Sacred Country Read online

  My mother was sitting in a chair. Her hair was tied back in a rubber band. She had a simpering expression on her face, like someone behind a counter trying to sell liberty bodices. She was doing some knitting. Her ball of wool trailed away across the room and under the bed made of pine slats. When she saw us, she smiled and held her knitting to her breasts, covering them with it and smoothing it down over them, as if she thought they should be hidden.

  Her room had orange curtains. The floor was lino and her chair was plastic. There was nowhere for us to sit except on her bed, which was very narrow, so we sat there side by side smiling at Estelle and she smiled back and Cord took out a handkerchief and wiped his face and rubbed his eyes.

  ‘How are you feeling, Est?’ Cord said after a moment. He usually called her ‘Est’, or sometimes ‘Stelle’ or sometimes ‘My Girl’.

  She said: ‘I’m right as rain, Daddy, as you can see. I am receiving a great deal of help, in particular with my shadows that I used to see and with my worry about the onion.’

  ‘Good,’ said Cord. ‘That’s what we want to hear. Eh, Martin?’

  I nodded. ‘What are you knitting, Mother?’ I asked.

  She looked down at the knitting, a grey slab, on her breasts.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I forget what it is. What things are is of no importance, is it?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Cord, ‘absolutely none.’

  We kept on smiling. I was glad we were alone with Estelle and not with those other people under the stalactites.

  ‘Food all right?’ asked Cord.

  Estelle shrugged. The smile left her face. ‘Meals are a farce,’ she said.

  ‘What, no good, eh? Nursery food, is it?’

  ‘People.’

  ‘Say again, Stelle?’

  ‘A farce. Utter. But I don’t look. I close my eyes.’

  ‘Not a pretty sight, I dare say?’

  ‘I don’t see them. I close my eyes. I do this knitting. Far better to do that.’

  I thought, it’s like that Nativity Play we did at school, where I was the Angel Gabriel and Billy Bateman was the First Shepherd, wearing a teatowel on his head with a rubber quoit round it. He got all his lines mixed up. I said: ‘Don’t be afraid, oh ye shepherds,’ and he should have said: ‘What have you come to tell us, good angel?’ But he said: ‘How far is it to Bethlehem?’ Then I said: ‘I bring you wonderful tidings,’ and Billy should have asked: ‘What are they?’ And instead he said: ‘I fear some of our sheep will die of cold,’ so I had to depart from the script and say: ‘Shut up about your sheep. I repeat that I am bringing you tidings.’ At the play, though, there was an audience to laugh and clap, and here there was only the play and no audience.

  I found a toffee in the pocket of my shorts with my note and I unwrapped it slowly and my mother watched me as I put it into my mouth.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mary,’ she said suddenly, ‘I am.’ Then she tugged the rubber band out of her hair and spread the hair across her face, rubbing it over her nose and mouth.

  ‘Don’t, Est,’ said Cord.

  The knitting fell onto the floor and Estelle began to rock backwards and forwards and you could tell she was crying into her hair.

  Cord was weeping, too. Tears were streaming down him.

  ‘Oh heavens, Stelle,’ he said. Then he got up and tried to push back the hair from my mother’s face. He kept saying: ‘It won’t be for long, Stelle. Only till you’re better, my girl,’ and I thought, I am not coming here again, ever! I am never going to set foot in this Mountview place ever again in my whole life.

  I ran out of the horrible little room and along the corridor. I ran like a sprinter, faster than a boy. I didn’t stop running until I got to the car and I stood holding on to the Minx that was burning hot from the sun until Cord arrived and we drove home.

  We couldn’t find much to say on the way back.

  I stuck my head into the fresh air, and it smelled of hay and mustard flowers.

  When we were nearly at Gresham Tears, Cord said: ‘What about a song, then?’ and so we tried ‘Wake Up, Little Susie’, but we didn’t know very many of the words.

  Oh, Sandra

  That summer, Walter Loomis fell in love for the first time.

  He met his love at the farmworkers’ cinema, held in the Girl Guide hut. The film was Captain Horatio Hornblower, starring Gregory Peck and Virginia Mayo. His love’s name was Sandra. Walter, on catching sight of Sandra, yearned to be Gregory Peck and to be able to raise one eyebrow without moving the other.

  She wore a felt skirt and a webbing belt. Her hair was the colour of marmalade. She told Walter that she had ambitions to become a stenographer, but meanwhile worked at Cunningham’s, selling bias binding and rick-rack and knicker elastic. She said her hobby was boating.

  Walter had had no practice at loving anybody except his parents and Pete. He didn’t know whether what he felt was what he was supposed to feel. He wondered whether he should write to a magazine for advice, but he didn’t know which magazine to choose. He said to Pete: ‘I feel as if I’m full of something that isn’t mine, as if I was the whale that swallowed a man.’ Pete yawned and then made an effort to align his eyes. ‘I’d better warn you, Walter,’ he said, ‘women can be the death of you and that’s just the start.’

  A summer fair came to Leiston. Walter went into Cunningham’s and found Sandra reorganising the trays of Sylko into a rainbow spectrum of notable precision. She was a girl who loved order. She plucked her eyebrows to a perfectly even arch. Her father was a spinner and weaver who made tassels and fringes for Harrods in London and for the Queen at Sandringham. Sandra had his long, careful hands and his liking for things done with care. Walter was not her type. When he stood in front of her, wearing his collarless shirt, and invited her to go with him to the Leiston fair, she looked up from the cotton reels and smiled and said: ‘No, thank you. I don’t think I will, thank you.’

  He walked to Leiston and went to the fair on his own. He got into a bumper car and knocked into some girls and laughed but they didn’t laugh back, they stuck their fingers up and said: ‘Buzz off, Curly!’ He sat on a carousel horse and went up and down and round and round and thought of Sandra’s marmalade hair lifting into the wind and her feet in their white shoes and socks dangling down.

  He found a fortune teller. She put on her glasses that had spangled frames and stared at Walter’s big red hands. She said: ‘I see a quest. Very long and difficult. And I see a river.’

  ‘The person I love is fond of boating,’ Walter said. ‘Could that be it?’

  The fortune teller frowned. She had no eyebrows at all, only a line of dusty pencil where they used to be. Before she could reply Walter said: ‘Can you do spells?’

  She was called Madame Cleo. She had paid twenty-nine pounds, seven shillings for a set of perfect teeth. She liked to smile and show them off. She smiled at Walter and told him that she only did good spells, beautiful spells, never bad ones and that a spell cost two guineas.

  Walter fumbled for his money and began to count it out.

  Madame Cleo took off her spangled glasses and let her shawl slip off her shoulders revealing the tops of her breasts bunched up above her pearly bodice. Walter understood. He took a deep, terrified breath. The feeling of having swallowed a man became so profound that he thought he might choke and die. He let Madame Cleo caress his cheek with her scarlet nail. He watched as she got up and put the Closed sign on her caravan door. He did not protest or move or ask himself whether he wanted to protest or move. He let her lead him like a lamb to her boudoir that was painted pink, with old blackout material at the window and two candles burning on saucers.

  The bed was soft and smelled of scorched rayon. Madame Cleo had a jewel in her navel and a rose tattoo on her thigh. She said all the spells were inside her, as many as he could dream of.

  Walter told Pete what he’d done at the fair.

  Pete laughed a roaring laugh. ‘You know what that Cleo’s real name is?’ he said. �
�Gladys.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ said Walter.

  ‘Gladys Higgins.’

  ‘I still don’t mind.’

  Pete gave him some ointment that smelled of tar. ‘If you’ve caught a spell, rub that on!’ he said.

  Anointing himself nightly, Walter returned to his dreams of Sandra. He put a jewel into her navel and a rose tattoo onto her white thigh. He lay with her under the counter at Cunningham’s.

  Then in the soft summer dawns, before going to work in the slaughtering yard, he wrote her a song. He didn’t have the tune for it yet, but he knew that it would come and when it came, his hopes for a distant future in Tennessee might come back with it. Even without a yodel. Because now Sandra would be his inspiration. With her in his heart, he would manufacture music.

  His song was sad. Most country songs were, he realised: sad and simple, because that’s how life is on the land, especially if your work is over a blood gulley. Days come and then they go and in all this repetition there is a sorrow somewhere, even when you can’t quite see it. He wrote the song on a bill of sale pad printed with the familiar words, Arthur Loomis & San, Family Butchers. It was called, ‘Oh, Sandra’. So far, it had one verse and then a chorus.

  I am a boy of twenty-one

  Before we met I thought my days were done

  I thought my life had been and gone

  I thought I’d always be alone

  Until I saw you I was just a stone

  Oh, Sandra,

  For you I’d ride across the tundra,

  For you I’d journey far and yonder

  If I could make you happy I’d be glad

  Oh, Sandra, do I need to feel so sad?

  He was proud of it. He recited it to Pete. Pete smiled. ‘Difficult word to rhyme with, Sandra,’ he said. ‘But it’s not a bad start.’

  In the bus, just like in the old days of the yodel, they sat up late, searching for a tune. The summer was beginning to be over. The dark enveloped them earlier and earlier. Walter stared out at it and thought of Sandra taking off her webbing belt and circular skirt and standing alone in her room, brushing her hair.

  When the tune arrived at last and Pete wrote it down, note by note, counting on his fingers, Walter began work on more verses. He wanted his song to be endless. He wanted it to take the place of ordinary time. He didn’t know which he loved more now, the song or the girl, ‘Oh, Sandra’ or Sandra. He was so pleased with himself his mouth hung open in a perpetual half-smile.

  Pete noted the boy’s pleasure and understood it. He said: ‘I felt like that in Memphis one summer. It had been cold and then there was this one hot night that came and the next day it was Sunday and all my roses had come out, bang, and the Minister said to me, “You have created a fine beauty here, Pete.” That’s how they spoke down there then: “You have created a fine beauty, Pete. Yes, Sir.” And that’s how I felt. Full of grin.’

  Walter went back to Cunningham’s. Amy Cunningham was unpacking a box of 2-ply wool. She fixed Walter with the stare she was famous for, hard as the tundra.

  Walter nodded to her politely, ignoring the stare. He’d put on a tie that day. He approached Sandra. She was inserting a plastic display hand into a black leather glove. He executed a little foolish bow. That part of his body that had probed for spells inside Madame Cleo he covered with his tweed cap.

  He suggested a boating outing on the River Alde. He said summer would be over soon. Sandra did not look at him. Once, with her father, she had rowed down the Alde as far as Orford Ness and the sea, and she had often dreamed of doing it again. She said: ‘Very well, Walter. On Sunday, then.’

  He collected her in the Loomis delivery van. He’d brought his banjo and a little hamper of cold meats and bottles of Tizer. He’d hoped for sun, but what he got was a white, unearthly day with no shadows and no wind.

  The boat hire firm was called Wheatcroft’s. The boats sat heavy in the water under layers of varnish. No cushions were provided. You sat on hard plank seats. Water collected between the slats under your feet. You could not lie your girl down with a parasol, like in an oil painting.

  Sandra did not talk. She watched the river banks going past and the cows standing still in low meadows. Her eyes were blue and lively.

  To initiate the subject of ‘Oh, Sandra’, Walter started to tell Sandra the life story of Hank Williams who had overcome his poor beginnings as the son of a log-train engineer to become a great singer-songwriter of hillbilly music.

  Sandra had never heard of Hank Williams. She said she couldn’t think what a log-train engineer could possibly be. Walter hurried past this hurdle. He told her that Williams had died in a car crash aged thirty but his songs carried on.

  ‘The reason they carry on,’ he said, ‘was because Hank understood the foundation of Country Music and that is sincerity. Hillbillies don’t pretend. They sing what they feel. And Hank said the reason they’re more sincere than most entertainers is because they know about hard work.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’ asked Sandra.

  Walter paused in his rowing. He was sweating. He let the boat drift slowly on the current.

  ‘Because,’ said Walter, ‘I thought it was something you might like to know. You know his famous number, “Your Cheatin’ Heart”?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘“I Don’t Care If Tomorrow Never Comes”?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s another song title.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He had a spine defect, you know. He had to walk with a stoop, but he didn’t let this stop him.’

  ‘Oh well. Shall we turn round now? I think it’s going to rain.’

  Turn round? They had hardly started out. There was the Tizer yet to be drunk and the hazlet, wrapped in greaseproof, to be eaten and, when the moment was right, the song to be sung. In Walter’s mind, the afternoon had had no end, dusk never fell, the hired boat was never returned.

  ‘Let’s go on a bit,’ he said. ‘If it rains, I’ll take you back.’

  She said nothing. She pulled the skirt of her pink dress further down over her knees and tucked it in behind her calves. And Walter saw in this gesture a love utterly unrequited.

  He steered them on. They saw moorhens busy at the river’s edge and the first willow leaves falling in showers, like petals. He thought, loving Sandra is like being the moon and trying to warm the sky.

  In the Surgery

  Margaret Blakey lived within sight and sound of the sea. She was fifty-seven. Her house stood on the soft sandstone cliffs above Minsmere. In her lifetime, vast pieces of the cliffs had fallen away, bringing the abyss nearer to her door by some twenty-two yards.

  She had one son whose name was Gilbert. He was a dentist. He was thirty and unmarried. Margaret liked to keep him by her. She had calculated that, if the sandstone continued to crumble and fall at its present rate, her house would drop into the sea when Gilbert reached the age of sixty-eight. Having Gilbert at home somehow prolonged his youth and so kept at a safe distance the loss of her own life and of the bit of earth on which it rested.

  Gilbert resembled a young Anthony Eden. His hair was pale, his upper canines and incisors prominent, his eyes dreamy. He kept his little moustache fastidiously trimmed. His hands were long and white. Margaret who had wept after Suez – for England and for Eden – took pride in Gilbert’s affinity with greatness, even with a greatness that was past. She cherished him like a baby. He slept between sheets of Irish linen and here dreamed, so Margaret assumed, of an imaginary surgery in Harley Street and the caries of famous mouths.

  He did not dream of these things. He dreamed of boys and young men. They waited for him on hard chairs, reading magazines. He summoned them one by one. He shone his 12-volt Miralux lamp on their soft mouths. ‘Open,’ he said sweetly. ‘Please.’

  On a day in October, two people sat in Gilbert Blakey’s waiting room. Neither of them was reading a magazine. Both were in pain. The two were Mary Ward and Walter Loomis. Neither had been to a d
entist before.

  They talked. Fear had misted up Mary’s glasses and, to her, Walter looked damp, like a person sitting in a Turkish bath. His face was red, as if from all the steam. She said: ‘Are you frightened, Walter?’

  He ran his big hands through his thick curly hair. ‘Shouldn’t be,’ he said, ‘not at my age. Should I?’

  ‘I’m frightened,’ said Mary. ‘Boys are, sometimes.’

  Next door they could hear the whine of Gilbert’s drill, a whine like a gnat. Often, pain had no sound, but today it did. It was better to talk of anything than listen to it.

  ‘I heard your mother was away, poorly,’ said Walter.

  Mary rubbed her misty glasses with her fist. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘We were all sorry for that. We were all sorry in the village.’

  ‘Do you live in that trolley bus, Walter?’ asked Mary.

  Walter smiled. Smiling seemed to add to his pain and to his fear. ‘I like that old bus,’ he said. ‘It’s Pete’s, not mine. He’s got a kitchen where the driver used to sit.’

  ‘When were trolley buses invented?’ asked Mary.

  ‘Invented?’

  ‘Yes. 1892, for instance.’

  ‘You’re a strange one. Who’d know a thing like that?’

  ‘Someone would. Everything had a time when it wasn’t there.’

  ‘Except the land.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Except the earth: Swaithey. That’s always been there. It’s in the Domesday Book.’

  ‘You still can’t say “always”. There’s a time before “always”, even.’

  Walter nodded. At home, his parents referred to Mary Ward as ‘that poor plain little mite’. ‘I heard you’re going to Weston Grammar School, Mary,’ he said.

  ‘If I pass the exam.’