The Birds of the Air Read online

  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.

  ‘I think so,’ she said imploringly. ‘I bought so much.’

  She purposely didn’t add that she’d worked for two days getting it all ready, since that might sound like a reproach or a confession of weakness. If Seb wished to think that she did it all by magic then so he should. That version of things would reflect credit on them both – on him for being worthy of magic and on her for being capable of it.

  The older, more practised guests had already eaten the pâté and the spinach quiche, and the rest were applying themselves to the turkey and ham and the rice and potato salads. Someone had stubbed out a cigar in a quarter of tomato. None of her mother’s friends would do such a thing. These academic people were so absent-minded. She should be used to it by now, but she wasn’t. The days of preparation and anxious thought – and then they all ate it up in the gaps between conversation, or left great heaps on their plates. Perhaps it was horrid – she couldn’t tell, since she could neither eat nor taste after two days of cooking.

  She pushed her way carefully through her guest
s.

  A man on her right was complaining about publishers and the high price of books. ‘They do it,’ he said, ‘pour encourager les auteurs.’

  Barbara sympathised deeply with people who were worried about the dreadful cost of living, but she had heard Sebastian remark, smiling nastily, that many of his colleagues should count themselves fortunate: they had such a splendid excuse when their books didn’t sell.

  At last she reached the bookcase in the other room, where she had hidden the after-dinner mints away from Sam. She was just in time to see her husband placing a piece of turkey with his fork in the damp red mouth of the wife of the Professor of Music, whose own hands were taken up with her glass and her embroidered ethnic evening bag, hung with tassels and studded with bits of mirror.

  This playful, lascivious act was so uncharacteristic of Sebastian, and suited him so ill, that for a moment Barbara failed to recognise him. She felt suddenly deathly faint, and then she realised for herself what Sam had learnt at tea time and what everyone else had known for months.

  Carefully she opened the bookcase and removed a book, Platonis Opera. She stared at it, wondering vaguely why it contained no chocolates.

  Sebastian stepped away from his paramour and stood beside his wife. ‘What is it, darling? What are you looking for?’ he enquired with wholly unwonted solicitude.

  ‘The sweets,’ she answered him fearfully. Her husband was being kind to her in order to put himself in a good light with his lover.

  Sebastian groped in the bookcase and handed her the box. ‘Here you are, darling,’ he said, dismissing her.

  Was Sebastian then, after all, stupid, she wondered. Did he not know that she knew, or didn’t he care?

  Sam was pleased to see the box in his mother’s hands. He’d searched all the usual hiding places – she must have found somewhere different.

  ‘No, Sam,’ said Barbara, holding the box aside. ‘You can have one later when everyone else has had one.’

  She sounded funny, she looked funny. Sam temporarily lost his appetite for chocolate. Despite his own revolutionary tendencies he preferred his parents to behave sensibly. He pushed on with his tape recorder.

  The rooms were inconveniently crowded and Sam was constantly halted by determined talkers engrossed in what they were saying and loth to move lest someone should seize the chance to interrupt with his own view of the topic under discussion. He found himself lodged behind a Regius Professor who was enquiring urbanely of a slender young man and a girl whether his desire to see the English keep their culture and heritage intact by mating only with persons of similar heritage made him a racist. As even Sam could see that the answer to this was yes, he couldn’t understand why they stood there like a couple of lemons nodding and sipping.

  Nearby the Canon was lecturing a small group on the subject of pride. ‘We are told that pride is a vice,’ he was saying, ‘but is it not a virtue? I take pride in my country. I took pride in my school and my university. I take a humble pride in the fact that the chapter saw fit to elect me one of their number . . .’

  He was nuts, decided Sam. The Canon was nuts, his father was nuts, they were all nuts. The biggest brains in Britain – and all nuts.

  Sam and the university regarded each other with complete mutual incomprehension. It was inconceivable to Sam that anyone should wish to resemble or emulate his father or his father’s colleagues, and inconceivable to them that anyone should not. He could see dimly that they were irrevocably separated by the age-old human problem – everyone’s unshakable belief that everyone else either is, or wishes or deserves to be, like himself. Just as the healthy think the ill are malingering, so the ill think the healthy haven’t yet recognised their own symptoms; as the homosexual think the heterosexual are lurking in the closet, so the heterosexual think the homosexual can be ‘cured’; the old think the young desire their wisdom, the young that the old covet their youth, blacks that whites envy them their virility, whites that blacks wish to be white, the rich that the poor wish to be like them, the poor that the rich are like them, only richer and less happy. It all made for a great deal of needless fear and confusion, thought Sam with vague conviction.

  Steering well clear of the Bursar, who had once, inadvisedly, cradled the back of Sam’s head in his hand, remarking that it was such a good shape, Sam sidled determinedly forward. He circled a don with a bemused expression listening to a long-haired girl describing the latest metropolitan party fun.

  ‘They pass round a sheet of looking-glass,’ the girl was explaining, ‘and there are neat little rows of coke on it and each person takes a straw and sniffs up a row each.’

  ‘Well, I think it’s terrifying,’ said an older woman. ‘It is addictive, no matter what they say. It completely rots the membrane in the nose . . .’

  ‘It’s terribly expensive,’ said the girl, rather wistfully.

  ‘I always think it’s such an insipid drink,’ said the don, completely at sea.

  Sam glanced at him through narrowed eyes, his expression of utter contempt giving him a brief resem -blance to his father when faced with an undergraduate trying to derive a moral principle from a set of factual premises.

  The Thrush, instantly distinguishable by her multi coloured, patched and banded peasant frock, was standing back to back with the Professor of Divinity, but Sam was wedged between him and an obviously troubled fat young person in spectacles who was addressing him.

  ‘And they say that sodomy is one of the sins crying out to Heaven for vengeance . . .’ the young man was saying.

  ‘It all depends on what is meant by sodomy,’ answered the divine stiffly, his narrow gold bracelet – a gift from a friend – glinting shyly as he toyed with his glass.

  Sam passed a group dominated by a frail old don speaking in exaggerated patrician accents by which he had not come honestly (all his relations had remained down their native pit). ‘Mike . . .’ he was saying to the group, ‘Mike here is quite right to use the word “numinous”. You see, Mike, when you say, Mike . . .’ That meant Mike was a dumbo. All the old dons used the first names of dumbos a lot to put them at their ease.

  ‘Silly ole fart,’ muttered Sam. He exchanged a hostile glance with a lady whose elbow he had jogged, and pushed on.

  He was next to the Thrush now. He lifted the micro -phone under his shirt to catch her words, half expecting her to declare her passion for his father. She was talking to another woman, similar to herself, but older.

  ‘My mother got rather cross,’ she was saying sweetly. ‘She thought I was being unkind about Thalia.’

  ‘There’s really nothing unkind one can say about Thalia,’ the other woman observed, laughing scornfully.

  ‘No, of course,’ agreed the Thrush, rather put out. Plainly she valued her connection with this Thalia, whoever she might be, and didn’t care to have either Thalia, or her own familiarity with Thalia, undervalued. ‘Superb musician,’ she added decidedly. ‘And did you know she has this bird?’ The Thrush raised and lowered each plump shoulder in sudden animation as she thought of it.

  ‘What kind of bird?’ asked the older woman suspiciously. ‘A real one?’

  ‘A real one,’ cried the Thrush ecstatically. This fright -fully rare sort of parrot – it just flies loose all over the house.’

  ‘My dear,’ interrupted the other with quiet triumph. ‘I have these friends in the country – the most lovely William-and-Maryish sort of house, one of the most beautiful houses in the country – and they have these macaws who fly loose around the valley. One’s just riding along on one’s pony and there’s this sudden flash of blue. It’s most lovely. They’ve picked all the window sills off, though,’ she added in a sudden concession to banality.

  The Thrush rallied. ‘I wish you’d send them here then,’ she said, in a brave attempt to keep the conver sation going. She could hardly now return to Thalia’s lone parrot, its house-bound brightness utterly dimmed by the brilliance of the outdoor macaws of her adversary’s friends. ‘There’s the
most ghastly concrete statue outside . . .’

  ‘Oh no,’ said the victorious one, putting the boot in. ‘They wouldn’t like that at all. They only like this lovely old stone!’

  The Thrush smiled dejectedly. Sam almost felt sorry for her; but she was saying no more, so he pushed on until he came to the Professor of Music, who was making one of his jokes.

  ‘He didn’t so much cook the goose . . .’

  ‘. . . as goose de cook,’ chimed Sam, who had over heard a mathematician telling this one some weeks before. In this place mathematicians, scientists and musicians tended to make puns, often of a scatological kind. Teachers of English literature, on the other hand, though they tended to know nothing about anything except English literature – ‘engliterates’ his father called them – were sometimes a bit funnier – though on the whole they amused only themselves and one another. As for the few remaining classical scholars, most of their jokes were not merely old, but 2,000 years old, and expressed in dead languages. These jokes had plainly lost something in the course of time and were produced more as passwords than as attempts to communicate amuse -ment, Sam thought. He called it showing off.

  ‘’s old,’ he said, gazing accusingly up at the annoyed man, who couldn’t be expected to know that Sam, in spite of his appearance and reputation, was, in matters of sex, an extremely proper, not to say prudish, child who had hoped to overhear him speak disapprovingly of the behaviour of the Thrush.

  Brooding on the permissive society, Sam had reached the opposite wall, where his little sister had pinned someone’s wife and was busy interrogating her on the works of Wordsworth.

  ‘It’s years since I went to school,’ said the poor woman with a terrified laugh.

  ‘I prefer the classical poets myself,’ Kate informed her truculently. She was a big girl for her age, her dress badly cut and the wrong length, the hem meeting the tops of her ankle socks. She was formidable.

  ‘Gerra bed, cow,’ said Sam.

  ‘My brother isn’t academic,’ Kate told her victim with sibling satisfaction.