Birchwood

by John Banville

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

  7

  SO BIRCHWOOD was to be mine, that much I understood, albeit dimly. What I failed to see was the plot to deprive me of my inheritance. Aunt Martha was the instigator and prime conspirator. She arrived one bright windy morning in June. There was a rap upon the door, and expectant whispering outside, and then she was in the hall, hallooing her presence, straightening her son's carroty hair, tipping Nockter for having carried in the bags, all at the same time, all the time talking. She was a small intense young woman, quick as a bird, with short red hair and a pale, pointed face. Mama peered apprehensively out of the drawing room, and Aunt Martha let her coat fall to the floor and clapped her little hands.

  ‘Beatrice!’

  ‘Martha…O.’

  They made a rush at each other, and smacked together in an awkward embrace. Nockter twirled his cap in his fingers and backed out of the hall, and Aunt Martha turned away from her sister-in-law and alighted on me with a tiny cry.

  ‘And this must be Gabriel! My, but isn't he a fine big man? We're going to be great friends, aren't we, Gabriel?’

  We were not. I stood stiff and silent as she hugged me, bending away from her aromatic bosom. ‘His father's boy,’ she said gaily, and releasing me without further ceremony, she reached out a fumbling hand behind her and caught hold of her son. ‘This is Michael, also a son of his father, god forgive us. Say how do you do-and try not to dribble, dear.’

  He was an odd-looking fellow, small and frail, with sly bright eyes and a fearsome set of teeth. I could see in him nothing of his mother except for his incongruously delicate skin, pale and perfect alabaster, translucent almost. He shuffled his feet while those eyes under their straw-coloured lashes avoided ours, and Aunt Martha, considering him glumly, said,

  ‘My little crucifixion.’

  Mama smiled timidly at the boy.

  Toor child,’ she murmured. He glanced at her quickly, sharply, and lowered his gaze again. Aunt Martha gave a great squawk of laughter.

  ‘O Beatrice, as soft as ever…’ She stopped, and stared past us toward the stairs, at the head of which my father was standing. He was in shirt sleeves, collarless, with hair unkempt, wearing half a beard of lather, staring stonily back into his sister's stare.

  ‘Hello, dear brother,’ she said softly, with what I was to come to call her cat-smile, it was so coldly calculating. He did not answer, but merely stood and looked, with one eyebrow quivering, and then went back into the bathroom. The hall was very still, waiting on Aunt Martha. Her eyes were slits, and something peculiar had happened to her mouth. She felt us watching her, and shrugged and turned again to Mama with a bright smile. ‘Trissy, tell me all the news, I must hear all the news! Are you still the only sane one in this madhouse?’ Mama blushed, and glanced nervously up the stairs. Aunt Martha laid a hand on her arm. ‘Don't worry about him, I don't mind, really, I'm used to it by now.’

  It was not my father who worried Mama, but Granny Godkin. The time had come and gone for her morning tea and still her curtains had not been drawn. The choice now was to leave her there to work herself into a temper, or bring her down to greet her long-lost daughter. What a choice! We went into the drawing room.

  The women sat down by the fire, and Aunt Martha immediately launched into a cheerful account of her trials and troubles. I paid no attention to her tedious rigmarole. Michael and I stood before the window, locked in a tingling silence, and frowned out at the garden where a pair of sparrows were fighting like frantic mechanical toys. A silent scream of boredom began to rise within me, but there rose also a vague fear, vague sense of being threatened by the arrival of this virago and her cretin. No, that is not true. Only hindsight has endowed me with such a keen nose for nuance. I glanced at the boy by my side. He was no longer watching the garden, for something new was happening behind us, and I had barely time to notice the hush that had descended on the room before there came a kind of strangled wail, and slowly, hardly able to believe our luck, we turned to the fire. Aunt Martha was biting her knuckles and weeping, crouched piteously in her chair with her head bowed. Mama stood over her patting her shoulder and making incoherent little noises meant to comfort, and Michael and I, holding our breath, took one cautious step forward and gazed blissfully upon the immensely satisfying spectacle of a grown-up dissolving in a puddle of grief.

  Of all our histories, Aunt Martha's is perhaps the most bizarre. She was the black sheep of the Godkins, if such a term means anything when speaking of my family. In the town she was known as a brazen hussy from the time she was a child, and was once, I believe, denounced from the popish pulpit in a veiled though obvious reference to bad companions. However, it was not until a certain summer of her young womanhood that she gave the gossips some real red meat on which to chew, and she was hardly sure of her own condition before the town also knew, in that mysterious way towns have of knowing such things, that she was expecting a little surprise. All hell broke loose in the happy house of Birchwood. Granny Godkin beat her daughter about the head with a silver-backed hairbrush. Papa returned from his honeymoon.

  For nine long months Martha was not allowed outside the grounds. She spent her time wandering in the wood, or sitting by the lake, with a sly secret smile in her eyes, hatching her plot. Her firstborn arrived that spring day of storm and panic when the circus invaded Birchwood, and Papa, dismounting that evening by the fountain, looked up and saw an infant lifted in the window. However, that infant was I, but more of that presently. Aunt Martha had already prepared for her departure. She paused only long enough to confer with Papa behind locked doors, and then bundled up her son and took flight. Granny Godkin stayed in bed for a week.

  And Martha's mysterious lover? Rumour had an inspired farrago of a story, according to which the leader of the Magic Circus, the travelling troupe of shams which had laid siege to our house, one Prospero by name, a magician apparently, had with Aunt Martha's enthusiastic cooperation conjured up the makings of that homunculus that stood beside me now gaping at its mother. I cannot say where rumour found evidence to support its claims, but the story had one point in its favour, that is, it held that the invasion by the circus was nothing more, or less, than Prospero's effort to claim his son and heir. Well, I shall say nothing. People must have their myths. Some said that Prospero was a cripple, some that he had a cloven hoof. One story, the favourite, and still current, had him a midget! A few held, however, that the magician did not exist. I shall say nothing.

  After Aunt Martha's departure, Granny Godkin had never spoken her name again until, these many years later, a letter arrived to say that the wanton was coming home. Then my grandmother smiled her smile, and wrote a gracious reply, and waited, and now Martha had returned, and she was to tutor me in the sciences and humanities, god help me.

  Michael and I stood with our eyes out on stalks and watched that grief bubbling until Mama turned at last and looked at us reproachfully. Her hand, behind her back where Aunt Martha could not see it, indicated the door. Reluctantly, we left the room, and plodded up the stairs with solemn tread, like two grave little old men. This is the landing, a spacious carpeted court, twin to the hall below, with tall gleaming windows affording a view across trees and fields to the quivering pale line of the distant sea. And there is the lake, see it gleam, wind-whipped. Michael said nothing, but paced behind me in silence, turning his eyes obediently where I pointed. Birchwood is a big house, three storeys topped by a warren of attics. We trailed through the empty bedrooms, pausing here before a pockmarked mirror, there by a trunk mysteriously crammed with broken crockery. I showed him the narrow back stairs which crept down surreptitiously, under bald linoleum, to a gloomy subterranean vault wedged between two doors, a rickety one bolted against the creeping green damp of the back yard, and another, panelled with green glass, opening on a potted palm and three deep steps which led, presto!, into the front hall. We examined the muddy paintings in the library, the bust of an unidentified blind Greek,
the complicated affair of rods and knobs by which the french windows were locked. Josie was on her hands and knees under the dining-room table, motionless, staring at nothing. We stood in the doorway and looked at her, and then retired silently. Aunt Martha was still weeping by the drawing-room fire. Mama glared at us. We climbed the stairs again.

  In my room, Michael sat on the bed with his hands dangling between his bony knees while I laid out my toys for his delectation in an arc before him on the floor. We stared at them as we had stared at everything eise, speechless and bored. In my imagination I was standing haughtily over him, with a hand resting elegantly on my hip, telling him just how things were, blockhead, this is my house, and these are my toys, so don't get any ideas, see?

  ‘You have a lot of things,’ he said, with a faint, faintly mocking smile, though whether it was me or himself that he mocked I could not tell, though I can now.

  My most precious toy, if that is the right word, was a magnificent circular jigsaw puzzle of over two thousand tiny wafer-thin pieces. After weeks of intermittent labour varying between a furious panicstricken scrabbling and the smiling swoon of delight when the right piece, the only possible piece, fell into its place in the mosaic, I had assembled out of it a glorious gold and blue painting of a Renaissance madonna, a picture which, in the completed puzzle, glowed with a sense of light and purity, of palpable intensity, which was mysteriously absent from its sibling reproduced on the lid of its box. This tormentor now lay docile at Michael's feet, where he examined it with uncertain sidelong glances. Abruptly, before I could stop him, he bent and picked up the board. Horrified, I tried to snatch it from him, it tilted, and the puzzle glided off, seemed to hang intact in mid-air for a moment, and then fell to the carpet and shattered with an absurdly inadequate, heartbreaking little clatter. Michael stared at the pieces, his mouth moving silently. Any colour there was in his face faded, leaving it a bonewhite mask of fury. The intensity of this speechless rage frightened me. I looked again at the shattered thing, and I could have wept. Cretin! It was not the wasted work that pained me, but the unavoidable recognition of the fragility of all that beauty. I turned without a word and stalked out of the room.

  I sat down on the highest step of the stairs, my favourite place to sulk, and was in time to see Granny Godkin hobble into the drawing room. The house rang with angry voices, the slamming of doors, heavy footfalls. Godkin fights were always dispersed, mobile affairs that sprawled across two or three rooms simultaneously. Michael came and sat down quietly by my side. I ignored him. Downstairs, the drawing-room door flew open and my father strode out, halted, looked up at us without seeing us, and turned back in the doorway and shouted,

  ‘No!’

  He plunged across the hall into the library, and a moment later an unseen hand gently closed the drawing-room door. Michael cleared his throat.

  ‘Ever see juggling?’ he asked.

  I disdained to answer. Granda Godkin came out of the dining room and, stealthily, his ear turned toward the drawing room, tiptoed after Papa into the library, only to come flying out again immediately and flee to the back of the house. Michael took from his pocket a chipped blue building block, a marble and a rubber ball. He began to juggle. At first it went clumsily, he dropped the ball, hit himself on the nose with the block, but then all abruptly changed, a rhythm appeared, one could almost hear it, like the airy beat of a bird's wing, and in his hands he spun a trembling pale blue hoop of light. His uplifted face gleamed from the effort of concentration as he leaned this way and that, following a sudden dip of the block, the wayward flight of the ball, and I found myself thinking of air and angels, of silence, of translucent planes of pale blue glass in space gliding through illusory, gleaming and perfect combinations. My puzzle seemed a paltry thing compared to this beauty, this, this harmony. The drawing-room door opened again and Mama led out Aunt Martha, sobbing and snuffling. Michael, his concentration shattered, dropped the ball. It descended the stairs in three high hops and skidded between the women's feet. Michael laughed, an odd noise, rose, dropped forward on all fours, gave a little kick, and stood on his hands. Like that, legs waving, teeth clenched in an inverted grin, he walked down the steps. I think I cheered. Aunt Martha lifted her head to find this grotesque thing advancing slowly toward her, and she opened her mouth and gave a shriek of mingled fright and woe. Mama put an arm around her shoulders and took her into the dining room.

  Michael retrieved the ball, stood upright, and came slowly back up the stairs, wiping the sweat from his forehead. He stopped below me and leaned against the banisters, tossing the ball from hand to hand. We were silent for a moment, and then he said,

  ‘She's always crying.’ He waited for me to reply. I could think of nothing to say. We considered the ceiling. He sighed. ‘She gives me a pain.’

  We tittered. He sat down beside me and handed me the ball.

  ‘Hard to juggle with, a ball,’ he said. ‘Too light.’

  I agreed.

  8

  I HAD EXPECTED , perhaps even hoped, that their arrival would immediately transform life at Birchwood. Nothing is so simple. Things changed, certainly, but slowly, and in subtle ways. The morning rituals, the fights, the elaborate, barely edible evening dinners, they remained unaltered, but the 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 do
wn 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.