Birchwood (3 page)

THE BUTTERFLIES CAME
in swarms in early summer, small blues, delicate creatures. There must have been something in the wood that attracted them, or in the garden, some rare wild plant perhaps. We got used to them, and when they found their way even into the house, and fluttered awkwardly, like clockwork flowers, around our heads at the breakfast table, it was with the tiniest frown of irritation that Mama rose to open the window, murmuring
shoo, shoo.
They were easily killed, I mean it would have been easy to kill them, while they went about their business on the lupins and the roses, but I never knowingly destroyed one of them, I don't know why. Indeed, in time I became their protector, their patron and friend, and I would carry them, throbbing in my cupped hands, out of the hall before Josie arrived with her mop to kill them. When I released them from the steps their incredulous drunken leap from my palm made the summer airs over the garden seem suddenly lighter, gayer, and as delicately tinted as the skyblue silken dust they left smeared on my fingers. Not that I had any love for them, or even liking. I wanted to kill them, but I did not. Some days my teeth ached with the desire for wanton slaughter, but I would not allow myself the pleasure, treasuring my benificence, and knowing anyway that if the situation became desperate there was nothing to stop me taking a rolled-up newspaper into the wood one afternoon and bludgeoning to extinction a whole species of lepidoptera, small blues, while they frittered away the first glorious days of summer.

It was in summer too that I came into my kingdom. The calendar date is lost, but the occasion is still invested in my mind with the sonorous harmony of a more complex, less tangible combination of pure numbers. There was a clearing in the wood, not a clearing, but an open place under the sadly drooping, slender boughs of a big tree. Mama sat at the edge of a white cloth spread on the grass, reading a book and brushing imaginary flies away from her cheek. At her feet my father lay on his back with his hands behind his head, quite still, and yet managing to give the impression of bouncing restlessly, tensely, on the springy turf. I watched, fascinated, this curious phenomenon, but soon the shifting patterns of light and leaf on the cloth distracted me, and there was another distraction, which it took me a while to identify, and it was this, that Mama had not once in ten minutes turned a page of her book. That was very strange. At last Papa stood up, stretched himself ostentatiously, and yawned. Mama's lack of interest in her book grew more intense, if that is possible, and I caught her glancing sideways at him with that furtive, mournful, altogether lovesick look which already I had come to know so well. Patting the last of his yawn with three fingertips, he considered the top of her head, the inclined pale plane of her jaw, and then turned and sauntered off into the trees, whistling through his teeth, his hands in his pockets. Soon she put her book away and followed him, as I knew she would. I was forgotten.

Our wood was one of nature's cripples. It covered, I suppose, three or four acres of the worst land on the farm, a hillside sloping down crookedly to the untended nether edge of the stagnant pond we called a lake. Under a couple of feet of soil there was a bed of solid rock, that intractable granite for which the area is notorious. On this unfriendly host the trees grew wicked and deformed, some of them so terribly twisted that they crawled horizontally across the hill, their warped branches warring with the undergrowth, while behind them, at some distance, the roots they had struggled to put down were thrust up again by the rock, queer maimed things. Here too, on the swollen trunks, were lymphatic mushrooms flourishing in sodden moss, and other things, reddish glandular blobs which I called dwarfs’ ears. It was a hideous, secretive and exciting place, I liked it there, and when, surfeited on the fetid air of the lower wood, I sought the sunlight above the hill, there on a high ridge, to lift my spirit, was the eponymous patch of birches, restless gay little trees which sang in summer, and in winter winds rattled together their bare branches as delicate as lace.

Left alone, I pulled pale stalks of grass from their sockets and crushed the soft flesh in my mouth. Timidly, almost unnoticed, there came breaking in upon me that music, palpable and tender, which a wood in summer makes, whose melody is always just beyond hearing, always enticing. Dreamily I wandered down through the trees, into the bluegreen gloom. Down there were flies, not the intricate translucent things which browsed among the birches, but vivid nightblue brutes with brittle bodies, swarming over the rot, and there were black birds too, under the bushes screaming. Somewhere afar a dog barked listlessly between precise pauses, and I heard the sound of an axe, and other sounds too numerous to name. I came to Cotter's place. This was a little house, in ruins, with everything gone under lyme grass and thorns but for one end wall with a fireplace halfway up it, and a shattered chimney with the black flue exposed, and over the fireplace a cracked mirror, a miracle of light, staring impassively over the tops of the trees. I never knew who Cotter was, but the name suggested…never mind. He was long gone now, and in what had been his kitchen, among the ferns that flourished there, a woman's pale hands clutched and loosed in languorous spasms a pale white arse bare below a hiked-up shirttail. She cried out softly under his thrusts, and, as I watched, a delicate arc of briar beside them, caught by a stray breeze, sprang up suddenly into the air, where two butterflies were gravely dancing. Lift your head! Look! The mirror's pale, unwavering, utterly silent gaze sent something like a deep black note booming through the wood's limpid song, and I felt, what shall I say, that I had discovered something awful and exquisite, of immense, unshakeable calm.

I wandered farther then, by unknown ways, and soon I heard Mama's voice hallooing here and there, each cry a little closer. I waited, and it was not long until she came hurrying down the hill, hands fluttering and her hair streaming behind her. She leaned over me, enfolding me in a tender weight of love and concern, murmuring incoherently into my ear, warm round words, swollen like kisses. Her cheeks burned. We found Papa pacing impatiently under the tree, kicking leaves and smoking a cigar. The picnic things were packed and stacked beside him. As we approached he bent to pick them up, and bending gave me that crooked sidelong sort of grin which is about the most I ever had from him by way of affection, which I always tried to avoid, and never could, it was so knowing, so penetrating and so cold. Mama was very busy, tying up her hair, taking things out of the basket only to put them back again, foothering around, as Granny Godkin would have said. The folded cloth slipped from under her arm and opened like an ungainly flower, and from out of its centre staggered a bruised blue butterfly. She paused, stood motionless for a moment, and then very slowly put her hands over her face and began to cry. ‘Jesus,’ said Papa, without any particular emotion, and walked away from us. For my part I was quite calm.

We straggled homeward. My father's long stride carried him far ahead of us, and he had to stop often and urge us on with weary silent stares. Mama laughed and chattered and exclaimed over the flowers in the hedge, trying by her gaiety to make the three of us doubt that outburst of tears. Her prattling irritated me. Full of the secret glimpsed under Cotter's wall, I carried myself carefully, like a patient floating blissfully on a drug, forgetful of the pain biding its time outside the vacuum. O I am not saying that I had discovered love, or what they call the facts of life, for I no more understood what I had seen than I understood Mama's tears, no, all I had found was the notion of—I shall call it harmony. How would I explain, I do not understand it, but it was as if in the deep wood's gloom I had recognised, in me all along, waiting, an empty place where I could put the most disparate things and they would hang together, not very elegantly, perhaps, or comfortably, but yet together, singing like seraphs.

So it was, as I walked up the drive, I perceived in my once familiar kingdom the subtle strains of this new music. The sun shone calmly on the garden, except in the corner by the swing where daffodils blazed like trumpetblasts. Josie was polishing an upstairs window, and the glass, awash with sky, shivered and billowed under the sweep of her cloth. We climbed the steps, into the hall, and Mama, pressing a hand to her forehead, dropped a bunch of primroses on a chair and swept away to her room. The cluster of bruised flowers came slowly asunder, one fell, another, and then half of them tumbled in a flurry to the carpet, and behind me the tall clock creaked and clicked, and struck a sonorous bronze chord. Listen, listen, if I know my world, which is doubtful, but if I do, I know it is chaotic, mean and vicious, with laws cast in the wrong moulds, a fair conception gone awry, in short an awful place, and yet, and yet a place capable of glory in those rare moments when a little light breaks forth, and something is not explained, not forgiven, but merely illuminated.

IT WAS ON WET DAYS
that the house really came alive for me, like a ponderous gloomy Chinese puzzle, those interminable Sundays, for they were always Sunday, when a thin drizzle fell all day, washing the colours out of the world outside the windows until even the black trees and the grey grass faded behind the fogged glass. They gave me things to play with, toy soldiers and tin drums, a fierce red rocking-horse with flared nostrils. I broke them all, threw them all away. What were these paltry things compared to Birchwood, out of whose weeping walls I could knock the bright reverberations of fantasy? I could hide in the hollow sarcophagus of the bench seat on the first landing and peer through a knothole at my family's legs carrying them up and down their day, oblivious of the silent spy who so often in his fancy sent them plunging down the stairs, roaring and flailing, and it was not until many years later, lying under the sacks on the cart while Silas and the rest stamped about outside, that I savoured again the peculiar secret delight of not being found simply because no one realised that I was there to be found. Or I would climb to the attic, where the floor was spread with copper-coloured shallots set to dry, where I once conducted a disturbing and exciting surgical operation on a large female rag doll, and where Mama saw the black shape of her madness coming to claim her. My childhood is gone forever.

On Granny Godkin's last birthday I discovered, obliquely, that I would inherit Birchwood. The old woman's day was a celebration not of longevity but of spite, for she was incredibly old, and the unspoken though general opinion was that if she had any sense of decency she would be dead, and lived on only despite us. My father in his cups was often heard to wonder in an apprehensive undertone if she was after all immortal, and my grandfather, her junior by some years, regarded her across the chasm of silence that separated them with the grudging air of one who suspects he is being cheated.

To say that the house was feverish with activity all day would be an exaggeration, but not a very great one, considering the indolent standards which normally prevailed at Birchwood. Mama worried, of course, and therefore fussed. Since she did not understand why the Godkins fought so much, there was nothing she could to do prevent a row, and therefore determined that at least those arrangements she could affect would be impeccable, and Josie, in the kitchen, turned to her saucepans to hide her wry silent laughter when her distraught mistress threw open the door and cried, as if in answer so some unspoken protest,

‘Do it right, Josie,
do it right?

My father absented himself for most of the day by paying one of his mysterious and frequent visits to the city. It was said that he kept a woman there, or even women, but that cannot have been true, since the income from the farm was hardly enough to keep the family, never mind a harem. What Mama thought of his jaunts I do not know, but that evening, as the dinner hour drew perilously near, and she came in from the darkening garden with dripping hair and her arms full of wet copper chrysanthemums for the table, she paused, or should I say faltered, to look from the open door down the deserted drive, and her smile was bravely sad as she lied,

‘I think I see your Papa coming, do I?’

I went with her into the dining room and leaned on the table while she arranged the flowers in the bowl. Granda Godkin hovered guiltily by the rosewood cabinet in the corner, shuffling his feet, wheezing and sighing, nervously patting the pockets of his jacket. The chrysanthemums glowed in the gloom like living things, gathering to themselves the last light of evening. They seemed to sing, these glorious bright blooms, and I could not take my eyes away from them. When I search in the past it is in moments such as this that I find myself as I was then, an intense little boy standing with his ankles crossed and one arm laid along the table supporting his inclined head, gazing solemnly into the luminous celeste of a dream, or walking gravely, stiff-legged out of the room, stopping as Granda Godkin giggled furtively, and looking back to see Mama turn to the old man slowly with her great sorrowful eyes and softly wail,

‘Simon! You've been
drinking!

My grandmother had dressed for the occasion in a black bombasine evening gown bedecked with feathers. She wobbled into the dining room on high-heeled black button boots, and Granda Godkin put a hand over his face and peeped at her from between his fingers, quivering with suppressed merriment. The old woman glanced at him and said to Mama, not without a certain grim satisfaction,

‘In the rats again, I see.’

She took her place at the head of the table, where I was allowed to approach her, have my cheek kissed, and give her my present, a painting done by me of a crimson horse with three blue legs. She held my head in her arms and rocked back and forth on the chair, making an odd choked cooing little noise, like a rusty hinge. I disengaged myself distastefully and turned to go. Mama prodded me in the small of the back. I was supposed to sing
Happy Birthday
, but having endured the indignity of that embrace I was damned if she was going to get music out of me too. I ran away.

I was curled up on the window seat on the landing, with my arms around my knees, watching the quicksilver 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
Jesus!
Mama slipped out of the dining room, casting a nervous glance behind her before closing the door.

‘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
chicken
?’ She lifted her eyes and glared balefully at Papa. ‘I say it's not yours to sell!’

Papa grinned.

‘Not yety
he said cheerfully.

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.
Not yet.
Though I understood nothing, those two words which Papa spoke so carelessly flashed in my mind like gleaming knives which even he could not blunt when, very late that night, he came into my room and stood above the bed in the darkness, breathing heavily and swaying on his feet, and stared at what he took to be his sleeping son and whispered,

‘Who ownsyouy boy, whose are you, eh?’