John Banville - Birchwood

I swam up slowly out of that murky sea into a calm bright morning. The light in the room was of the palest blue and gold, extraordinarily steady. It seemed to come from everywhere at once, as though each surface were the source of its own illumination. On the table by my bed a single red rose, mysterious and perfect, stood in a glass. The stem seemed fractured where it entered the bluish water. A deep stillness reigned, originating in the centre of my forehead and radiating out through room after room, holding the life of the house in thrall. I lay on my back in this floating florentine world and gazed into the white infinity of the ceiling. I felt as fragile as fine glass, neutral, numb except for my hair, which crackled painfully when I turned my head on the pillow, and even that minute torment was no more than the stab of anguish which pierces the heart when one is faced with something of incomparable beauty, as I was then, a beauty which did not spring from any one thing, but from every thing, causing the light to sing. I have experienced that same sensation only once or twice since then, in these nights, in my latest sickness, toiling over these words.

And as in this present toil too was the way that day in which my fevered brain was working. I went back through many years, as many as I could remember, gathering fragments of evidence, feeling my way around certain discrepancies, retrieving chance words let drop and immediately picked up again, collating all those scraps that pointed unmistakeably, as I now saw, to one awesome and abiding fact, namely, that somewhere I had a sister, my twin, a lost child. This discovery filled me with excitement, but I could not say whether the excitement was produced by the cool and lucid manner in which I marshalled the evidence or by the conclusion which I had reached, and that troubled me. But a sister! Half of me, somewhere, stolen by the circus, or spirited away by an evil aunt, or kidnapped by a jealous cousin-and why? A part of me stolen, yes, that was a thrilling notion. I was incomplete, and would remain so until I found her. All this was real to me, and perfectly reasonable.

Someone in the corridor tried the handle of the door. The sound floated through the hollow silence like the chiming of polished steel pipes. Footsteps boomed away into an enormous distance, fell silent, and then returned. This time the door opened, and another door, in the mirror of my wardrobe, flew open on another world out of which Aunt Martha stepped and laid her cold hand on my forehead.

‘O you're on fire, on fire!’

A petal fell from the rose beside me.

I recovered in a week or two. They told me that I had been delirious. I had no reason to disbelieve them, except that I had not invented Granny Godkin's death, or any of the events of that first day of fever, and I knew that if I had not invented all that, had not played out all those parts in my burning brain, then anything was possible.

IT WAS Ahard winter, no harder than in other years, I suppose, but the house was dying, and the cold got in, the fierce winds and fiercer frost. Flocks of slates flew off the roof, rain seeped into the bedrooms. One morning my water sizzled on a film of ice in the second floor lavatory, the only one that worked now. From that time there comes back to me above all the taste of porridge and the feel of damp blankets.

Papa no longer tried to hide his helplessness. He gazed on the dissolution of his kingdom in a kind of daze, humming distractedly under his breath. He was rarely sober, and sometimes at night I would hear him stumbling up the stairs, cursing and belching, and kicking over the jamjars which Mama had so carefully placed under the leaks in the ceilings. Nockter disappeared one night, and in the morning the police came looking for him. It seems he was in the movement. Papa was profoundly shocked. The rot of rebellion was no longer distant and therefore manageable, but had spread under his own roof, had flourished among the innocent flowers of Birchwood. I remember him, in his armchair in the library, gingerly opening the morning newspaper, holding his face away from it as though he feared that a fist might lash out from between the pages and punch him on the nose, and then there was his look of awe and bafflement as he read of the latest disasters and assassinations. Surely it was all a dream? The world was solid, god damn it! He began to watch Josie with a brooding eye, and engaged her in elaborate and roundabout conversations meant to test her loyalty, but which only amused her, and left her convinced that he was losing his reason. Then he made the most frightful discovery of all, that old man Lawless, Mama's father, was now in possession of a large share of Birch-wood. Every acre that Papa had sold he had sold unwittingly to his father-in-law, who, as usual, had worked in silence and stealth, using the Gadderns and the other buyers, all cronies, as his unofficial agents. Mama was mortified, and protested her innocence, but Papa, without a word, only a look, accused her of complicity. He saw betrayals everywhere. Poor Papa.

Now that Nockter was gone, Rosie and I went back to the hay-shed, and in that furry warm haven our passion blazed again briefly. Once or twice I tried to talk to Michael about her. He was not interested. In the last months he had changed, had become even more reticent, which meant that he hardly spoke at all. The mockery in his smile was now directed openly at all of us, but it was always mockery, never contempt, and there was something else, buried deep within him, wistfulness, longing, I don't know. He remains for me still, yes, even still, a secretive and troubled creature with a knot of thorns in his heart. Or is that only how I wish to remember him?

Mama instituted economy drives. They got nowhere, and probably put a greater strain on the budget than our usual profligacy. Her oddest venture was to dig out from god knows what musty corners our castoff clothes so that we might get one last wear out of them before they fell to pieces. We disappointed her by stoutly refusing, amid not wholly convincing guffaws, to deck ourselves out in these eerie echoes from the past, and it was left to her to trail through the house a bizarre parody of the weekend parties and hunt balls of immemorial seasons. The clothes had a chilling but, now that I think of it, not unexpected effect upon her. She began, in subtle ways, to play the part that the costume of the day demanded, and how uneasy was the silence that settled on the dining room when she swept to the table in a purple velvet evening gown, or came tripping down in a gossamer frock straight out of the gay nineties.

Snow fell on Christmas Day, as it is supposed to do. All morning, out of a low sky, the big white flakes flowed down, silent, mysterious, muffling everything. The house ached with boredom. For my Christmas box Aunt Martha gave me a stamp album, and I spent a pleasantly demented hour in my room ripping it slowly, lovingly, to shreds. At noon the snow made a determined effort to stop, and Josie served ham sandwiches and stewed tea and tacky mince pies. Michael trudged off toward the town. I tormented the grandfather clock in the hall, turning the hands to make it ring the changes of a whole day in ten minutes. Half way through noon the poor brute, confused and frantic, gave a last wobbly chime, groaned, and stopped, and somewhere above me a door slammed. I wandered up the stairs, drawing out of the banisters with a moistened finger a thin, piercing wail. There is nothing that cannot be tortured, given a bored child's resourcefulness.

Granny Godkin! Black against the window on the landing hung a grotesque caricature of the old woman, her dusty bombasine evening gown stretched on a spidery frame, my poor mad Mama. The dress hardly covered her shins. Her arms, constricted at the shoulders, dangled crookedly by her sides. Her pale bare wrists were inexplicably pitiable. She stood so, there before that white immensity of snow, her head inclined, listening intently. I stepped toward her slowly through an awful silence, mute, hypnotised, infected with a little bit of her madness. Faint voices crept out from Aunt Martha's room, and a silver jingle of laughter. Mama did not look at me. I doubt if she even realised that I was there. She gave a small grunt of satisfaction, tapped me twice absentmindedly on the shoulder with a fingertip, and skipped swiftly away down the stairs. The voices in Aunt Martha's room fell silent, and after a moment the door opened and my father peered out cautiously. Seeing that it was only me he glared, and received nothing in return but another glare which must have been a disturbing mirror image of his own. Behind his back, in the depths of the room, something lazily stirred, and a muffled voice spoke querulously. Papa retreated and softly closed the door, leaving behind him a woody whiff of cigar smoke.