1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (18 page)

Even so, while his father drank beer in the Anchor at lunchtime, Douglas made his way to browse in an antiquarian bookseller’s on East Street, who soon discerned the unusual passion of the intense, taciturn farmer’s boy who could barely read but who appeared in his bookshop every Wednesday without fail. Douglas was by far the youngest of his customers, and for that reason, if no other, the old bookseller looked out something he might be interested in and offered it to him at a fair price, rather than his customary starting price of a few shillings on top, because the boy clearly had no talent for bartering. And it was in that shop that Douglas bought the maps that would fill his room and fill his mind in parallel, in equal measure: a road map of the British Isles; an outline of the countries of Europe, with their shifting frontiers, the previous ones marked with a dashed line and the ones before that with dots, like the trails of glow-worms, growing fainter on the page; a survey map of the Russian wastes, drawn to estimate the mineral resources of Siberia; charts of the Chinese deserts; a relief map of the Himalayas;

Italian woodcuts of the
Geographica
of the Egyptian Claudius Ptolemy; reproduction clay tablets of field plans from the late Babylonian period.

As time went by Douglas learned to fly across the world and land wherever he wished. He studied ichnographies of the Pyramids; old Admiralty charts of the Cape of Good Hope; ancient Roman maps of the south coast of Britain, which they imagined to be the tip of a vast new continent with a fabulous wealth of gold and tin. On the happiest day of his young life Douglas was given, gratis, a facsimile of the first edition of a book of maps using Mercator’s projection, published in 1568. He hung globes of various sizes from the ceiling, on which he also glued planispheres of the heavens. He would lie on his bed, charting his way across medieval oceans with his Venetian portolan atlas, or staring at the stars on his ceiling, lost in a distant corner of the world, awoken from his reveries only by his father hammering on the door and telling him to “get on and muck out the pigs, you can’t lie around all day, this is a farm not a hospital, it’s time to milk the cows or the milk’ll go sour in their udders, you lazy little sod, you.”

For his fourteenth birthday his mother gave him a plaster of Paris model of Atlas kneeling with the world on his shoulders. She’d come across it in Woolworths, which in those days sold everything, as they claimed it did, on one of the rare occasions she accompanied her husband and their middle son to Newton Abbot. It was no bigger than the heart of a cauliflower, Douglas would already be able to engulf it in the palm of his hand, but his mother was overjoyed when she saw it: his passion had long proved itself to be of more substance than simply one of the capricious obsessions that marked other childhoods, and she’d been looking out for a gift that would acknowledge the seriousness of his hobby and, in the giving, accord him an adult’s respect. Sure enough, when Douglas untied the string and unwrapped the brown paper, he stood entranced before that cheap plaster reproduction of a second-rate sculpture of the Titan whose strength kept the world in its place. It became his most treasured possession, and would be the first thing he put into his tiny suitcase on the day he packed to leave.

All through his youth Douglas continued to purchase maps, bring them home and study them in his room. He had it all to himself, which was surprising since his older brother, George, had to share with the youngest, while their three sisters all huddled together in one big bed. But Douglas’s solitary nature had declared itself as soon as he was born: he’d never cried for milk, he never smiled back at his mother when she played baby games with him, making faces or blowing raspberries into the soft flesh of his tummy: she felt foolish, and left him alone, which was what he seemed to prefer. What he was given he took without a word, but he never asked for anything. When he scraped his knees in the farmyard he didn’t run into the house, looking for her instinctively to swallow up the pain and trauma in her open arms, but would turn and run in the opposite direction, away from people, like a cat, to lick his wounds alone.

When his next-born sister arrived Douglas was moved on from the cot at the end of his parents’ bed and into his older brother’s room. But as soon as he could walk he’d leave that space he found stifling, where he couldn’t breathe properly the air that was dense with the thick night breath of another human being and with the confusion of their dreams. His mother would find him in the morning sleeping in front of the fire, or laid out under the kitchen table, or curled up in his father’s tattered armchair, but when she asked him how he got there and what did he think he was playing at, he didn’t know what she was talking about, he looked at her like she was mad but he looked a little frightened and confused too, and she realized that her second son was a sleepwalker. At first she put up with it, because she was gratified by the belief then prevalent that somnambulism was a sign of sensitivity, and like all farmers’ wives she wanted at least one of her sons to find a station in life above the husbandry of animals. But when his nocturnal wanderings took him out of the house, and she had to enlist the other children’s help before breakfast in looking for him, at first in the hay loft, then sleeping with a smile on his infantile face in the clean straw of the pigsty, and finally perched precariously and snoring on the roost in the chicken coop, she realized it was getting out of hand, and gave him his own room.

And that was where Douglas retreated every evening as a child and as a youth, slipping away unnoticed from the tea-table in the furtive manner of the solitary, with a glass of milk, to pore over the maps that he acquired so indiscriminately, they all fascinated him, because he understood intuitively what only the most perceptive cartographers in history had understood, that maps delineate not only the layout of the physical world but also the geography of the unconscious, that in their attempts at an ever more accurate portrayal of what exists in material reality the map-makers were also charting the evolution of the imagination, the pursuit of truth.

It was not in itself so strange for a Devon boy to be fascinated by the boundaries of the known world, and what lay beyond, for most of the finest sailors in the ships that had made England the greatest power in the world, from anonymous cabin boys and midshipmen to Sir Francis Drake, the finest of them all, had been Devonians. But none, so far as anyone knew, had ever come from our village. Indeed when the Rector once showed me the first entry in the Baptism Registry it was that of George Westcott, of Shilhay Farm, in 1552, even the same Christian name as Douglas’s father and his elder brother. Their inheritance was a vision limited to the walls of the Valley, and if what propelled Douglas’s passion was an atavistic impulse then it came from way back, from the migrating nomads of pre-history, and had survived, intact and untouched, like a pebble through the digestive tract of countless generations of peasants.

So that when Douglas decided to leave home, apparently because of his father’s insulting remark, a pretext he would never admit to his family was not the real reason, he realized that he’d find her without any problem, because although he didn’t know the rest of the Valley very well the world was his oyster, he knew it back to front and upside down, he knew it from an orthographic as well as a conic projection, he’d studied charts of the shifting sands of the desert commissioned by Lawrence of Arabia, he knew all twenty-three authenticated sources of the Nile, he knew by heart the contours of the Antarctic memomed before him by Scott, and he’d inscribed upon a set of plates filed to one side of his brain, indelibly, the routes of the sleepwalking tributaries of the numberless rivers of the Russian Taiga, mapped out by a team of military cartographers who were aided in their endeavours by the legendary trapper Dersu Uzala.

In actual fact his knowledge, which he imagined to be virtually complete and a guarantee of trouble-free travels, was a hopelessly confused and tattered mess, riddled with the errors of history and superseded by time. In his travels he would lose his way more often than Marco Polo. And his only successful journey would be the one back home.

Someone to Watch Over Me

P
loughshares dispersed the top layer of dusty soil then snapped like ice on the rock-hard earth beneath. The corn had risen thinner than in the days when its seeds were scattered by hand. The meagre crop of hay came ready-dried for the winter. But it made no difference to the festival. All the grown-ups celebrated harvest that withered summer with more indulgence than ever, even though there wasn’t any, and the morning following the barn dance they all awoke gasping, their throats as dry as the fields, their bodies dehydrated. Even the old people who still went to early communion on the three Sundays in the month when there was no family service stayed at home that morning, unable to face the sun that hung like a gauntlet between them and the church, bringing great relief to the Rector, who could hear bells pealing in his head. Corporal Alcock readily agreed with his suggestion that with just the three of us we might as well go home, and he came up with an even better one of his own, that we dispense with the rest of the service all right, but at least they should celebrate communion itself, because there was enough wine in the chalice divided by two for a hair of the dog.

People’s parents, if they got up at all, wandered from room to room holding their heads and moaning: “Don’t touch me.” In our house Ian lay on his bed trying to keep as still as possible, after the one Saturday night of the year he relaxed his hunter’s instincts and allowed them to be flooded with alcohol, because it was spent in his own village. I pressed the mattress and he whimpered like a wounded dog. “Scat, you little cow,” he murmured, eyes closed, unable to move. He was filled to the very brim with a volatile liquid that would spill over unless he retained perfect balance. If he shifted position a fraction the giddying whirlpool in his stomach began to turn again and his brain started thumping against his skull.

I escaped to go swim in the quarry pool. I stopped on the way for sherbet fizzes at the village shop, where old Elsie Sims too was nursing the worst hangover of her long life. She let out a groan as I entered, and refused to open her eyes behind her pebble specs, instead groping blindly amongst the boxes on a shelf behind her and trying to give me melting chocolate bars and the ancient cigars that only grandfather ever bought, two at a time every Christmas, all of which I refused until she eventually unearthed three packets of incorruptible sherbet fizzes, with their stalks of brittle liquorice.

I swam around for a while and then sat by the edge of the pool with my feet in the water, sucking liquorice dipped in sherbet, waiting. The sun was making its slow climb through the sky, barely perceptible but still the only sign of life. I didn’t even know what I was waiting for. I hoped Johnathan would show up—of course he hadn’t come to the barn dance—but there was no sign of him.

Life had come to a standstill and everyone else seemed happy to let it. Maybe I was just different but I couldn’t stand it, this feeling of being in limbo, waiting for time to get going again, waiting for my life to start.

Then everything went dark and a voice said: “Guess who.”

I grabbed his hands from my eyes and bent his little fingers back.

“Ow!” he yelled. “Really, Alison, there’s no need to hurt. I was only playing.”

We swam for a while and then lay on the rock and shared the rest of my sherbet. Drops of water made it sizzle on our palms.

“You’re right, you know,” Johnathan agreed with me. “Life has stopped and no one’s noticed. They’re all turning into Oblomovs. But we shouldn’t really complain, actually.”

“Why the hell not?” I asked.

“Well, my mother says that Ethiopia’s a
real
drought, and we should count our blessings.”

I was going to argue but he suddenly jumped up and said: “Gosh, it’s late, I’ve got to get back for, um, elevenses.” He grabbed his towel and said: “What are you doing later?” But before I could answer he was scurrying away.

I couldn’t hear a thing, but sure enough a minute later figures appeared by the beech tree, their voices bounced around the rocks, and they came scrambling down to the pool. I wished I’d brought a book with me so I could ignore them and read it. Chris Howard challenged me to a race across the pool: he wouldn’t accept I was a faster swimmer, he pestered me for a rematch every chance he got. This time I slowed up at the end just enough to ensure a dead heat, ‘cos I couldn’t be bothered with him going on at me afterwards; but the little squirt, coughing water and spluttering for breath, claimed he’d touched the rock a fraction before me and he was waving his arms in victory like he’d just scored a goal. Luckily just then Jane, who’d been sunbathing with Susan aloof from the water, spotted some men clambering down the dry bed of the village stream, and yelled: “Look! Who’s that?”

As they got closer their bodies stopped shimmering and became recognizable: it was Corporal Alcock and Mike Howard, Chris’s older brother. They ignored us: they opened the boxes they were carrying and set up a tripod by the pool like the school photographer’s. The boys started showing off their backward somersault dives and Jane’s fat little brother did his bomb jumps, but although Corporal Alcock looked through the sights it didn’t have a camera, only a yo-yo underneath which he didn’t bother with. He looked through the sights and scribbled in a tiny black notebook while Mike Howard walked around the pool with a striped pole. Then they went back up the slope, constantly stopping and marking new patterns together, as if they were calculating the choreography of some new strip-the-willow dance.

I went over to Jane and Susan, who were lying in their bikinis on stripy towels. “Do you want to do something?” I asked.

Jane squinted at me and closed her eyes again. “What?” she enquired flatly.

“I don’t know,” I replied, “anything.”

“Steve and Rod are comin’ down soon, we’re waiting for them.” She sat up. “God, is it hot? Look at that,” she said, peeling her bikini pants away an inch or two and revealing the dazzling contrast between white skin and the deep chocolate brown of her suntan. “Not bad, eh?”