Birchwood

redolent of crushed grass and flowers, which Alessandro di Mariano knew so well, the texture of seraphs’ wings. Beside all this, the actuality of my peasant girlchild with her grubby nails and sausage curls seems a tawdry thing, and I suppose it is not her but an iridescent ideal that I remember. Try as I will, I cannot see her face. Her other parts, or some of them, I vividly recall, naturally. That evening, or another, in the wood, we talked for a while with excessive gravity and great difficulty and then, glumly, surrendered to the silence. Things were looking very bad when I played what turned out to my surprise to be a trump. I told her about algebra. She stared at me with open mouth and huge eyes as I revealed to her the secrets of this amazing new world, mine, where figures, your old pals, jiggers, yes, were put through outlandish and baffling exercises. Let x equal whaa…? Ah yes, I won her heart with mathematics. She was still pondering those mysterious symbols, her lips moving incredulously, when I delved between her chill pale thighs and discovered there her own, frail secret. She snapped her legs shut like a trap and scuttled out of my clutches, sat back on her heels and gazed at me with moony eyes, distraught, reproachful, shocked, aye, and tumescent.

‘You dirty thing,’ she whispered.

Our affair, then, was founded on mutual astonishment at the intricacy of things, my brain, her cunt, things like that. Affair, that word again. I must not exaggerate. We parted virgins. Still I do not deny, I do not deny what she meant to me. I wandered about the house and garden in a mad mist, blind to everything but the hands of the clock which, with their agonisingly slow semaphore, dragged the evening toward me across the ticking dry bones of the day. Birchwood and its inmates were disintegrating around me, and I hardly noticed.

Papa's jaunts to the city had become rare, and lately had ceased altogether. He displayed a new and, to me, disturbing interest in the house, almost an obsession. One day he announced a plan to have the place repaired. He would pay the builder with an acre of timber. Capital notion! He went into town to see about it, and came home drunk, in great good humour, the renovations forgotten. That very night the schoolroom ceiling collapsed, and when Michael and I went to investigate with Mama, the swaying light of our candles showed us, up in the rotten cavity, a decayed hanging forest of rank green growths stirring like seaweed in the swell of crossdraughts. We locked away that horrible aquarium, and in the morning Papa's headache would allow no mention of catastrophe. Two boards in the lavatory floor crumbled to dust under him on a silent Sunday morning, leaving him perched on the bowl, instantly constipated, his feet and crumpled trousers dangling above an abyss.

‘Nockter! Jesus Christ almighty. Nock-there you are. Get me a hammer, nails, a couple of planks, hurry up, we have a job to do. I could have been killed. Like that! Jesus can you imagine the laugh they'd have. Broke his arse on his own lav, ha!’ He glared at us darkly, daring us to laugh, but in spite of all his fierceness I noticed again now what I had noticed for the first time recently, that he had begun to shrink, I do not mean in my estimation, but in his own stature, as if something inside him, some of his stuffings, had fallen out, and I could not help thinking of a sucked brittle carcase of a wasp, neatly parcelled in paste, enmeshed in a spider's web. ‘This will have to stop, have to,’ he cried. ‘The bloody house is coming down around our ears.’ But before the tools were brought he had taken his gun and stalked off into the wood, running his hands through his hair and muttering under his breath, and I had slipped away to meet my love.

A soft hot haze, lilac, burnt gold, yellow, lay under the trees in the wood. The birds sang, dragonflies hovered above the briars. The butterflies were all gone. Summer was ending. Rosie waited for me in the shadow under Cotter's wall, sitting with her head dreamily drooping, her lithe brown legs folded under her, as I sometimes see her still in dreams, leaning on one taut curved arm, twisting and twisting a stalk of grass around her fingers. She gave me from under her long lashes that glance of inexplicable resentment which never failed to reduce me to a trembling ingratiating jelly. Inexplicable? No. One needed only to hear our accents to begin to understand. Class sat silent and immovable between us like a large black bird.

We walked through the goldengreen wood. The leaves were turning already. At a sudden bend in a long- untrodden path we came abruptly, magically, to the edge of the lake, and stopped and gazed out across a prospect of summer and peace, the ashblue water, the house, the windows brimming with light, and two little figures walking slowly up the steps to the front door. Birchwood always took itself too seriously, turning its face away from the endless intricate farce being enacted under its roof, but on its good days, when one was willing to accept it on its own terms, it was magnificent. Rosie twisted her mouth thoughtfully, squinting at all that quiet grandeur, and produced with a wry flourish a comment that seemed somehow the most fitting one imaginable.

‘If my granny seen me now, she'd kill me.’

Yes indeed, and if mine saw me. We wandered along the lake shore to the summerhouse, soberly musing on the punishments our furtive venery could call down upon us. She sat down in the ancient rocking-chair on the porch and stared past me with narrowed eyes.

‘All them swanks, she said suddenly, and sniffed, all that envy, that violent longing. I frowned, pretending that I had not understood her, but I knew well what she was after. Here was a perilous situation. The country was up in arms. Every day there were reports of our people burned out of their farms, of constabulary men beaten up, of magistrates shot in the streets. It all seemed far away at first, then an old man spat on Aunt Martha in the town, and Josie, to her great amusement, answered a dreadful banging on the front door one early morning and found one of our own chickens nailed to it, and now here was I, faced with a miniature rebellion of my own. I understood her well enough. Did she seriously think that I would let her meet my family, those mysterious and splendid swanks? Good god. There flashed before me a picture of the two of us advancing down the drawing room toward Granny Godkin on her throne by the fire, a Granny Godkin whom the prospects of fury and derision she perceived in the uprising had rejuvenated, whose shrill broken voice had begun to ring again through the house with something like its old authority, and as that horrible thought was exploding within me slowly I slowly clambered up the railing, grasped the clogged drainpipe above and hung before her, swaying slightly, a solemn baboon. She regarded me with a sullen eye, then flung herself from the chair and kicked open the door of the summerhouse. I flopped to the floor and followed her.

This place, cluttered more than ever with migratory bits and sticks from across the lake, we had not dared to enter before. It was a perilous forbidden chapel in our wood locked to us by the spell of Granny Godkin and her wicked cards. Our visit, therefore, was something of an occasion, and prompted in me frightful thoughts. We climbed the curving stairs at the back to a little room above, where there was a broken bed, two crippled chairs, and a curlicued gilt mirror, filthy but intact, a patient spy which now inclined its purblind eye upon my country darling, who poked among the junk with wrinkled nose. I hovered behind her like a nervous vampire and kissed her hot neck. She hardly noticed me, but twisted absently out of my reach and with graceful flamingo steps danced to the window, singing.

Chase me Charlie
I've got barley
Up the leg of me
drawers.

But there, by the glass, in the misty light, her mood shifted and she turned, suddenly transformed, and her scattered drugged smile touched me here and there like a small furry blind animal. She took a slow step, another, swimming through air, and without a word put her arms around me, and I seem to have fallen over backwards slowly, lost in that world contained in the tender roseate canthus of her eye. Perhaps it was love, after all. Beyond and above her blurred left temple a tiny redhaired phantom rippled into the depths of the mirror. She sensed my fright, and looked wildly over her shoulder at the glass. We crawled on hands and knees to the window, laid our noses on the sill and cautiously peered out. Down by the lake's edge Michael stood, looking toward the trees. Did I glimpse there a figure retreating into the leaves, an arm lifted in a hieratic gesture of farewell? I went down the stairs. Michael, coming in at the door, halted with the light behind him.

‘O, it's you,’ he said coolly. ‘Gave me a fright.’ Rosie went down past me, her head bowed, hands behind her, busy with her curls. As she passed him by, Michael glanced at her and then at me and permitted himself a brief grin. We went, all three, out into the glowing noon.

‘Well, I'm off,’ Rosie muttered, without looking back.