1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (26 page)

As soon as grandfather came back into the room with a steaming bowl in his hands, Douglas wiped the knife with spirit and said simply: “All right.”

Grandfather stooped to his wife’s side, ready with the gag and brandy, and watched with horror as Douglas’s scalpel blade entered the surface of her skin, just below her rib cage, as if it were no more solid than water, disappearing right up to its handle, and then sliced down her belly as Douglas pulled it towards him.

Grandfather prayed to the God he despised that she would not wake up, scrutinizing her face now. For a moment he even regretted doing this: it was virtually a desecration of her body, and he should have let her die in peace. Then her face suddenly twisted as the pain of the knife communicated itself, and he saw for the first time how old she was. Her eyes remained closed, but tears dampened her face. His heart was pounding. He realized they were his tears, falling upon her. Her face unclenched itself as she again lost consciousness, and he felt engulfed in a wave of relief and of sorrow. Douglas’s voice brought him back to the physical reality before him.

“What you say, bay?”

Douglas had been transformed in those brief moments in which he had prepared himself for this task, and when he opened her up it was with the detachment and authority of a surgeon. But what he found there reduced him once more to what he really was, a terrified fourteen-year-old boy. His bloody hands were shaking.

“Er’s all t-t-tangled up inside,” he stuttered.

Grandfather pushed him out of the way, and plunged his hands into the hot stew of his wife’s insides. The feel of her viscera seemed somehow familiar. He felt around and his fingers discovered the shape of another, tiny body, and he grasped it as gently as he could, and pulled it upwards, through the jumbled flesh and free, into the open air, where he held it by its feet.

“Cut the cord, bay!” he ordered.

Douglas obeyed him, nicking the umbilical cord with his scalpel, and with his thick and trembling fingers he tied a delicate knot in an instant, at the navel of the child who hung limply from grandfather’s hand. Then grandfather drew back his free hand and slapped the child’s back: it came to life with a pathetically weak but nevertheless imposing bawl. Cradling it in his arms he rushed once more along the corridor to his sisters’ room, and pushed the door open: his two sisters and five daughters were huddled on one bed, cowering together, with the patience of fear. He handed the child to the first pair of hands that reached towards him, turned, and rushed back.

“Run to the phone box, Douglas. 999. Get the doctor. Get the ‘ole fuckin’ hospital.”

Grandfather felt for grandmother’s pulse. As soon as he found it he didn’t wait to gauge its strength but set to cleaning her up. He couldn’t work out where all the blood had come from, and still came. He pulled the placenta out of her belly and threw it into a corner. Then he threaded a needle for the first time in his life, with black cotton, and started to sew together the loose folds of her skin with small, precise stitches, in rapt concentration, making as perfect a job as he possibly could, not because he imagined that in itself it was important but because he thought that as long as he was doing so she would stay alive, and he wanted to keep sewing until the ambulance came. He kept his mind concentrated by repeating under his breath, over and over like a prayer: “Hang on, lover. Hang on.”

He bit the cotton, as he’d seen her do a hundred times, and was tying the ends of the last stitch when the ambulance arrived. Lost in his labour of love, he was the only person in the whole village who didn’t hear the siren, the first time one had come into our part of the world. A small crowd had already gathered in the lane by the time they whisked her away, with grandfather still beside her, holding her hand as tightly as she’d earlier held his.

§

They kept her in the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital for three weeks, and gave her two blood transfusions, as well as undoing and rethreading the stitches of her Caesarean wound, before allowing her home to take over the rearing of the child who’d been wet-nursed, meanwhile, by one of Granny Sims’ granddaughters. They brought the baby to her when she limped, sorely, through the front door, and the first thing she did was to remove its clothes and nappy on the kitchen table, because she refused to believe what they’d told her until she saw it with her own eyes.

“All right,” she said in a hoarse voice, “so you wasn’t being funny. I’ll say this though: if that’s what ‘tis like giving birth to a bay, I’m glad we had all girls before.”

And that’s how Daddy came, unwillingly, into this world, and might be why, despite the fact that he almost killed her, he was the favourite of all her children, such is the logic of love.

Flight

T
he mosquitoes that followed the piano tuner in his travels weren’t the only animals who lost their sense of direction in that incandescent heat and ended up in the Valley. When the reservoirs up behind Christow dried up, strange species of fish, the like of which had never been caught by the lugubrious fishermen who came out from Exeter on Sundays, were beached on the black silt: flat, rhomboidal fish so much like children’s drawings even the warden doubted whether they had ever really been alive, as well as, so it was said, the still squirming freshwater eels of the Fens.

Back on our side of the Valley at the bottomless quarry pool the widowman heron was joined for one brief visit by a crane that glided over the pine woods to land like a cotton sheet. When I mentioned it to grandmother she told me about the young 14
th
Viscount, Johnathan’s grandfather, who in the inter-war years designed and constructed in the estate stables a prototype aeroplane. The entire population of the village gathered around the beech tree to watch him fly from the ridge above the quarry pool. They listened in disbelief as he explained the direction of his flight and pointed down the Valley towards Christow, to a field where champagne was on ice. Excitement mounted as he put on his goggles and climbed into the cockpit, and when his valet spun the propeller they held their breath, keeping it in as the plane launched from the ridge and plummeted, spinning, into the quarry pool. They held their breath until it burst out of them, and they stayed watching the surface of the pool until it had fully recomposed its placid surface. They waited even longer, too, but even so half of them were half-way home, muttering in agreement about the stupidity of the young and wiping their eyes, when back at the pool the 14
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Viscount’s leather helmet bobbed up to the surface and his mouth gasped for air. For the rest of his short life people would ask him what it was like down there, and he told everybody the same thing, that below the surface it was dark, too dark to see, he fell and fell and the water grew colder as he struggled to climb out of the cockpit; the only sense of any use to him was touch, except that everything felt unreal. Still he fell, and just as he thought he was losing consciousness he saw a bright light far below. Just then he broke free from the cockpit, and swam up towards the surface. He couldn’t rise fast enough through the black water, and was tormented by the possibility that he was going in the wrong direction. His lungs were two ravens clawing their way out of his rib cage while his head was nodding off to sleep, when suddenly he woke up at the surface of the quarry pool.

§

A few years later, in the middle of a war, the German plane appeared in the Valley. The pilot hadn’t lost his way: the granite works down by Teign Village was secretly producing cement for concrete bunkers and buildings. There were antiaircraft guns and a barrage balloon at the end of the Valley, by Chudleigh, but it was a quiet Saturday in June and the officers had gone to the races at Newton Abbot. The men on duty, who for months had been half-cursing, half-blessing their luck at being stationed far from the action in this tucked-away corner of the world, gaped at the plane with enemy markings that appeared out of the blue sky. They watched it approach and knew its target, and they had it in their sights: but no one dared to open fire without the order from one of their superiors. The plane came dipping and weaving, to evade the inevitable flak, but when it didn’t materialize the plane soared up and overshot the quarry, as if the pilot was so surprised he forgot to attack it.

Grandmother was one of those who saw it reappear and, as if in malicious imitation of the 14
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Viscount’s intentions, the pilot dipped his wings as he skimmed through the Valley, before emptying the contents of his bomb carriage directly above the granite works.

§

Some years after that grandfather took a one-off trip with Joseph Howard to Hereford market, to see what sorts of bulls other farmers were buying. (It was on that trip that he saw, in their orchards, bottles tied to pear trees, an idea he stole for the apple liqueur we drank at Christmas.) On the way back they drove underneath a crop-spraying aeroplane as it crossed over the road, and when they got home the paint on grandfather’s van was all blistered. He began to wonder what the chemicals must be doing to his own soil, but the promises and guarantees of the fertilizer salesmen helped him put it to the back of his mind until the village streams, just before they dried up in that hottest of summers, began to reflect weird, unnatural colours that no one—except grandfather—could quite take in because they didn’t have words to describe them.

§

“Er Dad don’t know ‘er, ‘er Dad don’t know ‘er.” The chant appeared in my head, an echo from the past coming up behind me, whenever I thought that the summer and the teachers’ strike would end and I’d have to start Comprehensive. In the playground at Chudleigh they’d taunt me at break when they were bored, a ring of grinning faces surrounding me. “Er Dad don’t know ‘er, ‘er Dad don’t know ‘er.”

I tried to stand aloof and regard the wheeling bodies with a look of such scorn that they felt ashamed, and the hands would break. Sometimes anger blew through me like a note through a whistle and I’d thump one of them: then either the game would halt for a second, allowing me to push through the ring and stalk off, or else I’d be thrown the relief of combat, the taunting forgotten for a more exciting spectacle, and I’d use all the tricks my brothers had taught me. But there were other times when the baiting pierced all my resistance, and I’d feel it discharge into a rush of tears. Then there’d be contrition and sympathy that I resented as much as when I saw it implicit in the greeting of some adult in the village.

The one person I wanted to talk about it with was Johnathan, but it was only a week since we’d burned down the barn and we were both too scared to even look at each other, let alone speak, down at the Valley road. The others all knew what we’d done, of course, and if they saw us getting friendly again word was sure to get back to our parents. And I suppose because I couldn’t talk to him, I wanted to all the more.

All through the summer, when the thought of school intruded, I prayed that the ridicule wouldn’t follow me to Newton. By this time it was a month into the term and although the school had now apparently opened part-time, those of us out in the villages still weren’t being admitted. It allowed me to hope that once the world began again my simple Daddy would have been forgotten along with other trivial details from the burned up past.

But what made me angry with myself was that it was the baiting I feared, the way it isolated me, and not its substance. It wasn’t so bad having such a father. He had inherited his mother’s generous and open nature, neither of which had been entirely lost. He’d never, so far as I could recall, scolded me, much less given me a beating. I knew well enough the sullen solitude of my friends’ fathers, who came in from the fields at dusk, bringing their own sweat and that of animals into the living-room, where they sat back silently smoking, before wearily treading upstairs to take shelter in the refuge of their wives. I had a companion instead: was that so bad?

My own brother, Tom, would one day be one of those fathers, with nothing to say at mealtimes and no ideas for improvements to the farm, which he left to Ian, cruising on habit and instinct, only fired with an implacable will in pursuit of the Woman he’d chosen. In the days following the dance, while other men worked on various schemes to bring water to the village, all as hare-brained as Corporal Alcock’s plan to use capillary osmosis to draw the black water up from the quarry pool, Tom ignored them and spent his time sitting on my window-sill, scrutinizing the Simmons’ house on the slope below the church. Since there was no school, Susanna’s parents made her stay in and study, keeping school hours. Consulting his watch every few seconds, Tom would go to meet her at breaktimes and dinnertime, and they strolled around the village hand in hand. At the end of her imitation school day they’d disappear together, returning as the sun went down, faces triangular in the dusk. It got so I couldn’t go to bed myself until I’d seen their goodnights taken care of, stepping into the shadow at her front door, then Susanna opening it and being swallowed up by the light inside.

Inside his soft cherub’s body, Tom was imbued with the wiry farmers’ strength of our family, that had enabled my brothers and cousins to make up half the village tug-of-war team that wiped the floor with the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary in their bulging blue track suits at the church fete the year before. He could do the physical work of three men, grandfather said, and at the busy times of the year went with four hours’ sleep a night and was still the first one up to put the kettle on and set the day’s first pot of tea brewing. But love wore him out: he nodded off on my window-sill, fell asleep in front of the television, yawned uncontrollably in the kitchen, and mother had to shake him awake with a mug of tea in bed in the mornings. He lost his appetite too, refusing meals, pushing his plate away with a look of disdain as if to make clear that so base an activity as eating was beneath him. He was under the illusion that love alone was sufficient, that their long-drawn-out kisses satisfied his hunger, although in the middle of the night he floated downstairs like a sleepwalker to raid the larder, consuming half loaves of bread, joints of meat and two pints of milk at a time, as he had as an adolescent. His eyes became bruised by fatigue, but inside brown rings the pupils shone like pebbles under water, and all they saw was Susanna Simmons, or portents of her. Love briefly overcame my brother’s sullen reticence. He appreciated for the first time the loyal devotion of the sheepdogs, almost as steadfast as his own eternal offering of himself to her. He watched as no naturalist had ever done the sand martins as they peppered the sides of the sand quarry at the granite works with their transitory nests, because they also, for no obvious reason, reminded him of her, her unnatural perfection that made his heart nutter whenever he looked at her strong shoulders, her delicate wrists, or beheld the miraculous articulation of her joints. The hallucinatory breeze he thought he saw on Monday afternoon ripple through a field of late corn reminded him of Susanna down to the last detail; and he even listened with Daddy to the morning record and was amazed to discover that other men had known exactly how he felt.