‘And when you are able you'll sing a song, won't you? And dance too, for your Mama, because you love her.’ She spoke in a hushed voice, almost a sigh, imparting some great secret. This woman whom, in the innocence of my heart, I called my mother, she was…what? Tall, very slim, with very long fine brown hair which each morning she bound into a burnished knot at the nape of her neck and each night unbound again. There is in the dark past, like something in Rembrandt, a corner illuminated where her hair tumbles softly in silence around her shoulders in the yellow dust of lamplight. I remember her as neither young nor old, but thirtyish, you might say, awkward and yet graceful, with perfect hands, yes, graceful and awkward all at once, I cannot put it better than that. I think she had a beautiful face, long and narrow, as pale as paper, with big dark eyes which, years later, I would find watching me shyly, stunned with helpless love for such a peculiar unapproachable creature as myself. Words. I cannot see her. When I try I cannot see her, I mean I cannot find any solid shape of her, as I can of Granny Godkin for example, or of my father, those who vibrate in the mind like unavoidable stars. Mama seems to have left behind her nothing of her essential self. Only the things that surrounded her come back, imbued with her presence, a fair prospect of trees, a clenched glove, light at evening, a yellow hat settling softly, slowly, into a wash of sunlight on a green table. It is as if she did not die, but rather was dispersed like vapour into objects of more endurance than she could ever claim, as if indeed she never existed, not what we call existing.
A path leads down by wooded ways to the summerhouse by the lake. There Granny Godkin sat, at a table by the window above the water, a pale skull floating among the paler reflections of tree and sky on the glass. She spent most of her days there in the year's clement weather, but how she spent them was her secret, for she was never caught unawares, but as we caught her now, watchful and silent, a game of patience, her alibi, spread before her on the rubbed green felt.
‘Ah come and give your poor Granny a kiss.’
I have no wish to make her seem an ogre, but her smile was awful, really awful, a sort of shattered leer. She smelled of peppermint and dust, and the jaw that I kissed trembled with ague. I had, I know not how, gained her-gained her regard, I wanted to say love, but the Godkins loved only those they could fight, and as yet I was too young for that. Perhaps she found in my infancy an echo of her own senility. For a while she babbled away at me, nodding and leering and prodding me with her talons in a clumsy imitation of tenderness, until I turned away from her, and she fell silent. Mama sat down on a wicker chair and dropped her hat on the table, and the old woman turned her attention to me again for one more try at squeezing some sign of fondness out of me.
‘And tell me, tell me this, who do you love the best?’
I did not answer, for I was engrossed in the startling and menacing intricacy of a daddy-longlegs going mad against the glass in the corner of the window, which was a small coincidence, for soon I saw, beyond the spinning insect, my own long-legged daddy approaching through the wood. Granny Godkin saw him too, and gave a cold neat sniff. He closed the door softly behind him, and without looking at any of us paced slowly past the table with his thumbs in the pockets of his tight black waistcoat. He always seemed to me, even in his worst rages, preoccupied with some old bad joke. Once, in a row with Aunt Martha, when she had flung an ashtray at his head, he snapped his teeth abruptly shut in the middle of a howl of fury and turned on his heel and stalked out into the garden. We sat in silence and inexplicable horror and listened to his laughter booming in the flower-scented darkness outside, and I, cowering in my corner, felt my face grinning wildly, uncontrollably, at this intimation of splendour, of violence and of pain.
‘Well?’ said Granny Godkin calmly. ‘Have you managed to put us in the poorhouse yet?’
Papa, whistling very softly, raised his eyebrows and glanced at her, but continued to pace. Mama became elaborately interested in her fingernails.
‘Well?’ the old woman asked again.
He stopped behind her and looked down at the cards, tapping his foot to the beat of a silent melody. ‘Poorhouse?’ he murmured absently. ‘Black knave on the red queen.’
‘Pah!’
The cards rattled, and Mama bit her lip apprehensively. My father carried a chair from the corner and sat down by the table with his hands on his knees. I leaned against Mama's shoulder. They were shaping up for a fight, I saw it in my father's playful flinty grin, in the convulsive snapping of Granny Godkin's jaw.
‘Did you see that man, you know, what's-his-name?’ Mama asked, making a vain stab at nonchalance.
Papa lit one of his small dark cigars. The smoke, a bluish dove, hovered for a moment over the table and then flew slowly up into the shadows.
‘A very civil fellow,’ he said. ‘Very civil. Treated me to a feed of bacon and cabbage in Regan's. I know, Mr Godkin, you're a man I can trust’ Granny Godkin cackled briefly. ‘I sold him the long meadow,’ Papa added quietly.
We waited on Granny Godkin. She peered at the cards and shifted her dentures. Either she had not heard his last remark, or the significance of the words had not registered.
Trust!’ she said. ‘Huh!’
There would be no fight, not today. Mama, one hand resting lightly on her knee, relaxed and leaned far back on the chair, lifting her face to the window and the tender blue sky. Granny Godkin, her thoughts gone all away, shuffled the cards and shuffled them, slower, and slower. They made a silky sound, the cards, falling together. My father, his long legs elegantly crossed, smoked in silence, his eyes hooded. The sun shone on the table, on Mama's yellow hat. It was pleasant there in the silence of the dusty little room, surrounded by deck chairs and straw hats and other ghosts of forgotten summers. Often now, late at night, or working in the house on rainy days, I feel something soft and persistent pressing in on me, and with sadness and joy I welcome back this scene, or others like it, suffused with summer and silence, another world. Forgetting all I know, I try to describe these things, and only then do I realise, yet again, that the past is incommunicable.
5
THE BUTTERFLIES CAME in swarms in early summer, small blues, delicate creatures. There must have been something in the wood that attracted them, or in the garden, some rare wild plant perhaps. We got used to them, and when they found their way even into the house, and fluttered awkwardly, like clockwork flowers, around our heads at the breakfast table, it was with the tiniest frown of irritation that Mama rose to open the window, murmuring shoo, shoo. They were easily killed, I mean it would have been easy to kill them, while they went about their business on the lupins and the roses, but I never knowingly destroyed one of them, I don't know why. Indeed, in time I became their protector, their patron and friend, and I would carry them, throbbing in my cupped hands, out of the hall before Josie arrived with her mop to kill them. When I released them from the steps their incredulous drunken leap from my palm made the summer airs over the garden seem suddenly lighter, gayer, and as delicately tinted as the skyblue silken dust they left smeared on my fingers. Not that I had any love for them, or even liking. I wanted to kill them, but I did not. Some days my teeth ached with the desire for wanton slaughter, but I would not allow myself the pleasure, treasuring my benificence, and knowing anyway that if the situation became desperate there was nothing to stop me taking a rolled-up newspaper into the wood one afternoon and bludgeoning to extinction a whole species of lepidoptera, small blues, while they frittered away the first glorious days of summer.