1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (11 page)

“I don’t care what anyone says, Mishkin isn’t stupid. He’s just surrounded by savages,” he said, adding, “as indeed we are, Alison.”

“I suppose so,” I agreed in as noncommittal a voice as I could.

“But Raskolnikov is a more profound man altogether. God,” he shuddered, in his crackly, half-broken voice, “he looked into the blackness of the human soul and entered it. I don’t know if I could have k-k-killed her, do you, Alison?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I mumbled, “it’s hard to say.”

“But you must have asked yourself,” he insisted.

“Really, Johnathan, I prefer the Bronte sisters, like I’ve told you before.”

“You’ve probably read inferior editions,” he said in his superior manner. “Remind me to lend you my Magarshack translations. I think you’ll find the introductions helpful.”

§

I climbed into bed, bent my knees up and leaned a book against them, and tried to lose myself in
Middlemarch
, while beneath me the others slumped in front of the TV and Daddy would be sitting on the step by the back door, stroking the dogs in the dusk. Gradually they’d amble away to the barn, except for Tinker, the eldest, who nestled into Daddy’s thigh. A motorbike roared into the village and swung into the farmyard, its white beam brushing across the front of the house. Pamela got off and gave her helmet to the rider, and strolled up to the house as he rode away. As she passed Daddy she bent down and picked a fluff of thistledown off his lapel, then she opened the door and a yellow light leapt across the farmyard to the hedge on the other side of the lane. The evening was thick and sticky. Outside, Tinker had entered a dog’s pretend sleep pressed against Daddy’s legs.

Daddy gazed ahead into the gathering darkness, feeling nothing but a glaze of unquestioning calm over the world. My head was filling up with dust, and my eyelids were too heavy to keep up. I let the weight of the book push my legs out flat, and I rolled away from it as I drifted into sleep.

Burning the Stubble

I
n the premature dawn that fooled the cockerel an uneven morning mist draped itself like sheets over the church and houses up on the ridge opposite. It made the village look abandoned, like the house next door in winter, whereas in reality it was the most active part of the day, when people took heart from that moisture, as if God had breathed on the window pane of his world, and undertook strenuous tasks. Mother sent me into the fields up on the hill behind the house to pick mushrooms: unaffected by the drought, they appeared overnight like warts on the earth’s skin; grandmother wondered whether they, too, might be susceptible to hypnosis, but they didn’t seem to need it.

From up there on the tops I could see, off to my left, Mike Howard spreading silage on his pasture, and down in the village mother plucking a chicken in the yard, covered in its feathers, as if she herself were a moulting angel; I could see all too clearly fields littered with farmers’ trash; discarded plastic fertilizer bags, orange nylon string, unused ends of mesh fencing and coils of barbed wire. Grandfather pottered about the meadow next to the barn, gathering up the rubbish like an impatient beachcomber, grabbing things with anger but also a little guilt, since his grandsons were no more careless than he’d been, it was just that in his day things were made out of canvas and twine, which rotted into the earth.

I could see Douglas Westcott in the distance lifting rams out of hedges that they’d caught their horns in trying to escape, convinced the next pasture must be better than this one, and Tom hanging a gate over in grandfather’s land by the rectory, surrounded by bales of black hay, like giant sheep pellets, scattered by the new combine that Ian had bought in time for the harvest. I could see Maria, too, hanging up a newcomer family’s washing in another breezeless morning, and they were all unable to stop themselves from reforming the daily, useless optimism that today might be different. It never was. The sun assumed its fierce midday throne by eight o’clock, to further torment the village, and fast burned off the mist and the dew, the mere memory of which, later in the day, was enough to make a person’s mouth water.

§

The granite works gave out face-masks and initiated a four-day week because of the lingering cloud of dust that clogged even the office workers’ lungs. Milk curdled in the churn and was refused by the collecting lorries. Men were sucked into the discomfort of their own flesh and stayed at home, where they sat swatting mosquitoes on their sweaty skin and suffered with their wives the awful sounds of dry wood, robbed of all its sap, splitting as heat opened the grain, and of starlings thudding against window-panes.

§

The starlings appeared in the village one evening as darkness fell, choosing the yew tree in the churchyard to tumble into out of the sky at dusk, like a pack of black cards sprinkled from the heavens. They made us think that grandmother might have been right after all when she said that time was changing direction, it had run out of momentum up the spiral and was falling back down again, because the starlings were like a reminder of the newcomers’ disastrous barbecue back in June, to which they’d invited each other; a pile of newspapers awaiting the dustman caught fire and a scattered flock of charred pieces of paper rose into the sky and dirtied sheets drying on clothes-lines, spread a fine film of black dust in all the rooms in all the houses of the village, and ruined Granny Sims’ six-monthly perm.

For some days the newcomers had stayed indoors, and when they had to go out they tiptoed around the village like unwelcome guests, and drove their silent cars off to work. Things turned right around, though, after the early harvest, because that was the time for Ian to do the job he enjoyed more than any other, the one he was best at, the one job he knew he could do better than Tom: burning the stubble of the cornfields. Ian subscribed to all the farming magazines, listened to the radio programmes over his early morning cup of tea, and sought advice from fertilizer salesmen and agricultural engineers for ways of improving our yield of cows and crops. But whenever anyone suggested that burning stubble was old-fashioned and wasteful, it was better to turn it over or dig it up or leave it be, then he folded the magazine or switched off the radio, saying: “Come on Tom, us better be gettin’ down to work afore ‘tis time to stop,” and Tom would have to gulp down his tea and stumble out after his brother into the semi-darkness of dawn.

Ian looked forward all year to that season, and when it came he took his time, to his grandfather’s dismay and his brother’s annoyance, since there was still a back-breaking load of other things to do before they could relax, and celebrate the harvest festival. But Ian wouldn’t be hurried, and in the end they left him to it, as they did every year, grandfather telling him: “Don’t you worry, bay, us’ll take care of the sheep-dipping ourselves, you take yer time, you must be an artist or somethin’ I suppose, us’ll collect up the hay on ours own. ‘Ow the ‘eck did us get all this land anyway, ‘twas better when the farm was small.”

Ian took no notice of them, because he knew you couldn’t rush it if you wanted to do it properly, and that was the only way he wanted to do it; other farmers just lit up some chaff in a corner of a field according to which way the wind was blowing, and left the flames to drift across of their own accord. But Ian spent all day preparing lines of hay around the edges of the field, in order to burn from the outside in: if he judged it correctly the fire would speed towards the centre at an accelerating pace and combust with a bang in the middle of the field, and it was all over in an instant. He would prepare all the fields during the day and rush around setting light to them at dusk, because that was when it was most dramatic, and what he aimed for was to have them explode as close together as possible.

That summer the stubble was so dry Ian was glad to see grandfather leave, because he was worried a spark from his pipe might set it alight before he was ready. He worked all day making his lines of hay, and studying the dimensions of the fields, their contours, and the barely perceptible breezes. He didn’t really trust anyone else to help him but he knew he couldn’t do everything himself, so when the time came he got me to lend a hand.

§

We ran along the hedges with torches, and the stubble crackled and flamed. He never paused then, because there was no time for error: he decided where to start and we circled the field with fire, leapt into his van, and tore off to the next one. There were six in all, and we managed to cover each of them before the first one combusted and boomed around the Valley, while we lay spreadeagled by the van, drenched in sweat and panting like dogs. Then another one exploded, and another, like the big guns of an almighty battle, making Corporal Alcock’s heart stop with nostalgic terror, Jane’s dad wake up thinking he was late for work on the night shift at the quarry, grandfather curse and bite his lip, and Douglas Westcott remember the earthquake that surprised him in Mexico City.

They made the Rector climb through the skylight with his cigarettes and gin and tonic, to stand on the roof of the rectory and watch the sun go down crimson behind a patchwork of golden fields, scorched and smouldering with orange flame and drifting clouds of smoke, crackling and blowing. He thought it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, and for some reason he couldn’t quite work out it made him contemplate his own death. He went back down to his study and took out his Bible, and found the passage that was nagging at him, in The Wisdom of Solomon:

As gold in the furnace hath he tried them, and received them as a burnt offering.

And in the time of their visitation they shall shine, and run to and fro like sparks among the stubble.

He scribbled it on a scrap of paper, which he absent-mindedly handed to me a couple of days later, when I asked him for a bookmark.

§

The next morning it was the newcomers’ turn to wake up with the black soot of burnt stubble on the carpets and furniture in their houses, and across the metallic paintwork of their saloon cars. With the communal energy of outsiders they visited us on a rota basis to complain to grandfather at such an unsociable habit, they wrote letters to the
Mid-Devon Advertiser
and the Exeter
Express and Echo
pointing out the safety hazards of this antiquated rural practice, and they organized a petition protesting at the damage done to the ozone layer, which they gave to the Rector, as their local councillor, to hand in to Teignbridge District Council. He listened to their resentment, took the petition from them, returned to his study, tore it up and threw it in his waste-paper basket.

§

On Thursday a parcel of books was delivered with my name on it by a conscientious headmaster who’d taken an oath that forbade him to strike. The family all volunteered to help with my postponed education, but in the end they all made excuses except Ian, who laid them out on the kitchen table but then just stared at the pages of the mathematics book in disbelief. After what seemed like hours he closed it and gave it me back, saying: “They don’t know what they’s lettin’ theirselves in for.”

The only person who was any help was Johnathan, who’d spent two weeks of every summer in France, and down at the quarry pool he tested me in my first attempts to learn the vocabulary of another language.

“Concentrate!” he urged me. “Surely you want to read
L’Etranger
in the original.”

“Lay who?” I asked.

Johnathan raised both his eyebrows at once, and sighed. “Albert Camus. He played in goal for the Algerian
national
team. One of the g-g-greats, Alison. Really!”

I began to wonder whether the Comprehensive in Newton Abbot that I’d passed by for years, whenever we went in for a Saturday shop, was anything more than a façade whose pretence was kept up by everybody older than me, and was as much of a mirage as when schools had been the impossible dream of rural philanthropists: grandmother, whose memory had been sharpening as if to compensate for the muddiness of her sight, told me that at this rate our own children would have to end up teaching us, just like her mother-in-law who had taught her illiterate parents after the village school was built. Her father became such a scholard that he spoilt his ballot paper in the next election by signing his initials, instead of the X that he assumed was merely intended to represent the mark of an uneducated man. Grandmother suggested that one of the newcomer women start up a dame school at home, and she reminded the Rector, when he came to give her sick communion now that she could no longer hobble to the services, of one of his predecessors who’d taught children in the church in a previous epoch. But the Rector declined her proposal: “I may be a priest, Mrs Freemantle,” he told her, “and we’ll doubtless be the last workers in the country to form our own union, but I’m no strike breaker.”

He tried to explain how reasonable the teachers’ demands were, and how, what’s more, every child should receive an equal education paid for out of income taxes, ‘because education’s not something the rich should be able to buy, surely, Mrs Freemantle, like a swimming pool or an expensive toy for their children, free and equal education’s the measure of a civilized society and the way things are going if that woman carries on, the poor will have to pay for their own pencils and rubbers, and we’ll be back to before the Second World War’.

Grandmother was unimpressed. She considered cruelty to children unforgivable, and refusing to teach them in order to demand higher wages she thought the lowest form of blackmail. She said that if she believed in capital punishment she’d recommend that they were shot, but since she didn’t then she thought they should be banished from the kingdom, a humane punishment that she regretted had fallen into disuse.

The Rector realized the futility of arguing with her. As an afterthought he told her how, soon after his arrival in the village, he’d been invited to become a governor of the Primary School in Chudleigh: back then there was still a grammar school in Newton Abbot and a secondary modern in Kingsteignton, and Chudleigh Primary held the record, in the county of Devon, of eight years without a single pass in the eleven-plus exam. The Rector did two things: he accepted a place on the Board of Governors, and he also bowed to his wife’s demands that they send their children to schools in Exeter, because he didn’t feel able to insist that their children’s education be hostage to his principles.