Read Online Sacred Country by Rose Tremain - Free Book Online

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 fromherself. 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.
    While the thistledowns clustered behind a thin curtain waiting to come on, Mary left the group and returned to the cloakroom where her coat hung on a peg. She took off her pink ballet shoes and put on her wellingtons. She imagined each of them as a cardboard cylinder and her legs as the salmon-coloured plastic legs of Judy Weaver’s doll. She puffed up her net skirt round the boots. Now, she thought, I am a living toilet roll cover.
    She returned to the group, shivering by the curtain. You cannot walk lightly in a wellington. The thistledowns turned, as if in one, synchronised movement, to stare at Mary. They drew in an anxious breath. They held on to each other. Their shivering intensified. The strongest of them put their hands to their mouths, stifling laughter.
    The thistledown music came. Out they streamed, puff, puff, up and away, things of no substance, chaff and prayers. Mary followed, striding and leaping. The squeak of the wellingtons was louder than anything the class had heard. The buttercups gaped. The pimpernels huddled down in shame. From the two rows of parents came a muttering and whispering like voices in a dream. Then Mary felt Miss Vista’s hand on her arm. She stopped dancing. She smiled as she was led away. She couldn’t see her parents. The parents were a blur. What she saw were two Miss Vistas, both of them fragile and neither of them a dancer.
    Sonny said, after this incident: ‘We must watch her all the time, Estelle. Day and night. Now, there’s no knowing what she can do.’
    There was no knowing. Mary did not know.
    When they got home after the thistledown show, Sonny hit Mary on the ear eight times with the flat of his hand.
    She covered her ear with a grey mitten. She thought it would turn to coral. Without speaking, she said to her father: When I’m a man, I will kill you.
    Estelle did not protect her or comfort her. Estelle went out and stared at her bantams in their compound, trying to hear contentment somewhere. Timmy followed her and put his hand in hers.
    On Christmas afternoon, Sonny and Estelle went to the sagging bed. They smelled of the cheap port they’d drunk with the pudding. Sonny had his arm round his wife’s neck and his hand on her breast, fondling it like money. He told Mary and Timmy to go out and play and not to come in until dark.
    Mary threw the green ball at Timmy. She threw it several times but not once could he catch it. She thought, this is why Estelle is in despair, because Timmy can’t catch a ball, because he walks about with his fingers over his eyes, because he has no stars on his class star-chart at school. ‘You’re barely human,’ she said as he dropped the ball yet again, ‘you’re killing our mother.’
    He began to cry and run towards the house but Mary remembered the smell of port on her parents’ breath and the skewed look in their eyes so she ran after him and picked him up. He struggled in her arms and she hated the feel of his limbs. She dumped him in the tyre swing and pushed him till the sun went down behind the hedge and a green twilight hung over them. And all the time she was pushing she counted the things that Timmy could not do for himself and which were driving Estelle into her own unreachable world. He couldn’t tie his bootlaces; he couldn’t read a simple word like ‘thing’; he