The Tree of Heaven | Page 2

that they had put
Grandpapa into the drawing-room and locked the door so that the
funeral men shouldn't get at him and take him away too soon. And
Auntie Louie had kept the key in her pocket.
Funerals meant taking people away.
Old Nanna wouldn't let him talk about it; but Mary-Nanna had told him
that was what funerals meant. All the same, as he went up the flagged
path, he took care not to look through the black panes of the window
where the elder bush was, lest he should see Grandpapa's coffin
standing in the place where the big table used to be, and Grandpapa
lying inside it wrapped in a white sheet.
Michael's message was that Mummy sent her love, and would Grannie
and Auntie Louie and Auntie Emmeline and Auntie Edie come to tea?
She was going to have tea in the garden, and would they please come
early? As early as possible. That was the part he was not to forget.

The queer thing was that when Michael went to see Grannie and the
Aunties in Grannie's house he saw four old women. They wore black
dresses that smelt sometimes of something sweet and sometimes like
your fingers when you get ink on them. The Aunties looked cross; and
Auntie Emmeline smelt as if she had been crying. He thought that
perhaps they had not been able to stop crying since Grandpapa's funeral.
He thought that was why Auntie Louie's nose was red and shiny and
Auntie Edie's eyelids had pink edges instead of lashes. In Grannie's
house they never let you do anything. They never did anything
themselves. They never wanted to do anything; not even to talk. He
thought it was because they knew that Grandpapa was still there all the
time.
But outside it the Aunties were not so very old. They rode bicycles.
And when they came to Michael's Father's house they forgot all about
Grandpapa's funeral and ran about and played tennis like Michael's
mother and Mrs. Jervis, and they talked a lot.
Michael's mother was Grannie's child. To see how she could be a child
you had only to think of her in her nightgown with her long brown hair
plaited in a pigtail hanging down her back and tied with a blue ribbon.
But he couldn't see how the three Aunties could be Grannie's other
children. They were bigger than Grannie and they had grey hair.
Grannie was a little thing; she was white and dry; and she had hair like
hay. Besides, she hardly ever took any notice of them except to make a
face at Auntie Emmeline or Auntie Edie now and then. She did it with
her head a little on one side, pushing out her underlip and drawing it
back again.
Grannie interested Michael; but more when he thought about her than
when she was actually there. She stood for him as the mark and
measure of past time. To understand how old Grannie was you had to
think backwards; this way: Once there was a time when there was no
Michael; but there was Mummy and there was Daddy. And once there
was a time when there was no Mummy and no Daddy; but there was
Grannie and there was Grandpapa. Now there was no Grandpapa. But
he couldn't think back far enough to get to the time when there was no

Grannie.
Michael thought that being Grannie must feel like being God.
Before he came to the black window pane and the elder bush he had to
run down the slopes and jump the gullies on his side of the Heath, and
cross the West Road, and climb the other slope to Grannie's side. And it
was not till you got to the row of elms on Judge's Walk that you had to
go carefully because of the funeral.
He stood there on the ridge of the Walk and looked back to his own
side. There were other houses there; but he knew his father's house by
the tree of Heaven in the garden.
* * * * *
The garden stood on a high, flat promontory jutting out into the Heath.
A brown brick wall with buttresses, strong like fortifications on a
breastwork, enclosed it on three sides. From the flagged terrace at the
bottom of the garden you looked down, through the tops of the
birch-trees that rose against the rampart, over the wild places of the
Heath. There was another flagged terrace at the other end of the garden.
The house rose sheer from its pavement, brown brick like the wall, and
flat-fronted, with the white wings of its storm shutters spread open, row
on row. It barred the promontory from the mainland. And at the back of
it, beyond its