1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (36 page)

Grandfather wasn’t anti-religion, like some among his generation, who’d watched, as their parents and grandparents had watched with unceasing bitterness, the complicity between priest and Viscount, and who’d greeted the Rector with such hostility when he first arrived. It was just that little of what grandfather had read in Sunday School or sung in the hymns or heard from the pulpit made any sense to him. If God had ever existed at all He’d been only a fleeting visitor, like one of the magicians who entertained the crowd at Chudleigh Carnival for a brief period in grandfather’s youth: he imagined God passing through the world of inanimate matter like a magnet across iron filings, causing them to dance into being, and then leaving the world to its fate and continuing on His journey. Responsible as God supposedly was for an infinity of stars, grandfather couldn’t see how He would have had time to linger on earth and supervise its growing pains, maintaining a personal interest in every one of the millions who’d professed faith in Him.

Apart from this life-breathing God of a fleeting wind, grandfather didn’t believe in the all-seeing and omnipotent Father of religion, because in his experience everything could be explained by nature. Its laws could be learned and respected, and when they were transgressed or tampered with then someone had to suffer. Certainly there were many things no one understood, but knowledge was something gradually accumulated in time: things that in his childhood were inconceivable had become commonplace during his lifetime: television, broadcasting events from the other side of the world even as they happened; travel, in God’s footsteps, to other planets; automatic washing machines in almost every home; babies conceived in glass tubes; dead men’s hearts sewn into other people’s bodies, to pump an extra lifetime.

There were many things no one understood, but any fool could see that there was no limit to knowledge. Only people who knew more than was good for them imagined their knowledge to give them power over nature. Nature would always prove unpredictable; but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be predicted.

Here in the Valley, on the farms, they knew enough about the earth and about animals to copy their parents’ customs, adding one or two of their own, to exist in an uneasy, mistrustful, respectful partnership with nature. At least that’s how it used to be.

Neither did grandfather believe in life after death, because he couldn’t see how something could live apart from its body, and he knew the difference between a body and a carcass because he’d seen so many hundreds, thousands of them in his life. When an animal died, whether it was human, bovine, or one of his beloved dogs, then that was it, the end of the story, and life was for the living. Grandmother’s sentimental attachment to the piskies and angels of her childhood had just been a weakness she’d not wanted to grow out of, and which he’d patiently put up with without ever making fun of her.

So when he told me that all he wanted was to rejoin her I knew he’d not undergone an easy conversion, grasping in his distress after dishonest consolation. What he meant was that he knew he couldn’t live without her and that he’d rather join her in oblivion, in the darkness that awaited them, than remain here without her.

§

In the days after the funeral, of which I have no memory at all, except for Auntie Sarah’s Toll rung on the bell as we walked away from the grave, grandfather’s habits gradually resumed their normal pattern: when the cock first crowed he rose as usual, washed and dressed in his vinegary silence, drank a mug of sweet tea with Ian and Tom, and followed them into the yard for their early morning chores before breakfast. And so he carried on through the days, padding like a somnambulist through his familiar routines, performing superfluous tasks that didn’t need doing that summer when time stood still, with Tinker at his heel, as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, showing no more sign of his grief. He came back into the house at dusk, hung his cap on the hook in the hallway, consumed the meal mother left for him in the oven, and then watched television if there was a wildlife programme on, before slipping upstairs without saying goodnight, as was his habit.

Grandfather brushed his teeth, put on his pyjamas and wrapped himself up in his grey woollen dressing-gown to contain the shivers of an old man despite the unrelenting temperature. The only thing different from normal was that now Tinker came in with him and curled herself up at his feet, blinking her heavy eyelids in the way that dogs do, pretending they’re not sleepy. He filled his pipe as usual for his last smoke of the day, staring into the darkness through the window he’d once made, while around him the members of the household made their ways to their own bedrooms.

He showed us no sign of grief. But at night, while the rest of the world was sleeping, grandfather lay on his back and stared at the ceiling, not bothering to take off his dressing-gown or get under the covers, and half-way through the night he turned over and faced the wall. He was surprised by how little willpower it took to stay awake, having prepared himself as if for a swim from one side of the quarry pool to the other, braving the pull of the deep as he had as a young man, remembering well how cramp attacked your body only when you were stranded in the middle. He imagined that sleep, too, would drag him down when he was at his most vulnerable, at two
AM
in the dead calm of the night. Instead, having decided to stay awake, he found sleep exerted no pull on him, no yawns, no feeling of fatigue. His only problem was boredom. He’d never had reason to appreciate how long a night lasts. Now, with nothing to do the nights seemed interminable, and grandfather wondered how he’d make his way across them to the dawn. Boredom like he’d never known threatened to shrivel his spirit, and he had no resources with which to combat it: he refused to seek refuge in memories, because he didn’t believe in living in the past, and neither could he escape into the future, for he had no plans at all. He fell back on his willpower, and rediscovered his implacable resolve of a youthful suitor, who’d forced his horse through waist-high drifts every Sunday of a distant winter, to persuade the young woman of the moor to become his bride. He told himself he was courting her now, except that instead of inviting her to join him in a new life, he was coming to rejoin her in death.

That was how grandfather kept himself awake until the world outside began to take shape in the first light of dawn, which came as a great relief but which he greeted nevertheless in cantankerous mood, resenting it out of habit even as it prised him from the torturous boredom of his bed.

§

Grandfather told no one of his sleepless nights, as he carried on throughout the day as usual, and no one noticed anything was wrong, because they were too wrapped up in themselves.

Ian was busy planning the final changes that he said would take the farm into the twenty-first century. “Agriculture’s an industry now,” he reminded us. “We’ve got to compete with big business, and not just in this country but all of Europe too. Us’ll have no more chickens pecking grit in the yard,” he said, as he drove off to consult with architects over building plans to house battery hens. “Animals is a waste of land resource,” he said, “cereals is where the money is today,” as he made a telephone call to book in good time the services of a crop-spraying aeroplane for the following summer.

As for Pamela, I hardly noticed that she hadn’t been around until she appeared one Sunday in a hire-van, which she filled with the contents of her room before kissing us goodbye and going back to a flat she’d rented in Exeter. Tom, meanwhile, spent more time than ever with Susanna, and they never let go of each other. They were like two people blinded by some accident who needed the constant reassurance of touch to verify their bodies were still intact.

Then one evening it was announced on the local news that the strike was over and all the schools would be back to normal the following Monday. Mother looked over at me and said: “What a mollywallops you is, Alison. We can’t have you goin’ off to school like that.”

“What’re you on about?” I asked.

“Come with me,” she said, and took me into the kitchen, where she put a towel round my neck and sheets of newspaper on the floor. I couldn’t believe it: she knew how grandmother went on about my hair being special in the family, but I was speechless before this callous act of sabotage. Long clumps of shiny black hair fell on my lap and on the floor around me. And I sat there in silent fury.

As soon as she’d finished I stormed out of the kitchen and looked in the mirror in the hallway, to discover with a shock that I wasn’t me any more. My drastic haircut revealed a stranger who gaped back, with my eyes and mouth and nose and everything but they’d changed somehow, been refashioned into a bizarrely altered model of myself. As if my long hair had been covering up changes in me. And as I stared at my strange reflection mother called through from the kitchen, as if reading my mind: “That’s right: you’re not a child any more, girl.”

§

It was Daddy who asked: “What’s up with the old man?” and we watched grandfather for a day or two. He’d told no one of his sleepless nights, but something in his manner betrayed him, a hesitancy in his movement, his limbs preoccupied. We all noticed it now, but we couldn’t put a finger on its cause, so mother called out Dr Buckle. Grandfather didn’t object to being examined: he stripped to his string vest and subjected himself to Dr Buckle’s clumsy fingers tapping his hollow back, to the cold metal of his stethoscope, which made him tremble, and to a spatula pressed upon his tongue. Dr Buckle pronounced him fit as a fiddle, but in the kitchen he whispered to mother that his heartbeat seemed sluggish, and that it might be a good idea if he stopped smoking. And so it was that grandfather let mother take his pipe away, without a word of complaint relinquishing his one consolation, in what he’d decided were to be the last days of his life.

Brothers

A
s soon as he was strong enough the Rector had loaded the rest of Maria’s belongings into the Commer parish van and brought them to the rectory. If he thought people would be scandalized he was wrong: no one batted an eyelid. The few who even noticed only wondered why he hadn’t done it years ago. They’d seen it coming long before the Rector ever had, because although he’d preached his gospel of love to the world he’d lived so long without it himself he’d learned how to manage.

Now Maria moved into his house and into his life with so little fuss that the Rector had to pinch himself to realize she hadn’t always inhabited them, except that he was experiencing emotions he’d not felt in forty years. At first he couldn’t fathom what they were, until it finally dawned on him that he was in love. The confusing difference was that when he was a younger man, he recalled with painful nostalgia, those emotions had made themselves manifest by wreaking havoc throughout his body, making his spine tingle, his stomach churn, his mind spin, his kidneys overact, his knees tremble and his sense of balance go haywire. Now his feelings were concentrated in one single organ, his heart, which pumped warm and contented blood around his body.

§

Maria didn’t try to change the Rector’s way of life at all. She was as much a confirmed spinster as he was a reconstituted bachelor; she put her food in the fridge and explained in Portuguese that the bottom shelf was for her and the rest for him, and they even cooked separate meals.

At eight-thirty in the morning she left the house and didn’t reappear until a quarter past five with a bundle of sheets she proceeded to iron in front of the mirror in the old drawing-room. Their lives ran parallel to each other until after supper, when they’d washed up their own utensils, one after the other, and the Rector had retreated to his study. Then Maria walked in, sat down in the armchair without even looking at him, and proceeded to read a book. The first evening the Rector found it difficult to concentrate on the sermon he was writing and kept looking at her because he felt her gaze burning his skin. But whenever he glanced in her direction he only found her engrossed in her reading. The second evening, however, he calmed down, and discovered that her quietly breathing presence made him feel better inside in some mysterious way and, if anything, helped him in his work.

At half past ten his concentration was broken by the firm thud of a book being closed and he looked up to see Maria rising from her seat. She stepped forward, said something in her native language, smiled, kissed him goodnight, and retired to her room next to his at the end of the upstairs corridor.

§

On the fourth day after her arrival the Rector was finishing his breakfast of bacon and eggs as Maria made to leave for work.

“Wait a minute,” he said, forgetting in his absent-minded way that she didn’t understand a word he said. “Look, Maria, there’s no need for you to go and clean people’s houses any more. My income’s large enough for both our needs.”

Maria smiled at him. “Don’t be soft,” she said in a strange Portuguese—Devonian accent, “I’ve not been supported by a man since I were nine year old. There in’t no need to start now, silly.”

§

Grandfather tried to keep up with the boys, but when he realized about midway through the morning that he was only holding them up, he dropped back and let them get on with their work. He’d spend the rest of the day pottering around doing things he’d never done in his life before but found were quite useful, determined to leave the farm in as good a condition as possible, sure that Ian would realize his foolishness and scale down his ambition, while cursing himself for making the farm so much bigger than the one his father had passed on to him. It was something he’d never particularly wanted to do anyway, it had just happened, somehow. Now he sanded down and painted the door- and window-frames of the sheds and creosoted their beams, in preparation for the piglets they’d surely buy in the spring; he spent three days pruning the apple and pear trees in the orchard, so unsteady on the ladder that Daddy and I had to take turns standing on the bottom rung; and he went around setting light to clumps of dead grass at the foot of trees and along fences. I had to watch him then, too, in my last week before school, because Ian was sure he’d start a fire, since everything on the surface of the earth was tinder dry. But grandfather’s little fires never got out of control: he understood the element. It was actually from him that Ian had inherited his skill at burning stubble.