Sacred Country by Rose Tremain

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