1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (4 page)

Cool Sanctuary of Stone

F
rom his room my brother Tom had a clear view of the field between the rectory and the new houses. It was where Susanna Simmons grazed her palomino pony. Sometimes she would just visit him, as he stood by the fence, licking the block of salt she renewed every week.

She always took an apple or a carrot with her, and offered it on her open palm. The pony mouthed it carefully, with his thick and clumsy lips, to avoid biting her.

After he’d swallowed it she stood beside him, stroking his neck, and they nuzzled each other, Susanna inhaling the sharp, sweet horse’s smell with her eyes closed, as she ran her nose across his skin. It seemed to Tom as if she were about to sink her teeth into the animal’s flesh. He watched her as she blew her breath into the pony’s nostrils: its body became quite still, and Tom felt, himself, the pony’s pleasure.

The Old Rectory had been the first building in the village in which glass was installed in windows, and people queueing to pay their tithes were perplexed to see themselves inside the house as well as outside where they stood, even though according to grandfather a full millennium had passed since the Romans had glazed the basilica in Isca just ten miles away.

When they built a new rectory up on the ridge along from the church they made an even bigger house, with rolling lawns at the front and a steep vegetable garden the size of a football pitch round the back. Now that the Rector’s family had long since grown up and left home and he had neither time nor appetite to cultivate it, he made only occasional forays into what had become a jungle to seek out the few hardy plants whose chemistry withstood the onslaught of weeds: cucumbers and rhubarb and sweet potatoes.

Daddy and I picked our way along paths dictated by the whim of the Rector’s footsteps, avoiding brambles and nettles, until we arrived at his front door.

I pushed the rectory doorbell and lifted the letterbox flap in order to hear the copper bell ring in the back hallway, and echo through the twenty-six empty rooms surrounding the Rector’s study, into which he retreated during his brief moments of respite, to continue the metaphysical contemplation he’d refused to abandon despite a lifetime’s ministry among people who ignored his ideas, though it would most likely have been the same anywhere else, since he had been so handsome that people weren’t able to look at him and absorb what he was saying at the same time. Instead, the men made jokes about his schoolboy looks and their wives fought remorseless silent struggles for the best pews. When at last time found him out at the age of fifty-five and overnight his face crumpled and his jet-black hair turned white it was already too late, for they’d long grown deaf to the obscure theology he proposed, simplified though it was from the lucid perceptions that came to him in his study, surrounded by twenty-six empty rooms, where he speculated upon new aspects of unconsidered truths.

When I got to know him and asked why he had so many rooms between him and the world he said he needed the space, though their number was irrelevant and might just as well have been three, for the space he needed was immeasurable.

The echo of the doorbell finally died in an abandoned dining-room, and no sound of footsteps came.

§

The church door was wide open but we hesitated in the porch: an old man was sitting in the front pew, his gaze directed at the altar. I was going to knock and ask if he minded us coming in, but Daddy looked at me and put a finger to his lips. We stepped stealthily in and sat down in a pew at the back, escaping from the torpid heat into a cool sanctuary of stone. I could feel the perspiration drying on my skin, cool and tingly.

My nostrils filled with a smell of must and moisture, an ecclesiological smell, as tangible as the enticing ordurous aroma that rain lifts from cow-pats. It was ever-present inside the church, exacerbating worshippers’ incipient rheumatism and almost encouraging enough signatures on Granny Sims’s biannual petition for the incense and holy water of High Church ritual to sway the three nonconformist priests whose ministries she oversaw, as well as allowing atheistic families to taunt their neighbouring believers with the claim that praying gives you piles.

Yet it was all an illusion. In reality the air was bone dry: it nibbled at the edges of the brittle leaves of the huge Bible spread across the lectern eagle’s wings, and following the old man’s gaze to the altar I could discern the candle there disappearing, consumed by its descending flame.

Dead flowers in dirty glass vases had shed their petals on the window-sills. On a boss in the centre of the nave roof three rabbits shared three ears of corn, keenly scrutinized by the eagle on the lectern, its savage beak prepared at any moment to break through its wooden shell, throwing off the huge Bible, which would disintegrate on impact with the stone floor, and sink its claws into those three rabbits that clung stupidly on to the ceiling. Corporal Alcock had told me during the Falklands war that an eagle’s talons are even sharper than the kukris of the gurkhas, alongside whom he’d once fought, and who broke the morale of the enemy at Goose Green, scalping Argentine conscripts as they slept.

The old man in the front pew was still motionless and facing the altar, the candle almost all eaten up. In the window behind, flanked by two female saints, the folds of their softly contoured skin and pleated robes flowing through the glass, sat a resolute Christ with a sickle in his hand. Running across the bottom of the window were the words: “Thrust in thy sickle and reap, for the time is come to reap, for the harvest of the earth is ripe.”

Beside me Daddy shuffled. He entered the aisle and slowly approached the old man. As he did so he could hear a dry whisper, but there were neither angels nor bats fluttering in the high roof, the wings of the saints remained rigid in glass, and there was no wind anywhere in the world to play around the steeple. It was only as he came right up behind the man that Daddy realized that the sound was that of the man intoning a barely audible, sibilant whisper.

“Hello,” Daddy exclaimed.

The man rose, tall and stooped, looking down on him. He was wearing a dog-collar, so Daddy recognized the Rector all right, but I knew how startlingly old he must have looked to him. A smile further creased his delicate skin into a cobweb of wrinkles.

“Hello, Georgie. How are you?”

“All right, Rector,” Daddy replied, his voice all disturbed. The Rector stepped out of the pew and Daddy took a few hesitant paces backwards, then stopped and stared at him.

“Rector,” he asked, “does praying make you old?”

The Rector looked sad, and reached a long, bony arm towards Daddy’s shoulder, but Daddy stepped backwards again and it fluttered there like a chicken’s useless wing. Daddy turned and rushed out of the church.

The Rector watched him go. Behind him, the big candle guttered and died, releasing a plume of smoke.

“Hello, Alison,” the Rector said softly; and then he cheered up as he walked towards me. “What are you doing? I’d have thought with no school you’d all be out playing. I wish teachers had gone on strike in our day.”

“There’s no one to play with, really,” I told him.

“Had an argument?” he smiled.

“Not really. They’re just stupid I suppose. Last time Jane and Susan came round they ended up with Pamela in her room, doing the dancing from Bananarama’s video. She hasn’t even got a big mirror.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“You should try it,” I said without thinking. “I suppose I better see where Daddy’s got to.”

§

I stepped into the still sweltering afternoon. Daddy had carried on out of the graveyard and past the old Gospel Oak whose roots still baffled gravediggers. I sat down against a headstone in the middle of the churchyard and closed my eyes. I could hear bees buzzing around the few wilting flowers placed on two or three graves. A centipede crawled onto my leg. It was the same colour as my skin. I tugged a stem of grass and tried to annoy the insect into biting the grass with its pincers, but it just crawled dumbly over my knee.

Into the silence came a tuneless whistle, attempting a martial tune. I looked round the side of the headstone and saw Corporal Alcock the organist limping stiffly into the churchyard, accompanied by Chico, his serpentine dog, and I felt happy again. Invalided out of the army in 1944 after being hit by shrapnel, which according to his wife would work its way out of his body, fragments appearing unexpectedly under the surface of his skin which she would pierce with a needle in order to remove them, Corporal Alcock had insisted ever since on being addressed by his rank. Any new arrival in the village he would plug with subtle but insistent questions to ascertain whether or not they’d been in the services, and if so what rank they’d achieved, because he was mortified by the possibility of failing to call his superiors ‘sir’ at the end of every sentence. He carried his bad leg as rigidly as his ramrod back, and treated everyone with the same impenetrable formality: there was no hint of deference in the manner of his salute to superiors nor condescension in his attitude even to us children. When I came out from behind the headstone he stopped and leaned away from me, gaining in width what he lacked in height by clasping his hands behind his back and thrusting out his shoulders.

“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.