Birchwood Read Online Free PDF Page B

in the wrong moulds, a fair conception gone awry, in short an awful place, and yet, and yet a place capable of glory in those rare moments when a little light breaks forth, and something is not explained, not forgiven, but merely illuminated.

IT WAS ON WET DAYS that the house really came alive for me, like a ponderous gloomy Chinese puzzle, those interminable Sundays, for they were always Sunday, when a thin drizzle fell all day, washing the colours out of the world outside the windows until even the black trees and the grey grass faded behind the fogged glass. They gave me things to play with, toy soldiers and tin drums, a fierce red rocking-horse with flared nostrils. I broke them all, threw them all away. What were these paltry things compared to Birchwood, out of whose weeping walls I could knock the bright reverberations of fantasy? I could hide in the hollow sarcophagus of the bench seat on the first landing and peer through a knothole at my family's legs carrying them up and down their day, oblivious of the silent spy who so often in his fancy sent them plunging down the stairs, roaring and flailing, and it was not until many years later, lying under the sacks on the cart while Silas and the rest stamped about outside, that I savoured again the peculiar secret delight of not being found simply because no one realised that I was there to be found. Or I would climb to the attic, where the floor was spread with copper-coloured shallots set to dry, where I once conducted a disturbing and exciting surgical operation on a large female rag doll, and where Mama saw the black shape of her madness coming to claim her. My childhood is gone forever.
    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.