1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (8 page)

“How did she know that language?” I asked him. “Had she lived another life in China?”

“What do you think?” he replied.

Sometimes when he left the house the Rector switched on his tape-recorder, and later we would listen, ears to the speakers, to distant voices, trying to make out what they were saying.

§

Midway through the mornings of that summer my brothers were beaten back inside by the heat of the day, and returned with the dogs, swearing at the sun. Tom sweated more than other people. He’d kick shut the door of his van, because the metal was so hot it burned his fingers, and come across the yard red-faced and wiping his brow. The first thing he did, even before pouring himself a mug of tea, was to fill a plastic basin with cold water and take it outside, which he wouldn’t have bothered to do if mother hadn’t insisted, since even she couldn’t bear the pestilential smell that erupted into the room when he took off his heavy workman’s boots. Then he peeled off his dripping socks and put his feet in the basin, and as the water hissed Tom closed his eyes, and sighed with pleasure.

§

Freed from her duties of a sheepdog, Tinker sometimes followed my scent and I’d find her lying with her paws crossed in the shadows of the rectory verandah, calmly waiting to accompany me home, taking upon herself responsibility for my whereabouts, since no one else at home noticed whether I was here, there or nowhere.

Tinker would shepherd me back to the house, see me through the door and then pad over to the barn, since she wasn’t allowed to follow me inside. She accepted her banishment with dignity, loping across the yard without a backward glance, but it seemed to me we were doing her wrong, because it hadn’t always been like that.

Tinker was born two years after I was, and when she was a puppy the house was as much her playground as it was mine. She bounced around after me, nipping at my ankles and flopping down when I did, with a permanent air of mischief and expectation. She chewed everything she could get her teeth into, dragging grandfather’s boots and mother’s slippers into corners and silently destroying them even as we searched for her underneath beds and behind chairs. She took matchboxes from off table-tops and scattered their contents across the sitting-room floor; she carried mother’s kitchen aprons up the stairs and deposited them in the bathroom. But no one had the heart to scold her with more than a brief, unconvincing reprimand, because her puppy dog’s eyes could soften the hearts of even the hardened farmers of our family.

I was just learning to talk then, so mother later told me, and Tinker was the only one with the patience to listen to the rambling monologues of a toddler: she sat up and stared back, cocking her head this way and that, as if trying to follow a convoluted line of argument.

The fact is she thought she was a human being. She refused to drink from her dish of water by the back door, waiting instead for people to leave a half-drunk cup of tea on the sideboard, whereupon she would stick her snout inside and drain it. It was the same with food: mother used to buy uncooked dog meat in bulk from the grain merchants, which filled the house with a foul smell when she boiled a huge pan of it each Monday. When she set a bowl down for Tinker she turned her nose up at it, fixed mother with a look of reproach, and walked out of the kitchen with her tail in the air. She preferred a bowl of cornflakes for breakfast and a mug of sweet tea. Later on, when she thought no one was looking, she’d creep back into the kitchen and gollop the dog-food down in two or three mouthfuls, but it didn’t affect her appetite for people’s left-overs, which she would delicately remove from their plates with her long tongue and sneak off with, to consume in a quiet corner.

At night Tinker slept full-length on the floor beside my bed. At the slightest sound, of an owl hooting in a distant wood or a mouse scrabbling along the rafters, her little tail would start thumping on the carpet in her sleep. On the other hand she woke up of her own accord every few hours and would bark to be let out, whine to be given some attention, or miaow for a saucer of milk in imitation of the cats. I always slept through her howling: mother was the one who had to attend to her whims. She complained that it was like having another baby in the house.

Tinker slept with her paws crossed from the very beginning, and also inherited from her grandmother the habit of climbing on to a chair, placing her front paws on the sill and, ears pricked back, watching the world through the window. When a chicken crossed the yard, though, or a car passed by along the lane, she didn’t seem to see them. Instead her eyes would suddenly stare, her snout point forwards and her head track intently across the yard when there was nothing there: she seemed to be scrutinizing the traffic of another dimension.

Strange things upset her. She never got used to the vacuum cleaner, and whenever mother hoovered the carpets Tinker would bark and growl and try to nip the nozzle until she knew she was beaten, and then she fled from the room with her tail between her legs and hid under my bed. And although she had the genes of generations of sheepdogs in her, a sheep had only to fix her with its gaze, the way sheep do with puppies, to make her run to us for safety.

She preferred human beings. In fact, she wouldn’t leave people alone. She nibbled grandfather’s toes as he watched television, licked Pamela’s face with her long tongue, and she climbed up the arms of grandmother’s chair and on to the back, so that she could drop unannounced into grandmother’s lap. She drove everyone to distraction and they would flick her snout or pinch her ears and tell her to go away, stupid dog, leave me alone, go and annoy the chickens. But then she’d look up at them with her dog’s eyes, cock her head to one side and make them feel guilty despite themselves, until they felt so bad they apologized to her and grandma invited her on to her lap, or grandfather fed her gobbets of bread by the side of his chair when he thought no one was looking.

The paradise we shared in the house was ended by her sudden expulsion: one night the house was surrounded by all the dogs in the village, who appeared without warning, one after another, to sit in the yard and howl in the direction of my window, until Tom turned the hose on them.

When I woke up in the morning Tinker wasn’t snoring by my bed, as usual, and she wasn’t in the kitchen or the sitting-room or chewing a towel in the bathroom or anywhere else in the house. Finally I had to break the news to mother: someone had stolen my puppy in the middle of the night. Mother stopped what she was doing and looked down at me.

“For one thing, girl, ‘er’s not your dog, ‘er’s grandfather’s. And for another, ‘er lives outside now,” she told me. “And I don’t want no tears,” she added, on that day grandfather decided Tinker was old enough to earn her keep, and from then on she had to sleep with her grandmother, Nipper, out in the barn. During the day she learned from her the craft of a sheepdog, and she was forbidden from ever entering the house, until in the October of that sad summer, when in the life of a dog she was almost a hundred years old, grandfather would ask her to share his vigil beside grandmother’s bed.

§

I was beginning to realize that the questions that preoccupied me were those to which no one knew the answers. “What happens to animals’ souls when they die?” I demanded of mother, but she only told me to stop mooching around the kitchen, getting under her feet. “Don’t worry about their damn souls, maid, get yourself busy, go collect the eggs like you should have done s’morning.”

“Why did rich people go to the moon, anyway, when poor people was starving on the earth?” I asked Pamela as she made up ready to go out, and she said: “I’ll take you to the moon when you’re a bit older, little sister. Here, try this lipstick, it’s more your colour than mine. Don’t go away now, you wants to start learning these things in good time.”

Ian might have told me things, but he was too busy. When I found him leaning forward with his head resting on his desk, dozing after lunch and catching up on the sleep insomnia had deprived him of, I prodded him awake. “What time is it?” he asked, looking round anxiously.

“Two-thirty,” I informed him. “Ian, you tell me: why are the pine trees bleeding? Something’s happening to the forest.” But he’d already picked up his pen and was back doing the accounts where he’d left off, and all Ian said was: “I’ll talk to ‘ee later, Alison, ask me tonight, I’ve got to correct these ‘ere for the broker now, the berk. Pass me my calculator.”

No one would give me any answers, no one that is except grandmother, whose answers only conspired to complicate the issues I was trying to clarify. “Of course there’s people ‘ere from other planets,” she affirmed, “there’s no end of stars in the galaxies, so it stands to reason. But there’s no end of dimensions ‘ere, see. Where do you s’pose souls and spirits live? Think about it. People from other planets hides in them dimensions and watches us. Anyway, they’d rather mix with the dead than the living, and who can blame ‘em? I think I would.”

Often her answers had nothing to do with the question. “How often is you s’posed to pray, grandma?” I asked her, hoping to learn something with which I could impress the Rector.

“Regularity,” she said, “that’s the answer. And not after breakfast neither, always before. Keep regular, girl, stay healthy.” More than anything else, it was grandmother’s recitation of these useless maxims that gradually made people oblivious to the sound of her voice. She only wanted to share the experience of her long lifetime, but without realizing it she was somehow being forced to pass on, along with her own wisdom, the advice she’d been given as a child. Strictures concerning personal cleanliness, a person’s duties both in the household and in the outside world, trite religious imperatives, these and many more would fall from her tongue on deaf ears, apart from mine. The trouble was that often I couldn’t tell the difference.

“I like the sound of your grandmother,” said Johnathan.

Blimey, I thought, next thing he’ll want to meet her, so I changed the subject quickly.

“Have you heard about all these unemployed?” I asked him. “Ian says they’re going to start riding out of the cities on their bikes and ask for their old jobs back.”

Johnathan stared at the surface of the quarry pool. “I wish Tolstoy was still alive,” he said gloomily. “He would have had an answer.” And then he jumped up and said: “Come on, race you to the middle!”

§

The Rector, though, was not only prepared to listen to my enquiries, he responded as if pleased to discover someone who shared his concerns.

I asked him why people fought against those they had most in common with, and he told me all about intolerance, about the war he’d fought in even though Jesus said to turn the other cheek, and he told a joke about a man stopped in a quiet lane in Northern Ireland in the middle of the night by masked gunmen.

“‘Are you Protestant or Catholic?’ they demanded.”

“The man trembled, but inspiration came to him: ‘I’m an atheist,’ he told them.”

“‘Yes, but are you a Protestant atheist or a Catholic atheist?’ they asked,” said the Rector, roaring with laughter which turned into a fit of coughing that bent him double. But he came back up smiling and carried on talking, about Jews who believe that the Torah was with God before He created the world, it existed in heaven; about Sunni Muslims who not only maintain that the Koran existed before Creation, they emphasize that it was in Arabic. He couldn’t stop himself from laughing again, and I began to realize that he joked when he was most serious. “They had trouble getting Muslims to sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” he told me, “because they didn’t agree with freedom of worship, since there’s only one God: Allah. It’s as bad as the Christian Churches, who decided most of the world, not yet introduced to Christ’s teachings, lived and died in a state of sin.” He shook his head at things beyond his comprehension.

“Where is God, anyway?” I asked. “In the church? Do you have to go there to be with him?”

He lit a cigarette and looked at me. “You know very well that’s simplistic nonsense,” he replied. “The church is merely symbolic, a place to help us concentrate our thought and energy. Are you teasing me, Alison?”

“No,” I said, “I just don’t understand how God can be everywhere. I know if he exists he must be everywhere, but he can’t be inside things and inside people and in the air and…everywhere.”

“I know. It’s hard to grasp,” he agreed, unhelpfully. “It’s funny, Alison, you know,” he reflected, “you’re just a little boy asking questions—“What’s this mean? Why do people do that?” You grow up but inside you’re still just a little boy asking questions. Except that the next thing you know there’s a boy or girl beside you asking you the very same questions.”

§

The Rector told me that when he was young he was convinced that other people saw the point of life. He could not imagine that anyone else suffered from the same inability to find purpose as he did. He could find no fixed point inside himself, no sense of self beyond a vapid personality that sensations, experienced in the flow of time, blew into ever changing shapes. He knew he had no substance. Whereas others’ actions, speech, movement, their very physical being, spoke of purpose.

It was only gradually that he realized he was no more purposeless than others, that the inherent busyness of their being, as observed, was an illusion created by the fact of observation. As he lost his awe of other people, his expectations of them, he realized not only that truth would not be given him by others, but that he had to find it within himself.

I told him about an experiment we’d done at Primary School, dipping a piece of string into a beaker of blue liquid, and how a crystal formed on the end of the string, as if out of nothing.

“That’s why we’re here, Alison,” he said, seizing upon the metaphor with his eagerness of a preacher; “we’re simply souls dipped into time, in order to substantiate ourselves.”

And yet although he thought he’d lost his awe of other people, he still felt himself insubstantial, and thought he saw glimpses in others of their greater solidity. He never saw himself as others saw him, a tough, obstinate man of impractical ideals and unshakeable integrity.