John Banville - Birchwood

‘Touch of the grippe. Be over it in a day or two. Well?’

The constraint in the atmosphere at last made an impression on him, and he looked around at the rest of them with his eyebrows quivering. Apparently he had not heard of Granny Godkin's departure. We marched down to the summerhouse, the tribe leading their medicine man to the evil spirit. The rain stopped and the sun appeared abruptly. We waited outside on the porch in an embarrassed silence while he went in to investigate. After what seemed an age the door opened and he backed out slowly, his head bent, fingers to his lips. He was intrigued.

‘Extraordinary. Upon my word, I've never come across anything like it…’ He found the bereaved family watching him with a suitably muted air of expectation, and he coughed and turned away abruptly, humming and hawing under his breath. We trooped back to the house, and there, in the dining room, swilling tea, his curiosity got the better of him again, and he had trouble preventing himself from grinning enthusiastically as he mused upon that strange death.

‘Most extraordinary, really. I've read of one or two similar cases, you know, in America, if I remember rightly, but I never thought'-he scoffed at his lack of foresight-'dear me, I never thought that here…that Birchwood…’ He looked about with a newfound air of respect at this humble and familiar place that had produced such a marvel. ‘Not a mark anywhere, only the chair. Can't have been a fire, discount that absolutely. Those smuts on the wall…’ Aunt Martha let fall a muffled sob, and the old boy glanced at her apologetically. ‘But it's terrible, of course, very sad, it must have been a great shock, indeed yes, ahem.’

He put down his cup, and with a promise to tip the wink to the coroner he prepared to depart. Papa tackled him in the hall.

‘Well you think then, Doctor…? I mean…?’

‘Eh?’ He cast a wary eye over Papa's shoulder at Aunt Martha's puffed tear-stained face. ‘Well of course until I examine it further… I may have to call in some people from Dublin. At the moment, however, I can see no other explanation…after all…’

‘Yes?’

The old shammer sniffed, and fussed with the collar of his cape. He turned to the door, paused, and cast one bloodshot eye back over his shoulder at us.

‘Spontaneous combustion ,’ he said faintly, dived out on the step, and with a last embarrassed grunt was gone. As I say, he may have been right, she may have just…burst, but I cannot rid myself of the notion that the house itself had something to do with it. Birchwood had grown weary of her, she saw that herself. Did it assassinate her? Extraordinary, as the Doc observed.

He did speak to the coroner, and a vague verdict of death by misadventure was returned, but for this service he expected to be allowed to conduct the people he had called in from Dublin, old cronies of his, around the scene of the disaster, and was greatly incensed when Papa refused entry to him and his band of ghouls. However, he kept our secret from the town. In a week or two there was hardly anything of the incident left, except Josie's mournful sobbing at odd hours of the day and night, for she came up trumps and surprised us all by displaying genuine grief for the old woman's passing. By the way, we settled the business of the funeral very neatly, and buried Granny Godkin's feet in a full-sized coffin. Despite the needless expense, the craftiness of the ruse pleased Papa enormously.

OLD MCCABE MAYhave been right about Granny Godkin, but he was quite wrong about my touch of grippe. In fact, it blossomed into an impressive dose of pneumonia. All day I had felt curiously isolated, as though I were enclosed in a very fine transparent membrane. Loud noises came to me muffled, whereas the tiniest sound, a match striking, say, was like a thunderclap. I pretended to be quite well, in spite of the Doc's diagnosis, which had galvanised Mama into a paroxysm of concern, and it was with great difficulty that I avoided having that evil-tasting thermometer thrust into the throbbing velvet under my tongue. I feared being put to bed, for the ramifications of the old woman's fiery finish were too good to miss, and anyway I had a date with Rosie.

Now that the summer was ended our affair had run into difficulties. We had no shelter. The empty stables behind the kitchen were dangerously close to the house, and Nockter nearly caught us on our one bold visit to the hayshed. We went back to Cotter's place and prayed for some disaster on the sun to turn our autumn into a searing indian summer. Our prayers, as we had gloomily expected, went unanswered. These material difficulties, however, were only the tip of the iceberg that had begun to rise between us. Our idyll was ending. The strange fact is that we were not drawing apart, on the contrary, we were beginning to get to know one another. We had each dreamed a lover for ourselves, but dreams are brittle things, and piggish reality tramples them to bits under its trotters. Now, as we peered through the thinning mist, we perceived in each other disconcerting little habits which, it is true, we had already noticed, but they had been sublimely unimportant. She picked her nose with a kind of venom when thinking deeply, and sometimes her laughter struck an unsettling echo of her grandmother's raucous cackle. Things like that. I clearly remember the unwarranted intensity of my shock when I discovered under her left armpit a sinister chocolate-brown mole. And I imagine that the variety of ways in which I disillusioned her must have been impressive. We saw us as we were, and the sight was hardly to be borne.

Late that evening the wind abated, but the rain began to fall again in half-hearted flurries, and the trees now and then dropped a clatter of tears. Rosie, wrapped in a gleaming black raincoat, wore her brother's Wellingtons and a yellow hat, and all I could touch were her chill damp face and etiolated hands. I huddled against her under Cotter's wall, shaking like a drunk. Those moments were perversely sweet. My hair stood on end each time she dipped her tongue into my throbbing mouth. At last, infuriated by my groans, she pushed me away. Nothing rages like a fourteen-year-old scorned.

‘ What are you crying for? ’

It was rain on my face, not tears. I grinned, to show her how well I was.

‘You're just playacting. You don't like me any more. Well I don't like you much any more either! Just because I'm not grand enough for you.’

That was how it was now. She ran away through the trees, holding her hat in place with one hand and stumbling in her outsize boots. I made no effort to stop her. I had arrived at that stage of illness where my weariness was such that it seemed I had all day been playing all the parts in a nonstop show, Rosie was right there, did she but know it, I had been Granny Godkin exploding, Nockter falling, the telephonist hooting, Rosie fleeing, Gabriel struggling with his ague, and now I was tired of it all, they would have to play their own parts without me, for I was retiring from the boards. Fever was the only reality. I rattled miserably home, and there, like the pale boy in a cautionary illustration, I fell into Mama's arms, a drenched waif.

That night was horrible. I wallowed in a hot noisome sweat that smelled of rotten roses, grinding my teeth and shivering. A small toadlike animal seemed to have lodged itself in my trachea, and at every cough it plunged a quivering claw into my left lung. The room seemed thronged until the early hours with unbearably busy nurses. Mama would lean over me in the bilious yellow lamplight, trumpeting incoherently, and then another, Aunt Martha perhaps, would fling open the door, sweep up to the bed and thrust her rubbery face down on mine. There was a troubling dichotomy between their frenetic activity and their voices, for all sound had slowed down to an underwater pace, an intermittent booming in my ears broken into regular beats whose rhythm, I suspect, corresponded to the fretful flutter of my pulse. I swung vertiginously in and out of sleep, and at last subsided into something which was not sleep, but rather a comatose sentry duty over my quietly pulsating body.