In the Place of Fallen Leaves Read online

  Mother gladly atoned for her absence from church by sewing me a plain white surplice. While I was trying it on Ian told me: ‘I looked up what you is in the dictionary. They calls it the celebrant’s assistant. You must be mazed, girl.’

  When the Underhills had another baby I broke the ice in the font so she could be baptized, and I started helping the Rector home after services, carrying his heavy black cassock and his frayed silk stole.

  A short way up Church Lane from the phone box, Maria sat in a chair on the patio in front of the old poet’s shack in which she lived, feeding the birds. If it hadn’t been for the thick hedge of shrubs and small trees, she could have looked down upon the village. Jane and I used to wriggle through a gap in the wall around the village hall yard and into her garden.

  ‘She in’t never been with a man,’ Jane whispered to me.

  ‘Where?’ I asked.

  ‘You know!’ she replied.

  But we soon shut up and lay there, patiently watching and waiting, because the reason we crawled into the edge of her garden was so we could witness the spectacle of blue tits and chaffinches alighting upon her shoulders.

  I hung the Rector’s vestments on a coathanger on the back of his study door, while he reheated himself some coffee and lit a cigarette, and after that I might have been invisible. He never invited me to stay or told me to go home: it was clear that I was welcome to do as I wished.

  I explored the empty rooms of the rectory like an archaeologist, gathering evidence of past lives: a small red button, from a child’s dress long since discarded; two miniature items of furniture, a chair and a dresser, in the corner of an otherwise empty room upstairs, as if they’d been shrunk by a magic spell; and on the inside of a cupboard I found a black and white cutting of a team of footballers in long shorts and thick shin-pads, looking much older than they do today. Their names were printed underneath, and I memorized the first one or two so as to impress Ian when I got home. But he interrupted me after the first name and reeled off the rest: ‘Carey, Aston, Anderson, Chilton, Cockburn, Delaney, Morris, Rowley, Pearson, Mitten. There’s some reckon they was the best team of all.’ He paused, as if recalling a particular game he could never actually have seen. ‘Of course,’ he continued, ‘’tis a load of old rubbish. Their memories is lyin’.’

  There were no women’s smells in the rectory: no aromas of flowers or herbs or the scent of perfume. The Rector’s study smelled of books and cigarette smoke, and in the kitchen the fierce odour of fried bacon was dispelled only by fresh pots of coffee that he made sporadically through the day. The rest of the house, except for his bedroom and bathroom at the far end of the upstairs corridor, was as if deserted, abandoned when the Rector gave away all his excess furniture, or rather sold it at rock-bottom prices, so that instead of insulting the poorest families in the village he gave them the satisfaction of striking exceptional bargains.

  That emptiness made the rectory seem even more enormous than it already was: our home wasn’t a quarter of the size and there were eight of us living in it without being squashed. While I wandered through the huge rooms I could occasionally hear the Rector emit a strangled, long-drawn-out sneeze that reverberated around the house. I wondered whether Fred provided him with snuff, but one day I was coming down the stairs just as the Rector emerged from his study and was suddenly seized by a spasm that bent him double, and it wasn’t a sneeze but a cough.

  There was barely a trace of the Rector’s family in the house. His wife had run away with someone someone knew, in a scandalous incident whose details no-one could recall because the Rector, instead of creeping back where he came from with his tail between his legs, had stayed put and brought up his three children alone, and grandmother told me that people were so impressed by that stubbornness that they were too busy taking it in turns to clean the house, cook meals, weed the vegetable garden and invite his children round for tea, to make fun of him. By now, few could even remember his having children: they’d all left home so long ago that most people treated him with the circumspection of a bachelor priest, and on the rare occasions his grown-up children came to visit him they slipped into the village and out again with the stealth of deer.

  It was during the last frosts of winter that the widowman heron came into our Valley. He came soaring silently above the trees of Haldon Forest and glided low over the village. I tugged Daddy’s arm by the beech tree and we watched, spellbound, as he floated grey against grey and with a lazily regal, captivating flapping of his wings made a wide circle in the sky. Then, seeing his reflection in the water below, he descended towards the quarry pool, where he landed without a shudder on his spindly legs, settled himself on the outhanging rock, and folded his night-watchman’s wings.

  One item of furniture remained in the old drawing-room of the rectory: a vast, gilt-framed mirror above the mantelpiece. It was pocked with bubbles and distorting flaws. I was drawn to it, and stood in the empty room, scrutinizing my uncertain reflection in its antiquated glass.

  If he thought he’d be undisturbed for any length of time, the Rector removed his dog-collar as soon as he’d put a saucepan of coffee on the stove. He walked with a firm stride and his limp only made him look more purposeful. He told me that he’d known the exact moment that would lead to his hip replacement operation: he’d gone for a walk with his young children on Dartmoor. It was drizzling, and they came to a five-bar gate. The Rector stepped ahead of his youngest daughter, placed a hand on the top bar and sprang forward, reaching over with his other hand for the middle bar, and keeping his legs out straight behind him he sailed over the gate in a perfect vaulting motion. He told me that in the second or so between his grip slipping loose, so that his limbs spreadeagled in every direction, and feeling his back thump against the granite ground, he had time to reflect, or rather some part of his mind scolded him, that for this moment of proud carelessness he might well pay for the rest of his life. So it would prove.

  ‘And it was also the moment I knew, and I don’t mean as an intellectual abstraction but I actually realized inside, that one day I’d die,’ he said.

  When he was young he’d known the physical exhilaration of running so fast you left yourself behind. Maybe that was why he drove his Triumph Vitesse like a madman around the blind-cornered lanes of our Valley. He’d had an athlete’s self-confidence in his body that came from the certainty that he could outrun a rampaging bull or catch a departing train, if ever such emergencies might arise, right up until at the age of fifty-five his angel’s face had suddenly crumpled into a web of wrinkles, his dark preacher’s hair went white, his hip started aching at night, and he admitted to himself that for some years he’d been approaching the bathroom mirror instinctively breathing in.

  His body had turned against him. It was like a mutiny, or the betrayal of an unspoken pact, at first in the grumbling of dissent from some inner recess, which gradually became more audible and constant, until there came a time when always some part of him ached, or burned.

  Even so, the Rector was a man in control of himself. His otherworldliness was not that of a vague or absent-minded dreamer but rather of a fierce idealist whose aims were unrealistic. His authority was so measured and articulate that he always appeared calm; Maria was the only one who could discern that within his resolute body his insides churned with the need to get things done before time ran out, because time was always slipping away. The Rector marvelled at patient people, and had to stop himself from despising them.

  He was always impatient. He never had any time, because there was so much to accomplish and so little time. His driving was notorious throughout the Valley, and the only advantage of his discovery of the Triumph Vitesse, another model of which he got hold of after each accident, with its awesome powers of acceleration, was that you could hear its throaty engine coming from a long way off. Many a driver had raised a fist as he roared past them within an inch of their own vehicle, only to lower it when they glimpsed the blur of his dog-collar. Mother was aware that he
sometimes took me along for the ride when he went to visit a parishioner on one of the outlying farms, and she disapproved because she knew, as did everyone, what a terrifying driver he was.

  His most hair-raising accident had occurred one Christmas night: he’d taken Midnight Mass at Bridford, a nearby village which didn’t have its own priest, and was coming back along the Valley road. A blizzard had blown up while he was in church, and the road was already covered in a thin icing of snow, while a cascade of thick snowflakes continued to fall. A number of cars groped their way along the road, bumper to bumper, and he came up behind them. Even though he had nothing to get home for except sleep, he must have been driving with the usual impatience that gripped him behind the wheel: he tried to overtake the entire line of cars with a burst of acceleration on the slippery snow. His was the first car to start skidding and the rest followed suit, as if in imitation of his, and six cars started skating along the Valley road, in a blizzard one Christmas night.

  The miraculous powers of the saviour born that day must have intervened, as He had when the quarry was flooded on another of His birthdays earlier in the century, because even though all six cars were write-offs not a single person was hurt.

  The Rector wore a freshly ironed white handkerchief in the breast pocket of his jacket, although when he had to wipe a gob of phlegm off his lips he used a crumpled one from his trouser pocket.

  ‘Well, Alison,’ he said, ‘it’s a gentleman’s habit to carry a spare handkerchief.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘For emergencies,’ he replied with a grin, suggesting notions of gallantry that came from an earlier time, and another place.

  I watched how the Rector made his coffee, putting three spoonfuls into a pot, filling it up with hot water, and stirring sixty times. I learned to guess when he wanted another mug and would take it into his study just as he was rising from his chair to go and make it himself. The time this saved him the Rector spent talking with me. He told me about a woman blind from birth, who dreamed in rich and startling images that she recounted to him in detail; and of another woman, who also lived in one of the many identical back-streets of Crewe, similar to the single street in Teign Village across the Valley, who was cleaning the windows of her house and fell off the chair she was standing on. They put her to bed, and when she woke up she looked at them with surprise and spoke in a gibberish no-one had ever heard before, but which sounded as if she was taking the mickey out of them. One by one they brought all the foreigners they knew of to her bedside to see if they could help, until the owner of the Chinese takeaway thought he recognized a word here and there. The string of visitors ended with a Professor of Philology from Manchester University, who identified her utterances as being those of a dialect of Mandarin that had become obsolete in the seventeenth century. She came to her senses after a week in this condition, with no memory of it. Instead she shooed them away from around her bed, telling them she couldn’t lie around all day when she was in the middle of cleaning windows.

  The Rector lit a cigarette and flicked the lit match towards his overflowing wastepaper basket. The flame died and was replaced by a tail of smoke in its spinning orbit.

  ‘How did she know that language?’ I asked him. ‘Had she lived another life in China?’

  ‘What do you think?’ he replied.

  Sometimes when he left the house the Rector switched on his tape-recorder, and later we would listen, ears to the speakers, to distant voices, trying to make out what they were saying.

  Midway through the mornings of that summer my brothers were beaten back inside by the heat of the day, and returned with the dogs, swearing at the sun. Tom sweated more than other people. He’d kick shut the door of his van, because the metal was so hot it burned his fingers, and come across the yard red-faced and wiping his brow. The first thing he did, even before pouring himself a mug of tea, was to fill a plastic basin with cold water and take it outside, which he wouldn’t have bothered to do if mother hadn’t insisted, since even she couldn’t bear the pestilential smell that erupted into the room when he took off his heavy workman’s boots. Then he peeled off his dripping socks and put his feet in the basin, and as the water hissed Tom closed his eyes, and sighed with pleasure.

  Freed from her duties of a sheepdog, Tinker sometimes followed my scent and I’d find her lying with her paws crossed in the shadows of the rectory verandah, calmly waiting to accompany me home, taking upon herself responsibility for my whereabouts, since no-one else at home noticed whether I was here, there or nowhere.

  Tinker would shepherd me back to the house, see me through the door and then pad over to the barn, since she wasn’t allowed to follow me inside. She accepted her banishment with dignity, loping across the yard without a backward glance, but it seemed to me we were doing her wrong, because it hadn’t always been like that.

  Tinker was born two years after I was, and when she was a puppy the house was as much her playground as it was mine. She bounced around after me, nipping at my ankles and flopping down when I did, with a permanent air of mischief and expectation. She chewed everything she could get her teeth into, dragging grandfather’s boots and mother’s slippers into corners and silently destroying them even as we searched for her underneath beds and behind chairs. She took matchboxes from off table-tops and scattered their contents across the sitting-room floor; she carried mother’s kitchen aprons up the stairs and deposited them in the bathroom. But no-one had the heart to scold her with more than a brief, unconvincing reprimand, because her puppy dog’s eyes could soften the hearts of even the hardened farmers of our family.

  I was just learning to talk then, so mother later told me, and Tinker was the only one with the patience to listen to the rambling monologues of a toddler: she sat up and stared back, cocking her head this way and that, as if trying to follow a convoluted line of argument.

  The fact is she thought she was a human being. She refused to drink from her dish of water by the back door, waiting instead for people to leave a half-drunk cup of tea on the sideboard, whereupon she would stick her snout inside and drain it. It was the same with food: mother used to buy uncooked dog meat in bulk from the grain merchants, which filled the house with a foul smell when she boiled a huge pan of it each Monday. When she set a bowl down for Tinker she turned her nose up at it, fixed mother with a look of reproach, and walked out of the kitchen with her tail in the air. She preferred a bowl of cornflakes for breakfast and a mug of sweet tea. Later on, when she thought no-one was looking, she’d creep back into the kitchen and gollop the dog-food down in two or three mouthfuls, but it didn’t affect her appetite for people’s left-overs, which she would delicately remove from their plates with her long tongue and sneak off with, to consume in a quiet corner.

  At night Tinker slept full-length on the floor beside my bed. At the slightest sound, of an owl hooting in a distant wood or a mouse scrabbling along the rafters, her little tail would start thumping on the carpet in her sleep. On the other hand she woke up of her own accord every few hours and would bark to be let out, whine to be given some attention, or miaow for a saucer of milk in imitation of the cats. I always slept through her howling: mother was the one who had to attend to her whims. She complained that it was like having another baby in the house.

  Tinker slept with her paws crossed from the very beginning, and also inherited from her grandmother the habit of climbing on to a chair, placing her front paws on the sill and, ears pricked back, watching the world through the window. When a chicken crossed the yard, though, or a car passed by along the lane, she didn’t seem to see them. Instead her eyes would suddenly stare, her snout point forwards and her head track intently across the yard when there was nothing there: she seemed to be scrutinizing the traffic of another dimension.

  Strange things upset her. She never got used to the vacuum cleaner, and whenever mother hoovered the carpets Tinker would bark and growl and try to nip the nozzle until she knew she was beaten, and then she fled from the room wit
h her tail between her legs and hid under my bed. And although she had the genes of generations of sheepdogs in her, a sheep had only to fix her with its gaze, the way sheep do with puppies, to make her run to us for safety.

  She preferred human beings. In fact, she wouldn’t leave people alone. She nibbled grandfather’s toes as he watched television, licked Pamela’s face with her long tongue, and she climbed up the arms of grandmother’s chair and on to the back, so that she could drop unannounced into grandmother’s lap. She drove everyone to distraction and they would flick her snout or pinch her ears and tell her to go away, stupid dog, leave me alone, go and annoy the chickens. But then she’d look up at them with her dog’s eyes, cock her head to one side and made them feel guilty despite themselves, until they felt so bad they apologized to her and grandma invited her on to her lap, or grandfather fed her gobbets of bread by the side of his chair when he thought no-one was looking.

  The paradise we shared in the house was ended by her sudden expulsion: one night the house was surrounded by all the dogs in the village, who appeared without warning, one after another, to sit in the yard and howl in the direction of my window, until Tom turned the hose on them.

  When I woke up in the morning Tinker wasn’t snoring by my bed, as usual, and she wasn’t in the kitchen or the sitting-room or chewing a towel in the bathroom or anywhere else in the house. Finally I had to break the news to mother: someone had stolen my puppy in the middle of the night. Mother stopped what she was doing and looked down at me.