1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves

by Tim Pears

  §

  Grandfather told no one of his sleepless nights, as he carried on throughout the day as usual, and no one noticed anything was wrong, because they were too wrapped up in themselves.

  Ian was busy planning the final changes that he said would take the farm into the twenty-first century. “Agriculture’s an industry now,” he reminded us. “We’ve got to compete with big business, and not just in this country but all of Europe too. Us’ll have no more chickens pecking grit in the yard,” he said, as he drove off to consult with architects over building plans to house battery hens. “Animals is a waste of land resource,” he said, “cereals is where the money is today,” as he made a telephone call to book in good time the services of a crop-spraying aeroplane for the following summer.

  As for Pamela, I hardly noticed that she hadn’t been around until she appeared one Sunday in a hire-van, which she filled with the contents of her room before kissing us goodbye and going back to a flat she’d rented in Exeter. Tom, meanwhile, spent more time than ever with Susanna, and they never let go of each other. They were like two people blinded by some accident who needed the constant reassurance of touch to verify their bodies were still intact.

  Then one evening it was announced on the local news that the strike was over and all the schools would be back to normal the following Monday. Mother looked over at me and said: “What a mollywallops you is, Alison. We can’t have you goin’ off to school like that.”

  “What’re you on about?” I asked.

  “Come with me,” she said, and took me into the kitchen, where she put a towel round my neck and sheets of newspaper on the floor. I couldn’t believe it: she knew how grandmother went on about my hair being special in the family, but I was speechless before this callous act of sabotage. Long clumps of shiny black hair fell on my lap and on the floor around me. And I sat there in silent fury.

  As soon as she’d finished I stormed out of the kitchen and looked in the mirror in the hallway, to discover with a shock that I wasn’t me any more. My drastic haircut revealed a stranger who gaped back, with my eyes and mouth and nose and everything but they’d changed somehow, been refashioned into a bizarrely altered model of myself. As if my long hair had been covering up changes in me. And as I stared at my strange reflection mother called through from the kitchen, as if reading my mind: “That’s right: you’re not a child any more, girl.”

  §

  It was Daddy who asked: “What’s up with the old man?” and we watched grandfather for a day or two. He’d told no one of his sleepless nights, but something in his manner betrayed him, a hesitancy in his movement, his limbs preoccupied. We all noticed it now, but we couldn’t put a finger on its cause, so mother called out Dr Buckle. Grandfather didn’t object to being examined: he stripped to his string vest and subjected himself to Dr Buckle’s clumsy fingers tapping his hollow back, to the cold metal of his stethoscope, which made him tremble, and to a spatula pressed upon his tongue. Dr Buckle pronounced him fit as a fiddle, but in the kitchen he whispered to mother that his heartbeat seemed sluggish, and that it might be a good idea if he stopped smoking. And so it was that grandfather let mother take his pipe away, without a word of complaint relinquishing his one consolation, in what he’d decided were to be the last days of his life.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Brothers

  As soon as he was strong enough the Rector had loaded the rest of Maria’s belongings into the Commer parish van and brought them to the rectory. If he thought people would be scandalized he was wrong: no one batted an eyelid. The few who even noticed only wondered why he hadn’t done it years ago. They’d seen it coming long before the Rector ever had, because although he’d preached his gospel of love to the world he’d lived so long without it himself he’d learned how to manage.

  Now Maria moved into his house and into his life with so little fuss that the Rector had to pinch himself to realize she hadn’t always inhabited them, except that he was experiencing emotions he’d not felt in forty years. At first he couldn’t fathom what they were, until it finally dawned on him that he was in love. The confusing difference was that when he was a younger man, he recalled with painful nostalgia, those emotions had made themselves manifest by wreaking havoc throughout his body, making his spine tingle, his stomach churn, his mind spin, his kidneys overact, his knees tremble and his sense of balance go haywire. Now his feelings were concentrated in one single organ, his heart, which pumped warm and contented blood around his body.

  §

  Maria didn’t try to change the Rector’s way of life at all. She was as much a confirmed spinster as he was a reconstituted bachelor; she put her food in the fridge and explained in Portuguese that the bottom shelf was for her and the rest for him, and they even cooked separate meals.

  At eight-thirty in the morning she left the house and didn’t reappear until a quarter past five with a bundle of sheets she proceeded to iron in front of the mirror in the old drawing-room. Their lives ran parallel to each other until after supper, when they’d washed up their own utensils, one after the other, and the Rector had retreated to his study. Then Maria walked in, sat down in the armchair without even looking at him, and proceeded to read a book. The first evening the Rector found it difficult to concentrate on the sermon he was writing and kept looking at her because he felt her gaze burning his skin. But whenever he glanced in her direction he only found her engrossed in her reading. The second evening, however, he calmed down, and discovered that her quietly breathing presence made him feel better inside in some mysterious way and, if anything, helped him in his work.

  At half past ten his concentration was broken by the firm thud of a book being closed and he looked up to see Maria rising from her seat. She stepped forward, said something in her native language, smiled, kissed him goodnight, and retired to her room next to his at the end of the upstairs corridor.

  §

  On the fourth day after her arrival the Rector was finishing his breakfast of bacon and eggs as Maria made to leave for work.

  “Wait a minute,” he said, forgetting in his absent-minded way that she didn’t understand a word he said. “Look, Maria, there’s no need for you to go and clean people’s houses any more. My income’s large enough for both our needs.”

  Maria smiled at him. “Don’t be soft,” she said in a strange Portuguese—Devonian accent, “I’ve not been supported by a man since I were nine year old. There in’t no need to start now, silly.”

  §

  Grandfather tried to keep up with the boys, but when he realized about midway through the morning that he was only holding them up, he dropped back and let them get on with their work. He’d spend the rest of the day pottering around doing things he’d never done in his life before but found were quite useful, determined to leave the farm in as good a condition as possible, sure that Ian would realize his foolishness and scale down his ambition, while cursing himself for making the farm so much bigger than the one his father had passed on to him. It was something he’d never particularly wanted to do anyway, it had just happened, somehow. Now he sanded down and painted the door- and window-frames of the sheds and creosoted their beams, in preparation for the piglets they’d surely buy in the spring; he spent three days pruning the apple and pear trees in the orchard, so unsteady on the ladder that Daddy and I had to take turns standing on the bottom rung; and he went around setting light to clumps of dead grass at the foot of trees and along fences. I had to watch him then, too, in my last week before school, because Ian was sure he’d start a fire, since everything on the surface of the earth was tinder dry. But grandfather’s little fires never got out of control: he understood the element. It was actually from him that Ian had inherited his skill at burning stubble.

  Once he’d started, grandfather took to burning dried grass with an enthusiasm that was compulsive. He didn’t even notice that I was there: he just went from one clump to another, tested the wind by licking his finger and holding it up in the air, and struck
a match. He set off little pyres all over a field and left charred patches behind him; it was like he was making obsequies for grandmother. He’d found his own way of saying goodbye to her, all across their farm.

  Then grandfather looked around and saw me. “These bloody wasps is gettin’ on my nerves, Alison,” he said. “They’s everywhere. Come on, I’ll show you how to burn their nest, flush the buggers out for good.”

  We found them drifting in and out of a hedge in the bank up behind the house, and grandfather pulled up some armfuls of dried grass: oblivious of wasps buzzing around his head he stuffed the grass into the hedge. I stood well back.

  “Aren’t you getting stung, grandpa?” I called.

  “In’t no use worryin’ about that, maid. Go get a can of petrol out the barn.”

  He emptied the entire contents over the wodge of grass. The air shimmered, and stank of petrol. He stepped back, grinning all over his face.

  “You can’t use half measures with these buggers,” he declared. He struck a match and nicked it towards the hedge. Nothing happened, so he did it again, but again the match died.

  “Damn!” he said, and stepped forward. He struck another match and reached out with it: the petrol-soaked grass whooshed up in a rush of flame. Grandfather staggered back, his hair and eyebrows singed, but still grinning, while above the roar of the fire came the buzzing of angry wasps, as hundreds of them came out into the air and swarmed around in irate, confused circles.

  “That’ll do the job,” grandfather said, as he turned and hobbled back to the house. I picked up the empty petrol can and followed him.

  That night I had a dream: it was soon after dawn, but everyone else was sleeping. A damp, early morning mist clung to the earth, bleaching the colours so that everything was a dull lifeless shade of grey or green, and muffling whatever sounds might have carried from the fields around. Then a distant, intermittent clacking entered the edges of my hearing. As it grew louder I recognized it as a horse’s hooves approaching at a gallop, coming into the village along the road behind the almshouse. It grew louder and louder in that grey, dull silence and then appeared past the houses on fire, bright orange flames raging from its mane and back and tail, frenziedly galloping through the village.

  §

  Ian was left to withstand alone the barrage of drivel that poured from Tom’s mouth, which he put up with stoically, keeping his irritation under control, until Tom started to explain the meaning of love. He wouldn’t have minded if Tom had asked his advice on the subject, realizing in time the trap he had set for himself and appealing to Ian to help extricate him. That was what Ian had been expecting, and he’d prepared his answers, not out of smugness but compassion. What he never expected was for Tom to start explaining to him, his older brother, about love. He told him what it felt like, like an illness except that it was the opposite, and he told him how to cope with the symptoms, which was to encourage them. He noted how strange it was, but true none the less, that when you really love someone the thing you most want to do is to die for them, and it was only a shame that no opportunity seemed to present itself. On the basis of Susanna’s behaviour he told Ian what women were like, in what ways they were different from men and in what ways the same. Ian couldn’t believe his ears. For the first day or two he smiled in response, his smile of complicity, acknowledging the joke, all the better for being such a meandering but sustained one, and welcome evidence of Tom’s newfound sense of humour. Eventually, though, he was forced to admit that Tom was serious, his monotonous monologue was indeed intended to impart the wisdom of his experience, and he had no time for humour because it was more important to tell Ian that he’d discovered something new in the world, more precious than life itself, more nutritious than meat, more substantial than the earth, and yet it was invisible, can you believe that? If people would only listen to him they’d become richer than people in olden times did from the discovery of tin up on Dartmoor, because this was something people made out of nothing, just by being together, and if he called it love that didn’t mean he was talking about the same thing people had talked about before when they used that word, it was just that he couldn’t think of a better one.

  “No, Ian,” he said, pausing for emphasis as Ian held another sheep down and Tom stood above him with the syringe. “No, the thing is, when you really loves someone ‘tis forever, like.”

  Ian’s irritation turned into anger. He bit his lip, but he felt the anger growing inside him. It increased as he glimpsed Tom and Susanna walking around the village arm in arm; it gave him a headache to catch them in the toolshed, Tom sitting on the workbench while Susanna blew her warm breath into his nostrils; he felt blood gather behind his eyeballs and tingle along his limbs as he watched from the window of his room, next to mine, as they said their lingering goodnights at her front door, disappearing into the shadow of the porch for a period that lengthened every night, until she opened the door and disappeared into the light. His anger mounted right up to that Saturday evening, when he came downstairs dressed like an Edwardian artisan for his night of a stalker on the dance floor, and saw them curled up together on the sofa in front of the television, their limbs so intertwined it was as if they’d been spliced together. Ian bolted his supper down and left without taking his customary glass of Calvados with grandfather and Daddy, slamming shut the door of his yellow van and leaving a brushstroke of burnt rubber in the yard.

  He never drank more than two pints of beer, sipping them slowly, because he could see no point in blurring the edges of pleasure. Now, though, he joined his footballing cronies at the bar and copied their uncivilized consumption of double whiskies followed by lager chasers. He’d never enjoyed their company outside the brief, intense intimacy of playing football together, but discovered now how much fun they were to be with when they were drunk, and he lost his bad feeling in their ribald bravado. His head felt light and hot at the same time, and he undid the top button of his shirt as men he’d never got to know before nudged him, shouted lewd references to certain girls in the hall, winked at each other, and argued their right to buy the next round.

  The alcohol flooded his senses, and he felt his instincts of a hunter bob only briefly and then disappear beneath the surface. Two girls he recognized but whose names he could not recall asked him and his goalkeeper to dance, and he stumbled past flashing lights into a minefield of music, with its thumping bass and ear-splitting treble, stepping on their toes and falling against them until they abandoned him in the middle of the dance floor.

  His friends greeted him back at the bar with admiration and laughter for such a clumsy show, their aloof captain one of the boys at last, no longer the stuck-up silent man they couldn’t help respecting but they didn’t have to like, who sneaked off with a different woman every week; here he was, having a drink with the lads and prepared to make a fool of himself. He put his arm around someone’s shoulder, emptied his glass and smiled with bleary-eyed pleasure.

  §

  He hadn’t even thought of Tom and Susanna for hours. His anger had dissipated, squeezed from his head by alcohol that took up all the space. He came back along the Valley road under the illusion that he was sober. The moon was not quite full, but it was so light that he considered cutting the lights of his van so that he could see more than just what their beam illuminated. There were no other cars about: he felt solid and sure, carefree and at ease. And then, precisely because he was so clear-headed he began to sense his anger with Tom rising once more. “Dammit,” he thought, “why should I make myself think of him?” But there was nothing he could do about it: his blood was pulsing more urgently and his muscles were tense, and he was unaware that his clenched knee was pressing the accelerator pedal down against the floor, as the road, raised up to avoid the spring thaw floods, passed the water meadows next to the river.

  Some years earlier the Rector, late for a meeting of the Valley parishes joint Flower Festival committee, being held in Bridford, had roared along the Valley road in his Triumph
Vitesse. He’d flashed past the Little Hyner lane at sixty miles an hour, past the Hyner Farm entrance at seventy, past the estate drive at eighty, and then entered the chicane in the road there. Unable to hold his lane, he’d had no option but to surrender to his fate and take the bend on the wrong side of the road, at which point he was passed by a car doing the same speed in the opposite direction, also on the wrong side of the road. At that moment the Rector understood that, against all logic, it was possible for God not only to direct the course of the universe but also to follow the destiny of each and every individual, by means of intermediaries in the form of guardian angels.

  Now Ian entered the same chicane, coming the opposite way the Rector had then, cursing his brother under his beery breath, driving on automatic pilot. Suddenly his mind shifted and he became conscious of being behind the wheel, only because some bastard had gone and extended the curve of the road. He thought for a moment that the road had been turned into a cul-de-sac with a roundabout at the end, that he was going to be brought right around in a complete circle and be sent back towards Christow, because the bend seemed to be going on for ever. His skin went dry and his blood turned to ice, he was ready for anything, but he knew he was powerless: if he tried to turn the wheel any harder down the van would flip right over, and if he took his foot off the accelerator it would surely skid. Time, too, bent into an endless curve: he seemed to have an age in which to ponder his misfortune. In fact he wanted to roll a cigarette and contemplate the beauty of the car’s unchangeable momentum, cruising in a lock-solid groove created by the combination of curvature, speed and gravity.

  “H’m,” he thought to himself, “‘tis invisible, like love.”

  When he saw the road straighten out at last, up ahead, he knew it was too far away, too late, that he and his old van wouldn’t make it, because the verge was suddenly coming closer.