In the Place of Fallen Leaves

by Tim Pears

  He instructed his head gardener to hire the local slaughterer, and so early one morning Douglas Westcott walked across the Valley with his bag of tools. The world was white, covered not with snow but a layer of brittle frost; the entire earth was still, having retreated into the depths of its deep sleep. Douglas felt like an intruder, worried he might wake up the earth as he walked across it, his boots crunching in the silence. His escaping breath froze on the air, hinting at thoughts whose articulation remained trapped on his tongue.

  He caught half a dozen peacocks in the same way that he did chickens, creeping up on them from behind, undaunted by the eyes of their fans watching him, and swooping down upon them with his coat wide open.

  Maria was polishing a second-floor window when she saw him in the backyard behind the scullery, slicing the necks of those beautiful creatures with a cleaver, their final ghastly breaths shrieking from their windpipes and shattering every silence but his own. She was stung with pity, whether for him or for the peacocks she wasn’t sure. In some confusion she descended to the kitchen and made a pot of tea. As soon as she stepped out of the scullery Douglas recognized her: she was the black-haired stranger in a black dress he’d watched from the corner of his furthest field, walking into the village with a wicker basket; she was the angel who’d been interfering with his dreams. As she set the tray down on the ground his mind went haywire and came to an irrevocable decision, and with the next swing of his cleaver he opened a deep gash across his hand.

  As the winter wore on Douglas returned at regular intervals to kill another unfortunate bird, one only at a time, and afterwards he would make his way to Maria’s tiny room, where she changed the dressing. After love Maria came back to the world as slowly as she could, and she made her sullen lover laugh as she smoked his pipe and chattered to him in her native language.

  After spring came and plants and grass began to grow again, Douglas failed to return. Maria was neither surprised nor sad, only mystified by the way his absence made itself known inside her, tugging at one or other of her organs like a torn tendon, as if his absence had always been and would always be there, requiring his intrusion into her life to bruise it and make itself known. But she wasn’t sad; she was almost relieved. Life was complicated enough without him. She assumed he’d come to the same conclusion: she didn’t know he’d walked out of his front door and left home.

  * * *

  One Sunday in every month my aunts and uncles and cousins came in from their cottages and small farms at various points around the parish and squeezed into the kitchen for afternoon tea. We sat around what had begun as a small and sturdy deal table, the same one on which grandfather had had his tonsils removed, but as children and grandchildren were born so grandfather had added folding flaps and extendable leaves, and on those Sunday afternoons the little table sprouted out almost to the walls, along which we slid in and sat on benches.

  It was the only time we got together specially, and you realized that all those people made up one family; the rest of the time you forgot it. We’d meet each other in normal day to day, in the lane or coming out of the shop, and we didn’t feel anything special towards each other; no more than towards other people like Granny Sims, or Martin the hedge-layer. It was like everyone was related, or else that none of us were. And it was even harder to believe that all the mothers were Daddy’s older sisters, the same little girls who’d once made grandfather so proud.

  ‘Mother,’ aunt Susan asked that Sunday, ‘why on earth don’t you and father buy a larger house, or else build an extension to the kitchen? Us is squashed up like frogspawn.’

  She made the same suggestion every month, and grandmother always gave the same reply: ‘At our age? It saw you all in and ‘twill see us out. In’t that right, lover?’ she asked grandfather, and he responded with an affirmative grunt, neither age nor the familiarity of his kin alleviating his shyness.

  The men sweated uncomfortably and consumed in silence the mountains of paste sandwiches mother had prepared, while the women talked to each other across them.

  ‘Where’s Pamela this month?’ enquired aunt Dorothy, the eldest.

  ‘You knows perfectly well where ’er is, girl,’ said aunt Shirley, and my other aunties giggled.

  ‘’Er’s one for the boys all right,’ said grandmother approvingly.

  ‘Nothing wrong with that,’ replied aunt Dorothy, ‘but ’er shouldn’t neglect the family.’ Dorothy was the only one without a husband. She used to have one, but he left her before I was born. She always knew he would. They said she was so jealous she used to make him stay in all the time, and kept the windows shut so even his smell wouldn’t get out. She knew other women were after him. When he left her, without any children, she got rid of all the old furniture, threw out the carpets and the curtains, burned the sheets, replaced the cutlery and lamps and everything else too, as well as redecorating from top to bottom, to rid the house of every last trace of him.

  ‘Pamela’s rehearsin’,’ said mother quickly. ‘You know, for this amateur dramatics.’

  ‘Rehearsin’ with the leading man, more like,’ said aunt Shirley. None of the men smiled except uncle Sidney, who enjoyed his wife’s provocative humour.

  Uncle Terence never laughed at anything. No-one could remember when he’d become bad-tempered. His round face was cast in a permanent mould of misery, with a thin-lipped down-turned crescent of a mouth, and his only son, Terry, who wasn’t much older than me, was a copy of him.

  Terence’s wife, aunt Marjorie, was the ugliest of my aunts: she had a face that looked as if it had had an argument with itself; her features were all mismatched, put together higgledy-piggledy, like she had one person’s nose but another’s ears, and her eyes belonged to someone else again. She also had a penetrating glance and looked at you intently, making you think she knew things about you you’d never told anyone; it was years before I realized that was an illusion caused by myopia, which she admitted to no-one, too vain to wear glasses.

  While the women were chatting, the men got talking by asking uncle Terence questions, because his lack of humour was what they found funny.

  ‘There’s a curlew around top field,’ uncle Sidney told him.

  ‘He’s a noisy old bird,’ said uncle Terence, ‘nearly as bad as that nightjar’s churr: drives a man mazed. What with all the ivy leaves rustling in the breeze, what a miserable old row ’tis, a man can ’ardly sleep nowadays.’

  ‘Susan made ’erself up a bag of pine needles helps her sleep,’ said uncle Bill.

  ‘T’che! Stink! Don’t ’e bother with that.’

  Grandmother said little at Sunday tea nowadays, fully occupied with picking her way through her food, refusing to take anyone’s word that paste sandwiches and drop scones presented no possible danger since she’d heard of someone choking on a chicken bone. But somehow the tea pivoted around her. Her husband was so modest that, even while he was becoming richer and widely respected in the neighbouring villages, with each flap and leaf he added to the kitchen table he made his own place more and more remote from what could be identified as the head of the table, with the expanding surfaces shaped to the uneven walls of the room itself. If anyone’s position was most distinctive it was that of grandmother, who like all the women of her line had shed in her senescence the weight assumed for the years of fertility and who, wedged into the tight corner near the door, with the table pointing like an arrow towards her, gave out an aura of ageless but receding wisdom from her silence embellished only by patient mastication.

  ‘Alison,’ said aunt Shirley, ‘fill the pot up will you, me lover?’

  We took butter straight from the fridge, but even so it soon melted on the drop scones.

  ‘I ’eard a silage tank exploded over Ashton las’ week,’ said uncle Terence.

  ‘Serves ’em right!’ said aunt Shirley.

  ‘Is you predictin’, Terence?’ asked aunt Susan. ‘Is you bodin’ omens?’

  ‘No,’ he denied it. ‘I idn’t worrie
d ’bout what’s to come, ’tis bad enough now. We lost two ewes last week.’

  Gradually, as we munched drop scones and swallowed lukewarm tea, grandmother’s silence settled over the table. The men looked down at their empty plates; the large women leaned back against the wall; grandmother chewed quietly.

  I thought of our ewes, and tried to remember them in the spring with their lambs. The world was so different then it was like remembering a completely different place: the earth was still moist and soft from the winter thaw, and the young lambs, as they frolicked in the field along the lane, bounced vertically off the ground. They looked like the most carefree beings in existence, but if a human approached they became panic-stricken, like children in a party game, and ran into and across each other looking for their mothers. They usually made for the wrong ones, and became lost and bemused, until their ears suddenly picked up the distinctive bleating of their own mother, and then they would home in on her and attack her teats, berating her for deserting them, it seemed, as much as seeking the security of her milk.

  Then I remembered how, when I was much younger, one of the ewes had died in the midst of giving birth. It was a thing that hardly ever happened and grandfather was furious: he pulled the half-emerging lamb from the dead ewe’s womb, cleaned it up himself, and brought it to the house. He came in the kitchen, handed it to his daughter-in-law without a word, and left, to carry on with the rest of the lambing.

  I don’t think mother was too sure what to do. She got me to put some rags in a cardboard box while she warmed a baby’s bottle of powdered milk. The lamb was a runty little bundle of bone and wiry wool. He looked more sleepy than anything else, but he took the rubber teat and sucked without pause. Mother told me to hold the bottle.

  ‘He can be your responsibility, Alison,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you what to do. And you can think of a name for him for starters.’

  I decided then and there to call him Smudge, because he wasn’t white like he was supposed to be. After he was fed we put him in the bottom oven of the Aga, with the door open.

  Runts get ignored if they’re lucky, or more likely picked on. There was nearly always one chicken scrawnier than the rest, who’d peck its feathers for no good reason, for their own humourless amusement, proving you don’t need any brains to be cruel. They’d send it flapping into a corner of the yard. Smudge was never going to be like that. He didn’t learn the timidity of his species, which in reality is only a habit passed on from one generation to the next: without their example he followed me everywhere, curious and playful as a puppy, but bolder. Tinker was no longer allowed in the house, and when Smudge followed me into the yard – the dogs’ territory – instead of submitting to their indignant inspection of this unwelcome guest he’d look them in the eye and stare them out until they turned tail, and left him alone. The only thing he wouldn’t do was allow himself to be house-trained, and I had to go around scooping up his neat pellets off the carpets.

  As soon as he was old enough to graze Smudge was reintroduced to his flock in the fields: they accepted him immediately, and he them, but he remained aloof. I took my friends to play with him: we approached quietly along the lane, and Jane or Susan May would slip through the rungs of the gate. The game was to see how far we could creep up on the flock before they noticed us. As soon as one of them did then they all knew simultaneously, through electricity as grandmother would say, their heads snapping back, mouths full of grass clamping shut. Then they scurried away all together towards a far corner of the field; all, that is, except one, Smudge, who was growing into a proud, twist-horned ram and who galloped instead in the opposite direction, straight towards us, to renew his acquaintance with our species. Jane always got the closest, so that she then had to run the furthest back to the gate, squealing with terror and delight, hotly pursued by that comical sheep that I’d fed from a bottle.

  One day grandfather took him off for slaughter along with the other young rams, without thinking to tell me.

  Uncle Bill blew his nose loudly, lowered his handkerchief, and inspected its contents; uncle Sidney and aunt Shirley stole glances at each other; thin aunt Susan, with her wide eyes like a bird, cupped her almost empty teacup. I rubbed my finger round the rim of my glass; when the hum started, moths closed their wings and dropped off the lampshade. Mother slapped my wrist.

  After a while Ian leaned across and muttered something to grandfather, who nodded with evident relief, before standing up.

  ‘Us is goin’ to the barn,’ he declared awkwardly, ‘to talk farmin’ matters.’ He stepped outside with Ian, followed by his sons-in-law and grandsons. The sharp scent of their sweat lingered over the table as the women watched them through the window, thin wisps of smoke coming round the sides of their heads as they ambled towards the barn in their crumpled Sunday suits.

  The women remained silent a moment more, feeling some part of themselves departing, some silent measure of their conversation. But departed also was the particular inhibition men caused, and they pushed their chairs back and relaxed. Some drank another cup of tea, while we cleared away around grandmother and washed up.

  When aunt Dorothy went to the lavatory, aunt Shirley said: ‘Have you been over her place recently? She’s got another bloody dog.’

  ‘Must have more than ’alf a dozen,’ said aunt Marjorie. ‘Why on earth’s ’er want so many?’

  ‘All I know is she started acquirin’ them, like, when she knew she wan’t goin’ to get another man,’ aunt Shirley replied, adding: ‘And who’s to say ’er made the wrong choice?’ And they all laughed, hiding their faces when she came back in the room.

  Of the men only Daddy stayed inside, obedient to the bias instilled in childhood when, as the only son, he’d grown up in a household so filled with women that their cycles came to coincide.

  Terry was the only cousin almost as young as me and he was as bad-tempered as his father. I’d given up on him ever since he’d declared in the spring that there were too many primroses about, so when we were sent outside to play I manoeuvred down to the back of the barn so that we could see what was going on.

  Down in the shadows of the cavernous barn, its floor bare except for a dusty sprinkling of chaff, they sat around on barrels and beams. Ian was telling grandfather of the decision that was forcing itself upon them: to buy in hay at great cost, or to slaughter the animals.

  ‘I wanted to tell you before us decided one way or t’other. Make sure you approved, like, grandfather. To be honest, I think there’s only one choice.’

  Grandfather narrowed his eyes, cleared his throat, and spat a gob of phlegm into the dust. ‘’Tidn’t right,’ he declared. ‘Us built this whole farm on stock. Even in the bad summer not long after the war, when your father was born, when I ’ad to pick carcasses up myself and bring ’em home on the trailer, I waited for the autumn. It’ll come.’

  ‘But we can get these ’ere subsidies now, you never ’ad’em –’

  ‘– I knows that.’

  ‘We ’ardly grows enough grain for ourselves. If we turn over fields from grazin’ to grain, ’tis money for old rope.’

  ‘You needs sheep for the ’illsides,’ suggested uncle Sidney.

  ‘Tidn’t a proper farm without pigs, that’s for sure,’ uncle Bill added emphatically.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ said uncle Terence.

  ‘See, we’re wastin’ space leavin’ animals out in the fields,’ Ian explained. ‘They should be inside, then the meat in’t lost with runnin’ about. Us could easy convert the sheds for starters.’

  They sat around in the dimness, the barn, squeezed by the heat, gently pulsating with their various thoughts.

  ‘I’ll approve of this,’ grandfather declared at length, having admitted to himself that it was too late to take back the authority he’d passed to his grandson. ‘If you has to slaughter, do it now; keep back the best. Then you can feed they the hay you’ve got left. You can start the ’erd up again next year.’

  With the confidenc
e of one with no doubts about his own leadership, Ian turned to his brother. Tom nodded.

  ‘’Tis agreed, grandfather,’ Ian said. ‘I’ll get Douglas soon’s he can.’

  ‘Good, ’tis settled,’ grandfather said as he stood up. ‘Now, I needs all of you bays. Deborah wants the chicken hut moving. They’s peckin’ up nothin’ but dust, and us can all lift it together.’

  They stepped outside. Eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun, my uncles’ heads were filled with the calculations of acres and tonnes and Common Market money. Terry joined them and I went back to the house, just as Daddy was helping grandmother into the sitting-room. He eased her gently into her chair by the fire, which she insisted she needed kept alight to stop from getting cold, even in that furnace of a summer. She gripped his hand, and her milky eyes gazed vaguely through him.

  ‘You’s a good bay,’ she muttered hoarsely. ‘Too good for this world.’

  He smiled. ‘So’s you, grandma.’

  ‘That’s all right then, ’cos I’ll not be much longer of it.’

  ‘Course you will,’ said her daughters, who were on the settee, and they made tutting noises.

  ‘Put another log on the fire, Georgie,’ grandmother asked. ‘I shiver.’

  Grandmother was looking straight at me, but she couldn’t see.

  ‘Grandma,’ I asked her, ‘mother says you won’t ’ave an operation for your cataracts. Why not? It must be awful not to see proper.’

  ‘No, maid, no, I don’t want it,’ she replied. ‘I’ve already seen enough for one life.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  Electric Summer

  Things aren’t simple. Things change. You see how people are, and you think they were always like that. You don’t realize what people do to accommodate themselves in the world.

  For one thing, it was hard to believe, looking at them now, but fifty years earlier grandmother had realized what a mistake she’d made within months of the wedding. She’d met the wiry, reserved farmer at a harvest dance in Moretonhampstead, and he courted her every Sunday, riding his cob up past the reservoirs to her father’s house on the edge of Dartmoor. He arrived every week without fail, at first in the late autumn, when she showed him her favourite walks across the heather and round the Tors, and then into the winter when he appeared through sweeping rain like a phantom. He’d change into the spare clothes he brought wrapped in oilskin and spend the day silently watching grandmother and her sisters sew, smoking his clay pipe and refusing their invitations to play cards or sing around the piano.