The Birds of the Air (2 page)

Now Mary could no longer see the brief wilderness – only the garden, the wide border that in the summer shone with flowers, the shrub-enclosed lawn that stopped at one side in a rustic fence to support the sweet peas that would screen the vegetable plot, melancholy now with rimed bolted cabbage stalks and blackened stands of beans. The people of Innstead concealed their vegetable gardens, preferring to contemplate in season the useless glories of aster and delphinium, petunia and pelargonium, lobelia, lupin, chrysanthe mum and mesembryanthemum.

The sky had darkened when Mrs Marsh came back with lunch. She pushed open the door with her bottom, balancing a tray covered with two cloths, one under and one over the food, lest germs should leap on it in the few feet between the kitchen and her child.

‘Why didn’t you turn the light on?’ she asked, though if it had been on she would have asked why Mary hadn’t called her to do it, or remarked that too much light was bad for the eyes. Life had so treated her in recent years that she couldn’t trust it to itself for a second. A solitary magpie – vain, god-cursed bird, clad in its eternal half-mourning – flew forever across her mind’s eye and had to be propitiated or cunningly foiled with constant changing and re -arranging. By questioning and vigilance fate might be deflected.

She pulled up a small round table and unveiled the tray with its lidded pot of tomato soup, lightly boiled egg hidden in a cosy, strips of toast ready buttered, banana and glass of water. The cosy was painstakingly embroidered to match the roses and forget-me-nots of the egg cup, as this was a district where the members of the Women’s Institute were dainty rather than robust, embroiderers and flower-arrangers rather than makers of chutney and whole-grain bread.

‘Or you could have an orange if you preferred?’

‘This will be perfect, thank you,’ said Mary, who though she didn’t feel at all guilty about imposing on her mother tried to give as little actual trouble as possible.

‘Won’t it be nice when Barbara and Kate are here?’ urged Mrs Marsh. ‘And Sam and Sebastian too,’ she added with less enthusiasm.

‘Lovely,’ agreed Mary.

‘A family Christmas,’ continued Mrs Marsh dreamily. ‘All of us together.’

Later, at the kitchen sink, she convicted herself of tactlessness and, as punishment, washed the dishes in water that was slightly too hot for her little white hands, for assuredly had things been otherwise Mary would not have been here.

But I am coping very well, she thought, comparing herself with her daughter and torn between pride and pity. She missed John very badly. She permitted herself to weep a little each morning in the bathroom before she put on her eyeshadow, but she knew and accepted what apparently Mary did not – that life had to go on. Mary had gone far, but had been wounded and forced to return; and her mother felt the ever so slightly spiteful vindication of the keeper of the cage. The bird had come back, if only to die.

Mary was at the window again, watching the antics of the wind.

Sam was eating a bowlful of peanuts and some pickled gherkins. He had hidden half a bottle of sherry under the valance of the chesterfield, and he sipped from it when he was sure he was unobserved.

On the chesterfield sat two undergraduates: a Ghanaian who couldn’t afford the fare home and a lad from a northern grammar school in similar straits. This lad, after a while – perhaps to show his lack of prejudice, perhaps because he resented the relentless hospitality to which he was being subjected, or perhaps simply because, like most people, he disliked Sebastian Lamb – had a further fatal sherry and remarked, ‘Old Lamb looks shagged out. He probably spent the morning screwing the Thrush.’

Their gruff, knowing laughter had thinned slightly as they shifted and descried Sam in his hiding-place behind them. One, at least, had paled a little, realising too late that this was indiscretion.

‘
Screwing the Thrush
,’ Sam had repeated to himself musingly throughout the afternoon. ‘
Screwing the Thrush
. . .’ Round about tea time he had remembered that the Thrush was what they called the wife of the Professor of Music, and he had blushed until he thought his skin must shrivel.

‘Move away from that radiator,’ his mother advised. ‘Or take off your sweater. Drink your tea.’

‘Another cup?’ asked Mrs Marsh, glancing with disfavour at the now ebony-gleaming windows. ‘
Anyone
could see in,’ she complained.

‘Not a great many people frequent other people’s gardens,’ said Mary, wary of curtains – for what if tonight should become the day of resurrection and Robin stand unseen in the garden?
Dies irae
.

‘Dennis does,’ said her mother, speaking of the retired police officer who lived next door. ‘He’s always creeping round people’s gardens.’

‘Dennis is crazy,’ said Mary.

Well, perhaps he
was
a little, thought Mrs Marsh. Dennis had nothing to do and she knew he missed her husband. John had been kind to him with his unchanging warm politeness so unlike the chilly manners of the other people in the Close. But she never let herself think too long of her dead husband, for that way lay resentment and depression.

‘Ah well,’ she said, pouring the tea into two copiously floral cups. ‘Do you remember the teas Mrs Lewis used to give us at Melys y Bwyd?’ she asked after a while, her memory stirred by the wild flowers stitched into the tray-cloth.

‘No,’ lied Mary.

‘They were lovely,’ lied her mother.

She had been so happy with John and her two little girls, holidaying, content in the high-hedged, stone-walled cottage safely away from traffic and the mad rapist. The tractor and the village idiot had worried her not at all – nor even the farm cockerel and the road-lumbering cows on their way to be milked in the reassuring presence of the farmer and his boy. Like everyone else, she. had transferred her atavistic terror of the woods and wilderness to the city. Great Pan had left the deserted places, put on black face and gone into the streets to become a mugger. The fearful desolation of the tower block had supervened upon the awful terror of the grove. It was to the country that people now went to seek the safety that they would once have found in the company of their fellows. People who double-locked and chained the doors of their town houses slept contentedly in fields in open tents.

‘You loved them,’ claimed Mrs Marsh, misled by her daughter’s protestations of forgetfulness. Her little girls had been so sweet in their summer frocks, walking up the lane to a Sunday farmhouse tea, believing her answers to their every question. ‘It will be strawberry jam for tea and homemade cake,’ she had told them; and ‘That little white flower is called coltsfoot’; and ‘It will be perfectly all right. Its mummy will come and take it back to the nest and make it better.’

Wandering fondly down this memory lane she came to a sudden halt – even recollection shadowed and chilled by the black yews that crouched enormously in the churchyard. Robin, she thought angrily. It was so difficult to remember the sequence of events – she must be getting old. She glanced guiltily at Mary, but her daughter looked perfectly composed, eating bread and butter.

Mary remembered the lane, pretty as a wedding, when she was a child: great laces and nets of umbels flung joyously down, meadowsweet and cow parsley; the wind whispering sentimentally on the crisp bosom of the blackthorn and sighing through the handkerchief-scented grasses; wild roses every shade of bridesmaid from riotous, hoydenish pink to the frailest nervous pallor; the matronly mother-of-the-groom purple of foxgloves; the urchin trails of ragged robin; something borrowed in the straying rape, something blue in the garter button of speedwell; new leaves, old trees ranged like solemn guests, and blown petals floating in the dark puddles.

It was a long time ago. Since then, down that wedding lane, dazed with summer, Robin had come, borne in a slow black hearse sorrowful with dying wreaths – Robin passive beyond understanding, disguised as stone. Stone-faced, calm, closed and cold; marbled with dissolution and grave with the gravity of earth, all flowering ceased.

How brave I was, thought Mary derisively – consoling those who loved me, for my loss. You must never let the bugger think he’s got the upper hand, she had told them, speaking of Death, and burning with crazy joy like a torture victim who must feel something and can only feel pain. She had carried a carnation which a friend had stolen from the wreath of someone else, recently interred, to enliven her blackness and cheer her up. She had bent each of its little knees the length of its stem so that it genuflected while the words went on and the holy water was sprinkled. She still had it – brown and flattened between the pages of her missal.

‘You caught a chill at that funeral,’ accused her mother, growing crosser and abandoning the pretence that neither knew what the other was thinking.

‘It was eighty in the shade,’ said Mary.

‘Why you had to have a funeral in the country . . .’ her mother was saying. ‘Father’s buried here . . . all that way . . . so tiring . . .’ Mrs Marsh had imagined for a while that bereavement would change Mary, that Mary would now understand her and grow closer, but Mary had burned, as remote as a salamander in a blazing exaltation of grief, seeming to draw energy from what should have devoured her, and when she emerged she had, it is true, changed, but she was no closer.

‘A waste of money,’ concluded Mrs Marsh. She looked almost with dislike at the strange woman in whom her little daughter was now subsumed. Not for the first time she mourned that daughter as though she were already dead.

‘Put your cardigan on,’ she said. She took the tea things out – a bright, cross little woman, brave as an officer. ‘Supper soon,’ she promised.

That night Barbara gave a party – a real one this time, for Sebastian’s colleagues.

‘Come in,’ she cried encouragingly, as the first guest arrived. ‘How lovely to see you!’

Sam scowled. His mother saw that woman nearly every day. It couldn’t always be lovely.

‘Professor . . .’ she said, ‘let me take your coat. Katherine, do you know . . .? Sam, find Sir Albert a drink. Now Elizabeth, what will you have? Mrs Potts, you were able to come! How lovely . . .’

Yak yak yak, thought Sam sourly. He slopped some white wine into a glass and handed it to a professor, who didn’t want it and looked round aggrievedly for the whisky.

The rooms were filling up with academics quite quickly now: straight dull dons, though not many; old creamy dons, mannered as mandarins; a poor don twitching with paranoia; a rich don, unctuous as mayonnaise; sad neurotic dons; and one or two who were possibly clinically insane. There were ladies dressed in their best who looked as though they’d been moulded out of short squat boxes; dons’ wives, earnest and helpful, or etiolated in their husbands’ shade and thrusting out eagerly, desperately, for a little light; some wives of heads of houses, incandescent with confidence and as bossy as Dr Johnson; and one or two dons’ husbands. They reminded Sam of his late peers at Mrs Bright’s nursery school, to which all the university toddlers were despatched to be set off on the right foot. It would have been futile to deny that jealousy, ill-will and ambition were powerfully present; but just as Mrs Bright’s firm and kindly eye kept the kiddies in check, so ancient usage and the edicts of extreme refinement kept the university from outright shows of pride and hostility. In this ordered atmosphere dangerous emotions were allowed measured expression and all was secure.

‘Sam,’ said his mother. ‘Darling, why don’t you take the girls upstairs and play them your records?’

Sam regarded the girls. Although older, they resembled Kate, ugly and obedient and eager to do as their parents wished. He turned away.

‘Sam,’ insisted his mother tentatively. She was nervous. Sam had refused to change out of his torn jeans, leather jacket and tennis shoes. The ensuing altercation had left her trembling and tearful. It emerged that he had swapped his Harris tweed jacket for the dreadful thing he was now wearing, and when she had expostulated about the expense he told her with quiet satisfaction that the leather jacket had been twice the price of the tweed one. ‘S’a bargin,’ he said, and Barbara had been forced to notice, yet again, that her world and her values were threatened by madness. ‘You look like a yob,’ she had told him hopelessly, and Sam had been offended. Later she wondered, puzzledly, why he hadn’t been pleased.

Two lady philosophers had also turned up in tennis shoes, but this was no consolation to Barbara. They had proved themselves and were entitled to dress as they wished.

Barbara urged herself not to worry and put out a hand to a solitary female in petrol blue.

‘Sam is such an original boy,’ she confided to this person, who didn’t care either way. ‘A little trouble finding his feet,’ she continued, and stopped as the guest, eyes glazing, turned to talk to someone more interesting.

Barbara turned too. After all, she knew everyone here. They were her friends.

‘Margaret, how lovely to see you! We weren’t sure you were back.’ Determinedly she addressed herself to the distinguished anthropologist. ‘You must find it so cold. Have an olive.’

In spite of herself she stretched her neck sideways to see what Sam was doing now. She could just see the top of his head above the chesterfield. He’d be biting his nails, or picking his nose. He wasn’t a sociable boy. She smiled with relief as Kate passed, the top of her writing pad visible above the pocket of her dress. Kate was the child anyone would wish for.

Sam was fiddling with spools of tape. He was experimenting with crowd noise.

‘Sebastian.’ Barbara touched her husband’s arm anxiously. ‘They should eat now. The whisky’s nearly all gone!’

Interrupted, Sebastian turned back to his companion. ‘According to Schwenk . . .’

‘Seb,’ persisted Barbara timidly.

‘Oh, what?’ asked Sebastian, his lips paler than his face with irritability.

‘The buffet,’ said Barbara. ‘They must all be starving.’

‘Ah,’ cried Sebastian with sudden, unreal geniality. ‘Eats. Is there enough?’ he asked in a threatening aside to his wife.