by Tim Pears
The church was never locked. People still remembered the PCC meeting that took place in the days when atheists first began stealing from churches: Granny Sims had got on to the agenda a motion that the church be locked from Sunday to Sunday, with keys given out only to regular churchgoers prepared to recite the Athanasian Creed. In the ensuing discussion it was only by resorting to the underhand trick of losing his temper that the Rector persuaded them to postpone the vote until the next meeting. In the interim he deposited, in a bank, the chalice and paten left behind by Buckfast Abbey, the cup given by the 1st Viscount Teignmouth with his coat of arms on the side, the pewter collection-plate that was said to have been used by the Romans, the stoup which Corporal Alcock lined up for last so that he could drain it, and the nickel-plated candlesticks that a gullible Rector had once bought off the same didicois whom grandmother could remember, passing through the village on their wagons that were like rooms turned inside out with everything hanging off the outside of the walls. The Rector deposited all those church utensils in a bank vault in Exeter and bought cheap replacements, so that the notion of putting a lock on the door of an inviolable sanctuary need never again arise.
Sometimes when I went I’d find the Rector there too, because when he wasn’t in his study surrounded by twenty-six empty rooms, wrestling with an opponent whose limbs were made of liquid, he’d limp over to the church to have it out with Him face to face. He’d be walking between the pews looking at the ground and gesticulating, an unlit cigarette in his fingers, mouthing words of reproach he felt towards his Maker whose Creation contained so many baffling flaws.
Usually, though, I was alone in that cool sanctuary of stone, so dry that all the hymn books were crumbling but which retained its damp, ecclesiastical smell, that hung heavy in people’s sinuses and antagonized their incipient rheumatism.
The day of my recovery from the summer flu, a flaming Friday, I stole out of the heat into the church, and sat in a pew in the middle. I cooled down deliciously, eyes closed, and had just become comfortable with my body again when the air began to tremble. It felt thin, like they say it gets on the top of mountains, as if it no longer held enough oxygen to support life. What happens to space when the air goes? Invisible birds were beating their wings, and would at any moment become visible. But then I realized that far from being a sign of some imminent apparition, those wings were the sign of life’s departure. The air became empty of itself, it became a vacuum: I realized with horror that I was in Limbo. There was no time in there, so I could have been trapped for a second or a century, but the vacuum was shattered with the implosion of all the stained glass windows, coloured shards of glass cascading into the church.
My eyes blinked wide open like a cat’s.
It was around then that I spent time with grandmother as we waited for the flour cloud to turn into rain, renewing the intimacy that had been reduced by her blindness. I read to her from holiday brochures that Pamela picked up from travel agents in town. She liked to hear descriptions of places she’d never shown any desire to visit: maybe she was doing it for my benefit, to open up my horizons.
She used to call me her little sparrow, yet just as I was growing faster than ever before, so that all my pairs of jeans had a creased white ring around the bottom of the legs where mother had already let them down, and were still too short for me, it was grandmother who was becoming bird-like, her clothes like a bird’s feathers inside of which there’s hardly anything.
When I was little she would sit me on her lap and whisper: ‘Who’s my favourite granddaughter, then?’ and fondle my shining black hair, which hadn’t been seen in our family for three generations. Grandmother had had the first photograph in the whole village, which people stared at for ages before suddenly recognizing her mother-in-law, standing beside her out-of-focus son on Teignmouth pier. Grandmother saw the picture on her bedside table every night before turning out the light, and for a long time had assumed the inky black hair to be lost in history. But it had reasserted itself in me after taking a rest, and it made me stand out in her eyes among all her grandchildren.
That was before the thickening of her cataracts, which we didn’t notice at first and which she wouldn’t admit to. She had difficulty picking bones from her food, but insisted that she ate so slowly on the advice of the Prime Minister at the time of her infancy, who advocated chewing each mouthful thirty-two times to aid digestion, and after she’d repeated it a few times we all forgot that she hadn’t always done so. After a while the rest of the family realized they didn’t have time to be polite at every single meal, and soon even on Sundays we’d clear the tea away around her and leave the table, where she remained, chewing through the afternoon.
Grandmother’s eyes went milky, but no-one suspected what it meant. We didn’t realize that she’d learned to identify people across a room by their smell. Even when she stopped reading, we accepted her claim that she’d read enough about other people, who after all only repeated the same old ideas and made the same mistakes. Her worsening arthritis seemed like a sufficient reason to stay indoors, and she left the house only to hobble to church, along a route she’d memorized over the years without trying, until, despite copper bracelets to ward off arthritis and a magnet hidden under the bedclothes to draw out rheumatism, she said she found the path too steep, and the Rector began bringing communion to her at home.
Gradually, however, once she’d stopped reading she began to lose interest in life; she’d never listened to the radio, unnerved by being unable to put faces to all those disembodied voices. Daddy came to spend hours beside her, the two of them holding hands and gazing ahead into an unpopulated blur, and it was Daddy, in fact, who inadvertently discovered that she was blind and saved her from dying of boredom, when he asked her how many lonely people there were, and she replied without thinking: ‘About as many as there be white hairs on your ’ead.’ Daddy ran through to the kitchen and blurted out: ‘Come quick, grandmother’s blinded, ’er thinks my hair’s gone grey.’
Even though she was only speaking the truth, all at once things fell into place: why she insisted on taking a mug of tea in her hands rather than have it put on a table beside her, no matter how hot it was, and why she’d given up knitting after a lifetime making pullovers and woollen socks for her numerous offspring, which she claimed was because the clicking of the needles was beginning to get on her nerves after seventy years of the sound.
At first grandmother denied her blindness, not out of pride but because she dreaded becoming a burden, so Ian devised a series of tests: the first was a card with letters decreasing in size, as he’d remembered from the school optician’s visits, but although grandmother could only make out the two largest letters at the top she closed her eyes and concentrated her mind and guessed the rest correctly. Then Ian beckoned her to the window and asked her to say which vehicles were in what position around the farmyard, but again she was right despite the fact that the scene was no more than a blur before her, because she assumed that they would be parked now just as they had been the last time she’d seen them, since people are above all creatures of habit, her own family no exception. It was only with his third and final test that Ian caught grandmother out, when he brought his brother and sisters into the room and asked her the colour of our hair.
With enormous relief, saved from her one fear, that of being a burden on her family, grandmother distinguished us easily by our smell and correctly announced the hair-colour of each of us until she got to Pamela, who was at the end of the line. All Ian said was: ‘Wrong! Us’ll come closer.’ We took a step towards her each time, but she carried on getting it wrong, growing more and more stupefied. It didn’t occur to her that Pamela might have dyed her brown hair with peroxide.
Forced to accept reality, things got better for her after that, not worse, and she didn’t become the burden she feared. Grandfather constructed at his carpenter’s bench a complicated contraption for reading with, which consisted of three magnifying glasses, a pair of t
hick pebble spectacles and an Anglepoise lamp with an extra powerful bulb. Mother got her larger and larger type books from the mobile library, and grandmother regained her appetite for life.
During those days when I sat with her, waiting vainly for rain to fall out of flour, I held her hand and asked her why she’d refused spectacles for so long. ‘No-one should see their own chillern growin’ old,’ she replied. I lent her my Walkman, and Pamela got her some talking book cassettes from Exeter Library, and grandmother fell asleep in her chair with the headphones on and dreamed of the members of her family acting out scenes from the plays of William Shakespeare.
During those forlorn days, when it became clear that nothing would bring the rain before it was ready, Tom received a blow that no-one had prepared him for: overnight, Susanna became indifferent to him. Her pupils no longer grew larger when they stepped into the shadows together. She didn’t mind whether he came to see her at breaktimes or not, and when they parted and he said: ‘See you later, then?’ she replied: ‘If you want to,’ or ‘Why not?’ She didn’t refuse him, but let her hand flop limply in his, and her languid lack of response when he kissed her was worse than any rejection. After the euphoria of his discovery of love her indifference was more than he could bear, but everything was so dried up by that stage of the summer that he couldn’t find any of the tears that he wanted to cry. On one occasion he kissed her and found it was the saddest thing he’d ever done, and he bit her lip: but even then she made no response, just tasted the blood on her tongue, with no expression of anger or even curiosity. Disconsolate, and with no-one to turn to, it was then that Tom followed the other men over the fields to the pub at Ashton.
Tom wasn’t the only one to lose his groundless optimism of the morning twilight, that today might be different. During those next few days there was nothing but confusion, as people lost hope and with it reality. Fred Sims’s addiction to sneezing was worse than ever as he bumped us down the hill to a phantom coach supposed to take us to a non-existent school, while his crates of milk curdled in the phone box. Wasps and hornets bumped into each other in the air. The old bell in the church boomed when you least expected it. The animals, even as their ribs stuck out, were getting restless, and Ian and Tom exerted themselves in the false dawn to put up an extra barrier of electrified wire around the fields; Daddy kept on becoming intrigued and touching the buzzing wire, which throbbed unpleasantly through his organs, but he’d forget by the time he saw another one. Fortunately Tinker learned to growl when he went near and so distract him.
It wasn’t only nettles and coltsfoot, meanwhile, that flourished without water in the arid soil. Rhubarb with leaves the size of tablecloths spread themselves across lawns, and the tomato plants that mother dug into the bed at the kitchen door multiplied along the side of the house and climbed the walls like wisteria. She picked a bucketful of green ones in the morning and put them on the window-sills. The following day they’d all be as red as the letterbox, and I’ve never in my life tasted such sweet tomatoes.
‘Love apples, us used to call them. Is they fruit or vegetables?’ grandmother asked me. ‘Nobody knows, see. And they never will, neither, until they’re too clever for their own good.’
‘Don’t you know, grandma?’
‘Course I do, maid,’ she replied. ‘They’s sweet little vegetables, that’s what they is.’
People even got confused over time itself, especially in our house where the piano tuner, distracted by the mosquitoes that accompanied him, had left behind one of his metronomes by mistake, and it mocked us with its sardonic version of time rocking back and forth, back and forth, without going anywhere.
‘If you set that thing going one more time, girl, you’ll be for it!’ mother shouted through from the kitchen.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Slaughter
Monday was a somnolent morning, when even Pamela seemed to have plenty of time for breakfast before leaving in a state of calm. After she’d gone the rest of us sipped tea and Ian said:
‘Us’ll need everyone’s help herding. We’ll bring ’em into the farmyard.’
‘Surely the abattoir lorries can go right up to the fields?’ mother asked.
‘Course they will, mother,’ he replied, ‘but there’s some they won’t give us nothin’ for. Douglas ’as got to slaughter they.’
Mother was puzzled. ‘What are we going to do with the carcasses?’
‘Fill the freezers, mother.’
‘Don’t be stupid, bay. Us can fit a few joints in, what about the rest?’
Ian was reluctant, and he was looking into his mug of tea. ‘Bury them.’
‘Bury them? Where? Ian, you can’t –’
‘– Don’t you worry,’ he interrupted: he looked her in the eye. ‘Mother, we idn’t payin’ good money to no knacker who’ll sell ’em for glue. Mike Howard’s going to use ’is digger; Douglas is coming round s’mornin’.’
Mother looked like her head was caught up in a cobweb of perplexity. She sat down.
Ian stood up. ‘Bring Dad and Alison up top field. See you there.’ Tom left with him. The dogs joined them as they crossed the yard. The silence in the kitchen was tightened by their departing figures, as we sipped our lukewarm tea. Then mother pushed her chair back and rose purposefully to her feet. ‘OK, you two, let’s get ready.’
I collected the tea mugs. As mother rinsed them at the sink I put a hand on her back. Mother relaxed her hands in the water, eyes gazing into it. She took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly. ‘Whatever you might hope for in this life, girl,’ she said, ‘don’t expect to understand men. At some point they stops growing up, like, but they still carries on in another direction. My father, my husband, now my own sons. They all baffles me.’
She might have added the dogs to her list. They followed their own precise but ludicrous logic, describing huge superfluous arcs in pursuit of a breakaway heifer. And the cattle followed another, even stupider, pattern, thus thrown into terrified confusion by Ian and Daddy flapping their arms as if trying to take flight and Tom yelling hypnotic chants, and by the dogs veering in upon their flanks and nipping their pasterns. With panic in their eyes the herd were driven along the lane, the flurry of hooves further ruining the melted tarmac.
Douglas was waiting in the farmyard, sitting impassively on a barrel by the barn with his old leather doctor’s bag, as the herd were brought wheeling into the yard in a splatter of gravel, their hooves sticky with tar.
Ian sent Daddy and me over to guard the fence by mother’s sorry-looking vegetable garden, while mother put lightweight gates across the front entrance. Tom ordered the dogs to their place by the kitchen door.
‘We’ll let ’em calm down a while,’ Ian ordered. He went over to Douglas, while mother went in to make tea.
‘’Tidn’t too many?’ Ian asked, gesturing to the remnant of his herd, no more than twenty, only the most scrawny and sorrowful, that were worth nothing to the abattoir, whose ribs pushed out through their sad hides, and who’d been abandoned even by parasites, the last of whom had gladly jumped on to any of the dogs that’d got close enough during the drive.
Douglas, facing the sun, had lowered his head. ‘No,’ he replied, without raising it.
Grandfather wasn’t helping us with the cows: I found out later that he’d refused to, and instead gone for a long walk around the village. He saw uncle Sidney and his children ripping out the hedges between the fields of their farm ready to sow wheat, like the Saxons who cut down the high hedges to make their large continental fields that were so unsuitable for Devon, and were soon divided up again; he heard uncle Terence and Terry with their chain-saws laying to waste the small copse in the dip between three fields and he thought of the riots that had taken place when threshing machines were introduced in the previous century; and going past the hippies, who already had to walk around in groups, grandfather remembered the first men from the Labour Party who arrived without warning in the square and tried to inspire people with the ch
imera of democracy. Word soon got round and they were sent packing with bloodied noses, not because the villagers were inculcated with the gentry’s Tory views, or even because they disagreed with the idea that people were equal, but because they wanted to be left alone by outsiders.
‘So, she’s right,’ he thought, ‘time’s stopped still, and we’re going backwards.’
In his best field behind the church he took a handful of earth and, closing his fist, felt not the rich reddy soil of his heartland but sandy, dusty topsoil slip through his fingers. ‘What’s happening to our land, mother?’ he cried.
Tom broke open the last bale of hay and strewed handfuls round the yard. Gradually the panic in the eyes of the cattle contracted. While we drank tea, replacing the sweat that poured from us in that cauldron of a morning but dried instantly on our skins in the strangely metallic heat, Douglas set up his tools in the depths of the barn. He plugged in his gun, and called out to Ian from the shadows: ‘Bring the first one in, bay.’
Ian didn’t move, but simply nodded to Tom, suspecting that there was an appropriate order to the slaughter, and that Tom might guess it by instinct. Tom walked over to a sad old cow, her udders shrivelled, and looped a makeshift halter of bailer twine over her neck. He slapped her bony haunches and led her to the barn.
