In the Place of Fallen Leaves

by Tim Pears

  They had a golden labrador who growled whenever Tom touched Susanna, and sometimes even when he only imagined doing so. Once, forgetting he was in someone else’s house, Tom grabbed the dog by the scruff of its neck and led it outside, where dogs were supposed to live. That was too much for Susanna’s father, who was horrified by such uncivilized behaviour: he brought the dog back inside and asked Tom to leave instead.

  Tom didn’t mind, and neither did Susanna. They assumed that everyone else was as happy as they were, since everyone looked happy to them. They could only stand being apart from each other because each parting was as delicious as coming together again, and they mapped out the routes of their days precisely, so that Tom could sound his tractor horn on his way to the sheep while Susanna was half-way through a French essay, and she in turn would wave to him from her horse at 2.48 p.m. as he tightened the electric fencing down in the meadows. They were intoxicated by each other. He told her the reason they got on so well was that she carried on her jeans her horse’s sweat while he for his part could never entirely shake off the sharp scent of pigs, and as everyone knows horses and pigs are the two most compatible species of animal, able to be left to pasture together without fear of a quarrel. It was the first joke he’d ever been known to make.

  Susanna was learning to play the trombone. After she’d said goodnight to Tom she didn’t want to lose the warm and curious feeling that enveloped her, so she would practise on her trombone late at night. Her family complained that she was keeping them awake, but they couldn’t force her to go to bed because they’d decided that when she reached the age of fourteen they’d treat her like an adult. So her mother went to a music shop in Exeter and bought a device for muffling the instrument. From then on Susanna played her trombone muted, and her family were able to sleep again, except that the music rose through the floorboards and infiltrated their dreams, saddening them as they slept.

  In the course of his meticulous preparations for Saturday nights, Ian had never noticed Tom. It was as if he simply disappeared from view, melting into the furniture. It was just part of the process by which the whole world altered its appearance, as Ian unconsciously honed his instincts for the chase. His nostrils became sensitive to the trail of perfume, his ears attuned themselves to the rustle of a dress and to certain nuances of a woman’s voice, his thick farmer’s fingers took on the sensitivity of a masseur’s, and his sight altered so blatantly that men fell as if out of focus to the periphery of his vision, as he prepared himself for his once a week night of a lonely hunter. Ian had never bothered himself with his younger brother’s sentimental education, other than to pass on the solitary word of advice that he had received from Daddy, that when you leave a girl you should make her believe that she’s left you. He assumed, if he ever thought about it at all, that a man has to find these things out for himself, as he had, or not learn them at all.

  Now, though, Ian began to notice Tom, and he felt some brotherly pity as he saw him lose his grip, as he watched him falling into the abyss of love. He wondered how anyone could be so stupid, could so deceive themselves, and wanted to point out certain things so obvious it seemed impossible Tom had not learned them, if only from Ian’s own example: that the weekend’s the time for it, bay, the weekdays is for working; that women is what makes life worth living, but your life is your own and no-one else’s; that when you get a woman started you better take her all the way, that’s all, take her half-way there and drop her off and she’ll hate yer guts, you can do a hundred different things, just make her happy, touch every part of her except her heart; that if you stays the night you might never leave, bay, always make sure there’s an unlocked door; that you can make them cry ’cos they likes that sometimes, but if you ever hurts a woman then don’t come to me for help, you deserves what you gets, you fatherless bastard.

  Ian couldn’t help himself from thinking these things as he saw his silent brother transformed before his eyes, an idiot grin creasing his fleshy jowls and his eyes ringed by the fatigue of an activity the fool had confused with love. He found he had to remind Tom how to perform simple tasks Tom knew better than he did: he’d put the wrong tools in the van, take straw instead of hay over to the sheep, and couple the plough to the tractor when what they needed was the binder to reap the spindly, useless corn of that summer’s meagre harvest. When they went to check the pigs in the top field Tom electrocuted himself on the wire and, instead of kicking the nearest sow as he would normally have done, only giggled. And at odd moments of the day he would suddenly say: ‘You carry on, Ian, I’ll be back in a couple or three minutes.’ At first Ian thought he’d got the collywobbles from drinking too much tap water and disappeared to relieve himself, but he soon discovered that Tom was running off to keep his fleeting rendezvous with Susanna in the midst of her studies.

  In the evenings Ian had always been the one to nag Tom and grandfather to finish work and get back for tea, and he often ended up coming home alone and asking mother to put theirs in the oven, because Tom found it as painful as grandfather did to stop work before dusk had smudged the outlines of things and left them with no alternative but to return to people. Now, though, Tom would ask grandfather to check the time on his pocket watch from four o’clock onwards, and would admonish the others, saying: ‘Us better get back, ’tidn’t fair to keep mother waiting.’

  Worst of all, though, Tom started talking. They’d always worked in silence, a silence learned from grandfather, speaking no more than was necessary for the accomplishment of each task; superfluous speech did not disturb the sounds of metal on wood, the rustle of dry grass manipulated by human hands, the tread of heavy boots echoing on the hard earth. In that silence the primeval language common to all farmers asserted itself over any more recently developed dialect, because it was one that animals understood, a vernacular of grunts, whoops, whistles and guttural commands, monosyllabic but possessed of infinite expressiveness through the variables of intonation, inflection and emphasis. When they spoke to each other during the day, outside the house, it was in a pidgin English, using ordinary words but tersely, isolated from each other in truncated sentences, using their farmers’ primitive colloquial to give the meaning of what they were saying. It was a language of necessity, of only urgent communication above the roar of the tractor engine or across a field, so that when we joined them to help round up animals or stack the hay loft we were startled at the way they addressed each other, as if cursing, and we felt as if we’d just stepped into the aftermath of some almighty argument. In reality they each worked at a steady pace, with a steady heart, and had the respect for each other that came from everyday, mutual dependence.

  Then suddenly Tom had broken ranks, the least likely to do so, lured by love from their unspoken agreement over the parsimony of language. He started chattering while they drank their first mug of tea by the stove, he carried on gibbering as they crossed the yard, he shouted over the noise of the tractor, and he drivelled on as they returned for breakfast. He spoke about anything and everything, garrulous as a two-year-old, as if Susanna had triggered off that phase of a child’s development that he’d not gone through at the proper time. He commented on the weather, noting with apparent surprise that it was just the same as yesterday; he told them how he’d slept and what he’d dreamed; and he pointed out the various types of tree and flower they passed, as if none of them had seen such things before. ‘Lookee there, grandfather, ’tis a hazel, innit?’ he’d suggest. ‘Well bugger me if that idn’t a dandelion clock. Funny old things. Oi! See that? ’Twas a thrush. Right there in the ’edge. Got itself a nest in there I don’t doubt. You can never tell with they old birds. Be a lot of ladybirds around, too. I don’t know as I’ve ever seen so many’s I ’ave today, like. You see ’em, Ian? Little things they is, in’t they?’

  Deprived of the sacrosanct silence in which to sip his first mug of sweet tea, grandfather never sloughed off the bad temper caused by having to wake up in the morning. After three days of Tom’s loquacity grandfath
er caught Ian’s arm as they left by the kitchen door, letting Tom carry on ahead, talking to himself.

  ‘I idn’t feeling too clever, bay. I think as I’ll leave you to it today.’

  ‘What’s up, grandad?’ Ian asked him. ‘Illness in’t never stopped you wanting to work.’

  ‘Well, then, I’ll tell ’ee, between you and me, like,’ grandfather replied. ‘I in’t never ’eard a man so full of prattle. I can’t stand it no more. I’ll get on with some little jobs around the yard. ’E’ll get over it, I don’t doubt.’

  Grandmother, in her throaty voice, whispered to me a secret, certain way to bring rain, sending me off to throw flour into the same spring that her mother-in-law had used to finally dispel the drought in 1911. Her directions were simple and precise and I followed them easily to a spring in a hidden corner of a field up behind Longbrook Farm. I threw the flour in and stirred up the water with a hazel-rod, and a mist arose. It was only a matter then of waiting for it to condense into a rain-bearing cloud.

  I had faith in grandmother’s pronouncements, even if no-one else did. They’d first begun to take less notice of what she said the previous autumn, when she started to make surprise visits to her daughters, persuading grandfather to drive her on an itinerary dictated by the caprice of her dreams: she would dream that one of her offspring was ill or unhappy, pack her bags in the morning, and arrive unannounced on the doorstep in order to lend one or other of her daughters a hand for a few days, as she used to do when their children were small. They contrived at first to validate her intimations, out of the respect they had for her, saying: ‘Yes, grandma, you’re right, Andrew hasn’t been feeling too clever; yes, grandma, it probably is the measles, even if he is twenty-seven now.’ But instead of being a help she just got in the way and caused more trouble than she was worth, volunteering to prepare a meal but making a mess instead because she’d forgotten how long things took to cook and she couldn’t read the recipe, so that half the ingredients were overdone and the rest were cold. In the end they lost their patience, and told grandfather not to bring her any more. When she asked him to he had to tell her a white lie, that the car had broken down again, and brought the telephone to her chair instead so that she could make sure her family were all right, and give them at least some verbal advice.

  The truth was that she was losing substance, slipping into the background of the family, having occupied centre stage for fifty years. She spent most of the day in her armchair now, much of it asleep, hobbling ever more slowly through to the kitchen for meals. She paused in the doorways, holding on to the frames to check her balance and get her breath back. ‘Come along, grandma,’ said mother when she came up behind her, ‘you’re causing another bottleneck.’

  I was all the more surprised, then, when I came home with Daddy on Tuesday afternoon and we found her inching her way across the yard. We ran over.

  ‘What you doin’, grandma?’ I cried.

  ‘I seen it, maid; ’tis yere,’ she said.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘It’s taking my spirit away, but I’m not ready.’

  ‘Come on, grandma,’ I said, ‘us’ll help you back inside.’

  She gripped my arm with surprising force. ‘No, maid. This is serious. I can see the thread pulling away. You can ’elp me or not, but I’m goin’ after it.’

  We carried her, Daddy and I: Daddy took her legs, I held her under her shoulders. She was so light we could have carried her for miles, even in that liquid-looking heat: she was no more than brittle bones and dried-up skin. We carried her across two fields, as she directed us, following something only she could see, into the apple orchard, where we caught up with her invisible spirit. We rested under a tree, Daddy and I nibbling sour fallers while grandmother closed her eyes and got her breath back. And then we picked her up again and carried her home, my grandmother, frail as a bird, holding on to life.

  When grandfather stopped going out on the farm because Tom’s voice bruised the inside of his head, he assumed that after a day or two Ian would give him the welcome news that Tom had recovered and was once again his usual taciturn, bearable company. What he hadn’t considered was that it was only his unswerving schedule of strenuous work all the hours of daylight, every day of the week except Sundays, that had held back the onslaught of old age. His age had never meant anything to him: he was always surprised when he came in to breakfast to find presents and cards by his place at the table and to be told he was another year older. ‘Don’t seem a year since the last one,’ was about all he could say, overcome with shyness by all our attention.

  But once he stopped performing the punishing tasks of a farmer, lifting sheep on to the trailer, or carrying a hay-bale on each shoulder and another on his back, as he’d always done, and instead pottered around the farmyard doing nothing more strenuous than sharpening tools and sweeping out the sheds, he lost the wiry strength of his forebears. When, over a week later, the yard had less dust than the house, forcing the chickens out into the lane, and all the sash-cords had been replaced inside the house, grandfather was reduced to oiling the hinges of the barn doors, yawning with boredom, even though he’d done it the day before. And Tom was still rambling on.

  So grandfather borrowed a wad of Pamela’s cotton wool from the bathroom, stuffed bits in his ears, and rejoined his grandsons. He was horrified to find that he couldn’t keep up with them. Walking over fields at their steady pace, the pace he himself had taken from his father and kept for seventy years, made his breathing come hard and reluctant. Trying to help them lift some hundredweight feed-bags he felt his pulse skipping like a frisky calf, and Ian saw him open his eyes wide and look to the sky as he slumped against the tractor wheel to steady himself. He felt his heartbeat calm down but too much, heavy and sluggish, as if there were silt in his veins.

  That night, when grandmother came to bed, she found him lying there as usual, staring at the ceiling, as he waited for her. When she’d got undressed and joined him, taking his hand as always, his rough, flattened hands made too big, by a lifetime’s physical labour, for his wiry body, as if they belonged to someone else, then he started to tell her of the events of the day. His eyes gazed at the ceiling as he spoke. At first he simply told her what he and the boys had done, noting the small changes since he’d last worked with them, two weeks previously, as if what was of interest was his getting back into the routine of things. He told her of the worrying state of the cows, their scrawny flanks embossed with ticks; he mentioned the latest EC subsidies on offer, reported on the farming page of that morning’s paper; he commented on the drought-stricken pastures up on the ridge past the rectory, beyond the makeshift homes of the hippies, and he recalled the disastrous summer after the war that they’d seen through together, when the earth had swallowed lambs.

  She knew that he was most talkative when he was most tired, and let him drone on. She was almost falling asleep, his voice growing distant, when he added, casually, as if an afterthought, that it had taken it out of him today, maybe he shouldn’t have taken so much time off, though he’d soon get back into it, no doubt, he said. He described his symptoms, still gazing at the ceiling, and the only reason she realized that he’d wasted so many words just to get around to mentioning his erratic heartbeat and his unbalanced breath was when she felt that his big rough hand in hers was trembling. She squeezed it, and he turned his head towards her.

  ‘I just wondered if you ’ad in mind one of your remedies, mother, get me back to normal, like,’ he told her.

  Grandmother turned back the covers. ‘Come with me,’ she said, taking him by the hand as she hobbled across the room. She opened the door of their bedroom, paused to make sure no-one was still up, then led him downstairs. She turned the light on in the hallway, and stood him in the middle. Then she let go his hand, put her arms around his waist, and hugged him. ‘You know I loves you,’ she whispered into his shoulder. ‘There weren’t no other man for me.’ And then she let him go, and began to unbutton his pyjama top. He offe
red no resistance, too confused for a moment to think of doing anything, because this was something she used to do long ago, in the very first years of their marriage, and he’d offered no resistance then. She slid his top off, then she bent over and undid the cord of his pyjama bottoms, which crumpled around his ankles. He looked down at them as she stepped to his side, and pulled off her own nightdress. When he looked up he found himself faced with his own reflection, and hers beside him, in the large mirror.

  She looked at him in the glass: ‘No-one never told you, lover. Us’ve gone and got old now. There b’ain’t no remedy for that.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Sickness, Health

  That same night of 9 October, which was also the night of the day that Ian led men off to work out how to steal water from the old estate waterfall, a summer sickness hit us so abruptly that no-one had time to defend themselves. Everyone succumbed, apart from Gordon Honeywill’s father, who worked at the sewage-farm towards Kingsteignton, and who’d not caught so much as a cold in fifteen years. For two days no-one stepped out of their houses: no-one fed their animals, Fred didn’t deliver the milk, old Martin neglected the hedges and the church bells were silent. I lay on my bed, wishing I could die, leaving it only to crawl along the corridor to the bathroom, where there was someone else already doing what my own body had to do. But we were oblivious to each other in the misery of our sickness, and the tact and respect of each other’s privacy that enables a family to live under the same roof were set aside.