Papa opened his mouth and closed it again, looking slowly from one of us to the other. We avoided his eye. His uncertain gaze distressed us. It was unthinkable that he, the rock on which our fortunes so perilously teetered, should crack under the pressure of a mere family row. Mama's knife clattered as she dropped it on her plate. She blushed. On occasions such as this her greatest wish seemed to be to merge quietly into the wallpaper and disappear. Michael, hunched over his dinner, looked out cautiously at Aunt Martha from under his pale brows. Papa shook his head wearily and crossed with heavy tread to the french windows and drew them open on the still night. From the garden there entered the fragrance of flowers and trees, of earth, a sturdy sensuousness which hovered on the thick tepid air of the room like an uninvited and unwelcome guest. Papa chuckled softly, rocking on his heels.
‘We might as well get what we can while we can,’ he said softly. ‘They're taking over.’
He put his hands into his pockets and sauntered off into the darkness, whistling. Granny Godkin shrugged, and clutched her shawl tightly about her shoulders.
‘Drunken nonsense!’ she snapped. ‘Rubbish. Beatrice! Will you shut that window before I catch my death.’
Mama obediently rose to close out the unsettling night, but suddenly Papa reared up out of the darkness, wild-eyed, his hair on end and his suit smeared with mud, a startling transfiguration. He pushed Mama aside and flung himself at Aunt Martha.
‘YouT he roared, and thrust a trembling forefinger under her nose. ‘You and your whelp can get out if you don't like it here. Nothing to stop you!’
Aunt Martha folded her arms and gazed at him calmly, smiling faintly. His eyes bulged, and two small bright crimson stains appeared on his cheekbones. His tie was twisted under his left ear. I knew, by a sudden unimpeachable intuition, that he had tripped over the bicycle which I had left lying on its side on the lawn, and I had to look into Mama's tormented face to keep myself from laughing.
‘PigS said Aunt Martha, jabbing the word like a needle into Papa's face, and carelessly picked a thread from her sleeve. He reached out behind him to the half-dead wine bottle on the table and flung it across the room. It burst against the wall with an understated plop and sprayed blood-red wine down Michael's back. A curved splinter of pink glass flew up in an arc and splashed into the water jug beside Granny Godkin's plate, and the old woman gave a squeak of fright. Aunt Martha sprang to her feet, ready to howl, but Papa suddenly turned to her with an admonitory finger to his lips. He smiled. She stood aghast, her mouth and eyes wide open, and he took his finger from his lips and waved it roguishly at her and then stalked softly out of the room. I was shocked, not by his violence, that was nothing new, but by something odd and humourously sinister which I had perceived in that balletic moment between them, a moment frozen forever for me in the precise picture of his smile which I retain to this day. Mama stared at her sister-in-law, and through clenched teeth produced a weird sound, a kind of snarl, full of pain and jealousy. Aunt Martha turned her back on the room disdainfully. Jealousy?
‘Is he gone mad or what?’ Granny Godkin demanded, glaring petulantly at the two women. She liked to start these fights and then pretend that those who fought with her were unreasonable to the point of insanity. ‘The DTs,’ she muttered. ‘Definitely.’
‘O shut up!’ Aunt Martha cried, and plunged her hands into her hair. Michael, not without amusement, craned his neck and peered down at the wine stains on his back. Papa returned. He had straightened his tie and brushed his hair and sponged the mud from his suit. He took his place at the head of the table. Aunt Martha remained standing for a time, uncertain whether or not the row was finished, glaring histrionically at my father. He ignored her, and she sat down. Josie brought in the coffee.
‘Well, men,’ said Papa, glancing at Michael and me. ‘Blackers tomorrow, eh? All set?’
‘Yes, Uncle Joe.’
‘That's good, that's good.’ He nodded vigorously, spooning sugar into his cup. ‘It's a fair crop this year.’
What surprises me even still is that his heartiness was only slightly false, and only that much because he did not know how to talk to youngsters. The shouting and the broken bottle, all that was as nothing. Mama started the milkjug on its journey around the table. Granny Godkin was made to take her pill. Aunt Martha yawned behind her fingers.
‘A fair crop,’ Papa said again, and buried his nose in his cup. Michael glanced at me. I heard Josie rattling pots in the kitchen. Darkness pressed sofidy against the windows. The night was still and calm in its reaches, with a promise of fair weather for the morrow. Humankind is extraordinary.
12
PAPA WAS RIGHT, the blackcurrant crop was the heaviest in years that year. Just as well, since the fruit was by now one of the last remaining sources of income at Birchwood. The land on which it flourished had been already sold, and this was the final harvest we would take. Michael and I were put in charge of the pickers, a ragged army of tenant children and their grandmothers, and a few decrepit old men no longer capable of heavier toil. They were a wild primitive bunch, the old people half crazed by the weight of their years, the children as cheerfully vicious as young animals. Their conversation dwelt almost to the exclusion of all else on sex and death, and the children managed a neat conjunction of the two by carrying on their lovelife after dark in the local graveyard. They shied away instinctively from me, found me cold, I suppose, or saw my father in me, but Michael they immediately accepted. That surprised me. They listened to his orders and, more startling still, did as he told them. They even offered to arrange a girlfriend for him. That offer he declined, for he had little interest in the sexual duet, being a confirmed soloist, and it was I who made a conquest, when I met Rosie.
In the morning I rose early and waded down through pools of sleep on the stairs to the garden, where Michael waited for me in the cart with Nockter. The lawn was drenched with light, the trees in the wood were still. A bright butterfly darned the air above the horse's head. We rattled along violet-shadowed lanes quick with blackbirds, by the edges of meadows where the corn was bursting. Birdsong shook the wood like gushes of wind. All was still but for the small clouds sailing their courses, and it was pleasant to be abroad in that new morning, with the smell of the furze, and the grass sparkling, that hawk, all these things.
We reached the plantation. Nockter set up the huge brass scales, and Michael unharnessed the horse, whispering in its ear. I heard beyond the clatter of metal and leather the distant ring of voices, and turned and saw, down the long meadow, a concourse approaching, trembling on the mist, their cries softly falling through the air, mysterious and gay. If only, when they were beside me, when I was among them, they had retained even a fragment of the beauty of that first vision, I might have loved them. It is ever thus.
The fruit we hardly picked, but rather saved. From under their canopies of leaf the heavy purple clusters tumbled with a kind of abandon into our hands. Down in the green gloom under the bushes, where spiders swarmed, the berries were gorgeous, achingly vivid against the dusty leaves, but once plucked, and in the baskets, their burnished lustre faded and a moist whitish film settled on the skin. If they were to be eaten, and we ate them by the handful at the start, it was only in that shocked moment of separation from the stems that they held their true, their unearthly flavour. Then the fat beads burst on our tongues with a chill bitterness which left our eyelids damp and our mouths flooded, a bitterness which can still pierce my heart, for it is the very taste of time.
Rosie was there with her granny, an obese old woman whose coarse tongue and raucous cackle froze the child into a trance of embarrassment. I noticed her first when we paused at noon to eat our sandwiches. Michael and I lay in the long grass of a ditch, belching and sighing, contemplating our outstretched bare legs and grimy toes. Rosie sat a little way from us, daintily fighting three persistent flies for possession of a cream bun. She had short dark hair rolled into hideous sausage curls. A saddle of freckles sat on her nose. She wore sandals and a dress with daisies on it. She was pretty, a sturdy sunburned creature. Having won her bun, she wiped the corners of her mouth with her fingertips and began to eat blackcurrants from the basket beside her, slowly, one by one, drawing back her lips and bursting each berry between her tiny white teeth. A trickle of crimson juice ran down her chin and dropped, plop, into her lap, staining a yellow daisy pink.