Birchwood (7 page)

SUMMER ENDED OFFICIALLY
with the lighting of a fire in the drawing room. Rain fell all day, big sad drops drumming on the dead leaves, and smoke billowed back down the chimneys, where rooks had nested. The house seemed huge, hollow, all emptiness and echo. In the morning Granny Godkin was discovered in the hall struggling with an umbrella which would not open. She was going down to the summerhouse, rain or no rain, and when they tried to restrain her she shook her head and muttered, and rattled the umbrella furiously. In the last weeks, after her brief vibrant interval of fanged gaiety when the prospect appeared of a peasant revolt, she had become strangely withdrawn and vague, wandering distractedly about the house, sighing and sometimes even quietly weeping. She said there was no welcome for her now at Birchwood —a remark I wish to stress, for reasons which I will presently disclose—and spent more and more time down at the lake despite the autumnal damp. Often Michael and I would see her sitting motionless by the table in the summerhouse, her head inclined and her eyes intently narrowed, listening to the subtle shifts and subsidences within her, the mechanism of her body winding down.

‘But you'll catch your death,’ Mama cried. ‘It's teeming.’

‘What?’ the old woman snapped. ‘What? Leave me alone.’

‘But—’

‘Let me
be
, will you.’

Mama turned to my father. ‘Joe, can you not…? She'll get her death…’ As always when she spoke to him now her voice dwindled hopelessly, sadly, and in silence her eyes, moist with tenderness and despair, followed him as he shrugged indifferently and turned away wearily to shut himself into the drawing room.

‘Curse you, will you open?
Granny Godkin snarled, and thwacked the brolly like a whip. Mama, with her pathetic faith in reason, opened wide the front door to show the old woman the wickedness of the weather. ‘Look, look how bad it is. You'll be drenched.’

Granny Godkin paused, and grinned slyly, wickedly, and glanced up sideways at Mama.

‘You worry?’ she whispered. ‘Heh!’

The grin became a skeletal sneer, and she glared about her at the hall, and suddenly the umbrella flew open, a strange glossy black blossom humming on its struts, and when I think of that day it is that black flower dipping and bobbing in the gloomy hall which recalls the horror best. The old woman thrust it before her out the door, where a sudden gust of wind snatched it up and she was swept down the steps, across the lawn, and I ducked into the library to avoid Mama's inevitable, woebegone embrace.

Aunt Martha waited for me, huddled in an armchair by the empty fireplace with a shawl around her shoulders, gazing blankly at a book open in her lap and gnawing a raw carrot. She hardly looked at me, but flung the carrot into the grate and began to whine at once.

‘Where have you been? I'm waiting this hour. Do you think I've nothing better to do? Your father says you're to learn Latin, I don't know why, god only knows, but there you are. Look at this book. Amo amas amat, love. Say it, amo, come on. Amo, I love.’

I sat and looked at her with that serene silent stare which never failed to drive her into a frenzy. She slapped the primer shut and bared her teeth, an unpleasant habit she had when angry, just like Papa.

‘You know you really are a horrible little boy, do you know that, do you? Why do you hate me? I spend half my life in this house trying to give you some kind of an education, and all you do is gawp and grin—O yes, I've seen you grinning, you you you…’ She clapped a hand to her forehead and closed her eyes. ‘O, I, I must… Look, come, try to learn something, look at this lovely language, these words, Gabriel, please, for me, for your Mama, you're a dear child. Now, amo, I love…’

But she shut the book again, and with a low moan looked fretfully around the room, searching for something to which she might anchor her fractured attention. It occurred to me that my presence made hardly any difference to her, I mean she would have carried on like this whether I was there or not, might even have talked all that nonsense to the empty air. They were all fleeing into themselves, as fast as they could flee, all my loved ones. At the dinner table now I could gaze at any or all of them without ever receiving in return an inquiring glance, or an order to eat up and stop staring, or even a sad smile from Mama. Even Michael had since that day at the summerhouse become silent and preoccupied, had begun to avoid me, and I felt sure that he knew some secret which involved me and which I was not to know. I was like a lone survivor wandering among the wreckage, like Tiresias in the city of plague.

Papa insinuated himself into the room, slipped in at the door and tiptoed to the window without looking at us, and there stood gazing out at the dripping trees, rocking slowly on his heels, a gloomy ghost. Aunt Martha appeared not to have noticed him. She tapped my knee peremptorily with her fist.

‘You must learn, Gabriel, it's no good to—’

The room shook. There was no sound, but instead a sensation of some huge thing crumpling, like a gargantuan heart attack, that part of an explosion that races out in a wave ahead of the blast and buckles the silence. But the blast did not arrive, and Aunt Martha looked at the ceiling, and Papa glanced at us querulously over his shoulder, and we said nothing. Perhaps we had imagined it, like those peals of thunder that wrench us out of sleep on calm summer nights. The world is full of inexplicable noises, yelps and howls, the echoes of untold disasters.

‘It's no good to just sit and say nothing, Gabriel,’ said Aunt Martha. ‘You must learn things, we all had to learn, and it's not so difficult. Mensa is a table, see? Mensa…’

While she talked, Papa made his way across the room by slow degrees, casually, his lips pursed, until he stood behind her chair looking down over her shoulder at the book and jingling coins in his pocket. She fell silent, and sat very still with her head bent over the page, and Papa hummed a tune and walked out of the room, and she put down the primer and followed him, and I was left alone, wondering where and when all this had happened before.

I picked up the book she had dropped and humbed glumly through it. The words lay dead in ranks, file beside file of slaughtered music. I rescued one, that verb to love, and, singing its parts in a whisper, I lifted my eyes to the window. Nockter, his elbows sawing, knees pumping, came running across the lawn. It was so perfect a picture of bad news arriving, this little figure behind the rainstippled glass looming out of wind and violence, that at first I took it to be no more than a stray fancy born of boredom. I looked again. He slipped on the grass, frantically backpedalling an imaginary bicycle, and plunged abruptly arse over tip out of my view amid a sense of general hilarity. I waited, and sure enough a few moments later the house quivered with the first groundswell of catastrophe. Nockter appeared in my window again, limping back the way he had come, with my father now by his side, his coattails flying. Next came poor Mama, struggling against the wind and, last of all, in a pink dressing gown, Aunt Martha. They dived into the wood, one after another, but when they were gone the shaking and shuddering of the stormtossed garden seemed an echo of their tempestuous panic. Michael entered quietly behind me.

‘What's up?’ he asked.

I did not know, and hardly cared. It was not for me to question this splendid spectacle of consternation in the adult camp. I was not a cruel child, only a cold one, and I feared boredom above all else. So we clasped our hands behind our backs and gazed out into the rain, awaiting the next act. Soon they came back, straggling despondently in reverse order, Aunt Martha, Mama, and then Nockter and my father. They passed by the window with downcast eyes.

‘We should…’ Michael began. He eyed me speculatively, biting bits off a thumbnail. ‘Do you think she's…?’

The hall. I remember it so well, that scene, so vividly. My father was stooped over the phone, rattling the cradle with a frenzied forefinger and furiously shaking the earpiece, but the thing would not speak to him. His hair was in his eyes, his knees trembled. Mama, with one hand on her forehead and the other stretched out to the table behind her for support, leaned backwards in a half swoon, her lips parted and eyelids drooping, her drenched hair hanging down her back. Nockter sat, caked with mud from his fall, on the edge of a little chair, looking absurdly stolid and calm, almost detached. The front door stood open. Three dead leaves were busy chasing each other round and round on the carpet. I saw all this in a flash, and no doubt that precise situation took no more than an instant to swell and flow into another, but for me it is petrified forever, the tapping finger, Mama's dripping hair, those leaves. Aunt Martha, in her ruined pink frilly, was slowly ascending the stairs backwards. The fall of her foot on each new step shook her entire frame as the tendons tugged on a web of connections, and her jaws slackened, her chest heaved, while out of her mouth there fell curious little high-pitched grunts, which were so abrupt, so understated, that I imagined them as soft furry balls of sound falling to the carpet and lodging in the nap. Up she went, and up, until there were no more steps, and she sat down on the highest one with a bump and buried her face in her hands, and at last an ethereal voice in the phone answered Papa's pleas with a shrill hoot.

My memory is curious, a magpie with a perverse eyes, it fascinates me. Jewels I remember only as glitter, and the feel of glass in my beak. I have filled my nest with dross. What does it mean? That is a question I am forever asking, what can it mean? There is never a precise answer, but instead, in the sky, as it were, a kind of jovian nod, a celestial tipping of the wink,
that's all right, it means what it means.
Yes, but is that enough? Am I satisfied? I wonder. That day I remember Nockter falling, Mama running across the garden in the rain, that scene in the hall, all those things, whereas, listen, what I should recall to the exclusion of all else is the scene in the summerhouse that met Michael and me when we sneaked down there, the ashes on the wall, that rendered purplish mass in the chair, Granny Godkin's two feet, all that was left of her, in their scorched button boots, and I do remember it, in a sense, as words, as facts, but I cannot see it, and there is the trouble. Well, perhaps it is better thus. I have no wish to make unseemly disclosures about myself, and I can never think of that ghastly day without suspecting that somewhere inside me some cruel little brute, a manikin in my mirror, is bent double with laughter. Granny! Forgive me.

WE MISSED HER
,
in a way. When Granda Godkin died it was like the shamefaced departure of a ghost who no longer frightens. That tiresome clank of bones was no more to be heard in the hall, the wicked laughter on the landing was silenced. The space he had occupied closed in, making a little more room for the rest of us, and we stretched ourselves and heaved a small sigh, and were secretly relieved. But when the old woman was so unceremoniously snuffed out something fretful entered the house. Now there was always something wrong with the stillness. Our chairs seemed to vibrate, a ceaseless tremor under our backsides would not let us sit, and we went wandering from room to room like old dogs sniffing moodily after their dead master. The house seemed incomplete, as often a room did when Mama, on one of her restless days, shifted out of it a piece of furniture which had stood in the same place for so long that it was only noticed in its absence. Birchwood was diminished, there is no denying it.

The arranging of her funeral gave rise to some moments of bleak comedy. That was really awful, for we could not in decency laugh. How was she to be buried, anyway? Were we to call in the undertakers to scrape what little was left of her out of the chair, off the walls? No no, if the ghastly manner of her death got out the town would burst with merriment. Well then, were we to do it ourselves? God forbid! An unspeakable vision arose of the family donning dungarees and gumboots and trooping off to the summerhouse with buckets and trowels. Never had the euphemism
the remains
seemed more apt.

The situation itself was bad enough, but it was made doubly difficult by the virtual impossibility of talking about it. Apart from the unmentionable horror of the old woman's death, each of us was tonguetied by the fact that we were convinced that the others knew exactly how she had died, that it was ridiculously obvious, that our own bafflement was laughable. We became very cunning in our efforts to quiz each other. The fishing! How we sighed, and played with our fingers, and glared solemnly out of windows during those awful plummeting silences between casts.
The poor thing, it must have been terrible
—
to go like that!
Yes, terrible.
Do you think…?
No no, no, I wouldn't…
Stilly she must have known…
O there's no doubt—
But still
— Yes? Yes?
Exactly!
And at the end, no wiser, we parted morosely, guiltily, furious with ourselves.

Doc McCabe was the only one to offer an explanation, and although it was too scandalous and too simple in its way for my family to accept, I think he may have been right. He arrived in the afternoon, huffing and puffing, trailing rainwater behind him from the ends of his cape, an overweight tweedy ball of irritation. He had attended two hysterical and protracted births that day, and now he pronounced himself banjaxed. Before anyone could speak he lumbered over to my chair, wrenched my jaws open and glared down my throat.

‘Touch of the grippe. Be over it in a day or two. Well?’

The constraint in the atmosphere at last made an impression on him, and he looked around at the rest of them with his eyebrows quivering. Apparently he had not heard of Granny Godkin's departure. We marched down to the summerhouse, the tribe leading their medicine man to the evil spirit. The rain stopped and the sun appeared abruptly. We waited outside on the porch in an embarrassed silence while he went in to investigate. After what seemed an age the door opened and he backed out slowly, his head bent, fingers to his lips. He was intrigued.

‘Extraordinary.
Upon my word, I've never come across anything like it…’ He found the bereaved family watching him with a suitably muted air of expectation, and he coughed and turned away abruptly, humming and hawing under his breath. We trooped back to the house, and there, in the dining room, swilling tea, his curiosity got the better of him again, and he had trouble preventing himself from grinning enthusiastically as he mused upon that strange death.

‘Most extraordinary, really. I've read of one or two similar cases, you know, in America, if I remember rightly, but I never thought'—he scoffed at his lack of foresight—'dear me, I never thought that here…that Birchwood…’ He looked about with a newfound air of respect at this humble and familiar place that had produced such a marvel. ‘Not a mark anywhere, only the chair. Can't have been a fire, discount that absolutely. Those smuts on the wall…’ Aunt Martha let fall a muffled sob, and the old boy glanced at her apologetically. ‘But it's terrible, of course, very sad, it must have been a great shock, indeed yes, ahem.’

He put down his cup, and with a promise to
tip the wink
to the coroner he prepared to depart. Papa tackled him in the hall.

‘Well you think then, Doctor…? I mean…?’

‘Eh?’ He cast a wary eye over Papa's shoulder at Aunt Martha's puffed tear-stained face. ‘Well of course until I examine it further… I may have to call in some people from Dublin. At the moment, however, I can see no other explanation…after all…’

‘Yes?’

The old shammer sniffed, and fussed with the collar of his cape. He turned to the door, paused, and cast one bloodshot eye back over his shoulder at us.

‘Spontaneous combustion
,’ he said faintly, dived out on the step, and with a last embarrassed grunt was gone. As I say, he may have been right, she may have just…burst, but I cannot rid myself of the notion that the house itself had something to do with it. Birchwood had grown weary of her, she saw that herself. Did it assassinate her? Extraordinary, as the Doc observed.

He did speak to the coroner, and a vague verdict of death by misadventure was returned, but for this service he expected to be allowed to conduct the people he had called in from Dublin, old cronies of his, around the scene of the disaster, and was greatly incensed when Papa refused entry to him and his band of ghouls. However, he kept our secret from the town. In a week or two there was hardly anything of the incident left, except Josie's mournful sobbing at odd hours of the day and night, for she came up trumps and surprised us all by displaying genuine grief for the old woman's passing. By the way, we settled the business of the funeral very neatly, and buried Granny Godkin's feet in a full-sized coffin. Despite the needless expense, the craftiness of the ruse pleased Papa enormously.