Birchwood

solid, god damn it! He began to watch Josie with a brooding eye, and engaged her in elaborate and roundabout conversations meant to test her loyalty, but which only amused her, and left her convinced that he was losing his reason. Then he made the most frightful discovery of all, that old man Lawless, Mama's father, was now in possession of a large share of Birch-wood. Every acre that Papa had sold he had sold unwittingly to his father-in- law, who, as usual, had worked in silence and stealth, using the Gadderns and the other buyers, all cronies, as his unofficial agents. Mama was mortified, and protested her innocence, but Papa, without a word, only a look, accused her of complicity. He saw betrayals everywhere. Poor Papa.

Now that Nockter was gone, Rosie and I went back to the hay-shed, and in that furry warm haven our passion blazed again briefly. Once or twice I tried to talk to Michael about her. He was not interested. In the last months he had changed, had become even more reticent, which meant that he hardly spoke at all. The mockery in his smile was now directed openly at all of us, but it was always mockery, never contempt, and there was something else, buried deep within him, wistfulness, longing, I don't know. He remains for me still, yes, even still, a secretive and troubled creature with a knot of thorns in his heart. Or is that only how I wish to remember him?

Mama instituted economy drives. They got nowhere, and probably put a greater strain on the budget than our usual profligacy. Her oddest venture was to dig out from god knows what musty corners our castoff clothes so that we might get one last wear out of them before they fell to pieces. We disappointed her by stoutly refusing, amid not wholly convincing guffaws, to deck ourselves out in these eerie echoes from the past, and it was left to her to trail through the house a bizarre parody of the weekend parties and hunt balls of immemorial seasons. The clothes had a chilling but, now that I think of it, not unexpected effect upon her. She began, in subtle ways, to play the part that the costume of the day demanded, and how uneasy was the silence that settled on the dining room when she swept to the table in a purple velvet evening gown, or came tripping down in a gossamer frock straight out of the gay nineties.

Snow fell on Christmas Day, as it is supposed to do. All morning, out of a low sky, the big white flakes flowed down, silent, mysterious, muffling everything. The house ached with boredom. For my Christmas box Aunt Martha gave me a stamp album, and I spent a pleasantly demented hour in my room ripping it slowly, lovingly, to shreds. At noon the snow made a determined effort to stop, and Josie served ham sandwiches and stewed tea and tacky mince pies. Michael trudged off toward the town. I tormented the grandfather clock in the hall, turning the hands to make it ring the changes of a whole day in ten minutes. Half way through noon the poor brute, confused and frantic, gave a last wobbly chime, groaned, and stopped, and somewhere above me a door slammed. I wandered up the stairs, drawing out of the banisters with a moistened finger a thin, piercing wail. There is nothing that cannot be tortured, given a bored child's resourcefulness.

Granny Godkin! Black against the window on the landing hung a grotesque caricature of the old woman, her dusty bombasine evening gown stretched on a spidery frame, my poor mad Mama. The dress hardly covered her shins. Her arms, constricted at the shoulders, dangled crookedly by her sides. Her pale bare wrists were inexplicably pitiable. She stood so, there before that white immensity of snow, her head inclined, listening intently. I stepped toward her slowly through an awful silence, mute, hypnotised, infected with a little bit of her madness. Faint voices crept out from Aunt Martha's room, and a silver jingle of laughter. Mama did not look at me. I doubt if she even realised that I was there. She gave a small grunt of satisfaction, tapped me twice absentmindedly on the shoulder with a fingertip, and skipped swiftly away down the stairs. The voices in Aunt Martha's room fell silent, and after a moment the door opened and my father peered out cautiously. Seeing that it was only me he glared, and received nothing in return but another glare which must have been a disturbing mirror image of his own. Behind his back, in the depths of the room, something lazily stirred, and a muffled voice spoke querulously. Papa retreated and softly closed the door, leaving behind him a woody whiff of cigar smoke.

And later that evening, while I was preparing for a visit to the hayshed to meet Rosie, there floated down from the hushed upper reaches of the house an eerie ululating cry, half laugh, half shriek, a truly terrible sound. I met Papa in the hall. We stared at each other for a moment in trepidation, listening intently.

‘Jesus, what now,’ he muttered, and plodded up the stairs, his bent black back the very picture of gloom. I followed solemnly after him. Mama stood in the attic among the shallots, still wearing Granny Godkin's gown. She took no notice of us as we entered, but stared into the corner under the roof, where there was a battered tricycle, a dusty bit of cracked mirror leaning drunkenly against the wall, a gutless tennis racket and a black leather trunk with brass studs. Papa sighed.

‘What, in the sweet name of Christ, are you at now, Trissy?’ he asked, slowly, wearily. Mama did not hear him. She had departed into another world.

‘Like black smoke,’ she mused, nodding slowly, intrigued. ‘Yes, yes.’

Papa took her by the arm. She disengaged herself gently and turned to the door, where she paused and glanced down at my Wellingtons, the incongruous badge of my love. Slowly she lifted her eyes to mine, with the faintest of smiles, conspiratorial, tender, and sad.

‘Poor boy, poor boy,’ she murmured. ‘All alone’

I stayed in the attic long after they had gone, thinking, I cannot say why, of Rosie waiting for me in a nest of hay. I imagined her very clearly, her fingers blue with cold, her cold lips. All that was finished. Part of my life had fallen away, like a rock into the sea. I do not think I am exaggerating.

18

THE SNOW MELTED, the earth quickened. Spring came early. In March there was a brief mock summer, strange balmy days, still and close. I would have preferred the toothed winds of other years. Mama steadily journeyed on into the deeps of her new world. There was about her sickness something whimsical and mischievous, a secretive knowing air, almost as if she were humouring us. She laughed softly under her breath, and smiled hazily, mysteriously past us, clawing a paper napkin asunder under the table, the damp torn pieces falling to the floor like shreds of her own anguish. Some days she would go raging through the house, an uncanny replica of Granny Godkin, others she was a sobbing caricature of her gentle self. There was no denying her madness, and yet, in our hearts, we did try, with desperate nonchalance, to gainsay it. But none of us was really sane, I am convinced of that, none of the Godkins or their kin. Aunt Martha, during our increasingly rare tutorials, was given to sudden silences, unwarranted starts of fright, and often, with eyes narrowed and mouth working tensely, she would question me on my activities on certain and, for me, forgotten days. My indifferent answers provoked in her an excited hum of suspicion, but of what she suspected me I did not know. She fought interminable battles now with Papa over the mysterious terms of his will. Her son too cultivated new peculiarities, skulking in the garden among the bushes, on the stairs at dusk, preoccupied and distant, glancing at me covertly from under his pale brows. I began to wonder if they were all sharing a secret from which I was excluded, and my thoughts turned again and again to my lost sister, of whose existence I was now convinced, but in a detached, unreal way, I cannot explain.

On the feast of Saint Gabriel the Archangel my father laid an unsteady hand on my shoulder and steered me into the library for a little chat, as he called it. He bade me sit on an upright chair in front of his desk while with ponderous solemnity he locked the door and pocketed the key. Then he sat down opposite me with his fists clenched before him, grimaced over a stifled sour belch, and gave me briefly one of his awful icy grins. He was half shot already.

‘Well Gabriel?’ he began heartily. ‘I suppose you know what we're here to talk about? I've dropped enough hints, eh? No? O…O well now.’ His eyes slid away from mine and gazed dully past me toward the window. It was a restless bright day, full of wind and misty light. The sight of the flushed spring garden seemed to annoy him. He unclenched his fists and drummed his fingers on the green blotter, regarding me with one eyebrow raised and one eyetooth bared. For Papa, the ideal of a son never fused with my reality. On those rare occasions when he could not avoid acknowledging my existence, it was with a vaguely disconcerted eye, a faintly rueful frown, that he considered me, his little pride and joy.

‘Well what I want to say to you Gabriel is, this house…’ He waved a hand before him, lifted his eyes to the ceiling, and sat quite still for a moment, frowning. Then he pushed back his chair and wrenched open a drawer, took out a flat leather-covered flask and tipped a shot of brandy into the cap, and hurriedly, almost angrily, threw the liqour down his throat. ‘Ach! frightful stuff. Anyway, Gabriel, this house, what with your mother sick, and, well,