Birchwood Read Free

white cold in the air. He did not look back. The hoarfrost crackled under her slippers as she walked back to the house that was changed now beyond all recognition.
    They were married in the spring. She wore white. In the church the window behind the altar blazed with light, scattering pale spangles around her on the flagstones. Baffled among the jumble of her emotions, she stumbled through the ceremony convinced that she was elsewhere. The wobbly music of the organ marched her out into the churchyard, where her heart stopped dead for an instant at the sight of the April sunlight shining gaily on the tombstones. Joseph suffered it all in a mood of tired boredom which he succeeded in enlivening only once, when he paused for a full five seconds before saying Yes to the contract. The minister gaped at him, nodding and mouthing in frantic dumb show, and Beatrice's mother, who was to die within the year, let loose a gulp of woe and slumped down in her invalid chair, and, for many years, Papa was to remember the occasion with a warm glow of spite.
    The Lawlesses attended the wedding in force. They wept in the church, and stood solemnly to attention outside while their photographs were taken. At the reception they all got drunk, and Uncle Teddy, the rake, twirling his moustaches, sang questionable songs. They toasted the bride, and wept once more on each other's shoulders. The dining tables were taken away and they danced, and one of my aunts fell and broke her ankle. O they had a glorious time. Shopkeeping had made shopkeepers of them. The Godkins stayed away. Perhaps some of them really disapproved, but most of them were afraid to come for fear of Granny Godkin, who sat at home in the same chair all that long day long and planned a welcome for her son's bride at Birchwood.
    What a welcome it was. They returned from blossoming Paris into rain, a wild sky, strife in the trees. The garden was sodden, the first flowers of the year scattered on the grass, soiled and broken. No fires were lit in the house. Joseph stamped through the rooms roaring for Josie the housekeeper, for his mother, for his dinner. Beatrice hauled their bags, plastered with wet yellow petals, into the hall, and wandered around the house, blowing her nose. In the drawing room she found Joseph, his mother and his sister Martha confronting each other, dumb with rage, all three. The old woman's eyes flickered toward the open door, where Mama hovered, and Joseph turned and stared at his wife with an icy eye.
    ‘Jesus,’ he muttered.
    That was for her an ending of a kind. She had thought that life would be different and therefore better, but it was only different, and even the difference was not so great. She pondered the moments when all had seemed ready to change, but she could retrieve only bits and pieces, a tree in winter, smell of spring in a Paris street, bits and scraps. The real moments of transformation, these in time she forgot, long before, three seasons later, she looked from the kitchen and saw that rakish pair coming to plunder her morning.

TO BE SPECIFIC —to be specific!—what she saw or noticed first was the line of horsedrawn caravans halted outside on the road, their black roofs behind the hedge. Imagine her surprise, for it was not every day the traveller stopped at our forbidding gates, and, as if the caravans were not enough, she had next to cope with Silas and the fat woman. Silas was short and plump, with plump short legs and a big head, a big belly, and tufts of white hair sticking out under the brim of a black hat. He wore a black suit that was too tight for him, and white linen gloves. The fat woman's fat was trapped in a shapeless flowered dress with a crooked hem. A rainbow of feathers wobbled in her floppy hat. They paused to look up at the house, and Silas said something, and Angel laughed, and for a moment a kind of cruel ramshackle frivolity was abroad in the garden, like that in the instant between the steeplejack's stumble and his