TO BE SPECIFIC—to be specific!—what she saw or noticed first was the line of horsedrawn caravans halted outside on the road, their black roofs behind the hedge. Imagine her surprise, for it was not every day the traveller stopped at our forbidding gates, and, as if the caravans were not enough, she had next to cope with Silas and the fat woman. Silas was short and plump, with plump short legs and a big head, a big belly, and tufts of white hair sticking out under the brim of a black hat. He wore a black suit that was too tight for him, and white linen gloves. The fat woman's fat was trapped in a shapeless flowered dress with a crooked hem. A rainbow of feathers wobbled in her floppy hat. They paused to look up at the house, and Silas said something, and Angel laughed, and for a moment a kind of cruel ramshackle frivolity was abroad in the garden, like that in the instant between the steeplejack's stumble and his plummet to the cobbles when general laughter threatens to break out among the mourners gathered in the graveyard below. Arm in arm they set off again toward the front door, and soon Mama could no longer see them, though she leaned over the stove with her cheek pressed to the window. The bell rang insistently, and when she had swept through the dining room and the hall up to the first landing she saw them again, two grotesque foreshortened figures sitting calmly on the front steps with their faces turned to the garden. I think she was upset. What a predicament! She would not let them in. It was left to Josie, some time later, to open the door to them and reward their patience at last.

In the hall Angel sat on one of the little antique chairs inside the door, her arse overflowing the seat. Silas stood beside her with his hat held in his fingertips. Mama pressed her palms together and saw, on the sunlit step outside, a little black bird alight. Silas gazed at her in silence, with humour, with compassion, his head inclined. He peeled off one of his gloves and advanced, on tiptoe it seemed, and in the mirror of the hatless hatstand a plump smiling ghost appeared briefly. He offered her his chubby pink hand and murmured obsequious greetings. Angel opened her mouth and sneezed uproariously twice, her heels clattering on the parquet and her feathers wobbling. Silas and Mama ignored her, and she glared at them and sniffed haughtily. A tiny shadow darkened the doorway and the three of them ducked their heads as the bird flew into the hall, rose and turned with a wild whacking of wings and was gone. Silas laid a hand on his heart and turned again to Mama, his lips pursed, smiling at his own fright.

Such scenes as this I see, or imagine I see, no difference, through a glass sharply. The light is lucid, steady, and does not glance in spikes or stars from bright things, but shines in cool cubes, planes and violet lines and lines within planes, as light trapped in polished crystal will shine. Indeed, now that I think of it, I feel it is not a glass through which I see, but rather a gathering of perfect prisms. There is hardly any sound, except for now and then a faint ringing chime, or a distant twittering, strange, unsettling. Outside my memories, this silence and harmony, this brilliance I find again in that second silent world which exists, independent, ordered by unknown laws, in the depths of mirrors. This is how I remember such scenes. If I provide something otherwise than this, be assured that I am inventing.

Silas and Angel went back down the drive with a step jauntier than that which had brought them up, and soon the caravans came through the gateway and across the lawn down into the fallow field. There was shouting and laughter, and someone played a tin whistle. The horses when they were let loose wandered back to the lawn, searching out the sweet grass. A small boy, or he might have been a dwarf, came and hunted them away again. The whistle was joined by a bodhran. Mama stood and watched the camp take shape. The tall clock slowly tocked, and slender columns of shadow hung motionless from the ceiling behind her. At last she turned, and quickly, firmly, shut the door.

Granny Godkin lay awake, waiting, in the stuffy fastness of her room. Her watchful silence unnerved Mama when she entered there each morning. Not the dawn over the fields began the day at Birchwood, but the first light breaking in Granny Godkin's bedroom. Mama drew the curtains. That was her task. Our house was run on ritual in those days. The old woman coughed and muttered, pretending to wake, and thrashed about under the blankets, until Mama set the pillow at the headboard and propped her against it.

‘There you are now.’

‘O, it's you.’ Granny Godkin's dry cough rattled. ‘Well?’

‘Sun is out.’

‘Good. Not a wink all night. Pains! What time is it?’

‘Eight.’

‘You took your time. My tea—?’

‘On its way.’

This duet hardly varied from day to day. When it was finished they were lost. Mama drifted back to the window, while the old woman sat scratching the counterpane with her nails and turning her eyes vacantly from side to side. Theirs was a curious relationship. Granny Godkin, before she met her, had imagined Beatrice as a tough blue-eyed bitch. What a royal battle there would be! She polished her weapons and waited. That day of the wedding, when she sat staring into the garden, she burned with excitement. The real Beatrice, a gentle creature dazed by her passion for my father, was a bitter disappointment, but, refusing to give up her dreams of flying blood and Jiair, the old woman launched her attack regardless. Mama, mistaking what was expected of her, pretended that things were other than they were, made herself agreeable, replied to what she wanted to hear not what was said, smiled, smiled, and raged in her dreams. Such tactics were unbeatable because of their innocence, and Granny Godkin, in baffled fury, turned on her son and cried, She has no style, no style! Joseph grinned, and lit a cigar, and strolled out into the garden. Something in his mother folded up, she took to grumbling, and began to die, and there at last she found her finest weapon, for Beatrice knew, without knowing how, that she was killing the old woman. Joseph, mildly amused, observed this unexpected turn in the tide of war, and when Beatrice guiltily spoke of his mother's decline he grinned at her too and said that she would never die, not, my dear, so long as she has you. Which might have proved true had not the house, weary of this wild old woman, finally turned on her and extinguished her itself.

There was a scratching at the bedroom door, and it opened wide enough to allow in Granda Godkin's wizened skull. My grandmother turned her face away from him. The ancient couple could not remember when they had last spoken to each other, which is not to say that they did not have their suspicions, although it often occurred to me that each may well have thought the other already dead and come back a spiteful and tenacious ghost. Still with only his head inside the room Granda Godkin winked at Mama, who had turned from the window in sudden alarm.

Tn a pet today, are we, in a pet?’ he inquired, and nodded toward his wife. He withdrew his head with its sprinkling of ginger hairs, and a rattle of phlegm in the corridor betrayed his secret laughter. He was a wicked little old man. Once again his pixie's face appeared, and he was already speaking when Mama began to shake her head at him in urgent mute appeal.

‘I see the tinkers have moved in.’

Another retreat, another laugh, and this time the door closed. Granny Godkin's eyes and mouth flew open—

‘Where's that Josie?’ Mama muttered, and fled. She was in the corridor before the old woman began to bray. Josie's ragged gray head came up the stairs, and she stopped, slopping tea into the saucer, and turned her ear toward the commotion in the bedroom with a bleak little grin.

‘What's wrong with her now?’ she asked.

‘Bring in the tea, Josie, bring it in,’ her mistress answered wearily. Poor Mama.

She went out into the garden, into the stained light and the birdsong, and walked on the lawn by the edge of the wood. A wind from the sea lashed the tops of the trees together and made spinning patterns of the fallen may blossom on the grass. Nockter the gardener, a square hulk of a man, knelt in the flowerbeds uprooting the weeds that flourished among the violets.

T-p-powerful day, ma'am.’

‘Yes, glorious.’

He edged away from her and bent again to his task, nervous of her mad placid smile.

She sat on the iron seat in the little arbour under the lilacs. An early cricket ticked among the bluebells. She heard without hearing it the music fade down in the fallow field. All was still in her little chapel, while, outside, spring whistled in the leaves, the chimneys, ran shrieking through the long grass under the trees. Spring. Perceive the scene, how, how shall I say, how the day quivers between silence and that spring song, such moments are rare, when it seems, in spite of all, that it might be possible to forgive the world for all that it is not. Granny Godkin came across the lawn, her jaw shaking furiously. She was dressed in black, with a white brooch at her throat. At every other step she plunged her stick into the ground and wrenched it free behind her.

‘Tinkers!’ she cried. ‘You let them in!’

Mama said nothing. The old woman sank down beside her on the seat.

‘You let them in,’ she sighed, mournful now, her thin shoulders drooping, her shoulder blades folded like withered wings. That switch from anger to weary sadness was a well-tried assault on Mama's soft heart, but Mama had no time now for the game. Something odd was going on, a lowering silence surrounded her. She looked about the garden with a wary eye and murmured absently,

‘They're not tinkers. It's a circus. It might be nice. What harm…?’

‘What harm?’ Granny Godkin shrieked. ‘What harm Look!’

Cloudshadow swept across the fallow field, and through that gloom a ragged band came marching. There was a young man with a sullen mouth, two strange pale girls, the small boy or dwarf. Were the others there too, those women, grotesque figures? Granny Godkin rose and brandished her stick at them, gobbling in fury and fright.

‘O Jesus Mary and Joseph they'll murder us all!’

A flock of birds rose above the trees with a wild clatter of wings. Granny Godkin fled, and Mama folded her hands in her lap, and closed her eyes and smiled. Ruin and slaughter and blood, brickdust, a million blades of shattered glass, the rooftree splintering—the poppies! Suddenly I see them, like a field of blood!

That day was to be forever famous in the history of Birchwood, and justly so. An invasion, no less! Granny Godkin's shoulder was dislocated by the shotgun she fired off at the invaders. Granda Godkin locked himself into a lavatory, where he was found hours after the battle sitting paralysed on the bowl and frothing at the mouth. A policeman's skull was split by an ashplant. Beatrice laughed and laughed. And I was born.

Papa, hacking home at evening, met Nockter running down the road with the news. What a splendid figure he must have cut, my dark father, eyes staring and teeth bared as he thundered up the drive on his black steed, the hoofbeats, the gravel flying, his coattails cracking in the wind, that is a sight you will not see every day these days. He dismounted by the fountain, and threw down the reins, and in that sudden silence stopped and heard above him a cry, a kind of stricken cough, and in an upstairs window a naked child was lifted, shaking its little fists. There was another cry, weaker than the first, and when it stopped, and the echoes stopped, a hollow horn of silence sounded throughout the house.