1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (22 page)

He’d indulge us for our inevitable losses with toffee-apples and candy-floss and lead us along the promenade. We gaggled around him as he strolled along with his trousers rolled up, his dog-collar forgotten, a smile on his face as he inhaled the salty air and observed the unhealthy families down from the north for their holidays, the beach-huts with their paint blistered by the sun and salt, the wild dogs sniffing scents along the seafront, the tropical plants in the municipal gardens, and the crazy golf he always encouraged us to ask him to let us play, even though he enjoyed it more than any of us did.

§

One Saturday back in July we’d filled a boat to go mackerel fishing. The skipper was an old man with a face made of cowhide, and we chugged to and fro across the calm bay without a bite, the old man shaking his head and assuring us over and over that they were there somewhere, he was sure of it. We sat around the back and sides of the boat, yawning with boredom, our lines trailing uselessly behind, when suddenly Jane gave a yelp and stood up, her line trembling from her fingers. Within seconds everybody’s was doing the same. We pulled them in and copied the way the Rector unhooked the petrified fish, tossed them into buckets in the middle of the boat, and then fed our lines back into the water. A moment later they were tugging again, mackerel throwing themselves onto the hooks, and we found ourselves immersed in a frenzied, floating slaughterhouse. The skipper had shut his outboard right down and was crawling through the water: it was obvious that we were passing across a vast shoal of mackerel beneath the boat. We couldn’t see them, but the water had a silvery glint in it, below the surface.

Slithering fish accumulated in the middle of the boat, tossed there as if they’d jumped in of their own accord out of the sea. They’d soon filled the buckets to overflowing and were flapping and jerking around on the floorboards, eyes staring in terror at the air they couldn’t breathe but tried to anyway, gulping it down in disbelief, while their bodies twisted in half, lay still, then twisted again. I dropped my line in the boat and tried to look away, as far out to sea as possible. We weren’t squeamish people, but that frenzy had the same effect on the others, who, one after another, also dropped their lines or let them go into the water, to be hooked forever into the cheek of some unfortunate fish. By the time we’d passed out of the shoal only the Rector and Gordon Honeywill were still pulling them in, while the skipper sized up the writhing mass of fish in his boat with a rapacious, amazed expression on his leathery face.

We never went mackerel fishing again, though half the families in the village were delighted to have such a welcome treat on their plates at tea the next day. What the Rector really preferred was to catch shrimps and prawns in rock pools along the shore with a half-moon shrimping net. While we made sandcastles and buried each other on the beach he wandered off with his trousers rolled up, his stomach stopped churning and settled down as he hunted amongst the miniature watery worlds of sea anemones, pincer crabs, seaweed, limpets and shells in perfect pools left by the tides, and he’d not return until his bucket was full of shrimps in salt water that would spill over the rim in the van on the way back home, and which he would boil alive before shelling, and then consume in mouth-watering sandwiches as he watched the late-night film on the television in his kitchen.

Once or twice our expeditions took us up to the high tors on Dartmoor, with compass and maps, and once we went to the cinema in Exeter because there was a brief revival of the western. But wherever we went, we somehow always ended up by the sea at dusk, the Rector answering the call of a secret vocation, the salt in his nautical blood of a long line of sailors, he told me, left traces in his nostrils and its taste on his tongue, and we sat on the beach sipping the last tepid coffee from the thermos, beginning to shiver and huddle together, conspirators, trembling and giggling in our tiredness, all except the Rector, who sat off smoking and gazing out to sea, watching the waves break first past the end of the pier, the sound of their dull crash coming after, watching them break again below us and the water slide up the sand teasingly towards his feet, almost tickling them before withdrawing, invitingly, back into the godforsaken vastness of the ocean.

In contrast to the raucous journey down we returned in silence, curled up in the van, children and dogs, sand between our toes, unable to keep our eyes open as the Rector drove us home through the darkness.

Tea

“S
it down a minute,” grandmother said, and she slurped the mug of milky tea I’d brought through to her. I wanted to get outside.

“It were the coldest winter in history,” she declared suddenly.

“What was?” I asked.

She took my hand in hers. “The story I’ll tell ‘ee, stupid.”

“Oh,” I said. So I gave up and tried to snuggle up beside her, except that now I was bigger than she was.

“It were twenty-five year ago,” she began.

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted, “I thought you said last year was the worst winter we ever had.”

“Nonsense, maid. This one were much colder.”

§

It was in the coldest and most prolonged winter in history, twenty-five years earlier, when the peacocks that patrolled the terraced lawns began to peck away at the bulbs and roots of hibernating flowers, that it occurred to the young 15 th Viscount Teignmouth that those peacocks had probably never been husbanded since their ancestors’ arrival, brought by the very first Viscount. There was certainly no one in his retinue of servants, so far as he knew, with responsibility for their management: they were simply left to themselves.

The Viscount tried to count them and found it an impossible task, confused by their fans, which they spread and then withdrew with baffling irregularity, but he figured there were around thirty. “If I don’t do something soon,” he thought, “they’ll have wiped out the lawns and the flower beds too, before spring ever arrives.”

He instructed his head gardener to hire the local slaughterer, and so early one morning Douglas Westcott walked across the Valley with his bag of tools. The world was white, covered not with snow but a layer of brittle frost; the entire earth was still, having retreated into the depths of its deep sleep. Douglas felt like an intruder, worried he might wake up the earth as he walked across it, his boots crunching in the silence. His escaping breath froze on the air, hinting at thoughts whose articulation remained trapped on his tongue.

He caught half a dozen peacocks in the same way that he did chickens, creeping up on them from behind, undaunted by the eyes of their fans watching him, and swooping down upon them with his coat wide open.

Maria was polishing a second-floor window when she saw him in the backyard behind the scullery, slicing the necks of those beautiful creatures with a cleaver, their final ghastly breaths shrieking from their windpipes and shattering every silence but his own. She was stung with pity, whether for him or for the peacocks she wasn’t sure. In some confusion she descended to the kitchen and made a pot of tea. As soon as she stepped out of the scullery Douglas recognized her: she was the black-haired stranger in a black dress he’d watched from the corner of his furthest field, walking into the village with a wicker basket; she was the angel who’d been interfering with his dreams. As she set the tray down on the ground his mind went haywire and came to an irrevocable decision, and with the next swing of his cleaver he opened a deep gash across his hand.

As the winter wore on Douglas returned at regular intervals to kill another unfortunate bird, one only at a time, and afterwards he would make his way to Maria’s tiny room, where she changed the dressing. After love Maria came back to the world as slowly as she could, and she made her sullen lover laugh as she smoked his pipe and chattered to him in her native language.

After spring came and plants and grass began to grow again, Douglas failed to return. Maria was neither surprised nor sad, only mystified by the way his absence made itself known inside her, tugging at one or other of her organs like a torn tendon, as if his absence had always been and would always be there, requiring his intrusion into her life to bruise it and make itself known. But she wasn’t sad; she was almost relieved. Life was complicated enough without him. She assumed he’d come to the same conclusion: she didn’t know he’d walked out of his front door and left home.

§

One Sunday in every month my aunts and uncles and cousins came in from their cottages and small farms at various points around the parish and squeezed into the kitchen for afternoon tea. We sat around what had begun as a small and sturdy deal table, the same one on which grandfather had had his tonsils removed, but as children and grandchildren were born so grandfather had added folding flaps and extendable leaves, and on those Sunday afternoons the little table sprouted out almost to the walls, along which we slid in and sat on benches.

It was the only time we got together specially, and you realized that all those people made up one family; the rest of the time you forgot it. We’d meet each other in normal day to day, in the lane or coming out of the shop, and we didn’t feel anything special towards each other; no more than towards other people like Granny Sims, or Martin the hedge-layer. It was like everyone was related, or else that none of us were. And it was even harder to believe that all the mothers were Daddy’s older sisters, the same little girls who’d once made grandfather so proud.

“Mother,” aunt Susan asked that Sunday, “why on earth don’t you and father buy a larger house, or else build an extension to the kitchen? Us is squashed up like frogspawn.”

She made the same suggestion every month, and grandmother always gave the same reply: “At our age? It saw you all in and ‘twill see us out. In’t that right, lover?” she asked grandfather, and he responded with an affirmative grunt, neither age nor the familiarity of his kin alleviating his shyness.

The men sweated uncomfortably and consumed in silence the mountains of paste sandwiches mother had prepared, while the women talked to each other across them.

“Where’s Pamela this month?” enquired aunt Dorothy, the eldest.

“You knows perfectly well where ‘er is, girl,” said aunt Shirley, and my other aunties giggled.

“Er’s one for the boys all right,” said grandmother approvingly.

“Nothing wrong with that,” replied aunt Dorothy, “but ‘er shouldn’t neglect the family.” Dorothy was the only one without a husband. She used to have one, but he left her before I was born. She always knew he would. They said she was so jealous she used to make him stay in all the time, and kept the windows shut so even his smell wouldn’t get out. She knew other women were after him. When he left her, without any children, she got rid of all the old furniture, threw out the carpets and the curtains, burned the sheets, replaced the cutlery and lamps and everything else too, as well as redecorating from top to bottom, to rid the house of every last trace of him.

“Pamela’s rehearsin’,” said mother quickly. “You know, for this amateur dramatics.”

“Rehearsin’ with the leading man, more like,” said aunt Shirley. None of the men smiled except uncle Sidney, who enjoyed his wife’s provocative humour.

Uncle Terence never laughed at anything. No one could remember when he’d become bad-tempered. His round face was cast in a permanent mould of misery, with a thin-lipped downturned crescent of a mouth, and his only son, Terry, who wasn’t much older than me, was a copy of him.

Terence’s wife, aunt Marjorie, was the ugliest of my aunts: she had a face that looked as if it had had an argument with itself; her features were all mismatched, put together higgledy-piggledy, like she had one person’s nose but another’s ears, and her eyes belonged to someone else again. She also had a penetrating glance and looked at you intently, making you think she knew things about you you’d never told anyone; it was years before I realized that was an illusion caused by myopia, which she admitted to no one, too vain to wear glasses.

While the women were chatting, the men got talking by asking uncle Terence questions, because his lack of humour was what they found funny.

“There’s a curlew around top field,” uncle Sidney told him.

“He’s a noisy old bird,” said uncle Terence, “nearly as bad as that nightjar’s churr: drives a man mazed. What with all the ivy leaves rustling in the breeze, what a miserable old row ‘tis, a man can ‘ardly sleep nowadays.”

“Susan made ‘erself up a bag of pine needles helps her sleep,” said uncle Bill.

“Tche! Stink! Don’t ‘e bother with that.”

Grandmother said little at Sunday tea nowadays, fully occupied with picking her way through her food, refusing to take anyone’s word that paste sandwiches and drop scones presented no possible danger since she’d heard of someone choking on a chicken bone. But somehow the tea pivoted around her. Her husband was so modest that, even while he was becoming richer and widely respected in the neighbouring villages, with each flap and leaf he added to the kitchen table he made his own place more and more remote from what could be identified as the head of the table, with the expanding surfaces shaped to the uneven walls of the room itself. If anyone’s position was most distinctive it was that of grandmother, who like all the women of her line had shed in her senescence the weight assumed for the years of fertility and who, wedged into the tight corner near the door, with the table pointing like an arrow towards her, gave out an aura of ageless but receding wisdom from her silence embellished only by patient mastication.

“Alison,” said aunt Shirley, “fill the pot up will you, me lover?”

We took butter straight from the fridge, but even so it soon melted on the drop scones.

“I ‘eard a silage tank exploded over Ashton las’ week,” said uncle Terence.

“Serves ‘em right!” said aunt Shirley.

“Is you predictin’, Terence?” asked aunt Susan. “Is you bodin’ omens?”

“No,” he denied it. “I idn’t worried ‘bout what’s to come, ‘tis bad enough now. We lost two ewes last week.”