1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (31 page)

So I heard Maria’s footsteps coming down the stairs, and through the wide crack between the door and its frame I could see the Rector standing at the bottom. He waited until Maria had reached the second step up and was facing him, their eyes level with each other. His wrinkled face had a mystified expression.

“What’s going on, Maria?” he asked her, and she answered him matter of factly, explaining things to him in detail, with emphatic gestures, as straightforwardly as she could, like someone giving directions to a driver lost in a strange city. When she’d finished she looked the Rector in the eye, smiled a wide open smile of satisfaction, took the Rector’s white handkerchief from the chest pocket of his jacket, licked it, and wiped a fleck of jam from the side of his mouth.

The Rector felt heat rise up his body and burn his cheeks, but this was anger, not shame. He had to close his eyes, tilt his head back and take a deep breath, or he feared he might lose his temper. He could hardly believe that at his age he could feel such exasperation, but he did do and that was that. In fact he was almost trembling with it, for he was exasperated beyond measure by everything about the woman who stood grinning in front of him, on the other side of his closed eyelids. He was exasperated by her presumption, by her matter of factness, by the excruciating language barrier she refused to take down, even though everyone knew she’d been here so long she must know as much English as they did. He was exasperated by the fact that he never knew what she was thinking, by her inappropriate smiles, and by the streaks of grey in her hair. He opened his eyes. She was no longer grinning at him. He stood there not knowing what to do or say. She raised her eyebrows. And just as his anger had risen, the Rector felt it slide off him and, exasperated above all by the love he felt for her, he opened his arms, and I slipped away through the door on to the verandah.

The Confusion of Dreams

T
he thunder came from a long way away. It came rolling through the Devon valleys and combes, feeling its way towards our village, a slow, mysterious booming not from the heavens but rolling low across the earth. A single fork of lightning struck a moment later, like the crack of a whip in the dry atmosphere: it struck a tree beneath which three horses stood sleeping, one of which was Susanna’s palomino pony. Their carcasses were found there in the morning, by the smoking tree stump.

When I threw open the curtains and saw the pony calmly grazing, it took me a moment to realize I’d only been dreaming.

§

Mother came into my room in the middle of the morning. “You’re not in reading again, girl! I’ve told you enough times, surrounded by all this mess an’ all. Why don’t you get out and play? What’s Jane or Susan doing?”

“They’re boring,” I moaned, without looking up. The only person I wanted to see was Johnathan, but I couldn’t tell mother that.

“Well, I’m sure you’re full of fun, turning into a cabbage. It’s not healthy for a girl your age, you should be outside.”

“There’s no point. I think I’m a
lushni ludi
, mother.”

“And what might that mean, may I ask?”

“I’m one of the superfluous men,” I told her.

“Don’t you cheek your mother, young lady!” she said, grabbing the book from my hands. “Come on! Out! There’s plenty of chores need doing.”

I suppose other people didn’t know you could go into the church whenever you liked. It was the only cool place left. Grandmother pointed out that in previous times they brewed and stored the parish ale in the church and that the priests used to keep wool or corn from their tithes there too, which got farmers talking amongst themselves about leaving the milk for the collecting lorries in the nave overnight. But no one had yet suggested it to the Rector in case it all reminded him of his own long overdue tithes, which he seemed to have forgotten. In fact, they often came to mind at this time of year: he’d only neglected to collect them out of modesty, having been privately lobbying the Bishop for a revival of the Norman custom whereby tithes in the parish of an unpopular incumbent could be paid to any neighbouring priest.

The church was never locked. People still remembered the PCC meeting that took place in the days when atheists first began stealing from churches: Granny Sims had got on to the agenda a motion that the church be locked from Sunday to Sunday, with keys given out only to regular churchgoers prepared to recite the Athanasian Creed. In the ensuing discussion it was only by resorting to the underhand trick of losing his temper that the Rector persuaded them to postpone the vote until the next meeting. In the interim he deposited, in a bank, the chalice and paten left behind by Buckfast Abbey, the cup given by the 1
st
Viscount Teignmouth with his coat of arms on the side, the pewter collection-plate that was said to have been used by the Romans, the stoup which Corporal Alcock lined up for last so that he could drain it, and the nickel-plated candlesticks that a gullible Rector had once bought off the same didicois whom grandmother could remember, passing through the village on their wagons that were like rooms turned inside out with everything hanging off the outside of the walls. The Rector deposited all those church utensils in a bank vault in Exeter and bought cheap replacements, so that the notion of putting a lock on the door of an inviolable sanctuary need never again arise.

Sometimes when I went I’d find the Rector there too, because when he wasn’t in his study surrounded by twenty-six empty rooms, wrestling with an opponent whose limbs were made of liquid, he’d limp over to the church to have it out with Him face to face. He’d be walking between the pews looking at the ground and gesticulating, an unlit cigarette in his fingers, mouthing words of reproach he felt towards his Maker whose Creation contained so many baffling flaws.

Usually, though, I was alone in that cool sanctuary of stone, so dry that all the hymn books were crumbling but which retained its damp, ecclesiastical smell, that hung heavy in people’s sinuses and antagonized their incipient rheumatism.

The day of my recovery from the summer flu, a flaming Friday, I stole out of the heat into the church, and sat in a pew in the middle. I cooled down deliciously, eyes closed, and had just become comfortable with my body again when the air began to tremble. It felt thin, like they say it gets on the top of mountains, as if it no longer held enough oxygen to support life. What happens to space when the air goes? Invisible birds were beating their wings, and would at any moment become visible. But then I realized that far from being a sign of some imminent apparition, those wings were the sign of life’s departure. The air became empty of itself, it became a vacuum: I realized with horror that I was in Limbo. There was no time in there, so I could have been trapped for a second or a century, but the vacuum was shattered with the implosion of all the stained glass windows, coloured shards of glass cascading into the church.

My eyes blinked wide open like a cat’s.

§

It was around then that I spent time with grandmother as we waited for the flour cloud to turn into rain, renewing the intimacy that had been reduced by her blindness. I read to her from holiday brochures that Pamela picked up from travel agents in town. She liked to hear descriptions of places she’d never shown any desire to visit: maybe she was doing it for my benefit, to open up my horizons.

She used to call me her little sparrow, yet just as I was growing faster than ever before, so that all my pairs of jeans had a creased white ring around the bottom of the legs where mother had already let them down, and were still too short for me, it was grandmother who was becoming bird-like, her clothes like a bird’s feathers inside of which there’s hardly anything.

When I was little she would sit me on her lap and whisper: “Who’s my favourite granddaughter, then?” and fondle my shining black hair, which hadn’t been seen in our family for three generations. Grandmother had had the first photograph in the whole village, which people stared at for ages before suddenly recognizing her mother-in-law, standing beside her out-of-focus son on Teignmouth pier. Grandmother saw the picture on her bedside table every night before turning out the light, and for a long time had assumed the inky black hair to be lost in history. But it had reasserted itself in me after taking a rest, and it made me stand out in her eyes among all her grandchildren.

That was before the thickening of her cataracts, which we didn’t notice at first and which she wouldn’t admit to. She had difficulty picking bones from her food, but insisted that she ate so slowly on the advice of the Prime Minister at the time of her infancy, who advocated chewing each mouthful thirty-two times to aid digestion, and after she’d repeated it a few times we all forgot that she hadn’t always done so. After a while the rest of the family realized they didn’t have time to be polite at every single meal, and soon even on Sundays we’d clear the tea away around her and leave the table, where she remained, chewing through the afternoon.

Grandmother’s eyes went milky, but no one suspected what it meant. We didn’t realize that she’d learned to identify people across a room by their smell. Even when she stopped reading, we accepted her claim that she’d read enough about other people, who after all only repeated the same old ideas and made the same mistakes. Her worsening arthritis seemed like a sufficient reason to stay indoors, and she left the house only to hobble to church, along a route she’d memorized over the years without trying, until, despite copper bracelets to ward off arthritis and a magnet hidden under the bedclothes to draw out rheumatism, she said she found the path too steep, and the Rector began bringing communion to her at home.

Gradually, however, once she’d stopped reading she began to lose interest in life; she’d never listened to the radio, unnerved by being unable to put faces to all those disembodied voices. Daddy came to spend hours beside her, the two of them holding hands and gazing ahead into an unpopulated blur, and it was Daddy, in fact, who inadvertently discovered that she was blind and saved her from dying of boredom, when he asked her how many lonely people there were, and she replied without thinking: “About as many as there be white hairs on your ‘ead.” Daddy ran through to the kitchen and blurted out: “Come quick, grandmother’s blinded, ‘er thinks my hair’s gone grey.”

Even though she was only speaking the truth, all at once things fell into place: why she insisted on taking a mug of tea in her hands rather than have it put on a table beside her, no matter how hot it was, and why she’d given up knitting after a lifetime making pullovers and woollen socks for her numerous offspring, which she claimed was because the clicking of the needles was beginning to get on her nerves after seventy years of the sound.

At first grandmother denied her blindness, not out of pride but because she dreaded becoming a burden, so Ian devised a series of tests: the first was a card with letters decreasing in size, as he’d remembered from the school optician’s visits, but although grandmother could only make out the two largest letters at the top she closed her eyes and concentrated her mind and guessed the rest correctly. Then Ian beckoned her to the window and asked her to say which vehicles were in what position around the farmyard, but again she was right despite the fact that the scene was no more than a blur before her, because she assumed that they would be parked now just as they had been the last time she’d seen them, since people are above all creatures of habit, her own family no exception. It was only with his third and final test that Ian caught grandmother out, when he brought his brother and sisters into the room and asked her the colour of our hair.

With enormous relief, saved from her one fear, that of being a burden on her family, grandmother distinguished us easily by our smell and correctly announced the hair-colour of each of us until she got to Pamela, who was at the end of the line. All Ian said was: “Wrong! Us’ll come closer.” We took a step towards her each time, but she carried on getting it wrong, growing more and more stupefied. It didn’t occur to her that Pamela might have dyed her brown hair with peroxide.

Forced to accept reality, things got better for her after that, not worse, and she didn’t become the burden she feared. Grandfather constructed at his carpenter’s bench a complicated contraption for reading with, which consisted of three magnifying glasses, a pair of thick pebble spectacles and an angle-poise lamp with an extra powerful bulb. Mother got her larger and larger type books from the mobile library, and grandmother regained her appetite for life.

During those days when I sat with her, waiting vainly for rain to fall out of flour, I held her hand and asked her why she’d refused spectacles for so long. “No one should see their own children growin’ old,” she replied. I lent her my walkman, and Pamela got her some talking book cassettes from Exeter Library, and grandmother fell asleep in her chair with the headphones on and dreamed of the members of her family acting out scenes from the plays of William Shakespeare.

§

During those forlorn days, when it became clear that nothing would bring the rain before it was ready, Tom received a blow that no one had prepared him for: overnight, Susanna became indifferent to him. Her pupils no longer grew larger when they stepped into the shadows together. She didn’t mind whether he came to see her at breaktimes or not, and when they parted and he said: ‘See you later, then?’ she replied: ‘If you want to,’ or ‘Why not?’ She didn’t refuse him, but let her hand flop limply in his, and her languid lack of response when he kissed her was worse than any rejection. After the euphoria of his discovery of love her indifference was more than he could bear, but everything was so dried up by that stage of the summer that he couldn’t find any of the tears that he wanted to cry. On one occasion he kissed her and found it was the saddest thing he’d ever done, and he bit her lip: but even then she made no response, just tasted the blood on her tongue, with no expression of anger or even curiosity. Disconsolate, and with no one to turn to, it was then that Tom followed the other men over the fields to the pub at Ashton.