Sacred Country Read online

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.’

  Estelle:

  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.

  He showed me some of the hidden things the Austin drivers did not know existed: edible puff balls, chanterelles, bullaces, fennel roots and wild garlic. He had never been in an Austin. He could recognise the footprint of a badger and the call of the nuthatch. He had no particular interest in moths.

  He climbed into my bedroom through the dormer window, while my father sat alone by the fire, sipping Wincarnis. What he had sampled in the cart he now used and I used him back. And, I remind Irene, usage of this kind is a drug. You want and want and your brain turns to slush and your cunt to a velvet river and your limbs to willow, bending to the least touch. You want and want. Until the day when you do not want any more. And then you are cured and free, but are a prisoner and have nothing.

  In one month, I was pregnant with Mary. Sonny and I got married in the flint church. My bouquet was lilies and smelled of the past. Rose petals were flung at us. Even in church, the feeling of wanting was there, as we knelt down.

  I moved to Sonny’s farm, leaving my father quite alone with his bottle of Wincarnis and the Daily Telegraph.

  In bed, Sonny laid his damaged ear on my belly. He said: ‘pray it’s a boy. Pray and pray.’

  And so I wonder now, as I walk by the river, what, among all the lost or strange or disappearing things, does an unborn child know? What can it hear through the womb wall? Did Mary understand that it was not her that I was made to long for, but somebody else, a child of Sonny’s imaginings?

  I remember, she got lost once. Almost before her life had started, she got lost in it. She wandered off into a wood and held on to a tree, as if the tree were what would save her and what she sought.

  We didn’t find her for a long time. I thought she was drowned in a ditch and I began to cry. Sonny said: ‘All your looks go, Estelle, when you start weeping. Any resemblance you ever had to Ava Gardner disappears absolutely.’

  So I go to the river and stare at myself. I look down at my face, at the ripples of water ignoring it and moving on. The river has a goal, to get past the weeds and the rushes and on to the salt sea, and I have none and all my wanting of things is over. And on glittering days, I have the following thought: sadly, I think, for that girl in Hamlet, she did not return home, as I do from the river, to wash her hair in Drene.

  ‘Light, light …’

  It was near to Christmas when Mary was enrolled in Miss Vista’s Saturday-morning dancing class. This class was held in the Swaithey Girl Guide hut, a building that looked like a settler’s cabin, with creosoted plank sides and an iron roof. The floor was linoleum, waxed once a week. Miss Vista’s dancers squeaked around on it, eager but mortified. The squeaks were like farts, funny and yet awful.

  It was Sonny’s idea. He said to Estelle: ‘That child is never still. Look at her.’

  She’d found an old tennis ball in a ditch, electric green with algae stain. She’d dried it on the stove till it was crisp and bouncy and now she had it as a companion. She threw it and ran after it, hurled it and caught it, flung it at trees, kicked it and bounced it and rolled it. It wore her out. She slept with it in her hand.

  Estelle watched. Mary’s movements were jerky and wild. More disconcerting seemed to be her aims. She’d pitch the ball in an arc and then try to outrun it. She’d try this again and again and again, refusing to see that it couldn’t be done. It was as if she wanted to be the green tennis ball hurled in the air, flung at trees to bound back.

  ‘At her age,’ said Sonny, ‘she should have some grace.’

  ‘I know,’ said Estelle. ‘But grace is not in the air, is it? It’s not something you can breathe.’

  ‘You don’t breathe it, you learn it.’

  ‘Yes. But I wonder how?’

  ‘By example.’

  So they enrolled Mary with Miss Vista.

  Estelle remembered her own childhood dancing lessons in the library of a private house. She remembered ribbons and glancing sunlight, a piano played with the soft pedal down, Livia on a hard chair, watching. Estelle thought she was giving Mary something of value – a compartment of her own past.

  Mary asked if there would be boys as well as girls in the dancing class. Estelle said she thought there might be; they might be taught to dance hornpipes.

  But there were no boys. And the girls were rehearsing for a Christmas show Miss Vista had entitled Meadowsweet. The dancers had been divided into three groups; one group were buttercups, another scarlet pimpernels, the third thistledowns. ‘Welcome in, Mary,’ said Miss Vista, ‘you can join the thistledowns. Just follow what they do.’

  It was cold in the Girl Guide hut. Miss Vista danced in her overcoat, with coils of knitting round her calves. The children wore only their chillproof vests and knickers and over these their flimsy meadow costumes: scarlet and yellow shifts for the pimpernels and the buttercups, and for the thistledowns skirts of white net that stuck out stiffly like fans. Miss Vista had a fervent mouth, lipsticked orange. Out of it poured her passionate instructions as she moved, squeaking on her blocks, about the room, her arms lifting and swaying under the weight of her coat. ‘Bend, buttercups! The wind is coming. Yield! Yield to the wind. You can do no other. But you, thistledowns. Up you go! You’re aloft. The wind is carrying you. You’re light, light! In a bunch, all together at first. Puff, puff! Then off and away singly. That’s right, Mary, off on your own. Riding on the wind. Light, light, light!’

  Mary had thought there would be rules to dancing. Miss McRae often said that everything in life had rules, even if sometimes you couldn’t see what they were. ‘In these cases, they’re internal rules, Mary, hidden completely, but present nevertheless, dear.’ Yet in Miss Vista’s class you just skipped about, pretending to be weeds. You were not told what your feet should do or how to make a circle with your arms. You could tell from Miss Vista’s legs that she had once learned some rules. She had just decided not to pass them on.
If boys had come to the lesson, she would not have taught them how to do a hornpipe.

  Mary was repelled. She despised Miss Vista. She wanted to hurl her green tennis ball at her face. She wanted a real wind to come and swoop her up into the black universe.

  When she told her parents that Miss Vista was not teaching her how to dance, they said she could learn to ‘move better’. Estelle said: ‘When I was your age, we made beautiful patterns with ribbons.’

  They’d spent money on ballet shoes. Wearing them was like wearing gloves on your feet. You could feel every bit of ground underneath you, every stone. Mary looked at her pink legs with these pink shoes on the end of them and pitied them, as if they belonged to some other girl, fooled into believing she could dance. With her thistledown skirt on, she reminded herself of the toilet roll cover doll Judy Weaver had brought to school as her ‘precious thing’. She tore off the shoes and the fan of net and put them out of sight. She lay down on her bed, balancing her tennis ball on her chest. She formed a plan.

  As the day of the Christmas show neared, Miss Vista grew more attentive to unity. She urged the buttercups to bend in unison, the pimpernels to crouch down together. Only the thistledowns were allowed to scatter and fly, because this was their nature, this was what they did. But she urged on them the need to become insubstantial, to pretend they had no bodies, no feet on the earth. ‘Light, light, girls!’ Miss Vista implored. ‘Feathers! Dreams! Particles of dust!’ So they tore round the hall squeaking and jumping, sometimes falling over or accidently bumping into the walls.

  Miss Vista grew hot in her efforts to alchemise them into windblown seeds and removed her overcoat, under which she wore an orange roman tunic and a fairisle cardigan. Mary moved with big, fast strides. She turned the near-chaos in the hut into an absolute, dreamlike chaos by removing her glasses. Now, Miss Vista was not only parted from her coat, but from herself. Mary felt laughter rising inside her: laughter like a scream.

  The parents arrived for the show and sat in two rows on hard chairs. Estelle’s hair was greasy from the oil baths she kept giving it to restore its lustre. Sonny sat with his head bowed, like a penitent. Estelle looked at the lino and remembered the yellowy parquet of the library.