1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (38 page)

It came to him, though, not from his mind but from his gut, bile rising towards his heart, as anger once more began to consume him. “Of course,” he thought, “that sodding brother of mine, that’s what’s gettin’ to me. Thinks he’s William Shakespeare, Tom Crabtree and fuckin’ Frank Si-natra, rolled into one. Tellin’ me how things is!” And he walked on up past Rydon, cursing as he threaded his way through the penumbral landscape, his brother’s happiness filling him with rage, having wiped from his memory his own uninformed, accurate diagnosis of the reason for that rage.

Blood and Water

G
randfather was deteriorating before our eyes. He lost weight he could ill afford to lose, his hair thinned out and revealed the shape of his skull. He was coming to resemble one of the drawings I’d done when I was a small girl, which still clung to the greasy wall above the cooker where mother had pinned them years before: spidery and crooked, as if the muscles and tendons and ligaments of his wasting body were no longer capable of supporting his frame, which was twisting into unlikely angles wrought by a combination of arthritis and grief.

He took to wandering off on his own, without a word to anyone, with each step planting a walking stick, which Tom had cut from an ash tree, on the ground before him like a cane beside sweet-peas, for without it his precarious limbs would surely waver and fall. Despite such slow progress, grandfather sometimes set off so early in the morning that by the time anyone thought to worry about his absence he’d hobbled clear out of the parish, and Ian and I had to drive around the lanes in ever widening circles, stopping to ask people whether they’d seen him. And whenever we described a frail old man who looked as if he was about to collapse, accompanied by an anxious sheepdog, we could barely reconcile our description with the grandfather we knew.

Usually we would meet him coming back home, not of his own accord but shepherded by Tinker, who used her nose to guide him in the right direction. On one occasion, though, after hours of driving, Ian and I found him at dusk on the bridge over the motorway below Chudleigh, in the middle of which grandfather stood leaning against the rail, waving his stick at drivers in the fast lane. Ian helped him into the passenger seat of one of the three new cars he’d just purchased in order to claim tax relief on capital investment, and we set off back home. The muffled engine glided along as silent as a hearse, but grandfather still shouted, because it was a farmer’s habit of a lifetime to shout above the noise of the tractor, as he berated his grandson for treating him like a child.

§

I dreamed that the world was awash with water: everything was sinking beneath a biblical deluge. Only the roofs of the houses showed above the surface. It was a silent and deserted landscape, except for a cluster of hens perched on the ridge-tiles of the Honeywills’ cottage, and the widowman heron on the thatch of the Old Rectory, staring impassively into the water.

I found myself on a raft, floating between the roofs. The world was empty. I woke up drenched in sweat and loneliness, the bed sheets soaked.

§

Grandfather had decided to leave as unobtrusively as grandmother: this time, though, I was the first one into his room. I stood by his head, looking down at his closed eyelids, his stubbly face, his proud nose and his hesitant white lips of a taciturn grandfather. I understood that he’d done exactly what he wanted to do, forcing his body, by sheer willpower, to relinquish his lonely soul into the nothingness where grandmother had already gone. One by one the others appeared and gathered round, mystified and silent.

I knew he’d done what he wanted to do, and it was out of happiness for him that my eyes filled up and a tear dripped on to one of his eyelids. Then we all gasped and stepped backwards, transfixed, as grandfather’s eyes opened slowly and stared sleepily towards us. They were icy blue and translucent, and I felt my legs and my stomach go soft, when his eyes suddenly blinked and snapped into focus. He looked at me and then along at the rest of his family, raised himself up, and growled: “What the ‘eck’s is going on? Can’t a man get no sleep round yere without being interrupted?”

§

The telephone rang and I ignored it as usual till mother shouted through from the kitchen: “Will you get off your backside and answer that, girl?”

I said yes and Johnathan’s voice asked: “May I speak to Alison, please?”

“It’s me,” I said, shocked, not because it was Johnathan but because I’d never thought of talking to him or anyone else on the phone. My friends had always been from a few doors away, and the only time I ever dialled anyone was to make reluctant thank you calls to my aunts at Christmas. Suddenly a previously unconsidered method of communication, of immediate and intimate contact, opened up before me. No need to depend on surreptitious signals or chance rendezvous, we could just call each other any time we wanted. It was an entry into the adult world.

“I didn’t recognize you,” Johnathan was saying.

“I had a haircut,” I replied.

There was silence at the other end of the line, then: “I meant your voice.”

“It was a joke, Johnathan,” I told him.

“Listen,” he said, thinking it best to ignore me, “father just decided we’re going on holiday tomorrow, to Brittany.”

I thought he was joking. “Didn’t you hear? We’re starting school Monday. We should’ve bin there
months
ago.”

“I know. I told father. He said: “Spontaneity’s the keynote.” You know what he’s like.”

My heart sank. I was counting on us making a fresh start together. It was going to be bad enough anyway. “Your family’s all upside down,” I told him bitterly.

“I can’t help it, Alison. Anyway, promise you’ll help me catch up when I get back.”

“Maybe. I might have new friends by then, I might be too busy.”

There was silence at the other end. I could picture Johnathan’s face, with that look of his like he was about to cry.

“Bring me back some French chocolate, and I might think about it,” I teased him.

“Don’t worry about that,” he replied eagerly. “Tell you what, I’ll find some real Breton crepe dentelles.”

“Don what?” I said. “Sounds boring. No, it’s chocolate or nothing.”

“All right, all right, no need to fret. I’ll see you in a couple of weeks, then, okay?”

“S’pose so.” The line was quiet. Neither of us could think of anything to say.

“You can call me again if you like,” I said in the end. “In fact, why don’t you call me from France?”

“I’ll try. See you then.”

“Bye.”

§

Pamela came to visit that evening; now it really was like having a guest in the house, she was such a stranger. She brought a bottle of red wine left over from some farewell party at the office where she worked. She opened it at supper and poured it into tumblers in equal measures, except for mine, which she diluted with water.

“That’s what they do in France,” she told me, winking. “Kids start on wine at seven year old.” I felt even more envious of Johnathan.

Tom lifted his glass and emptied it in one gulp before Pam could stop him. “You’re not meant to do that, stupid,” she admonished him. “You’re meant to savour it. Let your nose enjoy it first, then your tongue, before you let it go down your throat.” She showed us how, and we copied her.

Ian had hardly ever drunk wine before, apart from sparkling white wine that had stood in for champagne on various occasions, and the aftertaste of cheap red wine in one or two kisses. When he lifted his glass to his nose, though, and inhaled its perfume, he was stunned by a shock of recognition: for what he smelled in the bouquet was Susanna. She had brushed past him a hundred times in the hallway, she’d sat next to him at this table, but he’d never considered her as he did other women, with her own secret, intoxicating scent. It had never occurred to him that she had one. But here it suddenly was, caught like a spirit in the bottle of wine, her aroma filling his nostrils and lightening his head. He lowered the glass, pondering this provocative magic, and drank the wine in sombre mood.

§

It was a blazing Friday morning, the last before the postponed term at my new school was finally to begin, that Ian lost his head. Everyone was half-way through breakfast by the time I came tripping downstairs. There was a scampering sound coming from the sitting-room, and I pushed the door open to find one of the ginger cats taunting a sparrow. She was relaxing her grip long enough for it to think itself free and flap its wings and then pouncing again, her claws turned in, causing it no physical harm, only terror. I yelled: “Scat!” She didn’t move except to spin her head towards me and stare, eyes wide, and in that moment’s distraction the sparrow broke free and rose. Too late the cat swiped her claw at air. The bird made straight for the light of the window and bashed against the glass, and then scurried against the pane as if frantically signalling to other birds outside. The ginger eyed me with calm hatred as I crossed the room. I was going to open the window, but the sparrow looked so pathetic in its stupidity and fear that I wanted to reassure it. In its fright it had smeared a streak of yellow against the glass. It was tiny in my hand: its wings beating gave it the illusion of a size and power it didn’t have. It was insubstantial, less than a handful of feathers, skin and splintery bone, and startled eyes. I opened the window and launched it outside, and it flittered off towards the sun.

“What the ‘eck’s you doin’, maid?”

Mother was standing in the doorway, shaking her head. “I called you twice for breakfast. Don’t know why I bothers.”

My brothers were leaving. “You go on ahead with the tractor,” Ian told Tom. “I’ll catch ‘ee up in the car, I needs to get some tobacco.”

“I’ll wait for ‘ee,” Tom replied.

“You get on, bay,” said Ian. “I’ll catch up with ‘ee there. Take the dogs and the Benitrex, make a start. I’ll see if Howards ‘as got any syringes to spare.”

I dragged Daddy out and we went looking for someone to play with. But the village was like some enormous chicken house at night when the hens aren’t exactly sleeping but you know they must be doing something similar.

Up at the Brown the telephone was ringing but no one answered. The front door of the almshouse was wide open but Nan Dyer had retreated into its shadows. The only other person outside was Douglas Westcott, who was sitting all alone chewing daisies in the middle of the Brown, as if he was wondering when the children were coming out to play.

The ringing of the telephone died behind us as we walked out of the empty village towards the quarry pool, brushing the hedges that were swallowing the lane because lately the heat had achieved an intensity that proved too much even for old Martin the hedge-layer. He sat with his sickle and hook in the small cottage whose location I could never make out, somewhere off the back lane to Chudleigh, searching through his memories to ascertain whether or not the notion that had just occurred to him was true: namely that all his life, while he had greeted people, introduced himself, initiated conversations, hailed passers-by, waved to motorists, let children run their hands over his nut-brown skull, invited dancing partners, given tips to gardeners and advice to pregnant women, escorted the elderly up the lane and made suggestions to farmers, no one had ever approached him, not really. “Even the dogs growl at me,” he said to himself.

The only things thriving in that tropical heat were alien plants impervious to the lack of water. Colonies of coltsfoot covered whole fields overnight and giant rhubarb that no one could be bothered to cut sprouted, like rampant fungi, in odd places. A hoopoe was seen in the village for the first time since one of the Howards shot one almost two hundred years before. Crimson rashes of poppy reappeared in the stubble of wheatfields, their seeds all confused by the climate, while in the hedgerows impossibly tall nettles, whose stems could not support them, bent over and stung our necks.

Down at the pool the widowman heron stood on his rock, and he stayed where he was while we splashed around nearby.

I didn’t mind skinny-dipping with Daddy, I liked him looking at me. Daddy had forgotten how to swim, so I had to keep an eye on him as he fooled around at the edge of the pool, but after he got tired I made the heron move and gave Daddy a diving demonstration, saving my backward somersault for last: as I curved backwards through the quivering heat I could feel my body trembling, not one beating heart but the accumulation of a million cells palpitating, before I sliced into the black water. I rolled and stretched beneath the surface and swam lazily, half-consciously, on top. Then Daddy went sniffing around the old mineworkings, and the widowman came back as I sat on a smooth flat stone underwater, and closed my eyes.

§

Elsie was already holding out a packet of Ian’s brand before the bell on the door had stopped ringing. He fingered it as he got out his money: it rustled.

“Ain’t you got none no more recent than this? ‘Tis all dried up.”

“You sayin’ we been kept it too long, bay? Buy it somewheres else if you don’t like it: you’s the only one what smokes that sort, I only orders it for you. ‘Tidn’t our fault anyways; what can you expect in this weather?”

“If I rolls one with this, ‘twill fall out before I can light it.”

“Give up smokin’, then.”

Stuart came in from the back room, dragging a box of groceries. “Put a piece of orange peel in the tin,” he suggested. “That’s what some people does.” He stood up, holding his back and grimacing as he did so.

“How are you doin’?” Ian asked him.

“Ah, this bastard heat,” Stuart replied. “Excuse me, miss.” He sat down in his easy chair. “They says ‘tis cold and rain makes arthritis bad, but not mine. It’s never got me so good as now. I can’t wait for the bastard rain.” He slapped his mouth. “Excuse me, Elsie.” Then he got up again and went over to open the door. Stuart had always walked with bow-legs, but that summer it got more and more pronounced, as if his legs were stretching outwards to escape a pain whose source lay between his knees.

“Yes, give me rheumatism anytime, I don’t mind that.”