The Birds of the Air (11 page)

‘I hope you’re going to be polite to the Chief Inspector,’ she said to Sam, feeling like someone about to introduce a dog to a cat. ‘You don’t have to talk to him. Just don’t swear or . . .’

She stopped. She wanted to say ‘Don’t look at him’ – since Sam’s expression of sullen hostility was quite as offensive to the respectable middle-aged as rude words, but it sounded so odd.

‘Just be good,’ she said feebly.

Sam disliked and mistrusted the police on other grounds than merely social. Those of his fellow pupils who conformed he found odd enough – like waiters. In their obedience and subservience, they must, Sam felt, be joking. At any minute he expected them to throw off the cloak of humility, prod their masters with a jovial thumb and suggest that it was time the game was over. Soldiers, too, were incomprehensible. That anyone should submit himself, voluntarily or not, to a life of rules and regimentation was beyond his understanding, together with the whole concept of Queen and country. That this way of life also offered injury and death made it seem bizarrely perverse. But the police still struck Sam as the most peculiar. Burglars he understood perfectly, taking it as read that people who owned a great deal of money or property had come by it unjustly. History, as Sam saw it, proved the fact – as did the almost daily exposures of politicians and businessmen. Until held up to popular obloquy, the rich were universally respected because they were rich. Therefore, by aspiring to riches, the burglar was aspiring to respectability and it was hypocrisy to blame him for it. If what the rich possessed made them good, then it would make good anyone who possessed it. Sam could see no flaw in his argument and was shocked at the class treachery of working men who devoted their lives to halting or impeding this process of the redistribution of wealth and virtue. And, while the prisons were bulging with resentful burglars, there were several really determined and dedicated murderers, rapists, traitors, queers and spies running around in total freedom, sniggering conceitedly at the inefficacy of the detective force. The only imprisoned murderers were those accidental domestic ones, discovered on Monday morning drenched in blood, declaiming, ‘I never meant to do it and everything went black, m’lud.’ For the most part, Sam knew, policemen owed their promotion to harrying black youths and arresting drunks, whom they rendered also incapable by kicking them in the crutch. And it was clear that when reluctantly compelled to investigate the activities of the upper classes the entire judicial system did its level best to ameliorate the consequences of those activities. As for his grandfather, the judge, and the like – where was the justice in permitting that class of persons most commonly stolen from to sit in judgment on that class of persons who most commonly stole? A certain bias seemed inevitable. Sam had no time for juries either. They were, by definition, already respectable and did as they were told.

‘Pig,’ said Sam aloud, and generally – of the Chief Inspector, his grandfather, his father, his headmaster and all others who sought to guide or contain him.

Now Barbara, in a flash of drunken enlightenment, recognised the similarity of her son to her sister and rose to blame someone for it.

‘Mummy,’ she said, pushing her mother towards the kitchen and closing the door.

‘Lunch,’ said Mrs Marsh, after a few difficult moments, with bar-deserving bravery.

She felt strong and capable. Barbara wasn’t clever enough to be secretive and Mrs Marsh, who regarded secrecy as sinful, was glad. She could cope with honest hurt and recrimination, with the human and recognisable doubts of her younger daughter, but not with the sly, invidious resolutions of the elder. Mary was beyond help: it was insulting, denigrating – Mary’s refusal of comfort and love. Barbara had damply confessed the discovery of her husband’s infidelity, her son’s intransigence, her own inadequacy – and for all these Mrs Marsh had the answer. Life must go on, she had told her, without considering the matter at all. It was plain that this was so. ‘You must pick the raisins out of the cake,’ she had said. ‘Just look for what is good in your life.’ Barbara, snivelling, had recognised the sense in this but had, to some extent, misunderstood her mother, confusing her advice with the prevalent wisdom which seemed to hold that sexual fulfilment, innocently pleasurable and free of guilt, was all that mattered. She slid on to the arm of the chair in which Hunter sat, endeavouring to lean as much of herself as was possible against as much of him as was available, while at the same time gazing across the room with an expression of tranquil reflection. The tension and urgency of her body, combined with what appeared to the onlooker to be a look of insane vacancy were disturbing.

‘Your glass is empty, dear,’ said Evelyn nervously, reaching to the sideboard for a bottle – any bottle.

Barbara smiled brilliantly. ‘Oh
thank
you,’ she said, as though Evelyn had just ennobled her. ‘Thank you so
much
.’

Into the silence that followed, Mrs Marsh announced that lunch must now be served. ‘Mary,’ she called peremptorily, ‘come and sit down.’

Mary returned from Melys y Bwyd. The kitten’s pale eyes were like rain-washed wood anemones, the tiny pads of its paws like blackberry pips and its claws like bramble thorns – the small, less serious ones high up the stem near the blossom . . . Robin on the whole had preferred the wild raspberries to the blackberries. One year they had spent the whole summer turning raspberries into jam. Robin had said it was
adorable
. No one else, as far as she knew, had ever described food as adorable. That was the year, she remembered meticulously, that Robin got covered in crows’ egg, up a tree, poking down the nest with a clothes pole – not out of merry vandalism but in the eventual best interest of the crows, because they got down the chimney and it would be better for everyone if they were to leave. The careless structures of twigs in the chimney were a nuisance, causing damp grey-yellow clouds of smoke to billow out when she first lit the fire, but it was worse to open up the silent cottage smelling of the wilderness, trapped, and see the sooty, perfect tracery of desperate wings on the white-washed walls and know that somewhere there lay a corpse to be disposed of. Crows were stupid enough to fall down chimneys but too stupid to get up them again. Silly birds, she thought, knowing that if it were daylight she could look across beyond the ridge and see the branches of the distant trees, clotted with crows’ nests, but never Robin, never again, up or down a tree.

‘What nonsense,’ she said, freshly incredulous. ‘You’d better take this cat,’ she told her mother, handing it, now limply trustful, across her palm. ‘It’ll be better in the kitchen. Puss off.’

The ground at Melys y Bwyd would be icebound now, Robin’s grave clasped iron-hard, Robin’s bones as cold as stone. All around, the meadow grass would be silver-green and the mountain bracken red-gold; the trees plucked bare as dead birds save for the black yews and the fox umber of beech in the hedgerows. The hedgerows now, thought Mary with satisfaction, would be dry and pinched with frost – all gone their nuptial finery, the idle golden peace of summer days. Those hedgerows had much to answer for, decked for weddings, letting the hearse pass through them in the flowery dust. Once upon a time the lads of the village would have been looking to their staves now, plaiting a little cage, getting ready to beat the hedgerows in pursuit of the wren on the 26th. Such a sad, angry, godless day, the day after Christmas – the laughing, brutal young men carrying a dead caged bird high in triumph all round the boundaries to bury in the churchyard and allay misfortune for the coming year, and St Stephen stoned for feeding the poor. On Boxing Day the entire population would be pretty stoned – fat, sick, hungover and dreary with anti-climax and a surfeit of rich things.

‘Comin’, Mary?’ enquired Mr Mauss. He was quite relaxed and clearly had no consciousness of being an intruder on this family scene. He had removed his beltless mac and his hat and wore a light-weight jacket and trousers, a striped shirt and strange feet-shaped shoes. He seemed to have aged since they last met and it didn’t suit him. Like all his countrymen, he was designed for youth, the ball-game, swimming the Atlantic. Now his handsome steak-and-milk-fed bones were obscured by drooping flesh, and his splendid teeth looked foolishly out of place between developing dewlaps.

Mary was thinking, ‘The north wind doth blow and we shall have snow and what will the robin do then . . .’

‘You do look well,’ she said. She didn’t habitually greet other people with observations on their appearance – like a hunter sighting game and weighing it up in his mind’s eye.

‘You look great,’ said Mr Mauss, inexactly. He didn’t much like Mary, who had once given it as her opinion that his great country was founded on heresy, genocide and greed – what the Americans themselves referred to as religious idealism, courage and enterprise. It was, he had considered, a quite uncalled-for remark.

Hunter whispered in Mary’s ear as they paused in the hall. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I could have left him in London, but it didn’t seem to occur to him that I would.’

‘Well, of course you couldn’t,’ said Mary. Even she could see that. ‘Christmas is sacred to them.’

Hunter giggled. They shared an image of the American Christmas – riches, reconciliations, tears, snow, success, sentiment, furs and firs, the shop windows shining like Heaven and everything good for sale.

‘Jingle
bells
,’ said Mary.

Mrs Marsh smiled, indulgently, if a little nervously. She had never understood their silly jokes but was glad to see Mary laughing. She wondered vaguely, not for the first time, why they had never married. They always got on so well.

She began to make people stand up so that she could pull their chairs to the tables. It was awkward and upsetting, and she wished momentarily that she could clap her hands and disperse everyone like the birds. So many people made a room even untidier than did present wrappings and string. Gamely, she coaxed and com manded. ‘Evelyn, you sit here between Seb and Mr Mauss. Hunter, you get between Ba and Mary. Kate and Sam, you go and sit on the stairs . . .’

It was now that Mr Mauss revealed a hitherto unsus -pected and wholly unwelcome aspect of his personality. He was
good with children
– he was fonder than Father Christmas of little children, fonder than Italian waiters, than politicians on polling day. Kate, he declared, should by no means sit outside on the stairs. She should sit on his knee if needs be. He didn’t seem as fond of Sam.

Mrs Marsh could have crowned him with her tray. ‘There isn’t room,’ she protested.

‘Nahnsense,’ said Mr Mauss roundly. At one point he even spoke of ‘the little lady’.

Mrs Marsh gave in. She went so far against her principles as to put the sofa cushions on the floor for the children. Sam could hardly be banished alone to the stairs, though he was more than willing. She had never approved of Americans, ever since the days of G.I.s – funny-coloured uniforms and chewing gum . . .

‘I’ll serve in the kitchen,’ she said flatly, not bothering to ask who would like what or how much of it.

‘They’ll have what they’re given,’ she muttered to Evelyn, who had maddeningly insisted on climbing over Mr Mauss to come out and help. The thought of waving vegetable dishes and boiling gravy boats above those close-crammed heads and her pretty chintz was altogether too daunting.

For once Sam wasn’t hungry. He had eaten all the soft-centred chocolates from several of the boxes on the sideboard. He wished he hadn’t. He liked the food he was given here. At Granny Lamb’s now they would be sitting in the dining room with dogs dribbling at their sides. They’d be eating something like rotting pheasant with Smith’s Crisps warmed up in the oven, and what his grandfather called ‘bread poultice’; he ate it all the same, thought Sam – and the bitter walnuts from his own tree. Pauline, the housekeeper, wouldn’t be there today; his grandmother would have to do the washing up. Though Pauline usually did all the kitchen work, he had never seen his grandmother actually touch her. It was as though the lower classes, no matter how much they washed dishes or themselves, would never be clean enough for her to touch. (The pedigree dogs slept on her bed and licked her brown-spotted hands.)

Mr Mauss and Kate discussed poetry. Sam sat up at the mention of a poem by Tennyson called ‘Marijuana in the Moated Grange’ but lost interest when it turned out to be about a girl.

‘That’s the wise thrush,’ trilled Kate, ‘he sings each song twice over . . .’

Barbara’s bit of turkey went down the wrong way.

Hunter beat her on the back and Evelyn brought her a glass of water.

‘A lot of people die of choking these days,’ Evelyn said conversationally. ‘In American restaurants they keep a special thing for putting down people’s throats. The average size of a piece of meat that people choke on is about like a cigarette packet. I expect Mr Mauss could tell you . . .’

First fine careless rapture, thought Barbara. Careless rapture . . . She hiccoughed violently and turned her face to Hunter’s shoulder.

Oh help, thought Mrs Marsh.

‘Hail to thee, blithe spirit,’ waffled Kate.

Mary decisively clanged her knife down on the table.

Kate stopped speaking. She ate a potato slowly, one eye on her aunt. Despite her curiosity she had had enough sense not to question Mary on the effects of bereavement. She had considered offering the sweet sympathy of an innocent child, but had luckily thought better of that too. It would have been very foolish. Nevertheless her aunt’s lack of interest made her nervous. She suspected, astonished, that of the two of them, Mary liked Sam the better – a preference unique in Kate’s short experience.

‘Bird thou never wert,’ declaimed Mr Mauss.

Mrs Marsh saw worriedly that there still seemed to be a great deal of wine about. It reminded her indirectly of her mother, who had never approved of the Lord’s actions at the marriage at Cana and was wont to suggest by way of excuse that he had probably turned the water into tonic wine, adding further that it must always be remembered that in those countries the water was undrinkable.