by Tim Pears
He bit the cotton, as he’d seen her do a hundred times, and was tying the ends of the last stitch when the ambulance arrived. Lost in his labour of love, he was the only person in the whole village who didn’t hear the siren, the first time one had come into our part of the world. A small crowd had already gathered in the lane by the time they whisked her away, with grandfather still beside her, holding her hand as tightly as she’d earlier held his.
They kept her in the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital for three weeks, and gave her two blood transfusions, as well as undoing and rethreading the stitches of her Caesarean wound, before allowing her home to take over the rearing of the child who’d been wet-nursed, meanwhile, by one of Granny Sims’s granddaughters. They brought the baby to her when she limped, sorely through the front door, and the first thing she did was to remove its clothes and nappy on the kitchen table, because she refused to believe what they’d told her until she saw it with her own eyes.
‘All right,’ she said in a hoarse voice, ‘so you wasn’t being funny. I’ll say this though: if that’s what ’tis like giving birth to a bay, I’m glad we had all girls before.’
And that’s how Daddy came, unwillingly, into this world, and might be why, despite the fact that he almost killed her, he was the favourite of all her children, such is the logic of love.
Chapter Twenty
Flight
The mosquitoes that followed the piano tuner in his travels weren’t the only animals who lost their sense of direction in that incandescent heat and ended up in the Valley. When the reservoirs up behind Christow dried up, strange species of fish, the like of which had never been caught by the lugubrious fishermen who came out from Exeter on Sundays, were beached on the black silt: flat, rhomboidal fish so much like children’s drawings even the warden doubted whether they had ever really been alive, as well as, so it was said, the still squirming freshwater eels of the Fens.
Back on our side of the Valley at the bottomless quarry pool the widowman heron was joined for one brief visit by a crane that glided over the pine woods to land like a cotton sheet. When I mentioned it to grandmother she told me about the young 14th Viscount, Johnathan’s grandfather, who in the inter-war years designed and constructed in the estate stables a prototype aeroplane. The entire population of the village gathered around the beech tree to watch him fly from the ridge above the quarry pool. They listened in disbelief as he explained the direction of his flight and pointed down the Valley towards Christow, to a field where champagne was on ice. Excitement mounted as he put on his goggles and climbed into the cockpit, and when his valet spun the propeller they held their breath, keeping it in as the plane launched from the ridge and plummeted, spinning, into the quarry pool. They held their breath until it burst out of them, and they stayed watching the surface of the pool until it had fully recomposed its placid surface. They waited even longer, too, but even so half of them were half-way home, muttering in agreement about the stupidity of the young and wiping their eyes, when back at the pool the 14th Viscount’s leather helmet bobbed up to the surface and his mouth gasped for air. For the rest of his short life people would ask him what it was like down there, and he told everybody the same thing, that below the surface it was dark, too dark to see, he fell and fell and the water grew colder as he struggled to climb out of the cockpit; the only sense of any use to him was touch, except that everything felt unreal. Still he fell, and just as he thought he was losing consciousness he saw a bright light far below. Just then he broke free from the cockpit, and swam up towards the surface. He couldn’t rise fast enough through the black water, and was tormented by the possibility that he was going in the wrong direction. His lungs were two ravens clawing their way out of his rib cage while his head was nodding off to sleep, when suddenly he woke up at the surface of the quarry pool.
A few years later, in the middle of a war, the German plane appeared in the Valley. The pilot hadn’t lost his way: the granite works down by Teign Village was secretly producing cement for concrete bunkers and buildings. There were anti-aircraft guns and a barrage balloon at the end of the Valley, by Chudleigh, but it was a quiet Saturday in June and the officers had gone to the races at Newton Abbot. The men on duty, who for months had been half-cursing, half-blessing their luck at being stationed far from the action in this tucked-away corner of the world, gaped at the plane with enemy markings that appeared out of the blue sky. They watched it approach and knew its target, and they had it in their sights: but no-one dared to open fire without the order from one of their superiors. The plane came dipping and weaving, to evade the inevitable flak, but when it didn’t materialize the plane soared up and overshot the quarry, as if the pilot was so surprised he forgot to attack it.
Grandmother was one of those who saw it reappear and, as if in malicious imitation of the 14th Viscount’s intentions, the pilot dipped his wings as he skimmed through the Valley, before emptying the contents of his bomb carriage directly above the granite works.
Some years after that grandfather took a one-off trip with Joseph Howard to Hereford market, to see what sorts of bulls other farmers were buying. (It was on that trip that he saw, in their orchards, bottles tied to pear trees, an idea he stole for the apple liqueur we drank at Christmas.) On the way back they drove underneath a crop-spraying aeroplane as it crossed over the road, and when they got home the paint on grandfather’s van was all blistered. He began to wonder what the chemicals must be doing to his own soil, but the promises and guarantees of the fertilizer salesmen helped him put it to the back of his mind until the village streams, just before they dried up in that hottest of summers, began to reflect weird, unnatural colours that no-one – except grandfather – could quite take in because they didn’t have words to describe them.
‘’Er Dad don’t know ’er, ’er Dad don’t know ’er.’ The chant appeared in my head, an echo from the past coming up behind me, whenever I thought that the summer and the teachers’ strike would end and I’d have to start Comprehensive. In the playground at Chudleigh they’d taunt me at break when they were bored, a ring of grinning faces surrounding me. ‘’Er Dad don’t know ’er, ’er Dad don’t know ’er.’
I tried to stand aloof and regard the wheeling bodies with a look of such scorn that they felt ashamed, and the hands would break. Sometimes anger blew through me like a note through a whistle and I’d thump one of them: then either the game would halt for a second, allowing me to push through the ring and stalk off, or else I’d be thrown the relief of combat, the taunting forgotten for a more exciting spectacle, and I’d use all the tricks my brothers had taught me. But there were other times when the baiting pierced all my resistance, and I’d feel it discharge into a rush of tears. Then there’d be contrition and sympathy that I resented as much as when I saw it implicit in the greeting of some adult in the village.
The one person I wanted to talk about it with was Johnathan, but it was only a week since we’d burned down the barn and we were both too scared to even look at each other, let alone speak, down at the Valley road. The others all knew what we’d done, of course, and if they saw us getting friendly again word was sure to get back to our parents. And I suppose because I couldn’t talk to him, I wanted to all the more.
All through the summer, when the thought of school intruded, I prayed that the ridicule wouldn’t follow me to Newton. By this time it was a month into the term and although the school had now apparently opened part-time, those of us out in the villages still weren’t being admitted. It allowed me to hope that once the world began again my simple Daddy would have been forgotten along with other trivial details from the burned up past.
But what made me angry with myself was that it was the baiting I feared, the way it isolated me, and not its substance. It wasn’t so bad having such a father. He had inherited his mother’s generous and open nature, neither of which had been entirely lost. He’d never, so far as I could recall, scolded me, much less given me a beating. I knew well enough the sullen solitude o
f my friends’ fathers, who came in from the fields at dusk, bringing their own sweat and that of animals into the living-room, where they sat back silently smoking, before wearily treading upstairs to take shelter in the refuge of their wives. I had a companion instead: was that so bad?
My own brother, Tom, would one day be one of those fathers, with nothing to say at mealtimes and no ideas for improvements to the farm, which he left to Ian, cruising on habit and instinct, only fired with an implacable will in pursuit of the woman he’d chosen. In the days following the dance, while other men worked on various schemes to bring water to the village, all as harebrained as Corporal Alcock’s plan to use capillary osmosis to draw the black water up from the quarry pool, Tom ignored them and spent his time sitting on my window-sill, scrutinizing the Simmons’s house on the slope below the church. Since there was no school, Susanna’s parents made her stay in and study, keeping school hours. Consulting his watch every few seconds, Tom would go to meet her at breaktimes and dinnertime, and they strolled around the village hand in hand. At the end of her imitation school day they’d disappear together, returning as the sun went down, faces triangular in the dusk. I got so I couldn’t go to bed myself until I’d seen their goodnights taken care of, stepping into the shadow at her front door, then Susanna opening it and being swallowed up by the light inside.
Inside his soft cherub’s body, Tom was imbued with the wiry farmers’ strength of our family, that had enabled my brothers and cousins to make up half the village tug-of-war team that wiped the floor with the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary in their bulging blue track suits at the church fête the year before. He could do the physical work of three men, grandfather said, and at the busy times of the year went with four hours’ sleep a night and was still the first one up to put the kettle on and set the day’s first pot of tea brewing. But love wore him out: he nodded off on my window-sill, fell asleep in front of the television, yawned uncontrollably in the kitchen, and mother had to shake him awake with a mug of tea in bed in the mornings. He lost his appetite too, refusing meals, pushing his plate away with a look of disdain as if to make clear that so base an activity as eating was beneath him. He was under the illusion that love alone was sufficient, that their long-drawn-out kisses satisfied his hunger, although in the middle of the night he floated downstairs like a sleep-walker to raid the larder, consuming half loaves of bread, joints of meat and two pints of milk at a time, as he had as an adolescent. His eyes became bruised by fatigue, but inside brown rings the pupils shone like pebbles under water, and all they saw was Susanna Simmons, or portents of her. Love briefly overcame my brother’s sullen reticence. He appreciated for the first time the loyal devotion of the sheepdogs, almost as steadfast as his own eternal offering of himself to her. He watched as no naturalist had ever done the sand martins as they peppered the sides of the sand quarry at the granite works with their transitory nests, because they also, for no obvious reason, reminded him of her, her unnatural perfection that made his heart flutter whenever he looked at her strong shoulders, her delicate wrists, or beheld the miraculous articulation of her joints. The hallucinatory breeze he thought he saw on Monday afternoon ripple through a field of late corn reminded him of Susanna down to the last detail; and he even listened with Daddy to the morning record and was amazed to discover that other men had known exactly how he felt.
Tom was not among the men who met round our kitchen table that Tuesday morning to scrutinize the minutely detailed plans that Ian had abandoned his chess to stay up all night working on. Even Daddy’s brothers-in-law, whom we usually only saw on Sundays, came to help in the search for the water which, according to Granny Sims, the hippies had come with the express intention of stealing.
Uncle Sidney with his woman’s voice was the most optimistic. ‘There’s water in the rocks if we could tap it. Us is mostly water ourselves, that’s why we’re such good conductors of electricity; ’tis everywhere, even now.’
Uncle Bill was adamant about the best source of water: ‘’Tis pourin’ non-stop down that waterfall over the Valley. While our fields is crackin’ up and the waterboard’s puttin’ standpipes in the village, there’s water wastin’ away.’
‘How’s us gonna get it over yere?’ asked Mike Howard.
‘Well, as everybody knows, over the length of its path from Houndtor it rises twenty feet, ’tis a proven fact. I can’t see no reason why it shouldn’t rise some more.’
‘Not that much,’ said Ian, ‘it’s not possible. Besides, ’tidn’t our water.’
They crunched mother’s biscuits. I looked down on them from the top of the fridge.
‘I know!’ uncle Sidney announced eagerly. ‘Since it idn’t ours us could steal it outright. At night. Form a chain with buckets. Men, women and children.’
They were all so struck with this idea that they scraped their chairs back and left then and there to go to the telescope and check the practicalities. On the way they met Tom, who’d gone off to gaze at the dawn mist clinging to the surface of the quarry pool like smoke on a mirror. His cousin Andrew, Sidney and Shirley’s youngest son, sarcastically asked whether Tom would care to favour them with his opinion of their scheme.
‘Who needs water?’ he replied. ‘Us can drink cider and wash in wine. They makes it in enormous lakes in Europe.’
Chapter Twenty-One
Liquid
There were nights when something twisted inside me, sometimes in my tummy but more often in my mind, and sprang me out of sleep like a fish from water. It twisted me into a confusion that was inseparable from pain. I curled up as tight as I could to contain it, and I could hear myself whimpering. I wanted to go and slide under the sheets and snuggle up beside Daddy, but I knew mother would sense me there. She slept with a frown on her face, as if expecting the worst even in her dreams. She’d say: ‘No, you’s too old for that sort of silliness, what’s wrong with you, girl?’, and she’d give me a glass of milk of magnesia and tuck me up back in my own bed.
Light seeped out from under Ian’s door. I’d find him by his short-wave radio, like a castaway on the island of his insomnia, listening to the sounds of the sea in a pool of light spread by the desk-lamp. He twiddled the dials of the radio distractedly, as if only out of some obscure obligation keeping an ear open for people’s voices from across the night, when really he preferred the company of the oceanic lament of interference.
At such times, creeping noiselessly into his room, I would see Ian unguarded, unaware of himself, adrift, curling his hair with his finger as he scrutinized his chessboard, filled in balance sheets or browsed through one of Pamela’s glossy magazines. He held his cigarette between his middle fingers so that it wouldn’t drop if he fell asleep, would instead burn his fingers and wake him rather than set the room alight, a nightwatchman’s habit he’d learned from the quarrymen. He looked like a stranger then: his features were much sharper than I imagined them to be, his eyes were closer together, his lips thinner, his nose narrow, his cheekbones and jawline sharp as a ferret’s. Amongst people his smile, his speech, his gestures, just the fact of self-consciousness opened up and rounded his face. If I could have taken a photograph as I saw him then I wonder whether people would have recognized him.
As soon as he realized I was there he became himself again. ‘Can’t sleep, maid? You got those pains again, little lamb?’ I didn’t say anything, I just climbed on to his bed and succumbed to the urge, provoked by his sympathy, to start crying, and Ian pushed his chair back, saying: ‘You wants me to make you feel better? I’ll try.’ He shook his head. ‘What girls has to go through at your age. ’Tidn’t right. Almost as bad as bays.’ He picked up a jar of oil that he kept by the bed. ‘Take yer ’jamas off, then, and lie on your front.’
His fingers travelled across my skin and kneaded it like dough: he pushed and squeezed according to the bone structure beneath: his fingers seemed to know of their own accord the underlying secrets of my anatomy, and they persuaded the pain and unhappiness out of my body. Gra
dually it let go its grip and let me melt back into sleep, while his radio continued to transmit the sound of the sea to my brother’s lonely room.
Tom was the better looking of my brothers. But before Susanna kissed him he couldn’t look at a girl without blushing. As a boy he’d developed the ability, learned from hen pheasants on shooting expeditions with grandfather, to blend into the background: at school he made himself invisible behind his desk. He could still recall vividly, viscerally, an occasion when he, alone in the class, knew the answer to a teacher’s question. He wanted to rise from his anonymity and he urged himself, heart hammering against his chest, breaking out in sweat, his face reddening and a vein on his forehead pulsing, as if it would burst, he urged himself to put up his hand. But it was beyond him, the teacher broke the silence saying: ‘I give up on you all,’ the chance of glory passed and he had failed. It was even worse with girls. Remote and forbidding, they existed in a different dimension, and he had no idea how to make contact.
The night of the barn dance when Susanna kissed him, her warm mouth vinegary from too much stolen cider, Tom’s life turned inside out: he appeared at breakfast with his neck covered in red bites, smiling like an idiot, and he giggled at inappropriate moments. He began talking to people, filled with an overpowering urge to tell them about the miracle of love, not to boast but rather with the philanthropy of an inventor, because he was sure he’d discovered it for the first time. Their absorption with each other was mutual. At first they spent as much time at her house as ours, unaware, as they were of everything else, of her father’s disapproval: he had other ideas for his daughters than getting caught up with some farmer’s boy, and knew that the one danger of moving his family into the village was of having those plans tampered with when they were still so young. He wanted to forbid her from seeing him, except that such parental dictatorship went against his principles.