Sacred Country (8 page)

When she didn’t cry out or make any sound, he punched her ear, the same ear he had slapped after Miss Vista’s show. The force of this blow knocked Mary to the floor. Sonny pulled her up by the arms and hit her head again and then again and again until he had no more strength to haul her to her feet.

He left her lying and walked away. He stood in the cold bathroom, drinking a quart of water.

Mary remembered no morning or returning day. She lay in a pit. She knew she was deep down in the earth, where no one could find her.

Sounds came and then passed, came and passed. One of the sounds that came was the voice of Miss Vista. ‘Light, children!’ it whispered. ‘Light, light!’

My grandfather – Livia’s husband – was called Thomas Cord. We knew him as Grandpa Cord. He was sallow and small and fond of history. He was addicted to Wincarnis. When he talked, he closed his eyes, as if seeing and speaking at the same time were too difficult for him. He loved four things in the world. One of these was his remembered Livia. Another was the face and voice of an actress called Mary Martin.

He wrote sayings out in green ink on little cards and pinned them up over door lintels. Some of these were in Latin. His favourite one was
Ama et fac quod vis
. He would stop at this one sometimes and say: ‘True, true. All too true.’ Some of the sayings were faded. Grandpa Cord said: ‘Green ink perishes, Mary. As can wisdom. When a saying is faded, it might be time to take it down. Or it might not.’

He lived eleven miles from our farm, in a village called Gresham Tears. His house was flint and brick and square and dark. This was the home where my mother had lived as a child. There were twin holly trees at the gate, their heads shaped into cones by Grandpa Cord’s shears. His address was Holly House, Gresham Tears, Suffolk and he thought this address very marvellous and cheering. It was the third thing that he loved in his life.

I had thought that I would never really know Grandpa Cord. I had thought I would always see him on short visits and
he would pour me ginger beer and tell me about King Ethelred the Redeless, and then he would die. But I was wrong about that. In the summer of 1957 I was sent to live with him. I left the farm and my address became Holly House, Gresham Tears, Suffolk. I took all my clothes and my school books and my
Dictionary of Inventions
and my green tennis ball. My father said: ‘We’re sending you for the coaching. Grandpa Cord will get you through the Eleven-plus.’

On my first night, Grandpa Cord showed me a theatre programme for a show called
South Pacific
. It had a picture of Mary Martin in it and Grandpa Cord said: ‘What do you think of that?’ I thought people looked dead in photographs, like they were ancestors of themselves, long departed, but I said the name Mary Martin was a good name and that I would call myself that from now on. And this amused Grandpa Cord. He slapped his old corduroy knee. He said: ‘No one told me you were a good sport, but I can see that you are!’

So I began to live there and to be called Mary Martin. After a week I said: ‘Much as I like Mary Martin as a name, it is rather long, Grandpa Cord. So I think you can just call me Martin.’

‘Plain old Martin?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Very well. A bit peculiar, but who cares? And you call me Cord, Martin. “Grandpa” makes me feel I should have lumbago. Is that a deal?’

I said it was a deal. We shook hands. The skin on Cord’s hands had the feel of medal ribbon, ribbed and silky. He closed his eyes and said: ‘Scouts honour, as they say.’

So then I thought of us as a firm, Martin and Cord, Limited. We were a firm of dreamers. Cord specialised in the past, the long-ago past of Ethelred the Redeless and the middle past of the Battle of Marston Moor and the near past of Livia wearing a shawl from Madagascar and playing Liszt. My department was the future, the future spinning towards me, of Weston Grammar School and the loss of Miss McRae, and the future that sat still, waiting for time to get to it, the future of Martin
Ward. Cord supplied me with green ink – the only kind he bought – and in it I wrote out my new name hundreds of times in different writing.

No one told me the real reason for my leaving the farm, but I knew it.

Irene, who now lived with Pearl in Mr Harker’s house, had said to me twice: ‘The day may come, Mary, when your mother will have to go away for a bit. Just Until.’ So I understood. I was being sent to Cord’s because Just Until was coming. Because I couldn’t stay alone at the farm with my father and Timmy.

I didn’t want to think about where Estelle was going. On the other side of Leiston there was a place called Mountview Asylum which we had sometimes passed on the way to the sea in Sonny’s van. I whispered once to Timmy that this was a loony bin where boys got sent if they couldn’t learn multiplication. Instead of cringing with fear as I’d hoped, he looked at the place, which was a converted stately home with red walls and flying turrets, and said: ‘Which bit of it is the actual bin?’ And we all laughed. Even Estelle. This is the only time that I can remember us all laughing together – like a proper family in an Austin with a picnic hamper – when Timmy asked the question about the Actual Bin.

But now I had dreams about Estelle in a metal bin, being hurled about and hurt as the bin spun round. In the dreams, I was a knight. I had armour. I jousted with the bin and stopped it turning. I put my mother on my grey charger and rode away. The dream never said where I rode to or where or if I set my mother down. I just rode out of the dream and woke up in Cord’s house in my room that was wallpapered with scenes of boating. I said to the boaters: ‘I refuse to think about what’s happening.’ And then I’d put on my glasses and open one of the History books Cord had given me and read a thing like ‘Thomas Wolsey was the son of a butcher and cattle dealer of Ipswich’ or ‘Early death was common in medieval times’ and wait for my day to begin.

*

Cord started his day with Yoga. His mat was a bath mat with all its thickness worn away by time and the mangle and Livia’s wet feet long ago. Yoga was the fourth thing he loved in his life. He’d learnt it in Ceylon, in the house of a man called Varindra. He said Varindra had taught him how to put the world away and how to move inwards instead of out all the time and that this ‘moving inwards’ had kept him breathing and alive when the news came of the glider crash. I didn’t understand what ‘moving inwards’ meant and Cord said: ‘Well, no, I don’t expect you to, Martin, not at your age, but later when you’re in your proper life, you will.’

I said: ‘Do you mean, when I’m Martin Ward?’

‘You
are
Martin Ward,’ said Cord.

I thought, I shall tell him one day soon. He will be saying something like ‘John Davis made three further attempts to find the North-West Passage, but he failed to notice the Hudson Strait and was driven back by ice,’ and I will say: ‘I have made three attempts to tell somebody that I am not a real girl,’ or he will say: ‘Life on board a carrack was full of hardship,’ and I will say: ‘Life as Mary is full of confusion.’ And then, once this is said, we won’t just be a firm of dreamers but a firm of surveyors and planners.

I trusted Cord. I began to like being with him, old as he was. I thought he would agree with me when I said I was a boy inside.

I thought a lot that was wrong. I thought the whole summer would pass at Holly House without any word about Estelle coming to disturb us. I thought we would just go on doing our history and listening to
The Brains Trust
and drinking Wincarnis and ginger beer. I thought we were being
allowed
to step out of the world, being given the knack of it, like old Varindra in Ceylon in 1924. But then one morning, after Cord had made us bacon and fried bread and we were listening to Brenda Lee he said: ‘Listen to me, Martin, we’re
going to see your mother today and I suppose we’re also going to have to be brave about what we find.’

‘Is she at Mountview?’ I asked.

‘Yes. That’s it. But not for long, I don’t expect.’

‘Only Just Until.’

‘Yes. Just Until. And it won’t be long coming.’

I thought of my dream of the bin and the jousting. ‘I’m sorry!’ sang Brenda, ‘so
sorry!
’

It was a bright August morning in Gresham Tears. The flints of the houses opposite looked polished. Cord’s Hillman Minx sat waiting in the sun to take us to Mountview. I thought, names are often wrong: Minx for a little slow car; Mountview for a place not near any mountain. I thought, people just decide things without giving them any attention and Miss McRae would not approve.

Then I went up to my bedroom to get ready. I stood and looked at the boaters and decided that I would not be capable of going into a room full of mad people and finding my mother there. I tore a page out of my History exercise book opposite a very bad drawing of Vasco da Gama and wrote her a letter:

Dear Mother,

I am writing this very quickly, as we have to leave in five minutes to come and see you.

I hope you are getting better. I hope everyone is kind to you. I hope you can have your sewing machine.

I am having a nice time with Grandpa Cord. I am learning about explorers, including Hakluyt. He went to Russia. He said, ‘their streets and ways are not paved with stone as ours are’. In the evenings, I have Ginger Beer.

I hope you are getting better. I want you to get better now, this moment, and not be there when we arrive.

love from Mary

I did not put Martin. Miss McRae once said to me: ‘Living in a lighthouse taught me that not all wisdom comes from others, Mary. Some comes from oneself, if one can but hear it.’
But I had on my Martin clothes, my aertex shirt and my grey shorts and my plimsolls, Blanco’d white. I stuffed my letter into the pocket of my shorts and we got into the Minx and drove away. We sang all the way. We sang ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘Bye bye, love’. Someone had told us a rumour that Brenda Lee was a child of my age or younger than me, but we didn’t believe it.

When we turned into the drive of Mountview, Cord said: ‘Rum show, Martin, eh?’

I said: ‘Was this once a house?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Cord, ‘Jacobean, 1618. Peacocks on the lawn, cold woodcock for breakfast, that kind of nonsense. Became a hospital in the ’14–’18 war. A lot of shrieking then, I dare say, soldiers and peacocks all screaming.’

Now, you could tell it was a bin and not a house because of a huge chimney, like a factory chimney, they’d built behind it and some little huts like pre-fabs they’d put on the lawn and signs that said
Car Park
and
Laundry
and
No Visitors Beyond this Point
.

Cord was trembling. He kept saying: ‘Rum show, damn bad show.’ I could tell he didn’t want to be there but back in Gresham Tears pouring himself another glass of Wincarnis. His sallow face looked a kind of custard colour and his eyes bruised and heavy, like prunes in the custard. He held my hand. I thought, this is more than we can stand.

We went in and stood on a polished floor, waiting. There was a smell of Dettol and of something sweet and living but terrible, like brains. People passed us but didn’t seem to see us or else saw us and looked away. We didn’t know where to go or how to be. I thought we should go back to the Minx and sit in it and think and then maybe drive away and pretend we’d never tried to come there at all. But then Cord went up to one of the people, a person in a white overall, and spoke in a firm voice, as if he were Hakluyt asking the way to Moscow. So we followed the man through an enormous room with a ceiling moulded into square roses and upside-down pinnacles that looked like stalactites about to form. Men and women sat about under the
stalactites all silent and grave, waiting for the first icy drips to fall on them, and it was their brains that were smelling and their plastic chairs that were swabbed with Dettol.

The man in the white coat walked very fast, so Cord and I had to run and Cord detested running more than almost anything in life.

We dashed down a long corridor made of something like stone and then up some stairs covered in coconut matting. Out of the windows on the stairs you could see the chimney, with black smoke coming out of it. And then we were on a landing, a shadowy place with lots of doors with numbers on them and I knew my mother was going to be there, behind one of these doors, so I got out my note, ready to give it to Cord to give to her. But Cord still held my hand clenched in his. I tried to pull it free but it was difficult to get my hand out, and then Cord farted twice, out of fear and exhaustion, and I thought, I can’t abandon him while he’s farting, I must be Martin and strong.

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.