John Banville - Birchwood

‘Dear Martha,’ she said, ‘I've told you, he's in the shed down there.’

Aunt Martha bared her teeth.

‘Mad bitch,’ she said softly. The words slipped from her lips like a silken red ribbon of hatred. She swept out to the porch, where she halted and stared back at us over her shoulder with an impossibly melodramatic look, eyes smouldering and nostrils flared. She disappeared. Mama touched my cheek. Behind her there was wind, a frozen moon, black trees. Suddenly I had an irrational desire to strike her. Instead I pushed her aside and ran down the steps, across the garden. The blanket clutched at my legs, and I must have fallen more than once, for in the morning my knees were crusted with dried blood and bits of grit. The fire wagon was parked at the corner of the garden, its two black horses stamping the grass uneasily and rolling their eyes. Dim figures were busy in the glasshouses, and a white canvas hose, swelling and writhing like a stranded eel, crawled through a smashed frame and down the path toward the rear of the house, where I followed it.

The shed was a glorious sight. Enormous scarlet flames poured through the door and the windows, lighting with an evil glow the underside of the tumbling pall of black smoke above the roof. In the open yard squat firemen in outsize uniforms were running up and down and shouting. There seemed to be a horde of them. Two stalwarts grappled valiantly with the gasping hose and sprayed a stream of water on the cobbles, the empty sties, even on the burning shed, and once on the figure of Aunt Martha, a tragic queen, standing below the flames with her arms flung wide, her face livid in the glare. The fire roared like a wounded animal, but it could not drown out her piercing crv.

‘ Michael P

She dropped her arms and set off toward the shed with an odd broken stride, her hands flapping. Josie and a fireman made a lunge at her and missed, and the fireman darted after her, tapped her on the shoulder, and then, beaten by the heat, turned and scampered back to his mates. I thought that he giggled, like a child playing tig. It was an extraordinary moment, in which it seemed that the whole yard was about to erupt into guffaws.

Aunt Martha halted outside the burning doorway, and remained there, apparently at a loss, for a very long time, and Papa, looming up behind me like a huge pale spider in his long woolly underwear, gave a grunt of astonishment as she lifted her arm to brush the sweat from her forehead with a languid, lazy, stylised gesture of weariness. Acting still! Her dress burst into flames then, and she trotted on through the door. Her wild, ululating cry was the perfect counterpart of her rippling figure as it drifted, so it seemed, slowly, dreamily, wrapped in an aureole of light, into the furnace. Papa opened his mouth and bawled, angrily, terribly, and covered his face with his hands, and in that theatrical pose I left him, as a fireman, no doubt acting out some cherished notion of heroism, grabbed me up out of the path of a non-existent danger and went pounding off around the house to the front door, where Mama still stood, still smiling placidly.

DOWN IN THE GLOOMof the kitchen Josie fed me bread and butter and bruised bananas and scalding tea. A naked bulb, like a drop of bright yellow fat, burned above the table where my stouthearted fireman, balancing his helmet on his knee, sat with his nose in a steaming mug. Each time I looked at him he winked slyly, as though we were conspirators. Perhaps we were? Josie, wrapped in a shapeless quilted dressing gown which had once been Granny Godkin's, stood silently by the stove stirring and stirring something in a huge saucepan. Her hair stood upright on her head, grey spikes and springs. I think she was asleep on her feet. Outside in the darkness a lone bird sang, foolishly welcoming the false dawn. Mama brought down my clothes and I dressed on the warm tiles beside the stove. Josie grinned at me sleepily. I felt like a little child again. We heard the fire wagon depart, and at the sound my rescuer started up in alarm. His helmet fell to the floor and rolled about drunkenly. He retrieved it quickly and sat down again, grinning sheepishly, and ever after that morning the angel of death has been for me a fat celestial fireman with a permanent wink and a helmet perilously balanced over one ear. Mama, with her fingers pressed to her cheek, sat by the table and watched me dressing.

‘You never cried,’ she mused, idly. ‘Never once, did you?’ I shook my head. She took me in her arms and kissed me tenderly. She had a smell, of milk, of hair, of violets, the smell of madness. ‘My Gabriel.’

Once, when I was very young, I had this strange experience. I was standing, I remember, by the french windows in the library looking out into a garden full of butterflies and summer, as gardens always seem to be when we are very young. I thought to open the windows and walk out there, into the sunlight, but with my fingers on the handle I hesitated, for no reason, and for an instant only, and then I went out. But I was followed by a terrifying notion that there was ahead of me, as far ahead as the duration of that momentary hesitation, a phantom of myself who mimicked my every movement precisely, but in another world, another time. That same conviction, but this time profounder and more terrible, was with me as I slipped out of the house at first light. It was a gauzy green dawn, damp and bright. The birds, my faithful friends! There were lavender shadows under the trees. The hayshed still smouldered, a black sore in the midst of spring's tempestuous greenery. I caught a glimpse of Papa down there, wandering in the ruins, dazed and lost. I left him there and went down the drive. Birchwood dwindled behind me. Far along the road the shimmering roofs of the town were visible, with here and there a little plume of ashblue smoke. I thought about Michael. Many things puzzled me. Why had Aunt Martha died? Did Rosie set fire to the shed in revenge for my abandoning her? Where was Michael? And my sister? All these questions, and many more. I longed for answers. O but no, I did not really long. They could wait, for another time.

IT WAS STILL EARLYwhen I reached the town. The sunlight was bluish, laden with soft dust. More like summer really than spring, except for that sensation of pins and needles in the air. The townsfolk were abed, but stirring, I could hear them. I was stared at by dogs, by sleepy cats with cloudy green poison in their eyes. I have always felt a friend to dumb creatures. A milk cart creaked down the narrow main street, the horse with its tail arched dropping a trail of steaming brown pats like hoofs come undone. The milkman wore trousers made from flourbags. He landed a spit between my feet. Admirable aim.

I sat on the steps below a fragment of an ancient rampart. The barracks with its barred windows faced me across the road. To my left was the priory, with broken tombstones, a tower and a green bronze bell. Monks were slaughtered there by Cromwell. Some hard thing struck me on the spine. It was the toe of a boot. He stood behind and above me on the steps with the sun at his back, his hands on his hips. He wore a dark-green frock-coat with black and gold frogging, tight white duck trousers, stout black boots and gaiters laced to the knee. On his square head a cocked hat sat, with a flowing ostrich plume in the band. A white wirebrush moustache bristled under his granite nose. The voice when he spoke was like a distant cannonade.

‘Richard FitzGilbert de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, stood there.’ He eyed me distastefully, pointing at the spot where I sat. ‘Strong-bow himself, that was, on them very steps! Now bugger off.’