by Tim Pears
We could have drowned all at once and not been noticed, but we couldn’t see any danger. After shouting and screaming as we splashed around we’d file quietly up the dried bed of the stream and back into the village. We each settled into our own thoughts, disturbed only by the strange boom that came from the church bell even though no one was ringing it. Behind us the heron resumed his vigil as the quarry pool digested our raucous and bubbly laughter and recomposed the placid, inscrutable black mirror of its surface.
§
There were no mirrors in our house; not since Daddy, losing his temper for the first time in his life, had stormed through all the rooms and smashed every last one, after lifting a soapy shaving brush and seeing not the sultana eyes and smooth, nineteen-year-old complexion of his own face, but someone else entirely. For a few seconds he stood, trembling, and stared back at brown berry pupils stranded in bloodshot whites, crows’ feet picked out at the side of each eye and beneath them a single crease holding up a crescent of puffy, aubergine-coloured skin. From his precise jaw, pouches of flesh were pushing out at the jowls. Lazily parted lips revealed blackened teeth, and the apple-red ruddiness of his cheeks was blotted with mulberry splotches.
Daddy wrenched the mirror off the wall and smashed it on the basin, and then stormed through the house, mindless of the children he startled awake: no one said a word, not even Ian, who thought he’d discarded fear the year before when he fought with Joanna Simmons, leader of the newcomers’ children. But like his brother and sisters he was struck dumb by our father’s unheard of fury. I was only a toddler then, but mother said that even I held my breath until Daddy had completed his destruction, before summoning it for a high-pitched scream that echoed in the shards of glass scattered on every floor.
§
At the time mother said nothing, her immediate response being to blame herself, seeing Daddy’s actions as the bizarre anger of an uncomplaining man in this strange village, anger directed at her and her unknowing transgressions, which grandmother would only later explain to her: allowing me to see my reflection before reaching my first birthday, or failing to veil the mirrors after the death of grandfather’s sister. So she said nothing. Then one morning she awoke to find him sitting up in bed and scrutinizing her with a puzzled expression, and she felt all the substance of her being sucked out.
At first Daddy’s amnesia had been intermittent. He’d start a job but move on to another before it was finished, leaving a trail of uncompleted tasks at the end of the day that grandfather had to clear up. When there was a pause in conversation he changed the subject, as if trying to prove how quick-thinking he was, and he would further bewilder mealtimes by asking, no sooner had he finished, what time was tea going to be ready, and what’s more how come no one’s done the washing-up, we can’t eat off dirty plates. It got worse: he would plummet through the years, to find himself stranded at some point in the past, unaware of his predicament and eager for a future that had already occurred.
Dr Buckle at Chudleigh was harsh in his diagnosis. “It’s the cider, Mrs Freemantle. Stop him drinking and these lapses won’t trouble him any more.” Mother felt everything she’d tried to ignore rise up from her liver. In the very first month of their marriage he’d disappeared one evening and she eventually found him in the barn, an empty flagon beside his unconscious body.
“Is it me?” she’d sobbed the next morning.
“Tis me, my lover,” he’d replied, pulling her to him with the tenderness he’d never entirely lose. But while she dissolved gratefully into his reassuring arms, he continued to seek the oblivion of rough cider, melting into the night and drinking himself unconscious.
“Why?” she pleaded.
And he would look away and say: “I couldn’t tell ‘ee.”
After the initial shock, mother managed to convince herself it didn’t threaten her: it was Daddy’s secret, solitary weakness that dragged him off into the darkness but returned him more loving than ever. She was too grateful to him not to ignore it, too grateful to the school classmate who ignored her but whom she’d never forgotten, and who suddenly reappeared seven years later at her front door. He’d walked across the Valley and up through Teign Village, where net curtains were lifted for prying eyes, so that even before he reached Hennock she’d heard on the grapevine that he was heading that way, and wondered with envy who he was visiting.
He knocked on her door and her heart jumped.
“Do ‘ee want to walk up the reservoirs with me?” he’d smiled. And so they walked, swapping news but talking less and less, though his smile said enough as they circled the reservoirs that damp autumn afternoon, their fingers imperceptibly becoming entwined.
“I’ll be back next Sunday,” Daddy told her at her gate.
§
It was in unconscious imitation of his own father that Daddy courted a woman from outside the village. Although she wasn’t a stranger, as grandmother had been, since she’d been to the same school as everyone else in the Valley, and neither did she possess grandmother’s provocative beauty, still the women of the village resented her intrusion. They suspected her of having crept up on Daddy and seduced him while he was working alone in one of the hidden fields near the river, unwilling to accept that she was Daddy’s own, enigmatic choice.
That habit the men of our line had of bringing wives into the village from outside was one of the things that set our family apart. Another was the practice of reasoning with their children instead of beating them, a practice that had been widely derided but which continued for three generations, right up until mother destroyed a tradition she herself had strained harder than anyone to continue, when on the first of October she would lose control and strap me, as her own father had done to her.
§
Grandfather made new windows for the entire house as a wedding present, and grandmother moved their things out of the main bedroom to give way to the bride. Daddy joined grandfather in his workshop to carve the parts of the bed they would share, and took his advice: “Make it good and big, bay; sometimes you’ll want all the space you can get for love, an’ other times you’ll need all that space to put between you.”
On the morning after their wedding night Daddy woke early. He didn’t want to wake his bride, gently snoring beside him, and he wondered what to do with himself. Then he noticed her shoes lying where she’d kicked them off, in the middle of the room. He took them, along with all the other pairs she’d put in the wardrobe, downstairs to the kitchen. When she came down to make breakfast she found the table covered with rows of shining shoes.
From then on Daddy polished shoes every day, before he did anything else. He found it a pleasing way to wake up, and he continued as his children grew, placing Ian’s toddler’s sandals beside grandfather’s heavy workman’s boots. Mother told me that she sometimes found him transfixed by the sight of his children’s tiny shoes on the kitchen table, and when he realized she was there he would blush and hide his watery eyes from her as he gathered them up.
§
He’d been locked in the past for months at a time when Dr Buckle at last referred him, too late, to a neurologist in Exeter.
“He’s suffering from alcoholic degeneration of the mamillary bodies,” the specialist told mother. “He won’t recover his memory.”
While white strands were appearing in his unruly crown of hair Daddy himself was growing younger, percolating through his own past until amnesia gripped him for good at an isolated, unchanging moment in his childhood, present joining the lost past as daily experience soaked like receding water into the sands of forgetting. That was my Daddy, a man constantly disorientated by a world where people grew old overnight and moved house without warning, where everyday objects became mysterious totems withholding their true meaning, so that I’d come across him switching a light on and off in amazement or trying to speed up the brewing tea with mother’s liquidizer, because he’d gone back to live in a world before the day that electricity came to the village, on which
cows danced in the meadow that ran down to the stream.
Somehow we remained at least faintly familiar to him, as if our daily contact contained some coagulant that could partially plug the haemorrhage of memory, but even so, you sensed that it was like the disconcerting familiarity felt on meeting a stranger in a dream.
§
Coming back from the quarry pool through the vibrant heat haze that Friday morning I felt myself as if invisible, the cells of my body insinuating themselves into the thickening air, as I came into the yard. Mother was hanging up white sheets on the washing-line. Over at the barn Daddy was passing the last bales of hay down from the loft, a task so repetitive that there weren’t sufficient intervals in which to forget the rest of the chore. Reappearing from the shadows gripping another bale by its twine and using his knee to swing it out from the loft, before letting it drop to Ian, Daddy was imbued with an illusory decisiveness and strength. Mother grasped a sheet and leaned into it, and regret stole her breath away. She stayed that way, breathing hard.
“Mother!” Ian’s voice snapped her out of herself. He came across to her. “Us is at the end of the early crop, near’s dammit. We’ve got a week’s feed left. I didn’t want to say nothin’ las’ night, but you ought to know. ‘Cos then we either buys or slaughters.”
He climbed onto his tractor and manoeuvred away. Daddy was sitting at the loft door, legs dangling, waiting for something to occur to him. Mother hurriedly pegged the rest of the washing onto the line, returned to the kitchen, and rolled herself a cigarette from the tobacco Ian kept in an old cigar box on the mantelpiece. When Ian was a boy and smoked in secret, she used to confiscate his cigarettes whenever she caught him puffing in the worksheds. After he’d gone to bed she smoked them herself. She never came to look like a smoker, though; she looked like a young girl still learning how to.
She inhaled the smoke deep into her lonely lungs. She had no friends in the village, and she never once returned to Hennock after Daddy brought her to the farm past the jealous scrutiny of the other women; their suspicion, though, only encouraged her pride and she carried herself aloof from them all: the intimacy with her one man was enough for her. In the early years of their marriage they’d meet by chance in the bedroom, drawn by a mutual whim, and mother would re-emerge into a friendly world with her body lighter. Recently, she’d noticed how her limbs had grown clumsy, and would knock into things for no good reason.
Mother rolled herself another cigarette, and as she put the lid back on the box her attention was caught by the framed set of school photographs that made us all look the same age. Mother picked it up and placed it on the table beside her as she lit her cigarette and inhaled the coarse smoke. Disappointment rose inside of her; she felt it hiss through her throat with the smoke as she studied those pictures of her children, from whom Daddy had hidden his drinking, teaching Ian chess with the set given him years before by auntie Sarah’s grandchildren from Bristol, and taking Pamela with him on his long Sunday walks around the parish, which encouraged her gregariousness, as the walks became for her simply the route from one remote farm to another, where she could renew acquaintance with friends; the flowers and birds and boundaries that Daddy pointed out held no interest for Pamela and were instantly forgotten.
It was true that he never saw much of Tom, who even as a small boy would beg to go off and help grandfather mending fences, dipping sheep, or dismantling tractor engines, invariably coming in long after his bedtime and resenting the daylight hours he had to spend at school, aching for the weekends, and beyond them the holidays, and further ahead to when he’d be able to spend all of his time tending the animals and the land.
So that when their father was swept through the house in his wind of confusion, breaking all the mirrors, my brothers and sister awoke convinced they were still dreaming.
And mother had no idea who to turn to. There was no question of her approaching grandmother: Daddy was her favourite child, and mother was sure she’d hear nothing said against him, would only blame mother for anything wrong, even more than she did herself. Finally she swallowed her pride and, even though ever since the previous Granny Sims had died the sewing circle had been steadily losing its power, she had to talk to someone. In Granny Sims’ front room half a dozen elderly women sat around dropping stitches and reliving the times when what was decided in that circle, from the buying and selling of land and livestock to prospective marriages, was invariably carried out. Mother took along some socks and darning wool, and the older women, as self-important as their predecessors even as their influence waned, leaned back in the armchairs, lace chair coverings like aureolae behind their heads, so that they resembled the fading saints on the church screen. Mother told her story and when she’d finished, after a period of silence punctuated by the clicking of knitting needles, Granny Sims leaned forward and told her: “You’re a woman. This is yours to bear.”
Mother stubbed her cigarette out in the bottom of a teacup, squashing it with her thumb as if by putting out every tiny ember she might extinguish her thoughts. But it was no use. Watching from the dim passageway, I saw her pick up the photos that made us seem like quadruplets: Ian, their chess prodigy for whom anything was possible, but who relented to the pressure from his grandfather and uncles to take over the farm that they’d been propping up until he left school. Mother sent off for prospectuses from every university and polytechnic in the country, but Ian did no more than leaf silently through them in the evenings. Still addicted to the mathematical perfection of chess, but with no opponent of sufficiently high calibre in the area, he’d entered the chimerical labyrinths of chess problems, staying up half the night in his bedroom poring over the inanimate pieces on their chequered board, though always reappearing before dawn to dispel the heavy cloud of fatigue from his shoulders with mugs of bitter tea, before setting off into the fields.
Pamela at least would escape, but then she’d been born without ties. Mother remembered the words of the old Granny Sims, who looked at her baby after the christening and told her: “She’ll cut the cord, Deborah; you can always tell.”
She possessed a freedom the rest of us lacked, as if she had just come to visit one day and had stayed a bit longer than expected. It occurred to me that maybe my own sister was in fact the guest I had been expecting. Her freedom showed in all sorts of small ways: she’d never acquired the modesty that others had, who would be embarrassed by opening the bathroom door and finding her there naked, washing her hair in the basin or painting her toenails. In fact she took over the communal rooms as if they were set aside for her personal use. Whereas the rest of us trooped in and out of the bathroom, she set up camp there, with her tray of bath oils, scented soaps, essential perfumes, facial cleansers and toners, moisturizing creams, shampoos and conditioners and massage lotions. She squirted into the bath drops of oil and scented water from various containers and ran the taps, spreading through the house aromas of lavender, coconut and roses. When the bath was full and steaming she immersed herself and stayed there, deaf to the pleas of her family, whose bladders were bursting and who’d been waiting half an hour already, because she couldn’t see why they wouldn’t come in and use the facilities anyway; she didn’t mind.
She liked me to read to her from her magazines while she lay in the bath, allowing her skin to luxuriate in the essential oils of mint and oranges, massaging herself in the water. The articles she most enjoyed were quizzes designed to ascertain whether or not she was a woman who loved too much, or a human doormat, or chased her best friends’ boyfriends, or had the problem of being a successful businesswoman but a failure in love. She answered them all, carefully selecting the answer to each question, and I ticked them off as the pages of the magazine became damp and soggy in the sauna of a bathroom, until the biro refused to work any more.
She stood up to wash her hair under the shower attachment Ian had installed, although he’d never got round to fixing a plastic curtain rail around the bath, so that the water sprayed all over the fl
oor. Pam stood under the jet of water with her eyes closed, her body foamy with shower gel, with a smile on her face. She always peed when she took a shower: she couldn’t help herself; relaxing under the water that coursed over her body, she let go of the water inside her.
When she finally evacuated the bathroom, to the relief of her family, they found a scene of mayhem in which some natural disaster had occurred: water was dripping off the ceiling, the floor was flooded, towels had disappeared, soap was stuck to the bottom of the bath, the tops of the toothpaste tubes had vanished, and suddenly we were all out of toilet paper.
It was the same in the kitchen: there was an unwritten rule that we ate our meals together at the same time every day, breakfast at seven-fifteen and dinner at six-thirty. But Pam took less and less notice: she swept downstairs only when she heard the newcomers who gave her a lift to Exeter beeping their horn in the lane, and she grabbed whatever was on the table as she passed. In the evenings she rarely came home till late, and mother gave up putting a plate in the oven for her, because it always ended up in the pigswill. Yet mother never reproached her. She knew she’d missed the opportunity, and exactly when it had arisen: one Saturday evening five years before, when she was fifteen years old, Pamela had asked to be excused from the supper table early, because she was going out. Mother assumed she’d be off to watch television in one of the other girls’ houses, or to play in one of their rooms, as she and her friends usually did. We were finishing dessert when she reappeared in the kitchen with mascaraed eyes and vermilion lips, a pair of black net gloves that went up to her elbows and matched her tights, a black lycra dress which hugged all the curves that showed she’d become a woman, and a certain perfume whose scent caused her older brother to stop breathing. The fact was she’d grown up overnight: her father didn’t recognize her, and mother was too astonished to say anything before Pam had walked across the kitchen and through the door, said ‘See you later’ over her shoulder, and got onto the back of a stranger’s motorbike revving up in the lane. And having missed her opportunity then, instead of pouring out her cold anger, burning her daughter’s precocious wardrobe and tying her down to a regime of punishment, as everyone expected, mother simply accepted the fact that Pamela lived according to different rules from the rest of us, and from then on treated her as an equal.
