by Tim Pears
Grandmother was lying in bed, her eyes closed, not breathing. Grandfather was sat in his old grey dressing-gown, on a chair side-on to the bed, on the far side from me, both hands on the eiderdown, bent over. Pam was standing beside him, one hand on the back of his chair. Ian and mother both stood at the end of the bed, while Tom and Daddy were standing off away on the other side. They were all looking at grandmother as if waiting for her to say something, all of them frozen, except for grandfather: it was the first and last time I saw his tears. He wept as silently as he could, because even in this, the saddest moment of his life, he couldn’t overcome his customary reserve and grieve openly. With a superhuman effort he held back his sorrow, his mouth clamped shut. Instead his sobs, forced up from the guts of his grief, broke in his throat, so that he looked as if a fishbone were stuck in his gullet. Tears, though, were not so easily thwarted. They brimmed out of his blue eyes and slid over his cheekbones.
I’d not looked at grandmother since my first glance took in the whole room. I didn’t want to look at her. That’s why I stared at grandfather. But the truth came up from inside me. From the doorway I ran to the bed and was on it before anyone could move, trying to bury myself in beside her, trying to lose myself in her. Ian dragged me off and carried me away; they said I was screaming and shaking. I don’t remember. He took me into his room and let me cry with him.
§
That night Tom slept on the sofa downstairs, to give grandfather his bed. Grandfather couldn’t sleep. The doctor had given him some sleeping pills but he ignored them. He missed the damp heat of her body and her shallow, anxious breathing. He calculated that from the age of twenty-four he’d not slept a single moment without her beside him, since even when he went to bed before her exhausted, in the middle of harvest or in the stupor of Christmas, he was unable to fall asleep until she was curled up beside him and the rhythm of her breathing had changed; and in the morning he always woke a few minutes before her, with a farmer’s bad conscience, bad-temperedly rising through the darkness towards his first mug of tea. And he resolved there and then that he’d never again sleep without her. He got out of Tom’s bed, pulled on his moth-eaten dressing-gown, and returned to their bedroom. There he pulled a chair from the wall up to the bed, took his tobacco pouch from the pocket of his dressing-gown, and filled his pipe. He felt calm, not in a smug or unfeeling way, but because the worst had happened, and now he knew what was to come. He recalled the disastrous summer after the war which almost destroyed the precarious economy of the farm, and how at the moment they understood the full extent of the crisis—their herd wasting away, crops failed—he’d experienced this same sense of utter calm, floating above the disaster and seeing it grow smaller and insignificant.
And as he sat smoking beside her, so he forgave grandmother for doing the one and only thing that in the fifty-six years of their marriage he’d ever asked her not to do, which was to die before him.
§
The next day a man came dressed in a piano tuner’s clothes, and he spent an hour in grandmother’s room with the door closed. The following day the man returned with two of his brothers, carrying a child’s coffin. As soon as he saw it grandfather lost his temper and ordered them out of the house. Ian conciliated them out in the yard, till grandfather appeared with grandmother’s wedding dress, neatly folded and wrapped in tissue paper.
“Use that to measure it this time,” he told them, turning on his heels, and as he slammed the door behind him he spat out: “Disrespectful bastards.”
§
Grandmother died with so little fuss that none of us could quite take it in. We were stunned. We’d not prepared ourselves, having missed each of the many clues she’d laid before us in her thoughtful way, dismissing as further signs of second childhood her abstract asides, telling no one in particular that ‘I’ve packed my bags,’, ‘We’ll miss the last train if it don’t come soon,’ and ‘I don’t want no flowers, maid.’
It was the sight of the tiny coffin which so angered grandfather that made me realize she was really dead. I kept on remembering her as she was alive, with her smell of face powder, her large bony hands and her throaty voice, fixing an image of her in my mind to last me through the years ahead, to fill the gaping hole inside me, but each memory only made it worse. I needed to cry, to share the loss, but no one else wanted to. They must have been sad too but they wouldn’t show it, they put rigid masks on their faces and bit their lips and went off to their rooms alone.
I ran all the way to Johnathan’s house across the Valley in the dark, too distraught to be scared, and threw pebbles at his unlit window. Eventually the curtain opened, and then closed again immediately. For one desolate moment I thought he’d hidden himself deep under the bed-covers, but then the light went on around the curtains. Next thing he was at the front door in his pyjamas, ushering me inside.
I didn’t give him a chance to ask me what I was doing: as soon as our eyes met I lost all self-control and fell forward into his skinny arms, engulfed in tears.
I must have made a racket. I was dimly aware that at some point the Viscount appeared on the stairs, a misty, bemused vision in his dressing-gown, and I heard Johnathan say: “It’s all right, father, I’ve got a visitor.”
He didn’t say another word until I’d exhausted myself and all I had left were snuffly, choking breaths. Then he extricated his damp pyjama-top from my clammy embrace, poured a glass from his parents’ drinks cabinet and said: “Swallow this.” It was sour and burning. Then he took me upstairs, pulled my trainers and jeans off, and laid his duvet over me, and I sank into sleep beside him.
§
Grandfather had never allowed dogs inside the house. He’d been given his first one, a new-born puppy, for his first birthday, so that they could grow up together. The puppy, a black and white mongrel bitch called Nipper, soon outgrew him, but only for a brief period before he caught her up again, and grew up and away from her. She remained his shadow throughout his childhood, and before she’d died, at the age of fourteen, he’d replaced her with one of her identical granddaughters, the runt of the latest litter because they make the best sheepdogs. Her name was Tinker. That was the pattern for the rest of his life: he not only replaced each one as she grew old with one of her granddaughters, always a bitch, but he christened each one with the name of her grandmother’s grandmother. For that reason, and the fact that he taught them to respond to the same gruff commands, grandfather almost convinced himself that he was accompanied throughout his long life by one or other of the same two dogs, reacting with the same quicksilver obedience to his commands, even before he’d uttered them, as they had when he was nine years old: nipping the heels of a lazy bullock; retrieving rabbits stunned by the invisible bullets of his .22 rifle; or selecting a sheep in the middle of a flock and circling it at such mesmerizing speed that it thought itself surrounded, and gave in.
Now, though, without telling anyone, he invited Tinker inside, to share his vigil at grandmother’s side. He’d explained to me that to calculate a dog’s age relative to a person’s you had to multiply by seven, and by that reckoning Tinker was almost a hundred years old. She let herself in and out by the kitchen door, waiting patiently for someone to appear and open it, and then padding through without looking at us, shy as her master but proceeding with assurance of her right to go, now, where she’d not been allowed to since she was a small puppy and my companion.
She sat beside him, as he sat beside grandmother, with her paws crossed, glassy-eyed and blinking slowly. Now and then she climbed onto a chair by the window, put her front paws on the sill, and looked outside, eyes wide open, as if waiting for grandmother’s spirit to return.
I knew it never would. They’d brought back a larger coffin, and grandmother looked lost inside it. The undertaker’s embalming fluid had given her the complexion of waxed fruit. I tried not to look at her when I came, with a mug of sickly sweet tea or a feather for his pipe, to keep grandfather company. Members of the family came to the
house, and they stood beside grandfather with a hand on his shoulder, expressing platitudes of sympathy he ignored, and coughing in the fug of tobacco smoke that filled the room. Word got round the village of how grandfather puffed on his pipe beside the body of his wife, and people tutted to each other at such behaviour.
§
Dusk was absorbing the light in the room, and we’d been sitting silently, when he suddenly said, without turning to me: “Er idn’t gone, maid, ‘er’s waitin’.”
“What for, grandpa?”
“For me, maid. And ‘twon’t be too long, I can assure ‘ee of that.”
“Then what, grandpa?”
“Then us’ll be ‘gether ‘gain.” He spoke with calm finality, and there was no more to be said. I wanted to ask him where it was they were going to meet, what they’d do together. But I knew it would only irritate him. He had lost part of himself, and looked forward only to losing the rest, having decided to believe that in doing so he would in reality become whole again.
The next time he spoke I was dozing, but was brought back instantly by his quiet voice in the darkness.
“They says other men falls in love in springtime. Me, I met your grandmother in autumn, and I courted her through the winter: we was married in May, near enough sixty year ago, that’s the reason us endured, like.” His voice began to waver. “It don’t make no sense, but they you plants September gets their roots in best. You could dig up an old vegetable garden been abandoned fifty year, and still bring up a stack of tatties on your fork.”
Grandfather coughed, and a gob of phlegm slid up his throat. He spat it into his handkerchief. “Leave me now, maid. I wants to be alone with ‘er.”
§
When the Rector came he didn’t stay long. I took him upstairs to grandfather. I’d never seen just the two of them together before. They had little to say to each other. The Rector was confident of his ability to lend comfort to the bereaved, even to those who rarely came to church, because at such a time they were glad to accept that the person they’d lost had not been wiped out but had moved on to a more important place, and that they too would join them there when the time came. But grandfather only listened politely, impassive, and when the Rector paused grandfather gave him a list of hymns she would have wanted sung at her funeral, and got up to see him out.
A long time ago grandfather had consented to attend confirmation classes because his mother, who sang in the choir when we still had one, long before the days of Corporal Alcock, insisted that he did so. But after his first communion at the age of thirteen, when he took his wafer and sip of wine from the purple-robed Bishop of Exeter, he determined never to go to church again except, reluctantly, for baptisms, weddings and funerals, and then only to please the women. He didn’t even go with most of the other men of the village to midnight mass on Christmas Eve, when the damp smell and the scent of candles was overpowered by alcohol on the breath of unsteady men, who’d hurried back from the pub at Ashton. In our family it was different: each Sunday morning, until her arthritis forced her to accept sick communion at home, grandmother led her offspring to church while grandfather stayed behind, reading the Sunday papers that Fred delivered, and occasionally basting the roast.
Grandfather wasn’t anti-religion, like some among his generation, who’d watched, as their parents and grandparents had watched with unceasing bitterness, the complicity between priest and Viscount, and who’d greeted the Rector with such hostility when he first arrived. It was just that little of what grandfather had read in Sunday School or sung in the hymns or heard from the pulpit made any sense to him. If God had ever existed at all He’d been only a fleeting visitor, like one of the magicians who entertained the crowd at Chudleigh Carnival for a brief period in grandfather’s youth: he imagined God passing through the world of inanimate matter like a magnet across iron filings, causing them to dance into being, and then leaving the world to its fate and continuing on His journey. Responsible as God supposedly was for an infinity of stars, grandfather couldn’t see how He would have had time to linger on earth and supervise its growing pains, maintaining a personal interest in every one of the millions who’d professed faith in Him.
Apart from this life-breathing God of a fleeting wind, grandfather didn’t believe in the all-seeing and omnipotent Father of religion, because in his experience everything could be explained by nature. Its laws could be learned and respected, and when they were transgressed or tampered with then someone had to suffer. Certainly there were many things no one understood, but knowledge was something gradually accumulated in time: things that in his childhood were inconceivable had become commonplace during his lifetime: television, broadcasting events from the other side of the world even as they happened; travel, in God’s footsteps, to other planets; automatic washing machines in almost every home; babies conceived in glass tubes; dead men’s hearts sewn into other people’s bodies, to pump an extra lifetime.
There were many things no one understood, but any fool could see that there was no limit to knowledge. Only people who knew more than was good for them imagined their knowledge to give them power over nature. Nature would always prove unpredictable; but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be predicted.
Here in the Valley, on the farms, they knew enough about the earth and about animals to copy their parents’ customs, adding one or two of their own, to exist in an uneasy, mistrustful, respectful partnership with nature. At least that’s how it used to be.
Neither did grandfather believe in life after death, because he couldn’t see how something could live apart from its body, and he knew the difference between a body and a carcass because he’d seen so many hundreds, thousands of them in his life. When an animal died, whether it was human, bovine, or one of his beloved dogs, then that was it, the end of the story, and life was for the living. Grandmother’s sentimental attachment to the piskies and angels of her childhood had just been a weakness she’d not wanted to grow out of, and which he’d patiently put up with without ever making fun of her.
So when he told me that all he wanted was to rejoin her I knew he’d not undergone an easy conversion, grasping in his distress after dishonest consolation. What he meant was that he knew he couldn’t live without her and that he’d rather join her in oblivion, in the darkness that awaited them, than remain here without her.
§
In the days after the funeral, of which I have no memory at all, except for Auntie Sarah’s Toll rung on the bell as we walked away from the grave, grandfather’s habits gradually resumed their normal pattern: when the cock first crowed he rose as usual, washed and dressed in his vinegary silence, drank a mug of sweet tea with Ian and Tom, and followed them into the yard for their early morning chores before breakfast. And so he carried on through the days, padding like a somnambulist through his familiar routines, performing superfluous tasks that didn’t need doing that summer when time stood still, with Tinker at his heel, as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, showing no more sign of his grief. He came back into the house at dusk, hung his cap on the hook in the hallway, consumed the meal mother left for him in the oven, and then watched television if there was a wildlife programme on, before slipping upstairs without saying goodnight, as was his habit.
Grandfather brushed his teeth, put on his pyjamas and wrapped himself up in his grey woollen dressing-gown to contain the shivers of an old man despite the unrelenting temperature. The only thing different from normal was that now Tinker came in with him and curled herself up at his feet, blinking her heavy eyelids in the way that dogs do, pretending they’re not sleepy. He filled his pipe as usual for his last smoke of the day, staring into the darkness through the window he’d once made, while around him the members of the household made their ways to their own bedrooms.
He showed us no sign of grief. But at night, while the rest of the world was sleeping, grandfather lay on his back and stared at the ceiling, not bothering to take off his dressing-gown or get under the covers, and half-way throug
h the night he turned over and faced the wall. He was surprised by how little willpower it took to stay awake, having prepared himself as if for a swim from one side of the quarry pool to the other, braving the pull of the deep as he had as a young man, remembering well how cramp attacked your body only when you were stranded in the middle. He imagined that sleep, too, would drag him down when he was at his most vulnerable, at two AM in the dead calm of the night. Instead, having decided to stay awake, he found sleep exerted no pull on him, no yawns, no feeling of fatigue. His only problem was boredom. He’d never had reason to appreciate how long a night lasts. Now, with nothing to do the nights seemed interminable, and grandfather wondered how he’d make his way across them to the dawn. Boredom like he’d never known threatened to shrivel his spirit, and he had no resources with which to combat it: he refused to seek refuge in memories, because he didn’t believe in living in the past, and neither could he escape into the future, for he had no plans at all. He fell back on his willpower, and rediscovered his implacable resolve of a youthful suitor, who’d forced his horse through waist-high drifts every Sunday of a distant winter, to persuade the young woman of the moor to become his bride. He told himself he was courting her now, except that instead of inviting her to join him in a new life, he was coming to rejoin her in death.
That was how grandfather kept himself awake until the world outside began to take shape in the first light of dawn, which came as a great relief but which he greeted nevertheless in cantankerous mood, resenting it out of habit even as it prised him from the torturous boredom of his bed.
