1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (27 page)

§

Tom was not among the men who met round our kitchen table that Tuesday morning to scrutinize the minutely detailed plans that Ian had abandoned his chess to stay up all night working on. Even Daddy’s brothers-in-law, whom we usually only saw on Sundays, came to help in the search for the water which, according to Granny Sims, the hippies had come with the express intention of stealing.

Uncle Sidney with his woman’s voice was the most optimistic. “There’s water in the rocks if we could tap it. Us is mostly water ourselves, that’s why we’re such good conductors of electricity; ‘tis everywhere, even now.”

Uncle Bill was adamant about the best source of water: “‘Tis pourin’ non-stop down that waterfall over the Valley. While our fields is crackin’ up and the waterboard’s puttin’ standpipes in the village, there’s water wastin’ away.”

“How’s us gonna get it over yere?” asked Mike Howard.

“Well, as everybody knows, over the length of its path from Houndtor it rises twenty feet, ‘ta proven fact. I can’t see no reason why it shouldn’t rise some more.”

“Not that much,” said Ian, “it’s not possible. Besides, ‘tidn’t our water.”

They crunched mother’s biscuits. I looked down on them from the top of the fridge.

“I know!” uncle Sidney announced eagerly. “Since it idn’t ours us could steal it outright. At night. Form a chain with buckets. Men, women and children.”

They were all so struck with this idea that they scraped their chairs back and left then and there to go to the telescope and check the practicalities. On the way they met Tom, who’d gone off to gaze at the dawn mist clinging to the surface of the quarry pool like smoke on a mirror. His cousin Andrew, Sidney and Shirley’s youngest son, sarcastically asked whether Tom would care to favour them with his opinion of their scheme.

“Who needs water?” he replied. “Us can drink cider and wash in wine. They makes it in enormous lakes in Europe.”

Liquid

T
here were nights when something twisted inside me, sometimes in my tummy but more often in my mind, and sprung me out of sleep like a fish from water. It twisted me into a confusion that was inseparable from pain. I curled up as tight as I could to contain it, and I could hear myself whimpering. I wanted to go and slide under the sheets and snuggle up beside Daddy, but I knew mother would sense me there. She slept with a frown on her face, as if expecting the worst even in her dreams. She’d say: “No, you’s too old for that sort of silliness, what’s wrong with you, girl?”, and she’d give me a glass of milk of magnesia and tuck me up back in my own bed.

Light seeped out from under Ian’s door. I’d find him by his short-wave radio, like a castaway on the island of his insomnia, listening to the sounds of the sea in a pool of light spread by the desk-lamp. He twiddled the dials of the radio distractedly, as if only out of some obscure obligation keeping an ear open for people’s voices from across the night, when really he preferred the company of the oceanic lament of interference.

At such times, creeping noiselessly into his room, I would see Ian unguarded, unaware of himself, adrift, curling his hair with his finger as he scrutinized his chessboard, filled in balance sheets or browsed through one of Pamela’s glossy magazines. He held his cigarette between his middle fingers so that it wouldn’t drop if he fell asleep, would instead burn his fingers and wake him rather than set the room alight, a nightwatchman’s habit he’d learned from the quarrymen. He looked like a stranger then: his features were much sharper than I imagined them to be, his eyes were closer together, his lips thinner, his nose narrow, his cheekbones and jawline sharp as a ferret’s. Amongst people his smile, his speech, his gestures, just the fact of self-consciousness opened up and rounded his face. If I could have taken a photograph as I saw him then I wonder whether people would have recognized him.

As soon as he realized I was there he became himself again. “Can’t sleep, maid? You got those pains again, little lamb?” I didn’t say anything, I just climbed onto his bed and succumbed to the urge, provoked by his sympathy, to start crying, and Ian pushed his chair back, saying: “You wants me to make you feel better? I’ll try.” He shook his head. “What girls has to go through at your age. “Tidn’t right. Almost as had as bays.” He picked up a jar of oil that he kept by the bed. “Take yer ‘jamas off, then, and lie on your front.”

His fingers travelled across my skin and kneaded it like dough; he pushed and squeezed according to the bone structure beneath: his fingers seemed to know of their own accord the underlying secrets of my anatomy, and they persuaded the pain and unhappiness out of my body. Gradually it let go its grip and let me melt back into sleep, while his radio continued to transmit the sound of the sea to my brother’s lonely room.

§

Tom was the better looking of my brothers. But before Susanna kissed him he couldn’t look at a girl without blushing. As a boy he’d developed the ability, learned from hen pheasants on shooting expeditions with grandfather, to blend into the background: at school he made himself invisible behind his desk. He could still recall vividly, viscerally, an occasion when he, alone in the class, knew the answer to a teacher’s question. He wanted to rise from his anonymity and he urged himself, heart hammering against his chest, breaking out in sweat, his face reddening and a vein on his forehead pulsing, as if it would burst, he urged himself to put up his hand. But it was beyond him, the teacher broke the silence saying: “I give up on you all,” the chance of glory passed and he had failed. It was even worse with girls. Remote and forbidding, they existed in a different dimension, and he had no idea how to make contact.

The night of the barn dance when Susanna kissed him, her warm mouth vinegary from too much stolen cider, Tom’s life turned inside out: he appeared at breakfast with his neck covered in red bites, smiling like an idiot, and he giggled at inappropriate moments. He began talking to people, filled with an overpowering urge to tell them about the miracle of love, not to boast but rather with the philanthropy of an inventor, because he was sure he’d discovered it for the first time. Their absorption with each other was mutual. At first they spent as much time at her house as ours, unaware, as they were of everything else, of her father’s disapproval: he had other ideas for his daughters than getting caught up with some farmer’s boy, and knew that the one danger of moving his family into the village was of having those plans tampered with when they were still so young. He wanted to forbid her from seeing him, except that such parental dictatorship went against his principles.

They had a golden labrador who growled whenever Tom touched Susanna, and sometimes even when he only imagined doing so. Once, forgetting he was in someone else’s house, Tom grabbed the dog by the scruff of its neck and led it outside, where dogs were supposed to live. That was too much for Susanna’s father, who was horrified by such uncivilized behaviour: he brought the dog back inside and asked Tom to leave instead.

Tom didn’t mind, and neither did Susanna. They assumed that everyone else was as happy as they were, since everyone looked happy to them. They could only stand being apart from each other because each parting was as delicious as coming together again, and they mapped out the routes of their days precisely, so that Tom could sound his tractor horn on his way to the sheep while Susanna was half-way through a French essay, and she in turn would wave to him from her horse at 2.48
PM
as he tightened the electric fencing down in the meadows. They were intoxicated by each other. He told her the reason they got on so well was that she carried on her jeans her horse’s sweat while he for his part could never entirely shake off the sharp scent of pigs, and as everyone knows horses and pigs are the two most compatible species of animal, able to be left to pasture together without fear of a quarrel. It was the first joke he’d ever been known to make.

Susanna was learning to play the trombone. After she’d said goodnight to Tom she didn’t want to lose the warm and curious feeling that enveloped her, so she would practise on her trombone late at night. Her family complained that she was keeping them awake, but they couldn’t force her to go to bed because they’d decided that when she reached the age of fourteen they’d treat her like an adult. So her mother went to a music shop in Exeter and bought a device for muffling the instrument. From then on Susanna played her trombone muted, and her family were able to sleep again, except that the music rose through the floorboards and infiltrated their dreams, saddening them as they slept.

§

In the course of his meticulous preparations for Saturday nights, Ian had never noticed Tom. It was as if he simply disappeared from view, melting into the furniture. It was just part of the process by which the whole world altered its appearance, as Ian unconsciously honed his instincts for the chase. His nostrils became sensitive to the trail of perfume, his ears attuned themselves to the rustle of a dress and to certain nuances of a woman’s voice, his thick farmer’s fingers took on the sensitivity of a masseur’s, and his sight altered so blatantly that men fell as if out of focus to the periphery of his vision, as he prepared himself for his once a week night of a lonely hunter. Ian had never bothered himself with his younger brother’s sentimental education, other than to pass on the solitary word of advice that he had received from Daddy, that when you leave a girl you should make her believe that she’s left you. He assumed, if he ever thought about it at all, that a man has to find these things out for himself, as he had, or not learn them at all.

Now, though, Ian began to notice Tom, and he felt some brotherly pity as he saw him lose his grip, as he watched him falling into the abyss of love. He wondered how anyone could be so stupid, could so deceive themselves, and wanted to point out certain things so obvious it seemed impossible Tom had not learned them, if only from Ian’s own example: that the weekend’s the time for it, bay, the weekdays is for working; that women is what makes life worth living, but your life is your own and no one else’s; that when you gets a woman started you better take her all the way, that’s all, take her half-way there and drop her off and she’ll hate yer guts, you can do a hundred different things, just make her happy, touch every part of her except her heart; that if you stays the night you might never leave, bay, always make sure there’s an unlocked door; that you can make them cry ‘cos they likes that sometimes, but if you ever hurts a woman then don’t come to me for help, you deserves what you gets, you fatherless bastard.

Ian couldn’t help himself from thinking these things as he saw his silent brother transformed before his eyes, an idiot grin creasing his fleshy jowls and his eyes ringed by the fatigue of an activity the fool had confused with love. He found he had to remind Tom how to perform simple tasks Tom knew better than he did: he’d put the wrong tools in the van, take straw instead of hay over to the sheep, and couple the plough to the tractor when what they needed was the binder to reap the spindly, useless corn of that summer’s meagre harvest. When they went to check the pigs in the top field Tom electrocuted himself on the wire and, instead of kicking the nearest sow as he would normally have done, only giggled. And at odd moments of the day he would suddenly say: “You carry on, Ian, I’ll be back in a couple or three minutes.” At first Ian thought he’d got the collywobbles from drinking too much tap water and disappeared to relieve himself, but he soon discovered that Tom was running off to keep his fleeting rendezvous with Susanna in the midst of her studies.

In the evenings Ian had always been the one to nag Tom and grandfather to finish work and get back for tea, and he often ended up coming home alone and asking mother to put theirs in the oven, because Tom found it as painful as grandfather did to stop work before dusk had smudged the outlines of things and left them with no alternative but to return to people. Now, though, Tom would ask grandfather to check the time on his pocket watch from four o’clock onwards, and would admonish the others, saying: “Us better get back, ‘tidn’t fair to keep mother waiting.”

Worst of all, though, Tom started talking. They’d always worked in silence, a silence learned from grandfather, speaking no more than was necessary for the accomplishment of each task: superfluous speech did not disturb the sounds of metal on wood, the rustle of dry grass manipulated by human hands, the tread of heavy boots echoing on the hard earth. In that silence the primeval language common to all farmers asserted itself over any more recently developed dialect, because it was one that animals understood, a vernacular of grunts, whoops, whistles and guttural commands, monosyllabic but possessed of infinite expressiveness through the variables of intonation, inflection and emphasis. When they spoke to each other during the day, outside the house, it was in a pidgin English, using ordinary words but tersely, isolated from each other in truncated sentences, using their farmers’ primitive colloquial to give the meaning of what they were saying. It was a language of necessity, of only urgent communication above the roar of the tractor engine or across a field, so that when we joined them to help round up animals or stack the hay loft we were startled at the way they addressed each other, as if cursing, and we felt as if we’d just stepped into the aftermath of some almighty argument. In reality they each worked at a steady pace, with a steady heart, and had the respect for each other that came from everyday, mutual dependence.

Then suddenly Tom had broken ranks, the least likely to do so, lured by love from their unspoken agreement over the parsimony of language. He started chattering while they drank their first mug of tea by the stove, he carried on gibbering as they crossed the yard, he shouted over the noise of the tractor, and he drivelled on as they returned for breakfast. He spoke about anything and everything, garrulous as a two-year-old, as if Susanna had triggered off that phase of a child’s development that he’d not gone through at the proper time. He commented on the weather, noting with apparent surprise that it was just the same as yesterday; he told them how he’d slept and what he’d dreamed; and he pointed out the various types of tree and flower they passed, as if none of them had seen such things before. “Lookee there, grandfather, ‘tis a hazel, innit?” he’d suggest. “Well bugger me if that idn’t a dandelion clock. Funny old things. Oi! See that? ‘Twas a thrush. Right there in the ‘edge. Got itself a nest in there I don’t doubt. You can never tell with they old birds. Be a lot of ladybirds around, too. I don’t know as I’ve ever seen so many’s I ‘ave today, like. You see ‘em, lan? Little things they is, in’t they?”