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.
3
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 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-?’