The Birds of the Air Read online

‘You should go if you’re going,’ said Mary. ‘It’ll snow.’

  Alone in the house, she stood up. She could go into the kitchen if she liked, or the other room, or even upstairs. She could scream if she liked, though not too loudly or they’d hear her next door.

  At Melys y Bwyd a flock of white geese grazed by a stream where the lane passed through a farmyard, overhung and dark with trees. She could see them – so perfectly shaped and delineated that they were like excisions from some more clearly conceived reality, making even the barn cats seem amateurly constructed and the scuttling and fussing hens bungled – mere mistakes.

  Then there was Robin stencilled against her awareness like the geese against the Advent darkness, clear and preternaturally real, quite unlike her tweaked and harassed relations, and shining always with a radiance that graced the living only when they stood against the snow.

  ‘Well,’ she said aloud. She was back in the lane going to the graveyard. It was winter – winter, so there would be berries in the rusted hedgerows, blood-hued from bright scarlet to arterial purple, the fruit of the wild rose and the hawthorn and elder and holly scattered against the cold sky, as though some wounded god, running, had shaken a bleeding hand in irritable pain. The streams that ran alongside the hedgerows would be frozen to steel and the dead grass stiff with frost. She could feel the wind encircling her head and tears chill on her face.

  In the summer there had been no tears. There had been no whipping wind, no onions, no small pains to bring them, and she couldn’t weep for Robin – weeping was insufficient and inappropriate. The birds of the air should mourn for Robin and all the vast hordes of the dead.

  The sun had shone with great heat for Robin’s last day above the earth. It had been a shadowless day, without measure, so that the flies that rose from the dung heaps in the lane had seemed no less beautiful than the wild flowers strewn under and over the hedgerows. Shy grave diggers, half concealing their rude spades, stood in the rib-high grasses at the unkempt edge of the graveyard, nodding apologetically if they caught anyone’s eye.

  They had dared to lower Robin in a box into a pit in that dry graveyard, filled with sun.

  It hadn’t been then, nor did it seem now, an occasion for tears.

  Mrs Marsh plodded towards the shops, her fur hat pulled well down over her ears, dragging her wheeled basket behind her. She enjoyed Christmas, with the darkness and the light in the shops. The sky away over the city was yellow through grey, like old rubbed Sheffield plate, but the High Street was bright with oranges and lemons.

  She waited in an ill-defined queue at the greengrocer’s, secretly enjoying the smells of celery and damp paper and apples. All the ladies present knew each other slightly and spoke. ‘Hello,’ they said, and ‘Isn’t it cold?’ Most were well and casually dressed, their hair tipped and streaked with blonde.

  ‘Hullo, Mrs Marsh,’ said someone running in from the street.

  ‘Hullo, Vera,’ said Mrs Marsh. This was her next-door neighbour, whose hair was grey-brown and untended, though partially obscured by a felt hat. She had very small eyes.

  ‘I’m run off my feet,’ said Vera. ‘I know it’s only Dennis and I, but I never seem to stop. How’s Mary?’ She lowered her voice for this question, and her little eyes crossed as she looked into Mrs Marsh’s face.

  ‘She’s fine,’ said Mrs Marsh. ‘It’ll take time . . .’

  ‘Of course,’ agreed Vera.

  ‘. . . but she’ll be fine,’ concluded Mrs Marsh. She didn’t want to discuss her daughter with this dumpy little creature. She had overheard Evelyn explaining Mary’s illness to Vera. ‘Complete physical collapse,’ Evelyn had said in knowledgeable tones. ‘One day her legs just gave way and down she went. Psychological, of course . . .’ Mrs Marsh had interrupted with a quite unnecessary reminder to Evelyn that she was expected for Christmas lunch. Then she had gone on, even more unnecessarily, to invite Vera to come for drinks in the evening. She couldn’t understand why she’d done it: she was neighbourly and hospitable by disposition but she didn’t crave the company of Vera and Dennis.

  ‘Don’t forget you’re coming for a drink on Christmas Day,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, we won’t,’ said Vera confidently. ‘We’re looking forward to it.’

  Mrs Marsh hauled her basket along to the dry cleaners and collected her velvet jacket. She didn’t really need very much shopping. She was out for the pleasure of it, to see people she knew and to look in the shop windows, and to be away from the house for a while – on the run. She bought a dozen eggs and wondered if she had deserved a cup of coffee. No, she decided, she hadn’t. She walked back to the greengrocer’s to buy some grapes for Mary and some nuts for the birds.

  Barbara was frenziedly packing. She had turned off the central heating, or hoped she had. She could never quite work the various controls, and Seb, who could, she was certain, if he wanted to, grew so irritable when she asked him to do it. She had emptied the fridge and given all the left-over food from the party to her cleaning lady, who in turn would give what was suitable to the cat and throw the rest away. Barbara knew she would do this but didn’t care as long as the shame of wastefulness couldn’t be attributed directly to her. She and the cleaning lady had scraped squashed olives and dog-ends off the stained mushroom-coloured carpet, done what they could for a cigarette burn on the walnut table and rather feebly shaken the brown-and-white patterned curtains to release the smoke. The house had grown shabbier and shabbier through Sam’s short life and a series of parties.

  Now she went alone through the bedrooms. Shirts, underpants, socks, ties, shaving things for Seb. As she packed, she inspected all his garments for signs of infidelity – lipstick, strange hairs, semen – but found nothing. No notes in the pockets of his suits, no jewelled clips caught in his vests. Seb was so neat and clever, she reflected with a prideful hatred.

  She found Sam’s leather trousers and his worn, smelly, thick-soled suede shoes, which she had agreed to bring on the understanding that he wouldn’t wear them. When Sam had asked ‘Whassa point o’ bringin’ ’em, den?’, she had burst into tears, and Sam had retired in the sullen, despairing rage of the adolescent.

  In Kate’s room she carefully chose the best clothes from her chest of drawers and the little wardrobe covered with pictures of baby deer and rabbits. She packed Kate’s notebooks and drawings to show Grandma, and sat teddy on her bed to await her return.

  Then she packed the few things she herself would need – her crimson frock for Christmas Day, two petticoats, two best pairs of knickers, two uplift bras, all her tights, her tartan skirt and her purple jumper. She would wear her tweed skirt and the green jumper and be prepared for any occasion. She put in her nightie of cream viyella, a packet of sanitary towels and the things for her face. She mustn’t forget her deodorant and her bottle of lavender water. Finally, the Christmas presents: a box of handmade chocs for her mother and a jar of real caviar for Mary. She was unconscious that the reason why she had chosen these comestibles was that her native thrift rebelled against giving anything more durable to the aged or to one who might be terminally ill. Her husband’s and children’s presents were already in the boot of the car, and she wondered without much hope whether they would like them.

  She went once more round the house to make sure she had left nothing that would smoulder or moulder – no cigarette ends in the waste-paper baskets, or Sam’s crusts under cushions. There was a fresh burn on the stair carpet she hadn’t noticed before.

  Taking a tranquillizing pill she locked the door, pulling it several times to make sure, and walked round to pick up the car.

  Sam was sitting in the back with his feet dangling over the front seat.

  ‘I thought you were with Kate at Emily’s house,’ said Barbara. ‘I was just coming to get you.’

  ‘Wuz boring,’ said Sam.

  ‘And how did you get into the car?’ demanded his mother.

  ‘Wuz open,’ said Sam.

  Barbara knew perfectly well t
hat it couldn’t have been, and was shaken again by the awful fear that her son was a natural criminal.

  They picked up Kate, who was waiting in her red coat, from Emily’s house. Then they collected Seb from his college, where he was polishing a paper. He detested being taken away from his work and muttered as he followed them to the car.

  Sebastian had devoted his life and his career to the proposition that words should be used with tremendous care, that no statement should be made that wasn’t capable of precise utterance, and that anyone who couldn’t say exactly what he meant should keep his trap shut. In the heady days earlier in the century when this novel idea first began to gather adherents, it was held by them that a massive, invincible engine was being constructed that would overturn all false, all mistaken structures of human thought – such as religious belief – and clear the ground for true human progress. But as time passed it began to seem that this tool resembled not so much a mighty bulldozer as that useful but scarcely earth-shaking, and indeed slightly anachronistic, implement – the thing for taking stones out of horses’ hooves. Sebastian didn’t care. His philosophy perfectly fitted his personality, and he had nearly finished his latest book – would have finished it, if it hadn’t been for Christmas.

  ‘Would you go in the back, Seb?’ asked his wife.

  ‘I’m not going in the back,’ said Seb, getting in the front.

  ‘Then you children mustn’t quarrel,’ said Barbara. ‘It’s dangerous when I’m driving.’ Her mother used to say to her and Mary: ‘Birds in their little nests agree.’ Mary at a young age had denied it, pointing out that birds in their little nests spent most of their time trying to shove the other birds over the edge. Mary had always been cynical – and ungrateful – thought Barbara, hot with anxiety and resentment that so many of her relations should be so unsatisfactory.

  Sam suddenly felt furiously sorry for his mother. In her sheepskin jacket and her sheepskin mittens she looked like an inverted bell-wether. (All the university wives wore sheepskin when they drove or shopped because they thought it unassuming and practical and ladylike; but, if they had only realised, it was actually merely sheeplike.) Also, her dark curly hair was in a mess and the end of her nose was red. He kicked Kate, who immediately howled.

  ‘Oh,’ cried Barbara, on a breaking note, earning herself a look of disgust from Sebastian, who turned to address his children . . .

  Mrs Marsh beat around the house like a moth. Her movements, though disciplined and deliberate, were to Mary as irritating and alarming as the pointless vacillations of a large insect. She was flapping dusters over spotless sur -faces, counterpanes over immaculate beds, embroidered guest-towels over the bathroom rails, thin little rugs on the gleaming slippery parquet of the hall. There was so much useless cloth in this house.

  Mary thought nostalgically of winding sheets, of linen ripped for bandages, of sails – of taking to the sea uncluttered and cold as a rafter of bones. Housework should be done in secret or not at all. A busy woman was a reproach, insistent and disturbing, a reprimand to the silent scholar or the idle dead, announcing with each flourish that life was to be lived, that there was no room in the habitations of the living for the grey peace of dust and decay, that the virtuous must polish and wash and sweep and scrub – scouring and mopping, relentless as time.

  Mary just sat by the window. Pain and rage and guilt lay in her mind as still as fish in a stagnant pool. In the dull depths she could also discern the untidy lineaments of shame. During the painstaking unravelling of feeling into thought, she had realised that she would have preferred Robin to live on, suffering, rather than herself suffer the anguish of loss. There’s love, she said, astonished. What a peculiar thing! Yet she neither wished nor had the time to dislike herself. It was hardly worth the trouble. She had never bothered to rejoice when she had been ‘lucky Mary’ – so lucky that passing people asked (or so it seemed) ‘Who is that lucky one? Is it some princess?’ and she would answer, not triumphantly, ‘No, it is lucky Mary. She has found her heart’s desire and this is her happy-ever-after.’ She was unsuited to life. Perhaps, despite the evidence of her mother’s devotion, she hadn’t come through the usual channel, but had dropped from a branch, treating as she did even happiness as a caged ape a banana, suspiciously and all thumbs.

  ‘They’ll be here soon,’ said her mother joyfully from the doorway, flapping a silk hankie up the sleeve of the smart little frock she had just put on. It would do Mary so much good to have the family here to take her out of herself. It was so good of Barbara to be coming here instead of going to Seb’s parents even though it was their turn: she hoped they would mind, since she knew they thought Barbara wasn’t really worthy of their son, living as they did in the country, keeping dogs and getting mud on their boots. That life wouldn’t have suited Mrs Marsh at all, but this didn’t prevent her from realising that they considered her socially inferior.

  Sebastian’s father, the judge, was a complacent man with a high colour, the set mouth of one who has never been contradicted and a voice which sounded as though he was perpetually swallowing a mouthful of expensive whisky together with a few fox hairs. Sebastian’s mother, the bishop’s daughter, resembled her husband, except that her voice was high – like a curlew’s cry. Neither of them in their whole lives, as far as anyone knew, had ever suffered any reversal of fortune. Even the state of the nation, which they attributed to the greed and sloth of the working classes and to something they called the ‘politics of envy’, didn’t particularly dismay them, and they were waiting with a certain retributory anticipation for the tide to turn. Mrs Marsh felt towards them the slight fear and hostility, mixed awkwardly with wondering respect, that each layer of the English class structure feels for the layer just above it. They were both, of course – Mrs Marsh and the in-laws – united in their admiration of the monarchy, since the royal succession was secure and no jumped-up entrepreneur or foreigner could aspire to it. The absence of possibility had a soothing effect on the caste system.

  Sebastian’s sister, Jennifer, had married a large rich man who still played rugby and got even muddier than the rest of the family. Mary said they’d met in Harrods and bought each other there, but Mrs Marsh thought highly of Harrods and wasn’t consoled.

  ‘I’ll sit in the Close and wait for Barbara,’ said Mary, adding to her mother’s pleasure.

  Her motive was selfish. She wished to save herself pain, to be warned of the arrival, since if she were to relax and drift the shortest distance into her reveries of wilderness the shock of recall would be unpleasant. Even now she hated to hear a knock at the door. At Melys y Bwyd the doors had never been locked. The old Welsh tradition still held in that remote valley. Friends of the house walked straight in, calling ‘Is anybody home?’ A knock at the door meant that strangers had come among them.

  The two young men had knocked for a long time before she heard them – as the bird had knocked at the window of Melys y Bwyd in another dawn, unthinking harbinger of despair in the damp soft greyness as the moonless night ebbed. She had tapped back at the bird through the brittle membrane of glass, waved her arms at it mockingly, shouted at it. Sad, black, desperate thing – it wouldn’t go away. That means a death, the Welsh had told her. The policemen, too, had come to tell her of a death. She seemed to remember that she’d thanked them and they’d offered to make her a cup of tea . . . Doors had lost significance, since not one would ever open to admit Robin. Walls and windows too now possessed a strange ambivalence. Dangerous and circum scribing, they no longer represented safety or comfort but merely translated the wilderness into a view – into a humanised, rationalised vision of infinity, the measure of which it was impossible to formulate. Later that evil morning, leaving the house, because arrangements had to be made, she had smelled the flowering privet fresh and shining from the night’s rain, glimpsed the racing liberated sky and been appalled by a moment of glittering joy, as intense as any she had ever known. She wondered sometimes whether she had gone mad then and sta
yed mad ever since, since in order to tolerate the intolerable it was necessary to change the rules, or at least one’s conception of them. She had heard the cuckoo that spring too, while she was walking down the lane. ‘Jesu Grist,’ the roadman had said, busy giving the hedgerow a short-back-and-sides. ‘There’s bad luck.’ It seemed it was only safe to hear the cuckoo call while you stood on greenery – leaves or grass, even a sprig of parsley. To hear it while you walked on barren ground was a poor omen. Mary wished he’d told her earlier. She would never have left the garden, would have made her shoes of salad stuff.

  ‘Sit on the bench,’ said Mrs Marsh. ‘You’ll be nice and sheltered there.’

  The bench circled the cedar that grew in the middle of the little lawn. To the cedar’s unprotesting trunk was nailed a shingle – cut obliquely to retain the greatest amount of bark – deeply incised with the gilded words ‘Honeyman’s Close’. It interrupted the flow of the squirrel as he poured up and down collecting the delicacies that were put out for him by the residents. Sometimes he sat on it, and his benefactors took photographs of him to send to their relations in New Zealand. Round the lawn stood a dozen new little houses in what had been the garden of a larger house. The high surrounding wall remained, but the garden was cut up into gravel paths wide enough for cars and the cedar was all that was left of the original trees. New trees and shrubs had been planted – all evergreen, because they were better value for money, retaining their decorative properties the year round and not dropping their messy leaves all over the place like the spendthrift deciduous varieties.

  Mary was quite alone. Most of the neighbours were childless. Some had grown-up children who had long since left home, and those who had young children had been careful to have so few that they could afford to send them to boarding school and take them away on holidays. No tricycles lay about, no balls, no discarded garments. God, thought Mary. There were only the birds, summer-fat in midwinter in this bird-loving environ ment. There were no cats; and dogs were discouraged, except for old Miss Jones’s scottie, who was permitted, because his mistress was said to be of county descent and therefore at once deserved him and could be relied upon to look after him. The people at No. 5 who owned a chain of hairdressing shops had originally moved in with a Bedlington, a boxer and a dachshund, looking like an incomplete set of old-fashioned pictorial cigarette cards, but although there had been no unpleasantness they had soon realised that dogs didn’t fit in to the Close and had given them away to friends who lived in ampler surroundings. There had been angry consternation when the Close heard that a policeman was to move in to the house next door to Mrs Marsh’s. The neighbours were relieved to learn that he was a Chief Inspector, but still they wished he’d chosen a different place of retirement. ‘He’ll bring his alsatian or his dobermann pinscher,’ prophesied the lady from No. 5. They were all quite surprised when he didn’t.