1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (29 page)

Maria drained her glass, and found that she was thinking of the Rector. So she put on her red shawl and walked to the rectory along the lane, past the Alcocks’, the village hall, the church and into the drive. The rectory lawns were forlorn-looking shadows of their former selves, almost all the grass faded to a dry, lifeless brown, but still patterned in precise lines: Gordon Honeywill cut them every Saturday morning, with the Rector’s old-fashioned tennis court mowing-machine, and the Rector paid him to carry on all through the summer, even after the grass had stopped growing in July, because he knew how much Gordon enjoyed doing it. I sometimes saw him at work when I visited the Rector: the same age and size as me, he steered the mower with intense concentration and effort, his tongue stuck out of his mouth and aping his mind, towards a cricket stump. When he reached it he’d leave the mower idling, carry the stump back across the lawn and place it ready for his next line. Then he’d return to the mower, swivel it round, and aim for the stump once more, his eyes fixed upon it. Although I tried to stop myself, in the end I couldn’t help asking him why the hell he didn’t use two stumps and get the job done in half the time.

He looked at me with furious eyes. “You do your bloody things your way, maid,” he shouted; “I does my things my way.”

Maria let herself into the rectory by the back door, as she did whenever she brought the Rector a jar of marmalade or a bag of her home-made fudge. She called out, but there was no reply. She carried on into the kitchen, which looked and smelled the same as usual, the kitchen of a bachelor, which is what it was: on the draining-board were the plates and utensils of a dozen TV dinners, and on top of the stove was a blue china coffee pot, a strainer sitting across its neck, and a saucepan with a thin layer of three-day-old coffee in the bottom. Maria smiled at the tools of his illogical coffee-making routine: he would make himself a fresh pot before breakfast and then reheat mugfuls in the saucepan, each one a little staler, a little more stewed and unenjoyable than the last, until the pot was empty, whereupon he’d make up a fresh one.

She walked along the corridor towards the only other downstairs room in use, the Rector’s study. All the other, empty rooms’ doors were open, filling the house with light. The deep green carpet in the hallway cushioned Maria’s footsteps as she approached the open study door, hesitated, and listened for the sound of his writing, his cuff scudding fitfully across paper, or for the striking of a match. She liked to listen to the sounds of his concentration when she paid him a call. Sometimes there would be silence, and she’d put her head round the door to see him sitting at his desk but turned sideways, gazing out of the window. Now, Maria stepped into the room and found he wasn’t there, but when she came back into the hallway she was seized by the conviction that he was somewhere in the house.

The staircase reached the first floor by climbing around the walls. Three-quarters of the way up it turned, ran along for a few feet on a small landing which overlooked the hallway, beside a high sash window with a built-in seat below, and then turned again for the last few steps to the first floor. As Maria passed the sash window she had the strange sensation of a soul fluttering around like an invisible swallow, searching for an open window. She hurried along the upstairs corridor towards the furthest room, quickening her pace, until she reached the door and opened it, whereupon she was thrown backwards, across the corridor and into the bathroom, by an unbearable stench which even as she staggered back she knew was not that of death but of someone so sick they couldn’t even drag themselves a few yards to the toilet bowl. It took Maria a moment to compose herself, and as she did so she could hear the Rector praying to himself. She steeled herself against the smell and strode into the room, and what she saw melted her heart: the Rector was spread across the bed, arms outstretched; he looked as if his body, in damp pyjamas, was pinning itself down. The sheets were all scrunched up and spilling over the side of the bed, and were sullied with vomit and excrement. And the Rector, oblivious to everything outside the parameters of the pain and nausea that engulfed him, unaware of anything except the certainty that he was beyond all hope, was quietly moaning to himself.

Moving as briskly as possible Maria collected a bowl of hot water and soap, a sponge and towel, and she rootled through the cupboards for fresh sheets and pyjamas. Only then did she go over to the Rector and put her hand on his forehead, and murmur some soothing words to him in her native Portuguese. The Rector appeared barely to respond at all, except that he ceased his incantatory moaning and his eyes fluttered open, then closed again. Maria assumed he was still lost in his fever so high it burned her hand.

In fact her icy palm and soft undertones did reach him, soughing across the hallucinatory landscape of his delirium from far, far away, from the other side of his eyelids, which were themselves a long way away from him. With a tremendous effort of coordination he was able to flick them open, and that was when he knew, instantly, that he’d passed the worst of it and come out on the other side of death, because an angel in the far corner of the room was speaking in the celestial language, and watching over him.

“That’s interesting,” he thought to himself, “how different perspective is in the next dimension,” before he slipped once more under the waves and lost consciousness.

Maria gently peeled the Rector’s pyjamas from his limbs, and pulled the sheet and the sweat-soaked pillowcases off the bed. Then she eased a towel under his body, which was much lighter than she expected, and she began to clean him. At first she proceeded cautiously, almost fearfully, not out of embarrassment, to which she was immune, but with the timidity people feel handling an infant: he seemed so fragile and helpless she thought she might break something. Soon, though, her fingers and hands took on an authority of their own, manipulating him with the efficiency of a trained nurse, as she realized he was more robust than she’d thought.

She dipped the sponge into warm water, lathered it, and soaped his skin. His body was white and hairless, and he had an old man’s skin, soft and loose. His athlete’s stomach, once a hard wall of muscle, had slowly loosened and subsided over the years spent at his desk. He had a long white scar running from his right hip part way down his thigh: the scar tissue was like blistered skin, as if a hot fishbone had been branded into his hip. It crinkled when she rolled him over. She soaped his bottom and his genitals: his circumcised penis was stubby and shapeless, and Maria smiled to herself, as she had at each one of the few men she’d seen naked. When she’d wiped him clean with the flannel she dried him with the softest towel she could find, put fresh sheets on the bed, and dressed him in a clean pair of pyjamas.

The soiled linen was in a heap on the floor. Maria opened wide the window, scooped up the bundle and tossed it outside, unknowingly prefiguring an incident that would occur two days later in our house, when mother would come into my room to find the floor strewn with toys I no longer wanted, despite her repeated orders to tidy them up. And just as instantly as Maria, her anger as immediate as Maria’s curious commonsense, mother would open the window and throw them all outside to land broken and scattered in the yard. “
Now
you can clear them up,” she said; and I shovelled them into a dustbin.

§

When the Rector woke up again, an hour or so later, he was surprised to find that heaven, at least in his immediate environment, was in fact a replica of earth, before he corrected himself as he realized that it could only be the other way round. He looked around the room, but his guardian angel was nowhere to be seen, which irked him for a moment until he realized how arrogant that was, making demands in such a place, and so he attempted to give himself over to the will and mercy of God: he lay still, eyes closed, trying not to think of anything in particular. He was aware that he felt wonderful, his body at peace with itself in a way he’d forgotten was possible; in fact he felt weightless, and wondered quite what it meant to have a body in the afterlife. What he didn’t know was that he was simply basking in the brief, illusory haven of wellbeing that a sick man finds himself in when he first awakes, especially in a fresh pair of pyjamas. Instead he confused himself by pondering the consequences of waking up dead: how was he to communicate with the angel if and when she returned? Would he have to learn a new language, and if so would it be as difficult and frustrating as the European languages he misused on holiday, or as expressive as Serbo-Croat? Or would he suddenly start speaking in the angelic tongue himself, like those Pentecostal evangelists who lured the foolish and the vulnerable to their services in the community centre in Chudleigh? He was aghast at the idea, but it was replaced by another: what on earth did he himself look like now? He was seized with curiosity and, determined to find a mirror, lifted his head from the pillow, and his feverish mind, befuddled by brief exposure to the incongruities of life after death, exploded into complete bewilderment, for how could there be pain in the hereafter? It was inconceivable, the pantheon of Greek gods paraded past his mind’s eye, because something or someone had gripped his head in a pair of tongs and was squeezing it as hard as they could. He groaned and fell back on to the bed, hoping he could slip back into the state of grace he’d just occupied. But there was no relief. Instead his body came back to agonizing life: all his limbs ached, his heart raced, his stomach churned and his lungs burned. It hurt just to breathe, each breath sending a ripple of aching around his torso, and even the pull of gravity hurt, pressing the mattress against those parts of his body with which it made contact. He began to moan as he realized what a dreadful illusion had overcome him and wondered who could have done such a thing, though he already knew who his chief suspect was, himself, and he tried to work out why an angel had come to visit him when she’d only done so like a mortal woman, in order to desert him.

In fact, Maria was in the kitchen, having had the bright idea of giving the Rector a cup of coffee. Not only would its aroma dispel the odour of sickness that lingered in his bedroom, as it had in her shack, but she knew that his favourite drink would revive him. She made a fresh pot and carried it on a tray with milk and sugar, bearing it before her like a magic potion that would bring him back to life. The wonderful aroma preceded her, wafting along the hallway, up the stairwell, into all the empty rooms, and along the upstairs corridor. It reached the Rector’s bedroom a few moments before she did, and so nauseated him that she found him leaning over the side of the bed, heaving as if overboard a thin stream of yellow sputum.

Maria took cushions from the Rector’s armchair in the kitchen and made herself a bed in the next empty room along the corridor from his bedroom. While he was sleeping she collected spare clothes and a few bottles of aqua libra, and she pinned a note to the door of her shack to the effect that she would be unavailable for house cleaning, sewing and ironing until further notice, an act typical of her thoughtfulness except that it was in a language no one understood.

§

The Rector inhabited a feverish domain that shifted as treacherously as a Dartmoor bog. Maria took his temperature often, placing the thermometer under his arm, and it soared up and down from one minute to the next. The morning after her arrival he became aware of her presence, and thanked her gratefully for coming to save him from his distress, but then he seemed to spot a light out of the corner of his sickness and he followed it like an ignis fatuus on the moor, picking his way from one clump of moss to another until he stepped on nothing and disappeared from reality: Maria again assumed the guise of an angel and the Rector’s brow furrowed in confusion at further theological anomalies of the state he found himself in. He wondered whether he was in an uncharted region of
Umbus patrum
, once upon a time inhabited by the saints of the Old Covenant as they waited for Christ’s coming and his redemption of the world; unused for two thousand years, perhaps it was again being rilled with a new, obscure category of unredeemed souls, of whom he was one.

He’d explained to me the authenticated territories of limbo when I asked him what had happened to the souls of all the newborn babies buried in the graveyard, and he told me about
Limbus infantium
, the everlasting state of those who die unregenerate, including unbaptized infants, who were still in their state of original sin but were innocent of personal guilt. They were believed to be excluded from supernatural beatitude, he said, not bothering to conceal his irreverent grin as he did so, ‘but according to Aquinas, Alison, they enjoy full natural happiness, whatever that means, apart from the fact that intelligent men, whatever other idiotic things they say, have always regarded happiness as of secondary importance’.

The Rector enjoyed telling me of beliefs upon which he poured scorn. He recounted with distaste Saint Augustine’s teachings on the subject, written in disagreement with Pelagius, whom the Rector had studied in theological college and regarded as a close colleague: Augustine taught that all who die unbaptized suffer some degree of positive punishment. “For eternity, mind!” the Rector spat at me. “Forever, Alison! Now what sort of merciful God would think up such a thing?”

Now, though, the Rector, in the delirium of a flu so virulent it was as if all the minor illnesses he’d avoided through his lethal diet had caught up with him all at once; now he wondered whether he’d been wise to dismiss the wrathful God of the Old Testament. For some reason the story of Abraham and Isaac came to him: regarded as a paradigm of faith, it had always made him uncomfortable. The God he had come to believe in would never demand such a sacrifice, and could not therefore use the threat of it as a test. The Rector had already pondered the point exhaustively when his own son was a child, and had come to the conclusion then that if ordered to kill him simply to prove his faith he’d dismiss the emissary as a false messenger. His own faith was built on quite different foundations; life itself was God-given, and was more precious than any dogma. But what if he were wrong? Despite his lifelong battle with his own ego, his attempts to annihilate it in the crucible of prayer, so that he would be able to present himself to God possessed only of a faith of the purest simplicity, perhaps intrinsic to the nature of those struggles was in fact an overweening emphasis on his own powers of reason to hack a path towards the truth. In which case God would tear off the mask of mercy that the Rector had erroneously clothed him with and, laughing the harsh laughter of the God of the patriarchs, consign him to the punishing flames.