1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (12 page)

Grandmother cackled with delight: “You’s a good man, Rector, a good man. But your head spends most of its time in the clouds.”

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Unaware, as the world ground creaking to a halt, that the past was catching us up, and with it people’s long since discarded memories, we lived a carefree existence. The younger kids in dark skirts spun cartwheels on the Brown, like dwarf nuns pleading for respite from the sun’s divine punishment, or chased after a shrinking football, repeatedly punctured by Nan Dyer’s mad terrier, which the boys had to repair by soldering it with matches. Some of the older ones, though, those with obstinate parents reluctant to submit to the sun’s tyranny, were still assigned futile tasks: they planted a patchwork of tiny vegetable plots along the bank of the trickling stream until the day its last drops evaporated before their very eyes; they were then given improbable dowsing rods cut from hawthorn by old Martin the hedge-layer, and despatched in the vague direction of supposed sites of ancient wells. When I told grandmother she said she was sure she could remember coming across maps showing their locations, and she directed me to chests of drawers unopened in a generation. But there were no maps at their bottoms, only brittle sheets of old newspaper that crumbled to the touch.

Bigger boys accompanied their fathers to dying woods around the edge of the parish, because people were agreeing with grandmother that history is a spiral, and just like in 1976 the summer was so long it was burning up autumn altogether and would again be immediately followed by a harsh winter, and so the insistent hum that droned throughout those months was augmented for a while by the whine of chainsaws, cutting down the copses and spinneys that anyway, when you thought about it, only took up valuable space on arable land. They ripped up everything with their chainsaws: beech and ash, birch and elder, everything, that is, except oak, whose wood’s no good for burning. The oaks were left and the ground ploughed up around them, sad, solitary trees in an emptying landscape of dusty soil.

Mirror

A
ll along the Teign river beyond the quarry pool, willows stood along the far bank. You couldn’t imagine how they got there, they looked so out of place, but one of the Viscounts’ gardeners must have planted them, hundreds of years ago. By now they were old and stunted creatures, with varicose barks, twisted and splitting, rubbed against by generations of cows; their branches drooped sadly over the water.

The river was so dried up that on Friday morning Johnathan and I played jumping games across it, and when other children came down he hid in the cradles of the willow trees, watching.

Back at the pool we dislodged the widowman heron from his rock jutting out over the water; he retreated to a pile of granite rubble and regarded us mournfully, while sometimes one of the grown-ups, Maria in her red scarf or Yvonne, Jane’s tall, skinny mum, with her fruit-picking basket, kept an eye on us through the telescope up on the cliff, as we dived into the black water.

If we screwed up our eyes, though, we could see that they’d soon lifted the telescope away from us, to gaze upon the long and slender waterfall that had been the 9
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Viscount Teignmouth’s lifelong dream and celebrated achievement. It was fed by a leat built to the Viscount’s precise specifications by a dozen infantry veterans of Wellington’s victorious army at Quatre-Bras who, sensing the furious revenge imminent at Waterloo, deserted camp and made their way home to London, which they reached at the same time as the news of Napoleon’s final defeat.

They fled together to the spongy margin of Dartmoor, where the engineering Viscount found them lurking in his pine woods and offered them work in his great enterprise. His and Johnathan’s ancestor, the very first Viscount, had been a cabin boy with Sir Francis Drake, and the 9
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Viscount was a follower of the great engineer.

The deserters worked like Trojans building that leat which began at a spring below the volcanic extrusion of heaped boulders of Houndtor and was directed across open heather, over the sloping granite past Manaton, through the combes behind Hennock and finally into the familial acres of pine forest. Using skills of dam building, irrigation and hydrography learned in the universities of Europe but improved upon by the obsessive neuropathy of a gifted aristocrat, the Viscount worked out a precisely detailed route whose falls harnessed energy sufficient to drive water up succeeding rises, and it wasn’t until two generations later that an itinerant cartographer ingratiated himself with the then 11
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Viscount by proving that the leat rose across its entirety by a height of twenty feet, for the engineering Viscount’s route had been so complicated, with its ups and downs and unders and overs and around the corners, that it had fooled even gravity.

But apart from this unintentional miracle the waterfall was a failure, with not even the wit of an authentic folly; for the 9
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Viscount had actually intended that the water should supply the house, if needs be, as a precaution against drought, such as that suffered in 1750 when footmen expired on their carriages and the water-closets all clogged up, so that breezes carried across the Valley odours of aristocratic excrement, stirring in the peasants of our village at their decimated harvest forgotten rumours of equality spread by those Levellers who had passed nearby in their flight to exile in Cornwall. But by an ironic hydrological error the power generated by the long gush of the cascade was insufficient to push the water back up under the terraced lawns to the house.

Furthermore, the 9
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Viscount had imagined the spectacle created by narrowing the final flow of water from the leat through a carefully moulded clay funnel would emerge as a fluid representation of knowledge and art and manners, as the inevitable impulse of refinement inherent in civilization, broadening imperceptibly but unerringly during the progress of its own momentum. Instead it only made immature youths pee in their pants, and farmers’ wives sometimes went to the beech tree on the pretext of checking on the swimmers or gathering blackberries thereabouts but really to watch through the telescope as the sun, filtering intermittently through illusive cirrus clouds, made the slender cataract seem to weave and ripple in its ineluctable glissade, and although the sight itself, in the silent isolation of the lens, was no more than an abstract display of light and movement, the women felt themselves gliding above the sawdust of an urban dance-floor, rustic unease blurred by Norman Calvados, waltzing in the arms of a tall, slender mute whose joints were made not of bone but of honey.

We could have drowned all at once and not been noticed, but we couldn’t see any danger. After shouting and screaming as we splashed around we’d file quietly up the dried bed of the stream and back into the village. We each settled into our own thoughts, disturbed only by the strange boom that came from the church bell even though no one was ringing it. Behind us the heron resumed his vigil as the quarry pool digested our raucous and bubbly laughter and recomposed the placid, inscrutable black mirror of its surface.

§

There were no mirrors in our house; not since Daddy, losing his temper for the first time in his life, had stormed through all the rooms and smashed every last one, after lifting a soapy shaving brush and seeing not the sultana eyes and smooth, nineteen-year-old complexion of his own face, but someone else entirely. For a few seconds he stood, trembling, and stared back at brown berry pupils stranded in bloodshot whites, crows’ feet picked out at the side of each eye and beneath them a single crease holding up a crescent of puffy, aubergine-coloured skin. From his precise jaw, pouches of flesh were pushing out at the jowls. Lazily parted lips revealed blackened teeth, and the apple-red ruddiness of his cheeks was blotted with mulberry splotches.

Daddy wrenched the mirror off the wall and smashed it on the basin, and then stormed through the house, mindless of the children he startled awake: no one said a word, not even Ian, who thought he’d discarded fear the year before when he fought with Joanna Simmons, leader of the newcomers’ children. But like his brother and sisters he was struck dumb by our father’s unheard of fury. I was only a toddler then, but mother said that even I held my breath until Daddy had completed his destruction, before summoning it for a high-pitched scream that echoed in the shards of glass scattered on every floor.

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At the time mother said nothing, her immediate response being to blame herself, seeing Daddy’s actions as the bizarre anger of an uncomplaining man in this strange village, anger directed at her and her unknowing transgressions, which grandmother would only later explain to her: allowing me to see my reflection before reaching my first birthday, or failing to veil the mirrors after the death of grandfather’s sister. So she said nothing. Then one morning she awoke to find him sitting up in bed and scrutinizing her with a puzzled expression, and she felt all the substance of her being sucked out.

At first Daddy’s amnesia had been intermittent. He’d start a job but move on to another before it was finished, leaving a trail of uncompleted tasks at the end of the day that grandfather had to clear up. When there was a pause in conversation he changed the subject, as if trying to prove how quick-thinking he was, and he would further bewilder mealtimes by asking, no sooner had he finished, what time was tea going to be ready, and what’s more how come no one’s done the washing-up, we can’t eat off dirty plates. It got worse: he would plummet through the years, to find himself stranded at some point in the past, unaware of his predicament and eager for a future that had already occurred.

Dr Buckle at Chudleigh was harsh in his diagnosis. “It’s the cider, Mrs Freemantle. Stop him drinking and these lapses won’t trouble him any more.” Mother felt everything she’d tried to ignore rise up from her liver. In the very first month of their marriage he’d disappeared one evening and she eventually found him in the barn, an empty flagon beside his unconscious body.

“Is it me?” she’d sobbed the next morning.

“Tis me, my lover,” he’d replied, pulling her to him with the tenderness he’d never entirely lose. But while she dissolved gratefully into his reassuring arms, he continued to seek the oblivion of rough cider, melting into the night and drinking himself unconscious.

“Why?” she pleaded.

And he would look away and say: “I couldn’t tell ‘ee.”

After the initial shock, mother managed to convince herself it didn’t threaten her: it was Daddy’s secret, solitary weakness that dragged him off into the darkness but returned him more loving than ever. She was too grateful to him not to ignore it, too grateful to the school classmate who ignored her but whom she’d never forgotten, and who suddenly reappeared seven years later at her front door. He’d walked across the Valley and up through Teign Village, where net curtains were lifted for prying eyes, so that even before he reached Hennock she’d heard on the grapevine that he was heading that way, and wondered with envy who he was visiting.

He knocked on her door and her heart jumped.

“Do ‘ee want to walk up the reservoirs with me?” he’d smiled. And so they walked, swapping news but talking less and less, though his smile said enough as they circled the reservoirs that damp autumn afternoon, their fingers imperceptibly becoming entwined.

“I’ll be back next Sunday,” Daddy told her at her gate.

§

It was in unconscious imitation of his own father that Daddy courted a woman from outside the village. Although she wasn’t a stranger, as grandmother had been, since she’d been to the same school as everyone else in the Valley, and neither did she possess grandmother’s provocative beauty, still the women of the village resented her intrusion. They suspected her of having crept up on Daddy and seduced him while he was working alone in one of the hidden fields near the river, unwilling to accept that she was Daddy’s own, enigmatic choice.

That habit the men of our line had of bringing wives into the village from outside was one of the things that set our family apart. Another was the practice of reasoning with their children instead of beating them, a practice that had been widely derided but which continued for three generations, right up until mother destroyed a tradition she herself had strained harder than anyone to continue, when on the first of October she would lose control and strap me, as her own father had done to her.

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Grandfather made new windows for the entire house as a wedding present, and grandmother moved their things out of the main bedroom to give way to the bride. Daddy joined grandfather in his workshop to carve the parts of the bed they would share, and took his advice: “Make it good and big, bay; sometimes you’ll want all the space you can get for love, an’ other times you’ll need all that space to put between you.”

On the morning after their wedding night Daddy woke early. He didn’t want to wake his bride, gently snoring beside him, and he wondered what to do with himself. Then he noticed her shoes lying where she’d kicked them off, in the middle of the room. He took them, along with all the other pairs she’d put in the wardrobe, downstairs to the kitchen. When she came down to make breakfast she found the table covered with rows of shining shoes.

From then on Daddy polished shoes every day, before he did anything else. He found it a pleasing way to wake up, and he continued as his children grew, placing Ian’s toddler’s sandals beside grandfather’s heavy workman’s boots. Mother told me that she sometimes found him transfixed by the sight of his children’s tiny shoes on the kitchen table, and when he realized she was there he would blush and hide his watery eyes from her as he gathered them up.

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He’d been locked in the past for months at a time when Dr Buckle at last referred him, too late, to a neurologist in Exeter.

“He’s suffering from alcoholic degeneration of the mamillary bodies,” the specialist told mother. “He won’t recover his memory.”

While white strands were appearing in his unruly crown of hair Daddy himself was growing younger, percolating through his own past until amnesia gripped him for good at an isolated, unchanging moment in his childhood, present joining the lost past as daily experience soaked like receding water into the sands of forgetting. That was my Daddy, a man constantly disorientated by a world where people grew old overnight and moved house without warning, where everyday objects became mysterious totems withholding their true meaning, so that I’d come across him switching a light on and off in amazement or trying to speed up the brewing tea with mother’s liquidizer, because he’d gone back to live in a world before the day that electricity came to the village, on which cows danced in the meadow that ran down to the stream.