1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (30 page)

These and other thoughts occupied the Rector in his molten fever. They formed themselves with pleasing lucidity in his mind, and as soon as he began to get better he longed to return to them, however spiritually uncomfortable their content, because reality was physically uncomfortable, which was even worse.

His gratitude towards Maria, meanwhile, was replaced by intense embarrassment at his realization of what she’d done for him. Horrified at the idea of her cleaning up the mess his body had produced, he blushed deeply. Maria saw the colour rush back into his pale cheeks and, gratified by this sign of recovery, smiled at him, which only increased his shame. Summoning up a strength that only humiliation could lend him, he swept back the covers, swung his legs out of bed and pushed past Maria in a flustered manner, thanking her profusely for all she’d done, “but I’m fine now, Maria,” he stammered, “I can look after myself.” He stood up and stepped forward.

“I’ll get up and get dressed and I’ll see you home,” he spluttered, still blushing, and then he found himself rooted to the spot as the room quite suddenly started to move, it spun round him, twice, and turned on its side, and although he thought he himself was still standing, the floor had come up to where the wall should have been and he was leaning against it. He could feel the carpet against his cheek. He closed his eyes and fell asleep.

Those next two days were the worst for the Rector. Unable to keep down even water his dignity spilled out of every orifice and, while he slept, from the entire surface of his being sweat poured into the sheets that Maria replaced three or four times a day, washing them by hand in the bath and hanging them out on the line in the overgrown vegetable garden. As weak as one of the Howards’ newborn lambs, the Rector submitted to Maria’s ministrations, as she mopped up the liquid faeces that he was unable to hold back and wiped acidic spittle that retched from his mouth, with a warm flannel. In between these inescapable ordeals of humiliation, the Rector recalled equally painful incidents from his life, such as the time when, as a seven-year-old schoolboy at Tyttenhanger Lodge, the Classics master had made him stand at the front of the class and recite the various tenses of the verb ‘to be’ in Latin, and reduced him to tears with his ridicule of the boy’s mistakes. The memory still, more than sixty years later, made him burn with rage, and he wondered for how much longer he would have to carry such trivial instances of personal hurt with him. Through how many lives, he wondered, must we drag our failings and fears behind us?

On the afternoon of the third day after Maria’s arrival, the Rector awoke with his pyjamas drenched in sweat and aching all over. His mouth felt like a dry quarry, his throat parched. Maria, who’d just herself awoken from a doze in the armchair in the kitchen, appeared with a glass of water. The Rector downed half of it in one gulp, and felt it stream down his gullet and into his stomach, which suddenly churned into motion like a cement mixer and sent the water back up the way it’d come. The Rector groaned and leaned forward, towards the towel Maria quickly held across his lap, and he spewed an infernal, foul-smelling liquid into the towel, the clear water transformed during its brief journey to his gut into a frothy, green-tinged stew. When his stomach had yet again emptied itself, its last sediment having dribbled from his lips, he fell back, exhausted.

His head felt detached from his body, but both were equally useless. He could hear, distantly, as one does on the edge of sleep, Maria running the bath taps, and thrusting the towel in and out of hot suddy water. And at that very moment he knew his degradation was over, for he felt not the slightest trace of shame. The last remnants of his pride had been sucked out of him then, and with a curious sensation of freedom he accepted all at once his old age, his sickness, his helplessness, the bilious discharges of his body that he’d not wanted anyone to see; but most of all he accepted Maria’s unquestioning presence. The extent of her charity and the depth of her devotion became apparent, and in the face of it embarrassment was not only inappropriate, it was wrong. What this devotion meant he wasn’t sure. Despite her career as a kitchen maid at the Viscount’s estate, this was not the deferential loyalty of a servant towards her master, for theirs was a relationship of equals. It could only be love, of a kind that worried him. And as he lay there, worrying, so he began to get better.

§

Maria, meanwhile, had discovered with pleasure her talent for nursing. Once she’d got over the stench of the molten lava that poured from his bowels and the sickly-sweet contents of his stomach, she came to enjoy cleaning up his smooth, weak body, putting fresh linen on his bed, taking his temperature, giving him warm water scented with marjoram to settle his stomach, washing his soiled and sweaty pyjamas, and she even found some satisfaction in mopping up his mess. It never occurred to her to call a doctor. She treated him in practice as she’d always thought of him, as a child whose mind was too busy, which in reality was the main reason he ceased to be discomforted by her presence. She was also surprised by obscure envelopes of her memory which contained the lullabies and ballads her mother had once sung to Maria and her brothers and sisters. They’d folded over and remained tucked away during the intervening years, fragments of the tunes escaping from time to time, but now it was as if they were steamed open by the balsam, derived from essence of eucalyptus, that she made the Rector inhale to clear his sinuses and his mind, his head underneath a towel, so that he looked as if he were studying a part of himself in private. Maria sang the Rector to sleep in her husky, tuneful voice, and as his eyelids grew heavy she stroked his arm, and picked bits of fluff off his pyjamas.

§

Gradually the Rector’s volatile organs calmed down. Time passed quickly, since there wasn’t enough in which to decipher his inscrutable nurse’s intentions, and he was soon able to keep down a breakfast of boiled egg and slices of thin toast, and other meals of thin broth and junket. The first time he reached the bathroom unaided he saw, as he sat on the toilet, feeling a little faint, white sheets on the line, swaying in the illusory breeze.

Maria knew he was irreversibly on the road to recovery when she found him smoking in bed, his first cigarette for a week, which made him feel light-headed. That afternoon he staggered downstairs to his study, clutching the banisters, to make a phone call, because the next day was Sunday, and he didn’t want to risk fainting in the pulpit. He rang the Reverend Brian Dennis, who was a protege of the Rector’s from the days of his industrial chaplaincy in Crewe: Brian had been an apprentice electrician in the railway yards who, like me, had acted as one of the Rector’s servers, and gone on to help organize the parish youth club. He kept in touch after the Rector moved to Devon, and followed him some years later to set up his own business in Torquay. His piety was matched only by his pursuit of unattached women: wherever he went two or three would accompany him. The Rector helped him through theological exams, which he reckoned, as he told me more than once, to be one of his most notable achievements, since not only was Brian’s grasp of doctrinal matters tenuous, but his spelling was worse. He would drive up from Torquay on midweek evenings with his essays, and his silent girlfriends drank gin and tonic while the Rector corrected the mistakes of a dyslexic, which he would recount to me when he was in a good mood. “Did you realize, Alison, that Moses rose up and led his people out of Eggpyt?” he would say, chuckling. “And are you aware that Jesus carried his cross towards the Cavalry?” he howled with laughter. “Do you believe in immaculate contraception, girl?” he spluttered, coughing his smoker’s laughter. “Have you read the parable,” he asked, bent double with amusement, “the parable of the lost ship?”

Brian had passed his exams—by virtue, the Rector maintained, of a clerical error—and was ordained, but remained a lay preacher. He would fill in when the Rector took one of his rare holidays, and the Rector also occasionally invited him to give the sermon at services the Rector himself was taking. The chief reason he did so was something only I was aware of. The Rector would never have admitted it to anyone, least of all himself, but it was obvious to me: I had only to watch him, from my place in the chancel, while Brian was speaking to the congregation. Whereas the Rector addressed fellow human beings equally burdened with the profound challenge of existence, Brian treated us as if we were his children, and Jesus was a kind uncle we’d not seen for a long time but who might just be coming to visit. Whatever the text he started from, each of Brian’s sermons became a homily to Jesus.

“You see, friends,” he would say in his strange northerner’s accent, “they couldn’t see what they were doing. They were blind to their own sinfulness, and we know why, don’t we?” He would pause, and scan the scattered faces before him with an expression of sad reproach. “It was greed that blinded them, wasn’t it? And we all know about that. We know we’re all greedy sometimes, when we shouldn’t be. But instead of punishing them, what did Jesus do, ay? He understood them, because he understands people, and he forgave them. Now isn’t that wonderful? Don’t we know how hard it is to forgive people who’ve done us wrong? But Jesus could. And he was showing us how to, wasn’t he?”

I’d look over at the Rector, sitting in the empty choir stalls, and I was the only one in the church who could discern in his bearing the assumption of superiority. His affection for Brian was untainted by his dismissal of Brian’s childish theology, and the reason he liked to have him preach was so that his parishioners would realize how fortunate they were that every other Sunday they had someone prepared to face up to the unavoidable problems of faith. In reality virtually everyone was grateful to be given sermons they could understand, and which were always comforting, unlike the Rector’s, which if you could follow them at all only meant that you left the church with more on your mind than when you went in.

So now the Rector telephoned Brian. He was the most reliable man the Rector had ever met, and he knew that Brian would alter any other plans he might have and somehow arrange things so that he could come to the village with his compatible girlfriends, different ones each time and more, the Rector insisted, ever since he’d started wearing dog-collar and vestments. They’d fill the front pew and betray their inexperience in church by standing up and sitting down at the wrong moments, but during the sermon they would gaze up at Brian in the pulpit above them as if his words were actually coded messages, unique for each one of them.

§

By Monday the Rector had gained sufficient strength to dress himself and get up. He thought he’d surprise Maria as he appeared in the kitchen, but she’d already laid his place for breakfast. Afterwards, he stumbled in the corridor on his way to the study, and only Maria’s precipitous reactions saved him from falling over. Ever since his hip had started giving him trouble, bone rubbing against bone, he’d walked with a limp, and he’d become accustomed to the moderate but constant pain. I’d given him a walking stick which old Martin cut for me: the Rector used it occasionally, walking on the moor, to test the ground in boggy areas, but otherwise he scorned it. Now, though, after Maria had steadied him, he fetched the walking stick from the porch and employed it as an aid to help him keep his balance, and he was not to be seen without it again.

As he got better the Rector fretted all the more over Maria: he knew that the experience had changed things between them, and that the stage of convalescence had been reached when they would look at each other and he would have to thank her. But how? In what manner? She would doubtless stand, mute and unworried as usual, while he floundered around trying to find the right thing to say, and all she’d do would be to step forward and pick a hair off his lapel. He imagined it, and already felt awkward.

Not long before the moment came the Rector, back at his desk sorting through his mail and wondering where to start work, heard a clinking of bottles in the kitchen. He picked up his empty mug and walking stick and made his way towards the kitchen. As he passed the open door of the old dining-room he saw her walking away across the lawn, with a carrier bag full of her empty aqua libra bottles, and he realized with a tremulous wave of relief that Maria, inscrutable as ever, had gone back home without even saying goodbye. His life had returned to normal.

A couple of hours later he was licking stamps, having answered all the mail with his own concise letters, and was planning to take them to the post-box and then walk around the village to find out what had happened while he was ill, when the door of his study opened wide and Maria put her head round and spoke to him in words he didn’t understand.

She disappeared. Disconcerted, the Rector got up and limped into the corridor, to find it filled with children, of whom I was one, each of us holding something of Maria’s: a black bin-bag of clothes, a cardboard box with her herb jars, a plastic bag of toiletries, while Gordon Honeywill carried on his shoulder the foam rubber, rolled up and tied with string, that served as Maria’s mattress.

From her shack Maria had seen us down at the Brown playing football. I was the only girl, summoned to play in goal, but there were seven or eight boys there, chasing their sweaty dreams. Maria came down and walked right into the middle of the game, avoiding the ball by a fraction as it fell out of the sky from one of Gordon’s enormous punts. She spoke to us all, then started walking back again. We didn’t have a clue what she wanted, and were about to resume the game when she turned round and beckoned us to follow her. And so, half an hour later, she led us in a line, our arms full, the short distance from her shack to the rectory.

The Rector watched Maria march up the stairs, followed by her bearers. As I passed him he looked at me quizzically, and I shrugged my shoulders. Maria had us put down her things in the room along the corridor, the one she’d slept in, and gave each of us a piece of her mouth-watering fudge. The others all trooped out of the back door, but I dropped back and slipped into the old drawing-room, with its huge mirror, just to sit on the floor in that empty space and peaceful atmosphere.