1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (37 page)

Once he’d started, grandfather took to burning dried grass with an enthusiasm that was compulsive. He didn’t even notice that I was there: he just went from one clump to another, tested the wind by licking his finger and holding it up in the air, and struck a match. He set off little pyres all over a field and left charred patches behind him; it was like he was making obsequies for grandmother. He’d found his own way of saying goodbye to her, all across their farm.

Then grandfather looked around and saw me. “These bloody wasps is gettin’ on my nerves, Alison,” he said. “They’s everywhere. Come on, I’ll show you how to burn their nest, flush the buggers out for good.”

We found them drifting in and out of a hedge in the bank up behind the house, and grandfather pulled up some armfuls of dried grass: oblivious of wasps buzzing around his head he stuffed the grass into the hedge. I stood well back.

“Aren’t you getting stung, grandpa?” I called.

“In’t no use worryin’ about that, maid. Go get a can of petrol out the barn.”

He emptied the entire contents over the wodge of grass. The air shimmered, and stank of petrol. He stepped back, grinning all over his face.

“You can’t use half measures with these buggers,” he declared. He struck a match and nicked it towards the hedge. Nothing happened, so he did it again, but again the match died.

“Damn!” he said, and stepped forward. He struck another match and reached out with it: the petrol-soaked grass whooshed up in a rush of flame. Grandfather staggered back, his hair and eyebrows singed, but still grinning, while above the roar of the fire came the buzzing of angry wasps, as hundreds of them came out into the air and swarmed around in irate, confused circles.

“That’ll do the job,” grandfather said, as he turned and hobbled back to the house. I picked up the empty petrol can and followed him.

That night I had a dream: it was soon after dawn, but everyone else was sleeping. A damp, early morning mist clung to the earth, bleaching the colours so that everything was a dull lifeless shade of grey or green, and muffling whatever sounds might have carried from the fields around. Then a distant, intermittent clacking entered the edges of my hearing. As it grew louder I recognized it as a horse’s hooves approaching at a gallop, coming into the village along the road behind the almshouse. It grew louder and louder in that grey, dull silence and then appeared past the houses on fire, bright orange flames raging from its mane and back and tail, frenziedly galloping through the village.

§

Ian was left to withstand alone the barrage of drivel that poured from Tom’s mouth, which he put up with stoically, keeping his irritation under control, until Tom started to explain the meaning of love. He wouldn’t have minded if Tom had asked his advice on the subject, realizing in time the trap he had set for himself and appealing to Ian to help extricate him. That was what Ian had been expecting, and he’d prepared his answers, not out of smugness but compassion. What he never expected was for Tom to start explaining to him, his older brother, about love. He told him what it felt like, like an illness except that it was the opposite, and he told him how to cope with the symptoms, which was to encourage them. He noted how strange it was, but true none the less, that when you really love someone the thing you most want to do is to die for them, and it was only a shame that no opportunity seemed to present itself. On the basis of Susanna’s behaviour he told Ian what women were like, in what ways they were different from men and in what ways the same. Ian couldn’t believe his ears. For the first day or two he smiled in response, his smile of complicity, acknowledging the joke, all the better for being such a meandering but sustained one, and welcome evidence of Tom’s newfound sense of humour. Eventually, though, he was forced to admit that Tom was serious, his monotonous monologue was indeed intended to impart the wisdom of his experience, and he had no time for humour because it was more important to tell Ian that he’d discovered something new in the world, more precious than life itself, more nutritious than meat, more substantial than the earth, and yet it was invisible, can you believe that? If people would only listen to him they’d become richer than people in olden times did from the discovery of tin up on Dartmoor, because this was something people made out of nothing, just by being together, and if he called it love that didn’t mean he was talking about the same thing people had talked about before when they used that word, it was just that he couldn’t think of a better one.

“No, Ian,” he said, pausing for emphasis as Ian held another sheep down and Tom stood above him with the syringe. “No, the thing is, when you really loves someone ‘tis forever, like.”

Ian’s irritation turned into anger. He bit his lip, but he felt the anger growing inside him. It increased as he glimpsed Tom and Susanna walking around the village arm in arm; it gave him a headache to catch them in the toolshed, Tom sitting on the workbench while Susanna blew her warm breath into his nostrils; he felt blood gather behind his eyeballs and tingle along his limbs as he watched from the window of his room, next to mine, as they said their lingering goodnights at her front door, disappearing into the shadow of the porch for a period that lengthened every night, until she opened the door and disappeared into the light. His anger mounted right up to that Saturday evening, when he came downstairs dressed like an Edwardian artisan for his night of a stalker on the dance floor, and saw them curled up together on the sofa in front of the television, their limbs so intertwined it was as if they’d been spliced together. Ian bolted his supper down and left without taking his customary glass of Calvados with grandfather and Daddy, slamming shut the door of his yellow van and leaving a brushstroke of burnt rubber in the yard.

He never drank more than two pints of beer, sipping them slowly, because he could see no point in blurring the edges of pleasure. Now, though, he joined his footballing cronies at the bar and copied their uncivilized consumption of double whiskies followed by lager chasers. He’d never enjoyed their company outside the brief, intense intimacy of playing football together, but discovered now how much fun they were to be with when they were drunk, and he lost his bad feeling in their ribald bravado. His head felt light and hot at the same time, and he undid the top button of his shirt as men he’d never got to know before nudged him, shouted lewd references to certain girls in the hall, winked at each other, and argued their right to buy the next round.

The alcohol flooded his senses, and he felt his instincts of a hunter bob only briefly and then disappear beneath the surface. Two girls he recognized but whose names he could not recall asked him and his goalkeeper to dance, and he stumbled past flashing lights into a minefield of music, with its thumping bass and ear-splitting treble, stepping on their toes and falling against them until they abandoned him in the middle of the dance floor.

His friends greeted him back at the bar with admiration and laughter for such a clumsy show, their aloof captain one of the boys at last, no longer the stuck-up silent man they couldn’t help respecting but they didn’t have to like, who sneaked off with a different woman every week; here he was, having a drink with the lads and prepared to make a fool of himself. He put his arm around someone’s shoulder, emptied his glass and smiled with bleary-eyed pleasure.

§

He hadn’t even thought of Tom and Susanna for hours. His anger had dissipated, squeezed from his head by alcohol that took up all the space. He came back along the Valley road under the illusion that he was sober. The moon was not quite full, but it was so light that he considered cutting the lights of his van so that he could see more than just what their beam illuminated. There were no other cars about: he felt solid and sure, carefree and at ease. And then, precisely because he was so clear-headed he began to sense his anger with Tom rising once more. “Dammit,” he thought, “why should I make myself think of him?” But there was nothing he could do about it: his blood was pulsing more urgently and his muscles were tense, and he was unaware that his clenched knee was pressing the accelerator pedal down against the floor, as the road, raised up to avoid the spring thaw floods, passed the water meadows next to the river.

Some years earlier the Rector, late for a meeting of the Valley parishes joint Flower Festival committee, being held in Bridford, had roared along the Valley road in his Triumph Vitesse. He’d flashed past the Little Hyner lane at sixty miles an hour, past the Hyner Farm entrance at seventy, past the estate drive at eighty, and then entered the chicane in the road there. Unable to hold his lane, he’d had no option but to surrender to his fate and take the bend on the wrong side of the road, at which point he was passed by a car doing the same speed in the opposite direction, also on the wrong side of the road. At that moment the Rector understood that, against all logic, it was possible for God not only to direct the course of the universe but also to follow the destiny of each and every individual, by means of intermediaries in the form of guardian angels.

Now Ian entered the same chicane, coming the opposite way the Rector had then, cursing his brother under his beery breath, driving on automatic pilot. Suddenly his mind shifted and he became conscious of being behind the wheel, only because some bastard had gone and extended the curve of the road. He thought for a moment that the road had been turned into a cul-de-sac with a roundabout at the end, that he was going to be brought right around in a complete circle and be sent back towards Christow, because the bend seemed to be going on for ever. His skin went dry and his blood turned to ice, he was ready for anything, but he knew he was powerless: if he tried to turn the wheel any harder down the van would flip right over, and if he took his foot off the accelerator it would surely skid. Time, too, bent into an endless curve: he seemed to have an age in which to ponder his misfortune. In fact he wanted to roll a cigarette and contemplate the beauty of the car’s unchangeable momentum, cruising in a lock-solid groove created by the combination of curvature, speed and gravity.

“H’m,” he thought to himself, “‘tis invisible, like love.”

When he saw the road straighten out at last, up ahead, he knew it was too far away, too late, that he and his old van wouldn’t make it, because the verge was suddenly coming closer.

“Fuck me, bay,” he said aloud, as both nearside wheels touched the verge, “‘tidn’t anger, bay,” as the wheels on his side lifted off the road, “of all people, Ian Freemantle, you prick, you,” as he felt himself light and rising, away from his horrible mood, feeling lucid and light and relieved for the first time in weeks.

“So this is what jealousy feels like,” Ian said to himself, as the van was sprung from the grip of gravity, launched itself over the hedge and spun through the air in a vaulting arc, before falling towards the low-lying meadow.

§

When Ian woke up he didn’t know where he was. He knew somehow that it was night, that he was enclosed in darkness, but there were bright lights directly above him. He was lying down but his legs were bent up towards his torso. There was a faint antiseptic smell, a smell of cleanliness. He could hear movement, footsteps, commotion of some kind, but he didn’t know whether it was bustling around him, coming closer or fading into the distance. Trying to piece together the jigsaw he listened for nurses’ voices, but heard none. Sensation began slowly to return to his body: he felt bruised somewhere but couldn’t at first locate its source. Then he realized that it was all over: every one of his limbs was possessed of a dull ache. His hands and arms returned to his body, tingling with pins and needles. Something instinctive made him lean to his right while his right hand searched in the darkness, which he knew was stupid even as he shouldered the air beside him, except that sure enough he made contact with something, which gave way, and the door of his van dropped off its precarious hinges and clattered to the ground. The chaos into which he’d awoken fell into explicable shape: the van had ended up on its back, headlights pointing solemnly at the sky, as if searching forty years too late for a German plane that had once dipped, unchallenged, along this same Valley. He switched them off.

Ian lowered himself out of the van carefully and wearily. He could feel no bones broken, nor the dampness of blood, only a spreading bruise on both the outside and the inside of his skin. He began to walk tentatively away from the van, and could hear across the meadow the sound of cattle running together, scampering away from the metal comet that had landed in their pasture: so he’d been unconscious only a moment. He made straight towards the river, aiming to cross it at a place he knew, where a branch reached across the water. Then he would walk up past Rydon, enter our land through the copse by the top field, and drop to the back of the house.

As he walked Ian tried to remember what had happened, but something was missing. He recalled shouting goodnight to his mates at the hall, and coming back along the Valley road. It was clear and light, he thought; yes, of course, as it is now. He’d considered cutting the lights but thought better of it, just in case a silent police car was cruising through the area. Then he’d started thinking about something else, he was sure. He couldn’t recall actually driving: it seemed to him that it wasn’t that he’d forgotten driving along, but rather he’d done so automatically, and so would not have stored the images in his memory anyway. He was preoccupied with something else at the time, dammit, why couldn’t he remember?

He was sure it was something important. He stopped by the river and rolled himself a cigarette. His pain trickled away as he racked his brains trying to remember, annoyed with himself but at the same time enjoying his mind’s struggle because it was exactly like battling with a chess problem whose solution lurked just outside the margin of your intellectual capacity. “Maybe this is how father feels all the time,” he thought.

Ian threw the glowing stub of his cigarette into the river and started walking again. Movement jogged the brain cells, which was why he paced to and fro across his room at night, to and fro past the chessboard on his desk, during his nights of a chess player’s insomnia.