1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (17 page)

We took our plastic cups of lemonade and coke up to the hay loft and looked down upon our parents and uncles and aunts and neighbours, amazed at their laughter, sullen faces cracking open when they got the steps right, and even wider when they got them wrong.

One by one the men were persuaded by other men’s wives to join in, and they fell off the sides of the barn like currants into mother’s cake mix. Mike Hatchings danced with Yvonne Ashplant and Jim Ashplant danced with Sylvia Hutchings. Old Martin, who wanted to partner everyone, was frustrated that there wasn’t time for that many dances even if they kept going all night, until he recalled that you couldn’t stay with one partner for the duration of a dance even if you wanted to but got passed on from one to another, and then he enjoyed himself more than anyone, grinning through a glaze of sweat. Stuart and Elsie hobbled around energetically, in decrepit imitation of an ancient ardour whose promise they’d never fulfilled.

Douglas Westcott, meanwhile, was so astounded by the Barbadian judge’s magnificent wife that she awoke in him for the duration of a square dance the excitement of his one and only, impetuous entanglement many years before, when he’d gone to the estate to slaughter the peacocks, and been brought a tray of tea by the Portuguese maid. Maria, who’d come to live in the old poet’s shack when the estate was sold, had become a grey-haired and distinguished matron who still refused to learn a word of English. She and Douglas barely recognized each other at the dance, and felt no emotion. Instead, people manoeuvred her and the Rector together, because their innocent love affair was an open secret obvious to everyone but they themselves.

Pamela had brought along two or three young men from her rehearsals, and they patiently took turns partnering her. And even mother, only half-ignored by the other women on this evening of a half-truce, danced not just with Daddy but with his brothers-in-law too.

Tom, though, hung around the bar run by Corporal Alcock, because the proximity of so many people gave him goose-pimples, along with other men unable even on this once-a-year occasion to shake off their discomfort in the company of others: Douglas, whose family had been so upset by the deterioration in his manners since his return that one by one they’d left Shilhay Farm; and grandfather, who leaned against the bar downing glasses of cider not a single one of which he paid for. They were bought by other men old enough to remember him as a sinewy youth stepping forward and knocking out the Cornish bully of a foreman at the quarry, before the Christmas Eve when it filled up with water.

With the beginning of each new dance Tom postponed his approach until the next one, and observed a succession of partners hold Susanna tightly and join in the swirling mayhem. Tom watched morosely as the hours spun by, drinking steadily, leaving his place against one of the pillars only to step outside and pee against the wall of the barn. After a while he wasn’t sure whether the chaos of dancers were spinning round or whether they were mannequins striking poses around which he and the other spectators hugging the walls of the barn were spinning. Only his stomach was still, but he could feel rising from its depths an inexplicable bubble of anger: he found himself scrutinizing the faces of the other men and he could perceive there, in the leering faces of his friends, in the dogs’ eyes of lonely farmers, in the lecherous lips of the old men and even in the mournful gaze of the piano tuner on the accordion a lascivious desire for the prettiest girl in the village. He managed to get outside just before the bubble burst and emptied his stomach in a corner of the Howards’ yard. He floated back into the barn as the caller announced the last waltz. Pausing only to cadge a polo mint off Corporal Alcock, Tom asked Susanna Simmons if he could have this dance. The piano tuner was already unstrapping his accordion.

“I’m afraid it’s taken,” she replied, nodding towards him.

Without a second’s hesitation Tom strode over: “Put that thing back on or I’ll break yer neck,” he told him. “And play it well,” he added, “or I’ll break yer fingers.”

He returned to Susanna’s side. “‘E forgot. ‘E’s gotta play ‘is concertina on this one too. ‘E apologizes, like, and asks you to let me take ‘is place.”

My practical brother had never danced a step in his life, uninterested in something that didn’t have a function, but he melted without fear into the precisely flowing movements of her body, and by a miracle of intuition concealed his clumsiness.

§

Mother took me and Daddy home while the rest of the world stayed awake. I didn’t want to go to sleep. I was spongy with fruit punch, but the music was still giddy in my head. I sat on the window-sill. There was only a sliver of moon, but by then the sky was so clear and the air so thin that night became like another day, in the lucid light of a lunar morning. It was so hot people found it impossible to sleep with anything touching their skin: they discarded pyjamas and nighties, then blankets, until by June we all slept covered with a single cotton sheet. Mother flung hers off in the stew of 2
AM
, and was shocked when she awoke to discover herself naked to the world.

Some people caught Ian’s disease, insomnia, as if reverting to the rhythms of poachers. They’d thresh around in bed, having thrown off sheets and clothes but still trapped in the discomfort of their own sweaty skins, changing position constantly, resentful of their partner’s peaceful breathing and infuriated to find they’d forgotten the simplest of childish skills, that of falling asleep.

Now, though, the village was alive with people making their way home from the dance, figures stumbling along the lane and disembodied voices shrieking and cursing.

One person going in the other direction, trudging home out of the village, was the solid silhouette of Douglas Westcott, who that summer resumed his youthful habit of scrutinizing the night sky for falling stars. Grandmother told me that his leaving home in a huff many years before, after being chided by his father for his bestial table manners, was only a pretext to go in search of a fallen angel he’d seen plummet through the sky. He was convinced she was the woman he’d loved in his previous life, who’d thrown herself into the quarry pool because they weren’t allowed to love each other. He scanned the faces of those in the vicinity in which he thought she’d landed, and gradually widened his search in ever expanding circles, figuring that traces of her landing would be evident in ripples. He’d reach a new port on some godforsaken continent and become excited by an aching familiarity in the sailors’ bars and the bakeries and the oddly surfaced streets, and he’d begin looking for her in the market place and in the temples and by the stream where they did their washing, until it slowly dawned on him that he’d been here before, and the only spoor he was following was his own; Douglas returned home with no hope, only to have it resuscitated that inscrutable summer when the sky was so clear that stars flickered like candles.

§

The last distant shouts of drunken revellers died down. A brief deceptive breeze fluttered up from the Valley and over in the copse between the old and new rectories the pine trees swooned.

The very last people walking out were Tom and Susanna Simmons, round and round the village, looking into each other’s eyes, gleaming with wine, their footsteps a dry whisper in the lunar silence, until they were finally swallowed up by moonshadow at the Simmons’ front door. After a long time the door opened and blew the shadow away. Susanna stepped inside, and the shadow returned, then Tom emerged into the moonlight and made his way home, but I’d fallen asleep before he reached the house.

Geographies of the Unconscious

M
other told me that when she was heavily pregnant with me she was walking back one day along the lane from the shop, when Douglas Westcott stepped out of nowhere. They both slowed down, like you do, and mother said hello; but Douglas didn’t say anything, he only fixed his grim gaze at her enormous stomach she had to hold in front of her as she walked. She wasn’t sure whether to feel flattered or uneasy, and she didn’t move. He stared at her stomach, then he looked up at her face. He seemed to be asking for something with his eyes, for permission; mother smiled, she didn’t know why. Douglas stepped forward, blushing but unflustered, and without a word put his hand on mother’s belly. She let it rest there a while, then she put her palm over the back of his hand and guided it over her stretched skin to where he could feel me kicking.

He closed his eyes and felt the faint, irregular heartbeat of a baby treading water in the womb, pushing through into his hard palm. Then he withdrew his hand, opened his eyes, looked at mother again, to say thank you perhaps, she wasn’t sure; and he stepped past her and walked away.

§

Who knows why he’d once left home the way he did? Grandmother knew his mother, but even she wasn’t certain. No one knew for sure.

They said he was heartbroken by the Portuguese maid at the big house; they said he’d gone and fallen in love with the crazy woman who’d killed herself the year before he was born: it didn’t matter to him she was long gone down to her watery grave, he thought he’d seen her in the sky, on a night of falling stars. Others, more matter of fact, said it was an old story, between him and his father: they feared and hated each other, the way sons and fathers sometimes do on the remote farms, where such emotions fester. His father was well known for his pride, which, added to the whole family’s reclusiveness, meant he never asked anyone for anything: in the winter of ‘53, rather than ask for help, he bled his cattle, as he’d heard the Highlanders of Scotland did, and his wife made them strange blood cakes, which it was said gave Douglas the taste for it.

§

The pylons carrying electricity to the village marched across Douglas’s fields. Jane and I stood underneath them to remind ourselves of what rain sounded like, but we kept a wary eye out for Douglas, in his dirty blue overalls, with his black curly hair. We were scared of his dogs, too: they snapped for no reason, because unless dogs grow up with children they think that they’re adversaries.

§

They said that after his return Douglas kept a bag always packed, ready for immediate departure, even after the rest of his family had left him alone on the farm, and he must have known he’d never leave.

When he left his mother was devastated, and refused to talk to her husband, whom she blamed; but when she went into her departed son’s room she realized that whether he’d known it or not, his whole life he’d been preparing for this moment.

§

He’d never made friends, not as a child nor as a youth nor yet as a man, because he didn’t like talking to other people. His mother had seen how even in his third year he showed no excitement at the discovery of language, as her other infants had, rambling on interminably to their parents, their siblings, animals, dolls, fantasy companions, or just to themselves, delighting in the torrent of words that grew larger every day. Douglas never went through that stage. From his first utterances, which were ‘mum’, ‘moo’ and ‘cut’, he continued to speak only in terse, monosyllabic sentences, his speech in actual fact not so much the limited expression of an idiot, as people assumed, as a miracle of brevity and concision possible only for someone of rare intelligence, but hemmed in on all sides by the curse of shyness.

His mother patiently watched him grow up, hoping against hope that, unable or unwilling to express himself in words, the most common language and the most versatile, the one in which people threatened and bullied one another as well as being the one of the spirit, he’d come to adopt as his own one of the other languages that man had invented: music, the language of the soul; or mathematics, the language of the mind.

Instead he chose another. She remembered the very day he discovered it: he came home at the age of eight with a neatly folded piece of paper. “Look what us done in school today, mother,” he said in a rare burst of loquaciousness that alerted her immediately, and on the kitchen table he unfolded a map of Great Britain on which his teacher had made them trace the major rivers, from their sources to the sea. She saw the gleam in his eye, the rigidity of his muscles in the first instance of a child’s obsessive interest that he’d yet displayed. He didn’t say anything, he just laid out the map for her, assuming she’d find it as fascinating as he plainly did, staring at it intently. Then he pointed at the south-west peninsula and told her: “That’s where us is, mother. ‘Tis Devon there. And the stupid-shaped bit on the end, ‘tis Cornwall.”

That was the beginning of Douglas’s interest in maps, the very day he was smitten with the shape of the world. From then on he saved up the coppers his father gave him for the jobs he did on the farm, a farthing for every ten lambs’ tails he docked, a halfpenny a week for helping to milk the cows, a penny for looking after all the chickens, and a bonus of sixpence at harvest, and he spent them on only one thing: while other children bought sweets, dolls and footballs, Douglas purchased nothing but maps, and not just modern atlases but historical ones too, without discrimination.

His father went to market in Newton Abbot every Wednesday, and Douglas made himself indispensable by doing more than a child should, even in those days: he took such an interest in their herd of cows and flock of sheep that his father came to rely on his small son’s second opinion in the business of buying and selling, to the point where Douglas no longer had to argue the case for having the day off school, where you learned so much information that was no use to country people, and they drove together to market. In fact it was there, even more than at home, that the boy became what he had hitherto only pretended to be, a farmer, as he slipped through the cattle pens, assessing the meat on the flanks of bullocks, measuring himself against the animal arrogance of the bulls, eavesdropping on the whispered conversations of Dartmoor sheep-farmers striking clandestine deals, and learning to decipher the abnormal utterances of the auctioneer. He felt at home with the various animals, and also understood the curious comradeship of men whose common bonds were their profession and the discomfort they felt in each other’s company.