Sacred Country Read Online Free PDF

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    Irene lay awake, feeling sorrowful. The announcement of Estelle’s retreat and Mr Harker’s withdrawal into the cellar made her feel helpless.
    She decided she would speak to Mr Harker. She would explain that, although Pearl followed her around the house, she had been forbidden ever to touch anything of his, that she played quietly with her dolls and had been told not to sing to them. She would, if necessary, beg Mr Harker not to sack her and remind him that within a few months Pearl would be goingto school. Before the talk, she would polish all his silver and lay it out for him to see on a traycloth, gleaming proof that her work was thorough.
    A fortnight before Harker’s intended trip to Marseilles (during which he had added to the purchase of the hat some expensive cotton underwear and a copy of Wisden 1953 to read on his balcony), Irene left a note on his kitchen table. The spelling was weak and Irene, examining her note, marvelled at how difficult writing things down was compared to saying them. Saying something was as easy as laughing; writing caused you grief, as though you were mourning somebody who had abandoned you too soon.
    The note read:
    Dear Mr Harker,
    I would like to talk to you please towmorow. Please will you come up to the kitchen at elevensis time i.e. eleven o’clock. I will make a pot of tea. Yours trully
    Irene Simmonds
    At home, she baked a pink and yellow Battenberg cake and placed it on a doily to set it off. She washed Pearl’s hair and tied it with a blue ribbon. She cut the child’s nails and made sure her hands were clean.
    As eleven approached, her heart, which she imagined as a thing like a cauliflower, began to thump against the bib of her apron. To lose this job would be like losing the world.
    She laid out the tea things. She found a silver cake knife and put it by the Battenberg. She didn’t know whether Mr Harker preferred his tea steeped or watery. She sat Pearl at the table with a bib round her neck. She gave her a beaker of lemon squash and told her to be as quiet as a squirrel. She brushed down her apron and patted her home perm. She waited.
    Mr Harker came up from the cellar humming. ‘Pom. Tiddly-tiddly-tiddly pom.’ Irene saw this as a cheerful sign. ‘Tiddly-tiddly tiddly tiddly-tiddly-tiddly …’ Irene smiled her big, dimpled smile and drew Mr Harker’s attention to the cake.She saw that he looked relieved, as if he were glad there was something to which his attention could be drawn. He said that no one knew how to make a Battenberg since the war.
    Irene poured the tea and they sat down. An electric wall clock let time advance jerkily round its plastic face. Pearl announced to Mr Harker that she was going to be as quiet as a squirrel. He let his eyes move upwards from his own hand stirring his tea and look at the child. She regarded him gravely. Although Harker had seen her many times prior to his self-imposed incarceration in the cellar, he felt now that he had never really noticed her before. He wasn’t a connoisseur of infants, he’d encountered so very few, but he could tell straight away that here was a very pretty little girl, pretty beyond telling, with the kind of surprising grace children seem to possess in portraits of them by Gainsborough.
    He took a bite of his piece of Battenberg. He saw Irene’s plump arm reach out with a handkerchief and wipe a crumb from Pearl’s cheek. He looked away. He tried to concentrate on the cake, but there seemed to be a sweet, perfumed taste to it, now soft mush in his mouth, that resembled the smell of Irene and, dare he say it, the taste of her body that his disobedient mind would persist in imagining. He swallowed the last mouthful of cake and washed away the sweetness of it with tea. He wiped his mouth firmly. His decision was made. Harker, he instructed himself, get rid of the woman!
    He looked at her then, at her wide, smooth-skinned face, at her huge breasts inside a neat blouse behind the apron bib. He