The Birds of the Air (6 page)

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 stayed 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.

The squirrel was accepted – nay, loved – since he was a solitary celibate squirrel and caused no trouble at all, living as he did up a tree, an honorary bird. Had he been one of a group, things would have been different and the council called in. As there were no children there were no pet rabbits. Moles, voles and mice were severely discouraged, and any resident of the Close would have died if he had met a rat. Foxes were said to forage occasionally in the dustbins of people who lived nearer to the downs, but they hadn’t yet ventured in to the Close. There were no toads, frogs or newts, since the garden pond had been filled in. And as for bears – fierce, unfriendly, foul-breathed and not very bright (when transfixed by the spear of the plucky Finn, they would grasp the shaft in their long-clawed paws and, rather than attempt to wrench it out, push it further into their black ursine heart) – it was inconceivable that a bear should venture within a thousand miles of Innstead. Yet in every house in the Close there were effigies, icons and books of tales about all these animals; china statues of moles and toads in bonnets and shawls; watercolours of mice up cornstalks and rabbits and frogs in rings with fairies. Each resident had kept his own or his children’s teddy bear and the children’s classics which had sustained their youth. One year the toy manufacturers had intro -duced a new line of teddies bearing the facial similitude of the Poet Laureate (himself a teddy-bear fancier), and a number of children had been badly frightened.

The totem of the English was a small animal – furry, stuffed and articulate. Winnie the Pooh vied with the Queen (God trailing in the distance) for the forefront of the mind of the English middle class. An English diplomat imprisoned in a foreign country, kept for month upon month in solitary confinement, thrown into spiritual confrontation with himself, emerged from captivity and wrote a book about a baby seal who preferred T-bone steak to fish. Even the leaders of the political parties had come to resemble little animals. On the left an old teddy; his stuffing, his credibility, leaking a little now. On the right a mouse – a shop mouse, her head stuck in a yellowed meringue, a mean little mouse bred on cheese rind and broken biscuit and the nutrition-less, platitudinous parings of a grocer’s mind. The erstwhile leader of the middle party was a fox – rather tired now – his fine brush matted and drooping, his cunning mask despondent. Did any other people, Mary wondered, apart from Red Indians, make such a fuss of creatures which in reality they were in the habit of chasing, shooting, poisoning, trapping or beating to death with sticks? Mrs Marsh had bought Kate a book about rabbits, ‘suitable for the older child’ but widely read by supposedly normal adults.

Barbara’s car must be quite near now. It would probably be inching down the crowded derelict road that led out of the metropolis, past boarded shop windows, car-hire firms, Chinese take-aways, shops selling saris, pram and bicycle shops, stretches of Georgian houses ruined and blackened by despair, municipal offices neat and well lit, small factories, the baths, very low churches (theologically speaking) with very large notices of warning and exhortation aimed principally at the godfearing immigrant community. Then it would follow a stretch of road lined with huge pubs, small houses and car dumps. This was a route that missed the best of Innstead – the private schools, discreet hospitals, well-tended gardens and the old village street, so carefully restored and maintained. It merely cut across a small section of the downs and came out again into a wilderness of intersecting highways mad with cars speeding through the dead common, asphyxiated bushes and bleached grass that shrank away from the roadside. Stained paper drifted about these bushes. Under them lay old petrol cans and – mysteriously – the rusting discarded organs of motor cars. This was dangerous country, where no one walked save for the occasional amateur botanist in search of the elusive winter aconite, or young couples driven from the comfort of the three-piece suite by men and boys intent on Match of the Day. The walkers would be as likely to stumble upon the tights-strangled bodies of young women thrust into plastic bags and bound with electrical flex as find the aconite or peace with each other. It was always bad ground, ill-used and perilous, that lay between town and country. Even the piglets that sometimes escaped from the few decaying farms eschewed it and ran squealing down the road that led to the coast. It was astonishing, unbelievable, that a short though nervous and hurried walk across the intersections and through the five sets of traffic lights would bring the pedestrian in a minute to the saccharine silence of Honeyman’s Close, to the unique, inimitable cleanliness and warmth of the small, prosperous suburban home, to the well-appointed, walled, enfoliaged, grass-laid peace of modest but sufficient wealth – neater, more stable and more contained than great riches, and far more comfortable, but not like the wild sweetness of Melys y Bwyd, ‘Sweet is Life’ . . .

The sudden loud rebuke of a motor horn gave Mary warning. Whenever Sebastian was in the car something happened to Barbara’s driving that caused other motorists to sound their horns, swear or take evasive action according to temperament.

With a splash of gravel Barbara drew up.

They looked oddly at home, thought Mary – not at all out of place, as her own few friends always did. This cloistral suburb had more in common with the university than she had realised. Intellect was lacking here certainly, but exclusivity and the calm conviction of rightness were not. Honeyman’s Close too had its own aims, values and customs set apart from the rest of the world. Therefore it ill became Sebastian Lamb to gaze about him with such weariness. Only Sam was incongruous, and Mary found it no easier than anyone else to imagine a situation in which he might not be.

The worst was over now. Her relations had leapt into the silence with noisy cries of greeting, like people on first reaching the sea, but now were merely moving about in it, talking in normal tones.

Two opposite doors stood open in the Close, Evelyn framed in one and Mrs Marsh running from the other.

‘You’ve arrived,’ announced Evelyn welcomingly.

Sebastian was forced to respond in agreement since Barbara, Kate and Mrs Marsh were all mixed up together and Sam seldom responded to anything. Sebastian raised and lowered his hand, his tweed hat still on his head. Hatraising had gone out, but Evelyn hadn’t been told so and thought him very rude for an educated man.

‘I’ll see you all later,’ she said in the voice she used on the telephone, and closed her door.

Barbara stood with her mother and daughter in the middle of the little bedroom hoping she wasn’t going to cry again. It was so warm and soft and gently lit, and her mother was so pleased to see her. Barbara was just beginning to recover from her lifelong and entirely mistaken conviction that Mary was their mother’s favourite, only to be presented by Sebastian with a new, even more dangerous, rival. It wasn’t fair.

Mrs Marsh fussed, full of joy, about the double bed upon which, obscuring the pale-green counter-pane, lay an assortment of things which she was going to give to her younger child. ‘Aunt Gwennie’s fur,’ she said, ‘and some beautiful underwear she never wore. And the cashmere sweater she bought in the summer sales – I know because I went with her to get it – and her dear little watch, and her jade brooch . . .’

She stopped, aware of a lack of enthusiasm. Kate had seized the watch and was crying, ‘Oh Mummy, look. Oh Granny, what a dear little watch. I always wanted a little watch . . .’

Mrs Marsh looked slowly at Barbara with the begin nings of apprehension. Another sad daughter would be too much to bear. Mary had been quite indifferent to all the pretty things. ‘It looks as though there’d been a cat burglary,’ she’d said, ‘rather than a death. All those little thievables.’ Mrs Marsh had wondered then what Mary had done with Robin’s belongings – but there hadn’t been many . . . She had begun to understand, with real fear, that Mary was
waiting
– such terrible, greedy waiting as she had never contemplated. The woman who had been her pretty, merry little daughter was waiting for the dead to return and, failing that, was waiting, as a lover waits, for death to come and get her.

Mrs Marsh could think of no suitable rebuke to fit such a case. ‘The coat is a bit big on me,’ she said uncertainly to Barbara, ‘but you’d look lovely in it.’

Lovely. Suddenly Barbara’s misery fell away. She would look lovely on Christmas Day. Hunter was coming. They would walk together up the hill to the old village and she would drink something sweet in the nice pub with the open fire and the genial landlord. Seb would come to find her and see her laughing at Hunter’s conversation and Hunter sitting a little too close. Then she would choose between them . . .

She put on the coat and straightened her shoulders.

‘You look lovely, Mummy,’ piped Kate.

‘A perfect fit,’ said Mrs Marsh.

Poor Mary was looking very plain, thought Barbara irrelevantly.

Mary was tired – so tired she felt she would crumble to ash at a touch, like a burnt message. Perhaps the Grim Reaper was after her in earnest now. Death had kept very close all year – taken Robin, friends, aunts, a cousin. Even the Pope had died twice that year. It had been like autumn for people.