2
MY FATHER is grinning in his grave at the notion of his paltry son fiddling with this, with his, baroque madhouse. Mama in her plot is probably weeping. Birchwood for her was a kind of desert, bleak, magnificent, alien. She would have gladly seen the place collapse some suitably wet Sunday. In spring and summer, snatched from sleep by the raucous chorus of the birds, she would rise at dawn and wander through the corridors and the empty rooms, sighing, softly singing, a bit mad even then. On the day I arrived it was she who saw, through the window above the stove in the cavernous kitchen, Silas and the fat Angel coming up the drive. I wonder what she thought of when she saw them, what pestilence and passion? Though she cared nothing for our history, that glorious record of death and treachery of which the Godkins were so proud, it was that very history which made her life so difficult. She was a Lawless, and for such a sin there was no forgiveness.
The family tree is a curious one, with odd echoes among the branches and many an odd bird whistling in the leaves. For generations the Lawlesses were masters of Birchwood, and then my great-great-grandfather and namesake, Gabriel Godkin, arrived. Where he came from is not known, nor who he was. One day, suddenly, he was here, and nothing was the same again. Joseph Lawless, then squire of the estate, disappeared, died, was murdered, no matter. He is remembered in our annals for his answer to the commissioner who informed him at the height of a potato famine that the tenants of Birchwood were being decimated by starvation. A trick, sir, another of their tricks! Joseph roared. Indeed he was right, was Joseph, for the peasants were a tricky lot, they died by the score, thereby forcing the authorities across the sea to send in a relief shipment of six sacks of Indian corn.
The estate was in ruin, bled white by agents and gombeen men. The land had been hacked into tiny holdings where the tenants were strangling the soil to death in their frantic efforts to meet the rents and feed their annually expanding families. All that was to change. Within six months of the, shall we say the disposal of the master, our Gabriel Godkin married the daughter of the house, Beatrice by name-echo!-and took over Birchwood. He broke up the smallholdings, and evicted those who would or could not fall in with his plans. He turned the estate into a huge collective farm ruled by his own ruthless though not unbenign despotism. While the tenants hated him for the loss of what they considered theirs, their own tiny plots, they relinquished their dignity, became serfs, and when their fellows in other parts were on their knees, cropping the grass, their own bellies were, if not full, at least not empty either.
At this point Gabriel's glory fades, he forfeits my interest. In the beginning a dark stranger appearing out of the south, touched with the magic of death and dreams, now he becomes merely another squire and country gent, a name in a parish register, a part of the past. Who was he? I do not know. I am not saying that I have no opinions, I have, but I keep them to myself, for reasons not entirely clear.
The Lawlesses, Joseph's brothers, fought for Birchwood, and what with the legal tangles, and the peculiarities of the will, not to mention the unshakeable faith in perfidy which there was on both sides, the fight was long and dirty in the extreme. Gabriel won, and his fortunes flourished. Demoralised by defeat, the Lawlesses languished. From landed stock to small-town merchants was a short step down. However, there is always justice, of a kind, and while the Lawlesses grew solid and sane the Godkins were stalked by an insatiable and glittering madness born, I suspect, of the need to hate something worthy of their hatred, a part the Lawlesses could no longer play. I am thinking of Simon Godkin furiously dying with his teeth sunk in birchbark, of my mother screaming in the attic. I am thinking of all the waste sad deaths. This violence will be visited on me, in the fullness of time.
My father's share of the family's congenital craziness took a novel and desperate form. He set himself to fall in love with Beatrice, daughter of John Michael Lawless and, correct me if I am wrong, the double-great-grandniece of Joseph, last of the Lawlesses at Birchwood. Papa, also called Joseph, another of those echoes bound to cause confusion, did not succeed in loving her, but married her all the same. Why? Did he have the guts to attack the Godkin madness at its root, end the feud, bring the Lawlesses home, complete the cycle begun a hundred years before? I doubt it. Perhaps he married Mama because his mother, my Granny Godkin, was so violently set against the match, and Joe was never one to pass up a fight with that ancient harridan, the only one of us that he loved, I hope that is the word. She could smell in this affair, she declared, a low plot on the part of the Lawlesses to regain Birchwood by the only means left open to them, namely, the tyranny of the cunt and its corollary, the womb. She may have been right. John Michael Lawless was a crafty old scoundrel behind the subservience, but if he held the deck in this game, the winning of which would see a transfer of business from his general store back to the great farm at Birchwood, he dealt the wrong cards to the wrong players. My father was not to be tyrannised, and poor Beatrice was no amazon, and any Lawless plot there might have been foundered finally on the tormented wasted love which Joseph so unexpectedly kindled in his bride.
He was a handsome man, with thick black hair brushed sternly back, a black moustache, and teeth like white stones. Who could have resisted him, with his weariness of spirit, his disenchantment, his wry gaiety? Beatrice imagined that it was these ill-perceived qualities combined which so pleasantly alarmed and excited her. She was mistaken. What she found fascinating in him, did she but know, was the muted but savage anguish that hounded him all his life, and which, in order to live with it, he transformed into fury or passion, brooding melancholy, visible pain. This is what she loved, by love's perverted nature, but if at first she found romantic an unhappiness which would not be alleviated by anything short of death, it was not long before she learned the folly of her notion. To live with one stricken by such a sickness is to experience compassion first and sympathy, then irritation, resentment, and finally a pity which is indistinguishable from revulsion. Romantic!
She hardly knew him, had seen him in the town, or riding the fields, had danced two foxtrots with him at a hunt ball, when she stopped on the stairs that winter morning and saw him in the hall with her father. Old Lawless stooped and simpered, clasping his hands on his breast, while Joseph leaned away from him with his jaw clenched in distaste. Though she made no sound he heard her, and turned.
‘I want to marry you,’ he said, just like that. Convulsed with embarrassment, she felt the blood rush to her face. She was not surprised, and that surprised her. They ignored her father's fulsome speechifying and went out and walked across the garden into the orchard. There, locked in silence, they stood under a bare black tree, and she watched, fascinated, Joseph slowly pulling off his gloves, finger by finger.
‘Well?’ he asked. ‘What about it? I'm not going to kneel, you know.’
She said nothing, but flung herself at him. They grappled awkwardly in a stunned silence, her teeth clattering against his. He pushed her away, startled by her ferocity, and his hat fell off, he snatched it up, flashed his fierce cold grin with that gold tooth gleaming in it, turned quickly and stalked off through the trees. She found herself shivering, and noticed for the first time the bitter white cold in the air. He did not look back. The hoarfrost crackled under her slippers as she walked back to the house that was changed now beyond all recognition.