Birchwood

by John Banville

  17

  IT WAS A hard winter, no harder than in other years, I suppose, but the house was dying, and the cold got in, the fierce winds and fiercer frost. Flocks of slates flew off the roof, rain seeped into the bedrooms. One morning my water sizzled on a film of ice in the second floor lavatory, the only one that worked now. From that time there comes back to me above all the taste of porridge and the feel of damp blankets.

  Papa no longer tried to hide his helplessness. He gazed on the dissolution of his kingdom in a kind of daze, humming distractedly under his breath. He was rarely sober, and sometimes at night I would hear him stumbling up the stairs, cursing and belching, and kicking over the jamjars which Mama had so carefully placed under the leaks in the ceilings. Nockter disappeared one night, and in the morning the police came looking for him. It seems he was in the movement. Papa was profoundly shocked. The rot of rebellion was no longer distant and therefore manageable, but had spread under his own roof, had flourished among the innocent flowers of Birchwood. I remember him, in his armchair in the library, gingerly opening the morning newspaper, holding his face away from it as though he feared that a fist might lash out from between the pages and punch him on the nose, and then there was his look of awe and bafflement as he read of the latest disasters and assassinations. Surely it was all a dream? The world was solid, god damn it! He began to watch Josie with a brooding eye, and engaged her in elaborate and roundabout conversations meant to test her loyalty, but which only amused her, and left her convinced that he was losing his reason. Then he made the most frightful discovery of all, that old man Lawless, Mama's father, was now in possession of a large share of Birch-wood. Every acre that Papa had sold he had sold unwittingly to his father-in-law, who, as usual, had worked in silence and stealth, using the Gadderns and the other buyers, all cronies, as his unofficial agents. Mama was mortified, and protested her innocence, but Papa, without a word, only a look, accused her of complicity. He saw betrayals everywhere. Poor Papa.

  Now that Nockter was gone, Rosie and I went back to the hay-shed, and in that furry warm haven our passion blazed again briefly. Once or twice I tried to talk to Michael about her. He was not interested. In the last months he had changed, had become even more reticent, which meant that he hardly spoke at all. The mockery in his smile was now directed openly at all of us, but it was always mockery, never contempt, and there was something else, buried deep within him, wistfulness, longing, I don't know. He remains for me still, yes, even still, a secretive and troubled creature with a knot of thorns in his heart. Or is that only how I wish to remember him?

  Mama instituted economy drives. They got nowhere, and probably put a greater strain on the budget than our usual profligacy. Her oddest venture was to dig out from god knows what musty corners our castoff clothes so that we might get one last wear out of them before they fell to pieces. We disappointed her by stoutly refusing, amid not wholly convincing guffaws, to deck ourselves out in these eerie echoes from the past, and it was left to her to trail through the house a bizarre parody of the weekend parties and hunt balls of immemorial seasons. The clothes had a chilling but, now that I think of it, not unexpected effect upon her. She began, in subtle ways, to play the part that the costume of the day demanded, and how uneasy was the silence that settled on the dining room when she swept to the table in a purple velvet evening gown, or came tripping down in a gossamer frock straight out of the gay nineties.

  Snow fell on Christmas Day, as it is supposed to do. All morning, out of a low sky, the big white flakes flowed down, silent, mysterious, muffling everything. The house ached with boredom. For my Christmas box Aunt Martha gave me a stamp album, and I spent a pleasantly demented hour in my room ripping it slowly, lovingly, to shreds. At noon the snow made a determined effort to stop, and Josie served ham sandwiches and stewed tea and tacky mince pies. Michael trudged off toward the town. I tormented the grandfather clock in the hall, turning the hands to make it ring the changes of a whole day in ten minutes. Half way through noon the poor brute, confused and frantic, gave a last wobbly chime, groaned, and stopped, and somewhere above me a door slammed. I wandered up the stairs, drawing out of the banisters with a moistened finger a thin, piercing wail. There is nothing that cannot be tortured, given a bored child's resourcefulness.

  Granny Godkin! Black against the window on the landing hung a grotesque caricature of the old woman, her dusty bombasine evening gown stretched on a spidery frame, my poor mad Mama. The dress hardly covered her shins. Her arms, constricted at the shoulders, dangled crookedly by her sides. Her pale bare wrists were inexplicably pitiable. She stood so, there before that white immensity of snow, her head inclined, listening intently. I stepped toward her slowly through an awful silence, mute, hypnotised, infected with a little bit of her madness. Faint voices crept out from Aunt Martha's room, and a silver jingle of laughter. Mama did not look at me. I doubt if she even realised that I was there. She gave a small grunt of satisfaction, tapped me twice absentmindedly on the shoulder with a fingertip, and skipped swiftly away down the stairs. The voices in Aunt Martha's room fell silent, and after a moment the door opened and my father peered out cautiously. Seeing that it was only me he glared, and received nothing in return but another glare which must have been a disturbing mirror image of his own. Behind his back, in the depths of the room, something lazily stirred, and a muffled voice spoke querulously. Papa retreated and softly closed the door, leaving behind him a woody whiff of cigar smoke.

  And later that evening, while I was preparing for a visit to the hayshed to meet Rosie, there floated down from the hushed upper reaches of the house an eerie ululating cry, half laugh, half shriek, a truly terrible sound. I met Papa in the hall. We stared at each other for a moment in trepidation, listening intently.

  ‘Jesus, what now,’ he muttered, and plodded up the stairs, his bent black back the very picture of gloom. I followed solemnly after him. Mama stood in the attic among the shallots, still wearing Granny Godkin's gown. She took no notice of us as we entered, but stared into the corner under the roof, where there was a battered tricycle, a dusty bit of cracked mirror leaning drunkenly against the wall, a gutless tennis racket and a black leather trunk with brass studs. Papa sighed.

  ‘What, in the sweet name of Christ, are you at now, Trissy?’ he asked, slowly, wearily. Mama did not hear him. She had departed into another world.

  ‘Like black smoke,’ she mused, nodding slowly, intrigued. ‘Yes, yes.’

  Papa took her by the arm. She disengaged herself gently and turned to the door, where she paused and glanced down at my Wellingtons, the incongruous badge of my love. Slowly she lifted her eyes to mine, with the faintest of smiles, conspiratorial, tender, and sad.

  ‘Poor boy, poor boy,’ she murmured. ‘All alone’

  I stayed in the attic long after they had gone, thinking, I cannot say why, of Rosie waiting for me in a nest of hay. I imagined her very clearly, her fingers blue with cold, her cold lips. All that was finished. Part of my life had fallen away, like a rock into the sea. I do not think I am exaggerating.

  18

  THE SNOW MELTED , the earth quickened. Spring came early. In March there was a brief mock summer, strange balmy days, still and close. I would have preferred the toothed winds of other years. Mama steadily journeyed on into the deeps of her new world. There was about her sickness something whimsical and mischievous, a secretive knowing air, almost as if she were humouring us. She laughed softly under her breath, and smiled hazily, mysteriously past us, clawing a paper napkin asunder under the table, the damp torn pieces falling to the floor like shreds of her own anguish. Some days she would go raging through the house, an uncanny replica of Granny Godkin, others she was a sobbing caricature of her gentle self. There was no denying her madness, and yet, in our hearts, we did try, with desperate nonchalance, to gainsay it. But none of us was really sane, I am convinced of that, none of the Godkins or their kin. Aunt Martha, during our increasingly rare tutorials, was given to sudden silences,
unwarranted starts of fright, and often, with eyes narrowed and mouth working tensely, she would question me on my activities on certain and, for me, forgotten days. My indifferent answers provoked in her an excited hum of suspicion, but of what she suspected me I did not know. She fought interminable battles now with Papa over the mysterious terms of his will. Her son too cultivated new peculiarities, skulking in the garden among the bushes, on the stairs at dusk, preoccupied and distant, glancing at me covertly from under his pale brows. I began to wonder if they were all sharing a secret from which I was excluded, and my thoughts turned again and again to my lost sister, of whose existence I was now convinced, but in a detached, unreal way, I cannot explain.

  On the feast of Saint Gabriel the Archangel my father laid an unsteady hand on my shoulder and steered me into the library for a little chat, as he called it. He bade me sit on an upright chair in front of his desk while with ponderous solemnity he locked the door and pocketed the key. Then he sat down opposite me with his fists clenched before him, grimaced over a stifled sour belch, and gave me briefly one of his awful icy grins. He was half shot already.

  ‘Well Gabriel?’ he began heartily. ‘I suppose you know what we're here to talk about? I've dropped enough hints, eh? No? O…O well now.’ His eyes slid away from mine and gazed dully past me toward the window. It was a restless bright day, full of wind and misty light. The sight of the flushed spring garden seemed to annoy him. He unclenched his fists and drummed his fingers on the green blotter, regarding me with one eyebrow raised and one eyetooth bared. For Papa, the ideal of a son never fused with my reality. On those rare occasions when he could not avoid acknowledging my existence, it was with a vaguely disconcerted eye, a faintly rueful frown, that he considered me, his little pride and joy.

  ‘Well what I want to say to you Gabriel is, this house…’ He waved a hand before him, lifted his eyes to the ceiling, and sat quite still for a moment, frowning. Then he pushed back his chair and wrenched open a drawer, took out a flat leather-covered flask and tipped a shot of brandy into the cap, and hurriedly, almost angrily, threw the liqour down his throat. ‘Ach! frightful stuff. Anyway, Gabriel, this house, what with your mother sick, and, well, everything, I've been thinking-and your Aunt Martha thinks so too-that it's not really the place for a growing boy to grow up, you know? Look, son, what I'm really trying to say, now I'll be honest with you, straight from the shoulder, between men, what I'm saying is…’ He was silent once more, and looked at me glassy-eyed, helpless, his mouth moving feebly. Out came the flask again, and this time he left it standing by him, his right-hand man. Eventually, having circled the subject for as long as was possible, he came to the point. I was to be sent away to school.

  I did not react at all to this supposedly stunning notion, but sat with my hands folded and waited for him to continue. He was surprised at my calmness, and disappointed too, I think. Did he expect tears and tantrums, a fit on the floor and drumming heels? If he did he knew nothing of his son. He rose heavily and plodded to the window, where he stood looking out, and the fingers of his clasped hands played with each other behind his back.

  ‘Mist is lifting,’ he said. ‘Be a grand day presently. I remember when I was your age, here. Better times.’

  He came back again and sat down with a sigh, pressing his knuckles to his forehead. He took another drink.

  ‘It was easier then to be…for your grandfather to…I mean I was happy! I had plenty to occupy me, friends, people used to come here. The parties we had! And then Martha, your Aunt Martha and I were very close, very…close.’ He glanced at me swiftly, with a shifty eye. ‘We were like pals, great pals. We had grand times, plenty of laughs, parties, all that. Things were better.’ He gazed glumly at his hands, shaking his head sorrowfully over the dead past. ‘People had more time, it went slower then, there was more…time. Yes. Great pals. And, you see, your Mama is going away too, into a…into a home.’

  We were silent. He was getting old, beginning to crack. It was nothing to do with wrinkles or gray hairs, but it was a slackening of an inner fibre, a loosening of grip, his great word, grip. Keep a grip, boy, just keep a grip and you'll be all right. One did not need to be strong, only strong enough to keep one's weakness hidden, that was what he meant, I suppose. I watched him there, guzzling cheap brandy, good old Papa. What does one feel for a father? Resentment, disappointment-love? What do they mean, these words? Once I had respected and feared him, captivated by his violence, his arrogance, his pain. Now I only disliked him, found him distasteful. He would not send me away, for I was gone away already. Birchwood was dead. He started up again, like an ancient engine.

  ‘I haven't much advice for you, boy. Always try to play fair. Nobody likes a sneak, you know the kind of chap I mean, a bit of a mama's boy, a cissy, always mooning around the place, always…’ He stopped, perhaps realising that it was precisely my type he had described. ‘Well anyway, be a man, learn what life is about. Do the right thing! That's what I mean. And you won't go wrong.’ He lifted a clenched fist between us and grinned again. I knew what was coming. ‘Grip,’ he said softly. ‘It's your only man.’

  For a moment he was his old self again, agate-eyed, bright-toothed, the tiger of Birchwood, but the moment passed, and he was back to brooding, sighing through his nose, grinding his teeth. He sat sideways at the desk with his legs crossed and one elbow on the blotter, his chin sunk on his breast. The flask was empty. I turned away from him. How gay the garden seemed, how bright, beyond this room with its dead books and dust, its weariness. Michael crossed the lawn, a small distressed figure against the windswept trees. He disappeared behind the glasshouses, going toward the hayshed. Papa stirred. The chair groaned under his heavy thighs.

  ‘Yes, learn what life is about, the hard way, the way we all had to. It's not all poems and roses, take it from me, no, not by a long chalk. I learned, aye. I was like you once, I was, full of dreams. O I was going to do great things, great bloody things, make a mark on the world, yes indeed. I soon learned.’

  He stood up, faltered, clapped a hand to the desk to steady himself, and then began to pace up and down behind me, waving his arms excitedly. Bits of white grime gathered at the corners of his mouth.

  ‘No bed of roses, that's for certain. You have to learn that lesson before you go out in the world, because if you don't, take it from me, you'll make a ballocks of it. Look around you, you can start to learn here, anywhere, it doesn't matter a damn. Take a look! Well, what do you see?’ Together we considered the room. ‘Aye. Aye. That's the way it is all right.’

  He flung himself down on the chair again and thrust his face across the desk at me, the veins in his neck straining, his bloodless lips parted, eyes brimming with a passionate sorrow and distress, agonised and mute. For fully a minute we sat so, our noses nearly touching. His fervour slowly drained away, leaving his large grey face with its violet shadows and moist eyes lugubrious and weary. When he spoke his voice was a harsh whisper.

  ‘We get up in the bloody morning, and we go to bed at night, and there's nothing to do. We think we're doing things, making the world sit up and take notice. We give ourselves heartburn, we're so busy running up and down, and all the time, nothing. And we're sick of ourselves. Look into your heart, boy, listen to it. What does it say to you? What does it show? Nothing. And that's what you'll learn is there. Say it after me. Nothing. Say it!’

  I turned my face away from him again, to the window, to the wide world. I said softly,

  ‘Nothing.’

  He relaxed, and withdrew his head, an old tortoise, and contemplated me in silence for a moment, nodding slowly, and then he said, in a tone compounded of a little pride and great disgust,

  ‘You're your father's son, no doubt of that.’

  He unlocked the door for me, rattling the key in the lock, and laid his hand awkwardly on my shoulder. The falsity of the gesture made his fingers tremble.

  ‘Get your things together. Josie will fix you up. Train is at eight in the morning. A
nd Gabriel. O, nothing-’

  At that word he bit his lip, and suddenly grinned, gaily, guiltily, and hastily retreated, closing the door in my face. I turned, and another hand descended on my shoulder.

  19

  IT WAS AUNT MARTHA , very distraught, her hair standing on end, her lips quivering.

  ‘Well?’ she snarled, glaring at me accusingly out of her cat's eyes. ‘What was all that about? Speak! And where's Michael? You little beast, sneaking around, sticking your nose in. You're a sly little boy, do you know that, do you? I saw you with the blotting paper.’ This was a reference to my effort to read the smudges on Papa's green blotter by holding it before a mirror one day after I had overheard talk of his famous will. I thought I had not been observed. It hardly mattered, since all the mirror gave me back were blots turned the right way about but still illegible. Aunt Martha's talons sank deeper into my shoulder. ‘Little lord of the manor, you are, smirking there. Young Lord Snot. Well we'll see about that too, let me tell you. I asked you where he is, didn't I, now where is he?’

  I smiled at her sweetly and said nothing, not a word. I had to admit that this new concern for her son and his whereabouts interested me, but it would have needed more than interest for me to speak of her then. She released me, and with a little gasp of fury turned and strode away down the hall. Later I saw her wandering distracted up and down the lawn, calling Michael's name and wringing her hands. By nightfall he had still not returned and she dragged Papa into the hall to telephone the police.

  ‘But, but,’ he spluttered, wriggling in her grasp. He was quite drunk. She propped him against the wall and thrust the phone into his hands, and he mumbled into it, looking at her with pained, injured eyes.

  ‘I can't get through, the lines must be down.’ He glowered at the smug black machine. ‘The bastards,’ he said cryptically.