The Birds of the Air (13 page)

‘I’m writing a book of verse,’ said Kate, brazenly, to Hunter. She had been waiting for a suitable opportunity to point this out, but none had so far offered itself.

Hunter wanted to reply ‘Then stop it at once,’ but instead remarked that that was nice.

Mrs Marsh brightened. ‘Show Hunter, darling,’ she said.

‘
What
a clever girl,’ said Vera disapprovingly.

Hunter could have screamed. He couldn’t remember when he’d last met someone who wasn’t writing a book.

Kate waited, a slow expression of hurt spreading over her normally bland countenance as Hunter was silent.

‘You must let me read it,’ he said at last resignedly, beckoning up the responsive platitudes. In the world of books it was never worth saying what you meant. Extreme caution was necessary in negotiating your way through the sensibilities of people who wrote, and while this child already clearly had an ego like the liver of a Strasbourg goose it offered her no protection against rejection. Quite the contrary.

Hunter read a poem under the eager intent gaze of Kate and Mrs Marsh.

‘Very good,’ he said flatly, closing the book and handing it back. ‘Very good indeed for her age,’ he added as they both obviously found this praise inadequate.

Kate reopened the book and handed it back to him. ‘Have you read that one?’ she asked.

Hunter read it. ‘It’s very . . .’ he began. ‘Excellent,’ he ended heartily.

It was Barbara who saved him, for once putting her own needs before those of her child. Ever since the temperature had begun to drop so noticeably she had been worrying about whether she had remembered to turn off the water at the mains, and if not whether Seb had remembered to leave his key with the archaeologist up the road who was staying at home for the holidays and had promised to keep an eye on things. She wasn’t sure that this man would be any more useful than Seb in an emergency, but at least he could go and have a look. None of this did she dare confide to her husband, who would be very angry, and would blame her personally for the ice and snow.

She ousted Kate and sat down by Hunter. ‘Don’t be a nuisance,’ she told the baffled child. ‘Hunter doesn’t want to talk business today.’

Kate took her poems straight to Mr Mauss. An initial American publication was not something she had planned, but she could think of nothing against it.

Barbara closed her eyes and put her head back, breathing in the scent of Hunter – a faintly woolly, bachelor smell, quite unlike the smell of a husband. He smelled of his little house, comforting, secure. Now the thought of her probably ruined home no longer troubled her – icicles in the airing cupboard, the staircase a glacier. She took a sip of wine and snapped her fingers – pooh. She thought of Hunter’s house instead. She had been there twice – no, three times: always on a Sunday afternoon and always because Seb needed to see Hunter. They had taken the children and had tea. It was odd to remember that she hadn’t much enjoyed it at the time, worrying about the drive home in the dark, and getting the children’s school things ready for the next day . . . It had had that damp, sweet, oddly womanless smell, and she had teased him a little – about the dishes in the sink, the mouse tracks in the pantry, the stew left in a cupboard from one week to the next. There had been lamplight too, and firelight and a lavender bush outside the front door, and bees in hives in a field, and little brown birds. Once she had rested on Hunter’s hard bed when she had a migraine. She had thought nothing of it at the time, she remembered, amazed at her ingratitude and yet proud that she had been so untouched by the wonder of lying on Hunter’s bed. She hadn’t even looked around for evidence of women. It seemed never to change, Hunter’s house. Each time it was the same: the same books, the same cups, the same comb in the bathroom. Perhaps in the New Year Seb would ask her to take his MS down to Hunter. She would leave the children with her friend Ruth and a cold supper for Seb and arrive early, before Hunter got home. The door was warped and stuck on the flagstones when you pushed it open. She could see herself pushing it, feel her spirits sink as she thought it was locked, pushing again, harder. It opened. She was inside, she was lighting the oil lamps – she had no idea how to go about this, but inspiration would come to her. She lit the fire. The little house was growing warm and glowing with pearly light. Hunter had left steak – no, chops. She would make a hotpot and the homely smell would welcome him. He would be so surprised to see the lights gleaming through the snow, and smell lamb. It didn’t occur to her that anyone approaching home under these unexpected conditions might turn straight round and come back with a policeman. Potatoes? Onions? She frowned in the effort to remember where they were kept. The silly boy would have left them too long and they’d be sprouting. But she would have done her shopping on the way. She would have bought fresh vegetables for Seb. Hunter should have them. She would lay the table, but Hunter didn’t seem to have any tablecloths and the table top wasn’t very nice. There was a paisley counterpane in one of the bedrooms – she’d use that. She checked that there was wine in the cupboard by the fire. She made the bed when she took the counterpane – she wished she had a pink frilled nightgown like a rose to lay on the pillow beside Hunter’s pyjamas. She wished she could happen to have about her clean white sheets, smelling of gardens. Then she remembered that Hunter’s sheets smelled only of Hunter, and she shivered with wholly unaccustomed libidinous delight.

‘Barbara . . .’ he was saying, and she was back in Innstead – the lamps in Hunter’s house still glowing, the hotpot simmering. But the blizzard was raging here – not forcing her to stay alone with Hunter, but keeping Hunter here with Mr Mauss and Evelyn and Dennis and Vera and Seb and the children and so on, as though a fairy had given her a wish and she had got it wrong, forgetting to specify that she wished to be snowed in
alone
with Hunter. And even Hunter’s actual presence was somehow less con -vincing than her imaginings. She was a little disappointed in him.

‘I thought you were going to drop your glass,’ said Hunter, who was feeling squashed between Barbara and Vera.

‘I like the painting,’ said Vera, looking at the framed representation of the lunatic asylum on the mantelpiece.

‘Do you?’ said Mrs Marsh, surprised.

Evelyn waited.

‘Evelyn did it,’ said Mrs Marsh hastily. ‘She’s very clever.’

‘We knew you painted,’ said Vera. ‘Dennis has seen you with your easel and that.’

‘I haven’t been doing it long,’ said Evelyn. ‘I’m still learning, really.’

‘I’ve been writing poetry for years,’ said Kate, crudely.

She and Evelyn glared at each other, competing for the uncertain and wavering limelight.

‘I admire people who do things,’ said Vera. ‘Dennis did pottery once, but he didn’t stick to it.’

‘I’ve got a lot more at home,’ said Evelyn. ‘You can come and see them if you like.’

‘Now,’ said Barbara suddenly. ‘She’s very good,’ she added explanatorily. ‘You should really see her things.’

Evelyn was gratified but puzzled. She didn’t think Barbara had ever seen her paintings. ‘When . . .?’ she began.

‘Sam,’ said Barbara, ‘wipe the window and see what the weather’s doing.’

‘No’gorracloff,’ said Sam.

‘Well, use your hand.’ Barbara was impatient.

‘I’m no’gonna use my
han’
,’ said Sam indignantly. Tha’s all uvver peopew’s condense’ breff.’

No one would have suspected him of such fastidiousness.

‘Well, get a tissue from the kitchen and use that,’ suggested his mother.

‘Can’ fin’ one,’ came Sam’s voice.

Barbara almost despaired. Sam seemed to have inherited all his father’s impracticability without even his intellect. Surely most normal people would have ascertained by now whether it was snowing or not. ‘Open the door and look,’ she said, in a brave effort to resolve this apparently insoluble problem.

‘No, don’t do that,’ said Mrs Marsh. ‘You’ll let all the cold in.’

‘If you turned the wireless on you might get the weather forecast,’ observed Evelyn.

‘Dennis,’ asked Vera with simple faith, ‘is it still snowing?’

Now Mr Mauss rose from the hearth where he was playing snakes and ladders with Kate. Resolutely he wiped the window pane with his clean white handkerchief. ‘It’s snowing fit to bust,’ he told them.

Thwarted, Barbara poured herself another drink. Paradoxically her faint disillusion with Hunter had given her the courage and determination to get him alone, all to herself. He seemed rather more available. ‘No,’ she would have said, detaining him as they all left for the feast of art at Evelyn’s. ‘Not you, Hunter. I want to ask you some -thing.’ It would have to be something about Mary, she had decided unscrupulously, killing two birds with one stone. Her question would be personal, faintly psychiatric, the kind that only he as an old friend could answer, and that would necessarily exclude Mary’s presence. It hadn’t yet occurred to her to doubt that when they were alone Hunter would, in some fashion, declare himself.

‘Hunter,’ said Mrs Marsh, knowing now upon whom she could rely in this gathering, ‘would you ask Mary if she’d like a hot drink?’

Hunter rose gladly and Barbara got up to pour herself another drink, not hot, she thought, but very strong.

After a while Mrs Marsh followed Hunter to discover the answer to her question. He sat opposite Mary, laughing.

‘No, she wouldn’t,’ he said, remembering, as Mrs Marsh opened the door.

Mrs Marsh felt let down. ‘I wish you’d come through, Mary,’ she said. ‘It seems awfully rude to Dennis and Vera you sitting in here. As though you were avoiding them.’

‘If I were a man,’ said Mary broodingly, ‘I think I’d rather be called dogshit than Dennis.’

‘Oh, well if you’re in that mood,’ said Mrs Marsh, ‘you’d better stay in here. Come on, Hunter, leave Misery on her own.’

‘Besides,’ Mary said, ‘Vera’s face looks like a tumour.’

Mrs Marsh was furious with Mary for saying something so unkind and disgusting. Nevertheless she inhaled her next sip of sherry instead of swallowing it as she had intended. It went up her nose and started coming out of her eyes, as she wondered what would happen if her nerves impelled her to ask Vera whether she would like to come upstairs and powder her tumour. Her face
was
unhealthily bright and shiny. Mrs Marsh spluttered and dashed her eyelids with the top of her finger.

‘What are you laughing at?’ asked Evelyn. ‘Share the joke.’

‘I’m not laughing,’ said Mrs Marsh, furious with herself.

‘Well, here’s one,’ said Evelyn, reading from a strip of paper. ‘What did the god say when his thunderbolt boomeranged?’

‘God knows,’ said Mrs Marsh, uncaring.

‘I’m Thor,’ revealed Evelyn.

Only Sam immediately saw the point of this and he didn’t think it was funny.

Restlessly, Barbara got up. Her vision was clear but restricted. She tripped over a footstool but made unerringly for the door, the hall and the door beyond, where she saw Hunter as though isolated in a circle and Mary a threatening blur on the periphery.

‘I just wish everyone would stay in one place for five minutes,’ said Mrs Marsh. ‘It’s like a pantomime – Mary’s in and out like a fiddler’s elbow and now Barbara’s doing it too.’ Normally she wouldn’t have spoken so disloyally, but it seemed that this Christmas Day it wasn’t the Prince of Peace but the Lord of Misrule who held sway, and Mrs Marsh didn’t care for anarchy.

‘Do come through, Hunter,’ said Barbara.

She leaned backwards and held out both hands to him where he lay on the floor. It. was a totally unnatural gesture and one that it was impossible to respond to gracefully.

He got up hurriedly and touched one of her out stretched hands. ‘Come on, Mary,’ he said.

‘You’ve been rejec’-neject-neglecting us, Hunter,’ said Barbara, seizing the tail of his coat.

Mary sat down by Sebastian, reflecting that one of the consolations of death was that when it came very close it at least inhibited the invincibly rational from making their usual attempts to disabuse the credulous of their belief in God and the after-life. Even Seb, it seemed, had sufficient delicacy not to speak when there was plainly nothing he could say to her. He was none the less, she considered, a pretty terrible man. He had no garden round his mind.

Dennis looked thoroughly uneasy. He had, of course, been told that Seb’s father was
the
Mr Justice Lamb and had been speaking to Seb with a curdling mixture of brusque bonhomie and deference. Twice he had referred to ‘this moment in time’, twice he had called Seb ‘Sir’ and once he had called him ‘Seb’.

Sebastian, as was his way, had simply ignored him; and now the Chief Inspector sat on the edge of his chair, his elbows on his parted knees, twirling his glass in his fingers, while drops of sweat emerged on his temples and under his eyes.

Vera was less nervous. Evelyn was talking to her, and sometimes Vera said, ‘Ooh, lovely.’

Soon they would go, thought Mary. Christmas was like a storm washing people to and fro to end up, unwanted, in each other’s homes: Kate lying like flotsam on the rug, the extraordinarily alien American, the policeman hopelessly out of place, Sebastian bored almost insensible and Barbara lost in unhappy fantasy. What was needed was an ebb tide.

Sam, with youthful charity, actually felt sorry for the Chief Inspector. He didn’t himself often suffer from social unease but he knew it when he saw it from his experience with his father’s undergraduates. While it was true that the Chief Inspector would probably be happier kicking some miscreant to death, it was still unfair to expect him to sit around in a little room talking to a clever, unresponsive man whose dad could probably have had him thrown out of the Force if he’d wanted to.

Sam raised his eyebrows at Dennis, meaning to indicate ‘You don’t have to be polite. That’s only my father.’

‘Well, young man,’ said the Chief Inspector, feeling more on his own ground with this naughty-looking youth.

Sam lowered his eyebrows. The Chief Inspector was incorrigible. His next words would probably be ‘We’ve been watching you for some time.’