The Birds of the Air (15 page)

It was to this scene that the others returned.

They saw Barbara lying on the floor, wet and dirtstreaked and weeping, Mary poised over her with a rug as though her sister was a budgerigar who would not be silent for the night, Hunter giggling feebly and Sam, his face white, clutching an empty jug.

‘What mischief is this?’ enquired Sebastian, smacking his son’s head.

Barbara struggled to her knees, a primitive mother-instinct bared by drink. ‘Don’t you touch . . .’ she began, falling back against the newel post.

Sam made for the door, pausing only to thrust his jug upon Mr Mauss. Kate flung herself after him into the night, crying in ringing thespian tones, ‘Sam, oh Sam, don’t
do
this!’

‘Will someone shut that child up,’ said Hunter, regaining his calm and slamming the door, nearly catching Kate’s nose as he hauled her in.

‘Ow,’ she said.

‘I’ll go after him,’ said the Chief Inspector.

‘No,’ said Barbara very loudly. ‘You leave him alone.’ She looked hot-eyed at Sebastian. ‘
You
go,’ she said to her husband. ‘
You
go and get him.’

Sebastian was a small man but his violence darkened the hall, his cream pale face set in carven, god-like lines of anger and disgust. He was immovable, and Barbara understood that she could fall right over the edge of despair into death and he would still be immovable because he was an entirely reasonable man.

She went, herself, into the Close.

‘Sam,’ she shrieked.

Hunter followed her.

‘Pig,’ she shouted at him.

The squirrel in his drey awoke and peered down, astonished, a querying paw curled against his breast. The quarrelsome birds, peaceful in the darkness, shifted in their puffed and staring feathers. The teddy bears in all the little houses clapped their cloth paws over their cloth ears.

What will the neighbours think, wondered Mrs Marsh, statutorily, past caring. She, alone, had sufficient courage to approach the distraught, coffee-scented woman and draw her home.

Vera stood by the door clutching her bag with both hands and looking eminently useless and unhelpful. Dennis, too, was at a loss, like a person stripped of authority in the presence of strange, but not criminal, behaviour – as indeed he was. His natural human responses had atrophied years ago under the pressure of applied order.

‘Deary me,’ said Evelyn, ‘what a to-do.’ She pressed Vera’s coat upon her. Evelyn’s father having been a bank manager, she was qualified in such extreme circumstances to give orders to a mere policeman’s wife. ‘Run along home,’ she said, adding, ‘Off you go, Dennis. Vera looks tired.’

Mr Mauss was uncomfortable and rather angry. The corner of his mouth twitched a little. His easy manners, his familiarity with the workings of the human mind as disclosed by psychiatry, his overall goodwill were inadequate to deal with this nasty scene, and he had no desire at all to witness the drunken discomfiture of an English lady. It upset his ideals. Besides, he was American and liked all events and occasions – no matter how unfortunate or bloody – to end in sweetness and reconciliation, and it seemed most unlikely that these people would finish the evening in each other’s arms singing.

‘Come along,’ said Evelyn. ‘You two can spend the night at my house.’ They could all have some more coffee, sitting round the table. It would be like the days when her brothers were young, sitting up late into the night, planning a hiking trip. ‘If we’re quick,’ she promised, ‘we’ll just catch the news and the main points of the Queen’s speech.’

‘I hope you feel better, dear,’ she said to Barbara. ‘Come across in the morning and have a cup of coffee.’ She had thought it was Mary who was the drinker and wondered for a moment, as Mrs Marsh had feared she might, how these girls had been brought up. Bad blood, she thought, and put the thought aside.

All Barbara would feel like in the morning, thought Hunter, would be a stiff formaldehyde. It seemed unlikely that he would see much even of Mary after this.

‘Goodbye,’ he said regretfully.

Mary had gone back to her room. She opened the French windows and went out into the garden.

She could see the snow falling through the small rounded light from the downstairs lavatory window, a light as pure as from any cathedral clerestory. It fell with such soft determination in the still silence – soundless, weight less: gentle alien blossom that would melt, if she waited long enough, into familiar wetness, tears on the face: bathetic melting, mud in the garden, slush on the roads, useless tears.

She lifted her face to the angelic descent in the muted darkness, to the movement compelled by something other than desire, the lifeless idle movement of the drowned, to the veil, grave cloths, the floating sinking cerements, untroubled by blood, by colour: the discrete, undeniable, intractable softness of the slow snow in the night and the silence . . .

‘Robin . . . ?’ she said.