she was a child, and was once, I believe, denounced from the popish pulpit in a veiled though obvious reference to bad companions. However, it was not until a certain summer of her young womanhood that she gave the gossips some real red meat on which to chew, and she was hardly sure of her own condition before the town also knew, in that mysterious way towns have of knowing such things, that she was expecting a little surprise. All hell broke loose in the happy house of Birchwood. Granny Godkin beat her daughter about the head with a silver-backed hairbrush. Papa returned from his honeymoon.
For nine long months Martha was not allowed outside the grounds. She spent her time wandering in the wood, or sitting by the lake, with a sly secret smile in her eyes, hatching her plot. Her firstborn arrived that spring day of storm and panic when the circus invaded Birchwood, and Papa, dismounting that evening by the fountain, looked up and saw an infant lifted in the window. However, that infant was I, but more of that presently. Aunt Martha had already prepared for her departure. She paused only long enough to confer with Papa behind locked doors, and then bundled up her son and took flight. Granny Godkin stayed in bed for a week.
And Martha's mysterious lover? Rumour had an inspired farrago of a story, according to which the leader of the Magic Circus, the travelling troupe of shams which had laid siege to our house, one Prospero by name, a magician apparently, had with Aunt Martha's enthusiastic cooperation conjured up the makings of that homunculus that stood beside me now gaping at its mother. I cannot say where rumour found evidence to support its claims, but the story had one point in its favour, that is, it held that the invasion by the circus was nothing more, or less, than Prospero's effort to claim his son and heir. Well, I shall say nothing. People must have their myths. Some said that Prospero was a cripple, some that he had a cloven hoof. One story, the favourite, and still current, had him a midget! A few held, however, that the magician did not exist. I shall say nothing.
After Aunt Martha's departure, Granny Godkin had never spoken her name again until, these many years later, a letter arrived to say that the wanton was coming home. Then my grandmother smiled her smile, and wrote a gracious reply, and waited, and now Martha had returned, and she was to tutor me in the sciences and humanities, god help me.
Michael and I stood with our eyes out on stalks and watched that grief bubbling until Mama turned at last and looked at us reproachfully. Her hand, behind her back where Aunt Martha could not see it, indicated the door. Reluctantly, we left the room, and plodded up the stairs with solemn tread, like two grave little old men. This is the landing, a spacious carpeted court, twin to the hall below, with tall gleaming windows affording a view across trees and fields to the quivering pale line of the distant sea. And there is the lake, see it gleam, wind-whipped. Michael said nothing, but paced behind me in silence, turning his eyes obediently where I pointed. Birchwood is a big house, three storeys topped by a warren of attics. We trailed through the empty bedrooms, pausing here before a pockmarked mirror, there by a trunk mysteriously crammed with broken crockery. I showed him the narrow back stairs which crept down surreptitiously, under bald linoleum, to a gloomy subterranean vault wedged between two doors, a rickety one bolted against the creeping green damp of the back yard, and another, panelled with green glass, opening on a potted palm and three deep steps which led, presto!, into the front hall. We examined the muddy paintings in the library, the bust of an unidentified blind Greek, the complicated affair of rods and knobs by which the french windows were locked. Josie was on her hands and knees under the dining-room table, motionless, staring at nothing. We stood in the doorway and looked at her, and then retired silently. Aunt Martha was still weeping by the drawing-room fire. Mama glared at us. We climbed the stairs again.
In my room, Michael sat on the bed with his hands dangling between his bony knees while I laid out my toys for his delectation in an arc before him on the floor. We stared at them as we had stared at everything eise, speechless and bored. In my imagination I was standing haughtily over him, with a hand resting elegantly on my hip, telling him just how things were, blockhead, this is my house, and these are my toys, so don't get any ideas, see?
‘You have a lot of things,’ he said, with a faint, faintly mocking smile, though whether it was me or himself that he mocked I could not tell, though I can now.
My most precious toy, if that is the right word, was a magnificent circular jigsaw puzzle of over two thousand tiny wafer-thin pieces. After weeks of intermittent labour varying between a furious panicstricken scrabbling and the smiling swoon of delight when the right piece, the only possible piece, fell into its place in the mosaic, I had assembled out of it a glorious gold and blue painting of a Renaissance madonna, a picture which, in the completed puzzle, glowed with a sense of light and purity, of palpable intensity, which was mysteriously absent from its sibling reproduced on the lid of its box. This tormentor now lay docile at Michael's feet, where he examined it with uncertain sidelong glances. Abruptly, before I could stop him, he bent and picked up the board. Horrified, I tried to snatch it from him, it tilted, and the puzzle glided off, seemed to hang intact in mid-air for a moment, and then fell to the carpet and shattered with an absurdly inadequate, heartbreaking little clatter. Michael stared at the pieces, his mouth moving silently. Any colour there was in his face faded, leaving it a bonewhite mask of fury. The intensity of this speechless rage frightened me. I looked again at the shattered thing, and I could have wept.
I sat down on the highest step of the stairs, my favourite place to sulk, and was in time to see Granny Godkin hobble into the drawing room. The house rang with angry voices, the slamming of doors, heavy footfalls. Godkin fights were always dispersed, mobile affairs that sprawled across two or three rooms simultaneously. Michael came and sat down quietly by my side. I ignored him. Downstairs, the drawing-room door flew open and my father strode out, halted, looked up at us without seeing us, and turned back in the doorway and shouted,
‘No!’
He plunged across the hall into the library, and a moment later an unseen hand gently closed the drawing-room door. Michael cleared his throat.
‘Ever see juggling?’ he asked.
I disdained to answer. Granda Godkin came out of the dining room and, stealthily, his ear turned toward the drawing room, tiptoed after Papa into the library, only to come flying out again immediately and flee to the back of the house. Michael took from his pocket a chipped blue building block, a marble and a rubber ball. He began to juggle. At first it went clumsily, he dropped the ball, hit himself on the nose with the block, but then all abruptly changed, a rhythm appeared, one could almost hear it, like the airy beat of a bird's wing, and in his hands he spun a trembling pale blue hoop of light. His uplifted face gleamed from the effort of concentration as he leaned this way and that, following a sudden dip of the block, the wayward flight of the ball, and I found myself thinking of air and angels, of silence, of translucent planes of pale blue glass in space gliding through illusory, gleaming and perfect combinations. My puzzle seemed a paltry thing compared to this beauty, this, this
Michael retrieved the ball, stood upright, and came slowly back up the stairs, wiping the sweat from his forehead. He stopped below me and leaned against the banisters, tossing the ball from hand to hand. We were silent for a moment, and then he said,
‘She's always crying.’ He waited for me to reply. I could think of nothing to say. We considered the ceiling. He sighed. ‘She gives me a pain.’
We tittered. He sat down beside me and handed me the ball.
‘Hard to juggle with, a ball,’ he said. ‘Too light.’
I agreed.
8
I HAD EXPECTED, perhaps even hoped, that their arrival would immediately transform life at Birchwood. Nothing is so simple. Things changed, certainly, but slowly, and in subtle ways. The morning rituals, the fights, the elaborate, barely edible evening dinners, they remained unaltered, but the
