The Birds of the Air (12 page)

Hunter must have brought all these bottles, realised Mrs Marsh, and she hadn’t thanked him.

Sebastian, his head inclined downwards, his face thoughtful, was shaking the peppermill – one of a pair, tall shiny wooden things, faintly phallic, a gift from the lady who owned the hairdressing salons. Mrs Marsh herself didn’t much care for them – she preferred her dainty glass and silver cellar and pot – but at least she knew how to work them.

‘You twist the top – Professor,’ she said, permitting herself a moment’s malice. ‘Like this.’ She leaned across and ground a liberal quantity of black pepper over Sebastian’s sprouts.

Barbara was a little shocked that her mother should dare to tease Sebastian. ‘He doesn’t like too much,’ she said.

Evelyn didn’t think the party was going very well. She took her cracker and proffered an end to Hunter. ‘Pull,’ she invited.

The paper hat fell into his cranberry sauce, but Evelyn had the half with the joke. She unravelled it. ‘What flies in the air and shaves?’ she asked, announcing, as everyone seemed non-plussed, ‘A hairy plane.’

‘Oh, that was funny,’ cried Mrs Marsh insincerely. ‘Now, Kate, why did the bull rush?’

‘Because it saw the cow slip,’ responded Kate obediently.

Mr Mauss looked puzzled.

‘What’s the difference between a weasel and a stoat?’ enquired Evelyn. No one knew. ‘Well, a weasel is weasily distinguished and a stoat is stoat-ally different.’

Seb closed his eyes.

‘Why did the lobster blush?’ asked Evelyn, quickfire.

‘Because it saw the salad dressing.’ Kate was scornful.

‘No,’ said Evelyn triumphantly. ‘Because it saw Queen Mary’s bottom.’

Mrs Marsh remembered one of her mother’s risky jokes – why is Queen Victoria like a flower pot? But it wasn’t suitable for mixed company. Her mother had only told it as a concession – a treat for the girls when they were scouring pans or darning socks. Like the one about the Houses of Parliament passing motions in chambers. It was only at Christmas that Mrs Marsh remembered things like that – her mother and the jokes, and the Band of Hope, and the mutton broth and sago pudding that were always Tuesday’s dinner. She suddenly felt like Methuselah. She had passed through so many modes of everyday existence: from long to short to long to short skirts, from the copper and the dolly and the rubbing board to a geyser with constant hot water and now to a washing machine, from the old flat irons heating on the range to the neat little appliance that perched above her folded ironing board in the cupboard. The interminable nappies and linen sheets and shirts and tablecloths had been replaced by cotton wool and plastic and things that drip-dried. After the range she had had to get used to a gas stove, and now she had her clean electric oven. Soda and soft green soap had given way to plastic bottles of fat-fighting liquid. She was too sensible to feel regret, but she did feel extraordinarily old. And she wasn’t old in present-day terms, she thought incredulously. Merely a senior citizen. I feel like God’s granny, she thought, lost in the oddness of time.

‘Whaddaya do if ya nose goes on strike?’ asked Sam unexpectedly.

Only Kate knew the answer to this and she was, fortunately, not prepared to divulge it.

Barbara knew Sam too well to imagine it would be suitable for a family gathering, and her look threatened him with numerous deprivations if he proceeded.

Mrs Marsh rose hurriedly. ‘Trifle or Christmas pudding?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know that one either,’ said Evelyn.

‘I mean do you want to eat trifle or Christmas pudding?’ said Mrs Marsh. Really, Evelyn could be dense at times.

‘We’d better hurry,’ she said. ‘Dennis and Vera will be here soon.’ She could kick herself for inviting them, but she
had
felt sorry for them, retired and alone and their boy – as they called him – away engineering somewhere in some unsafe country.

She dumped glass bowls in front of everyone, splashing a few spots of freshly melting brandy butter on Seb’s cardigan. He dabbed at it, tutting, instead of ignoring it as a proper man would have done.

The sight of the kitchen horrified her. It looked as though a major accident had taken place rather than a Christmas luncheon. Evelyn hadn’t scraped or separated the plates but had put them straight in the sink and filled it with water. Bits of turkey, grease and stuffing floated miserably about on top, interspersed with torn crackers. Part-filled bowls and glasses stood around on every surface, and the steam which was intended merely to heat the pudding had filled the room and escaped through the hall.

Into this chaos, if she knew him, would come the Chief Inspector and his wife. He seemed never to have heard of front doors. Probably used to bursting in shoulder-first in the small hours, thought Mrs Marsh unjustly. She made sure the kitchen door was bolted. This once, she decided, he should do the thing properly.

‘Barbara,’ she implored, driven to appeal for help, ‘clear the front room, and make the coffee.’

‘I’ll do it,’ said Evelyn cheerfully.

‘No,’ said Mrs Marsh, louder than she had intended. ‘You sit down and rest and talk to Mr Mauss.’

In the end Hunter did the tidying up. He did it beautifully and Mrs Marsh gazed at him with respect, wishing Sebastian were a bit more like him.

She put away the stilton and biscuits, which she hadn’t offered to anyone. They would make too many crumbs and she was sure everyone had had enough to eat – except for Mary, who had messed about like a child, hiding her turkey under her potato and refusing parsnip and stuffing. She’d have to have an eggnog later, noted Mrs Marsh.

Evelyn was sitting on the sofa next to Sebastian, who was speaking of his work to Hunter. She looked bewildered. Seb’s insistence on ordinary language and absolute clarity of expression rendered his discourse entirely unintelligible to the ordinary person.

Mrs Marsh felt warm affection for her. At one of Barbara’s university parties Mrs Marsh had been lectured for half an hour by a small man, who looked to her as though he’d crawled up through a drain, on the importance of maintaining by breeding a standard of intelligence and physical beauty that was essential to civilisation. That much she had got of his drift. The points of the compass had come into it too – and there he had lost her.

Mr Mauss had also altered his demeanour and was speaking of important matters, but not, it seemed, to the satisfaction of Sebastian, who grew increasingly restive. At the words ‘a person in an addictive situation’ Seb lost patience. ‘An addict,’ he snarled. ‘You mean an addict.’

‘That is correct,’ agreed Mr Mauss, imperturbably.

Seb flung up his eyes behind his spectacles and exhaled loudly.

There were too many schools of thought here for Mrs Marsh to cope with. She herself liked the human comfort of the cliché.

‘Well, life has to go on,’ she said aloud, and went to wipe down the still warm oven. The kitchen was more or less back to normal, and she poured herself a medicinal tot of brandy. It was just possible, she reflected, that Dennis and Vera would think Sam’s green hair was a party hat.

Evelyn was now describing the grief she had felt on learning that Venice was slowly sinking into the sea. Mr Mauss was agreeing that it was indeed a tragedy.

Mary, on the other hand, was rather pleased. She thought that she herself must have that instinct of tyrants, who, when bereaved or upset, respond by demanding huge destruction, comparable to the loss they feel that they themselves have suffered. ‘Sod Venice,’ she thought idly, imagining the splash, plop, suck, as palaces, churches, paintings, statues, the horses of St Mark sank unprotesting into the turgid flood.

She retired to the back room and opened the window. Dry flakes of snow drifted in, as ready and accustomed as doves returning to their familiar cote. She left the window slightly ajar to feel the cold after the heat of the front room, and told herself that alive or dead she wouldn’t undergo another Christmas. The year’s accumulated ill-will seemed always to find expression at this time. Relations who throughout most of the year had the sense to stay apart confined themselves in small spaces to eat and drink too much. And not content with this they felt it necessary to invite people who were lonely because they were unpleasant or boring and no one liked them. They had to be made to participate since it was felt that no one should be alone on this of all days.

Alone – thought Mary. She put a shovelful of smokeless fuel on the fire, and it settled down obediently and burned. Like the hard black seeds her mother planted – they dropped unprotesting into the earth, grew, flowered and were cut, arranged by the W.I. and thrown away – all without a moment’s query.

Mary was disobedient and perverse. ‘No,’ she said, sharply and aloud. It was, for Mary, quite a usual response. But answers abounded, and of them all death was the most neat and particular. There was no arguing with the imperial composure of the dead . . .

She drew a mahogany box from under her bed and began to burn the contents. Letters, birth and death certificates. Not many photographs since they had always made her uneasy – the pale faces and dark hair of dead wives, the polite expressions of doomed soldiers tricked out as for a party, the eager fearless smiles of past children beaming through old sunlight . . . She took out a child’s drawings and letters, closed her eyes and put them back. There was no suitable repository anywhere in the world for such things. She thought perhaps she should eat them; for certainly, certainly when she went they would have to go with her.

‘Do you want tea?’ asked Hunter rather impatiently from the doorway. He’d forgotten the way suburban housewives had of stuffing guests from the city as though they’d travelled days and nights over deserts.

Mary turned her face to him and he looked away. ‘Good heavens, no,’ she said cheerfully.

Hunter relaxed. Firelight had a very odd quality, especially when it shone upwards on to a white face. For a moment he had feared that the humane thing to do would be to take the poker and put down the creature kneeling there in such pain.

‘You are so right,’ he said. The meals seemed to have run together. Lunch had drifted into tea time, and any minute now the people from next door would be in for drinks.

He helped Mary to her feet and she replaced her mahogany box and closed the window.

‘We should really be off,’ he said, not looking forward to Christmas night in London with Mr Mauss. ‘Perhaps we should wait for the snow to ease up.’

‘Oh, it’s cold outside,’ quoted Mary.

They hummed together a few bars of song, inflaming a new area of Barbara’s endlessly receptive jealousy.

‘You seem very cheerful,’ she snapped at her sister, meaning ‘Fraud, fake, hypocrite’.

‘Oh, I am,’ said Mary, grinning. Procne to mute Philomela grieving for her Itys, she thought. There was truly no song left in her.

Barbara had never been able to make out her sister. She found it impossible to know whether Mary knew something she didn’t or was merely pretending, and it was hard to know which would have been the more infuriating. She smiled nervously at her grinning sister to let Hunter know that she and Mary understood one another.

They heard Mrs Marsh enunciating through the glass of the kitchen door: ‘You’ll have to go round the front. I don’t want to let the cat out.’

Mary decided she couldn’t face Dennis and Vera, and hurried back to her room.

Hunter wished he could go with her. He had, himself, a specific interest in policemen, but not in Chief Inspectors. It was the uniform, of course – not as glamorous as guardsmen or sailors, but an improvement on Spanish waiters in these hard and frugal times.

He opened the door. ‘Crikey,’ he said, impressed by the amount of snow that still fell.

‘Brass-monkey weather,’ said Dennis without emphasis or obscene intent, taking his coat off.

‘It’s warm in here,’ said Vera, looking on the bright side.

‘How’s the cat?’ asked the Chief Inspector, surprising Evelyn with this evidence of his uncanny detective abilities. She had kept the kitten secret.

‘You were calling “Puss, puss”,’ he told her dropped jaw. His tone was stern but kind.

‘It was my present to Mary,’ said Evelyn guiltily. She hoped he wouldn’t ask where she’d bought it, feeling sure that he would caution her and advise her that anything that was found should be handed in to the nearest police station.

‘Dog man, myself,’ he informed her, and she felt worse. She could see him with a great, grey, slavering, red-eyed alsatian striding the main street of Innstead – and the neighbours wouldn’t let him have one.

‘No dogs,’ said Vera decisively, and Evelyn felt relieved. It was his wife who wouldn’t let him.

No one, absolutely no one, was glad to see Dennis and Vera. Even Kate, who was usually pleased to meet a potential audience, could tell at a glance that they weren’t poetic. The gregarious Mr Mauss could see that they weren’t meaningful, and everyone else was a bit frightened of Dennis, except for Sebastian, who probably thought he’d come to read the meter.

‘You know everyone,’ said Mrs Marsh. ‘Have a drink.’ She was exhausted and sick with drink. She longed to lie down, but she was responsible for all these people. ‘Sherry, whisky?’ she asked. She simply couldn’t be bothered to introduce anyone. They all knew their own names, dammit, she thought, with a restoring rush of temper, as they stood around, silent.

Hunter poured two glasses of sherry and handed them to the newcomers. He began to talk.

Mrs Marsh sat down, thankful for Hunter. He reminded her of her mother, who could calmly wipe obscuring tides of blood from a wound and pronounce it not mortal, while everyone else had fainted; who could come into a house in the small hours of emergency and, without removing her hat, restore order. She was
reliable
, thought Mrs Marsh, and Hunter was too; whereas Sebastian – she glanced at him with the venom of any music-hall mother-in-law – responded to difficulty with angry criticism, or sulking silence. Very helpful, she thought bitterly. For a moment she felt, like Mary, that death was blind or malevolent to take the beloved and leave the Sebastians. She was too tired and cross to regret these uncharitable Christmas-Day reflections. Life was unfair, and that’s all there was to it. She felt pity for Mary like sudden spring rain, but it brought her no relief. She shivered in the hot little room. It would always be the Robins who were at risk – young and so wild and foolish. Too young to leave their mothers, she thought sadly. The Sebastians were hardly at risk at all except for overeating and the danger of summer lightning.