Birchwood Read Free Page A

plummet to the cobbles when general laughter threatens to break out among the mourners gathered in the graveyard below. Arm in arm they set off again toward the front door, and soon Mama could no longer see them, though she leaned over the stove with her cheek pressed to the window. The bell rang insistently, and when she had swept through the dining room and the hall up to the first landing she saw them again, two grotesque foreshortened figures sitting calmly on the front steps with their faces turned to the garden. I think she was upset. What a predicament! She would not let them in. It was left to Josie, some time later, to open the door to them and reward their patience at last.
    In the hall Angel sat on one of the little antique chairs inside the door, her arse overflowing the seat. Silas stood beside her with his hat held in his fingertips. Mama pressed her palms together and saw, on the sunlit step outside, a little black bird alight. Silas gazed at her in silence, with humour, with compassion, his head inclined. He peeled off one of his gloves and advanced, on tiptoe it seemed, and in the mirror of the hatless hatstand a plump smiling ghost appeared briefly. He offered her his chubby pink hand and murmured obsequious greetings. Angel opened her mouth and sneezed uproariously twice, her heels clattering on the parquet and her feathers wobbling. Silas and Mama ignored her, and she glared at them and sniffed haughtily. A tiny shadow darkened the doorway and the three of them ducked their heads as the bird flew into the hall, rose and turned with a wild whacking of wings and was gone. Silas laid a hand on his heart and turned again to Mama, his lips pursed, smiling at his own fright.
    Such scenes as this I see, or imagine I see, no difference, through a glass sharply. The light is lucid, steady, and does not glance in spikes or stars from bright things, but shines in cool cubes, planes and violet lines and lines within planes, as light trapped in polished crystal will shine. Indeed, now that I think of it, I feel it is not a glass through which I see, but rather a gathering of perfect prisms. There is hardly any sound, except for now and then a faint ringing chime, or a distant twittering, strange, unsettling. Outside my memories, this silence and harmony, this brilliance I find again in that second silent world which exists, independent, ordered by unknown laws, in the depths of mirrors. This is how I remember such scenes. If I provide something otherwise than this, be assured that I am inventing.
    Silas and Angel went back down the drive with a step jauntier than that which had brought them up, and soon the caravans came through the gateway and across the lawn down into the fallow field. There was shouting and laughter, and someone played a tin whistle. The horses when they were let loose wandered back to the lawn, searching out the sweet grass. A small boy, or he might have been a dwarf, came and hunted them away again. The whistle was joined by a bodhran. Mama stood and watched the camp take shape. The tall clock slowly tocked, and slender columns of shadow hung motionless from the ceiling behind her. At last she turned, and quickly, firmly, shut the door.
    Granny Godkin lay awake, waiting, in the stuffy fastness of her room. Her watchful silence unnerved Mama when she entered there each morning. Not the dawn over the fields began the day at Birchwood, but the first light breaking in Granny Godkin's bedroom. Mama drew the curtains. That was her task. Our house was run on ritual in those days. The old woman coughed and muttered, pretending to wake, and thrashed about under the blankets, until Mama set the pillow at the headboard and propped her against it.
    ‘There you are now.’
    ‘O, it's you.’ Granny Godkin's dry cough rattled. ‘Well?’
    ‘Sun is out.’
    ‘Good. Not a wink all night. Pains! What time is it?’
    ‘Eight.’
    ‘You took your time. My tea—?’
    ‘On its way.’
    This duet hardly varied