1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (23 page)

Gradually, as we munched drop scones and swallowed lukewarm tea, grandmother’s silence settled over the table. The men looked down at their empty plates; the large women leaned back against the wall; grandmother chewed quietly.

§

I thought of our ewes, and tried to remember them in the spring with their lambs. The world was so different then it was like remembering a completely different place: the earth was still moist and soft from the winter thaw, and the young lambs, as they frolicked in the field along the lane, bounced vertically off the ground. They looked like the most carefree beings in existence, but if a human approached they became panic-stricken, like children in a party game, and ran into and across each other looking for their mothers. They usually made for the wrong ones, and became lost and bemused, until their ears suddenly picked up the distinctive bleating of their own mother, and then they would home in on her and attack her teats, berating her for deserting them, it seemed, as much as seeking the security of her milk.

Then I remembered how, when I was much younger, one of the ewes had died in the midst of giving birth. It was a thing that hardly ever happened, and grandfather was furious: he pulled the half-emerging lamb from the dead ewe’s womb, cleaned it up himself, and brought it to the house. He came in the kitchen, handed it to his daughter-in-law without a word, and left, to carry on with the rest of the lambing.

I don’t think mother was too sure what to do. She got me to put some rags in a cardboard box while she warmed a baby’s bottle of powdered milk. The lamb was a runty little bundle of bone and wiry wool. He looked more sleepy than anything else, but he took the rubber teat and sucked without pause. Mother told me to hold the bottle.

“He can be your responsibility, Alison,” she said. “I’ll show you what to do. And you can think of a name for him for starters.”

I decided then and there to call him Smudge, because he wasn’t white like he was supposed to be. After he was fed we put him in the bottom oven of the Aga, with the door open.

Runts get ignored if they’re lucky, or more likely picked on. There was nearly always one chicken scrawnier than the rest, who’d peck its feathers for no good reason, for their own humourless amusement, proving you don’t need any brains to be cruel. They’d send it flapping into a corner of the yard. Smudge was never going to be like that. He didn’t learn the timidity of his species, which in reality is only a habit passed on from one generation to the next: without their example he followed me everywhere, curious and playful as a puppy, but bolder. Tinker was no longer allowed in the house, and when Smudge followed me into the yard—the dogs’ territory—instead of submitting to their indignant inspection of this unwelcome guest he’d look them in the eye and stare them out until they turned tail, and left him alone. The only thing he wouldn’t do was allow himself to be house-trained, and I had to go around scooping up his neat pellets off the carpets.

As soon as he was old enough to graze Smudge was reintroduced to his flock in the fields: they accepted him immediately, and he them, but he remained aloof. I took my friends to play with him: we approached quietly along the lane, and Jane or Susan May would slip through the rungs of the gate. The game was to see how far we could creep up on the flock before they noticed us. As soon as one of them did then they all knew simultaneously, through electricity as grandmother would say, their heads snapping back, mouths full of grass clamping shut. Then they scurried away all together towards a far corner of the field; all, that is, except one, Smudge, who was growing into a proud, twist-horned ram and who galloped instead in the opposite direction, straight towards us, to renew his acquaintance with our species. Jane always got the closest, so that she then had to run the furthest back to the gate, squealing with terror and delight, hotly pursued by that comical sheep that I’d fed from a bottle.

One day grandfather took him off for slaughter along with the other young rams, without thinking to tell me.

Uncle Bill blew his nose loudly, lowered his handkerchief, and inspected its contents; uncle Sidney and aunt Shirley stole glances at each other; thin aunt Susan, with her wide eyes like a bird, cupped her almost empty teacup. I rubbed my finger round the rim of my glass; when the hum started, moths closed their wings and dropped off the lampshade. Mother slapped my wrist.

After a while Ian leaned across and muttered something to grandfather, who nodded with evident relief, before standing up.

“Us is goin’ to the barn,” he declared awkwardly, “to talk farmin’ matters.” He stepped outside with Ian, followed by his sons-in-law and grandsons. The sharp scent of their sweat lingered over the table as the women watched them through the window, thin wisps of smoke coming round the sides of their heads as they ambled towards the barn in their crumpled Sunday suits.

The women remained silent a moment more, feeling some part of themselves departing, some silent measure of their conversation. But departed also was the particular inhibition men caused, and they pushed their chairs back and relaxed. Some drank another cup of tea, while we cleared away around grandmother and washed up.

When aunt Dorothy went to the lavatory, aunt Shirley said: “Have you been over her place recently? She’s got another bloody dog.”

“Must have more than ‘alf a dozen,” said aunt Marjorie. “Why on earth’s ‘er want so many?”

“All I know is she started acquirin’ them, like, when she knew she wan’t goin’ to get another man,” aunt Shirley replied, adding: “And who’s to say ‘er made the wrong choice?” And they all laughed, hiding their faces when she came back in the room.

Of the men only Daddy stayed inside, obedient to the bias instilled in childhood when, as the only son, he’d grown up in a household so filled with women that their cycles came to coincide.

Terry was the only cousin almost as young as me and he was as bad-tempered as his father. I’d given up on him ever since he’d declared in the spring that there were too many primroses about, so when we were sent outside to play I manoeuvred down to the back of the barn so that we could see what was going on.

Down in the shadows of the cavernous barn, its floor bare except for a dusty sprinkling of chaff, they sat around on barrels and beams. Ian was telling grandfather of the decision that was forcing itself upon them: to buy in hay at great cost, or to slaughter the animals.

“I wanted to tell you before us decided one way or t’other. Make sure you approved, like, grandfather. To be honest, I think there’s only one choice.”

Grandfather narrowed his eyes, cleared his throat, and spat a gob of phlegm into the dust. “Tidn’t right,” he declared. “Us built this whole farm on stock. Even in the bad summer not long after the war, when your father was born, when I ‘ad to pick carcasses up myself and bring ‘em home on the trailer, I waited for the autumn. It’ll come.”

“But we can get these ‘ere subsidies now, you never ‘ad ‘em—”

“—I knows that.”

“We ‘ardly grows enough grain for ourselves. If we turn over fields from grazin’ to grain, ‘tis money for old rope.”

“You needs sheep for the ‘illsides,” suggested uncle Sidney.

“Tidn’t a proper farm without pigs, that’s for sure,” uncle Bill added emphatically.

“I don’t like it,” said uncle Terence.

“See, we’re wastin’ space leavin’ animals out in the fields,” Ian explained. “They should be inside, then the meat in’t lost with runnin’ about. Us could easy convert the sheds for starters.”

They sat around in the dimness, the barn, squeezed by the heat, gently pulsating with their various thoughts.

“I’ll approve of this,” grandfather declared at length, having admitted to himself that it was too late to take back the authority he’d passed to his grandson. “If you has to slaughter, do it now; keep back the best. Then you can feed they the hay you’ve got left. You can start the ‘erd up again next year.”

With the confidence of one with no doubts about his own leadership, Ian turned to his brother. Tom nodded.

“Tis agreed, grandfather,” Ian said. “I’ll get Douglas soon’s he can.”

“Good, ‘tis settled,” grandfather said as he stood up. “Now, I needs all of you bays. Deborah wants the chicken hut moving. They’s peckin’ up nothin’ but dust, and us can all lift it together.”

They stepped outside. Eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun, my uncles’ heads were filled with the calculations of acres and tonnes and Common Market money. Terry joined them and I went back to the house, just as Daddy was helping grandmother into the sitting-room. He eased her gently into her chair by the fire, which she insisted she needed kept alight to stop from getting cold, even in that furnace of a summer. She gripped his hand, and her milky eyes gazed vaguely through him.

“You’s a good bay,” she muttered hoarsely. “Too good for this world.”

He smiled. “So’s you, grandma.”

“That’s all right then, ‘cos I’ll not be much longer of it.”

“Course you will,” said her daughters, who were on the settee, and they made tutting noises.

“Put another log on the fire, Georgie,” grandmother asked. “I shiver.”

Grandmother was looking straight at me, but she couldn’t see.

“Grandma,” I asked her, “mother says you won’t ‘ave an operation for your cataracts. Why not? It must be awful not to see proper.”

“No, maid, no, I don’t want it,” she replied. “I’ve already seen enough for one life.”

Electric Summer

T
hings aren’t simple. Things change. You see how people are, and you think they were always like that. You don’t realize what people do to accommodate themselves in the world.

For one thing, it was hard to believe, looking at them now, but fifty years earlier grandmother had realized what a mistake she’d made within months of the wedding. She’d met the wiry, reserved farmer at a harvest dance in Moretonhampstead, and he courted her every Sunday, riding his cob up past the reservoirs to her father’s house on the edge of Dartmoor. He arrived every week without fail, at first in the late autumn, when she showed him her favourite walks across the heather and round the Tors, and then into the winter when he appeared through sweeping rain like a phantom. He’d change into the spare clothes he brought wrapped in oilskin and spend the day silently watching grandmother and her sisters sew, smoking his clay pipe and refusing their invitations to play cards or sing around the piano.

Even when the snow cut them off from the world in January, still he came, forcing his horse through the waist-high drifts and bringing honey and fresh cream from the Valley. The house was in a small hamlet, and on Sunday mornings the inhabitants all sat at their windows, each week agreeing that this time he wouldn’t make it, and then applauding him from behind the glass when horse and rider once more came stumbling through the snow.

Grandmother’s father, manager of the mines behind Manaton, resented the young peasant whose farm was little more than a smallholding, but by the end of that winter he’d relented to the perseverance of his daughter’s suitor. For her part, grandmother found his taciturnity a welcome relief from the garrulous hubbub of her large family, whose prattle, jovial and witty, could not conceal their lack of sensibility, and from which she had escaped as often as possible into the civilized worlds of her dead grandfather’s library and the windswept, elemental moor. She sensed the wisdom behind silence, and furthermore her nance’s determined wooing of her revealed a will as strong as her own: she knew that together they would improve and increase his small farm into the largest in the district.

As their wedding day approached they drew closer and closer together, as they planned their life and felt their separate destinies drawing into one. Grandfather prepared for her arrival in the farmhouse, his parents making way and moving out of the main bedroom, where he constructed a bed for grandmother and himself, while his two unmarried sisters shared the room at the end of the corridor. The dark building with its roof of threadbare thatch, the dusty farmyard, and the quaint, ramshackle outbuildings, seemed as beautiful to her as the pictures of Palladian villas she’d studied in a book in her grandfather’s library.

§

Grandmother soon sensed the extent of her error. It was as if her husband had used up all the resolution he owned in capturing her, some manly imperative like yeast lifting shape and purpose from his latent will, which in the months following the wedding collapsed into lethargy. He barely had enough energy to sustain the farm, taking days over jobs even grandmother realized could be done in hours, haphazardly feeding the livestock, and apathetically leaving the meagre harvest until impending rain forced him to it. In the evenings he would come in long before dusk and drink tea from a pot left brewing by the fire, and after supper he would sit there again, beside his sisters silently knitting, smoking his pipe, occasionally leaning forward and riddling the poker among the embers, and she realized then the awful and obvious truth of his reticence, that he said nothing because his brain was merely a froth of indecision and in his mind there were no coherent thoughts worthy of expression.

During the first winter of their marriage grandmother forced herself to swallow the phlegm of her regret, rather than spit it resentfully at her irresolute partner, and she gradually digested the reality of her predicament. She felt stifled and oppressed. She thought she would scream in the silent evenings around the fire, and she dreamed of saddling the horse one night as soon as the snow melted, and riding back home. Close to defeat, only her pride sustained her: once she said she’d do something she did it, and no one had ever stopped her before, least of all herself.

One Tuesday morning at the beginning of March grandfather was drinking his first mug of tea of the day when his wife swept into the kitchen, still shivering in her nightdress, and opened the window wide, before moving on into the sitting-room. He followed her, bemused, as she strode around the house, through every room, ignoring his sisters who were still in bed, opening all the windows and exclaiming loudly: