1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (3 page)

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Ian hid his impatience from most people, but if they watched him they’d have noticed the way he tightened the curls of his hair with one finger when he appeared to be at ease. And they might have wondered why he was so thin: he consumed prodigious quantities of food, as much as Tom did, but without adding any flesh to his wiry frame. Mother told him he kept a worm inside his body which ate up all the surplus calories, so that he could have the pleasures of gluttony without its consequences; he sometimes failed to make sure that the toilet had managed to flush away the evidence of his appetite, leaving a large turd floating in the bowl.

The only time Ian made no effort to hide his impatience was when he thought he’d be late for football, which was every Saturday afternoon. He’d rush across the yard, socks or shin-pads spilling from his sportsbag, rev up his yellow ex-British Telecom van, lurch forward then brake suddenly, remembering something he’d forgotten, lift off the door whose hinges he never got round to fixing, lean it against the side of the van, come scrambling back into the house, demand to know who the hell had hidden his tie-ups, eventually find them where he’d left them the week before, dash out again, leap into the van pulling the door behind him, and screech out of the yard in a turmoil of dust, burning rubber, and panic-stricken chickens.

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The only escape that Ian found from time’s unblinking scrutiny was in his insomniac’s refuge of the early hours, listening to the sounds of the sea on his short-wave radio as he played another game of chess against his computer. He couldn’t understand how, in the middle of the chaos and confusion of life that teemed around him, something of such beauty—and nothing more than a game, at that—could exist, an infinitely renewable, unfolding secret waiting for him to make the first move and develop into another unique pattern of intrigue and delight. It was truly incredible. When I started going to church on my own, after mother stopped, he used to tease me: “Don’t be silly, maid, there b’ain’t no God. Unless he was the one what invented chess. I could make some sense out of that.”

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“Come on, mother,” I said, while the record was still droning on. “Can’t I take Daddy out yet?”

“Stop your bloody moaning, maid. Why don’t you play with someone your own age for a change?” she demanded. “What’s Jane doing?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “Go on, mother, you can see he wants to.”

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Mother made Daddy put on his dark jacket, ‘because it keeps the heat off’, so she said, but I knew that really it was just because she liked him to look smart. We ambled across the farmyard through the fetid air that drifted from the barn, past the gaggle of cackling geese loath to leave the stagnant pond, between the hens pecking some illusory sustenance from the dust, and into the lane. Sweat broke out across Daddy’s smooth forehead, and his soft cheeks reddened.

We carried on out of the village. Since the sun hurt our eyes we opened our ears instead. All I could hear was the strange hum that hovered behind every other sound throughout that summer. Earlier on, when it first became audible, there was widespread unease at the idea that Mrs Corporal Alcock’s tinnitus had become contagious, and people bent over and shook their heads or used knitting needles to try and dislodge the singing insect in their eardrums. Soon, though, people had to make a special effort to distinguish it from everyday silence and it no longer irritated anyone, except for grandmother, who had recognized the first symptoms of cholera. Her own great-grandmother had died in the epidemic that decimated Exeter, and she would choose inappropriate moments to ask relatives and strangers alike who passed through the house whether they’d felt a sensation of giddiness recently of a feeling of uneasiness in their stomach, and she warned us to look out for what she described as rice-water motions.

Soon the hum was consigned to the background and there was a faint squelching as Daddy’s heavy boots were absorbed by gravel swimming in the liquefying tarmac. Gradually I extended the range of my hearing: a whine emerged from the blurry clouds of gnats and midges that hung over the meadow to our right, and we passed a thrush in the hedgerow whose liquid runs of melody were constantly abandoned and begun again. Then from what seemed a long way away came a tinkling of silver bells, and I shielded my eyes to see if I could catch my first glimpse of the procession of Buddhists who were rumoured to have turned Whiteway House over Haldon into a monastery and filed through surrounding villages begging for alms.

I couldn’t see anything, but then I looked down at my feet and found we were walking through an entire army of toads.

“Watch where you’re treading, Daddy!” I yelled.

“Runnin’ Belinda!” he exclaimed. “There’s hundreds of the little things.”

We stood still to let them pass. They were hopping laboriously along the lane, as disorientated by the sun stealing their ponds as they had been ten years before when the useless plots of land on the steep slope below the church were sold, and enormous yellow bulldozers invaded the village to gouge out platforms on which to build houses for commuting newcomers. With one scoop a bulldozer’s bucket removed the tiny bog where grandfather could remember collecting frogspawn. The Simmons family, first of the outsiders to move in the following winter, woke up one spring morning to find their house besieged by hundreds of croaking toads, the smallest of which had squeezed under the doors and hopped up the stairs to the bathroom. They returned every year, following the stars, to tamper with the dreams of the Simmons family with their mournful croaking, more melancholy even than the braying of the Honeywills’ donkey. Even when the toads grew silent it took only one of them to croak and set off all the others again. The children had vague but guilt-ridden dreams, until they finally persuaded their father to dig a goldfish pond in the garden.

The tinkling tribe of toads seemed endless, and by the time we’d passed through them all we’d reached where the lane forked left up to Haldon Forest. From over in Barton Wood came the tap-tap-tapping of a woodpecker, while the plaint of sheep at the heat of the sun expressed the whole world’s discomfort. The feeble trickle of water in the stream labouring towards the village was virtually inaudible, and was replaced in the spectrum of sound by the chiming of church bells for an hour well past: the air was so dry and thin that they came in dissonant waves, like a spring being unwound, all the way from Exeter Cathedral.

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We stood at the junction. Close by, a meadowlark elaborated phrases of notes in a new song. The air that was so dry in my throat was liquid to look at. Towards Shilhay, moving amongst his herd of sorrowful cows, was the shimmering but unmistakable silhouette of Douglas Westcott, as he carefully picked ticks off his cattle and squeezed them, in tiny eruptions of blood.

Douglas was the bull-like recluse who’d left home, grandmother told me, the day his father chided him for his bestial table manners. He rose from the table without a word. His mother found him packing everything he needed into a holdall no larger than a lady’s handbag. “I’m going to find out whether the world looks like the maps say it do,” he told her, and strode through the front door. His father ordered that no one should step over that threshold before Douglas did, and from then on they entered and left the house only through the kitchen. Once when Stuart from the shop was delivering a box of groceries and, receiving no answer to his knocking, opened the door to leave them in the porch, old Westcott saw him from the barn and stilled his heartbeat with a bellow. He marched over, picked Stuart up by the scruff of his neck, carried him to the drinking trough, and dropped him in.

Summers robbed the beechwood door of all its juice, and thirst bent it; the rains made it swell; the winters froze and cracked it. The house settled further upon itself.

Douglas appeared in the farmyard after twelve years, seven months, two weeks and six days away. When the family, who had heard his heavy flat feet approaching, had greeted him, then his father bade them gather as he ceremoniously opened the front door. But it was stuck fast, warped into the frame. He pushed and then he kicked it but he made no impression, except when he put his shoulder against it and felt, in his fury, fine shards of bone splintering off his scapula. As celebration turned into embarrassment Douglas fetched the big axe from its usual place in the barn, pushed his father out of the way, and with one swing clove the door in half so that it swung open, one side on the hinges, the other on the catch. He re-entered the house, and they knew then that he had changed for the worse.

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The afternoon was at its height: the sun had just begun its slow descending curve towards Cornwall and was slumbering on the wing. A drowsy hornet drifted by. The harsh air rasped my throat as I inhaled, and my eyelids felt heavy as velvet.

“I’m thirsty,” said Daddy. In the hedge to our right I spotted a ripe blackberry, and as Daddy reached over to pluck it another appeared, then another. Soon his lips and tongue were stained purple. He lay down in the shadowed verge and fell asleep, and I joined him.

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I dreamt of a man forcing his horse through waist-high snowdrifts up on to the moor, and of the woman, grandmother with hazelnut hair, breathing on a window pane as she waited. I dreamt that as I lay sleeping an insect flew from my mouth. People gathered round but wouldn’t wake me. Suddenly they were gone and I woke gagging on something in my throat. I hawked but it wouldn’t budge. I knew I should try and eat it, to save from choking, but the idea of swallowing a tick was worse than dying. Then I was saved by my own body, which sprang my neck forward in convulsive retching until I felt the insect tumble on to my tongue. I opened my mouth and gently lifted it between thumb and forefinger, but it had gone and turned into a freshly cut twig. At that moment my ears opened: a fury of thwacking and crackling bore down upon us, and as I looked up old Martin the hedge-layer saw me too and stopped working.

“Alison!” he exclaimed, and then as Daddy stirred, “Georgie! Oi didn’t see ‘ee down in the ditch there.”

Old Martin sunk his bill into a stout sapling and proffered a hand to help Daddy to his feet.

“Fell asleep, did ‘ee? Goods a place as any I s’pose, though ‘tidn’t wise to sleep out in the ‘ot. You’s all flicketty, maid; you must both be parch-mouthed. Come and ‘ave some tea.”

He poured us a cup from his thermos. The liquid soothed my burning mouth and throat, and as it trickled down my gullet and into my stomach it brought me alive.

“Thank you, that’s better,” Daddy said, returning the cup to old Martin, who poured himself a little and sipped it slowly. His face and bald skull were glazed in a film of sweat. He cleared his throat and gobbed into the hedge.

“You been out walkin’ then?” he asked Daddy.

“Yes,” I replied for him.

“See anything about?”

“Nothin’ much,” I said.

“See Douglas out with his cows, mazed bugger?” he asked, because he always wanted to know everything. When he’d asked all his questions, we leaned into the heat, saying nothing.

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“In’t you gettin’ ‘ot and tired workin’ out in this sun?” Daddy asked after a while.

“I loves it, bay. ‘Tis winter makes me slow at my age. Sweat’s my lubrication, I works better with it. Why, us ‘aven’t ‘ad a summer like this since 1976, though I don’t s’pose you’d callhome that, Georgie. No, the ‘otter the better for me. Only trouble is it gets lonely; the rest of you lazy buggers is sleepin’ all day!”

Old Martin could talk the hindlegs off a donkey, as grandmother put it; he was the friendliest man in the village.

“I never ought to be layin’ ‘edges this time o’ year, I don’t mind tellin’ ‘ee. You should cut young wood in winter, and the older ones early spring, or late autumn if you prefers. Not summer. Trouble is I don’t want to get behind, like, or they’ll start usin’ a tractor-saw and make a bloody mess of everything. You seen over Bridford?”

I shook my head.

“They’s pullin’ up ‘edges and puttin’ fences in their place. Old boy up there’s out of a job. They says to ‘im, they says, ‘Look at it practical, like. With ‘edges you can lay eight yard a day on yours own, or fifty yard with another bloke. But a man on his own can fence a whole field in a day.”

“Where’s the birds gonna nest then?” he says to ‘em. “Farmers ‘as always been greedy, like, no offence mind, but now ‘tis worse than ever ‘twas.”

Old Martin was the friendliest man in the village, and the most lonely. Even dogs slunk away from him, snarling, and he made televisions nicker on the rare occasions he was invited into someone’s front room. He’d been laying hedges for years, like his uncle before him. According to grandmother, at the end of the last war, when half a dozen young men returned to the village, old Cecil recalled the ingratitude that had greeted him when he came back from the Somme in 1918, and so he passed over his contracts to his nephew.

Now Martin drained his cup and screwed it back on the flask. Picking up his heavy maul he said:

“I better be back to work afore I cools down,” and I wondered how he’d be able to do that even if he wanted to. Daddy hung around to watch him thumping stakes into the middle of the saplings he’d already plashed. He put all his energy into it, but I felt like I saw him as Daddy saw him, and there was something illusory about his movements, as if someone else were really performing them. At last Daddy couldn’t contain his curiosity any longer.

“Where’s Martin the hedge-layer?” he asked. “Is you his uncle or what?”

Old Martin stopped and turned, his nut-brown forehead wrinkled with irritation at Daddy’s familiar question.

“I’m Martin,” he said, pointing to himself with his bill. “I’m the ‘edge-layer, Martin.” He returned to his work, and I pulled Daddy on along the lane back towards the village.

He was quiet for a moment, but was soon looking around to see what was happening in the world. Through the thick sluggish air a barely perceptible breeze surprised us, brushing past our faces. Then, to our left, across a field a scattered cloud of thistledown came floating. We climbed over the gate, and all across the field soft white burrs attached themselves to us, until we entered the huge, overgrown vegetable garden of the rectory.