1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (21 page)

“You’re the fastest runner,” he gasped. “Go and tell them.” But I was empty, sinking. My knees went and I dropped on to them. My hands were spread out, palms to the ground.

“I’ll go,” I heard Johnathan say, and his footsteps receding.

§

I didn’t faint. I wanted to run and hide, but I had the guts at least to stay. Or maybe I was just hypnotized. The roar became louder and louder, and smoke curled out of every crack in the walls. Then the flames burst through and the whole thing went up. Like a beacon. I watched it burn. I imagined I saw grandfather coming out of the inferno, leading his father’s pair of horses by their halters. The barn was a crackling, roaring mass of flame, showering sparks across the Valley, and a column of black smoke rose into the sky. The fire engine when it arrived couldn’t reach the field because the lane was blocked by cars full of strangers, who’d been drawn from miles around to stand and stare. It stood a hundred yards away along the lane, its siren wailing, while the firemen, in their Roman helmets, joined the silent crowd and watched the barn being reduced to ashes.

Mother telephoned Johnathan’s father. A beaten-up Morris Traveller pulled into the yard, and the 15
th
Viscount Teignmouth stepped out. He had a cook’s apron on. He ignored Johnathan, who didn’t say anything either, to his father or to mother or to me, but walked over to the car, got inside, and waited. The Viscount spoke with mother for a while and then left.

§

It was the first time she’d ever beaten me, despite regular threats, because she’d respected that tradition of the family she’d married into. But she didn’t hesitate about using the strap now.

She made me lie naked on my bed, and hit me with Daddy’s heavy leather belt all up the backs of my legs and on my bottom. I screamed with each whack, and mother shouted: “SHUT UP! SHUT UP!” and hit harder.

I squeezed the pillow and bit into it, and her fury slackened. She didn’t say anything else. She didn’t need to: I knew I deserved it. After she stopped it throbbed so much I didn’t dare move. She turned round in the doorway and said: “I won’t ‘ave you seeing him again. I’ll not have you leading that boy astray.” After she left, I sobbed until the throbbing became less intense, and I sank into the mercy of sleep.

§

The next few days I didn’t say anything to anyone, and Johnathan kept his distance from me. I just kept my head low, and made sure not to look anyone in the eye. When they spoke to me it was in a dismissive tone of voice. People get into habits, and maybe we would have carried on like that for ever, if Ian hadn’t come in to tea one day after talking on the telephone.

“Well, that’s all wrapped up,” he announced. “Us’ll get a new barn for one that was falling down any year, and we’ll get compensation for twenty ton of top quality hay.” He couldn’t conceal his delight, and I could tell from his voice that he was looking towards me: “Folks’ll think you done it on purpose, maid; they’ll say I put you up to it. Bah. They can think what they likes. Give us another cup of tea, mother.”

Waves Lapping, Children Laughing

W
henever a bug went round, of chicken-pox or measles or some such children’s virus, the first mother to discover the symptoms in her child would put word around the village, and the other women would bring their kids along to a party so that they could all catch it together and no one would miss out.

The Rector used to bring his noisy film projector and his collection of reels of the old silent comedies. We’d drink coke and eat sandwiches and then play games like sardines or pyramids, any that entailed us sticking close together, preferably in an enclosed space, where the virus could pass amongst us all. The Rector, meanwhile, would be threading his projector and pinning blackout material over the windows, and we’d squash into whosever front room it was, sitting three to a chair and cross-legged on the floor in front of the Rector, his projector clattering on a table, so we could fall ill and begin to get well again all at once, “because laughter’s the best healer,” he declared, “look at me, I never get ill,” although to fellow adults he confided that it was his deadly diet of cigarettes and alcohol that staved off flu, tummy bugs and the common cold.

It was true that he was never really ill. He must have been more at risk from unfriendly germs than anyone, on account of his visits to hospitals, with their unhealthy atmosphere, and his home calls to the bedsides of the infirm, but no one could remember his ever spending a day in bed. If on odd occasions his complexion was pale with the unhappiness indicative of influenza then he only blew his nose abruptly, gritted his teeth and carried on, because he was already behind in his duties, always, a hundred obligations large and small pressed into his collar-bone and preyed on his mind: there were meetings to attend, plans to draw up, papers to sign, disputes to settle, people to placate, sermons to compose, prayers to choose and fears to alleviate, and if he lost a single day from his schedule then that would be it, he’d never catch up.

The Rector’s only hope of fulfilling his infinite obligations was to adhere to a strict routine, yet such was the ad hoc and unpredictable nature of his ministry that only the Sunday services conformed to a pattern. Everything else arose unexpectedly and demanded to be seen to at once, so that he was having constantly to abandon his illusory schedule to deal with what always appeared to be urgent emergencies, however trivial they really were.

Those sick-party screenings, however, were one of the few disruptions he welcomed. He’d brought the projector with him when he came to the Valley, on the advice of his old tutor at theological college, who when the Rector told him he was leaving his industrial chaplaincy in Crewe to come to a hidden village in Devon recommended that he show film versions of biblical stories in Sunday School, because he should be careful not to leave the twentieth century behind him when he crossed over the Exe river, and cinema’s moving frescoes were the language of the age.

That earnest idea proved but one of the Rector’s many initial failures, but he was able to exchange the reels of ludicrous extracts from the Bible epics of Cecil B. de Mille for the silent comedies of his own childhood, that his mother had taken him and his two sisters to watch every Saturday morning, and thus he was able, with apostolic enthusiasm, to introduce slapstick humour to every child that grew up in the village during the years of his ministry.

Because we were all jumbled up together, aged from four to fourteen, the Rector made no attempt to introduce us to the various comedians in any particular order of accessibility. Instead he selected a different star, from his well-stocked library, for each screening, and would put on all of their reels that he owned as they came to hand. Only gradually, as each of us gained admittance to those sick parties and grew up with them, were we able to differentiate and classify the assorted comedians, and discover our own favourites. And they each became identified in our memories with particular illnesses (either because the symptoms presented themselves almost as soon as the bugs entered our susceptible young bodies, or more likely because in reality the virus had already spread amongst us from our everyday contact, and those screenings were in fact more ritual than function), so that even today, seeing Buster Keaton’s beautiful face bemused by but stoical towards the conundrum of existence I can feel my head begin to swim. I remember Ben Turpin, cross-eyed and indignant at being beaten at draughts by a dog just like Tinker, and I can feel again the hot flush of scarlet fever. I associate Harold Lloyd with being surrounded by other kids scratching the irresistible itch of chicken-pox, that would leave my cousin Dorothy’s face blotched for the rest of her life. And I remember watching my favourites, Laurel and Hardy, struggling with the cruel objects and heartless people of their world, while under my clothes the little red spots of measles were surreptitiously manifesting themselves.

Our mothers usually had to carry us home, less sick than simply exhausted from laughter. When we were better again we argued amongst ourselves over why the characters moved in such a jerky manner: we thought it was because the stories were all about city people, always rushing around, but then the Rector showed some Buster Keaton shorts set in the country, and everyone flew around in just the same state of panic. So we figured maybe that’s how Americans were. When I asked Ian why all the people in the Rector’s films were in such a hurry he remembered the same arguments from when he was a kid, and he told me what he and his friends had decided was the explanation, that people in those days didn’t live as long as we do today, so of course they were busier, because they had to fit everything into a shorter timespan. Pamela, though, said that was rubbish, it was simple, they only chose actors who walked with a stutter, because they were funnier.

By my time, of course, television had come to every house, but those screenings for sick children were still as special as they must have been for Daddy when he was a boy, because when compilations of silent comedy were shown on TV they weren’t nearly as funny. Mother could hardly bear to watch them: slapstick infuriated her. She scowled at the television, muttering under her breath: ‘Ridiculous’, ‘How stupid’, or, shutting her eyes and slapping her forehead: ‘I don’t believe it!’ as another custard pie landed in someone’s face. So I stopped watching them at home, reserving the pleasure for those communal sessions when we cried so many tears of laughter the salt burned our faces, and the Rector laughed loudest of all with his smoker’s laugh, broken up by bursts of coughing; unlike people’s parents he hadn’t lost his sense of humour when he’d grown up. While our mothers drank tea in the kitchen we laughed ourselves sick and well at the same time, we laughed ourselves silly, all except my friend Jane Ashplant, who, as a roomful of children fell about all around her, watched the black and white clowns on the flickering screen in silent, rapt concentration.

§

Sick parties were the only interruptions to the Rector’s endlessly disrupted routine that he welcomed. Everything else he was asked to do was yet more unbearable weight on his shoulders. It was only madness that had prompted him, when his children were small, to bundle them into the car at a moment’s notice, along with any friends they might be playing with at the time and any dogs excited by the commotion, for spontaneous excursions. His wife preferred to stay at home, glad of the solitude, and she would strip to her bra and knickers, pull on a pair of Wellingtons, and spend a rewarding afternoon in the garden, watched by one farmer or another from across a field.

Even after the Rector’s children had long grown up and left home he would still realize, suddenly, that he’d been working too long and too hard, and he’d throw compass, swimming trunks, a thermos of coffee, a bar of Kendal Mint Cake, a football and a pair of binoculars into his old army rucksack and get not into his Triumph Vitesse but into the van that he’d persuaded one of the well-off newcomers to sponsor: the fact was he had no wish to escape alone, and those abrupt flights from routine were so strongly associated with his habit of an indulgent father that he felt it only natural to share them with children. So he’d stop at the Brown to see if there were any kids playing there, he’d squash as many as would fit into the Commer van, buzz around the village to tell our parents he was taking us off their hands for the day, and drive out of the Valley. By the beginning of that summer I’d been his server for six months, and went on every one of his excursions: if I wasn’t already in the rectory or at the Brown at the moment of his sudden impulse, he drove into the yard to look for me, and we all set off for the coast.

§

The Rector loved everything to do with the sea. He’d drive us down to Teignmouth, where the river from our Valley joined the ocean, park the van, and jump out of it crying: “Last one in’s a nincompoop!” We’d race down to the beach, then wait for him to catch us up and choose a place to dump our stuff. He trotted across the sand, his limp less severe than usual, and plunged into the waves, to forget for a moment his exile from the world in a hidden village in a forgotten Valley, his bright white body floating in the salty sea, unprotected stomach exposed to the merciless sun.

Coming from the Valley, brown and dusty, everything burned up and dried out, all that water took a few moments to believe. Daddy came with us one time. He changed into his swimming trunks but when we all dashed into the sea he hesitated in the shallows, wading sideways, to and fro, the waves rippling around his knees, scared to come in any further, looking warily out to sea as if it threatened to absorb him. His own past was a still sea, vast and calm, from out of which isolated memories would now and then bob up to the surface. I wondered whether his memory came back to him in dreams, that he would forget upon waking. I saw him sometimes on the sofa during sleepy afternoons, dreaming like dogs do, twitching with apprehension or pleasure. He woke up with a disconcerted expression, retaining some sense of his dreams even as they slipped through his fingers.

We played football on the beach, the boys eager for a game any time, anywhere, even though that’s all most of them ever did back home. Then we went into the amusement arcade on the pier, full of machines for stealing a person’s money without them noticing: there were one-armed bandits, mechanical shooting galleries, crane-grabs, computer games, slot machines, ring-a-goldfish and penny slides. The Rector got a double handful of five pences and coppers from the change kiosk and distributed them casually amongst us, ignoring complaints from those who had less than others.

“Don’t be so ungrateful,” he said.

“But ‘tidn’t fair, Rector, ‘er’s got more than me.”

He shrugged without sympathy. “Enjoy what you’ve got,” he’d tell us. “Be content with that.”

He always made money from the machines, because he always stopped as soon as he was ahead, even if he’d put in a penny and got two pence back on his very first go: that would be it, he’d go straight back to the kiosk and cash in his own change. He was disappointed that none of us could ever follow his example, unaware that few people, especially children, possessed the willpower he took for granted.