Birchwood (6 page)

WITH GRANDA GODKIN
gone at last my father came into his inheritance. On the very day that the will was read, confirming his freedom, Papa sold off fifty acres to old man Gaddern of Halfmile House, who, it was rumoured, was financing the rebels in the area, partly from sympathy but mostly as a means of ensuring the safety of his portion of the new State the revolution would found. Along with other sales made on the sly while my grandfather was still alive, this latest iniquity left Birchwood crippled, with the Gaddern swine crowding us on three sides and the sea at our back. Papa got drunk at dinner that night, and when Granny Godkin launched her inevitable attack on him he just sat back and laughed at her, picking his teeth with a matchstick.

‘Times are hard, mother, times are hard. Have another glass of wine.’

‘Wine! Your father not cold in his grave and you…you…You were only waiting for him to die. Are you human at all?’

‘Aye, unlike yourself, all too human. Show me your glass here, come on.’

The old woman began to blubber, not very convincingly, and turned to Aunt Martha for support. If Papa was Granda Godkin's heir, his sister was being groomed as Granny's. Someone had to carry on the struggle. Martha, looking splendidly menacing in black, went to her mother's side to comfort her.

‘You're a pig, Joseph Godkin,’ said my aunt. ‘You always were.’

He laughed, and banged the table with his fist.

‘Beatrice, do you hear? That's the thanks we get for taking her and her brat in off the roads.’

Mama would not lift her head. She said quietly,

‘Joe, please, the boys…’

‘Ah let them listen, see what they'll be up against when the time comes.’ He turned to his sister again and considered her contemptuously. ‘By Christ, it's a laugh. The whores are on horseback.’

Aunt Martha grimaced in disgust and would not answer him. Granny Godkin, disappointed I think at her protege's apparent lack of spirit, pushed her daughter out of the line of fire and cried,

‘A goodfornothing drunkard, that's all you are.
And god forgive me that I ever had you.
Now!’

Papa opened his mouth and closed it again, looking slowly from one of us to the other. We avoided his eye. His uncertain gaze distressed us. It was unthinkable that he, the rock on which our fortunes so perilously teetered, should crack under the pressure of a mere family row. Mama's knife clattered as she dropped it on her plate. She blushed. On occasions such as this her greatest wish seemed to be to merge quietly into the wallpaper and disappear. Michael, hunched over his dinner, looked out cautiously at Aunt Martha from under his pale brows. Papa shook his head wearily and crossed with heavy tread to the french windows and drew them open on the still night. From the garden there entered the fragrance of flowers and trees, of earth, a sturdy sensuousness which hovered on the thick tepid air of the room like an uninvited and unwelcome guest. Papa chuckled softly, rocking on his heels.

‘We might as well get what we can while we can,’ he said softly. ‘They're taking over.’

He put his hands into his pockets and sauntered off into the darkness, whistling. Granny Godkin shrugged, and clutched her shawl tightly about her shoulders.

‘Drunken nonsense!’ she snapped. ‘Rubbish. Beatrice! Will you shut that window before I catch my death.’

Mama obediently rose to close out the unsettling night, but suddenly Papa reared up out of the darkness, wild-eyed, his hair on end and his suit smeared with mud, a startling transfiguration. He pushed Mama aside and flung himself at Aunt Martha.

‘YouT
he roared, and thrust a trembling forefinger under her nose. ‘You and your whelp can get out if you don't like it here. Nothing to stop you!’

Aunt Martha folded her arms and gazed at him calmly, smiling faintly. His eyes bulged, and two small bright crimson stains appeared on his cheekbones. His tie was twisted under his left ear. I knew, by a sudden unimpeachable intuition, that he had tripped over the bicycle which I had left lying on its side on the lawn, and I had to look into Mama's tormented face to keep myself from laughing.

‘PigS
said Aunt Martha, jabbing the word like a needle into Papa's face, and carelessly picked a thread from her sleeve. He reached out behind him to the half-dead wine bottle on the table and flung it across the room. It burst against the wall with an understated plop and sprayed blood-red wine down Michael's back. A curved splinter of pink glass flew up in an arc and splashed into the water jug beside Granny Godkin's plate, and the old woman gave a squeak of fright. Aunt Martha sprang to her feet, ready to howl, but Papa suddenly turned to her with an admonitory finger to his lips. He smiled. She stood aghast, her mouth and eyes wide open, and he took his finger from his lips and waved it roguishly at her and then stalked softly out of the room. I was shocked, not by his violence, that was nothing new, but by something odd and humourously sinister which I had perceived in that balletic moment between them, a moment frozen forever for me in the precise picture of his smile which I retain to this day. Mama stared at her sister-in-law, and through clenched teeth produced a weird sound, a kind of snarl, full of pain and jealousy. Aunt Martha turned her back on the room disdainfully.
Jealousy?

‘Is he gone mad or what?’ Granny Godkin demanded, glaring petulantly at the two women. She liked to start these fights and then pretend that those who fought with her were unreasonable to the point of insanity. ‘The DTs,’ she muttered. ‘Definitely.’

‘O shut up!’ Aunt Martha cried, and plunged her hands into her hair. Michael, not without amusement, craned his neck and peered down at the wine stains on his back. Papa returned. He had straightened his tie and brushed his hair and sponged the mud from his suit. He took his place at the head of the table. Aunt Martha remained standing for a time, uncertain whether or not the row was finished, glaring histrionically at my father. He ignored her, and she sat down. Josie brought in the coffee.

‘Well, men,’ said Papa, glancing at Michael and me. ‘Blackers tomorrow, eh? All set?’

‘Yes, Uncle Joe.’

‘That's good, that's good.’ He nodded vigorously, spooning sugar into his cup. ‘It's a fair crop this year.’

What surprises me even still is that his heartiness was only slightly false, and only that much because he did not know how to talk to youngsters. The shouting and the broken bottle, all that was as nothing. Mama started the milkjug on its journey around the table. Granny Godkin was made to take her pill. Aunt Martha yawned behind her fingers.

‘A fair crop,’ Papa said again, and buried his nose in his cup. Michael glanced at me. I heard Josie rattling pots in the kitchen. Darkness pressed sofidy against the windows. The night was still and calm in its reaches, with a promise of fair weather for the morrow. Humankind is extraordinary.

PAPA WAS RIGHT
,
the blackcurrant crop was the heaviest in years that year. Just as well, since the fruit was by now one of the last remaining sources of income at Birchwood. The land on which it flourished had been already sold, and this was the final harvest we would take. Michael and I were put in charge of the pickers, a ragged army of tenant children and their grandmothers, and a few decrepit old men no longer capable of heavier toil. They were a wild primitive bunch, the old people half crazed by the weight of their years, the children as cheerfully vicious as young animals. Their conversation dwelt almost to the exclusion of all else on sex and death, and the children managed a neat conjunction of the two by carrying on their lovelife after dark in the local graveyard. They shied away instinctively from me, found me cold, I suppose, or saw my father in me, but Michael they immediately accepted. That surprised me. They listened to his orders and, more startling still, did as he told them. They even offered to arrange a girlfriend for him. That offer he declined, for he had little interest in the sexual duet, being a confirmed soloist, and it was I who made a conquest, when I met Rosie.

In the morning I rose early and waded down through pools of sleep on the stairs to the garden, where Michael waited for me in the cart with Nockter. The lawn was drenched with light, the trees in the wood were still. A bright butterfly darned the air above the horse's head. We rattled along violet-shadowed lanes quick with blackbirds, by the edges of meadows where the corn was bursting. Birdsong shook the wood like gushes of wind. All was still but for the small clouds sailing their courses, and it was pleasant to be abroad in that new morning, with the smell of the furze, and the grass sparkling, that hawk, all these things.

We reached the plantation. Nockter set up the huge brass scales, and Michael unharnessed the horse, whispering in its ear. I heard beyond the clatter of metal and leather the distant ring of voices, and turned and saw, down the long meadow, a concourse approaching, trembling on the mist, their cries softly falling through the air, mysterious and gay. If only, when they were beside me, when I was among them, they had retained even a fragment of the beauty of that first vision, I might have loved them. It is ever thus.

The fruit we hardly picked, but rather saved. From under their canopies of leaf the heavy purple clusters tumbled with a kind of abandon into our hands. Down in the green gloom under the bushes, where spiders swarmed, the berries were gorgeous, achingly vivid against the dusty leaves, but once plucked, and in the baskets, their burnished lustre faded and a moist whitish film settled on the skin. If they were to be eaten, and we ate them by the handful at the start, it was only in that shocked moment of separation from the stems that they held their true, their unearthly flavour. Then the fat beads burst on our tongues with a chill bitterness which left our eyelids damp and our mouths flooded, a bitterness which can still pierce my heart, for it is the very taste of time.

Rosie was there with her granny, an obese old woman whose coarse tongue and raucous cackle froze the child into a trance of embarrassment. I noticed her first when we paused at noon to eat our sandwiches. Michael and I lay in the long grass of a ditch, belching and sighing, contemplating our outstretched bare legs and grimy toes. Rosie sat a little way from us, daintily fighting three persistent flies for possession of a cream bun. She had short dark hair rolled into hideous sausage curls. A saddle of freckles sat on her nose. She wore sandals and a dress with daisies on it. She was pretty, a sturdy sunburned creature. Having won her bun, she wiped the corners of her mouth with her fingertips and began to eat blackcurrants from the basket beside her, slowly, one by one, drawing back her lips and bursting each berry between her tiny white teeth. A trickle of crimson juice ran down her chin and dropped, plop, into her lap, staining a yellow daisy pink.

We went back to work then. I heard her granny's laughter rising over the meadow, and by some mysterious process that awful noise was transmuted into an audible expression of the excitement which was making my hands tremble and my heart race.

So at every noon we drew a little nearer to each other, treading our way like swimmers toward that bright island which we did not reach until the last day of the harvest, when the weights were totted and the wages paid, and under cover of the general gaiety she sidled up to me, stood for a long time in a tense silence, and then abruptly said,

‘I made sevenanatanner.’

She opened her fist and showed me the moist coins lying on her palm. I pursed my lips and gravely nodded, and gazed away across the fields, trying to look as though I were struggling with some great and terrible thought. At our feet Michael sat with his back against the wheel of the cart, slowly munching an enormous sandwich. He glanced up at us briefly, with a faint trace of mockery. Rosie stirred and sighed, trapped her hands behind her back, and began to grind the toe of her sandal into the grass. Her knees were stippled with rich red scratches, crescents of blood-beads.

‘That's fourteen stone,’ she said, and added faintly, ‘and two pound.’

That was more than I had picked, and I was about to admit as much when abruptly Michael bounced up between us, coughed, hitched up his trousers, and grinned at the horse. The shock of this apparition made our eyes snap back into focus, and the others around us materialised again, and the wave of jabbering voices and the jingle of money swelled in our ears. Rosie blushed and sadly, slowly, paced stiff-legged away.

I helped Nockter to dismantle the scales, and we loaded the pieces on the cart while Michael harnessed the horse. The pickers drifted off into the lowering sun. We followed them across the meadow and then turned away toward home. Nockter clicked his tongue at the horse and rattled the reins along its back. Michael and I walked in silence beside the rolling cart. He was wearing Nockter's hat pushed down on the back of his head. We reached the lane. I was thinking that if Michael had not popped up between us like that, the clown, I might have, I could have, why, I
would
have—Rosie stepped out of a bush at the side of the lane ahead of us, tugging at her dress. My heart! She gaped at us, greatly flustered, started off in one direction, turned, tried the other, stopped. The cart rumbled on. Nockter grinned. Michael began to whistle. I hesitated, doing a kind of agonised dance in my embarrassment, and finally stood stilL She smiled timidly. A massed choir of not altogether sober cherubim burst into song. I felt ridiculous.

‘You're gas,’ said Rosie.

She came to me at Cotter's place that evening with a shower of rain behind her. The drops fell like fire through the dying copper light of day. All of the wood was aflame. She had wanted me to meet her in the graveyard, like any normal swain. I drew the line there.

WHEN I WAS
with Rosie it seemed enough simply to be there— if one can ever be anywhere simply—but time complicates everything. Over the years the memory of our affair, that aching fugue of swoons and smiles, has dwindled to a motionless golden point whose texture in the surrounding gloom is that of sunblurred skin redolent of crushed grass and flowers, which Alessandro di Mariano knew so well, the texture of seraphs’ wings. Beside all this, the actuality of my peasant girlchild with her grubby nails and sausage curls seems a tawdry thing, and I suppose it is not her but an iridescent ideal that I remember. Try as I will, I cannot see her face. Her other parts, or some of them, I vividly recall, naturally. That evening, or another, in the wood, we talked for a while with excessive gravity and great difficulty and then, glumly, surrendered to the silence. Things were looking very bad when I played what turned out to my surprise to be a trump. I told her about algebra. She stared at me with open mouth and huge eyes as I revealed to her the secrets of this amazing new world, mine, where figures, your old pals,
jiggers
, yes, were put through outlandish and baffling exercises. Let x equal
whaa…
? Ah yes, I won her heart with mathematics. She was still pondering those mysterious symbols, her lips moving incredulously, when I delved between her chill pale thighs and discovered there her own, frail secret. She snapped her legs shut like a trap and scuttled out of my clutches, sat back on her heels and gazed at me with moony eyes, distraught, reproachful, shocked, aye, and tumescent.

‘You dirty thing,’
she whispered.

Our affair, then, was founded on mutual astonishment at the intricacy of things, my brain, her cunt, things like that. Affair, that word again. I must not exaggerate. We parted virgins. Still I do not deny, I do not deny what she meant to me. I wandered about the house and garden in a mad mist, blind to everything but the hands of the clock which, with their agonisingly slow semaphore, dragged the evening toward me across the ticking dry bones of the day. Birchwood and its inmates were disintegrating around me, and I hardly noticed.

Papa's jaunts to the city had become rare, and lately had ceased altogether. He displayed a new and, to me, disturbing interest in the house, almost an obsession. One day he announced a plan to have the place repaired. He would pay the builder with an acre of timber.
Capital notion!
He went into town to see about it, and came home drunk, in great good humour, the renovations forgotten. That very night the schoolroom ceiling collapsed, and when Michael and I went to investigate with Mama, the swaying light of our candles showed us, up in the rotten cavity, a decayed hanging forest of rank green growths stirring like seaweed in the swell of crossdraughts. We locked away that horrible aquarium, and in the morning Papa's headache would allow no mention of catastrophe. Two boards in the lavatory floor crumbled to dust under him on a silent Sunday morning, leaving him perched on the bowl, instantly constipated, his feet and crumpled trousers dangling above an abyss.

‘Nockter! Jesus Christ almighty.
Nock
—there you are. Get me a hammer, nails, a couple of planks, hurry up, we have a job to do. I could have been killed. Like that! Jesus can you imagine the laugh they'd have.
Broke his arse on his own lav, ha
!’ He glared at us darkly, daring us to laugh, but in spite of all his fierceness I noticed again now what I had noticed for the first time recently, that he had begun to shrink, I do not mean in my estimation, but in his own stature, as if something inside him, some of his stuffings, had fallen out, and I could not help thinking of a sucked brittle carcase of a wasp, neatly parcelled in paste, enmeshed in a spider's web. ‘This will have to stop, have to,’ he cried. ‘The bloody house is coming down around our ears.’ But before the tools were brought he had taken his gun and stalked off into the wood, running his hands through his hair and muttering under his breath, and I had slipped away to meet my love.

A soft hot haze, lilac, burnt gold, yellow, lay under the trees in the wood. The birds sang, dragonflies hovered above the briars. The butterflies were all gone. Summer was ending. Rosie waited for me in the shadow under Cotter's wall, sitting with her head dreamily drooping, her lithe brown legs folded under her, as I sometimes see her still in dreams, leaning on one taut curved arm, twisting and twisting a stalk of grass around her fingers. She gave me from under her long lashes that glance of inexplicable resentment which never failed to reduce me to a trembling ingratiating jelly. Inexplicable? No. One needed only to hear our accents to begin to understand. Class sat silent and immovable between us like a large black bird.

We walked through the goldengreen wood. The leaves were turning already. At a sudden bend in a long-untrodden path we came abruptly, magically, to the edge of the lake, and stopped and gazed out across a prospect of summer and peace, the ashblue water, the house, the windows brimming with light, and two little figures walking slowly up the steps to the front door. Birchwood always took itself too seriously, turning its face away from the endless intricate farce being enacted under its roof, but on its good days, when one was willing to accept it on its own terms, it was magnificent. Rosie twisted her mouth thoughtfully, squinting at all that quiet grandeur, and produced with a wry flourish a comment that seemed somehow the most fitting one imaginable.

‘If my granny seen me now, she'd kill me.’

Yes indeed, and if mine saw me. We wandered along the lake shore to the summerhouse, soberly musing on the punishments our furtive venery could call down upon us. She sat down in the ancient rocking-chair on the porch and stared past me with narrowed eyes.

‘All them
swanks
, she said suddenly, and sniffed, all that envy, that violent longing. I frowned, pretending that I had not understood her, but I knew well what she was after. Here was a perilous situation. The country was up in arms. Every day there were reports of our people burned out of their farms, of constabulary men beaten up, of magistrates shot in the streets. It all seemed far away at first, then an old man spat on Aunt Martha in the town, and Josie, to her great amusement, answered a dreadful banging on the front door one early morning and found one of our own chickens nailed to it, and now here was I, faced with a miniature rebellion of my own. I understood her well enough. Did she seriously think that I would let her meet my family, those mysterious and splendid swanks? Good god. There flashed before me a picture of the two of us advancing down the drawing room toward Granny Godkin on her throne by the fire, a Granny Godkin whom the prospects of fury and derision she perceived in the uprising had rejuvenated, whose shrill broken voice had begun to ring again through the house with something like its old authority, and as that horrible thought was exploding within me slowly I slowly clambered up the railing, grasped the clogged drainpipe above and hung before her, swaying slightly, a solemn baboon. She regarded me with a sullen eye, then flung herself from the chair and kicked open the door of the summerhouse. I flopped to the floor and followed her.

This place, cluttered more than ever with migratory bits and sticks from across the lake, we had not dared to enter before. It was a perilous forbidden chapel in our wood locked to us by the spell of Granny Godkin and her wicked cards. Our visit, therefore, was something of an occasion, and prompted in me frightful thoughts. We climbed the curving stairs at the back to a little room above, where there was a broken bed, two crippled chairs, and a curlicued gilt mirror, filthy but intact, a patient spy which now inclined its purblind eye upon my country darling, who poked among the junk with wrinkled nose. I hovered behind her like a nervous vampire and kissed her hot neck. She hardly noticed me, but twisted absently out of my reach and with graceful flamingo steps danced to the window, singing.

Chase me Charlie
I've got barley
Up the leg of me
drawers.

But there, by the glass, in the misty light, her mood shifted and she turned, suddenly transformed, and her scattered drugged smile touched me here and there like a small furry blind animal. She took a slow step, another, swimming through air, and without a word put her arms around me, and I seem to have fallen over backwards slowly, lost in that world contained in the tender roseate canthus of her eye. Perhaps it was love, after all. Beyond and above her blurred left temple a tiny redhaired phantom rippled into the depths of the mirror. She sensed my fright, and looked wildly over her shoulder at the glass. We crawled on hands and knees to the window, laid our noses on the sill and cautiously peered out. Down by the lake's edge Michael stood, looking toward the trees. Did I glimpse there a figure retreating into the leaves, an arm lifted in a hieratic gesture of farewell? I went down the stairs. Michael, coming in at the door, halted with the light behind him.

‘O, it's you,’ he said coolly. ‘Gave me a fright.’ Rosie went down past me, her head bowed, hands behind her, busy with her curls. As she passed him by, Michael glanced at her and then at me and permitted himself a brief grin. We went, all three, out into the glowing noon.

‘Well, I'm off,’ Rosie muttered, without looking back.

Michael and I stared at each other, teetering, as it were, on the edge of a revelation, and, who knows, we might have bared our hearts had there not come at that moment, beside us, or so it seemed, the shattering blast of a shotgun followed by a scream. Rosie was crouched by the edge of the trees with her head in her hands, and off to her left there was Papa, legs braced wide apart, smoking gun to his shoulder, a ridiculously stylised illustration of the archetypal hunter. Rosie sank to her knees, cowering in fright, with her arms still around her head. She lifted one elbow and peered out at him from under it. He looked from her to us, to the girl again. His moustache twitched, and one eyebrow jumped up his forehead. He lowered the gun, stood undecided for a moment, and then backed off into the trees, bowing under the boughs. Rosie began to howl. Michael softly laughed.