1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (28 page)

Deprived of the sacrosanct silence in which to sip his first mug of sweet tea, grandfather never sloughed off the bad temper caused by having to wake up in the morning. After three days of Tom’s loquacity grandfather caught Ian’s arm as they left by the kitchen door, letting Tom carry on ahead, talking to himself.

“I idn’t feeling too clever, bay. I think as I’ll leave you to it today.”

“What’s up, grandad?” Ian asked him. “Illness in’t never stopped you wanting to work.”

“Well, then, I’ll tell ‘ee, between you and me, like,” grandfather replied. “I in’t never ‘card a man so full of prattle. I can’t stand it no more. I’ll get on with some little jobs around the yard. E’ll get over it, I don’t doubt.”

§

Grandmother, in her throaty voice, whispered to me a secret, certain way to bring rain, sending me off to throw flour into the same spring that her mother-in-law had used to finally dispel the drought in 1911. Her directions were simple and precise and I followed them easily to a spring in a hidden corner of a field up behind Longbrook Farm. I threw the flour in and stirred up the water with a hazel-rod, and a mist arose. It was only a matter then of waiting for it to condense into a rain-bearing cloud.

I had faith in grandmother’s pronouncements, even if no one else did. They’d first begun to take less notice of what she said the previous autumn, when she started to make surprise visits to her daughters, persuading grandfather to drive her on an itinerary dictated by the caprice of her dreams: she would dream that one of her offspring was ill or unhappy, pack her bags in the morning, and arrive unannounced on the doorstep in order to lend one or other of her daughters a hand for a few days, as she used to do when their children were small. They contrived at first to validate her intimations, out of the respect they had for her, saying: “Yes, grandma, you’re right, Andrew hasn’t been feeling too clever; yes, grandma, it probably is the measles, even if he is twenty-seven now.” But instead of being a help she just got in the way and caused more trouble than she was worth, volunteering to prepare a meal but making a mess instead because she’d forgotten how long things took to cook and she couldn’t read the recipe, so that half the ingredients were overdone and the rest were cold. In the end they lost their patience, and told grandfather not to bring her any more. When she asked him to he had to tell her a white lie, that the car had broken down again, and brought the telephone to her chair instead so that she could make sure her family were all right, and give them at least some verbal advice.

The truth was that she was losing substance, slipping into the background of the family, having occupied centre stage for fifty years. She spent most of the day in her armchair now, much of it asleep, hobbling ever more slowly through to the kitchen for meals. She paused in the doorways, holding on to the frames to check her balance and get her breath back. “Come along, grandma,” said mother when she came up behind her, “you’re causing another bottleneck.”

I was all the more surprised, then, when I came home with Daddy on Tuesday afternoon and we found her inching her way across the yard. We ran over.

“What you doin’, grandma?” I cried.

“I seen it, maid; ‘tis yere,” she said.

“What is?”

“It’s taking my spirit away, but I’m not ready.”

“Come on, grandma,” I said, “us’ll help you back inside.” She gripped my arm with surprising force. “No, maid. This is serious. I can see the thread pulling away. You can ‘elp me or not, but I’m goin’ after it.”

We carried her, Daddy and I: Daddy took her legs, I held her under her shoulders. She was so light we could have carried her for miles, even in that liquid-looking heat: she was no more than brittle bones and dried-up skin. We carried her across two fields, as she directed us, following something only she could see, into the apple orchard, where we caught up with her invisible spirit. We rested under a tree, Daddy and I nibbling sour fallers while grandmother closed her eyes and got her breath back. And then we picked her up again and carried her home, my grandmother, frail as a bird, holding on to life.

§

When grandfather stopped going out on the farm because Tom’s voice bruised the inside of his head, he assumed that after a day or two Ian would give him the welcome news that Tom had recovered and was once again his usual taciturn, bearable company. What he hadn’t considered was that it was only his unswerving schedule of strenuous work all the hours of daylight, every day of the week except Sundays, that had held back the onslaught of old age. His age had never meant anything to him: he was always surprised when he came in to breakfast to find presents and cards by his place at the table and to be told he was another year older. “Don’t seem a year since the last one,” was about all he could say, overcome with shyness by all our attention.

But once he stopped performing the punishing tasks of a farmer, lifting sheep on to the trailer, or carrying a hay-bale on each shoulder and another on his back, as he’d always done, and instead pottered around the farmyard doing nothing more strenuous than sharpening tools and sweeping out the sheds, he lost the wiry strength of his forebears. When, over a week later, the yard had less dust than the house, forcing the chickens out into the lane, and all the sash-cords had been replaced inside the house, grandfather was reduced to oiling the hinges of the barn doors, yawning with boredom, even though he’d done it the day before. And Tom was still rambling on.

So grandfather borrowed a wad of Pamela’s cotton wool from the bathroom, stuffed bits in his ears, and rejoined his grandsons. He was horrified to find that he couldn’t keep up with them. Walking over fields at their steady pace, the pace he himself had taken from his father and kept for seventy years, made his breathing come hard and reluctant. Trying to help them lift some hundredweight feed-bags he felt his pulse skipping like a frisky calf, and Ian saw him open his eyes wide and look to the sky as he slumped against the tractor wheel to steady himself. He felt his heartbeat calm down but too much, heavy and sluggish, as if there were silt in his veins.

That night, when grandmother came to bed, she found him lying there as usual, staring at the ceiling, as he waited for her. When she’d got undressed and joined him, taking his hand as always, his rough, flattened hands made too big, by a lifetime’s physical labour, for his wiry body, as if they belonged to someone else, then he started to tell her of the events of the day. His eyes gazed at the ceiling as he spoke. At first he simply told her what he and the boys had done, noting the small changes since he’d last worked with them, two weeks previously, as if what was of interest was his getting back into the routine of things. He told her of the worrying state of the cows, their scrawny flanks embossed with ticks; he mentioned the latest EC subsidies on offer, reported on the farming page of that morning’s paper; he commented on the drought-stricken pastures up on the ridge past the rectory, beyond the makeshift homes of the hippies, and he recalled the disastrous summer after the war that they’d seen through together, when the earth had swallowed lambs.

She knew that he was most talkative when he was most tired, and let him drone on. She was almost falling asleep, his voice growing distant, when he added, casually, as if an afterthought, that it had taken it out of him today, maybe he shouldn’t have taken so much time off, though he’d soon get back into it, no doubt, he said. He described his symptoms, still gazing at the ceiling, and the only reason she realized that he’d wasted so many words just to get around to mentioning his erratic heartbeat and his unbalanced breath was when she felt that his big rough hand in hers was trembling. She squeezed it, and he turned his head towards her.

“I just wondered if you ‘ad in mind one of your remedies, mother, get me back to normal, like,” he told her.

Grandmother turned back the covers. “Come with me,” she said, taking him by the hand as she hobbled across the room. She opened the door of their bedroom, paused to make sure no one was still up, then led him downstairs. She turned the light on in the hallway, and stood him in the middle. Then she let go his hand, put her arms around his waist, and hugged him. “You know I loves you,” she whispered into his shoulder. “There weren’t no other man for me.” And then she let him go, and began to unbutton his pyjama top. He offered no resistance, too confused for a moment to think of doing anything, because this was something she used to do long ago, in the very first years of their marriage, and he’d offered no resistance then. She slid his top off, then she bent over and undid the cord of his pyjama bottoms, which crumpled around his ankles. He looked down at them as she stepped to his side, and pulled off her own nightdress. When he looked up he found himself faced with his own reflection, and hers beside him, in the large mirror.

She looked at him in the glass: “No one never told you, lover. Us’ve gone and got old now. There b’ain’t no remedy for that.”

Sickness, Health

T
hat same night of 9 October, which was also the night of the day that Ian led men off to work out how to steal water from the old estate waterfall, a summer sickness hit us so abruptly that no one had time to defend themselves. Everyone succumbed, apart from Gordon Honeywill’s father, who worked at the sewage-farm towards Kingsteignton, and who’d not caught so much as a cold in fifteen years. For two days no one stepped out of their houses: no one fed their animals, Fred didn’t deliver the milk, old Martin neglected the hedges and the church bells were silent. I lay on my bed, wishing I could die, leaving it only to crawl along the corridor to the bathroom, where there was someone else already doing what my own body had to do. But we were oblivious to each other in the misery of our sickness, and the tact and respect of each other’s privacy that enables a family to live under the same roof were set aside.

As I lay on my bed the only sounds that came in from outside were the postman’s van when he came to deliver the mail and to empty the post-box by the Brown, and an occasional car, by the uncertain sound of whose engine you could tell was probably lost. Otherwise there was only the steadily rising lament of geese and chickens and domestic pets, and from further away the resentful bleating of sheep, calling as if to God for sustenance.

On the third day the symptoms abated. I was the first in our family to recover: I woke up with a jolt, and lay on my back, still as the sarcophagus in the church, because to twitch a single muscle caused a throbbing, aching pain. So as I lay there I used the compass of my sixth sense, the mind’s awareness of its own body, to gradually travel along my limbs and through my flesh, ascertaining with mounting surprise that my head didn’t spin when I tried to formulate a thought, my throat was no longer as rough as sandpaper when I breathed, my sinuses were clear, my nose was no longer sore, and so on all the way down to my toes, which no longer ached, and with a yell of relief I sprang out of bed, ready again for normal life.

Having quickly dressed I sprang down the stairs three at a time, and found the living-room empty, exactly as it’d been left the evening before the evening before last, when we’d slunk upstairs without clearing up. It was a spooky sight, as if everyone had vanished in an instant, like Granny Sims’ grandmother who’d died of spontaneous combustion, and whose descendants all prayed, during that hottest of summers, that it wasn’t a hereditary condition.

There were scummy, half-drunk cups of coffee, an ashtray with the minute stubs of Ian’s narrow rollies, the rind of an orange on the arm of a chair. The cushions on the sofa and armchairs, which were grouped around the television as if the furniture itself had been watching while we’d been upstairs, were all creased and squashed. It was a disturbing sight, because mother would always tidy up, either last thing at night or else, if her insomniac son was still glued to the late-night programmes, then first thing in the mornings before I was awake. She’d collect the utensils and wash up, plump up the cushions, hoover the carpet, and push the pieces of furniture back into their rightful pattern against the walls.

In the kitchen, the last evening meal hadn’t been cleared away. All the plates on the table, though, were washed, even though their knives and forks still lay across them: they’d been licked clean by the cats. Filled with the newborn energy of recovery I did all the washing-up and wiped clean the kitchen surfaces. Then I put the kettle on, cut up a three-day-old loaf of bread and made breakfast. The aromas of toast and coffee spread through the house and woke the others from the spell of their sickness, and they appeared one by one around the table, mother and Tom both a little groggy still and content with a cup of tea, but Ian and Pam bursting with my own hunger, and Daddy looking no different from usual, ready as ever to eat whatever he was given. Grandmother and grandfather didn’t come down till the next day, because it takes old people a little longer to recover.

§

It transpired that the summer sickness hit everyone the same way, virulent but at least mercifully brief. Everyone, that is, except for the Rector. It picked him up and wrung him through and almost wiped him out completely. He blamed God rather than a virus because, as he openly admitted, he took pride in never having had a day’s illness in the whole of his adult life, and this was the punishment for his hubris.

§

On the same morning as I was making breakfast, Maria da Graga too woke up in her one-roomed shack fully recovered. She opened the windows, and made a pot of continental coffee: not to drink, since it tasted foul and had the effect of making her shudder, but for its divine aroma, which soon dispelled the sickly odours of illness in the room. Out on the terrace that overlooked the rest of the village she refilled the bird feeders with monkey nuts and poured some questionable milk into saucers for those cats who came to visit her. Then she sat down in her white plastic garden chair, listening to the sounds of the village coming back to life as people began to resume their responsibilities. She drank a long glass of her home-made aqua libra, which was all she ever drank, concocted from ingredients that Granny Sims ordered specially for her: sparkling spring water, certain fruit juices, fruit and vegetable aromatic extracts, aqueous infusions of sunflower and sesame, tarragon and Siberian ginseng.