were elderly and disapproved of Pearl’s very existence. Estelle might have cared for her, but the farm was a long way from Swaithey and, besides, Estelle had told Irene she was ‘retreating’. She wouldn’t say more. She was retreating into the shade was all she’d say. And she said it brightly, in a sing-song voice, as if she were announcing a new malted beverage on the wireless.

  Irene lay awake, feeling sorrowful. The announcement of Estelle’s retreat and Mr Harker’s withdrawal into the cellar made her feel helpless.

  She decided she would speak to Mr Harker. She would explain that, although Pearl followed her around the house, she had been forbidden ever to touch anything of his, that she played quietly with her dolls and had been told not to sing to them. She would, if necessary, beg Mr Harker not to sack her and remind him that within a few months Pearl would be going to school. Before the talk, she would polish all his silver and lay it out for him to see on a traycloth, gleaming proof that her work was thorough.

  A fortnight before Harker’s intended trip to Marseilles (during which he had added to the purchase of the hat some expensive cotton underwear and a copy of Wisden 1953 to read on his balcony), Irene left a note on his kitchen table. The spelling was weak and Irene, examining her note, marvelled at how difficult writing things down was compared to saying them. Saying something was as easy as laughing; writing caused you grief, as though you were mourning somebody who had abandoned you too soon.

  The note read:

  Dear Mr Harker,

  I would like to talk to you please towmorow. Please will you come up to the kitchen at elevensis time i.e. eleven o’clock. I will make a pot of tea. Yours trully

  Irene Simmonds

  At home, she baked a pink and yellow Battenberg cake and placed it on a doily to set it off. She washed Pearl’s hair and tied it with a blue ribbon. She cut the child’s nails and made sure her hands were clean.

  As eleven approached, her heart, which she imagined as a thing like a cauliflower, began to thump against the bib of her apron. To lose this job would be like losing the world.

  She laid out the tea things. She found a silver cake knife and put it by the Battenberg. She didn’t know whether Mr Harker preferred his tea steeped or watery. She sat Pearl at the table with a bib round her neck. She gave her a beaker of lemon squash and told her to be as quiet as a squirrel. She brushed down her apron and patted her home perm. She waited.

  Mr Harker came up from the cellar humming. ‘Pom. Tiddly-tiddly-tiddly pom.’ Irene saw this as a cheerful sign. ‘Tiddly-tiddly tiddly tiddly-tiddly-tiddly …’ Irene smiled her big, dimpled smile and drew Mr Harker’s attention to the cake. She saw that he looked relieved, as if he were glad there was something to which his attention could be drawn. He said that no one knew how to make a Battenberg since the war.

  Irene poured the tea and they sat down. An electric wall clock let time advance jerkily round its plastic face. Pearl announced to Mr Harker that she was going to be as quiet as a squirrel. He let his eyes move upwards from his own hand stirring his tea and look at the child. She regarded him gravely. Although Harker had seen her many times prior to his self-imposed incarceration in the cellar, he felt now that he had never really noticed her before. He wasn’t a connoisseur of infants, he’d encountered so very few, but he could tell straight away that here was a very pretty little girl, pretty beyond telling, with the kind of surprising grace children seem to possess in portraits of them by Gainsborough.

  He took a bite of his piece of Battenberg. He saw Irene’s plump arm reach out with a handkerchief and wipe a crumb from Pearl’s cheek. He looked away. He tried to concentrate on the cake, but there seemed to be a sweet, perfumed taste to it, now soft mush in his mouth, that resembled the smell of Irene and, dare he say it, the taste of her body that his disobedient mind would persist in imagining. He swallowed the last mouthful of cake and washed away the sweetness of it with tea. He wiped his mouth firmly. His decision was made. Harker, he instructed himself, get rid of the woman!

  He looked at her then, at her wide, smooth-skinned face, at her huge breasts inside a neat blouse behind the apron bib. He laid a concealing hand on his lap.

  ‘Irene,’ he said, ‘I wonder whether Pearl could go and play in some other room for a moment …’

  ‘Mr Harker –’ Irene began.

  ‘Just for a minute or two, while we get things sorted out.’

  Irene undid Pearl’s bib and told her to go and sit on the stairs.

  As soon as she’d gone, Harker said: ‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you for some time, Irene.’

  He said this with such gravity that Irene felt a slippery movement in her heart, like a maggot in it. ‘If it’s about Pearl …’ she said.

  ‘Pearl?’

  ‘Yes. If it’s about me having to bring her to work, I know this is inconvenient for you, Mr Harker, but I can’t rightly do anything about it. There’s no one I can trust her with. No one at all. This is why I wrote the note. I know you don’t like having her here, disturbing you …’
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  ‘Oh, it’s not exactly that …’ said Harker.

  ‘She’ll be in school springtime, when she’s four. Not long to go. And she’s a good girl. She does as I say. She plays with her dolls, but quietly. No singing …’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘And if I were to have to leave … you know my circumstances, Sir. You know how hard it would be for me to –’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Harker firmly.

  ‘There’s no one else in Swaithey would give me work.’

  The choke in Irene’s voice, her flushed and agitated appearance, these seemed to Harker to expand her presence in the room, so that he felt he was going to be smothered. Tell her to go and so forth and do it now, Harker, he told himself. The state of his lap was appalling, perilous, even. His face burned with the shame of it and when he tried to speak, his mouth was dry.

  ‘I can’t discuss it,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. As you know, I’m going to France in a fortnight’s time and I will pay you for the four weeks while I’m away and then that will have to be that.’

  Irene had not meant to cry. She apologised for herself. She got up and began to clear away the tea things. She let her tears flow onto the doily. She turned and looked at Mr Harker. She was surprised to find him still seated at the table. She thought he would have escaped back to his precious cellar by now.

  ‘Can I ask,’ she said through her film of misery, ‘if Pearl is the reason?’

  Harker blinked. He was distracted, as if his mind had already moved on somewhere else. ‘Pearl is the reason?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Oh yes. I’m afraid so,’ said Harker, marshalling his thoughts. ‘You see, my work is of a solitary kind, requiring great concentration. Any change of atmosphere in the house is damaging. Not your fault, Irene. Not your fault and I’m sorry. But there we are.’