1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (34 page)

Grandmother had a smile on her face at breakfast. “I heard the first ‘orseman in the night,” she said mysteriously, and was disappointed when we told her about the modern sirens.

“That’s the trouble, like I always said,” she declared, “they should never ‘ave replaced horses with cars.” Perhaps she was right. Her friend Nicholas and the other hippies had hardly got out of the village before their trucks started breaking down along the Valley road.

“On the other hand,” grandmother added, “if there was as many horses as there is cars, we’d be knee deep in it be now.”

Mother shook her head. “Shame,” she whispered to me. “Your grandmother’s lost more of ‘er marbles than she can count.”

I wanted to kick mother’s shin under the table, but then she said: “What on earth
is
that bay doing out there? Bin there ever since I got up.”

Even as I turned round, my heart bucked. I looked out of the window and there was Johnathan: whether out of politeness or timidity he was standing in the lane, staring at the tarmac, and occasionally glancing up at our house.

“Don’t you even think about it, Alison,” said mother, adding: “If he’s not gone in ten minutes I’ll give ‘is father a call.”

I tried to eat my toast but I couldn’t swallow it. I sneaked another look out of the window: he was still there, looking pathetic. I tried to pluck up courage, and waited. Time dragged heavy. Eventually mother got up. I summoned my energy: she took the teapot over to the kettle and I jumped out of my chair and ran into the hallway.

“Alison!” she yelled. “You come back ‘ere this
minute
!”

But I was out the front door and running, and no one could catch me.

“Come on!” I gasped to Johnathan, and we ran along the lane, up past the Old Rectory, and on into the copse below the rectory vegetable garden.

We collapsed together and leaned against the trunk of a pine tree. When I’d got some of my breath back I turned to Johnathan and said: “I thought you was
never
going to come and see me again.”

But Johnathan didn’t say anything. He looked startled, like a rabbit caught in a car’s headlights.

“You’re not such a scaredy-cat after all,” I reassured him.

He still didn’t say anything, he just sat staring at nothing. I thought he was being a bit over-emotional. I was so glad to see him, but I didn’t want to make a big thing of it.

Then Johnathan put his hands over his face, and started to tremble. I felt awkward, and regretted dashing out: after all, I’d be in for it when I got home. I tried to think of something to say, and I was about to suggest going hunting for the Rector’s wild cucumbers, when Johnathan stammered something through his fingers.

“What?” I asked.

He took his hands away; his face was bloodless white. “It was ho-horrible,” he repeated.

“What was?”

“You n-never saw anything like it, Alison,” he stuttered. “I saw it all.”

And then he told me: how he’d watched the hippies the night before, as they sought refuge in the deserted grounds of the old estate, silently pushing their vehicles through the Lodge gates and parking them on the terraced lawns. His mother had got him to help carry buckets of water from the outside tap, and to see if their babies needed anything.

In the morning they woke up to find the Valley road full of police vans. Johnathan’s father went out in his pyjamas to see what they wanted and they told him it was none of his business, it wasn’t his land any more and he’d better get back inside or he’d be charged with obstructing a police officer in the course of duty.

The police, who’d received some minor injuries in Tom’s brawl at the Manor Inn car park, had come to evict the hippies in full riot gear. They smashed the windows of the converted buses, frightened the children, made the women cry and the dogs bleed, and forced Nicholas and his scruffy friends to leave, running through a gauntlet of swirling batons.

§

I had to hold Johnathan’s hand to help him stop trembling, and then we both sat there not saying a word, staring ahead through the trees, both wondering what this world, that we were in such a hurry to be a part of, had in store for us.

Sleep

G
ranny Sims was convinced that people were suffering from a devil’s sickness, so she and her sisters trailed round the village in the merciless midday sun with a petition calling for the revival of church sleep, or healing by dreams, in which people spent the night in the church and the martyrs of history appeared in their dreams with a cure. But no one could be bothered to sign it, so she withdrew to reword a petition that she’d been waiting years for the opportunity to unearth from the bottom of a drawer, calling for the reintroduction of Elizabethan laws that decreed compulsory church attendance on pain of the stocks. Her real upset, however, was yet to come.

§

It was then that Douglas Westcott began to invite people round to tea, starting with the Rector, who discovered a man so unselfish that the mirrors in his hallway and bathroom only reached up to his shoulders, because he was a full head taller than most people, so that even though he’d had no visitors in ten years he himself had to bend down to shave or brush his hair.

“Perhaps he don’t like to look at his own reflection,” I suggested, but the Rector disagreed.

“You’re far too young to be cynical, Alison,” he told me in a disappointed tone of voice.

Douglas stayed behind after the early communion services to help Corporal Alcock blow out the candles, which spoiled half my fun, because I stayed too stacking the prayer books so that I could be there to watch Corporal Alcock’s breath turn to flame. People’s parents said it was no wonder, the way Corporal Alcock always took communion last, swallowing the remainder of the wine saying: ‘Thank you, Rector’; but when the ulcer he’d suppressed for years suddenly exploded in his stomach it shook people for a brief moment from the stupor of indifference and made them feel sorry for what they’d said.

It was the Rector himself who shocked Granny Sims at the next Parochial Church Council meeting. All the members attended, but half of them gazed vacantly out of the window and the other half found their heads growing heavy with the very real weight of fatigue and so they propped them up on their elbows and nodded off. Only Granny Sims, her rigid piety bearing her across the sea of indifference in which everyone else was pleasantly drowning, and the Rector, with his mind always occupied, were able to give their customary attention to the matters in hand, until they reached Any Other Business, whereupon the Rector proposed Douglas Westcott as a new churchwarden and everyone woke up with a bump.

Joseph Howard had to use all his chairman’s authority to bring some dignity to the discussion that followed, which confirmed the members of the PCC in their opinion of the Rector’s estrangement from reality. He tried to explain, in the old school that muggy evening, the parable of the lost sheep, but despite the lucidity of his argument he made no impression, just as none of his predecessors, going all the way back to the Celtic missionaries who first preached under the same Gospel Oak whose roots still baffled old Martin when he had to dig a grave, had ever been able to explain it to people who couldn’t see the sense in searching for some runty old stray when the rest of the flock needed seeing to.

The Rector lost his vote and from that moment on Granny Sims dropped her guard. But the Rector himself, fully recovered from his sickness, devoted more energy than ever to the welfare of his parishioners, relieved to dispense with the pretence of dealing with immortal souls and instead concentrate on the here and now of their bodies. I handed him the jug when he took the unbaptized and ritually immersed them in the quarry pool, to allow adults the relief of the ever icy water, and I passed round cups of tea when he held a storytelling session in the afternoon in the cool church to try to resuscitate people’s appetite for life with narrative, using not old Biblical stories as expected but rather serializing instead the Russian novels of his youth, a chapter of which he would read over lunch and then retell in simpler language.

Even Johnathan came to church for that, although it was in the guise of a critic rather than a listener: to my relief and surprise he declared himself impressed by the Rector’s literary taste.

“You might find it surprising that an old Anglo-Catholic priest could understand a t-t-tortured Orthodox agnostic, Alison,” he said in his almost-broken voice. “But you see the real spiritual challenges are universal. I say, he did the G-G-Grand Inquisitor scene really well, don’t you think?”

As far as the indifference was concerned, neither these nor the other tactics the Rector employed did any good at all, but he wasn’t dismayed.

Grandmother said his dedication reminded her of what she’d been told about the plague, in which so many parish priests died amongst their people that in an episcopal decree of 1549, ordering the emergency relaxation of canonical rules, women were permitted to take confession from the dying.

I could see that grandmother was frustrated at her increasing invalidity, because she knew how useful she would be in such a crisis if only she were still active. She racked her brains thinking of a suitable plant for the Doctrine of Signatures, by which like cured like, the ear-shaped leaf of a cyclamen a cure for deafness and the little eyebright for blindness, but no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t think of a flower that resembled indifference.

She did, however, tell me to warn people not to fall asleep during the day and that the consumption of olive oil might be fatal, when I accompanied the Rector round the village distributing orange-flavoured ice-cubes that Daddy and I had prepared in the freezer. The Rector hoped that they might counteract the numbness of the heat, but as he and Maria went from house to house, and people put gloves on when they answered the door because it had got so dry that they gave each other electric shocks when they shook hands, it gradually dawned even on the Rector that the time for last-minute remedies had passed.

§

Grandfather didn’t talk to anyone in the mornings until after he’d had his first mug of tea in the kitchen. It was the only thing grandmother ever complained of about him, because she for her part always awoke refreshed by sleep, enjoyable dreams having replenished her store of good humour. Grandfather always woke first, a few minutes before her, and lay in bed trying to come to terms with another day. During those moments, alone, even more so than in the company of other people, he felt especially discomforted by life. It was as if the consciousness into which he awoke were a new suit a little too narrow across the shoulders, the trousers too short, waist too tight and squeezing his midriff. He was pinched by existence, and each day was faced with having to wear it in anew.

When a smile spread across grandmother’s face grandfather knew she was about to wake up, and then he urged himself out of bed and began to get dressed. Grandmother opened her eyes, upon a world reassuringly familiar and full of promise. Her husband was sitting on his side of the bed, doing up his bootlaces; she took in his hunched, unfailing shoulders, his sloping backbone, his cropped white hair. ‘Sleep well, my lover?’ she asked, or ‘Tis a beautiful morning.’ But he never replied. The only response she received was the sight of his back rising and then disappearing from the room.

Grandmother would lie there then, disappointment seeping into her well of affection. Just once she wished his face to be beside hers when she awoke, his hand to welcome her into another day together, his voice to greet her, and such was her optimism that she failed to come to terms with the fact that he never would. Every morning of her married life, for a minute or two, she doubted that marriage: she blamed herself for succumbing too easily to his courtship, seduced by the tenacity of the silent farmer who forced his horse through waist-high snow drifts every Sunday afternoon of a long gone winter, to her father’s house on the edge of the high moor; she regretted coming down from the wide vistas of that moor to this valley within a valley, dark and enclosed. And then she swept back the covers, interrupting herself with action, refusing to allow herself to ponder too deeply, because this after all was her life.

Recently, though, grandfather had begun to notice that grandmother was finding it harder each morning to emerge from the world of dreams. She seemed like a diver he’d seen in a wildlife programme, emerging from the sea with phosphorescence clinging to her body.

Now grandmother’s dreams clung to her, and instead of addressing grandfather with her usual affectionate questions which so irritated him he had to leave the room, she spoke instead to her long dead sister, with whom she’d just been picnicking by Raven’s Tor, or to a character in one of the books she’d left behind in her father’s house. Instead of antagonizing him, in his bad humour, by being nice to him, she seemed to be barely aware of his presence. After a week of this behaviour grandfather had had enough: he stopped as he was leaving the room, turned round, and said: “In’t you even going to ask me how I is this morning? What the ‘ell’s up with ‘ee?” And he marched off to the bathroom, more crabby than ever.

Grandmother’s crepuscular confusion extended to the other end of the day, too, as she resumed the habit she’d once adopted as a young mother of walking through the house with a lantern to check on everyone sleeping. It was a habit she’d only stopped when Daddy married mother, and a new generation was born. Now she lit the paraffin lamp kept in the pantry and wandered through distorted shadows to rediscover, despite her almost total blindness, the calm, intense pleasure of gazing on the sleeping faces of the people she loved most. On one of those nights, though, mother woke suddenly to find herself being stared through by her mother-in-law, a stupid smile on her face, and she leapt angrily out of bed.

“What do you think you’re doing, mother?” she cried, grabbing the lantern. “You’ll kill us all, you old fool.” Daddy woke then, and watched without comprehension as mother grabbed her arm, saying: “Do ‘ee want to burn the ‘ole house down?” and led her off to grandfather, who was lying in bed, waiting for his wife to join him so that he could get to sleep.