1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (14 page)

It was in case of just such an eventuality that Ian had sent me there, and I knew I should jump off the gate and run home to tell him it’d started, so they could bring them into the barn, and Tom could help them with his inborn skills of a midwife. I knew I should; but I was transfixed.

It seemed like ages I stood there, gripping tighter the bars of the gate, silently urging the cow to push, mother, push it out of you, but nothing was happening, the calf was stuck and I was getting worried when quite suddenly it came sliding out all at once, afterbirth breaking up around it, tumbling into existence trailing its umbilical cord like a kite-string.

What happened next I’d never seen or even heard of before: while the calf was being born none of the other cows took the slightest notice. Now, though, although neither mother nor calf had made a sound, one or two of the other cows lifted their heads and ambled over, and when they reached the calf they began to lick it. It wasn’t just the nearest ones that came first: they sensed what was happening quite separately from each other, and odd ones would stop grazing and make their way over from different parts of the field.

Soon a circle had formed around the calf, not just licking it but even, it seemed, pushing it with their tongues. After ten or fifteen minutes it made its first attempt to stand up, as if only because it was being pestered to by the cows. It got just half-way up before its spindly legs gave way and it collapsed in a heap, confounded. But they wouldn’t leave it alone, instead urging it with their tongues to have another go: this time it nearly stood up straight before capitulating once more to the power of gravity.

But it wasn’t to be defeated. The other cows began to leave it alone now, and it carried on between short rests. I wondered at the instinct embedded in its mind, new-born after nine months sleeping in its mother’s belly, that compelled it so soon to struggle through that ordeal and stand on its own four legs. At last like a weightlifter it locked its knees, but then staggered giddily and keeled over; it took another few attempts before it could stand up straight and strong, by which time the other cows had all drifted away to graze, leaving its mother to finish licking it clean.

I told Ian the first calf was born, and that I’d seen how the other cows came round to welcome it into life and help it get used to reality.

“That!” said Tom, dismissing it with one syllable. “Cows always does that with the first one. They smells the placenta. Can’t resist its taste.”

§

When she got to my photograph I don’t know what mother thought; she just stared at the picture. But after a few moments she turned the photos face down on the table. Three stubs had accumulated at the bottom of the teacup. Mother was motionless, unbreathing: the pulsating silence gathered around her.

“Why, dear God, do it only get harder?”

She walked to the door and shielded her eyes. Daddy was no longer at the loft. The stifling heat throbbed against her temples, and the memory of one damp autumn afternoon made her shudder.

The sun squeezed the air out of the house. Invisible birds hovered in the shadows, their wings fluttering as they kept their balance. I ran past mother and out into the world.

The Lonely Hunter

D
uring the week Ian dressed as scruffily, as practically, as any farmer, in tee-shirt, jeans and Wellington boots. His week’s work ended around midday on Saturday, in good time for football in the afternoon. It was his abiding worry that he’d be late for kick-off, because at the last minute some crisis always seemed to occur—a sheep was lost, the trailer needed emptying—and he’d come crashing into the kitchen crying: “Mother, where’s me shin-pads? Where’ve you put the first team strip? What did I do with my liniment?” It was the one time of the week we saw Ian flustered, the lid blown off the top of his nervous stomach by the fear of missing his football. Mother and Pamela and grandmother and I, eating the last of our lunch, awaited his panic-stricken entrance every Saturday.

“Should be here any minute,” Pam would say, glancing at the clock, and we’d all giggle.

“Asn’t ‘e got ‘is kit ready again this week, silly bay?” asked grandmother.

When the door burst open we erupted into laughter, which only increased his alarm. “Don’t be stupid, mother,” he wailed, “I’m late. Someone’s stolen my shorts. Help me, mother.”

She would get up from the table slowly, with the smug assurance of a mother when she knows she’s indispensable.

“Hurry up, will you,” Ian cried, checking his watch and playing with his hair, “Ts late,” as she proceeded with calm authority to collect his socks from off the drying-rack, his shirt from the linen cupboard, his jock-strap from the top drawer of his chest, his scuffed and wrinkled football boots from the corner of the hallway where he’d dropped them the week before, and his tie-ups from off the mantelpiece, because not only did she know where the piskies hid things but she also had a mother’s memory, constantly taking stock and readjusting, for the location of objects around the house.

Ian scooped his kit from her arms and stuffed everything into a carrier bag, whose handles usually ripped open as he dashed out of the house, so that he wasted precious seconds retrieving a boot from the dust before throwing the bag into his yellow van and jumping in after it. He lifted the door on to its hinges even as he released the clutch, and bump-started the van as it rolled towards the lane.

In the event, Ian was invariably the first to arrive at the pitch, with time to stick the corner flags in and put the nets up before anyone else appeared. He accepted those chores as a captain’s responsibility. He played for the Christow team, who ignored the sun and continued without a break throughout the year, organizing friendlies from May to September. Cricket wasn’t a game taken seriously in the Valley, and was played by a team of soft-bellied newcomers and one or two older farmers, in a field next to the pub at Ashton. Tom had no interest in either sport, but he lent a hand when it was Ian’s turn to mark out the pitch, and a couple of times a year they took the tractor over to drag the grasscutter or the roller across the ground. That summer more than ever before they should have left the pitch alone to recuperate from the battering it took in the winter and spring, but Ian promised the Christow Village Hall Committee he’d returf it in time for the Agricultural Show, and so they continued to play every week. By June the goalmouths were two dried-up craters, and the only green grass left on the pitch lay in thin strips along each flank. By July these too had disappeared, and the entire playing field had become a dusty desert, scattered with knee-scraping pebbles and grit. And although each match began with pristine white lines, they were scuffed off within minutes of the kick-off.

Quite apart from the disastrous state of the pitch, it was madness to play football, of all things, in the fiery heat of those months. While everyone around them was adopting the continental habit of taking a nap in the early hours of the afternoon, and the whole Valley assumed a slumbering silence, Ian and his friends were dashing up and down the Christow playing field. They lost so much liquid they had to place bottles along the touchline and behind the goal, taking quick swigs whenever there was a lull in the action.

Ian and the rest of his side gradually adjusted to the conditions. The teams who came into the Valley, though, from the Newton Abbot end or from Exeter direction, were unable to alter their tactics of English footballers: they still slid and rammed into bone-crunching tackles, the ball simply a cushion with which to legitimize their violence; and they still hurtled without pause up and down and across the pitch, the ball like the thread of an argument they could not quite follow. At half-time the Christow players calmly drank tea and sucked oranges, while their opponents, on the other side of the pitch, lay gasping like fish for air, their lungs on fire, bleeding from gashed knees and scraped shins and elbows.

Ian’s team occasionally found themselves a goal or two behind at half-time, but they never once lost: the second half of every one of the friendlies they played during that summer became a clinical annihilation of the opposition, because they developed a new style of play, languid and skilful, based on accurate passing and control. They worked the ball in intricate patterns indirectly forward, and their opponents ran themselves into the ground chasing after the ball’s shadow, so that it was as if they were playing the game as it had been played during the days when it was first shown on television, as grandfather described, when there were never less than two balls on the pitch.

It was Ian who masterminded their new approach from his position as sweeper, and every week he obtained more satisfaction from the game he loved, as a dream unfolded in reality before him. At the beginning of the summer they were watched by the usual handful of spectators: Gerry, their manager, with his bucket and sponge; two or three of the most loyal wives or girlfriends, sweltering in the heat; some younger lads who longed to grow big enough to get into the team, including Johnathan, the would-have-been 16
th
Viscount, who kicked his football across the fields to watch in silence, talking to no one because he was scared they’d make fun of his undisguisable accent. He was the one who persuaded me to go along, and I did, not because I wanted to watch grown men thump a piece of leather round a field but because it was an opportunity to be with Johnathan without it being in secret, since no one else from our village went to the matches. The only other spectator was a rusty-coloured dog from the bungalows opposite Christow village hall, who escaped out of its house to come belting over to the touchline, where it bided its time before dashing onto the pitch and attempting to bite the ball.

Gradually, though, people waking from their Devonian siestas began to trickle down through the village in time for the second half, and as the summer wore on the touchline became lined with spectators, and by then I was glad to be among them since I’d come to see that it really was the beautiful game Ian had always claimed it to be. I in turn told the Rector, so that in the end he drove me over in his Triumph Vitesse, picking up Johnathan by the old Lodge gates.

The following season, watched by a crowd of rarely less than a hundred supporters at every home game, Christow were to win Division Two of the Exeter and District League without losing a single match (though they were knocked out of the Cup by their arch-rivals in a game of unprecedented violence, that came to be known as the Mudbath of Teign Village); and when, some years later, the World Cup was illuminated by the beautiful football of the Africans, football followers in our part of the country were confused, because they recognized ‘the Christow style’.

After the games, Ian never stayed to shower with his mates or swill lager with them in the Artichoke. He came straight home and ran a scalding bath so deep that when he lowered his body into it the water spilled over the rim of the tub. He lay there half an hour or more, the water restoring peace to his limbs, reliving the game in his mind’s eye and imagining further improvements to his team’s tactics, which he would suggest at the following Wednesday evening training session. From the moment he’d finished work Ian’s Saturdays adhered to an unchanging pattern. He finally climbed out of the bath, the fingers and toes of his wiry, tanned body all wrinkled, and wrapped a towel around his waist. He didn’t bother to dry himself, because in the heat of that summer drops of water evaporated on his skin and his hair shaped itself into loose brown curls, while he shaved.

Back in his room Ian took out the same double-breasted black suit he wore every Saturday evening from under his mattress, where it had lain all week, pressed by the heavy old mattress and the intermittent, additional weight of his body. It was the same suit grandfather had got married in, fifty years before, and he’d passed it on to Ian for his eighteenth birthday, when his own body had shrunk so much grandfather felt foolish wearing his bridegroom’s clothes. Ian laid it out on the bed and placed beside it his white cotton shirt, ironed by mother, with its subtle, barely discernible patterning. From his chest of drawers he selected one of his two pairs of maroon woollen socks, his matching maroon braces, and his gold cufflinks, and from the cupboard he picked his pride and joy, a pair of hand-sewn black brogues.

Ian cherished those shoes as if he was of an earlier generation, whose children had to spend their summers barefoot, developing thickly callused soles, and for whom wearing shoes was the highest luxury. He unthreaded the laces and polished the brogues, bringing up a shine with a buffing pad. Then he turned them over and hammered in some new metal studs, from a little bowl he kept on top of the chest of drawers. That habit seemed to be out of character for lan: the metal studs rang out on the road, signalling his approach in an ostentatious manner, and at night his footsteps struck sparks in the darkness. When the erratic engine of his van coming home woke me in the early hours of Sunday morning, its headlights spilling across the ceiling, I could tell from his echoing footsteps in the yard what sort of mood he was in: it was usually a good one, his stride long and loose, and I’d fall asleep again while downstairs in the kitchen he drank the cups of tea of a man with no particular wish for the night to end. But on rare occasions his tread was terse, and he’d clump up the stairs and straight to bed.

When Ian had relaced his shoes and placed them on the bed he’d roll a cigarette, and smoke it pacing abstractedly around the room, still with a towel wrapped round his waist, relishing those preparations for his night out. Only when he’d stubbed out the butt of his cigarette did he get dressed. Unlike virtually all his contemporaries Ian never wore men’s perfume. The younger blokes went out reeking of cheap aftershave, the married men splashed themselves with a more expensive cologne, and the greasers rubbed their bodies as well as their leathers with patchouli oil. But Ian must have known that he was one of those men whose sweat smells sweet, just as Daddy’s did. The other thing he never wore was a tie: he thought they were undignified, too much like a halter or a lead, appropriate for an animal but not for human beings. He simply did up the top button of his shirt, and went out like that.