patterns woven by these set-dances of life shifted gradually, until the whole mesh of emphasis and echo between the inhabitants of the house was warped. New alliances were struck. Granny Godkin astonished us all that first morning when, having risen at an unprecedented late hour, she embraced her tear-stained daughter before the drawing-room fire and spoke to her kindly, even lovingly. They closeted themselves in the old woman's room and were not seen again until that evening, when my grandfather was allowed into the sanctum, another precedent, in my time at least. Later he was led out in a flood of maudlin tears. Mama seemed uncertain whether all this lovingkindness relieved or disquieted her, but she smiled as always, and believed the best of people, as always. My father stalked softly about the house wearing a scowl of profound suspicion. Nothing is simple.
My schooling began almost immediately. By any other standards than my own, Aunt Martha was a dreadful teacher, but by mine she was ideal. She was blissfully ignorant of those subjects which a little boy is supposed to study, and I sometimes wondered if she was aware that such esoteric things as Latin, or vulgar fractions, existed in any sense that could apply to her young charge. To Aunt Martha, education was simply a synonym for books, any and all books, and since what one read was irrelevant so long as one did read, the selection was entirely arbitrary. After all, I could not know everything, so what did it matter which parts of the great sum of knowledge I approached? The only imprimatur a subject required was her ignorance of it, and the scope of her ignorance was impressive. For instance, she was convinced that if one sailed steadily westward along the equator one would, without ever touching dry land, astonish the point from which one had departed by sneaking up on it from behind eighty days later, or perhaps it was seventy-nine, one had to reckon with something called the dateline. Verne, therefore, with the help of Columbus and Marco Polo, taught me my befogged geography, not its facts but its poetry, for they delineated not meridians and poles, but a glorious chart of dreams. Ferdinand and Isabella sailed a bright balloon in search of Cathay, that fabulous rumour in the east, and I followed them on my paper wings.
I did not like Aunt Martha, she was a hard woman to like, but, having been ignored all my short life by all the family save Mama, who ignored me in her own way by treating me as an extension of herself, the fact that my aunt would devote three hours of her day solely to me was, shall I say flattering? Directly breakfast was over on the day after her arrival she announced briskly that she was ready to begin the great task. The announcement was greeted by a weary silence, and when she tried again, in case we had not heard the first time, Papa showed his teeth in a smile and inquired with ominous sweetness if we might be allowed to digest the bloody breakfast before she started giving orders. At that she threw down her napkin, the unmistakeable battle signal of the Godkins, but Mama jumped up and said of course, of course, the sooner the better, no time to lose, the child was backward enough as it was, and she whisked Aunt Martha and me up to the schoolroom.
This was a damp gloomy place at the top of the house, a relic of that lost age when the women of Birchwood bore whole battalions of children avid for knowledge. There were a dozen little desks ranged in three neat rows of four facing a delicately-made spindly lectern, curiously reminiscent of the ideal of a Victorian governess for whose service it had been built. Behind the lectern there was a large triangular window, silvered with rain now but which on bright days offered a cruelly enticing view across fields to the beach and the gay blue sea. Long blackboards ran the length of both walls to right and left of the desks, one of them set higher than the other owing to the slope of the ceiling. This imbalance added an incongruously jaunty touch to the sober oakbrown atmosphere of the room. Josie and her erratic duster had been there before us, but the legs of the lectern were still draped with an intricate filigree of cobwebs.
This is grand,’ Aunt Martha said dubiously. The place seemed fitted for a sterner sense of duty than hers. Mama, smiling, nodding encouragement, backed out of the room and softly closed the door. I sat down at one of the desks. How cold and smooth was the wood. The rain drummed on the window, a melancholy whisper. Aunt Martha stood and stared out of unfocused eyes, with that expression of quiet baffled despair which always seemed to take hold of the faces of grown-ups when their thoughts forgot themselves. I drew invisible patterns on the desk with a fingertip. The squeak of my nail on the wood recalled her from her brooding. She went and crouched over the ancient oilstove in the corner, chafing her hands and muttering under her breath. With her imitation smile she turned to me.
‘Well Gabriel, what do you know and not know? What would you like to learn?’
Nothing. Mama had taught me to read, in a perfunctory kind of way, and of course I knew my prayers off by rote, but apart from these graces I was a small, well-behaved savage. I wonder if I have changed, even yet? I have forgotten my prayers, that is something. Aunt Martha's bright smile quailed before my silence, and she wandered off about the room, searching fretfully for something that might interest me. She pushed open a sliding wooden panel in the wall and found a sunken bookcase.
‘Ah, now this is what we need. Let's see, how about-poo! this dust. I suppose you've read all these already, have you? No? Well, we'll see if we can find something exciting, something really…’
I stopped listening, and cautiously opened the lid of the desk. Inside I found a blunt pencil, a jotter with curled yellow leaves, and a hard shrunken brown thing like a nut, which on closer inspection turned out to be an ancient apple core. Who had left these relics here for me to find? My imagination failed against such a mystery. Dead, all dead. My spine tingled. Aunt Martha at last chose a book, and pushed the desk beside me close to mine. She sat down. The book was called
‘Do you never miss-? but of course you wouldn't, you couldn't have known…’ She laughed shrilly. She seemed nervous. Her fingers danced by themselves on the desk. ‘How silly I am! Aren't I silly, Gabriel? Tell me, tell me this, would you like a little sister to play with, hmm?’ Suddenly, to my disgust and intense discomfort, she swept me into her arms. The book tumbled to the floor. ‘You poor child,’ she whispered, her breath flowing down my cheek like warm syrup. ‘You poor poor child!’ She thrust me away from her with that hearty husky tenderness at which she was adept, and, holding me at arm's length, gazed upon me with brimming eyes. ‘Your Mama says you never cry…?’
I stared fixedly past her shoulder and squirmed slowly, cautiously, out of her clutches. So we sat for a moment, panting softly. It was all so very odd. I felt that some vital and strange event had taken place without my noticing. Aunt Martha suddenly smiled her sly smile, looking inexplicably triumphant. She picked up the book from the floor.
‘Gabriel and Rose…’
Her voice followed me down two flights of stairs before it faded. At the door of the library Mama met me with a look of alarm.
‘Where are you off to? Has Aunt Martha…? Gabriel? What are you doing?’
On a little low table by the bookshelves there was a small framed photograph of a young girl in white standing among leaves in a garden, leaning out of the tree's deep shade into a mist of sunlight. In one hand she held a flower. A rose. Look!
9
THE MAIN REASON I was not sent away to a proper school was that we could not afford it. The finances of Birchwood were dwindling at the same rate as the decline of Papa's interest in the farm, which had never been great anyway. I can still see him, with ink-stained fingers and collar agape, his gold tooth glittering, crouched at his desk in the library in a pool of lamplight, scrabbling desperately among a litter of bills, and, a little later, standing in the shadows, where glass clinked furtively on glass, running his fingers through his hair, soothing himself. Of course our genteel slide toward penury was never mentioned, not in my presence, but the silent evidence of it was everywhere around me, in the cracked paint and the missing tiles, the dry rot that ate its way
