1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (40 page)

“Tell me lunchtime, Alison. I’ve got to finish this washing and ironing first. Get your father to help you put that lot on the line; bring in what’s already on there.”

I sat down. “What’s up with you, girl? I want another load dry before lunch.”

I had to tell someone. “When’s Ian coming back?”

“He’s in already. Come in in a foul mood and went straight up to his room. Didn’t answer me when I asked him what sandwiches he wanted. If he chooses to be like that, he can go hungry.”

§

Tom completed his inspection of the flock and hurried back to Susanna’s, where he parked the tractor and trailer carelessly in the lane outside, with the thoughtlessness of love, forcing other drivers to take a detour round by Rattle Street.

Sometimes Susanna was already outside, waiting for him, and they would set off together for their hour-long stroll in the midday sun, blinded by each other. Sometimes, though, she’d still be at her desk, struggling with an essay. He knew that today her mother and sisters were probably still in Exeter, so he let himself in through the front door, trying to make up his mind as he did so whether to call out or to creep up and surprise her. It was the smoke he smelled first. It was invisible but he hit it like a wall: its stale odour clung to the room, familiar and unsettling. He walked straight through the sitting-room but his glance took in the green packet of Rizlas on the coffee table, and the blood stains on the dishevelled cushions on the sofa. Susanna was in the kitchen, in her white shirt and jeans, standing at the sink with her back to him, staring out of the window. She didn’t turn round.

§

I put the clothes pegs in their bag, which I’d hooked to Daddy’s trouser belt, and he followed behind me along the clothes line, strung across the lawn, so as I could drape the dry clothes over his impassive shoulders. The clothes were so dry they were light as paper, and Daddy looked like a farmer at harvest in one of grandfather’s old photographs, garments piled high on his shoulders like a huge forkful of hay. I was unpegging the last of grandfather’s white underpants when Tom drove the tractor and trailer clattering in from the lane. As he brought it to a halt Ian appeared in the front doorway. Tom jumped down from the cab and his face was disfigured by tears.

§

Tom’s tears were not for her, nor even for himself: they came because he knew he had to fight his older brother, and Ian knew it too. He’d been smoking in his room, curling his hair with his forefinger, stupefied with remorse, and he wanted to say he was sorry, it was all a big mistake, Tom, you’re my brother and I hurt you just because you was happy. And I beg your forgiveness, ask me anything I’ll do it, I’ll leave like Douglas did only I’ll never return, the farm’s yours, I’ll take my suit and my chess set and I’ll be gone forever. But he knew he couldn’t, that a primitive code of honour as old as our world forbade it, and before Tom had turned off the tractor engine Ian was already stepping outside.

Tom was crying for what his brother was forcing him to do, but his tears did not dilute his resolution. As they met, mother too appeared out of the kitchen door, a few yards away. None of us knew what was happening, but she’d glanced up and seen Ian pass along the hallway, his body hunched, and she’d smelled the rank odour of fear that escaped from Ian’s body, the only sign that betrayed what was about to take place, because he couldn’t conceal it.

Ian gestured to the barn, and Tom led the way across the yard. Mother didn’t say anything, she opened her mouth as if to speak but no words came out. She followed after them but stopped half-way, and she watched them stride inside and the doors swing shut behind them.

There were some muffled sounds. A dog barked. It was over in less than a minute. Tom emerged from the barn and came towards the house, still crying, his knuckles cut and bloodied. Mother waited until he’d passed by her, and hurried over. I left Daddy, immobile beneath the load of washing, and ran after her, but I stayed outside the barn. When she came out and found me there she grabbed my arm like I’d done something wrong and pulled me with her towards the house.

“Take Daddy, go see Maria, give her half a dozen eggs for the Rector. Don’t hurry. Should take you a couple of hours.”

When we came back, at dusk, the house was deserted. Even grandfather was gone. I found us some food and tried to ring Pamela, but there was no answer at her flat.

“I’m frightened, Daddy,” I said.

He looked at me with a worried expression. “So am I then,” he said.

“We better go to bed,” I told him. I made sure he cleaned his teeth and found his pyjamas under the pillow.

“Why’s everything feel like you can’t breathe?” he asked me.

“I think it’s going to rain,” I replied.

§

I awoke feeling as if I’d slept in syrup. I blinked, and peered into the darkness, and I could make out Daddy’s shadowy form drifting across my room to the window. Tinker had come in behind him, and sat down by the door. I joined Daddy and we both sat on the window-sill, and looked out into the murky night. An engorged cloud rested on the rim of hills around the village and its belly sank into the combe, enveloping the church tower over the other side. Suddenly it spat a tongue of lightning into the darkness. Daddy didn’t move.

“You know what that is, Daddy?” I asked.

“It bites trees,” he replied.

The lightning brought yellow and purple shapes to life: below us in the farmyard grandfather was hobbling in from the lane; he looked as if he was miles away, in a different dimension.

A crack of thunder erupted up on Haldon and rolled down the hillside, shaking the trees and houses.

“Did you hear that?” I exclaimed.

“No, ‘twas too loud,” said Daddy.

We gazed into the darkness, waiting for the intermittent illumination of the lightning. The air was heavier than ever: inside my chest, a butterfly started fluttering its wings, and I had to breathe deeper.

Then it was as if a fine scalpel had been drawn through the belly of the sky. It spilled open, and although that was the last thing we saw as the world went black, we could hear the rain roaring.

I stumbled over to the bed, with a pain inside, and I asked Daddy to sleep beside me. He lay down flat, staring upwards as always until his eyes closed of their own accord and the rhythm of his breathing changed.

I leaned, curled up, against his side: he was the only one who couldn’t do anything, who I couldn’t ask what was happening, who there was no use telling things to. But he was the only one who was there. The rain roared, from another world. Crying silently, I rocked myself to sleep. The summer was over.

Autumn

W
e woke to diagonal rain splattering like buckshot on the corrugated roofs of the sheds; it bounced in the yard, creating froth and steam, and made thousands of tiny rivulets which joined the dried-up stream that ran through the village and transformed it into a muddy torrent. God had woken up at last, with pins and needles. He shook himself awake and the rain fell.

A thrush hopped across the lawn pecking worms and grubs from the parched soil that was opening its pores to the rain. One worm in the bird’s beak was its largest meal in months, but it didn’t have the patience to actually stop and eat it: it dropped the worm to hop a little further and pick up a slug, but then dropped that too as it saw another worm wriggling from the soil. It was intoxicated.

The water drowned the horseflies and wasps, midges and mosquitoes that had tormented us all summer, but it also lifted another generation from the undergrowth. They rose, in between showers, doomed and dazed. With the rain came falling leaves, carpeting the surface of the earth: autumn had arrived all at once. The world smelled new again. It had been hammered by the sun as surely as a horseshoe at the blacksmith’s at Ashton till it was bent and buckled out of shape. Now the rain revived it and the world stretched back to life with a great breath of relief, and its breath smelled of pine and mint, mushrooms and dead leaves.

Water coursed across the sloping fields, carrying with it the thin, crumbly crust of top soil, while below the surface irrigation trenches and underground streams gushed and roared towards the river. The earth was cleansing itself, as if it had had enough and was clearing out its system: the streams rushed along with an unwanted cargo of chemicals and fertilizers and poured them into the Teign river, which rose to within an inch of its banks and was covered with a toxic foam as it surged down the Valley and towards the sea. The earth didn’t know that the rain itself was impure, and that the trees in the forest the following year would have the first tinge of pink in their leaves.

§

Ian spent the weekend in hospital and then, against the advice of the doctor, dressed himself slowly, overcoming the pain in his chest from his four cracked ribs, his eyes still so puffed up he could hardly see, his broken nose, his missing teeth and his wired-up jaw. He couldn’t eat solids, and was spoon-fed a diet of soup, yoghurt and liquidized fruit by the nurses, Tom having done to his own brother what grandfather had done to the quarry foreman over sixty years earlier. After an hour Ian had succeeded in dressing himself, so they told us, except that he wasn’t able to tie his shoelaces. He refused to let a nurse do it for him, though, and he limped slowly out of the ward.

He didn’t come home, not even to collect his things. He just went away somewhere. He didn’t tell mother where he was going and he didn’t write when he got there. She understood that he’d done something awful, even though Tom had refused to say a word to her or anyone else, because when she visited Ian in hospital he made no effort to communicate with her, not even to raise his hand, had only stared straight ahead, ignoring her presence while curling his hair with the forefinger of his left hand, so stricken was he with remorse. Now she became worried for his safety and she persuaded the police to send two divers into the quarry pool, with a special request to do it quietly, and they tried without success to reach its bottom, suffering from what they called ‘bends, only different’, as their torches failed to function in the impenetrable darkness of its depths. The only thing they disturbed was the widowman heron, who stubbornly put up with them from a distance until late in the afternoon, when he launched himself on to the air and with the regal, captivating flapping of his wings disappeared from our Valley forever.

§

It was that autumn that my mother grew older. She’d stayed the same age all through my childhood, but now she entered middle age overnight. She lost weight, went grey, and the wrinkles that had only showed when she frowned now showed all the time. She’d tried hard to cope with life, but it had only grown more difficult. She was surrounded by men immobilized by circumstances beyond their control: grandfather sat in his armchair, Tom stared at the rain, and Daddy followed her round the house, dogging her footsteps. The one who had helped her was gone. His room gathered dust: it settled on his chessboard, his short-wave radio and his Edwardian brogues. She gathered up the balance sheets, tax returns and paper-clipped wedges of receipts from off his desk and spent three evenings at the kitchen table attempting to make sense of the farm’s accounts. She was unable to do so: a bewildering quantity of figures moved themselves around, in and out of illogical columns which totalled different amounts every time she added them up, in a variety of permutations whose significance completely baffled her, except for her mounting conviction that we were hopelessly in debt and on the verge of bankruptcy. Finally she stuffed the papers into carrier bags and took them to the accountant in Exeter who she knew did the annual audit for Ian. She handed them over with trembling fingers and was unable to sleep, her mind teeming with numbers that always added up to a lot less than nothing.

Two days later the accountant rang her up because he was rather worried, he said, and she went stiff with fear. It’s true, he said, that the taxation rate on such large sums of capital as ours was thankfully a lot less than it was five years ago, he chuckled, but a little more judicious investment could still save us from missing out on a great deal needlessly, and there were a number of options he could suggest if she’d like to come in and discuss them. Some day next week? Perhaps Monday? Was she still there? Mother gathered herself and took a deep breath.

“You mean we idn’t in trouble?” she asked.

“In trouble, Mrs Freemantle?”

“We idn’t going bankrupt?”

He laughed down the telephone. “We’ve been auditing your family’s accounts for over thirty years,” he assured her. “You’re far better off than you’ve ever been.”

“You mean us is rich?”

He paused. “It’s a somewhat relative description. But yes, I’d say you were rich.”

A solicitor had meanwhile made an appointment with mother and grandfather, who were read out a will grandmother had made at the beginning of the summer. She’d told no one, not even grandfather, who was furious, and they couldn’t work out how or when she’d made her way to Exeter in secret, unless Ian had taken her there one day when everyone else was busy. To their amazement the will consisted of one single stipulation, namely that her secret savings of a lifetime—farthings saved from her pocket money, coppers kept back from the sale of hens’ eggs, pennies left over from the housekeeping, and pounds put by from her pension—all accumulated out of her thrifty common sense and invested in a Post Office savings account, whose blue book we’d find underneath her blouses in the third drawer down, should be used to send me, her youngest grandchild, to a private school, so that I’d be the first in the family to take our wasted intelligence into the outside world.

They both drove home in a bad temper and refused to speak to me, until it dawned on them that the sum of three hundred and twenty-seven pounds mentioned by the solicitor, and confirmed in the little blue book, was a hopeless and insignificant amount, and in that light the sentiment of her last wish became a most endearing one. I didn’t know why they’d been nasty to me and now I didn’t know why they turned nice; only that this time it wasn’t my fault.