Sacred Country by Rose Tremain Page A

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 driversdid 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. Theriver 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