On Granny Godkin's last birthday I discovered, obliquely, that I would inherit Birchwood. The old woman's day was a celebration not of longevity but of spite, for she was incredibly old, and the unspoken though general opinion was that if she had any sense of decency she would be dead, and lived on only despite us. My father in his cups was often heard to wonder in an apprehensive undertone if she was after all immortal, and my grandfather, her junior by some years, regarded her across the chasm of silence that separated them with the grudging air of one who suspects he is being cheated.
To say that the house was feverish with activity all day would be an exaggeration, but not a very great one, considering the indolent standards which normally prevailed at Birchwood. Mama worried, of course, and therefore fussed. Since she did not understand why the Godkins fought so much, there was nothing she could to do prevent a row, and therefore determined that at least those arrangements she could affect would be impeccable, and Josie, in the kitchen, turned to her saucepans to hide her wry silent laughter when her distraught mistress threw open the door and cried, as if in answer so some unspoken protest,
‘Do it right, Josie, do it right?
My father absented himself for most of the day by paying one of his mysterious and frequent visits to the city. It was said that he kept a woman there, or even women, but that cannot have been true, since the income from the farm was hardly enough to keep the family, never mind a harem. What Mama thought of his jaunts I do not know, but that evening, as the dinner hour drew perilously near, and she came in from the darkening garden with dripping hair and her arms full of wet copper chrysanthemums for the table, she paused, or should I say faltered, to look from the open door down the deserted drive, and her smile was bravely sad as she lied,
‘I think I see your Papa coming, do I?’
I went with her into the dining room and leaned on the table while she arranged the flowers in the bowl. Granda Godkin hovered guiltily by the rosewood cabinet in the corner, shuffling his feet, wheezing and sighing, nervously patting the pockets of his jacket. The chrysanthemums glowed in the gloom like living things, gathering to themselves the last light of evening. They seemed to sing, these glorious bright blooms, and I could not take my eyes away from them. When I search in the past it is in moments such as this that I find myself as I was then, an intense little boy standing with his ankles crossed and one arm laid along the table supporting his inclined head, gazing solemnly into the luminous celeste of a dream, or walking gravely, stiff-legged out of the room, stopping as Granda Godkin giggled furtively, and looking back to see Mama turn to the old man slowly with her great sorrowful eyes and softly wail,
‘Simon! You've been drinking!
My grandmother had dressed for the occasion in a black bombasine evening gown bedecked with feathers. She wobbled into the dining room on high-heeled black button boots, and Granda Godkin put a hand over his face and peeped at her from between his fingers, quivering with suppressed merriment. The old woman glanced at him and said to Mama, not without a certain grim satisfaction,
‘In the rats again, I see.’
She took her place at the head of the table, where I was allowed to approach her, have my cheek kissed, and give her my present, a painting done by me of a crimson horse with three blue legs. She held my head in her arms and rocked back and forth on the chair, making an odd choked cooing little noise, like a rusty hinge. I disengaged myself distastefully and turned to go. Mama prodded me in the small of the back. I was supposed to sing Happy Birthday, but having endured the indignity of that embrace I was damned if she was going to get music out of me too. I ran away.
I was curled up on the window seat on the landing, with my arms around my knees, watching the quicksilver rain slide across the black glass, when Papa returned. I looked down through the banisters to the dark hall in time to see his foreshortened figure crash into a chair and send it spinning, and hear his fiercely whispered Jesus! Mama slipped out of the dining room, casting a nervous glance behind her before closing the door.
‘Are you all right?’
He stood swaying on one leg, rubbing his knee, and did not answer her.
‘Are you-?’
Tm grand, grand!’ He edged around her to the door, but she plucked at his sleeve and whispered urgently into his ear. He shook his head irritably. ‘Not a drop, I tell you!’
They went through the door, and I crept downstairs. Josie came forward from the shadows bearing a noisome tray of food, and bent and applied her ear to the keyhole and gave me a conspiratorial wink.
‘Ructions!’ she whispered gleefully. Josie derived much bleak amusement from my family's doings. She had been with us for years. Her name was Cotter. They said she had a husband somewhere. She pushed open the door with her foot and entered. Framed by the doorway, the table and the celebrants floated in a little haven of candlelight. Mama sat facing the fireplace with her back turned to me. Granda Godkin's left eye suddenly sprang at me with alarming vacancy over her shoulder. Of my grandmother I could only see her disembodied sharp little face suspended over her plate. Papa stood by the table with one hand in his pocket and the other holding a glass which winked out of a dozen gold and amber eyes. Josie piled food on their plates. Granny Godkin peered suspiciously at her portion and said,
‘It doesn't trouble your conscience, I suppose, Joseph, that it's not yours to sell?-Is this supposed to be chicken?’ She lifted her eyes and glared balefully at Papa. ‘I say it's not yours to sell!’
Papa grinned.
‘Not yety he said cheerfully.
Granny Godkin threw up her hands in horror, and turned to Mama. ‘O! O! Beatrice, do you hear, he's wishing his own father dead!’
Mama said nothing, but let fall an abrupt lugubrious sob and clapped a hand over her mouth, bowing her head. Josie took up the empty tray. My father finished his drink and sauntered away into the shadows. Granda Godkin farted softly. All these, my loved ones. The pale radiance of the candlelight seemed to invest them with a morose yet passionate vividness, to intensify them, and they became for me, suddenly, creatures with a separate life, who would continue to exist even when I was not there to imagine them, and I recognised, perhaps for the first time, the remote, immutable and persistent nature of the love I wasted on them, as if I had love to waste. Granny Godkin, grinding her jaws in a prelude to another sortie, pointed a chicken leg accusingly at my invisible father, Mama lifted her head and blotted out Granda's glazed staring eye, and then, ah and then, Josie shut the door on them, locking from my sight this new mythology.