In the Place of Fallen Leaves by Tim Pears

Author:Tim Pears
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 1992-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEEN

Tea

“Sit down a minute,” grandmother said, and she slurped the mug of milky tea I’d brought through to her. I wanted to get outside.

“It were the coldest winter in history,” she declared suddenly.

“What was?” I asked.

She took my hand in hers. “The story I’ll tell ‘ee, stupid.”

“Oh,” I said. So I gave up and tried to snuggle up beside her, except that now I was bigger than she was.

“It were twenty-five year ago,” she began.

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted, “I thought you said last year was the worst winter we ever had.”

“Nonsense, maid. This one were much colder.”

♦

It was in the coldest and most prolonged winter in history, twenty-five years earlier, when the peacocks that patrolled the terraced lawns began to peck away at the bulbs and roots of hibernating flowers, that it occurred to the young 15 th Viscount Teignmouth that those peacocks had probably never been husbanded since their ancestors’ arrival, brought by the very first Viscount. There was certainly no one in his retinue of servants, so far as he knew, with responsibility for their management: they were simply left to themselves.

The Viscount tried to count them and found it an impossible task, confused by their fans, which they spread and then withdrew with baffling irregularity, but he figured there were around thirty. “If I don’t do something soon,” he thought, “they’ll have wiped out the lawns and the flower beds too, before spring ever arrives.”

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

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