rain slide across the black glass, when Papa returned. I looked down through the banisters to the dark hall in time to see his foreshortened figure crash into a chair and send it spinning, and hear his fiercely whispered
‘Are you all right?’
He stood swaying on one leg, rubbing his knee, and did not answer her.
‘Are you-?’
Tm grand, grand!’ He edged around her to the door, but she plucked at his sleeve and whispered urgently into his ear. He shook his head irritably. ‘Not a drop, I tell you!’
They went through the door, and I crept downstairs. Josie came forward from the shadows bearing a noisome tray of food, and bent and applied her ear to the keyhole and gave me a conspiratorial wink.
‘Ructions!’ she whispered gleefully. Josie derived much bleak amusement from my family's doings. She had been with us for years. Her name was Cotter. They said she had a husband somewhere. She pushed open the door with her foot and entered. Framed by the doorway, the table and the celebrants floated in a little haven of candlelight. Mama sat facing the fireplace with her back turned to me. Granda Godkin's left eye suddenly sprang at me with alarming vacancy over her shoulder. Of my grandmother I could only see her disembodied sharp little face suspended over her plate. Papa stood by the table with one hand in his pocket and the other holding a glass which winked out of a dozen gold and amber eyes. Josie piled food on their plates. Granny Godkin peered suspiciously at her portion and said,
‘It doesn't trouble your conscience, I suppose, Joseph, that it's not yours to sell?-Is this supposed to be
Papa grinned.
Granny Godkin threw up her hands in horror, and turned to Mama. ‘O! O! Beatrice, do you hear, he's wishing his own father dead!’
Mama said nothing, but let fall an abrupt lugubrious sob and clapped a hand over her mouth, bowing her head. Josie took up the empty tray. My father finished his drink and sauntered away into the shadows. Granda Godkin farted softly. All these, my loved ones. The pale radiance of the candlelight seemed to invest them with a morose yet passionate vividness, to intensify them, and they became for me, suddenly, creatures with a separate life, who would continue to exist even when I was not there to imagine them, and I recognised, perhaps for the first time, the remote, immutable and persistent nature of the love I wasted on them, as if I had love to waste. Granny Godkin, grinding her jaws in a prelude to another sortie, pointed a chicken leg accusingly at my invisible father, Mama lifted her head and blotted out Granda's glazed staring eye, and then, ah and then, Josie shut the door on them, locking from my sight this new mythology.
I went to bed filled with a vague excitement, conscious that a new mysterious eminence had arisen in my life.
7
SO BIRCHWOOD was to be mine, that much I understood, albeit dimly. What I failed to see was the plot to deprive me of my inheritance. Aunt Martha was the instigator and prime conspirator. She arrived one bright windy morning in June. There was a rap upon the door, and expectant whispering outside, and then she was in the hall, hallooing her presence, straightening her son's carroty hair, tipping Nockter for having carried in the bags, all at the same time, all the time talking. She was a small intense young woman, quick as a bird, with short red hair and a pale, pointed face. Mama peered apprehensively out of the drawing room, and Aunt Martha let her coat fall to the floor and clapped her little hands.
‘Martha…O.’
They made a rush at each other, and smacked together in an awkward embrace. Nockter twirled his cap in his fingers and backed out of the hall, and Aunt Martha turned away from her sister-in-law and alighted on me with a tiny cry.
‘And this must be Gabriel! My, but isn't he a fine big man? We're going to be great friends, aren't we, Gabriel?’
We were not. I stood stiff and silent as she hugged me, bending away from her aromatic bosom. ‘His father's boy,’ she said gaily, and releasing me without further ceremony, she reached out a fumbling hand behind her and caught hold of her son. ‘This is Michael, also a son of his father, god forgive us. Say how do you do-and try not to dribble, dear.’
He was an odd-looking fellow, small and frail, with sly bright eyes and a fearsome set of teeth. I could see in him nothing of his mother except for his incongruously delicate skin, pale and perfect alabaster, translucent almost. He shuffled his feet while those eyes under their straw-coloured lashes avoided ours, and Aunt Martha, considering him glumly, said,
‘My little crucifixion.’
Mama smiled timidly at the boy.
Toor child,’ she murmured. He glanced at her quickly, sharply, and lowered his gaze again. Aunt Martha gave a great squawk of laughter.
‘O Beatrice, as soft as ever…’ She stopped, and stared past us toward the stairs, at the head of which my father was standing. He was in shirt sleeves, collarless, with hair unkempt, wearing half a beard of lather, staring stonily back into his sister's stare.
‘Hello, dear brother,’ she said softly, with what I was to come to call her cat-smile, it was so coldly calculating. He did not answer, but merely stood and looked, with one eyebrow quivering, and then went back into the bathroom. The hall was very still, waiting on Aunt Martha. Her eyes were slits, and something peculiar had happened to her mouth. She felt us watching her, and shrugged and turned again to Mama with a bright smile. ‘Trissy, tell me all the news, I must hear all the news! Are you still the only sane one in this madhouse?’ Mama blushed, and glanced nervously up the stairs. Aunt Martha laid a hand on her arm. ‘Don't worry about him, I don't mind, really, I'm used to it by now.’
It was not my father who worried Mama, but Granny Godkin. The time had come and gone for her morning tea and still her curtains had not been drawn. The choice now was to leave her there to work herself into a temper, or bring her down to greet her long-lost daughter. What a choice! We went into the drawing room.
The women sat down by the fire, and Aunt Martha immediately launched into a cheerful account of her trials and troubles. I paid no attention to her tedious rigmarole. Michael and I stood before the window, locked in a tingling silence, and frowned out at the garden where a pair of sparrows were fighting like frantic mechanical toys. A silent scream of boredom began to rise within me, but there rose also a vague fear, vague sense of being threatened by the arrival of this virago and her cretin. No, that is not true. Only hindsight has endowed me with such a keen nose for nuance. I glanced at the boy by my side. He was no longer watching the garden, for something new was happening behind us, and I had barely time to notice the hush that had descended on the room before there came a kind of strangled wail, and slowly, hardly able to believe our luck, we turned to the fire. Aunt Martha was biting her knuckles and weeping, crouched piteously in her chair with her head bowed. Mama stood over her patting her shoulder and making incoherent little noises meant to comfort, and Michael and I, holding our breath, took one cautious step forward and gazed blissfully upon the immensely satisfying spectacle of a grown-up dissolving in a puddle of grief.
Of all our histories, Aunt Martha's is perhaps the most bizarre. She was the black sheep of the Godkins, if such a term means anything when speaking of my family. In the town she was known as a brazen hussy from the time
