In the Place of Fallen Leaves Read online

  ‘Runnin’ Belinda!’ he exclaimed. ‘There’s hundreds of the little things.’

  We stood still to let them pass. They were hopping laboriously along the lane, as disorientated by the sun stealing their ponds as they had been ten years before when the useless plots of land on the steep slope below the church were sold, and enormous yellow bulldozers invaded the village to gouge out platforms on which to build houses for commuting newcomers. With one scoop a bulldozer’s bucket removed the tiny bog where grandfather could remember collecting frogspawn. The Simmons family, first of the outsiders to move in the following winter, woke up one spring morning to find their house besieged by hundreds of croaking toads, the smallest of which had squeezed under the doors and hopped up the stairs to the bathroom. They returned every year, following the stars, to tamper with the dreams of the Simmons family with their mournful croaking, more melancholy even than the braying of the Honeywills’ donkey. Even when the toads grew silent it took only one of them to croak and set off all the others again. The children had vague but guilt-ridden dreams, until they finally persuaded their father to dig a goldfish pond in the garden.

  The tinkling tribe of toads seemed endless, and by the time we’d passed through them all we’d reached where the lane forked left up to Haldon Forest. From over in Barton Wood came the tap-tap-tapping of a woodpecker, while the plaint of sheep at the heat of the sun expressed the whole world’s discomfort. The feeble trickle of water in the stream labouring towards the village was virtually inaudible, and was replaced in the spectrum of sound by the chiming of church bells for an hour well past: the air was so dry and thin that they came in dissonant waves, like a spring being unwound, all the way from Exeter Cathedral.

  * * *

  We stood at the junction. Close by, a meadowlark elaborated phrases of notes in a new song. The air that was so dry in my throat was liquid to look at. Towards Shilhay, moving amongst his herd of sorrowful cows, was the shimmering but unmistakable silhouette of Douglas Westcott, as he carefully picked ticks off his cattle and squeezed them, in tiny eruptions of blood.

  Douglas was the bull-like recluse who’d left home, grandmother told me, the day his father chided him for his bestial table manners. He rose from the table without a word. His mother found him packing everything he needed into a holdall no larger than a lady’s handbag. ‘I’m going to find out whether the world looks like the maps say it do,’ he told her, and strode through the front door. His father ordered that no-one should step over that threshold before Douglas did, and from then on they entered and left the house only through the kitchen. Once when Stuart from the shop was delivering a box of groceries and, receiving no answer to his knocking, opened the door to leave them in the porch, old Westcott saw him from the barn and stilled his heartbeat with a bellow. He marched over, picked Stuart up by the scruff of his neck, carried him to the drinking trough, and dropped him in.

  Summers robbed the beechwood door of all its juice, and thirst bent it; the rains made it swell; the winters froze and cracked it. The house settled further upon itself.

  Douglas appeared in the farmyard after twelve years, seven months, two weeks and six days away. When the family, who had heard his heavy flat feet approaching, had greeted him, then his father bade them gather as he ceremoniously opened the front door. But it was stuck fast, warped into the frame. He pushed and then he kicked it but he made no impression, except when he put his shoulder against it and felt, in his fury, fine shards of bone splintering off his scapula. As celebration turned into embarrassment Douglas fetched the big axe from its usual place in the barn, pushed his father out of the way, and with one swing clove the door in half so that it swung open, one side on the hinges, the other on the catch. He re-entered the house, and they knew then that he had changed for the worse.

  * * *

  The afternoon was at its height: the sun had just begun its slow descending curve towards Cornwall and was slumbering on the wing. A drowsy hornet drifted by. The harsh air rasped my throat as I inhaled, and my eyelids felt heavy as velvet.

  ‘I’m thirsty,’ said Daddy. In the hedge to our right I spotted a ripe blackberry, and as Daddy reached over to pluck it another appeared, then another. Soon his lips and tongue were stained purple. He lay down in the shadowed verge and fell asleep, and I joined him.

  I dreamt of a man forcing his horse through waist-high snowdrifts up on to the moor, and of the woman, grandmother with hazelnut hair, breathing on a window pane as she waited. I dreamt that as I lay sleeping an insect flew from my mouth. People gathered round but wouldn’t wake me. Suddenly they were gone and I woke gagging on something in my throat. I hawked but it wouldn’t budge. I knew I should try and eat it, to save from choking, but the idea of swallowing a tick was worse than dying. Then I was saved by my own body, which sprang my neck forward in convulsive retching until I felt the insect tumble on to my tongue. I opened my mouth and gently lifted it between thumb and forefinger, but it had gone and turned into a freshly cut twig. At that moment my ears opened: a fury of thwacking and crackling bore down upon us, and as I looked up old Martin the hedge-layer saw me too and stopped working.

  ‘Alison!’ he exclaimed, and then as Daddy stirred, ‘Georgie! Oi didn’t see ’ee down in the ditch there.’

  Old Martin sunk his bill into a stout sapling and proffered a hand to help Daddy to his feet.

  ‘Fell asleep, did ’ee? Goods a place as any I s’pose, though ’tidn’t wise to sleep out in the ’ot. You’s all flicketty, maid; you must both be parch-mouthed. Come and ’ave some tea.’

  He poured us a cup from his thermos. The liquid soothed my burning mouth and throat, and as it trickled down my gullet and into my stomach it brought me alive.

  ‘Thank you, that’s better,’ Daddy said, returning the cup to old Martin, who poured himself a little and sipped it slowly. His face and bald skull were glazed in a film of sweat. He cleared his throat and gobbed into the hedge.

  ‘You been out walkin’ then?’ he asked Daddy.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied for him.

  ‘Seen anything about?’

  ‘Nothin’ much,’ I said.

  ‘See Douglas out with his cows, mazed bugger?’ he asked, because he always wanted to know everything. When he’d asked all his questions, we leaned into the heat, saying nothing.

  ‘In’t you gettin’ ’ot and tired workin’ out in this sun?’ Daddy asked after a while.

  ‘I loves it, bay. ’Tis winter makes me slow at my age. Sweat’s my lubrication, I works better with it. Why, us ’aven’t ’ad a summer like this since 1976, though I don’t s’pose you’d call-home that, Georgie. No, the ’otter the better for me. Only trouble is it gets lonely; the rest of you lazy buggers is sleepin’ all day!’

  Old Martin could talk the hindlegs off a donkey, as grandmother put it; he was the friendliest man in the village.

  ‘I never ought to be layin’ ’edges this time o’ year, I don’t mind tellin’ ’ee. You should cut young wood in winter, and the older ones early spring, or late autumn if you prefers. Not summer. Trouble is I don’t want to get behind, like, or they’ll start usin’ a tractor-saw and make a bloody mess of everything. You seen over Bridford?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘They’s pullin’ up ’edges and puttin’ fences in their place. Old boy up there’s out of a job. They says to ’im, they says, “Look at it practical, like. With ’edges you can lay eight yard a day on yours own, or fifty yard with another bloke. But a man on his own can fence a whole field in a day.” “Where’s the birds gonna nest then?” he says to ’em. Farmers ’as always been greedy, like, no offence mind, but now ’tis worse than ever ’twas.’

  Old Martin was the friendliest man in the village, and the most lonely. Even dogs slunk away from him, snarling, and he made televisions flicker on the rare occasions he was invited into someone’s front room. He’d been laying hedges for years, like his uncle before him. According to grandmother, at the end of the last war, when half a dozen
young men returned to the village, old Cecil recalled the ingratitude that had greeted him when he came back from the Somme in 1918, and so he passed over his contracts to his nephew.

  Now Martin drained his cup and screwed it back on the flask. Picking up his heavy maul he said:

  ‘I better be back to work afore I cools down,’ and I wondered how he’d be able to do that even if he wanted to. Daddy hung around to watch him thumping stakes into the middle of the saplings he’d already plashed. He put all his energy into it, but I felt like I saw him as Daddy saw him, and there was something illusory about his movements, as if someone else were really performing them. At last Daddy couldn’t contain his curiosity any longer.

  ‘Where’s Martin the hedge-layer?’ he asked. ‘Is you his uncle or what?’

  Old Martin stopped and turned, his nut-brown forehead wrinkled with irritation at Daddy’s familiar question.

  ‘I’m Martin,’ he said, pointing to himself with his bill. ‘I’m the ’edge-layer, Martin.’ He returned to his work, and I pulled Daddy on along the lane back towards the village.

  He was quiet for a moment, but was soon looking around to see what was happening in the world. Through the thick sluggish air a barely perceptible breeze surprised us, brushing past our faces. Then, to our left, across a field a scattered cloud of thistledown came floating. We climbed over the gate, and all across the field soft white burrs attached themselves to us, until we entered the huge, overgrown vegetable garden of the rectory.

  Chapter Five

  Cool Sanctuary of Stone

  From his room my brother Tom had a clear view of the field between the rectory and the new houses. It was where Susanna Simmons grazed her palomino pony. Sometimes she would just visit him, as he stood by the fence, licking the block of salt she renewed every week.

  She always took an apple or a carrot with her, and offered it on her open palm. The pony mouthed it carefully, with his thick and clumsy lips, to avoid biting her.

  After he’d swallowed it she stood beside him, stroking his neck, and they nuzzled each other, Susanna inhaling the sharp, sweet horse’s smell with her eyes closed, as she ran her nose across his skin. It seemed to Tom as if she were about to sink her teeth into the animal’s flesh. He watched her as she blew her breath into the pony’s nostrils: its body became quite still, and Tom felt, himself, the pony’s pleasure.

  The Old Rectory had been the first building in the village in which glass was installed in windows, and people queueing to pay their tithes were perplexed to see themselves inside the house as well as outside where they stood, even though according to grandfather a full millennium had passed since the Romans had glazed the basilica in Isca just ten miles away.

  When they built a new rectory up on the ridge along from the church they made an even bigger house, with rolling lawns at the front and a steep vegetable garden the size of a football pitch round the back. Now that the Rector’s family had long since grown up and left home and he had neither time nor appetite to cultivate it, he made only occasional forays into what had become a jungle to seek out the few hardy plants whose chemistry withstood the onslaught of weeds: cucumbers and rhubarb and sweet potatoes.

  Daddy and I picked our way along paths dictated by the whim of the Rector’s footsteps, avoiding brambles and nettles, until we arrived at his front door.

  I pushed the rectory doorbell and lifted the letterbox flap in order to hear the copper bell ring in the back hallway, and echo through the twenty-six empty rooms surrounding the Rector’s study, into which he retreated during his brief moments of respite, to continue the metaphysical contemplation he’d refused to abandon despite a lifetime’s ministry among people who ignored his ideas, though it would most likely have been the same anywhere else, since he had been so handsome that people weren’t able to look at him and absorb what he was saying at the same time. Instead, the men made jokes about his schoolboy looks and their wives fought remorseless silent struggles for the best pews. When at last time found him out at the age of fifty-five and overnight his face crumpled and his jet-black hair turned white it was already too late, for they’d long grown deaf to the obscure theology he proposed, simplified though it was from the lucid perceptions that came to him in his study, surrounded by twenty-six empty rooms, where he speculated upon new aspects of unconsidered truths.

  When I got to know him and asked why he had so many rooms between him and the world he said he needed the space, though their number was irrelevant and might just as well have been three, for the space he needed was immeasurable.

  The echo of the doorbell finally died in an abandoned dining-room, and no sound of footsteps came.

  The church door was wide open but we hesitated in the porch: an old man was sitting in the front pew, his gaze directed at the altar. I was going to knock and ask if he minded us coming in, but Daddy looked at me and put a finger to his lips. We stepped stealthily in and sat down in a pew at the back, escaping from the torpid heat into a cool sanctuary of stone. I could feel the perspiration drying on my skin, cool and tingly.

  My nostrils filled with a smell of must and moisture, an ecclesiological smell, as tangible as the enticing ordurous aroma that rain lifts from cow-pats. It was ever-present inside the church, exacerbating worshippers’ incipient rheumatism and almost encouraging enough signatures on Granny Sims’s biannual petition for the incense and holy water of High Church ritual to sway the three nonconformist priests whose ministries she oversaw, as well as allowing atheistic families to taunt their neighbouring believers with the claim that praying gives you piles.

  Yet it was all an illusion. In reality the air was bone dry: it nibbled at the edges of the brittle leaves of the huge Bible spread across the lectern eagle’s wings, and following the old man’s gaze to the altar I could discern the candle there disappearing, consumed by its descending flame.

  Dead flowers in dirty glass vases had shed their petals on the window-sills. On a boss in the centre of the nave roof three rabbits shared three ears of corn, keenly scrutinized by the eagle on the lectern, its savage beak prepared at any moment to break through its wooden shell, throwing off the huge Bible, which would disintegrate on impact with the stone floor, and sink its claws into those three rabbits that clung stupidly on to the ceiling. Corporal Alcock had told me during the Falklands war that an eagle’s talons are even sharper than the kukris of the gurkhas, alongside whom he’d once fought, and who broke the morale of the enemy at Goose Green, scalping Argentine conscripts as they slept.

  The old man in the front pew was still motionless and facing the altar, the candle almost all eaten up. In the window behind, flanked by two female saints, the folds of their softly contoured skin and pleated robes flowing through the glass, sat a resolute Christ with a sickle in his hand. Running across the bottom of the window were the words: ‘Thrust in thy sickle and reap, for the time is come to reap, for the harvest of the earth is ripe.’

  Beside me Daddy shuffled. He entered the aisle and slowly approached the old man. As he did so he could hear a dry whisper, but there were neither angels nor bats fluttering in the high roof, the wings of the saints remained rigid in glass, and there was no wind anywhere in the world to play around the steeple. It was only as he came right up behind the man that Daddy realized that the sound was that of the man intoning a barely audible, sibilant whisper.

  ‘Hello,’ Daddy exclaimed.

  The man rose, tall and stooped, looking down on him. He was wearing a dog-collar, so Daddy recognized the Rector all right, but I knew how startlingly old he must have looked to him. A smile further creased his delicate skin into a cobweb of wrinkles.

  ‘Hello, Georgie. How are you?’

  ‘All right, Rector,’ Daddy replied, his voice all disturbed. The Rector stepped out of the pew and Daddy took a few hesitant paces backwards, then stopped and stared at him.

  ‘Rector,’ he asked, ‘does praying make you old?’

  The Rector looked sad, and reached a long, bony arm towards
Daddy’s shoulder, but Daddy stepped backwards again and it fluttered there like a chicken’s useless wing. Daddy turned and rushed out of the church.

  The Rector watched him go. Behind him, the big candle guttered and died, releasing a plume of smoke.

  ‘Hello, Alison,’ the Rector said softly; and then he cheered up as he walked towards me. ‘What are you doing? I’d have thought with no school you’d all be out playing. I wish teachers had gone on strike in our day.’

  ‘There’s no-one to play with, really,’ I told him.

  ‘Had an argument?’ he smiled.

  ‘Not really. They’re just stupid I suppose. Last time Jane and Susan came round they ended up with Pamela in her room, doing the dancing from Bananarama’s video. She hasn’t even got a big mirror.’

  ‘Sounds like fun.’

  ‘You should try it,’ I said without thinking. ‘I suppose I better see where Daddy’s got to.’

  I stepped into the still sweltering afternoon. Daddy had carried on out of the graveyard and past the old Gospel Oak whose roots still baffled gravediggers. I sat down against a headstone in the middle of the churchyard and closed my eyes. I could hear bees buzzing around the few wilting flowers placed on two or three graves. A centipede crawled on to my leg. It was the same colour as my skin. I tugged a stem of grass and tried to annoy the insect into biting the grass with its pincers, but it just crawled dumbly over my knee.

  Into the silence came a tuneless whistle, attempting a martial tune. I looked round the side of the headstone and saw Corporal Alcock the organist limping stiffly into the churchyard, accompanied by Chico, his serpentine dog, and I felt happy again. Invalided out of the army in 1944 after being hit by shrapnel, which according to his wife would work its way out of his body, fragments appearing unexpectedly under the surface of his skin which she would pierce with a needle in order to remove them, Corporal Alcock had insisted ever since on being addressed by his rank. Any new arrival in the village he would plug with subtle but insistent questions to ascertain whether or not they’d been in the services, and if so what rank they’d achieved, because he was mortified by the possibility of failing to call his superiors ‘sir’ at the end of every sentence. He carried his bad leg as rigidly as his ramrod back, and treated everyone with the same impenetrable formality: there was no hint of deference in the manner of his salute to superiors nor condescension in his attitude even to us children. When I came out from behind the headstone he stopped and leaned away from me, gaining in width what he lacked in height by clasping his hands behind his back and thrusting out his shoulders.