by Tim Pears
As the sun burned into the Valley, the big house over on the estate rose through the mist, its enormous windows all boarded up and holes gaping in its tiled roof. Tracking across the deserted lawns to the waterfall I could make out kids from Teign Village or Hennock cooling themselves beneath the long cascade, seeking a kind of refuge just as rich people had when Napoleon declared war, and wealthy Exeter families fled from the impending invasion along the narrow lanes and up the steep hills to this remote asylum. The 8th Viscount Teignmouth had welcomed them all, each new arrival with ever greater warmth, not because of the rent he could charge them but because his family had acquired the politeness of aristocrats, and when the last of them departed after receiving news of the Battle of Trafalgar without giving him a farthing for his hospitality, they left the orchards bare, the granaries ransacked, the kitchens upside down, the terraced lawns rubbed out and everything in an even worse state than the Diggers had left it in a hundred and fifty years before, or the hippies would a hundred and fifty years later.
§
After seeing reminders of grandmother’s history I’d put the telescope back in its place and follow the stream down. The water in the quarry pool was so deep that beneath the surface it stayed cold all summer and gave you cramp when you least expected it. No one was supposed to swim out into the middle, and when now and then one of the older boys forced himself to, his fear was there for anyone to see in the disturbed muscles of his face as he struggled back.
The little kids went skinny-dipping, but we didn’t. Between swims we poked around in the scrubby copse that’d grown over the mineworkings around the pool, and into which the widowman heron retreated when we disturbed his vigil on the projecting rock that we dived off. We’d see how long we could lie in the sun without moving, until our backs sizzled, and then we’d leap into the water with a hiss.
The older girls didn’t want to dive, they just hung around whispering to each other and waiting for the boys to come over. But the boys were busy showing off their ever more complicated somersault twists and ducking each other. At the beginning of the summer, after I’d left Middle School for ever, I copied the older girls. Jane was happy to join them, but it was a tedious way to spend time, and soon I became the only girl that summer who learned to do a double backward dive. The boys resented that, and the girls looked the other way.
No one bothered with towels: the beads of moisture that came out of the pool with us vanished from our skin, but by the time we’d climbed to the beech tree our clothes would already be damp again.
§
Grandmother’s very first Christmas in the village was the wettest in living memory: it even rained on Christmas Day itself, an unheard-of phenomenon.
The church was full for the communion service, and afterwards, while the women were preparing dinner, the men in squeaking boots and uncomfortable hats strolled around the village, despite the drizzle, smoking and conversing over each other’s gates. Two of them, Joseph Howard and grandfather, ambled along the lane beside the village stream, discussing the barter of a new set of window-frames for a rocky slope of land behind the church, and before they knew where they were they found themselves at the end of the lane, beside the beech tree above the granite quarry where grandfather had briefly worked, looking down upon a sight so baffling they could only stare at it in silence. Yet even so others were drawn inexplicably in their direction and joined them, equally awestruck by the spectacle. When their daughters and sisters were sent out to call the men in to dinner they found the village deserted, and even though they searched separately for various fathers and brothers they all found themselves propelled in the same direction.
The women of the village sweating around the stoves, after calling from their kitchens, finally stepped outside and proceeded to follow each other without consultation, pulled not by their will but rather by impulses so far out on the edges of their senses that they were unaware of them at the time. It was only afterwards that they were able to infer from traces in the sediment of their memories that they must have been drawn by the inaudible screeching and the blurred tilting of wings of seagulls, and by the intangible taste of salt in the air, because that was the only explanation for them joining the rest of their families around the beech tree beside the lip in the hill where the village stream dropped to the Valley below. And then they too were dumbfounded by the sight of the great quarry transformed into a black, bottomless pool of water.
No one moved.
They barely breathed.
There was no conflict raging in their hearts, wondering whether to develop murderous intentions towards their employer, the 14th Viscount, for having them work in so dangerous a place, or on the other hand to thank Christ for delivering this natural catastrophe on the one day of the year when not a single person was working there. They were simply overcome by the spectacle. But then someone dropped forward, no one knows whether they stumbled or even fainted, whereupon everyone else too fell to their knees in relief and praise for the Saviour who’d been born on Christmas Day, the one day of the year everyone, even the night-watchman, had a holiday, and who had saved forty-seven villagers from what grandmother assured me was the worst form of death, that of drowning, because it’s the most lonely.
§
When I got back mother was cutting Daddy’s hair in the kitchen. He picked up a cluster that had fallen in his lap, and considered the mixture of black and white hairs with a frown on his face.
“I can’t ‘ave ‘ad a bath since us all painted the pig-sty,” he decided with a rare note of conviction, although he was wrong. In reality the Howards had been the first and only ones to make the mistake of whitewashing a farm building that summer: the whole family got snow-blindness and had to stay inside wearing dark glasses for a week, nursing their eyes with hot flannels boiled in rosemary-scented water. Mike said it even hurt to watch television. I helped Tom take care of their animals, scattering hay from the trailer like we did in winter.
§
Before she’d let Daddy out to play, mother made him lie down on the settee in the front room and listen to one of the records that Pamela brought home from the library in Exeter. Mother said it stopped him getting wrinkles. He lay still as a boulder in a stream and let the torrent of notes of a harpsichord sonata pour over him. He couldn’t hold them and didn’t try, but simply let them slide over the smooth surface of his mind.
I got itchy waiting: in common with my elder brothers and sister I had no talent for music. Mother had installed a piano when she first became pregnant, with Ian, and after that she knew when she’d conceived because she’d awake one morning with an illogical tune nagging at her mind which she’d have to root out on the piano. It was the only time she ever played, she said it was good for the baby in her womb and that we’d be born with a lifelong love of music, but the tactic failed with each of us in turn. After I was born she never played again, but she kept the piano tuned none the less in the hope that some inspiration might yet awaken in one of us a sleeping talent.
The piano tuner wore a black suit and tie, and he had the solemn bearing of an undertaker. Grandmother and mother and Pamela would argue over his age in the kitchen while he adjusted wires and tightened screws until he was satisfied with our cheap piano’s tone and pitch, and then he’d reduce them to enchanted silence with his rendering of one of Liszt’s Consolations. At one time he’d almost had to give up his practice because half the husbands barred him from coming into their houses while they were out at work, with his sad bearing like a droopy flower and his suspicious hair lotion whose aroma hung around the piano for the rest of the day, because they could sense that women felt a need to comfort him.
“Of all times to be in this line of work,” he said in his high-pitched voice when he joined us for coffee in the kitchen, “I find myself in the twentieth century. The Dismal Age of the Decline of Music. It’s up to you women to keep it going, you know, you’ll have to carry the responsibility now: men have lost their sensitivity. I don
’t know what I’d have done without the newcomers.”
The piano tuner had made his biannual visit from Chagford one Tuesday morning in July, plagued, as he was all through that mournful summer, by a small swarm of midges that gathered around the tuning fork, attracted by its hum, under the illusion that it was made by the wings of a female mosquito.
FOUR
Laying Hedges
Ian, my eldest brother, was the one who ran the farm now, but he never chose to. He didn’t seem to mind, he always brushed everything off.
“I never ‘spected to do what I want with my life,” he assured me, “there’s few people gets that lucky.” But you could see that underneath his calm manner he was in a constant state of fretting and fidgeting: the uncertainties of a farmer’s life tied his insides up in knots. He could never work out, despite hours spent at his desk making calculations, how we would ever make any money given the incalculables of the weather, health and disease, cattle-market prices and foreign competition, vehicle maintenance and capital investment, but, most of all, time. It was always working against him. He started his day, after a few hours of fitful sleep, swinging out of bed and punching the alarm clock in a single movement. In the bathroom he wiped himself with one hand and brushed his teeth with the other, he combed his hair as he shaved, he pulled his shirt on at the same time as he tied his shoelaces, at breakfast he gulped his tea while his mouth was full of food, and he carried on through the day in the same way, except that he somehow managed to do it with an air of calm efficiency, as if he were acting in this way purely as a controlled experiment, which saved him from looking like a madman.
Despite Ian’s efforts, though, time always seemed to catch up and overtake him and when, exhausted, he collapsed on his bed in the early hours of the morning, all the things he still had to do seemed to pile up on an imaginary conveyor-belt and glide contemptuously past, a succession of tasks undone, floating by him as sleep dragged him under, into tomorrow. I thought it was a unique and absurd affliction that possessed my brother, until I got to know the Rector and discovered that he suffered exactly the same.
§
Ian hid his impatience from most people, but if they watched him they’d have noticed the way he tightened the curls of his hair with one finger when he appeared to be at ease. And they might have wondered why he was so thin: he consumed prodigious quantities of food, as much as Tom did, but without adding any flesh to his wiry frame. Mother told him he kept a worm inside his body which ate up all the surplus calories, so that he could have the pleasures of gluttony without its consequences; he sometimes failed to make sure that the toilet had managed to flush away the evidence of his appetite, leaving a large turd floating in the bowl.
The only time Ian made no effort to hide his impatience was when he thought he’d be late for football, which was every Saturday afternoon. He’d rush across the yard, socks or shin-pads spilling from his sportsbag, rev up his yellow ex-British Telecom van, lurch forward then brake suddenly, remembering something he’d forgotten, lift off the door whose hinges he never got round to fixing, lean it against the side of the van, come scrambling back into the house, demand to know who the hell had hidden his tie-ups, eventually find them where he’d left them the week before, dash out again, leap into the van pulling the door behind him, and screech out of the yard in a turmoil of dust, burning rubber, and panic-stricken chickens.
§
The only escape that Ian found from time’s unblinking scrutiny was in his insomniac’s refuge of the early hours, listening to the sounds of the sea on his short-wave radio as he played another game of chess against his computer. He couldn’t understand how, in the middle of the chaos and confusion of life that teemed around him, something of such beauty—and nothing more than a game, at that—could exist, an infinitely renewable, unfolding secret waiting for him to make the first move and develop into another unique pattern of intrigue and delight. It was truly incredible. When I started going to church on my own, after mother stopped, he used to tease me: “Don’t be silly, maid, there b’ain’t no God. Unless he was the one what invented chess. I could make some sense out of that.”
§
“Come on, mother,” I said, while the record was still droning on. “Can’t I take Daddy out yet?”
“Stop your bloody moaning, maid. Why don’t you play with someone your own age for a change?” she demanded. “What’s Jane doing?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “Go on, mother, you can see he wants to.”
§
Mother made Daddy put on his dark jacket, ‘because it keeps the heat off’, so she said, but I knew that really it was just because she liked him to look smart. We ambled across the farmyard through the fetid air that drifted from the barn, past the gaggle of cackling geese loath to leave the stagnant pond, between the hens pecking some illusory sustenance from the dust, and into the lane. Sweat broke out across Daddy’s smooth forehead, and his soft cheeks reddened.
We carried on out of the village. Since the sun hurt our eyes we opened our ears instead. All I could hear was the strange hum that hovered behind every other sound throughout that summer. Earlier on, when it first became audible, there was widespread unease at the idea that Mrs Corporal Alcock’s tinnitus had become contagious, and people bent over and shook their heads or used knitting needles to try and dislodge the singing insect in their eardrums. Soon, though, people had to make a special effort to distinguish it from everyday silence and it no longer irritated anyone, except for grandmother, who had recognized the first symptoms of cholera. Her own great-grandmother had died in the epidemic that decimated Exeter, and she would choose inappropriate moments to ask relatives and strangers alike who passed through the house whether they’d felt a sensation of giddiness recently of a feeling of uneasiness in their stomach, and she warned us to look out for what she described as rice-water motions.
Soon the hum was consigned to the background and there was a faint squelching as Daddy’s heavy boots were absorbed by gravel swimming in the liquefying tarmac. Gradually I extended the range of my hearing: a whine emerged from the blurry clouds of gnats and midges that hung over the meadow to our right, and we passed a thrush in the hedgerow whose liquid runs of melody were constantly abandoned and begun again. Then from what seemed a long way away came a tinkling of silver bells, and I shielded my eyes to see if I could catch my first glimpse of the procession of Buddhists who were rumoured to have turned Whiteway House over Haldon into a monastery and filed through surrounding villages begging for alms.
I couldn’t see anything, but then I looked down at my feet and found we were walking through an entire army of toads.
“Watch where you’re treading, Daddy!” I yelled.
“Runnin’ Belinda!” he exclaimed. “There’s hundreds of the little things.”
We stood still to let them pass. They were hopping laboriously along the lane, as disorientated by the sun stealing their ponds as they had been ten years before when the useless plots of land on the steep slope below the church were sold, and enormous yellow bulldozers invaded the village to gouge out platforms on which to build houses for commuting newcomers. With one scoop a bulldozer’s bucket removed the tiny bog where grandfather could remember collecting frogspawn. The Simmons family, first of the outsiders to move in the following winter, woke up one spring morning to find their house besieged by hundreds of croaking toads, the smallest of which had squeezed under the doors and hopped up the stairs to the bathroom. They returned every year, following the stars, to tamper with the dreams of the Simmons family with their mournful croaking, more melancholy even than the braying of the Honeywills’ donkey. Even when the toads grew silent it took only one of them to croak and set off all the others again. The children had vague but guilt-ridden dreams, until they finally persuaded their father to dig a goldfish pond in the garden.
The tinkling tribe of toads seemed endless, and by the time we’d passed through them all we’d reached where the lane forked left up
to Haldon Forest. From over in Barton Wood came the tap-tap-tapping of a woodpecker, while the plaint of sheep at the heat of the sun expressed the whole world’s discomfort. The feeble trickle of water in the stream labouring towards the village was virtually inaudible, and was replaced in the spectrum of sound by the chiming of church bells for an hour well past: the air was so dry and thin that they came in dissonant waves, like a spring being unwound, all the way from Exeter Cathedral.
§
We stood at the junction. Close by, a meadowlark elaborated phrases of notes in a new song. The air that was so dry in my throat was liquid to look at. Towards Shilhay, moving amongst his herd of sorrowful cows, was the shimmering but unmistakable silhouette of Douglas Westcott, as he carefully picked ticks off his cattle and squeezed them, in tiny eruptions of blood.
Douglas was the bull-like recluse who’d left home, grandmother told me, the day his father chided him for his bestial table manners. He rose from the table without a word. His mother found him packing everything he needed into a holdall no larger than a lady’s handbag. “I’m going to find out whether the world looks like the maps say it do,” he told her, and strode through the front door. His father ordered that no one should step over that threshold before Douglas did, and from then on they entered and left the house only through the kitchen. Once when Stuart from the shop was delivering a box of groceries and, receiving no answer to his knocking, opened the door to leave them in the porch, old Westcott saw him from the barn and stilled his heartbeat with a bellow. He marched over, picked Stuart up by the scruff of his neck, carried him to the drinking trough, and dropped him in.
