There was a scratching at the bedroom door, and it opened wide enough to allow in Granda Godkin's wizened skull. My grandmother turned her face away from him. The ancient couple could not remember when they had last spoken to each other, which is not to say that they did not have their suspicions, although it often occurred to me that each may well have thought the other already dead and come back a spiteful and tenacious ghost. Still with only his head inside the room Granda Godkin winked at Mama, who had turned from the window in sudden alarm.
Tn a pet today, are we, in a pet?’ he inquired, and nodded toward his wife. He withdrew his head with its sprinkling of ginger hairs, and a rattle of phlegm in the corridor betrayed his secret laughter. He was a wicked little old man. Once again his pixie's face appeared, and he was already speaking when Mama began to shake her head at him in urgent mute appeal.
‘I see the tinkers have moved in.’
Another retreat, another laugh, and this time the door closed. Granny Godkin's eyes and mouth flew open-
‘What's wrong with her now?’ she asked.
‘Bring in the tea, Josie, bring it in,’ her mistress answered wearily. Poor Mama.
She went out into the garden, into the stained light and the birdsong, and walked on the lawn by the edge of the wood. A wind from the sea lashed the tops of the trees together and made spinning patterns of the fallen may blossom on the grass. Nockter the gardener, a square hulk of a man, knelt in the flowerbeds uprooting the weeds that flourished among the violets.
T-p-powerful day, ma'am.’
‘Yes, glorious.’
He edged away from her and bent again to his task, nervous of her mad placid smile.
She sat on the iron seat in the little arbour under the lilacs. An early cricket ticked among the bluebells. She heard without hearing it the music fade down in the fallow field. All was still in her little chapel, while, outside, spring whistled in the leaves, the chimneys, ran shrieking through the long grass under the trees. Spring. Perceive the scene, how, how shall I say, how the day quivers between silence and that spring song, such moments are rare, when it seems, in spite of all, that it might be possible to forgive the world for all that it is not. Granny Godkin came across the lawn, her jaw shaking furiously. She was dressed in black, with a white brooch at her throat. At every other step she plunged her stick into the ground and wrenched it free behind her.
Mama said nothing. The old woman sank down beside her on the seat.
‘You let them in,’ she sighed, mournful now, her thin shoulders drooping, her shoulder blades folded like withered wings. That switch from anger to weary sadness was a well-tried assault on Mama's soft heart, but Mama had no time now for the game. Something odd was going on, a lowering silence surrounded her. She looked about the garden with a wary eye and murmured absently,
‘They're not tinkers. It's a circus. It might be nice. What harm…?’
‘What harm?’ Granny Godkin shrieked. ‘What
Cloudshadow swept across the fallow field, and through that gloom a ragged band came marching. There was a young man with a sullen mouth, two strange pale girls, the small boy or dwarf. Were the others there too, those women, grotesque figures? Granny Godkin rose and brandished her stick at them, gobbling in fury and fright.
‘O Jesus Mary and Joseph they'll murder us all!’
A flock of birds rose above the trees with a wild clatter of wings. Granny Godkin fled, and Mama folded her hands in her lap, and closed her eyes and smiled. Ruin and slaughter and blood, brickdust, a million blades of shattered glass, the rooftree splintering-the poppies! Suddenly I see them, like a field of blood!
That day was to be forever famous in the history of Birchwood, and justly so. An invasion, no less! Granny Godkin's shoulder was dislocated by the shotgun she fired off at the invaders. Granda Godkin locked himself into a lavatory, where he was found hours after the battle sitting paralysed on the bowl and frothing at the mouth. A policeman's skull was split by an ashplant. Beatrice laughed and laughed. And I was born.
Papa, hacking home at evening, met Nockter running down the road with the news. What a splendid figure he must have cut, my dark father, eyes staring and teeth bared as he thundered up the drive on his black steed, the hoofbeats, the gravel flying, his coattails cracking in the wind, that is a sight you will not see every day these days. He dismounted by the fountain, and threw down the reins, and in that sudden silence stopped and heard above him a cry, a kind of stricken cough, and in an upstairs window a naked child was lifted, shaking its little fists. There was another cry, weaker than the first, and when it stopped, and the echoes stopped, a hollow horn of silence sounded throughout the house.
4
A LINE of tall trees trembling, a crooked field dusted with flowers, and sunlit figures walking a long way off. The sea was near, a faint soothing voice. The grassy ground bore me up with an admirable firmness. A hawk high in the blue wheeled slowly in descending arcs around a spire of air. Distant laughter tinkled like the sound bits of glass make falling into water. The hawk halted in flight, wings whipping, poised, then plummeted to earth. A tiny squeal pierced the stillness like a cold steel needle. The bird rose again and struggled up the pale blue air.
‘There you are,’ Mama murmured, leaning over me, and a primrose slipped from the bunch choking in her fist and fell into my lap. ‘I see you, Mister Man.’
That is, I think, the earliest memory of my latest life. What I remember best would be best forgotten, but the fragments that remain of the first years I guard with a jealousy which grows more frantic as I grow older, for I am forgetting them. Mama wore a long dress of fragile cream-coloured stuff and a yellow hat with a wide brim. Her fingers were stained with the dust of the flowers. There was dust on the road. A man on a high iron bicycle passed us by and gravely lifted his cap. Tall stalks of grass stood very straight and still in the tangled hedges.
‘And when you are able you'll sing a song, won't you? And dance too, for your Mama, because you love her.’ She spoke in a hushed voice, almost a sigh, imparting some great secret. This woman whom, in the innocence of my heart, I called my mother, she was…what? Tall, very slim, with very long fine brown hair which each morning she bound into a burnished knot at the nape of her neck and each night unbound again. There is in the dark past, like something in Rembrandt, a corner illuminated where her hair tumbles softly in silence around her shoulders in the yellow dust of lamplight. I remember her as neither young nor old, but thirtyish, you might say, awkward and yet graceful, with perfect hands, yes, graceful and awkward all at once, I cannot put it better than that. I think she had a beautiful face, long and narrow, as pale as paper, with big dark eyes which, years later, I would find watching me shyly, stunned with helpless love for such a peculiar unapproachable creature as myself. Words. I cannot see her. When I try I cannot see her, I mean I cannot find any solid shape of her, as I can of Granny Godkin for example, or of my father, those who vibrate in the mind like unavoidable stars. Mama seems to have left behind her nothing of her essential self. Only the things that surrounded her come back, imbued with her presence, a fair prospect of trees, a clenched glove, light at evening, a yellow hat settling softly, slowly, into a wash of sunlight on a green table. It is as if she did not die, but rather was dispersed like vapour into objects of more endurance than she could ever claim, as if indeed she never existed, not what we call existing.
A path leads down by wooded ways to the summerhouse by the lake. There Granny Godkin sat, at a table by the window above the water, a pale skull floating among the paler reflections of tree and sky on the glass. She spent most of her days there in the year's clement weather, but how she spent them was her secret, for she was never caught unawares, but as we caught her now, watchful and silent, a game of patience, her alibi, spread before her on the rubbed green felt.
‘Ah come and give your poor Granny a kiss.’
I have no wish to make her seem an ogre, but her smile was awful, really awful, a sort of shattered leer. She smelled of peppermint and dust, and the jaw that I kissed trembled with ague. I had, I know not how, gained her-
