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candlelight seemed to invest them with a morose yet passionate vividness, to intensify them, and they became for me, suddenly, creatures with a separate life, who would continue to exist even when I was not there to imagine them, and I recognised, perhaps for the first time, the remote, immutable and persistent nature of the love I wasted on them, as if I had love to waste. Granny Godkin, grinding her jaws in a prelude to another sortie, pointed a chicken leg accusingly at my invisible father, Mama lifted her head and blotted out Granda's glazed staring eye, and then, ah and then, Josie shut the door on them, locking from my sight this new mythology.
    I went to bed filled with a vague excitement, conscious that a new mysterious eminence had arisen in my life. Not yet. Though I understood nothing, those two words which Papa spoke so carelessly flashed in my mind like gleaming knives which even he could not blunt when, very late that night, he came into my room and stood above the bed in the darkness, breathing heavily and swaying on his feet, and stared at what he took to be his sleeping son and whispered,
    ‘Who ownsyouy boy, whose are you, eh?’

SO BIRCHWOOD was to be mine, that much I understood, albeit dimly. What I failed to see was the plot to deprive me of my inheritance. Aunt Martha was the instigator and prime conspirator. She arrived one bright windy morning in June. There was a rap upon the door, and expectant whispering outside, and then she was in the hall, hallooing her presence, straightening her son's carroty hair, tipping Nockter for having carried in the bags, all at the same time, all the time talking. She was a small intense young woman, quick as a bird, with short red hair and a pale, pointed face. Mama peered apprehensively out of the drawing room, and Aunt Martha let her coat fall to the floor and clapped her little hands.
    ‘Beatrice !’
    ‘Martha…O.’
    They made a rush at each other, and smacked together in an awkward embrace. Nockter twirled his cap in his fingers and backed out of the hall, and Aunt Martha turned away from her sister-in-law and alighted on me with a tiny cry.
    ‘And this must be Gabriel! My, but isn't he a fine big man? We're going to be great friends, aren't we, Gabriel?’
    We were not. I stood stiff and silent as she hugged me, bending away from her aromatic bosom. ‘His father's boy,’ she said gaily, and releasing me without further ceremony, she reached out a fumbling hand behind her and caught hold of her son. ‘This is Michael, also a son of his father, god forgive us. Say how do you do—and try not to dribble, dear.’
    He was an odd-looking fellow, small and frail, with sly bright eyes and a fearsome set of teeth. I could see in him nothing of his mother except for his incongruously delicate skin, pale and perfect alabaster, translucent almost. He shuffled his feet while those eyes under their straw-coloured lashes avoided ours, and Aunt Martha, considering him glumly, said,
    ‘My little crucifixion.’
    Mama smiled timidly at the boy.
    Toor child,’ she murmured. He glanced at her quickly, sharply, and lowered his gaze again. Aunt Martha gave a great squawk of laughter.
    ‘O Beatrice, as soft as ever…’ She stopped, and stared past us toward the stairs, at the head of which my father was standing. He was in shirt sleeves, collarless, with hair unkempt, wearing half a beard of lather, staring stonily back into his sister's stare.
    ‘Hello, dear brother,’ she said softly, with what I was to come to call her cat-smile, it was so coldly calculating. He did not answer, but merely stood and looked, with one eyebrow quivering, and then went back into the bathroom. The hall was very still, waiting on Aunt Martha. Her eyes were slits, and something peculiar had happened to her mouth. She felt us watching her, and shrugged and turned again to Mama with a bright smile. ‘Trissy, tell me all the news, I must hear all the news! Are you still the only sane one in