1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (35 page)

“If you can’t keep an eye on her,” mother told him, her temper at its shortest by being disturbed from deep sleep, “maybe us should find her somewhere’s where people can,” and she swept downstairs to hide the lantern at the back of the cupboard under the stairs.

Grandmother was fulfilling her own prediction that history had reached the top of its spiral and had changed direction: she was stepping backwards through her own life. When Daddy married mother and brought her into the house, grandmother and grandfather moved out of the main bedroom, to make room for the newlyweds, according to the family custom. Now, while grandfather awaited her, having retired first, grandmother would make her way to the wrong room, where she undressed, put on someone else’s voluminous nightdress, and got into the wrong bed, mildly surprised to find it empty. Mother, infuriated, would wake her up and escort her back to her own room.

She was slipping into the margin. She became unaware of her own bodily needs and began to have little accidents: Pamela picked up incontinence pads from Chudleigh clinic, and they parked an ancient commode beside her bed. In the middle of the night mother and grandfather picked her up and put her on it, and she emptied herself without having to fully awaken.

Although grandmother stopped the briefly resumed, wandering night-time vigil, in the mornings her dreams clung to her all the more, and each day she grew visibly more confused when she turned round in the kitchen and her great-aunt Isabel wasn’t there, or when she couldn’t find her mother anywhere in the house to tell her a new word she’d discovered, or when she spoke to God and found that He was no longer in the mood to talk with her. “I think God’s asleep,” she confided to no one in particular, “that’s the trouble these days.”

On Thursday morning I was coming back into the house after another abortive attempt to attend school. I opened the door and almost knocked grandmother over: she’d been standing in the hallway. “Sorry, grandma,” I said, “I didn’t see you there.” The door open, she was standing in full sunlight, against the shadowy background. Her milky eyes were more opaque than ever. “The days is comin’,” she murmured, “when all what’s hidden will appear.”

It took grandmother a little longer each day to come to terms with the logic of reality, until she stumbled through an entire day in a web of angels, piskies, childhood friends and her father, smiling at her with the smile of an idiot that fathers are unable to contain when they look at their favourite offspring.

She’d left us. We were the family she’d made. She’d given us all of her energy, her heart, her devotion. But now she turned her back on what she’d made, and returned to the family she’d left when she was still a girl.

§

I was still asleep the next morning when grandmother decided to die.

Mother didn’t wake me as usual at three minutes past seven, but at four minutes past I woke anyway, and rose cloudily out of bed. On my way to the bathroom I noticed that the house was still in the grip of night’s silence, even though it was light. Usually by the time I got up everyone else was moving around, but now there were none of the sounds of the cock crowing, the grandfather clock ticking, a tractor whining, dogs barking, crockery clinking. Only silence. I checked my watch: nearly ten past seven. In the passageway all the bedroom doors were open; I felt suddenly abandoned. Then at last I heard something: the distant sound of someone’s exertion, a long way away, and I padded silently towards the open door of my grandparents’ bedroom.

Grandmother was lying in bed, her eyes closed, not breathing. Grandfather was sat in his old grey dressing-gown, on a chair side-on to the bed, on the far side from me, both hands on the eiderdown, bent over. Pam was standing beside him, one hand on the back of his chair. Ian and mother both stood at the end of the bed, while Tom and Daddy were standing off away on the other side. They were all looking at grandmother as if waiting for her to say something, all of them frozen, except for grandfather: it was the first and last time I saw his tears. He wept as silently as he could, because even in this, the saddest moment of his life, he couldn’t overcome his customary reserve and grieve openly. With a superhuman effort he held back his sorrow, his mouth clamped shut. Instead his sobs, forced up from the guts of his grief, broke in his throat, so that he looked as if a fishbone were stuck in his gullet. Tears, though, were not so easily thwarted. They brimmed out of his blue eyes and slid over his cheekbones.

I’d not looked at grandmother since my first glance took in the whole room. I didn’t want to look at her. That’s why I stared at grandfather. But the truth came up from inside me. From the doorway I ran to the bed and was on it before anyone could move, trying to bury myself in beside her, trying to lose myself in her. Ian dragged me off and carried me away; they said I was screaming and shaking. I don’t remember. He took me into his room and let me cry with him.

§

That night Tom slept on the sofa downstairs, to give grandfather his bed. Grandfather couldn’t sleep. The doctor had given him some sleeping pills but he ignored them. He missed the damp heat of her body and her shallow, anxious breathing. He calculated that from the age of twenty-four he’d not slept a single moment without her beside him, since even when he went to bed before her exhausted, in the middle of harvest or in the stupor of Christmas, he was unable to fall asleep until she was curled up beside him and the rhythm of her breathing had changed; and in the morning he always woke a few minutes before her, with a farmer’s bad conscience, bad-temperedly rising through the darkness towards his first mug of tea. And he resolved there and then that he’d never again sleep without her. He got out of Tom’s bed, pulled on his moth-eaten dressing-gown, and returned to their bedroom. There he pulled a chair from the wall up to the bed, took his tobacco pouch from the pocket of his dressing-gown, and filled his pipe. He felt calm, not in a smug or unfeeling way, but because the worst had happened, and now he knew what was to come. He recalled the disastrous summer after the war which almost destroyed the precarious economy of the farm, and how at the moment they understood the full extent of the crisis—their herd wasting away, crops failed—he’d experienced this same sense of utter calm, floating above the disaster and seeing it grow smaller and insignificant.

And as he sat smoking beside her, so he forgave grandmother for doing the one and only thing that in the fifty-six years of their marriage he’d ever asked her not to do, which was to die before him.

§

The next day a man came dressed in a piano tuner’s clothes, and he spent an hour in grandmother’s room with the door closed. The following day the man returned with two of his brothers, carrying a child’s coffin. As soon as he saw it grandfather lost his temper and ordered them out of the house. Ian conciliated them out in the yard, till grandfather appeared with grandmother’s wedding dress, neatly folded and wrapped in tissue paper.

“Use that to measure it this time,” he told them, turning on his heels, and as he slammed the door behind him he spat out: “Disrespectful bastards.”

§

Grandmother died with so little fuss that none of us could quite take it in. We were stunned. We’d not prepared ourselves, having missed each of the many clues she’d laid before us in her thoughtful way, dismissing as further signs of second childhood her abstract asides, telling no one in particular that ‘I’ve packed my bags,’, ‘We’ll miss the last train if it don’t come soon,’ and ‘I don’t want no flowers, maid.’

It was the sight of the tiny coffin which so angered grandfather that made me realize she was really dead. I kept on remembering her as she was alive, with her smell of face powder, her large bony hands and her throaty voice, fixing an image of her in my mind to last me through the years ahead, to fill the gaping hole inside me, but each memory only made it worse. I needed to cry, to share the loss, but no one else wanted to. They must have been sad too but they wouldn’t show it, they put rigid masks on their faces and bit their lips and went off to their rooms alone.

I ran all the way to Johnathan’s house across the Valley in the dark, too distraught to be scared, and threw pebbles at his unlit window. Eventually the curtain opened, and then closed again immediately. For one desolate moment I thought he’d hidden himself deep under the bed-covers, but then the light went on around the curtains. Next thing he was at the front door in his pyjamas, ushering me inside.

I didn’t give him a chance to ask me what I was doing: as soon as our eyes met I lost all self-control and fell forward into his skinny arms, engulfed in tears.

I must have made a racket. I was dimly aware that at some point the Viscount appeared on the stairs, a misty, bemused vision in his dressing-gown, and I heard Johnathan say: “It’s all right, father, I’ve got a visitor.”

He didn’t say another word until I’d exhausted myself and all I had left were snuffly, choking breaths. Then he extricated his damp pyjama-top from my clammy embrace, poured a glass from his parents’ drinks cabinet and said: “Swallow this.” It was sour and burning. Then he took me upstairs, pulled my trainers and jeans off, and laid his duvet over me, and I sank into sleep beside him.

§

Grandfather had never allowed dogs inside the house. He’d been given his first one, a new-born puppy, for his first birthday, so that they could grow up together. The puppy, a black and white mongrel bitch called Nipper, soon outgrew him, but only for a brief period before he caught her up again, and grew up and away from her. She remained his shadow throughout his childhood, and before she’d died, at the age of fourteen, he’d replaced her with one of her identical granddaughters, the runt of the latest litter because they make the best sheepdogs. Her name was Tinker. That was the pattern for the rest of his life: he not only replaced each one as she grew old with one of her granddaughters, always a bitch, but he christened each one with the name of her grandmother’s grandmother. For that reason, and the fact that he taught them to respond to the same gruff commands, grandfather almost convinced himself that he was accompanied throughout his long life by one or other of the same two dogs, reacting with the same quicksilver obedience to his commands, even before he’d uttered them, as they had when he was nine years old: nipping the heels of a lazy bullock; retrieving rabbits stunned by the invisible bullets of his .22 rifle; or selecting a sheep in the middle of a flock and circling it at such mesmerizing speed that it thought itself surrounded, and gave in.

Now, though, without telling anyone, he invited Tinker inside, to share his vigil at grandmother’s side. He’d explained to me that to calculate a dog’s age relative to a person’s you had to multiply by seven, and by that reckoning Tinker was almost a hundred years old. She let herself in and out by the kitchen door, waiting patiently for someone to appear and open it, and then padding through without looking at us, shy as her master but proceeding with assurance of her right to go, now, where she’d not been allowed to since she was a small puppy and my companion.

She sat beside him, as he sat beside grandmother, with her paws crossed, glassy-eyed and blinking slowly. Now and then she climbed onto a chair by the window, put her front paws on the sill, and looked outside, eyes wide open, as if waiting for grandmother’s spirit to return.

I knew it never would. They’d brought back a larger coffin, and grandmother looked lost inside it. The undertaker’s embalming fluid had given her the complexion of waxed fruit. I tried not to look at her when I came, with a mug of sickly sweet tea or a feather for his pipe, to keep grandfather company. Members of the family came to the house, and they stood beside grandfather with a hand on his shoulder, expressing platitudes of sympathy he ignored, and coughing in the fug of tobacco smoke that filled the room. Word got round the village of how grandfather puffed on his pipe beside the body of his wife, and people tutted to each other at such behaviour.

§

Dusk was absorbing the light in the room, and we’d been sitting silently, when he suddenly said, without turning to me: “Er idn’t gone, maid, ‘er’s waitin’.”

“What for, grandpa?”

“For me, maid. And ‘twon’t be too long, I can assure ‘ee of that.”

“Then what, grandpa?”

“Then us’ll be ‘gether ‘gain.” He spoke with calm finality, and there was no more to be said. I wanted to ask him where it was they were going to meet, what they’d do together. But I knew it would only irritate him. He had lost part of himself, and looked forward only to losing the rest, having decided to believe that in doing so he would in reality become whole again.

The next time he spoke I was dozing, but was brought back instantly by his quiet voice in the darkness.

“They says other men falls in love in springtime. Me, I met your grandmother in autumn, and I courted her through the winter: we was married in May, near enough sixty year ago, that’s the reason us endured, like.” His voice began to waver. “It don’t make no sense, but they you plants September gets their roots in best. You could dig up an old vegetable garden been abandoned fifty year, and still bring up a stack of tatties on your fork.”

Grandfather coughed, and a gob of phlegm slid up his throat. He spat it into his handkerchief. “Leave me now, maid. I wants to be alone with ‘er.”

§

When the Rector came he didn’t stay long. I took him upstairs to grandfather. I’d never seen just the two of them together before. They had little to say to each other. The Rector was confident of his ability to lend comfort to the bereaved, even to those who rarely came to church, because at such a time they were glad to accept that the person they’d lost had not been wiped out but had moved on to a more important place, and that they too would join them there when the time came. But grandfather only listened politely, impassive, and when the Rector paused grandfather gave him a list of hymns she would have wanted sung at her funeral, and got up to see him out.

A long time ago grandfather had consented to attend confirmation classes because his mother, who sang in the choir when we still had one, long before the days of Corporal Alcock, insisted that he did so. But after his first communion at the age of thirteen, when he took his wafer and sip of wine from the purple-robed Bishop of Exeter, he determined never to go to church again except, reluctantly, for baptisms, weddings and funerals, and then only to please the women. He didn’t even go with most of the other men of the village to midnight mass on Christmas Eve, when the damp smell and the scent of candles was overpowered by alcohol on the breath of unsteady men, who’d hurried back from the pub at Ashton. In our family it was different: each Sunday morning, until her arthritis forced her to accept sick communion at home, grandmother led her offspring to church while grandfather stayed behind, reading the Sunday papers that Fred delivered, and occasionally basting the roast.