1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (15 page)

He never took Tom with him, and Tom was too shy to ask. He’d be sat in front of the television, but his ear was cocked like a dog’s for the sound of Ian’s preparations in the room above, the hammering of his metal studs and the faint pad of his bare-foot anticipation, and Tom watched out of the corner of his eye when Ian came downstairs in his antiquated suit that somehow looked brand new. While Ian had been playing football, Tom would have been pottering around the farm, hoping that this Saturday of all Saturdays his older brother would casually ask if he wanted to come along too, would advise him on what to wear, would teach him how to hold his drink, how to talk to girls, how to avoid fights and how to conduct them, and all the other mysteries of adult entertainment. Once Ian had returned from his game and was getting himself ready, Tom had the mounting conviction that this would indeed be his initiatory evening, and his body began to churn up inside with dread at the prospect, so much so that sometimes he disappeared into the fields again, on the pretext of completing some unfinished job, until he knew Ian would have gone out. But Ian never did ask Tom if he’d like to go with him, because he was a lone hunter and the thought never crossed his mind, and as soon as he’d left, alone, Tom’s anxiety evaporated from his body, only to be replaced by a deadening weight of disappointment, which would grow heavier and heavier as the evening progressed in front of dreadful television programmes in the company of his parents, his grandparents, and me, his younger sister.

After tea Ian sat outside with grandfather and Daddy: they dragged their seats from the table and drank small glasses of Calvados in the warm evening, as the sun went down on the far side of Dartmoor. It was the only time of the week they talked together; well, Ian talked, and grandfather said a bit, and Daddy just drank his fruit juice and didn’t even look like he was listening.

“See unemployment’s nigh on three an’ a half million now,” said Ian.

“Aye; bastards, not lettin’ a man work,” said grandfather.

The Rector had told me there were a hundred and twenty-seven people in the village, on the Parish Roll. I asked Ian what three and a half million was divided by a hundred and twenty-seven, so I could get a good idea of how many people that was, but he ignored me.

“Word is the Honeywills is in trouble,” he told grandfather.

“See about buyin’ their fields up by the forest,” grandfather said. “That’s good grazin’ up there.”

“I already ‘ad a word,” said Ian.

Ian rolled a cigarette and grandfather filled his pipe; then he laughed to himself and looked at me and said: “Watch you don’t talk to strangers, maid.”

“What strangers?” I asked.

“There’s bound to be some about,” he declared. “When I were a lad, in the thirties, they used to get lost on their way to Plymouth and walk through the valley. They ‘ad to walk, see, they didn’t ‘ave no money. Used to ask for work without breaking stride, whoever they passed.”

“‘Any odd jobs?’ they said, just out of habit. You’d say hello to ‘em or nod, like, and all they’d say was ‘Any odd jobs?’ They wouldn’t look at you or even break stride, they wouldn’t.”

He paused, then laughed again.

“Us found one of them in the orchard,” he said.

“What did you do, grandad?” I asked, already knowing the answer, because grandmother had told it me before.

“Father give ‘im a good bloody hiding, thievin’ bastard.”

§

It must have been the alcohol made grandfather so talkative. He emptied his small glass in straight swigs and refilled it, while Ian sipped his slowly and left it only half-drunk. He got up, bid us good evening, and walked over to his van, checking in his pockets as he approached it and invariably finding that he’d forgotten something vital, his silver lighter or his battered tobacco tin or his slim sheaf of cash folded over a rubber band, and swiftly returned inside to fetch it.

I was too young to understand then why girls were drawn to Ian, whereas they never gave Tom a second glance. It was only later I realized he had a lover’s smile, which is one of complicity.

Whenever there was one being held, Ian drove back along the Valley to the Christow disco, in the village hall. They were organized by the manager of the football team, Gerry, and his wife Jean, who owned the best grocery store in that village. Gerry stood on the door and took the money, tattooing people’s hands with a purple-inked date stamp in case they wanted to go in and out during the evening. Jean kept an eye on the flow of alcohol from the bar extension, and also broke up the fights: devoid of physical fear, she dived between the flailing limbs of drunken greasers, who were so shocked at being manhandled by a woman that they forgot why they’d started fighting in the first place and apologized for their behaviour.

Kids too young to buy alcohol from the bar, where they knew everyone’s age, bribed older brothers or sisters to get them a bottle of Clan Dew from the Artichoke. A mixture of rough Scotch whisky and sweet English wine, they drank it in the lanes and threw it up in the hedgerows, before returning to the hall to dance unsteadily to the same records that had been played for years. Despite occasional experiments, Jean and Gerry always came back round to booking a balding DJ from Newton Abbot, who played the latest hit records but had the insight to throw in the odd heavy metal song from the seventies, or better still one by Gary Glitter, and then all the men who’d been leaning against the wall, cupping their beer and gazing vacantly at the girls who were dancing together, would come forward and jerk their bodies in rhythmic, stilted movements.

Ian was one of the few to resist even the beat of nostalgia. He felt uncomfortable dancing, because he was unable to relax his instincts of a predator. In fact he didn’t enjoy discos at all: he disliked the music, and the fact that it was broadcast loud enough to bruise your eardrums made it even worse; he disliked the flashing lights and the frenetic atmosphere, as if courtship required suspension of the senses. He preferred to talk his way into a girl’s heart, gently, but instead he had to shout at her above the din, and rely on his wicked smile. He also suffered from an inferiority complex about his dancing, and was bemused by how girls seemed to be able to do twice as much with their bodies as he could do with his, with no apparent effort; whereas he was exhausted by his useless attempts.

For Ian, the fast records were simply there to fill the soundtrack of the time before the slow ones, which the DJ had the good sense to start playing in plenty of time before midnight. Ian leaned back against the wall, sipping his beer to make it last, and choosing with his eyes a girl for the evening. He gave her half an hour to acknowledge his gaze in the way he recognized, and if she didn’t then he’d choose another without a second thought. Now and then one of the blokes from the football team would join him, to yell in his ear with beery breath, or a past girlfriend would buy him a drink, hoping to persuade him into a resumption of their relationship. He never succumbed. When he did see the same girl for more than a couple of weeks he did his best to keep their affair a casual one, seeing her only on Saturday nights, never in the week, but still mother had got used to tearful phone calls from girls who couldn’t understand how someone so sweet, who’d smiled that complicitous smile, with whom they’d danced close together to songs whose every lyric proclaimed eternal, undying love, did not wish to spend every moment ever after with them, as they did with him. She did her best to console them, being careful not to offer a morsel of encouragement. Her son was a heartbreaker. He preferred a different girl every week, and if towards midnight he was without a partner, or if it was clear to his seducer’s instinct that the girl he’d been buying drinks for and dancing the slow dances with would not want to share their love later on, then he’d ease away from her, and end the evening with one of the plain and generous farm girls still dancing with each other.

In winter Ian would take his partner by the hand and they’d slip past the side of the stage, vibrating from the decibels of the speakers, and into the committee room at the end of the hall. Or if the DJ was already packing up his equipment they’d clamber into the back of Ian’s van, with the engine ticking over to keep the heater going, and make uncomfortable love in amongst empty grain sacks and strands of bailer twine, and the nutty smell of animal feed. That summer he made love where he most enjoyed it, out in the open, with grass underneath and open sky above, because that was where he could most easily lose himself.

It was Pamela who told me that, shaking her head in disapproval.

“How do you know?” I asked her.

“Word gets around,” she said. “That’s the trouble with our brothers, Ali, they’re as ignorant as each other in their different ways. Mind you don’t take no notice of them. I’ll take you to Exeter with me when you’re a bit bigger.”

Ian didn’t know why he never became attached to his fleeting girlfriends. The only advice Daddy had ever given him in such matters had fallen off his tongue one day some years before, as sometimes happened, the words as if of their own accord appearing for a moment on the tabula rasa of his memory. Ian had taken Daddy to help him patch up some fencing in the copse by the top field, getting him to hold off-cuts while he nailed them against tree stumps. As Ian bent to pick up some nails from the box at his feet, Daddy touched his arm and said: “When you gives a girl the push, bay, make sure her thinks she’s done it to you.” Then he turned and picked up another plank of wood, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. When Daddy said such things, in rare and inappropriate moments of lucidity, they had a peculiar force, like the first sentences constructed by infants in their acquisition of language. And, just as they vanished again from his memory as soon as he’d said them, so they imprinted themselves upon ours, and became a part of our family mythology.

That solitary piece of advice from a father to his son was something Ian took to heart and followed so assiduously that none of his girlfriends harboured resentment towards him. Whenever he met one he’d say hello and give some innocuous compliment and smile in his way, and they’d feel only tender pity towards him and wonder what it was that had made them break it off.

Ian had lost count of his girlfriends by the time he was twenty, although he always appeared to recognize them, even those whose faces he’d only seen distorted by the flashing lights of a disco and in the shadows of the Christow Hall committee room. He’d taken his pick from the girls of the Valley, as well as from the clusters from outside who came to the football club discos. If there wasn’t one being held, he’d drive right through the Valley and on to Moretonhampstead, a large village on the edge of the moor which had more pubs than houses, or else he’d turn left when he reached the Valley road and go all the way down to Torquay, which was full of northern girls on holiday, with hotel rooms of their own. The only thing he never did was to go east, to Exeter, because that was Pamela’s stamping ground, and they had some sort of unspoken agreement to keep out of each other’s territories. The exotic nightclubs she described to me on her lazy Sundays at home were like forbidden zones to Ian, but with no attraction, while Pam thought that when Ian went out to his farmers’ dances it wasn’t so much to go to a party as to take a step back in time.

Superstition

“T
hese yur’s the dog days,” said grandfather on Monday. Buildings were swimming in the heat. Ian stopped smoking during the day, his throat raw, and Tom took to using a handkerchief for the first time in his uncivilized life, to wipe away the sweat that streamed into his eyes. On Tuesday at noon Tinker staggered across the yard like she was drunk, while down in the meadow some loose bullocks ate tiny, wrinkled apples, dropped and fermenting in the grass, and they chased each other kicking their heels in the air.

§

My earliest memory came back, from years before: mother woke me up in the middle of the night. The light was on in the hall. She wrapped me in a blanket and carried me downstairs; Ian and Pamela and Tom were already pulling their coats on and rubbing their eyes. Ian opened the front door. Rain was falling silently in the darkness. I had my arms round mother’s neck, my legs wrapped round her body, as she led the way out of the yard. She was different then. I remember my head bobbing on her shoulder, that and the rain awakening me. Ian opened up a great black umbrella for himself and the other two, and they followed behind us, through the first field beside the lane and then away towards the orchard, the shapes of hedges and trees and the uneven ground revealing themselves as our eyes became accustomed to the darkness.

Suddenly mother stopped stock still. The others stumbling sleepily behind us bumped into her, and came around the sides of her to see if we’d reached our destination. We were still in the middle of the field, able to distinguish only the ground, for a few feet around us, in the darkness that had settled over the earth.

The rain was falling so softly each drop was as light as a snowflake and made no sound as it alighted upon the orbiting earth. Then out of the all-encompassing silence came the sound of breathing. We all held our breaths, instinctively. Footsteps became audible, coming closer towards us, walking at a heavy and ponderous pace. Breathing, deep and impatient, was almost upon us as a form began to materialize, dark as the night itself, as if the night itself were creating life from out of its formless immensity. But that was no human being appearing before us: instead, grandfather’s big black bull, that I would come to know and fear as long as he was alive, passed in front of us, so close I could have reached out and touched his huge flanks.

We waited till he’d been swallowed up by the night that bore him, and then we waited some more, before we dared to breathe again. Then without a word mother set off again, and we crossed the ditch by the orchard over a bridge of mossy wooden planks, the rain audible for the first time pattering as it joined the water in the stream.

It was at that moment that the smell entered my nostrils. But mother didn’t stop there. She carried right on into the middle of the orchard, through the ghostly trees, and there she made us stand and told us to close our eyes, the better to savour the painfully sweet scent of apple blossom that the softly falling rain had teased into the night air.