The Birds of the Air (7 page)

‘I get very tired,’ she said decisively to Seb and Sam. She didn’t think they would want to follow her into her room and make conversation, but it was as well to be on the safe side.

Seb sat down in an armchair in the little front room, and Sam idled about the kitchen and hallway. All three people on the ground floor wondered with varying degrees of desperation how they were to survive the next few days.

‘Don’t touch, Sam darling,’ said his grandmother, coming downstairs.

Sam moved away from the arched and illuminated recess with its glass shelves of treasures – china shepherdesses, little bowls and netsuke – and they edged round each other.

‘Why don’t you go for a run in the Close before it gets dark?’ suggested Mrs Marsh. ‘Call on Evelyn and she’ll show you her alligator.’

She had no hope at all that Sam would do this and so wasn’t surprised when he didn’t. ‘Go and unpack your things,’ she said. ‘You’re sleeping in the same room as your father.’

No one but Kate was entirely pleased with the sleeping arrangements, but Sam was horrified. He was shy of looking at his father. Knowledge of the Thrush hung between them like soiled sheets.

‘Shleep on de shofa,’ he offered.

‘Certainly not,’ said Mrs Marsh, who had just replaced the still immaculate Tudor print covers with a rather cooler pattern of cream roses on a green ground to match the carpet.

‘Shleep on de floor,’ said Sam hopelessly.

‘Don’t be silly, Sam. There are two very comfortable beds in that room and you’ll sleep in one of them.’ She was glad she’d had daughters. Boys were too difficult.

The evening passed off quietly enough. It started early with a simple supper of omelettes and peas and toast, followed by stewed apricots and cream, which they all ate standing up in the kitchen, except for Mary and Seb, who had theirs on trays in the back and front rooms respectively. Sebastian had a little stilton too, out of a jar – an early Christmas present to a lady at the W.I., who hadn’t liked it at all and had passed it on to Mrs Marsh, knowing that she would have a man staying over the holiday.

Sebastian took his papers to the pub. Sam lay in the front room and watched television. Evelyn came across for company, and they all crowded into the kitchen and made the mince pies.

Mary thought about what Sam would doubtless describe as ‘birf ’n’ deaf’. Robin’s death, the sudden absolute cessation of vaulting, joyful life, seemed to her quite as astonishing and worthy of remark as that other more widely acclaimed and admired miracle, birth. Despite her anger, she thought that God deserved more notice for this extraordinary trick. Even inclined as she was to side in rebellion with the Son of the Morning, she couldn’t but praise God for his infinite invention. It was as funny, that sudden shocking silence, as Jack in the Box, a sleight-of-hand performed by a master.

Mrs Marsh felt strange the next morning, coming into the hallway through the front door instead of down the stairs, taking off her coat and gloves before she made a cup of tea. The tea she had drunk at Evelyn’s had been wishy-washy. Her egg had been under-cooked, and she had had to scrape her spoon surreptitiously with her nail before using it. Evelyn didn’t rinse the washing up, and her sink and draining board were faintly scummed with dirt. She was the only slovenly resident in the Close – but also, allowed Mrs Marsh, the kindest, in spite of her irritating ways.

Mrs Marsh hoped briefly that the bed had been aired, and set about putting her own kitchen to rights. Barbara or Kate had left the washing-up brush on the wrong side of the sink and the teapot on the draining board instead of the shelf above the fridge. Remedying these little errors, she began her annual litany aloud. ‘Sprouts . . .’ she recited. ‘Chestnuts, sausages, extra bread, extra milk, nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, eggs, lentils, enough potatoes, enough sherry . . .’

She paused as Barbara came into the kitchen. ‘Hello, darling . . . Peas, coffee, onions, chocolate, preserved ginger . . . brown sugar . . . cornflour . . . cream . . .’

Mary, lying awake next door, could visualise her mother, thumbnail hitched under her top teeth, squinting concentratedly at the shelves of the kitchen cabinet. ‘Enough salt, brandy for the pudding . . .’ She’d forgotten something. There was a muted shriek and a scurry. ‘Barbara,’ she said, ‘I’ve got no sponge fingers and no glacé cherries for the trifle . . . oh.’

‘I’ll get them,’ said Barbara, sharing her mother’s serious appraisal of the deficiency, ‘and I’ll get some more butter and some biscuits, in case we run out of bread, and some crumpets for tea time and some mushrooms for breakfast. Have you got cloves?’

Sam rose astonishingly early for him and left the house at midday before his mother and Kate returned from the shops.

‘Goinasee a frien’,’ he told his grandmother nonchalantly.

‘All right, dear,’ she said without thinking, as she peeled chestnuts, hot from boiling water.

‘Where’s Sam?’ asked the returned Barbara as she pulled off Kate’s woolly hat and removed her own sheepskin coat.

‘Gonna – gone to see a friend,’ said Mrs Marsh, realising simultaneously that Sam had no friends in Innstead.

‘He’s gone to London,’ said Barbara in a fright. Sam had friends in London – the children of Seb’s publisher. They were awful, with spiky hair and pink eyes. Hunter had once brought them down for the day to give his boss a bit of a rest. She had been pleased until they arrived, thinking a publisher’s children would be nice friends for hers. She had had such a shock. They wore black plastic clothes hung with steel chains and had all perfected the use of the glottal stop.

‘I’ll ring Hunter,’ she said, conscious even through her panic of pleasure at the thought of speaking to him.

‘Why?’ asked Mrs Marsh puzzled.

‘Because . . .’ began Barbara. ‘Oh never mind. Sam’s gone to see Seb’s publisher’s children.’ It sounded so respectable, spoken aloud. ‘He’s Hunter’s boss.’

‘That’s nice,’ said Mrs Marsh.

‘If he’s not back by five I’ll ring Hunter then,’ said Barbara, calming a little. She didn’t want to appear hysterical to Hunter: frail and unjustly treated, yes – but not a nuisance.

She rang the office at five, but Hunter had left. She rang his house, but he hadn’t got back yet. Having drinks with some literary woman, she thought savagely, while I’m out of my mind with worry.

Sam returned at seven. And when he did, his hair was green.

‘Aaargh,’ said Barbara, quite unaffectedly, as she opened the door and the outside light shone on him.

Mrs Marsh tottered back, her hands to her mouth, realising, not for the first time, that it was quite possible thoroughly to dislike one’s grandchildren for the trouble and pain they caused one’s own child.

‘S’a fash’n,’ said Sam complacently.

‘It looks very Christmassy,’ said Mary.

‘Sebastian,’ called Barbara. ‘
Sebastian
.’ When the door of the front room remained closed, she opened it herself and thrust her verdant-haired son through it. ‘
Look
,’ she said. ‘Look what he’s done. He’s dyed his hair green.’

Sebastian glanced up from his papers. He found his wife’s twitching face far more irritating than his son’s green head. He looked a little disgusted but merely remarked that it would doubtless grow out if it didn’t rot, and requested everyone to be quiet as he was trying to work.

‘But . . .’ said Barbara, gasping, and after a while, as she still stood there, he got up and closed the door in her face.

Mrs Marsh watched quietly, admitting to herself that she found her son-in-law loathsome. She even went in to speak to him and was treated to the faint weasel gleam of his smile. ‘Barbara worries too much about the children,’ he told her.

Mrs Marsh stared speechlessly at his pale face, his gold-rimmed spectacles and his pale hair. His head looked as though it had been lightly buttered – so sleek, so unguent and so slight. He made her think of hard roads under a film of rain, shallow and dangerous; of slugs and Nazis and the minister she sometimes met in the terminal ward of the cancer hospital when she was arranging the flowers . . .

Mrs Marsh crossed the hallway – two steps – to Mary’s room. ‘He leaves too much to Barbara,’ she said. ‘He never gives her a thought. He’s wrapped up in his work.’

‘He’s all right,’ said Mary inadequately. ‘Barbara worries too much.’ He had to have some defence, she thought, against her sister’s grasping, tentacular nervousness.

Mrs Marsh sighed, remembering, for no reason, a moment when Barbara was a little baby sitting on her knee in the springtime at Melys y Bwyd and Mary was dancing – a silly two-year-old’s dance. Suddenly someone had laughed and laughed until the room was full of laughter, and it was the little baby on her knee – who previously had only smiled or cried – laughing with the utmost delight at the dancing child.

‘I don’t believe he loves her,’ she said.

Mary recoiled. ‘I’m sure he does,’ she said with artificial formality.

But Mrs Marsh doubted it. She wondered crossly if anyone but she knew what it was to love – how painful and tiring it could be. She wondered how Mary had loved Robin. She remembered how Robin had loved Mary, bounding at a photograph of her as a girl crying ‘Isn’t she lovely? Isn’t she beautiful?’, leaping through the door, not stopping to say hullo. Such extravagant behaviour. She wished she could tell Mary how much
she
loved her, but Mary wouldn’t listen . . .

She got up tiredly. She could cope with anything if people would be happy, would make an effort. Really, it seemed as if only she held all her world together. ‘I wish you’d speak to Sebastian,’ she said without hope. ‘He’d listen to you.’ It was Mary’s fault that Barbara had met Seb, though she’d been pleased at the time.

‘It’s snowing again,’ said Mary. There would be no point in trying to explain to her mother that the most ruthless dictators, impalers, people who put people in sacks and threw them in the river, robbers, politicians – all, all have always considered those who offer them the mildest hint of criticism to be extremely wicked and deserving of annihilation.

‘He wouldn’t listen,’ she said.

Sam was very good that evening. He smiled several times and jovially shoved Kate with his elbow when she mentioned poetry. He seemed quite unselfconscious about his hair, not even glancing in the numerous mirrors from time to time as anyone else might have done, for pleasure or reassurance, and helped his grandmother get the tree out from the cupboard under the stairs. Mrs Marsh never had a real tree. The needles were so difficult to remove from the carpet. She kept a number of little golden nets, put tangerines in them, and hung them on the ringer, interspersed with realistic-looking birds made from
papier mâché
and feathers. The effect, though artificial, was preferable to the garish pyramids of light in the neighbours’ windows. Mrs Marsh had no paper chains, balls or lanterns, just some real holly that the greengrocer acquired from somewhere on the downs. She strung her Christmas cards around the hall and put chrysanthemums in the front room. But she thought Mary’s room looked bleak for the time of year with no decorations at all.

‘Put up your cards,’ she urged. ‘It looks so miserable.’

‘No,’ said Mary. She liked the pale walls and the firelight and the skeleton garden visible through the window, unrivalled by brief baubles. And she disliked the funereal opulence of Christmas, the anxious overeating of a cold people in midwinter, the forced gaiety and the absurd expense. Christmas should be looking forward to spring, the thin clear light and the rains of hope, not banging and whistling in uncertain rebellion against the frozen despair of present dearth.

Mrs Marsh peered through the window. ‘It’s snowing quite heavily now. I wonder if I’ve got enough caster sugar.’

‘Ba,’ said Mrs Marsh on the morning of Christmas Eve. ‘We must get some more fruit. I think Sam’s been eating it.’

Sam didn’t like fruit. Kate had been eating it. But Barbara didn’t think it worth explaining.

‘Don’t take the car,’ said Mrs Marsh. ‘Put on your boots and wrap up warmly and walk in the soft snow on the edges – the roads are like glass. Just get oranges and apples and nuts – I’ve got bananas in the cupboard. They had some nice pineapples the other day but the price was disgusting. If you take Sam,’ she said as an afterthought, ‘make sure he wears something on his head.’

Sam stayed behind. He sat on a stool in Mary’s room and stared blankly before him. There was nothing she could say, since he obviously couldn’t sit with Seb and his papers, his grandmother didn’t approve of people sitting around in their bedrooms and Innstead offered nothing to divert him. He sat silently in her place by the window, his legs stretched out and his long feet in black boots falling sideways like a supine rabbit’s. The light from the garden shone coldly on his beige skin and his green hair, and he slid lower, his back against the wall, as the birds went on scrapping just outside. In imagination he straddled the rooftree like a warlock. Lines of silent, gape-mouthed people came to stare at him, and he knocked all their heads off, one by one, with superbly aimed sharp-edged slates, which he unhooked from their moorings with professional ease. (He knew how to do this since a holiday at Melys y Bwyd, when a man had replaced all the slates blown off by a wicked Welsh gale and he had sat on an upstairs windowsill, his back to the hills, and watched him all one morning. They had called from below, ‘Oh Sam, do be careful. You’ll fall.’ But they hadn’t dared go into the room for fear of startling him. The slater hadn’t minded him at all – just kept on doing his job and humming.) Zing went the slates, slicing through the winter air, decapitating people – none of whom were known to Sam: anonymous, complaisant game. They kept on wandering into view until the air was full of their silly heads, flying around as thick as autumn leaves. His brief cheerfulness had gone.

Mary watched him warily. He was, she realised, full of something and likely to confide in her. Several people had recently told her things that they would prefer not to be widely known, confirming her in her suspicion that they too thought she was going to die. Sometimes Sam reminded her of Robin, and she couldn’t be sure whether she liked him for this or whether she would prefer to see him dead too.