1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (41 page)

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I went for a walk by myself. I lay down in damp grass on top of the high ridge up behind the house. Moisture seeped through my clothing; it was in the air, too: it came in my breath and refreshed my throat and the insides of my lungs. I lay in the grass looking up at the overcast sky, trying to think of nothing. Then I realized the earth was slowly turning: it carried on turning half a circle until I was hanging on, looking down at the sky. The sky was waiting for me to fall into it, and the earth could have just dropped me off if it had wanted to. But it held on to me, and then turned back a half circle again to how it had been before, and I closed my eyes, thinking of my Daddy, wondering why the sweetest person in my life had drunk himself stupid and left me to fend for myself. There was no answer.

“The cider drowned ‘is memory, girl, that’s what ‘twas,” mother said when I got home and for the first time plucked up the courage to question her.

“But why did ‘e take to it in the first place?” I asked her.

“Truth is, I don’t know, Alison. Men ‘as secrets eat ‘em up inside. Sometimes it eats a girt big ‘ole, and they tries to flood it.”

She sent me out to get eggs for tea, and I searched in the dark corners of the barn. I could hear a chicken brooding in the shadows. My eyes got used to the darkness and I squeezed my hand under the hen and felt around for an egg there, daring the hen to peck my arm. Suddenly a voice said:

“Looking for one of these, by any chance?”

I spun round. Johnathan stood there, holding out a brown egg smeared with shit and straw.

“What on earth’s you doing here?” I asked him. “I thought you was in France.”

“We spent four days in Dover,” he said, smiling. “The dockers wouldn’t let anyone on the ferry.”

“Blimey,” I said. “I bet your mum was mad.”

“She was,” he agreed. “She got so cross she joined the picket line on the second day. It took father another two days to persuade her to come home.”

They’d got back the night before and Johnathan had gone straight to school in the morning. He wanted to know why I wasn’t there, and I broke the news that I was being sent away to boarding school. He had his look like he was about to cry, and I felt sorry too, but then he started laughing.

“With our family backgrounds,” he chuckled. “And here am I starting at Comprehensive while you’re off to Public School.”

“What’s so funny about it?” I demanded, but he just carried on chuckling to himself. Then he stopped abruptly.

“But when am I going to see you?” he asked in a distraught voice.

“Don’t be silly,” I replied, and then I thought about it myself. “It’ll be Christmas soon,” I said, not convincing either of us.

We sat against the wall of the barn. The chaff on the floor was itchy on our legs. The hen was clucking behind us. Rain dripped through the roof in various places, plonking into small puddles.

I fingered the dust beside me, between us, and doodled nondescript patterns. Johnathan was doing the same thing. We watched our fingers get closer. They didn’t belong to us. Our hands touched each other.

We sat there, our fingers playing together silently, feeling strange. My mind was both blank and teeming, thoughts like thick clouds scudding. After a long time we plucked up the courage to look at each other, and then we closed our eyes and our lips moved together.

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We held hands walking across the yard; it was only from the barn to the front door, but it felt like Johnathan was walking me home.

“We’re being separated by fate,” he said quietly, to himself rather than to me.

We stood by the door. The rain was drizzling.

“I know!” I said. “We can write to each other.”

Johnathan was overjoyed at the idea. “Oh, yes!” he agreed. “We’ll write amazing letters, Alison. I’ll tell you everything.” His eyes lost focus: he looked like he was already planning his first one.

“Well,” I said eventually, “I suppose I better go in.” We kept looking at each other as I opened the door behind me and he walked backwards. Then he turned and ran across the yard. His splashy footsteps receded, and I heard him whoop, once, in the lane.

Things happened fast. Grandfather spent all his time in his chair, with a grimace on his face. He switched the television on in the morning and kept it on all day but he wasn’t really watching, not even the wildlife programmes. When he spoke it was only to complain of the pain in his joints, all rusted up by the rain. He agreed with mother’s decision to respect grandmother’s wishes and send me away to school; she was keen on the idea of getting me off her hands for my own good, and she assured me I had no say in the matter.

“You can see your friends in the holidays,” she said, “and anyway, you’ll make better ones there. You ought to wake up and realize how grateful you should be, girl. There’s not many parents would make this sacrifice, so’s you can learn the things we never did.” She managed to convince herself, if not me, and got carried away planning my education: she unearthed from the cupboard under the stairs the pile of prospectuses for universities and polytechnics that she’d once sent off for for Ian. When she realized they were useless she rang around a list of schools that still had places left in the intake for the term that had already begun. Undeterred by my nervous, feigned indifference she dragged me on a whistle-stop tour and was most impressed by a meandering, airy palace in Somerset whose pupils were locked in small cells to practise the piano after lessons and slept together in dormitories, which was a good thing, the matron explained, because the girls’ individual dreams became confused, their cycles came to coincide, and they learned how to live together as adults.

We raced around Exeter and bought the prescribed uniform and new pairs of everything you could think of wearing, as well as a calculator and stationery, pens and compasses and rulers, a pocket camera, a matching set of suitcase and travelling bag, a hockey stick and a tennis racket, a Latin and a French and an English dictionary in a giddy unprecedented spree that mother took, amazingly, in her matter-of-fact stride, peeling notes from her wallet like she was dealing cards.

Back home I packed slowly. The few possessions that had escaped mother’s defenestration I threw away myself, sparing only grandmother’s perished and rusting skates in the bottom of the wardrobe. I packed the book that Johnathan had given me,
Peter Abelard
by Helen Waddell, declaring with evangelistic excitement, all the more startling for erupting out of his customary reserve: “You’ve got to start reading this before you even
eat
, Alison.”

I studied the covers. “Oh, it’s a love story,” I said.

Johnathan’s cheeks burned with anger and embarrassment. “It’s n-n-not at all,” he’d replied. Then, correcting himself: “Well in fact it
is
a love story, actually. But it happens to have been written by an-n-n angel.”

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Tom took no notice of my imminent departure. He’d returned to the person he had been before his one, disillusioning love affair: he left the house early, kicking the chickens out of his way as he walked through the rain across the yard, and he worked dumbly and furiously all day unblocking irrigation trenches, patching up holes in the roofs of barns and sheds, and turning over fleece-sodden sheep who were lying with their legs in the air.

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That last evening, when I’d finished packing after tea, I went to the rectory to say goodbye. I found Maria ironing sheets in the drawing-room and the Rector preparing a sermon in his study, surrounded by twenty-six rooms, each of them empty except for an extraordinary variety of buckets, cider barrels, pitchers and pos, plastic dustbins, crucibles and carafes, watering cans and a fish-tank, placed around the floors to catch the rain that dripped through the ceilings.

I told him I had to go away.

“That’s a shame,” he said. “People shouldn’t have to leave home.” He paused. “But maybe it’s for the best.”

“Why?” I asked.

He looked at me a moment before answering, and lit himself a cigarette. “Because your family can’t give you what you need, Alison. Maybe you’ll find people who can.”

Before I could work out what he meant exactly he asked if I was still the only one around here who could make a drinkable pot of coffee.

I brought him back a mug of his strong, bitter coffee and he said: “I say, Alison. Did I tell you I recorded something on our tape-recorder? You won’t believe it. I’ll play it to you.”

I curled up in the armchair in his study while he rootled through a drawer and found the cassette he wanted. At first there was nothing on it except for the assorted sounds we’d always picked up: odd footsteps; the whoosh of a wing; a hollow tap; all in amongst the distant roaring of a storm.

“There it is,” he declared.

“What?”

“Listen.” I pricked up my ears: from far away came not footsteps but a jangling guitar, a gentle drum, a rhythmic drone.

“What on earth is it?” I asked.

“How would I know?” he smiled. “But I do have an idea. I think they might be the lost songs of the disciples of Babaji. I must have mentioned them.”

“No you didn’t.”

“Well, you should ask Maria. She knows more about them than I do.”

From far away came a man and a woman’s voices, singing the saddest songs I’d ever heard, singing them so beautifully that even though the words were in a strange language you knew that what they were saying was that, despite everything, love is something real. Gradually they grew louder, and scratchy, like an old recording. I looked at the Rector: he grinned back at me. I didn’t know whether he was grinning with delight at capturing something on his tape or more likely because he was teasing me, so I just leaned back and closed my eyes. I half opened them briefly, to see him turned back to his desk, continuing with his sermon, his concentration undisturbed by the sound of a distant, departed guru’s disciples singing songs of praise from the other side of a storm. So I let my eyes close again, and as I drifted towards sleep I remember wishing I could stay there with him, in that room, that I didn’t want to go either home or away from home, I didn’t want to go anywhere; I wanted to stay, because I felt safe there, where he’d given me a place of safety between home and the world that was waiting. I wanted to say thank you, Rector, and I think I did, but I was so drowsy he may not have heard, before I sank into sleep.

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I woke at dawn with a crick in my neck: mother would be furious. The tape-recorder was off and the Rector’s chair was empty. I slipped out through the door on to the verandah, where I found Tinker waiting for me; she must have been there all night. I was stroking her behind the ears when I realized with a start that the Rector was standing at the far end of the verandah with his back to me, gazing, from there up on the ridge above the village, out across the Valley. I followed his gaze.

Dawn mist rising from the river was tangled in the treetops, obscuring the waterfall which became a barely perceptible glimmer of movement. Thick, low clouds inched across the sky, rearranging themselves into changing shapes of grey above muted leaves of russet and gold. Sporadic birdsong was beginning to fill the emptiness of the Valley. The Rector inhaled the smell of the soil, gently breathing; the whole Valley was gently breathing. And I suddenly became aware of the fact that, although she was hidden from me, Maria was standing in front of the Rector, leaning back against him, her hands resting on his arms around her shoulders. He stood so still, at peace at last in the valley of fallen leaves, the place of exile that had become his home; he stood so still, lost in the beauty and the strangeness of the earth.

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I slapped Tinker’s haunches and jumped off the verandah onto the wet skiddy grass, and ran across the lawn without looking back.

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