1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (7 page)

So I arrived early and placed hymn books not just in the regular attendants’ places but, on the Rector’s insistence, in all the pews, ‘because, Alison, we can never predict when people might turn towards God’. I collected the offerings in a little cloth satchel, a muffled jangle of coins, and brought it up to the altar. The Rector took it from me as if I wasn’t there, and I returned to my place accompanied by the offertory hymn, an uneven contest in which the few frail voices were no match for Corporal Alcock’s furious organ, having to concede defeat and forlornly follow him as best they could, wherever he chose to go.

It was one brittle Sunday morning while I was helping Corporal Alcock light the candles with a long taper, that the Rector popped his head round the vestry door and, pulling his surplice down over his shoulders, said: “Alison! How would you like to be my server?”

After church I ran all the way home, forgetting Daddy dropping further behind me, to tell grandmother.

“Like I always told ‘ee, cherry maid, you’s my cleverest girl of all,” she said, “us’ve never ‘ad one of they in our church before.” Then she furrowed her brow and asked: “By the way, girl, what do it mean?”

I soon learned: it was my job to put the chalice and paten in their little niche, ready for the Rector to consecrate the bread and wine at the altar, and to pass them to him when the communicants knelt at the altar rail; I handed him his hymn book, opened at the appropriate page, when it was time for him to sing, and his leather-bound Bible when he had to read the Epistle; and I exchanged his glasses for the bifocal spectacles he wore to deliver the sermon. Within two or three weeks I’d learned the simple procedure of the service, and the Rector for his part soon relied on my hand being there to take his Prayer Book and fold his stole, as if I’d been assisting him for years.

He told me that when he was an industrial chaplain in Crewe he had a whole phalanx of acolytes, sons of railway workers with ruff-collared surplices, who got in his and each other’s way. They flanked the Rector and his curates in a procession up the aisle during the opening hymn, led by the eldest boy carrying an iron cross that had been forged in the Works foundry, and they had a number of esoteric tasks to perform during the services, waving incense-carriers to please God’s nostrils and tinkling a tiny bell at certain intervals to wake people up. When he came down to Devon the Rector dispensed with those superstitious trappings of idolatry, as he called them, and in all the years of his ministry in our village I was his one and only server.

Mother gladly atoned for her absence from church by sewing me a plain white surplice. While I was trying it on Ian told me: “I looked up what you is in the dictionary. They calls it the celebrant’s assistant. You must be mazed, girl.”

When the Underbills had another baby I broke the ice in the font so she could be baptized, and I started helping the Rector home after services, carrying his heavy black cassock and his frayed silk stole.

§

A short way up Church Lane from the phone box, Maria sat in a chair on the patio in front of the old poet’s shack in which she lived, feeding the birds. If it hadn’t been for the thick hedge of shrubs and small trees, she could have looked down upon the village. Jane and I used to wriggle through a gap in the wall around the village hall yard and into her garden.

“She in’t never been with a man,” Jane whispered to me.

“Where?” I asked.

“You know!” she replied.

But we soon shut up and lay there, patiently watching and waiting, because the reason we crawled into the edge of her garden was so we could witness the spectacle of blue tits and chaffinches alighting upon her shoulders.

§

I hung the Rector’s vestments on a coathanger on the back of his study door, while he reheated himself some coffee and lit a cigarette, and after that I might have been invisible. He never invited me to stay or told me to go home: it was clear that I was welcome to do as I wished.

I explored the empty rooms of the rectory like an archaeologist, gathering evidence of past lives: a small red button, from a child’s dress long since discarded; two miniature items of furniture, a chair and a dresser, in the corner of an otherwise empty room upstairs, as if they’d been shrunk by a magic spell; and on the inside of a cupboard I found a black and white cutting of a team of footballers in long shorts and thick shin-pads, looking much older than they do today. Their names were printed underneath, and I memorized the first one or two so as to impress Ian when I got home. But he interrupted me after the first name and reeled off the rest: “Carey, Aston, Anderson, Chilton, Cockburn, Delaney, Morris, Rowley, Pearson, Mitten. There’s some reckon they was the best team of all.” He paused, as if recalling a particular game he could never actually have seen. “Of course,” he continued, “‘tis a load of old rubbish. Their memories is lyin’.”

There were no women’s smells in the rectory: no aromas of flowers or herbs or the scent of perfume. The Rector’s study smelled of books and cigarette smoke, and in the kitchen the fierce odour of fried bacon was dispelled only by fresh pots of coffee that he made sporadically through the day. The rest of the house, except for his bedroom and bathroom at the far end of the upstairs corridor, was as if deserted, abandoned when the Rector gave away all his excess furniture, or rather sold it at rock-bottom prices, so that instead of insulting the poorest families in the village he gave them the satisfaction of striking exceptional bargains.

That emptiness made the rectory seem even more enormous than it already was: our home wasn’t a quarter of the size and there were eight of us living in it without being squashed. While I wandered through the huge rooms I could occasionally hear the Rector emit a strangled, long-drawn-out sneeze that reverberated around the house. I wondered whether Fred provided him with snuff, but one day I was coming down the stairs just as the Rector emerged from his study and was suddenly seized by a spasm that bent him double, and it wasn’t a sneeze but a cough.

There was barely a trace of the Rector’s family in the house. His wife had run away with someone someone knew, in a scandalous incident whose details no one could recall because the Rector, instead of creeping back where he came from with his tail between his legs, had stayed put and brought up his three children alone, and grandmother told me that people were so impressed by that stubbornness that they were too busy taking it in turns to clean the house, cook meals, weed the vegetable garden and invite his children round for tea, to make fun of him. By now, few could even remember his having children: they’d all left home so long ago that most people treated him with the circumspection of a bachelor priest, and on the rare occasions his grown-up children came to visit him they slipped into the village and out again with the stealth of deer.

§

It was during the last frosts of winter that the widowman heron came into our Valley. He came soaring silently above the trees of Haldon Forest and glided low over the village. I tugged Daddy’s arm by the beech tree and we watched, spellbound, as he floated grey against grey and with a lazily regal, captivating flapping of his wings made a wide circle in the sky. Then, seeing his reflection in the water below, he descended towards the quarry pool, where he landed without a shudder on his spindly legs, settled himself on the outhanging rock, and folded his nightwatchman’s wings.

§

One item of furniture remained in the old drawing-room of the rectory: a vast, gilt-framed mirror above the mantelpiece. It was pocked with bubbles and distorting flaws. I was drawn to it, and stood in the empty room, scrutinizing my uncertain reflection in its antiquated glass.

§

If he thought he’d be undisturbed for any length of time, the Rector removed his dog-collar as soon as he’d put a saucepan of coffee on the stove. He walked with a firm stride and his limp only made him look more purposeful. He told me that he’d known the exact moment that would lead to his hip replacement operation: he’d gone for a walk with his young children on Dartmoor. It was drizzling, and they came to a five-bar gate. The Rector stepped ahead of his youngest daughter, placed a hand on the top bar and sprang forward, reaching over with his other hand for the middle bar, and keeping his legs out straight behind him he sailed over the gate in a perfect vaulting motion. He told me that in the second or so between his grip slipping loose, so that his limbs spreadeagled in every direction, and feeling his back thump against the granite ground, he had time to reflect, or rather some part of his mind scolded him, that for this moment of proud carelessness he might well pay for the rest of his life. So it would prove.

“And it was also the moment I knew, and I don’t mean as an intellectual abstraction but I actually realized inside, that one day I’d die,” he said.

When he was young he’d known the physical exhilaration of running so fast you left yourself behind. Maybe that was why he drove his Triumph Vitesse like a madman around the blind-cornered lanes of our Valley. He’d had an athlete’s self-confidence in his body that came from the certainty that he could outrun a rampaging bull or catch a departing train, if ever such emergencies might arise, right up until at the age of fifty-five his angel’s face had suddenly crumpled into a web of wrinkles, his dark preacher’s hair went white, his hip started aching at night, and he admitted to himself that for some years he’d been approaching the bathroom mirror instinctively breathing in.

His body had turned against him. It was like a mutiny, or the betrayal of an unspoken pact, at first in the grumbling of dissent from some inner recess, which gradually became more audible and constant, until there came a time when always some part of him ached, or burned.

Even so, the Rector was a man in control of himself. His otherworldliness was not that of a vague or absent-minded dreamer but rather of a fierce idealist whose aims were unrealistic. His authority was so measured and articulate that he always appeared calm; Maria was the only one who could discern that within his resolute body his insides churned with the need to get things done before time ran out, because time was always slipping away. The Rector marvelled at patient people, and had to stop himself from despising them.

He was always impatient. He never had any time, because there was so much to accomplish and so little time. His driving was notorious throughout the Valley, and the only advantage of his discovery of the Triumph Vitesse, another model of which he got hold of after each accident, with its awesome powers of acceleration, was that you could hear its throaty engine coming from a long way off. Many a driver had raised a fist as he roared past them within an inch of their own vehicle, only to lower it when they glimpsed the blur of his dog-collar. Mother was aware that he sometimes took me along for the ride when he went to visit a parishioner on one of the outlying farms, and she disapproved because she knew, as did everyone, what a terrifying driver he was.

His most hair-raising accident had occurred one Christmas night: he’d taken Midnight Mass at Bridford, a nearby village which didn’t have its own priest, and was coming back along the Valley road. A blizzard had blown up while he was in church, and the road was already covered in a thin icing of snow, while a cascade of thick snowflakes continued to fall. A number of cars groped their way along the road, bumper to bumper, and he came up behind them. Even though he had nothing to get home for except sleep, he must have been driving with the usual impatience that gripped him behind the wheel: he tried to overtake the entire line of cars with a burst of acceleration on the slippery snow. His was the first car to start skidding and the rest followed suit, as if in imitation of his, and six cars started skating along the Valley road, in a blizzard one Christmas night.

The miraculous powers of the saviour born that day must have intervened, as He had when the quarry was flooded on another of His birthdays earlier in the century, because even though all six cars were write-offs not a single person was hurt.

§

The Rector wore a freshly ironed white handkerchief in the breast pocket of his jacket, although when he had to wipe a gob of phlegm off his lips he used a crumpled one from his trouser pocket.

“Well, Alison,” he said, “it’s a gentleman’s habit to carry a spare handkerchief.”

“But why?”

“For emergencies,” he replied with a grin, suggesting notions of gallantry that came from an earlier time, and another place.

I watched how the Rector made his coffee, putting three spoonfuls into a pot, filling it up with hot water, and stirring sixty times. I learned to guess when he wanted another mug and would take it into his study just as he was rising from his chair to go and make it himself. The time this saved him the Rector spent talking with me. He told me about a woman blind from birth, who dreamed in rich and startling images that she recounted to him in detail; and of another woman, who also lived in one of the many identical back-streets of Crewe, similar to the single street in Teign Village across the Valley, who was cleaning the windows of her house and fell off the chair she was standing on. They put her to bed, and when she woke up she looked at them with surprise and spoke in a gibberish no one had ever heard before, but which sounded as if she was taking the mickey out of them. One by one they brought all the foreigners they knew of to her bedside to see if they could help, until the owner of the Chinese takeaway thought he recognized a word here and there. The string of visitors ended with a Professor of Philology from Manchester University, who identified her utterances as being those of a dialect of Mandarin that had become obsolete in the seventeenth century. She came to her senses after a week in this condition, with no memory of it. Instead she shooed them away from around her bed, telling them she couldn’t lie around all day when she was in the middle of cleaning windows.

The Rector lit a cigarette and nicked the lit match towards his overflowing wastepaper basket. The flame died and was replaced by a tail of smoke in its spinning orbit.