The Birds of the Air (5 page)

‘No,’ said Mary. ‘Thanks.’

‘I’ll get you some eggs,’ said Mrs Marsh. ‘They’ll be fresh today. You ought to come with me,’ she added. ‘You could do with some new make-up, and it’s no good me buying it when you’re not there.’ She looked resentfully at Mary’s pale face. ‘You look like a toad’s tummy,’ she said to it, not really addressing her daughter as a whole. She believed that women felt better with a touch of make-up on – no matter how old or sad or beaten the face. Her daughter was cold and alien as a puddock, a bright hard jewel of rage burning in her head.

Mary thought it would be diverting to paint her nose with lipstick and her teeth with eyeshadow and annoy her mother. ‘There’s no point,’ she said, which annoyed her mother more.

‘There’s
always
point,’ said Mrs Marsh. ‘Look your best and you feel your best.’

‘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 that 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.