I did not like Aunt Martha, she was a hard woman to like, but, having been ignored all my short life by all the family save Mama, who ignored me in her own way by treating me as an extension of herself, the fact that my aunt would devote three hours of her day solely to me was, shall I say flattering? Directly breakfast was over on the day after her arrival she announced briskly that she was ready to begin the great task. The announcement was greeted by a weary silence, and when she tried again, in case we had not heard the first time, Papa showed his teeth in a smile and inquired with ominous sweetness if we might be allowed to digest the bloody breakfast before she started giving orders. At that she threw down her napkin, the unmistakeable battle signal of the Godkins, but Mama jumped up and said of course, of course, the sooner the better, no time to lose, the child was backward enough as it was, and she whisked Aunt Martha and me up to the schoolroom.
This was a damp gloomy place at the top of the house, a relic of that lost age when the women of Birchwood bore whole battalions of children avid for knowledge. There were a dozen little desks ranged in three neat rows of four facing a delicately-made spindly lectern, curiously reminiscent of the ideal of a Victorian governess for whose service it had been built. Behind the lectern there was a large triangular window, silvered with rain now but which on bright days offered a cruelly enticing view across fields to the beach and the gay blue sea. Long blackboards ran the length of both walls to right and left of the desks, one of them set higher than the other owing to the slope of the ceiling. This imbalance added an incongruously jaunty touch to the sober oakbrown atmosphere of the room. Josie and her erratic duster had been there before us, but the legs of the lectern were still draped with an intricate filigree of cobwebs.
This is grand,’ Aunt Martha said dubiously. The place seemed fitted for a sterner sense of duty than hers. Mama, smiling, nodding encouragement, backed out of the room and softly closed the door. I sat down at one of the desks. How cold and smooth was the wood. The rain drummed on the window, a melancholy whisper. Aunt Martha stood and stared out of unfocused eyes, with that expression of quiet baffled despair which always seemed to take hold of the faces of grown-ups when their thoughts forgot themselves. I drew invisible patterns on the desk with a fingertip. The squeak of my nail on the wood recalled her from her brooding. She went and crouched over the ancient oilstove in the corner, chafing her hands and muttering under her breath. With her imitation smile she turned to me.
‘Well Gabriel, what do you know and not know? What would you like to learn?’
Nothing. Mama had taught me to read, in a perfunctory kind of way, and of course I knew my prayers off by rote, but apart from these graces I was a small, well-behaved savage. I wonder if I have changed, even yet? I have forgotten my prayers, that is something. Aunt Martha's bright smile quailed before my silence, and she wandered off about the room, searching fretfully for something that might interest me. She pushed open a sliding wooden panel in the wall and found a sunken bookcase.
‘Ah, now this is what we need. Let's see, how about-poo! this dust. I suppose you've read all these already, have you? No? Well, we'll see if we can find something exciting, something really…’
I stopped listening, and cautiously opened the lid of the desk. Inside I found a blunt pencil, a jotter with curled yellow leaves, and a hard shrunken brown thing like a nut, which on closer inspection turned out to be an ancient apple core. Who had left these relics here for me to find? My imagination failed against such a mystery. Dead, all dead. My spine tingled. Aunt Martha at last chose a book, and pushed the desk beside me close to mine. She sat down. The book was called The Something Twins, something like that, I barely glanced at it. She began to read, and I put a hand under my chin and considered the window, thinking what a glorious pleasure it would be to smash each of those pearly panes. Only a child knows’ what it is to be truly bored. Gabriel and Rose lived in a big house by the sea. One day, when she was very young, little Rose disappeared, and Gabriel went away in search of her. Crash went the glass, and daggers of crystal dropped down and stabbed Josie in the back of the neck as she came out into the yard below to feed the chickens. What fun! Slowly I became aware that the voice at my ear had fallen silent. Gabriel? Rose? Rose? Aunt Martha sat with the book open on one hand, one finger pressed to her cheek, her face turned toward me, watching me attentively. I had the eerie notion that she was listening to the ticking of my thoughts. She hummed a short snatch of a tune under her breath and then said,
‘Do you never miss-? but of course you wouldn't, you couldn't have known…’ She laughed shrilly. She seemed nervous. Her fingers danced by themselves on the desk. ‘How silly I am! Aren't I silly, Gabriel? Tell me, tell me this, would you like a little sister to play with, hmm?’ Suddenly, to my disgust and intense discomfort, she swept me into her arms. The book tumbled to the floor. ‘You poor child,’ she whispered, her breath flowing down my cheek like warm syrup. ‘You poor poor child!’ She thrust me away from her with that hearty husky tenderness at which she was adept, and, holding me at arm's length, gazed upon me with brimming eyes. ‘Your Mama says you never cry…?’
I stared fixedly past her shoulder and squirmed slowly, cautiously, out of her clutches. So we sat for a moment, panting softly. It was all so very odd. I felt that some vital and strange event had taken place without my noticing. Aunt Martha suddenly smiled her sly smile, looking inexplicably triumphant. She picked up the book from the floor.
‘Gabriel and Rose…’
Her voice followed me down two flights of stairs before it faded. At the door of the library Mama met me with a look of alarm.
‘Where are you off to? Has Aunt Martha…? Gabriel? What are you doing?’
On a little low table by the bookshelves there was a small framed photograph of a young girl in white standing among leaves in a garden, leaning out of the tree's deep shade into a mist of sunlight. In one hand she held a flower. A rose. Look!
9
THE MAIN REASON I was not sent away to a proper school was that we could not afford it. The finances of Birchwood were dwindling at the same rate as the decline of Papa's interest in the farm, which had never been great anyway. I can still see him, with ink-stained fingers and collar agape, his gold tooth glittering, crouched at his desk in the library in a pool of lamplight, scrabbling desperately among a litter of bills, and, a little later, standing in the shadows, where glass clinked furtively on glass, running his fingers through his hair, soothing himself. Of course our genteel slide toward penury was never mentioned, not in my presence, but the silent evidence of it was everywhere around me, in the cracked paint and the missing tiles, the dry rot that ate its way unchecked across the floors and up the stairs, in the games of musical chairs which Mama played, switching them from the front rooms to the back in a circle of increasing degeneracy until the day when, groaning and creaking, they regained their original places and the wheel ceased to turn. A leak, preceded by a burgeoning grey patch of damp, appeared in the schoolroom ceiling. Nockter, after an inspection of the roof, reported that half the slates had come loose and some were gone altogether. It would be repaired within days, Papa promised, he would get a man out from town, but the days became weeks, and I studied to the intricate accompaniment of the plop and splash of rainwater falling into a battery of jamjars ranged around me, and at last Aunt Martha and I were forced to abandon the schoolroom for the library. Then an army of rats laid siege to the kitchen.