Birchwood

gained her regard, I wanted to say love, but the Godkins loved only those they could fight, and as yet I was too young for that. Perhaps she found in my infancy an echo of her own senility. For a while she babbled away at me, nodding and leering and prodding me with her talons in a clumsy imitation of tenderness, until I turned away from her, and she fell silent. Mama sat down on a wicker chair and dropped her hat on the table, and the old woman turned her attention to me again for one more try at squeezing some sign of fondness out of me.

‘And tell me, tell me this, who do you love the best?’

I did not answer, for I was engrossed in the startling and menacing intricacy of a daddy-longlegs going mad against the glass in the corner of the window, which was a small coincidence, for soon I saw, beyond the spinning insect, my own long-legged daddy approaching through the wood. Granny Godkin saw him too, and gave a cold neat sniff. He closed the door softly behind him, and without looking at any of us paced slowly past the table with his thumbs in the pockets of his tight black waistcoat. He always seemed to me, even in his worst rages, preoccupied with some old bad joke. Once, in a row with Aunt Martha, when she had flung an ashtray at his head, he snapped his teeth abruptly shut in the middle of a howl of fury and turned on his heel and stalked out into the garden. We sat in silence and inexplicable horror and listened to his laughter booming in the flower-scented darkness outside, and I, cowering in my corner, felt my face grinning wildly, uncontrollably, at this intimation of splendour, of violence and of pain.

‘Well?’ said Granny Godkin calmly. ‘Have you managed to put us in the poorhouse yet?’

Papa, whistling very softly, raised his eyebrows and glanced at her, but continued to pace. Mama became elaborately interested in her fingernails.

‘Well?’ the old woman asked again.

He stopped behind her and looked down at the cards, tapping his foot to the beat of a silent melody. ‘Poorhouse?’ he murmured absently. ‘Black knave on the red queen.’

‘Pah!’

The cards rattled, and Mama bit her lip apprehensively. My father carried a chair from the corner and sat down by the table with his hands on his knees. I leaned against Mama's shoulder. They were shaping up for a fight, I saw it in my father's playful flinty grin, in the convulsive snapping of Granny Godkin's jaw.

‘Did you see that man, you know, what's-his-name?’ Mama asked, making a vain stab at nonchalance.

Papa lit one of his small dark cigars. The smoke, a bluish dove, hovered for a moment over the table and then flew slowly up into the shadows.

‘A very civil fellow,’ he said. ‘Very civil. Treated me to a feed of bacon and cabbage in Regan's. I know, Mr Godkin, you're a man I can trust’ Granny Godkin cackled briefly. ‘I sold him the long meadow,’ Papa added quietly.

We waited on Granny Godkin. She peered at the cards and shifted her dentures. Either she had not heard his last remark, or the significance of the words had not registered.

Trust!’ she said. ‘Huh!’

There would be no fight, not today. Mama, one hand resting lightly on her knee, relaxed and leaned far back on the chair, lifting her face to the window and the tender blue sky. Granny Godkin, her thoughts gone all away, shuffled the cards and shuffled them, slower, and slower. They made a silky sound, the cards, falling together. My father, his long legs elegantly crossed, smoked in silence, his eyes hooded. The sun shone on the table, on Mama's yellow hat. It was pleasant there in the silence of the dusty little room, surrounded by deck chairs and straw hats and other ghosts of forgotten summers. Often now, late at night, or working in the house on rainy days, I feel something soft and persistent pressing in on me, and with sadness and joy I welcome back this scene, or others like it, suffused with summer and silence, another world. Forgetting all I know, I try to describe these things, and only then do I realise, yet again, that the past is incommunicable.

5

THE BUTTERFLIES CAME in swarms in early summer, small blues, delicate creatures. There must have been something in the wood that attracted them, or in the garden, some rare wild plant perhaps. We got used to them, and when they found their way even into the house, and fluttered awkwardly, like clockwork flowers, around our heads at the breakfast table, it was with the tiniest frown of irritation that Mama rose to open the window, murmuring shoo, shoo. They were easily killed, I mean it would have been easy to kill them, while they went about their business on the lupins and the roses, but I never knowingly destroyed one of them, I don't know why. Indeed, in time I became their protector, their patron and friend, and I would carry them, throbbing in my cupped hands, out of the hall before Josie arrived with her mop to kill them. When I released them from the steps their incredulous drunken leap from my palm made the summer airs over the garden seem suddenly lighter, gayer, and as delicately tinted as the skyblue silken dust they left smeared on my fingers. Not that I had any love for them, or even liking. I wanted to kill them, but I did not. Some days my teeth ached with the desire for wanton slaughter, but I would not allow myself the pleasure, treasuring my benificence, and knowing anyway that if the situation became desperate there was nothing to stop me taking a rolled-up newspaper into the wood one afternoon and bludgeoning to extinction a whole species of lepidoptera, small blues, while they frittered away the first glorious days of summer.

It was in summer too that I came into my kingdom. The calendar date is lost, but the occasion is still invested in my mind with the sonorous harmony of a more complex, less tangible combination of pure numbers. There was a clearing in the wood, not a clearing, but an open place under the sadly drooping, slender boughs of a big tree. Mama sat at the edge of a white cloth spread on the grass, reading a book and brushing imaginary flies away from her cheek. At her feet my father lay on his back with his hands behind his head, quite still, and yet managing to give the impression of bouncing restlessly, tensely, on the springy turf. I watched, fascinated, this curious phenomenon, but soon the shifting patterns of light and leaf on the cloth distracted me, and there was another distraction, which it took me a while to identify, and it was this, that Mama had not once in ten minutes turned a page of her book. That was very strange. At last Papa stood up, stretched himself ostentatiously, and yawned. Mama's lack of interest in her book grew more intense, if that is possible, and I caught her glancing sideways at him with that furtive, mournful, altogether lovesick look which already I had come to know so well. Patting the last of his yawn with three fingertips, he considered the top of her head, the inclined pale plane of her jaw, and then turned and sauntered off into the trees, whistling through his teeth, his hands in his pockets. Soon she put her book away and followed him, as I knew she would. I was forgotten.

Our wood was one of nature's cripples. It covered, I suppose, three or four acres of the worst land on the farm, a hillside sloping down crookedly to the untended nether edge of the stagnant pond we called a lake. Under a couple of feet of soil there was a bed of solid rock, that intractable granite for which the area is notorious. On this unfriendly host the trees grew wicked and deformed, some of them so terribly twisted that they crawled horizontally across the hill, their warped branches warring with the undergrowth, while behind them, at some distance, the roots they had struggled to put down were thrust up again by the rock, queer maimed things. Here too, on the swollen trunks, were lymphatic mushrooms flourishing in sodden moss, and other things, reddish glandular blobs which I called dwarfs’ ears. It was a hideous, secretive and exciting place, I liked it there, and when, surfeited on the fetid air of the lower wood, I sought the sunlight above the hill, there on a high ridge, to lift my spirit, was the eponymous patch of birches, restless gay little trees which sang in summer, and in winter winds rattled together their bare branches as delicate as lace.

Left alone, I pulled pale stalks of grass from their sockets and crushed the soft flesh in my mouth. Timidly, almost unnoticed, there came breaking in upon me that music, palpable and tender, which a wood in summer makes, whose melody is always just beyond hearing, always enticing. Dreamily I wandered down through the trees, into the bluegreen gloom. Down there were flies, not the intricate translucent things which browsed among the birches, but vivid nightblue brutes with brittle bodies, swarming over the rot, and there were black birds too, under the bushes screaming. Somewhere afar a dog barked listlessly between precise pauses, and I heard the sound of an axe, and other sounds too numerous to name. I came to Cotter's place. This was a little house, in ruins, with everything gone under lyme grass and thorns but for one end wall with a fireplace halfway up it, and a shattered chimney with the black flue exposed, and over the fireplace a cracked mirror, a miracle of light, staring impassively