The Birds of the Innocent Wood (14 page)

One morning, however, while she was working in the attic, she heard shouting down in the farmyard. The wind blew away the words so that she could not hear what was being said, but, curious, she crossed to the skylight and opened it. Standing on tip-toe on an upturned box, she could see down into the yard, where James and Gerald were arguing. Gerald was clearly angry, while James looked scornful. Suddenly, she saw Gerald grasp James by the collar, but it was James who lifted his fist as if to hit the other man, and as he did there was a look of such quick violence on his face that Jane turned away. She remembered the day shortly before the wedding of Gerald and Ellen when James had shot the treeful of starlings, and she had watched him then as he trod upon the dying bird. It was the first time she had seen such violence in her husband, and she had looked at it steadily. But now she knew the violence that there was in him, and she could not bring herself to look because it frightened her too much: instinctively she turned away. When she glanced out of the skylight again a few moments later, both the men had gone, and the yard was deserted.

At lunchtime, only James came to the house.

‘How are you getting on with the apples?’ he asked as soon as he entered.

‘All right.’

‘Will you be ready for them if I bring in more this afternoon?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

He washed his hands at the scullery sink, dried them and went up to the kitchen table. Jane waited.

‘Oh, by the way,’ he said, ‘you needn’t put out any food for
Gerald today. He’s gone home to the cottage for his lunch.’

She did not ask him why: she did not want to hear the blatant lie which he would unblinkingly tell her, for she did not want to see that dishonesty any more than she had wanted to see his violence. But the incident had left her angry and frightened.

After James had eaten his lunch, she removed his plate saying, ‘I’ve changed my mind. You needn’t bother bringing me any more apples today. I’m not going to do the apples this afternoon.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t want to.’

‘Don’t you feel well, Jane?’

‘I’m all right,’ she replied impatiently.

After James had gone back out to the yard, Jane cleared away all the lunch things and tidied the kitchen. Then she left the house and went for a walk alone through the fields, as she had frequently done at the start of that year, while she was recovering from her illness.

It was a cold afternoon, and the grey sky promised rain. Jane pulled her coat more tightly around herself, and plodded on steadily until she reached the lough, having first carefully skirted the cottage. She stood looking over the wide expanse of dull, chill water, and she thought of the winter that soon would come, dreading it as she always dreaded the coming of winter. She could not believe that before the following spring she would be a mother. Putting her hand against her body, she tried to imagine the babies floating inside her, tried to think of life rather than death. Then she realized that her past habitual loneliness had been broken.
‘
I wish that I could be you, while still somehow
being myself.’
Well, that would never be possible with James. She knew that now, had known it for some time, and the incident of that morning was the final proof.

She turned to walk back towards the house, and as she did, she glimpsed Gerald pushing his way through the spindly trees which grew along the shore. He was at some distance from her and was not walking towards her, so she stayed where she was and remained very still, in the hope that he would not see her.

Gerald walked down to the edge of the water. He stopped, took off his jacket and hung it upon a little tree. Then he stepped into the water. The water’s coldness was evidently a shock to him at first, but he stepped forwards and steadily began to walk. The bed of the lough shelved gently: he had walked a considerable distance without having reached any significant depth of water.

And then he took one step more and vanished.

Jane, watching from the shore, was amazed by his sudden and complete disappearance. He had not stumbled, nor had he thrown himself into the water, but had taken a single step forwards and gone straight down. She stood there looking at the empty scene before her.
You didn’t imagine this,
she told herself.
It really happened. This is real
.

She turned and walked back across the fields, and she thought,
You know what this is, but do you know what it means? You
don’t know what it means. You can’t begin to know what it means
.

As she passed through the farmyard, James spoke to her but she did not answer. She walked silently into the house, went straight upstairs and she lay down on the bed. When James came up to see her still she would not speak, but lay looking at the ceiling and she did not utter a single word.

Ellen missed Gerald by mid-afternoon, and she found his jacket hanging on the tree. When the news was brought to the farm, Jane was still upstairs in bed. She heard James open the front door, heard voices and although she could not hear the words she knew what was being said. She heard James close the front door, pause, then he walked heavily up the stairs and came into the room. She knew what he was going to tell her. He sat down on the bed beside her.

‘Jane,’ he said very quietly, ‘Gerald drowned himself in the lough this afternoon.’

And even as she screamed, she wondered why she was screaming; even as she pulled away from James crying ‘No! No! It can’t be true,’ she could not understand why she should behave like this. Until that moment she had thought that if she had so desired, she could have given the news to James as
quietly as he had given the news to her. Now she realized that she had seen but she had not believed, and that James’s words alone had made the deed real for her.

‘I have to go and help to look for him,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can. Look after yourself until I get back.’

Jane spent the late afternoon sitting by an upstairs window, from which she watched the flotilla of little boats out dragging for the body. They worked all evening until the light failed, by which time they had found nothing. The search was abandoned for the night, to be resumed the following day at first light.

‘I suppose it could all be a cod,’ James said when he came back to the farm. ‘He could just have hung his jacket on a tree to let on. He could have gone off and be lying drunk in a ditch somewhere.’

‘I don’t think so.’ Jane said very quietly.

‘What makes you so sure?’

‘If he did do it,’ she said, as though thinking aloud, ‘I wonder what the reason was?’

James did not reply.

The more Jane thought about the incident, the more distressing it became to her. She did not go to bed that night, but sat up in the kitchen, wrapped in a blanket and drinking tea. She thought of his dead body drifting insensible down in the dark water with the weeds, the fish and the eels. It was not the power of the water that shocked her, but Gerald’s surrender to it, and even Jane wondered at the depth of self-hate that there must have been in his heart. It had not been his fate, but his will and his choice. Again and again she thought of how easily it had been accomplished, by an act simple and mysterious as a sacrament, but an act of such destruction.

James slept for part of the night, but when he awoke in the early hours of the morning to find that Jane was not by his side he came downstairs. They sat together in the kitchen drinking tea and talking inconsequentially while they waited for dawn to break. When at last they heard the first bird of the day sing they fell silent, and they listened while the clamour of bird-song increased. Darkness faded from the sky.

James had arranged to take part in the search with a man he knew who owned a small boat. He put on his coat and prepared to leave the house, but when he went to open the back door and go out, he suddenly heard her voice say loud and steady behind him:

‘I don’t care that he’s dead. We’re not. We’re alive.’

He turned around and saw Jane curled up in the old battered armchair, cradling a warm empty teacup in her hands. She was looking away from him as though she had not spoken a word, then she glanced casually in his direction.

‘You’d best be off, James.’

She spent all that day again sitting by the upstairs window, watching the boats. In the late afternoon James came home. ‘We found him,’ he said. Jane nodded.

She asked no questions, and he did not tell her that the body had been found from the boat in which he, James had been sitting, nor did he tell her that they had stopped using nets when they guessed what had happened to him. He had been pulled, by means of a large iron boat-hook, from the sand-pumping pit into which he had stepped. His clenched fists were full of gravel and sand.

Jane did not go to the wake or to the funeral: her pregnancy served as an excuse for her absence. When James came home from the funeral, she was up in the attic putting the last of the apples in store.

‘Is he buried, then?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where did they put him?’ She picked up an apple and wiped it slowly. ‘In Ellen’s family grave?’

‘No,’ James replied. ‘He’s at the foot of the hill.’

Jane’s hand stayed for only a second. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I see.’

She nestled the apple down in straw.

Four months later, Jane gave birth to twin girls, Catherine and Sarah.

Jane and James never spoke of Gerald again.

‘Catherine,’ Sarah says.

‘Yes?’

‘Did you know that we have a brother?’

It is late on a Friday night in March, and the sisters are standing in the kitchen. Their father has long since gone to bed. Weakly Catherine repeats her sister’s words. ‘We have a brother.’

‘Well, we had a brother.’ Sarah amends her initial statement. ‘Sit down here, Catherine. I’m sorry, I should have broken it to you more gently. Don’t upset yourself now, but look here and I’ll explain.’

She takes from her pocket two yellowed and creased pieces of paper, and she spreads them out on the table. ‘I found an old handbag belonging to Mama the other day. It was away at the back of the attic, and this is what was inside it.’ One of the pieces of paper is a birth certificate, one a death certificate.

‘Poor, poor Mama. It must have been so sad for her. It happened two years before we were born. Her first baby. Isn’t it terrible that we never knew? Don’t cry so, Catherine, try not to upset yourself. I wouldn’t have told you if I had known that it would upset you so much.’ But Catherine is weeping uncontrollably, and Sarah herself is beginning to cry.

‘All those years, and she had this secret.’

‘Dada too,’ sniffs Catherine.

‘Yes,’ says Sarah, ‘Dada too.’

For a moment they do not speak, then Catherine says, ‘I think Mama was very brave.’

‘Do you? Why?’

‘Because of her life. Because she never gave in, she always kept on trying. I loved her for being brave more than I loved her for anything else.’

‘I loved her too,’ says Sarah, ‘but she frightened me. Didn’t she frighten you?’

‘Yes,’ says Catherine. ‘A little.’ Sarah does not speak and then Catherine says, ‘No, that’s not true. She frightened me a great deal.’

‘Do you remember the day that I told her I didn’t believe what she had told us about her childhood? No? Well, I did. I said, “Mama, it’s all lies and I don’t believe a word of it. You’re making it all up so that we’ll feel sorry for you.’”

‘Did you really think that, Sarah? Did you really think that she was lying?’

‘In one way, yes, I did. I think most children feel that way about their parents’ past lives. You have to take it all on trust, for there’s no way that you can ever prove otherwise, and now and then everyone must suspect that they’re being lied to. But with Mama it was something more. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t believe what she told us, it was more that I didn’t want to believe. I didn’t want to believe that someone I loved had had to suffer so much; and I didn’t want to believe that what she said was true because if it was, then it made her even more frightening in herself than she already was. I once read about the daughter of a famous soldier, who said that she was very proud of her father, but I doubted it. I wondered if she felt about him as I felt about Mama. I wondered if she also tried not to believe the truth of all that her father had seen and done and suffered, because I couldn’t understand how anyone could live knowing such things about someone whom they loved. So I said it to her plainly, “Mama, I don’t believe you.”’

‘And what did Mama say?’

‘She was angry,’ says Sarah, smiling a little. ‘She was angrier than I ever saw her at any other time in my whole life. Do you know what she did, Catherine? She took hold of my hand and she said that if I didn’t apologize and take back what I had said, that she would break my little finger.’

‘And did you apologize?’ asks Catherine.

‘Of course I did. I didn’t want to get my little finger broken.’

Catherine looks up in surprise from the two certificates. ‘You
don’t honestly think that she would have done it, do you?’

‘She could have. If what she said was true, she was certainly capable of it. And it
was
true. I always knew that, and I always believed it. I just didn’t want to believe it.’

They fall silent, as though embarrassed by the honesty with which they speak. They rarely talk about their mother now. As they sit there in the empty kitchen, they can hear the birds crying out in the night, and that also makes Sarah think of her mother, and of her mother’s death.

A frosty night has the same effect, for she remembers how she looked up at the starry sky as they followed her into the hospital. Four hours later they walked out again, leaving her dead there; and again Sarah had looked up at the sky where the quiet stars still were shining. Now she saw them differently, but she could not and cannot define the difference: she knows that four hours and the death of one woman does not cause the stars to move in the sky. Later she realized that some of the stars themselves were dead, had died long before her mother’s death or even her birth, but their light still shone from a point in space so far distant that it could be measured only in terms of time. And so the dead empty stars still shone, and would shine, even after Sarah’s own death. She thinks of how, on that morning, they had driven back to the empty farm, and had walked from room to room. On coming to the kitchen, she heard the farm cat crying in the yard, and because it seemed to be the only creature for whom she could now do anything, she went out and gave it a saucer of milk. Even as she thinks of it she can feel the cat’s fur warm against her skin, can feel its head nudge her hand as she pours out the milk, and then the mews change to a contented lapping sound. Sarah looks up. Away in the east the dawn light bleeds up from the horizon into the clouds and the sky. She can see the dark rows of trees and hedges begin to take shape and blacken against the light, as though they are being fleshed out of the darkness itself. And above and beyond everything she hears the cry of invisible birds, caught out there between morning and night. The noise is wild, living, continuous, as though the whole earth is being wrung in re-creation. Never before has she
been particularly conscious of the bird-song; has taken it for granted all her life.

Now, two years after the death, she sits in the kitchen and she says to her sister, ‘Do you know, I never really noticed the noise of the birds until Mama died. Now I notice it all the time.’

Catherine replies, ‘Mama once told me that on the first day she came to this house, before she was married, the sound of the birds was the very first thing that she noticed. Isn’t that strange?’

Catherine does not add that until her mother died she had never known what it was to be lonely. Since then, she has known little else.

Again they fall silent, and they are both thinking the same thought: ‘Tell her now.’ The intimacy and the honesty of the night is unexpected and unusual, and both sisters feel that if ever they can confide in each other, it must be now. Still they do not speak, but they can sense a curious tension, for as they strain for the courage to tell they each become conscious that the other is not sensing this and opening herself to listen, but that she also seems to be on the point of confiding something. And each suddenly feels that the other knows her secret; that she will speak and her sister will reply, ‘I know.’ The silence strains for a moment longer, then Sarah abruptly begins to fold up the two pieces of paper which are lying on the table. At precisely that moment Catherine rises to her feet, saying, ‘I must go on up to bed now. I’m very tired.’

‘Yes, you must be. Off you go. Goodnight.’

They both look at each other for a fraction of a second, and they both know that they have failed. They know too that such an opportunity will probably not come again.

‘Good night, Sarah. Sleep well.’

‘Do you know that you have two great big dark rings under your eyes? Didn’t you sleep well last night?’

‘No,’ replies Sarah.

‘You’re worried about something,’ says Peter, putting his hand up to touch her tired face. ‘Tell me what it is.’

And when Sarah hears this she wants to weep, for she remembers that Peter asked her exactly the same question at the start of the year. Soon it will be Easter. All those intervening months now seem to be a failure and a waste, a stupid attempt to pretend that time is not passing. Against the flow of the weeks she has struggled to keep life – all their lives – in stasis. And what frightens her now is to see how nearly she believed that she had succeeded in this. It had been a genuine shock to see in Catherine’s face an inkling of knowledge. Now she knows that she had believed and not believed in what she knew about her sister, believed it in her heart, but thought that her silence could hold off reality for ever. Her belief in her sister’s fate had been like the belief in resurrection which she had thoughtlessly held from childhood until the day when she looked at her mother’s corpse, for she knew then that she could never believe that the dead will rise from the grave. For a moment she wonders if she could be mistaken: could Catherine know something else? But no, she thinks, that is only a cowardly wish and not a realistic hope. Her failure to broach the matter the previous evening fills her with disgust.

And Peter. What of Peter? She has forced him into the same situation; she has made progress of any kind impossible. In January he had wanted to know why she was worried and she did not reply. Now, four months later, when he asks her the same question, still she cannot or will not answer him. If I do not make things change, she thinks, they will change in any case. I cannot control my life or other people’s lives by doing nothing. I will tell him now.

She takes his hand in her hands and she steels herself to speak. ‘Peter, I …’ She breaks off and falls silent. Lifting up his hand, she looks at it, then rubs it against her face. Closing her eyes she holds his hand in hers as a child might hold on to a parent, and she strokes the base of his thumb. Then she opens her eyes and she looks at his hand again, turning it curiously this way and that, scrutinizing the length of the fingers and the shape of the nails. Peter is puzzled and embarrassed.

‘It’s one of a pair, you know,’ he says at last, holding up his
other hand. Sarah smiles. ‘What do you find so interesting in them?’

‘Nothing,’ she says, now frowning slightly. ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry, Peter. That must have seemed very odd.’ She strokes the back of his hand once more against her face, and then releases him. Glancing up at the clock on the wall she says, ‘I must be going now.’

But Peter stops her at the door. ‘You were going to say something to me, Sarah. What was it?’

Sarah turns. ‘Yes, I was going to say something, Peter. I think that all this has dragged on for far too long, going nowhere. I think that next week, we ought to go to bed together.’

As Sarah is walking home through the fields that afternoon, she finds a bird’s nest, blown to her very feet by a fresh spring wind. She stops, stoops and picks it up; cradles it in her hands and admires the beauty of it. The nest is made of interwoven twigs and fine green moss; inside it is smoothly rounded. She will bring it home and show it to Dada: he will be able to tell her what type of bird built it. Suddenly, here in the cold field, she remembers a visit made to the Natural History museum shortly after the death of her mother. She remembers the building’s oppressive warmth and the eerie stillness of the stuffed animals, but remembers above all the shock she felt when she saw a bird’s nest in a glass case. It was strange that this, the most inanimate object in the museum should be to her the most poignant, but she felt tremendous sadness to look at the dusty, antique nest, and its three blown eggs. Beside the nest was a scrap of yellowed paper, bearing in spiky black writing a date from the end of the last century, a woman’s name, and the name of an old demesne familiar to Sarah. Vividly she sees the demesne on a summer evening. The woman is walking. She is wearing a long dress and her hair is pinned up in heavy coils. At a particular tree she stops, and, parting the branches, she reaches up behind soft young leaves to lift down an empty nest. For some moments she stands looking at the nest as it lies there cupped in her hands, and then she decides that she will keep it.

As the sun declines the woman walks home through the innocent wood, while the hem of her long dress trails through the damp grass, and birds sing.

Now the woman and the singing, building birds are all dead, and only the nest remains, holding time like a chalice, holding that summer day, precisely dated on the piece of faded paper, and holding all the lost years that followed until the moment when Sarah stood bereaved before a glass case in a hot, dry museum, envying the woman who found the nest. Two years later, as she stands in the cold field, she knows that were she to put this nest, which she now holds in her livid hands, into a glass box and preserve it for one hundred years, at the end of that time some yet-to-be-born fool would look at the nest and envy Sarah; finding it impossible to take seriously Sarah’s suffering, for no other reason than Sarah’s distance from her in time.

Why did the woman in the long dress walk alone through the demesne? Did she seek out the nest or did she find it by hazard? Did she hold it in her hands and see in it her own mortality? Even as she touched it, did she not know that the nest would long outlast her, and that another woman would look on it when she had become forgotten dust with the bird that built it?

The woman is standing in her bedroom. The thick coils of hair have been unpinned and brushed out, and show long and dark against her white nightdress. She picks up the nest once more and looks at it, then places it on the window-sill and gets into bed, between stiff white sheets, which smell of lavender. She dims the lamp until the room is filled with perfect darkness. Lying alone in bed, the woman begins to cry quietly.

Sarah starts to walk again, and as she plods along, another meaning for the nest comes to her, a bawdy meaning, and it suddenly seems curiously apt that the nest should have been blown to her feet as she walked from the cottage today.

When she reaches the farm, Catherine is not in the scullery, nor in the kitchen, nor in the parlour. Sarah looks in all the rooms of the house, and at last she finds her sister lying in bed.

‘What are you doing here, Catherine?’

‘I came up to lie down for a while. I felt tired.’