In the Place of Fallen Leaves Page 4

  ‘Been in the church, Alison?’ he barked.

  ‘Yes, Corporal Alcock.’

  ‘Good girl. Us can’t let this ’eat get us down, can us? In the desert you know, with one mug of water for all our washin’ purposes, us shaved every day without fail. ’Tis a matter of morale.’

  ‘Yes, Corporal Alcock.’

  ‘Keep yer chin up.’

  He limped on towards the church, spine as proud as ever despite the fact that he was approaching his nemesis, for it was only because the organ unmanned him that he was not just tolerated but even cherished as organist for the monthly family service, when the congregation would struggle to overcome the cacophony he produced in return for the sublime pleasure of witnessing his inevitable humiliation. Tone deaf, Corporal Alcock began each hymn unerringly on the wrong note, losing the battle as soon as he started. The rest of the hymn would take off like a runaway horse that only became more frenzied as he attempted to whip it into submission, with the congregation trying to catch up. Occasionally, drenched in sweat and back arched over the keyboard like a wrestler pinning down his opponent, he’d finally force the tune to an abrupt standstill, only for the voices to gleefully carry on past, challenging him to catch up with them. Then he’d explode into action once more, inflexible legs pumping the pedals and stubby fingers crashing down upon the keys. With unfailing courage Corporal Alcock persisted, even through that merciless summer when the newcomers’ domestic animals, driven mad by the heat, would gather in the porch to miaow and howl their accompaniment. After each hymn, in the residue of insuppressible giggles, he’d bend limply forward, heaving breathlessly. Yet by the end of every service he’d fully recovered his composure and would march stiffly home behind his wife, oblivious to the ridicule and admiration of everyone.

  I could hear him begin practising, the organ an untameable beast, as I passed through the lych-gate, and I hurried on, catching up with Daddy in the square by the Brown. Over in the almshouse, Nan Dyer, blurred by cigarette smoke, shrank in her doorway: she was even smaller than Corporal Alcock. ‘Get out of the sun, maid,’ she called at me in her broken voice. She’d smoked so many cigarettes that she spoke with a growl. She was also, grandmother told me, the last of the choirsingers in the village: she’d sung all the right notes in the wrong way for forty years, until her vocal chords were shot to pieces.

  ‘You’ll go soft in the head if you stays out in this sun,’ she growled.

  I looked around for Daddy: he was on the Brown, hanging by his knees from the crossbar of one of the goals, grasping it with his hands. His jacket had fallen down and hung behind him, and he was gently rocking.

  When we stood down on the Valley road, waiting for the school bus that didn’t appear, Johnathan Teignmouth stood always apart. He never spoke to anyone, because as soon as he opened his mouth people made fun of his aristocrat’s accent, braying at each other like donkeys. If anyone spoke to him he answered not with words but by raising his left eyebrow, turning down the sides of his mouth, and gazing off in another direction. Out of the corner of his other eye, though, he watched everything that went on – the banter, the fighting, the laughter; all that he was excluded from. Standing aloof from the crowd, he managed to look both contemptuous and as if he was about to cry. But it was much easier and safer to laugh at him than to approach him, so I kept my distance.

  The next morning the bus again failed to show up, because the strike was being maintained, teachers still refusing to take classes so big that remembering everybody’s name, never mind teaching them, they claimed, was a proven impossibility. I went home, changed, and got straight back out to go swimming. Tinker followed me, padding along the lane, panting for breath. I reached the quarry pool and dived in on my own, feeling safe to do so because if anything happened I knew Tinker would throw herself in and doggy-paddle to my rescue.

  I floated on my back, propelling myself slowly to stop from sinking, looking up at the sky. If I bent my head right back the world was turned upside down.

  I climbed out on to the overhanging rock, and was sat there enjoying the brief sensation of water still on my skin, before it evaporated, when Tinker started barking. She went over to some bushes and stopped in front of them, bared her teeth, and growled. Standing beside her, I could make out some shapeless form amongst the branches and leaves, and colour in the shadows.

  ‘You better come out, whoever you are,’ I said, ‘or I might have to let this mad dog loose.’

  ‘No need to, actually,’ a voice called back, ‘quite all right; I’m c-c-coming out right away. Keep hold of your hound.’ Johnathan Teignmouth crawled from the bushes. Tinker growled all the more. Johnathan looked nervously at her, his eyebrows twitching. He was pale and skinny in his shorts and tee-shirt. The only reason one or two of the boys never went further than making fun of him was because a relationship of masters and servants that had lasted for hundreds of years couldn’t be set aside overnight, and saved him from the bullying that he was otherwise ready-made for.

  ‘Might it be an idea to stop him growling?’ he asked nervously.

  ‘He’s a she!’ I told him. ‘Anyway, what was you doing in there?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he replied. ‘Just looking for b-b-birds’ nests, actually.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. Birds don’t build nests in little bushes.’

  ‘Don’t they? No, I didn’t find any. Can’t you stop her growling?’

  ‘Maybe I can. Wouldn’t do no good.’

  ‘Why not?’ he asked worriedly, not taking his eyes off Tinker for a moment.

  ‘She’ll only stop if she thinks we’re friends. We’ll have to shake hands or something.’

  He extended his arm towards me, but Tinker bared her teeth, and he quickly withdrew it.

  ‘It’s all right, girl,’ I said, and stepped forward and shook his hand. Tinker looked at us for a moment, then went and lay in some shade under a bush.

  ‘Did you come to swim?’ I asked him. ‘I never seen you swimming.’

  ‘I don’t know that I do,’ he replied.

  ‘Come on!’ I said on impulse. ‘I don’t mind going in again.’

  He’d stopped twitching and blushing by now. He furrowed his brow in concentration, glanced up at the path, and then smiled: ‘That’s a jolly good idea.’

  He followed me on to the overhanging rock, and removed his trainers.

  ‘You can’t swim in your tee-shirt,’ I told him. ‘You’ll have to take that off.’

  ‘I’d rather not, actually.’

  ‘All right, if you don’t want to. Go on then, you can dive in first.’

  His left eyebrow rose. ‘I don’t dive, if you don’t mind.’

  I looked him up and down, beginning to regret my softheartedness. I should have let Tinker keep him trapped in the bushes until I felt like going home. He wouldn’t take his tee-shirt off, and he couldn’t even dive. He was no use to anyone.

  ‘I suppose you can swim?’ I asked sarcastically.

  ‘I think so,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean you think so? Don’t you know? Either you can or you can’t.’

  ‘Well, I suppose I can, then,’ he replied, the side of his mouth lifting in an ironic and superior smile. It made me suddenly furious.

  ‘We better find out, then,’ I said, and I stepped forward and pushed him backwards off the rock into the water. He was so light and skinny it was like pushing over a bundle of beanpoles: his body offered no resistance, falling into air. He somersaulted backwards, landed with a splash in the water, and disappeared.

  I leaned over the rock, and peered into the dark water. Gradually it recomposed its placid surface. And he was gone. My heart rose into my throat, and I could feel it thumping there. ‘Please, please,’ I pleaded, ‘come back, come back.’ But the water was still.

  I took a breath and dived in.

  When you went deeper than a body’s length in the pool, you couldn’t see anything; it was all dark, like being underground, and I had to feel around fo
r him, but my hands found nothing but water. I came back to the surface for air, and went back down again, twice, a third time, frantic, and a fourth. But I could only go down so far: he’d slipped down the steep side and into the depths of the pool. I kept on going, diving and coming up for air, hoping against hope that he would somehow still be no more than a few feet below the surface.

  I kept trying till all my strength was spent, and I could hardly drag myself out of the pool.

  I lay on the rock, shaking with fear, breathing hard to get my breath back, wondering already how I’d tell what I’d done, and whether I’d tell the truth. I started to cry, and looked up, and my heart stopped because there was Johnathan, standing twenty feet away, beside the water, looking at me with the side of his mouth raised in an ironic smile.

  I chased him all the way around the pool. When I caught him up he was still laughing, and I was still mad with anger. I threw myself at him, and got on top of him.

  ‘You bastard idiot!’ I screamed. ‘I thought you was dead. Don’t laugh! That’s the stupidest trick anyone can play. You must be mad.’

  I raised my hand and was about to hit him but the next thing I knew Tinker was beside me, barking. Only she wasn’t growling at him this time, she was pushing and nudging at me.

  ‘Get off, you stupid dog!’ I cried, but that just made her more excited, and I had to get up and move away. Johnathan laughed even more. I sat on the rock, my head swirling.

  Eventually Tinker calmed down, and Johnathan stopped laughing.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But you shouldn’t have pushed me in.’

  ‘You can fuck off!’ I yelled with my back to him. ‘I don’t want nothing to do with you. No wonder no-one talks to you, if that’s what you’re like.’

  When I turned round he was staring at the ground. His contemptuous look had vanished completely, leaving only the impression that he was about to burst into tears.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mean it, you idiot. Don’t be a baby.’

  He looked at me, and then back down at the ground.

  ‘Teach me to dive?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t try and make fun of me again, bay, or I really will get you.’

  ‘I c-c-can’t dive. I can swim, I admit, but I can’t dive. No-one’s had time to show me how.’

  ‘You don’t have to be shown, you just does it.’

  He wiped the sweat off his face. ‘I’m scared to,’ he whispered.

  I got up. ‘All right, then. Watch this.’

  It was the beginning of our friendship, that Friday when we should have been in school. Whenever I went down to the pool on my own he’d emerge from out of the scrubby wasteland and we’d swim together. But if anyone else was around he never appeared, and I realized that he must have gone there every day, and stayed in hiding. We lay on the rock, drying off and blowing through grass and throwing pebbles. His pale skin burned in the sun, but he wouldn’t leave until he heard someone else scrambling down the bed of the dried-up stream. Then his ears pricked up like a dog’s, he’d sit bolt upright and say: ‘Is that the time already? I ought to be going, actually,’ and whatever I said made no difference. He gathered up his things in an instant and disappeared.

  He was a good pupil: he did whatever I told him to, diving in with one hand or with his eyes closed, and even backwards, even when the very idea made his teeth chatter with fear. He stood rigid on the rock and stared hard at the water, his thin body trembling. Then he closed his eyes and screwed up his face like he was trying to swallow a mouthful of disgusting food, and launched himself forward.

  It was strange to see someone who was so frightened by life: it took him a huge effort to overcome himself. At first I wanted to make fun of him, like everyone else; but it didn’t take long for me to realize that in reality I’d never known anyone with so much courage.

  Chapter Six

  Grandparents

  My grandparents slept in a room at the other end of the corridor from mother and Daddy. Unlike most children in the village, my elder brothers and sister and I each had a room of our own, sandwiched between them. There was even a guest room next to the bathroom, where no-one ever seemed to stay but over whose twin beds mother spread out patterns of material, strange shapes that bore no resemblance to the human body, from which she sewed clothes on an antique Singer, as if she were making dresses and shirts for mysterious, misshapen relatives who never arrived.

  Grandfather and grandmother were as different from each other as it was possible for two such old people to be. ‘We’s two opposites come together to make a whole,’ she confided in me one evening, taking grandfather’s hand and cackling with pleasure at his embarrassment, as he struggled to concentrate on the wildlife programme on television.

  Grandmother had an answer to every question, which she gave without pause for thought but with total conviction, and she held opinions on any subject that arose.

  ‘Never trust a doctor,’ she’d told me when I came home from Primary School one day with my arm aching from an inoculation. ‘They makes money from fooling healthy folks into thinking they’s sick.’

  ‘But I told you grandma, ’twas a nurse.’

  She shook her head. ‘Same thing nowadays.’

  ‘You’d sooner find a good-natured Cornishman than an honest policeman,’ she assured me, spitting into the dust, on one of the rare occasions a Panda car cruised surreptitiously through the village. ‘Why don’t they leave people alone, prying into country folk’s affairs. Git on back to the city, where you belong!’ she shouted after them.

  Grandfather, on the other hand, had few words. ‘’Er’s got enough for the both of them,’ mother told me. Grandfather kept his own counsel. When someone addressed him, even one of his own family whom he’d known from the day of their birth, he shuffled from one foot to the other, unwilling to look you in the eye, blushing behind his ears and preferring to reply to grandmother, as if she was the one who’d asked him the question; or if she wasn’t there, then he’d look at the ceiling when he spoke to you, fingers fiddling with his pipe, his whole body afflicted by the discomfort of speech.

  I’m not sure anyone knew grandfather well, but everyone was aware of his reputation, not just as one of the wealthiest farmers in the district but also as a man of legendary guts, all because of two acts of bravery he’d committed in his youth. It wasn’t grandfather who told me, of course, it was grandmother. She told me her stories with such conviction that I had to remind myself that she hadn’t actually witnessed them herself.

  ‘He were no more than a boy of ten or eleven year old, younger than you is, maid,’ she said, taking my hand in her own roughened fingers as we sat on the sofa. ‘He pushed past his own father and run into a blazing barn, and come out through the flames leadin’ their pair of ’orses.’

  I tried to imagine grandfather as a young boy but it was difficult, and the image got confused with that of Johnathan, so that I saw a pale, skinny boy with grandfather’s stubbly face pulling two huge carthorses out of the fire.

  In fact, it was the second display of bravery that really earned grandfather his reputation: when he left school at fifteen, his father was unable to justify his joining him on their farm that was little more than a smallholding, and so he fixed his son up with a job at the Viscount’s quarry down in the Valley.

  The Viscount had recently committed the grave error of appointing a Cornish foreman, and grandfather had only been working there a matter of weeks when the Cornishman, a squat, red-faced man, caught sight of him relieving himself in one of the small side-tunnels underground. Back at the surface grandfather’s gang were stopped by the foreman. He didn’t single grandfather out but put his hands on his hips and addressed them all together.

  ‘You Devon bloody shirkers!’ he roared. ‘You works here same rules as the tin-miners: you eats in your own time, you shits in your own time. And you, lad,’ he added, pointing a finger at grandfather, ‘You’re docked a penny from your wages.’

  Grandfather felt hi
s blood bubble and rise, it coursed through his fifteen-year-old body and made him seethe, but he could still think clearly. He knew instantly that he was resigning himself to a life of comparative poverty, on a casual farm-labourer’s wages – unaware that the rest of the village miners would soon join him – when he stepped forward and with one punch sent the Cornish foreman back across the Tamar, with his jaw broken in so many places it was said that for the rest of his life he lived on a diet of soup sucked through a straw.

  It was the first and last time grandfather ever struck anyone in anger. Nowadays he only got cross when city ramblers, having lost their way in the forest and wandered into our valley by mistake, left gates open; and when people were cruel to their animals. That was the real reason, rather than his shyness, as people assumed, that he’d never belonged to the Young Farmers, and also turned down annual invitations to join the organizing committee of the Christow and District Agricultural Show; he’d seen how other men treated their livestock, without dignity, and it was beyond his comprehension.

  Grandfather never even raised his voice, except when he was on the telephone: when the first red phone box was erected across from the almshouse, grandfather had used it to order supplies from the grain merchants in Newton Abbot, and he shouted so loudly, since he couldn’t believe that otherwise it was possible to communicate with someone miles away, that everyone in the village knew his business. It was a habit he never got round to breaking: even years later, during that summer when the air became so thin that the sound of trains entering St David’s station in Exeter, nine miles away, could sometimes be heard in the Valley, fooling grandmother into thinking that the railway line beside the river had been reopened overnight, even then I’d be suddenly startled by the sound of grandfather shouting down the telephone, as if beside himself with rage, as he ordered ‘FIFTY HUNDRED-WEIGHT OF FERTILIZER; YES, YOU HEARD RIGHT; SIXTEEN SACKS OF GRAIN; THE USUAL, BAY; SIXTEEN, YES, AND TWO DOZEN TEN-GALLON DRUMS OF NITREX; DELIVER MONDAY, FREEMANTLE … YOU SHOULD KNOW BY NOW, ON ACCOUNT!’