Birchwood (10 page)

DOWN IN THE GLOOM
of the kitchen Josie fed me bread and butter and bruised bananas and scalding tea. A naked bulb, like a drop of bright yellow fat, burned above the table where my stouthearted fireman, balancing his helmet on his knee, sat with his nose in a steaming mug. Each time I looked at him he winked slyly, as though we were conspirators. Perhaps we were? Josie, wrapped in a shapeless quilted dressing gown which had once been Granny Godkin's, stood silently by the stove stirring and stirring something in a huge saucepan. Her hair stood upright on her head, grey spikes and springs. I think she was asleep on her feet. Outside in the darkness a lone bird sang, foolishly welcoming the false dawn. Mama brought down my clothes and I dressed on the warm tiles beside the stove. Josie grinned at me sleepily. I felt like a little child again. We heard the fire wagon depart, and at the sound my rescuer started up in alarm. His helmet fell to the floor and rolled about drunkenly. He retrieved it quickly and sat down again, grinning sheepishly, and ever after that morning the angel of death has been for me a fat celestial fireman with a permanent wink and a helmet perilously balanced over one ear. Mama, with her fingers pressed to her cheek, sat by the table and watched me dressing.

‘You never cried,’ she mused, idly. ‘Never once, did you?’ I shook my head. She took me in her arms and kissed me tenderly. She had a smell, of milk, of hair, of violets, the smell of madness. ‘My Gabriel.’

Once, when I was very young, I had this strange experience. I was standing, I remember, by the french windows in the library looking out into a garden full of butterflies and summer, as gardens always seem to be when we are very young. I thought to open the windows and walk out there, into the sunlight, but with my fingers on the handle I hesitated, for no reason, and for an instant only, and then I went out. But I was followed by a terrifying notion that there was ahead of me, as far ahead as the duration of that momentary hesitation, a phantom of myself who mimicked my every movement precisely, but in another world, another time. That same conviction, but this time profounder and more terrible, was with me as I slipped out of the house at first light. It was a gauzy green dawn, damp and bright. The birds, my faithful friends! There were lavender shadows under the trees. The hayshed still smouldered, a black sore in the midst of spring's tempestuous greenery. I caught a glimpse of Papa down there, wandering in the ruins, dazed and lost. I left him there and went down the drive. Birchwood dwindled behind me. Far along the road the shimmering roofs of the town were visible, with here and there a little plume of ashblue smoke. I thought about Michael. Many things puzzled me. Why had Aunt Martha died? Did Rosie set fire to the shed in revenge for my abandoning her? Where was Michael? And my sister? All these questions, and many more. I longed for answers. O but no, I did not really long. They could wait, for another time.

PART II
Air and Angels

IT WAS STILL EARLY
when I reached the town. The sunlight was bluish, laden with soft dust. More like summer really than spring, except for that sensation of pins and needles in the air. The townsfolk were abed, but stirring, I could hear them. I was stared at by dogs, by sleepy cats with cloudy green poison in their eyes. I have always felt a friend to dumb creatures. A milk cart creaked down the narrow main street, the horse with its tail arched dropping a trail of steaming brown pats like hoofs come undone. The milkman wore trousers made from flourbags. He landed a spit between my feet. Admirable aim.

I sat on the steps below a fragment of an ancient rampart. The barracks with its barred windows faced me across the road. To my left was the priory, with broken tombstones, a tower and a green bronze bell. Monks were slaughtered there by Cromwell. Some hard thing struck me on the spine. It was the toe of a boot. He stood behind and above me on the steps with the sun at his back, his hands on his hips. He wore a dark-green frock-coat with black and gold frogging, tight white duck trousers, stout black boots and gaiters laced to the knee. On his square head a cocked hat sat, with a flowing ostrich plume in the band. A white wirebrush moustache bristled under his granite nose. The voice when he spoke was like a distant cannonade.

‘Richard FitzGilbert de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, stood there.’ He eyed me distastefully, pointing at the spot where I sat. ‘Strong-bow himself, that was, on them very steps! Now bugger off.’

A most extraordinary fellow. What had I done to merit his displeasure? And the outfit! Extraordinary. I retreated under that fierce blue stare and from a safe distance threw a stone at him. He shook his fist.

Whelp!

I wandered idly up through the town. A joybell chimed, its ponderous music dancing on the morning air. A band somewhere began to clear its brassy throats. Around me in the narrow crooked streets a concourse swelled. There were droves of children, boys in white shirts and sashes, and little girls very pretty in pale-blue dresses wearing flowers in their hair. Fat babies in the arms of their fat mothers hung out of upstairs windows. Shawled crones gathered in gaggles here and there, shuffling their black boots. The menfolk leaned on their blackthorn sticks, their ankles crossed, big hardfaced fellows with knobbly hands and battered tall hats. A priest with a red bullneck and cropped carroty hair, his cassock swinging, strode up and down barking orders, vigorously cuffing little boys. A dogfight broke out, fangs and fur everywhere, foam flying. The band with a discordant blast of music wheeled into view. Strongbow and a group of his peers marched smartly out of a sidestreet, their ostrich feathers dipping. It was the feast of Our Lady of the Harbour. There was to be a procession.

On the footpath near me I noticed a raffish pair, a rednosed portly old man in a tight black suit and an odd-looking hat perched on a head of grizzled curls, and a fat woman with lank black hair and a broad flat yellowish face. They watched the milling crowd with amiable though faintly derisive smiles. There was about them something curious, an air, I could not quite identify it, but certainly they were not of the town. And there were others too, I amused myself by picking them out from the crowd, a young man with a dark brow and hot black eyes, two strange pale girls, a spare stringy man with big ears, all of them ignoring each other yet all joined by an invisible bond. The most outlandish of the lot were the two blonde children, androgynous, identical, exquisite, who, with their arms linked and their heads together, stood sniggering at Strongbow and his men. They wore sandals and shorts and yellow tunics with tight gold collars. Their lips and cheeks were painted, their eyebrows drawn in black. When I looked again for the pair who had been beside me, they were gone. On a broken-down wooden gate near where they had stood a bright red poster was pinned.

PROSPERO'S MAGIC CIRCUS
by apointment to the
CROWNED HEADS OF EUROPE
magicians actors
acrobats clowns
wild beasts

THRILLS!

SPILLS!

EXCITEMENT!
Admission 6d
CHILDREN 2d
for one week only ‘WE WERE AMUSED’
HRH
The Queen

The others too were gone, but they too had left posters behind them, pinned to doors, stuck on windows, wrapped around lampposts. This bright spoor I followed. It led me down to the harbour, along the quay, a merry chase, until at last, in a field outside the town, I spied their horsedrawn caravans parked beside a big red tent. The caravans were garish ramshackle affairs daubed with rainbows of peeling paint, with stovepipe chimneys and poky little windows and halfdoors at the front. Grasses and moss, even a primrose or two, sprouted between the warped boards of the barrel-shaped roofs. The horses, starved bony brutes, stood about the field with drooping heads, spancelled, apparently asleep. The tent was crooked, and sagged ominously. A woman unseen began to sing. That sad song, rising through the still spring morning, called to me. I entered the field. The old boy with the odd hat sat sprawled on the steps at the rear of one of the caravans with his hands clasped on his big belly and his rapt smiling face turned upward toward the open door, from whence the singing came. It stopped abruptly, and I stepped forward.

Tardon me, sir. Are you Mr Prospero?’

The old man started and peered at me over his shoulder. Behind him, in the gloom of the doorway, one of the pale girls, the singer, was sitting on a chair, silent now, pulling a daisy asunder with her long glittering nails.

‘Eh?’ the old man grunted. He had plump pink lips and small bright blue eyes, a hooked nose. I remember his boots, worn thin and wrinkled like black paper.

‘Are you—?’

‘I am not,’ he answered cheerfully. Tuck off now.’

The pale girl spoke briefly in a low voice. He looked up at her, frowned, and turned to me again.

‘Why, I believe you're right, my dear,’ he murmured. ‘Well well.’ He struggled up from his sprawling position, but did not rise, and leaned forward to scrutinise my face, my clothes, and craned his neck and peered at the pack on my back. ‘A travelling man, I perceive. Tell me, boy, what is your name?’

‘Gabriel, sir.’

‘Gabriel Sir?’

‘No sir, Godkin. Gabriel Godkin.’

He raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips.

‘Godkin, eh? Well now, that's a fine name to have, a fine old name. And tell me this now, Gabriel Godkin, who sent you here?’ I did not answer. ‘And you come from where?’ Again, no answer. My silence seemed to satisfy him. He sat and beamed at me with his plump hands resting on his knees. Behind him the girl stirred and sighed. Her face was wide at the eyes, white, curiously boneless. She was not pretty, I would not say pretty, but striking, certainly, with those eyes, the straw-coloured hair, that trancelike calm. The old boy chuckled softly and glanced up at her.

‘He wants to see Prospero, did you hear? Did you hear that?’ He turned to me once again, shaking his head, still beaming.
‘Nobody sees Prospero.
Why, I don't recall that I ever saw him myself! How about that now. You don't say much, do you, Gabriel Godkin? Still, there are worse faults, worse faults.’ He slapped his knees and stood up, hoisted up his trousers, tugged at his tight waistcoat. In spite of his bulk and the untidiness it entailed he possessed a certain elegance. We shook hands solemnly.

‘I am Silas,’ he said. ‘Come along with me now.’

I followed him down the line of caravans to the largest of them, painted black, and there, with another smile, in silence, he led me up the steps. They were all in there, perched on stools, reclining on the narrow bunks, standing idly about, the youth with the hot eyes, the fat woman, golden children, all. There was a great silence, and a smell of boiled tea. At my back the pale girl entered quietly. She went and stood by her twin, who was her double except for Ker ravenblack hair. No one said a word, but they all smiled, a symphony of strange smiles around me. Silas rubbed his hands.

‘Well here we are,’ he said. ‘Allow me to present—this is Angel, and Mario there, young Justin and Juliette.’ The painted children bowed and tittered. ‘And the baba under the table, little Sophie. Come out and say howdedoo, baba. Shy, are you? This is Magnus, and Sybil here, and last, but ah! the very best, my darling girls, Ada, Ida.’ He laid a hand on my shoulder and took a deep breath. ‘Children, this is Gabriel Godkin.’

I was confused. The names all slipped away from the faces, into a jumble. The tall slender woman with flame-red hair and agate eyes, Sybil it was, turned her face from the window and looked at me briefly, coldly. Still no one spoke, but some smiled. I felt excitement and unease. It seemed to me that I was being made to undergo a test, or play in a game the rules of which I did not know. Silas put his hands in his pockets and chuckled again, and all at once I recognised the nature of the bond between them. Laughter! O wicked, mind you, and vicious perhaps, but laughter for all that. And now I laughed too, but, like theirs, my laughter made no sound, no sound at all.

SILAS TOOK ME
next on a tour of his collapsible kingdom. Now strictly speaking it was not a circus at all, but a kind of travelling theatre. Here was no big top strung with a filigree of tightropes and gleaming trapeze bars, but a long rectangular tent with benches and a stage, the latter an awkward hinged affair which took a workparty of four an hour to dismantle. The canvas roof above us, cooking slowly in the sun, gave off a smell of sweat and glue. I felt obscurely betrayed. There were worse disappointments in store. Out behind the tent we found the wild beasts promised by the poster, a melancholy tubercular grey monkey in a birdcage, and a motheaten tiger lying motionless behind bamboo bars on a trailer. The monkey bared his yellow teeth and turned contemptuously away from us, displaying his skinned purplish backside. I peered into the tiger's glassy yellow eye and ventured to enquire if it was alive. Silas laughed.

‘Stuffed!’ he cried, greatly tickled. ‘Yet very lifelike, would you not say? Fearsome. Ha!’ He clasped his hands on the shelf of his big belly and beamed at me, not without fondness, amused by my chagrin. ‘It is
real
, you know, Gabriel. They find it quite convincing.’

They
were the folk who paid to look upon these wonders. There was both mockery and reverence in the way he spoke the word. People believed the shoddy dreams he sold them! The fact filled him with awe.

‘You see, my boy, they pay to gape at our stuffed friend here, to make faces at Albert the monkey, to watch us capering about the stage, they
pay
, mark you, and their pennies work like magic wands, transforming all they buy.’

We sat down side by side on the shaft of the trailer. He took from his waistcoat pocket a short black pipe and stuck it between his teeth, folded his arms and gazed at the blue hills away behind the town. I watched him suspiciously, with the uneasy feeling that he was making fun of me. He was an odd old man. I liked him. The sun, still low, was in our faces, and now I saw a figure approach out of a mist of light, skimming down the path by the caravans, a tiny figure on a threewheeled cycle. At first I thought it must be Prospero, and I stared at Silas. He said nothing. The little man pulled up before us and put one sharp shoe to the ground. He had a big square head and enormous hands. His black eyebrows and his hair were as smooth as fur. He wore a neat grey suit tightly buttoned. A red scarf was knotted at his throat. He was less than four feet tall.

‘Well well,’ said Silas, by way of greeting. ‘There you are.’

The little man stepped down from his cycle, tugged the wrinkles out of his jacket deftly with finger and thumb, and gravely bowed.

‘Silas, my friend, how are you? And…?’

‘This is Gabriel.’

He shook my hand.

‘The name is Rainbird,’ he said loftily, as though presenting to me something of inestimable value. We made room for him on the shaft and he settled himself daintily between us, clasping his mighty hands in his lap. Silas looked at him over his pipe and asked,

‘Well, any news?’

Rainbird squirmed, feigning a delicious horror.

‘What a day, O! what a day. Would you believe it, I was knocked off my bike. Just look at my things.’ There were a few faint mudstains on his jacket and his shoes were damp. ‘A child it was, a little girl, no higher than that. I could have slapped her face, I really could. And what's so funny, may I ask?’ Silas was chuckling. He turned his laughter into a cough and waved his hands apologetically. Rainbird sniffed. ‘I see nothing funny, I'm sure.’

He turned his attention to me and looked me up and down with a calm appraising gaze, and, still with his odd eye upon me, said to Silas,

‘Not much doing in these parts. Tenant farms, mostly. A village or two. They say the gentry are trigger-happy. Go north is our best bet.’

Silas nodded, paying scant attention to this information. He said to me,

‘Rainbird is our scout.’

The little man glared at him.

‘O that's all,’ he said, with heavy sarcasm. ‘Our
scout.
Nothing more.’

Silas grinned, still gazing away toward the hills.

‘Does a couple of tricks too, for the show.’

‘Tricks! Well!’ cried Rainbird. He ruminated darkly for a while, then shrugged and turned to me again. ‘Well Gabriel? Another hopeful, I suppose?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Running away from home, are you?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Aha, I thought so.’

‘Sir, the girl, the one who knocked you off your bike…?’

Although Silas did not stir, or look at me, I fancied that his delicate almost pointed ears quivered. I was sorry at once that I had spoken, and cursed myself inwardly for my incontinence. Had I not vowed that I would proceed upon my quest in silence cunningly? Now here I was, blurting out my heart's secrets, with no going back. Rainbird was examining me with a new interest, waiting for me to finish my question. When he saw that I would not, he said,

‘She was some child, I don't know. Why?’

Silas took the pipe out of his mouth and peered into the bowl, poked at the dottle with the nail of his little finger, clamped the pipe between his teeth again, gave it a couple of experimental puffs and put a match to it. He was waiting for me to proceed, and a perfect blue smoke ring, hovering above his head, seemed somehow to betray, unsuspected by himself, the very shape of his interest. Rainbird glanced inquiringly from one of us to the other. I found to my surprise that I had begun to enjoy my position at the centre of attention.

‘Well, I'm searching for someone, you see,’ I said, and added, faintly, ‘a girl.’

Rainbird's mouth formed a little circle, and he said,

‘Oo, are you now, indeed?’

‘Yes. My sister.’ They looked at each other and nodded slowly, apparently much impressed. ‘My twin,’ I said, quite reckless now. ‘She was stolen—’

‘By fairies?’ Rainbird asked innocently.

‘No no. I never knew her, you see, I mean I don't remember her, but I'm sure…that is I…’

I stopped, and looked at them suspiciously. They were altogether too solemn. Silas put a florid red handkerchief to his nose and blew a trumpet blast. Rainbird's nostrils quivered peculiarly.

‘And her name?’ he asked.

‘I—I don't know.’

‘O? And what does she look like?’

Silas nudged him.

‘He doesn't know that either, I'll bet.’

They brooded for a moment, and Rainbird drew a deep breath and said gravely,

‘Why then you have plenty of scope, haven't you?’

Silas gave a great sneeze of laughter, and Rainbird hugged his knees, pleased as punch with his joke. Their merriment made the shaft tremble under us. I could not understand it. Granted, my story had sounded silly, but why did they find it so screamingly funny? Once again I felt, as I had felt in the caravan earlier, that I was the only one who was ignorant of the rules of their game.

‘Plenty of scope
!’ Rainbird squeaked, beside himself, and slapped Silas on the back. The old man began to cough uproariously. After a while their hilarity subsided, and Rainbird happily swung his little legs. I said icily,

‘I have a picture of her, you know.’

Silas gave me a curious glance.

‘I'm sure you have,’ he murmured, and it was impossible to tell from his tone whether he believed me or was being sarcastic. Without another word I strode away from them, to the black caravan under the steps of which I had left my pack. The golden children, Justin and Juliette, leaned out over the halfdoor and watched me eagerly as I rummaged through my things and brought out the small framed photograph. I hurried back the way I had come, and met Rainbird and Silas strolling with the cycle between them. Silas took the picture from me, and glanced at it and handed it to Rainbird, who winked.

‘She's a dandy,’ he said, and sniggered.

Silas laid his hand on my head and smiled at me benignly.

‘Come along,’ he said, ‘come along, Sir Smile.’