1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (39 page)

“What’s all in the box there?” Ian asked.

“Oh, I got to take it up village,” Stuart replied.

“I thought you stopped doing deliveries?” Ian asked him, looking at Elsie. She rolled her eyes, behind her thick spectacles.

“I told him he shouldn’t oughta do it. You can’t tell ‘im nothin’.”

Stuart looked modestly at the floor. “Well,” he said, “just the odd one.” He raised his head. “I’ll charge ‘em, mind. Add a pound or more on, delivery charge, like.”

“Who’s it for?” Ian asked.

“Simmons, up the new ‘ouses.”

“I’ll drop it off on my way,” Ian suggested. He stepped forward and picked up the box. “Tain’t no trouble to me.”

§

He noticed the garage was empty, and for some reason he didn’t fully understand he drove past and parked his car up around the corner of the Brown, and carried the box back down Broad Lane. Susanna answered the door. She had a pen in her hand and an abstract expression he recognized as his own, when someone disturbed his concentration at the chessboard.

“Where’s the kitchen?” Ian demanded from behind the box.

She stared at him.

“I just been in the shop. It’s your mother’s groceries.”

“Oh,” she said. “Through here.” She turned, and as she did so Ian felt as if someone had struck a match inside his abdomen: her long blonde hair swirled lazily behind her, shadowing her body’s turn. As it settled against her back Ian’s gaze followed it down, past untidy split ends, past her white shirt to where it was tucked into her jeans, and settled on her bottom, which eased slightly sideways as she walked. His abdomen was made of wax, and was melting.

The fitted kitchen was bright and sparse. Must give you indigestion, eating in a room like this, he thought.

“I suppose you can put it on there, by the cooker,” Susanna gestured.

Ian did so, and turned, with his arm resting on top of the box. Susanna smiled, and looked at her trainers, and looked out of the window, looked back at Ian, waiting for him to say something, then looked at her feet again.

But Ian didn’t say anything. He was too busy looking at Susanna, taking her in as if she’d been away for many years. She was the same girl he’d seen the day before, intertwined with Tom, as they dragged each other under like a pair of drowning children, but overnight she’d changed, had been renovated, the complex architecture of her womanhood refashioned, and Ian lost his tongue and his self-awareness, engrossed in her perfect teeth, her adolescent cheeks, the discernible outline of her child’s bra beneath her white shirt, the way she was standing now, self-conscious and fidgety, with her legs of a colt and her long blonde hair. She raised her head and her eyebrows together.

“Do you want paying? Mum’s wallet’s somewhere.”

“Who? Oh. Isn’t she here?”

“She took the others shopping in Exeter.”

“Didn’t you want to go too?”

“I had to stay and work. Boring.”

Sure, he thought. Didn’t want to miss seeing Tom at lunchtime, more likely. “Each time you sees someone you love, you loves ‘em a little more,” Tom had informed him, with grave self-importance, on at least a dozen occasions.

“She keeps her wallet in one of these drawers.”

“Won’t she ‘ave it with her, if she went shopping?”

“This one’s just money for bills.”

“Well, there bain’t no need to pay me. She can see Elsie. I just dropped it off for ‘er.”

“All right, then.” Susanna stood again, almost swaying on her feet. She hadn’t yet learned the protocol of adult conversation. It was up to Ian to say that he was leaving: then she would see him out. She could only take her lead from him.

“You might give us a cup of coffee, though,” he suggested, giving her his smile that he knew wouldn’t be refused. Her adolescent eyes barely glanced at him, but they glimpsed his smile.

Ian was her boyfriend’s forbidding older brother, a lean and scowling presence in the background of their happiness. The rest of Tom’s family had welcomed her into our home, where she spent more and more time, and she never felt like an intruder, except now and then she noticed Ian glaring at Tom across the table when his hand on her leg made her giggle, or scowling at them as she sat on Tom’s lap on the sofa watching TV, his thin lips set hard in an expression of distaste. His censorious countenance had made her shiver, but she’d dismissed it because it made no sense.

His smile transformed him, as if instantly erasing what had only been a mask of disapproval. She’d misjudged him: after all, Tom was so sweet and playful, how could his own brother be the opposite? No, it wasn’t possible, and she chided herself for being so stupid.

They drank their coffee in the sitting-room. Susanna was sat on the sofa, Ian in one of the armchairs. He asked her about her school work, and he told her stories from his own schooldays, which seemed to him to have taken place a lifetime ago. He couldn’t believe how irrelevant his studies were to his life since leaving school, and he heard himself admitting how much he regretted not staying on and going to college. “You know what grandmother told me? “Everyone should study. You don’t learn nothin’, but it makes you think.” He made her laugh with stories of backward boys, wicked girls and scatterbrained teachers. She explained to him what it was like at an all-girls school, and he said he wished he’d gone to one. He asked her whether he might smoke and she said yes, flattered, as if it were her house and she had invited him, a guest, to take coffee with her.

Ian blew smoke rings. “This one’s for you,” he said, before dragging on the cigarette and releasing another small circle of smoke: they floated upwards, entrancing.

“Let me have a go?” she asked. “How do you do it?” First, he said, she had to learn to roll the cigarette, and she was amazed at how adroitly his thick, callused farmer’s fingers plucked the right amount of tobacco between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand and spread it along the paper; then with a brief flurry he twirled the paper, raised it to his mouth, licked the seal, and twirled it once more, and lo and behold he held another perfectly cylindrical cigarette.

Her fingers, by contrast, though slight and graceful by comparison, became ugly in their clumsiness. They might have been someone else’s, so removed were they from her mind’s instruction. She concentrated so hard Ian saw her mouth mimic her fingers’ struggle, but all she ended up with was a misshapen taper with a scrap of tobacco plugged in one end.

Then Ian showed her how to blow rings. “Use your tongue to make the hole,” he told her, “and pretend you’re a fish with your lips.” Some of the smoke escaped into her brain, and made her feel lightheaded. After a few abortive attempts she suddenly released a ring of smoke that floated gracefully upward.

“I did it!” she cried.

“You certainly got the skill,” he told her. “Took me two months of trying afore I could do that.”

“No,” she laughed, knowing he was teasing her.

“True,” he insisted. “Tell ‘ee what: see if you can blow me one.”

“What’s that?”

“Blow one t’wards me and I’ll show you.”

He sat beside her on the sofa. “Go on, just let it go in my direction.”

Susanna took another drag, collected the smoke in her mouth, poked her tongue into its midst, and opened her mouth in an inverted gulp. As the ring appeared, as perfect as the first, Ian was above her: he swallowed the smoke, smiled his complicitous smile, and blew it out again, not in a ring this time but a tiny globe of smoke.

“I want to do that!” she demanded, handing him the rollie. “Go on. It’s my turn.” She knelt on the sofa.

“You ready?” he asked.

“Go on,” she said. He sucked in a mouthful of smoke and raised his head towards her. She was ready, flexed in concentration above him. He moved his mouth towards hers; her lips parted slowly. He inched upwards and stopped. He could smell, despite the acrid smoke in his mouth, a faint taste of apples on her breath. They hovered like two dragon-flies. Then Ian turned his head, blew the smoke shapeless into the air, and brought himself back to face Susanna. She didn’t move. Ian brought his lips again closer, and stopped again. She felt his four-day stubble brush her chin. Again they trembled, barely a thought apart; and then Susanna edged towards Ian, and their lips met.

They were still kissing when Ian’s ears suddenly twitched and his mind hauled itself, as if out of water, back to reality: he’d heard the tractor engine, firing on three cylinders. He lifted his hands and put his fingers in her ears, and while Tom blew the horn of his tractor three times as he passed by, using their secret code of lovers, grinning to himself, Susanna was sinking in the quicksand of a kiss, the like of which she’d never tasted before.

§

In the quarry pool I sat in the shallows on a smooth flat stone underwater, up to my nose, knees held up to my chest. I wanted to rock to sleep in that patch of warm water. From out of the sheer blue sky some scattered drops of water landed on the pool. I stayed as still as I could, I didn’t know why, but I had to. Somewhere deep inside of me a thin, hot thread was being drawn through my body. I didn’t know what was happening, until I began to bleed into the water; my blood spread out into the quarry pool and was absorbed by it. I thought I was dying, but it was more like being born. It didn’t hurt; I wasn’t scared. I thought: “Things won’t be the same any more.” There was a taste on my tongue more metallic than ever. I thought: “The world is turning. I better stay.” The sun was fierce and the air as hot and humid as a greenhouse above the glassy water. I closed my eyes.

§

Tom wasn’t bothered by Ian’s not joining him at the field. He noted vaguely that he was alone, but assumed something had cropped up, and so he told the sheep about the meaning of love as he gripped them between his legs and inspected their eyes and teeth, and injected them with antibiotics to immunize them against the side-effects of the antibiotics they’d been given earlier on in the summer.

He broke off at eleven o’clock, unhitching the trailer and rumbling the tractor back into the village. As he passed Susanna’s he pressed the horn, three times, in his daily declaration of love, grinning to himself at the wealth of meaning enclosed within that clarion call, a straightforward one for the rest of the world but with so many secret meanings for Susanna, and the horn echoed around the village.

§

Ian held his arm around her. She lay with her back against him, her face buried in a cushion. He stared at the ceiling, lying as still as possible, trying to breathe as silently and as unobtrusively as his body would allow, hoping to stop time that way and give himself some time to think and make some sense of the confusion in which he was immersed. He wanted to disappear, he wanted to die, but the truth was he’d never felt so awfully alive. The one thing he’d not considered, had not imagined for a single moment, was that the two of them were still virgins, that their fumbled puppy-love caresses and endless, swooning kisses went only so far and never further, by unspoken mutual consent.

He should have realized before it was too late, he told himself; then he might have been able to turn back. How could he have failed to interpret the clues? For they were clear and repeated, in the way she kissed him with ardour, the way she blew up his nostrils which he found both strange and unpleasant, the sound she let escape from her mouth as he nibbled her ear-lobe, the way she guided his hand inside her bra, all these things, in contrast to the way she froze when his fingers slid to the bottom of her belly. So he withdrew them and returned them to her young girl’s breasts, and then he lowered his mouth, and she again moved in a way he admired in women, increasing her own pleasure. But when he unzipped her jeans and put his hand on her thigh he might have had electric fingers, for she was paralysed, she turned from a cat into a sparrow, her body fragile, her neck trembling.

He should have realized. But he was no longer sure of anything. Never before had he been so involved, so overcome, in the act of making love. From his very first time, with one of the ephemeral farm girls who worked for Miss Branham and Miss Tuck and who took pity on his shy smile, he’d discovered a composure, a command over himself and the situation, as if sex was a hand-held plough he steered by instinct. Now, though, he felt himself pulled along a furrow he hadn’t chosen. His body was doing the same things it had always done but his mind was not free, no longer the calculating mind of a lonely hunter but enmeshed in the act, inspired as he was by the closest thing to love he’d ever experienced, which was jealousy of his younger brother.

As soon as it was over he became himself again. He held her out of duty, and was about to move, as soon as it was possible to do so without revealing his cruel nature too openly, when Susanna got up first. Without saying anything she disappeared. He pulled his clothes on, gathered his tobacco tin and lighter, and took the ashtray to the kitchen to empty it, obeying his furtive instincts. He found her there, sitting naked at the kitchen table, staring out of the window. He was ten years older than she was but he felt much younger. He was going to say goodbye, but his mouth was dry and his tongue stuck to his palate.

§

When I pulled myself out of the pool I knew I’d left part of myself behind, dissolving in the water. I’d changed, had gone into the water a stringy girl but the changes bubbling inside me had moved into a new phase, like strawberry jam rolling. I came out with more substance. I didn’t know who I was any more, but I knew there was someone there, and that I would find her.

On the way back Daddy and I paused to look through the telescope, at the ragged peacocks on the terraced lawns of the boarded-up estate. The waterfall cascaded silently in shadow. Daddy looked sad.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he replied.

Tom had long ago taught me to throw. I extended the telescope to its full length and hurled it as far as I could. It spun out away from the cliff and fell, spinning all the way, towards the quarry pool, which it entered with a barely audible splash.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get back.”

§

“Mother,” I said, “I got something to tell you.”