In my room, Michael sat on the bed with his hands dangling between his bony knees while I laid out my toys for his delectation in an arc before him on the floor. We stared at them as we had stared at everything eise, speechless and bored. In my imagination I was standing haughtily over him, with a hand resting elegantly on my hip, telling him just how things were, blockhead, this is my house, and these are my toys, so don't get any ideas, see?
‘You have a lot of things,’ he said, with a faint, faintly mocking smile, though whether it was me or himself that he mocked I could not tell, though I can now.
My most precious toy, if that is the right word, was a magnificent circular jigsaw puzzle of over two thousand tiny wafer-thin pieces. After weeks of intermittent labour varying between a furious panicstricken scrabbling and the smiling swoon of delight when the right piece, the only possible piece, fell into its place in the mosaic, I had assembled out of it a glorious gold and blue painting of a Renaissance madonna, a picture which, in the completed puzzle, glowed with a sense of light and purity, of palpable intensity, which was mysteriously absent from its sibling reproduced on the lid of its box. This tormentor now lay docile at Michael's feet, where he examined it with uncertain sidelong glances. Abruptly, before I could stop him, he bent and picked up the board. Horrified, I tried to snatch it from him, it tilted, and the puzzle glided off, seemed to hang intact in mid-air for a moment, and then fell to the carpet and shattered with an absurdly inadequate, heartbreaking little clatter. Michael stared at the pieces, his mouth moving silently. Any colour there was in his face faded, leaving it a bonewhite mask of fury. The intensity of this speechless rage frightened me. I looked again at the shattered thing, and I could have wept. Cretin! It was not the wasted work that pained me, but the unavoidable recognition of the fragility of all that beauty. I turned without a word and stalked out of the room.
I sat down on the highest step of the stairs, my favourite place to sulk, and was in time to see Granny Godkin hobble into the drawing room. The house rang with angry voices, the slamming of doors, heavy footfalls. Godkin fights were always dispersed, mobile affairs that sprawled across two or three rooms simultaneously. Michael came and sat down quietly by my side. I ignored him. Downstairs, the drawing-room door flew open and my father strode out, halted, looked up at us without seeing us, and turned back in the doorway and shouted,
‘No!’
He plunged across the hall into the library, and a moment later an unseen hand gently closed the drawing-room door. Michael cleared his throat.
‘Ever see juggling?’ he asked.
I disdained to answer. Granda Godkin came out of the dining room and, stealthily, his ear turned toward the drawing room, tiptoed after Papa into the library, only to come flying out again immediately and flee to the back of the house. Michael took from his pocket a chipped blue building block, a marble and a rubber ball. He began to juggle. At first it went clumsily, he dropped the ball, hit himself on the nose with the block, but then all abruptly changed, a rhythm appeared, one could almost hear it, like the airy beat of a bird's wing, and in his hands he spun a trembling pale blue hoop of light. His uplifted face gleamed from the effort of concentration as he leaned this way and that, following a sudden dip of the block, the wayward flight of the ball, and I found myself thinking of air and angels, of silence, of translucent planes of pale blue glass in space gliding through illusory, gleaming and perfect combinations. My puzzle seemed a paltry thing compared to this beauty, this, this harmony. The drawing-room door opened again and Mama led out Aunt Martha, sobbing and snuffling. Michael, his concentration shattered, dropped the ball. It descended the stairs in three high hops and skidded between the women's feet. Michael laughed, an odd noise, rose, dropped forward on all fours, gave a little kick, and stood on his hands. Like that, legs waving, teeth clenched in an inverted grin, he walked down the steps. I think I cheered. Aunt Martha lifted her head to find this grotesque thing advancing slowly toward her, and she opened her mouth and gave a shriek of mingled fright and woe. Mama put an arm around her shoulders and took her into the dining room.
Michael retrieved the ball, stood upright, and came slowly back up the stairs, wiping the sweat from his forehead. He stopped below me and leaned against the banisters, tossing the ball from hand to hand. We were silent for a moment, and then he said,
‘She's always crying.’ He waited for me to reply. I could think of nothing to say. We considered the ceiling. He sighed. ‘She gives me a pain.’
We tittered. He sat down beside me and handed me the ball.
‘Hard to juggle with, a ball,’ he said. ‘Too light.’
I agreed.
8
I HAD EXPECTED, perhaps even hoped, that their arrival would immediately transform life at Birchwood. Nothing is so simple. Things changed, certainly, but slowly, and in subtle ways. The morning rituals, the fights, the elaborate, barely edible evening dinners, they remained unaltered, but the patterns woven by these set-dances of life shifted gradually, until the whole mesh of emphasis and echo between the inhabitants of the house was warped. New alliances were struck. Granny Godkin astonished us all that first morning when, having risen at an unprecedented late hour, she embraced her tear-stained daughter before the drawing-room fire and spoke to her kindly, even lovingly. They closeted themselves in the old woman's room and were not seen again until that evening, when my grandfather was allowed into the sanctum, another precedent, in my time at least. Later he was led out in a flood of maudlin tears. Mama seemed uncertain whether all this lovingkindness relieved or disquieted her, but she smiled as always, and believed the best of people, as always. My father stalked softly about the house wearing a scowl of profound suspicion. Nothing is simple.
My schooling began almost immediately. By any other standards than my own, Aunt Martha was a dreadful teacher, but by mine she was ideal. She was blissfully ignorant of those subjects which a little boy is supposed to study, and I sometimes wondered if she was aware that such esoteric things as Latin, or vulgar fractions, existed in any sense that could apply to her young charge. To Aunt Martha, education was simply a synonym for books, any and all books, and since what one read was irrelevant so long as one did read, the selection was entirely arbitrary. After all, I could not know everything, so what did it matter which parts of the great sum of knowledge I approached? The only imprimatur a subject required was her ignorance of it, and the scope of her ignorance was impressive. For instance, she was convinced that if one sailed steadily westward along the equator one would, without ever touching dry land, astonish the point from which one had departed by sneaking up on it from behind eighty days later, or perhaps it was seventy-nine, one had to reckon with something called the dateline. Verne, therefore, with the help of Columbus and Marco Polo, taught me my befogged geography, not its facts but its poetry, for they delineated not meridians and poles, but a glorious chart of dreams. Ferdinand and Isabella sailed a bright balloon in search of Cathay, that fabulous rumour in the east, and I followed them on my paper wings.