puffed tear-stained face. ‘Well of course until I examine it further… I may have to call in some people from Dublin. At the moment, however, I can see no other explanation…after all…’
‘Yes?’
The old shammer sniffed, and fussed with the collar of his cape. He turned to the door, paused, and cast one bloodshot eye back over his shoulder at us.
‘Spontaneous combustion ,’ he said faintly, dived out on the step, and with a last embarrassed grunt was gone. As I say, he may have been right, she may have just…burst, but I cannot rid myself of the notion that the house itself had something to do with it. Birchwood had grown weary of her, she saw that herself. Did it assassinate her? Extraordinary, as the Doc observed.
He did speak to the coroner, and a vague verdict of death by misadventure was returned, but for this service he expected to be allowed to conduct the people he had called in from Dublin, old cronies of his, around the scene of the disaster, and was greatly incensed when Papa refused entry to him and his band of ghouls. However, he kept our secret from the town. In a week or two there was hardly anything of the incident left, except Josie's mournful sobbing at odd hours of the day and night, for she came up trumps and surprised us all by displaying genuine grief for the old woman's passing. By the way, we settled the business of the funeral very neatly, and buried Granny Godkin's feet in a full-sized coffin. Despite the needless expense, the craftiness of the ruse pleased Papa enormously.
OLD MCCABE MAY have been right about Granny Godkin, but he was quite wrong about my touch of grippe. In fact, it blossomed into an impressive dose of pneumonia. All day I had felt curiously isolated, as though I were enclosed in a very fine transparent membrane. Loud noises came to me muffled, whereas the tiniest sound, a match striking, say, was like a thunderclap. I pretended to be quite well, in spite of the Doc's diagnosis, which had galvanised Mama into a paroxysm of concern, and it was with great difficulty that I avoided having that evil-tasting thermometer thrust into the throbbing velvet under my tongue. I feared being put to bed, for the ramifications of the old woman's fiery finish were too good to miss, and anyway I had a date with Rosie.
Now that the summer was ended our affair had run into difficulties. We had no shelter. The empty stables behind the kitchen were dangerously close to the house, and Nockter nearly caught us on our one bold visit to the hayshed. We went back to Cotter's place and prayed for some disaster on the sun to turn our autumn into a searing indian summer. Our prayers, as we had gloomily expected, went unanswered. These material difficulties, however, were only the tip of the iceberg that had begun to rise between us. Our idyll was ending. The strange fact is that we were not drawing apart, on the contrary, we were beginning to get to know one another. We had each dreamed a lover for ourselves, but dreams are brittle things, and piggish reality tramples them to bits under its trotters. Now, as we peered through the thinning mist, we perceived in each other disconcerting little habits which, it is true, we had already noticed, but they had been sublimely unimportant. She picked her nose with a kind of venom when thinking deeply, and sometimes her laughter struck an unsettling echo of her grandmother's raucous cackle. Things like that. I clearly remember the unwarranted intensity of my shock when I discovered under her left armpit a sinister chocolate-brown mole. And I imagine that the variety of ways in which I disillusioned her must have been impressive. We saw us as we were, and the sight was hardly to be borne.
Late that evening the wind abated, but the rain began to fall again in half-hearted flurries, and the trees now and then dropped a clatter of tears. Rosie, wrapped in a gleaming black raincoat, wore her brother's Wellingtons and a yellow hat, and all I could touch
‘Yes?’
The old shammer sniffed, and fussed with the collar of his cape. He turned to the door, paused, and cast one bloodshot eye back over his shoulder at us.
‘Spontaneous combustion ,’ he said faintly, dived out on the step, and with a last embarrassed grunt was gone. As I say, he may have been right, she may have just…burst, but I cannot rid myself of the notion that the house itself had something to do with it. Birchwood had grown weary of her, she saw that herself. Did it assassinate her? Extraordinary, as the Doc observed.
He did speak to the coroner, and a vague verdict of death by misadventure was returned, but for this service he expected to be allowed to conduct the people he had called in from Dublin, old cronies of his, around the scene of the disaster, and was greatly incensed when Papa refused entry to him and his band of ghouls. However, he kept our secret from the town. In a week or two there was hardly anything of the incident left, except Josie's mournful sobbing at odd hours of the day and night, for she came up trumps and surprised us all by displaying genuine grief for the old woman's passing. By the way, we settled the business of the funeral very neatly, and buried Granny Godkin's feet in a full-sized coffin. Despite the needless expense, the craftiness of the ruse pleased Papa enormously.
OLD MCCABE MAY have been right about Granny Godkin, but he was quite wrong about my touch of grippe. In fact, it blossomed into an impressive dose of pneumonia. All day I had felt curiously isolated, as though I were enclosed in a very fine transparent membrane. Loud noises came to me muffled, whereas the tiniest sound, a match striking, say, was like a thunderclap. I pretended to be quite well, in spite of the Doc's diagnosis, which had galvanised Mama into a paroxysm of concern, and it was with great difficulty that I avoided having that evil-tasting thermometer thrust into the throbbing velvet under my tongue. I feared being put to bed, for the ramifications of the old woman's fiery finish were too good to miss, and anyway I had a date with Rosie.
Now that the summer was ended our affair had run into difficulties. We had no shelter. The empty stables behind the kitchen were dangerously close to the house, and Nockter nearly caught us on our one bold visit to the hayshed. We went back to Cotter's place and prayed for some disaster on the sun to turn our autumn into a searing indian summer. Our prayers, as we had gloomily expected, went unanswered. These material difficulties, however, were only the tip of the iceberg that had begun to rise between us. Our idyll was ending. The strange fact is that we were not drawing apart, on the contrary, we were beginning to get to know one another. We had each dreamed a lover for ourselves, but dreams are brittle things, and piggish reality tramples them to bits under its trotters. Now, as we peered through the thinning mist, we perceived in each other disconcerting little habits which, it is true, we had already noticed, but they had been sublimely unimportant. She picked her nose with a kind of venom when thinking deeply, and sometimes her laughter struck an unsettling echo of her grandmother's raucous cackle. Things like that. I clearly remember the unwarranted intensity of my shock when I discovered under her left armpit a sinister chocolate-brown mole. And I imagine that the variety of ways in which I disillusioned her must have been impressive. We saw us as we were, and the sight was hardly to be borne.
Late that evening the wind abated, but the rain began to fall again in half-hearted flurries, and the trees now and then dropped a clatter of tears. Rosie, wrapped in a gleaming black raincoat, wore her brother's Wellingtons and a yellow hat, and all I could touch
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