Free Sacred Country by Rose Tremain

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’regoing 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