The Birds of the Innocent Wood (11 page)

Almost. But not quite.

Catherine’s religion gave her and gives her no peace. She knows that Sarah will never be happy with Peter. It is all she can do to stop herself from rising now and going to her sister’s bed, wakening her and saying, ‘You must stop now. It will only become worse.’ Every Saturday, she watches Sarah closely when she has returned from the cottage. Sometimes she is miserable almost to the point of tears, sometimes her temper is short, never does she seem contented.
Surely,
Catherine thinks,
there must be some happiness or satisfaction to be had from the affair, or
else why does she do it
?
She remembers how she had tried at first to pretend that nothing was happening, but insidiously attempted to turn Sarah against Peter by reminding her of their mother’s dislike of the pair at the cottage. But Sarah of course ignored all this, and went her own wilful way.

To Catherine the affair is a mystery in so many ways, and she wonders what it must feel like to open oneself to another person and be accepted, but her mind shies away when she tries to imagine the intimacy between them. She is hurt to think of their complicity. The idea that Sarah and Peter might talk about Catherine in her absence is hateful to her, until the point has come when she forces herself to ask her sister about it, no matter what the consequences might be. Sarah replies, Talk about you? You flatter yourself. We have better things to talk about.’ The tone is teasing, but Catherine knows instinctively that she is being completely honest, and when Sarah smiles at her she is kindly, without any trace of malice. She knows that Sarah understands her worry: it is like the fear of being watched unknown while one is asleep.

Catherine turns over in bed and lies flat upon her back. She remembers hospital tests in August: naked, but for a little dress of pale blue interfacing, she lies upon a narrow couch. They are taking X-rays, and the room is full of big machines. Catherine is made to lie upon her back, and when she looks up at the ceiling, she sees a coloured poster of Piglet and Pooh; imagines sick children lying where she now lies. Look up, dear. Look at Pooh while the lady takes a photograph of what’s inside you. A very special photograph.

She is alone with the nurse who makes her turn upon her side to lie coiled up, and as the woman guides her body into position, the feel of her hand upon Catherine’s bare skin makes Catherine feel vulnerable and uneasy.

Five minutes later, the nurse asks her, ‘Why are you crying? I can’t possibly be hurting you.’

She cannot tell the simple, stupid truth. She cannot say to this strange woman, ‘I’m lonely.’

In remembering this, she understands her sister, and can almost envy her.

If only she did not know. If only there was nothing to know.

But the images breed in her mind: herself crying on a plastic couch; Sarah and Peter in the cottage, and Peter and herself out in a boat.

Oars creaking in thole-pins. She looks at his hands. She raises her head and looks into the light. She will not speak to him. She does not want to speak to him ever again.

What she saw on that day has changed her whole life. It has heightened her consciousness to a degree that she can hardly bear. She remembers going back to the farm that afternoon, and she walks into the scullery feeling as though she has been flayed alive: not figuratively, but literally, so that every touch hurts. Now everything frightens her: the cups on the shelf, the farm cat licking itself at the door, the big tree opposite the house. She feels that every little thing which she sees and touches may at any moment fall apart under this new lucidity. Having seen the hidden significance in one thing, she is afraid that she will see something horrible in every simple thing.

And when Sarah took up with Peter, she could not believe the perversity of her sister: that she had to choose him, out of all people! But it was obvious that there really was no one else for her to choose.

She moves now like one lost, like one who has awoken in a strange country where the language is the language she has always spoken, but the meaning has changed. When she speaks a blessing the people understand a curse, and when she speaks of love they think she speaks of hate.

And her religion is not a comfort to her, but a torment. (Be honest, she thinks: that was the day when my future went astray, not when the nuns refused me.) It strengthened her resolve to go to the convent, but everything changed. That night when she came back from the boat, she prayed but she felt nothing. From that day on, she had no sense of the presence of God. Still she believes, but God’s silence hurts her.

Now she lives with this silence and emptiness. It is like learning to live with the loss of a sense, while concealing that loss from those around her. Still she keeps hoping. The spring will come, the summer will come. Sarah will no longer want Peter. My pains will go away. Dada will content himself.

Down in the parlour cupboard, there is a delft bowl filled with soil, in which are planted five tulip bulbs and Catherine thinks of them now. She knows that they have reached the point of being five short yellow spikes, but they will continue to grow, and when they are in the light they will grow further. They will be like stiff green flames unfurling, hard and vibrantly green, and then the green flower will come and grow and the colour will blush into it; in her mind’s eye the flower grows and gains colour, and she finds this promise of spring a comfort, the same comfort she feels when, on a summer evening, she sees the late light slant thick through the window and fall upon the wall in a broad gold bar; gilding the air through which it passes. When she thinks of these things, even now, in winter, in the night, she can almost persuade herself that all will be well.

At the moment when Jane’s baby was born, she turned her head sharply aside to face the window, and as she felt the weight of the child slide from her body the physical pain receded. She opened her eyes and saw, through her tears, the flat lough burn up the golden light of an afternoon in early summer; the sky above the water was bleach-white. The scene was now so familiar to Jane that its very strangeness lay in its familiarity, like the sight of a loved one’s half-remembered face, seen again after years of absence. She could scarcely have felt more amazed to open her eyes upon something completely unexpected; upon, say, a bright blue sea, or a forest filled with hunters and deer, than upon this stretch of predictable water.

‘Don’t you want to see your baby?’ said the midwife’s voice. ‘It’s a little boy.’

‘No,’ said Jane, and she quickly closed her eyes again upon the light of the view before her. The child had been stillborn: she had known that this would be so since the early stages of labour. Jane had resolved, even as she struggled to give birth, that she would not look at the baby.

‘I don’t want to see it, take it away please,’ she said, her eyes still firmly closed.

But James wanted to see the child.

His presence at the confinement was precluded by the customs of that time and place, and on her arrival the midwife had bustled him out of the room. He was reluctant to leave. For some time after that he hovered around by the closed door, until the noises from within began to disturb him. The moans and half-whispers reminded him of the noises which he and Jane had once struggled to suppress so that his father would not hear them. He felt then that to listen at the door was wrong, and that he would either have to go into the room or go downstairs. For a
moment he wanted to flout custom, to open the door and stay with Jane until the birth took place, if she would have him there. But his resolution wavered when he put his hand upon the doorknob: he could not bring himself to intrude upon the intimacy of what was already happening in the room, and sadly, reluctantly, he went down to the kitchen.

When the midwife told him what had happened, his first concern was for Jane. Assured of her health and safety, he then asked to see the child. The baby was brought to him and he looked at it: looked for a very long time. Then he swaddled the bundle up in his arms, and carried it upstairs. The midwife had told him of Jane’s reluctance to look, but he wanted her to look too, and to be as amazed and comforted as he was. As soon as the bedroom door opened, however, and Jane caught sight of the white shawl, she hid her head under the blankets.

‘Take it away from me,’ she said. ‘It’s dead, and I won’t look at it.’

‘He’s a lovely baby,’ said James, ‘and you ought at least to look at him. You’ll regret it later if you don’t.’

The muffled voice from under the blankets said again, ‘Take it away from me. Take it away.’

James did not reply, but he left the room. When the door closed and she could hear the sound of his feet descending the stairs, Jane poked her head out above the blankets. She lay there alone for a long time, and by dusk she had drifted off into a deep and dreamless sleep.

She awoke in darkness. Night had long since fallen, and while she slept, someone had pulled the curtains and had tucked the blankets neatly up around her, but in her first moments of consciousness, this was not what Jane noticed. Instead, she felt instinctively that something was wrong, something was different, something more than the absence of James from her side. And then she realized: for months now she had been woken daily not by the light of morning, nor by a clock, nor by James calling her because it was time to rise and work: she had been roused by the baby who woke independently and, floating inside her, kicked her into consciousness. Now her body was
still and quiet as an empty house; the baby was gone. Very quietly she began to cry. The bedroom door was slightly ajar, and between the noise of her sobs she could hear the steady and unbroken beat of the big clock in the hall. Time was a trap, coiled like a spring around her, and she could see a life open out beyond her, hours, days, weeks, months, years, spiralling away to her own death, and she would have to live that life.

Every point of apparent change would be just a point of variation, moving her into the next circle of her existence, which would be not quite the same as the preceding circle, but which would be a circle still. It was a long time before she slept again.

Two days later, the baby was buried: not in the family grave with his grandparents, but alone at the foot of the hill. When Jane was told this, she closed her eyes and she did not speak. She felt the last possible shred of comfort melt away from her, and she knew as a cold fact that she would never be whole again, that this final cruelty had broken something in her which could never be mended.

She came downstairs for the first time seven days later. Her body as she dressed felt curiously flat and light, but she moved much more slowly and deliberately than she had ever done during her pregnancy. When she appeared at the kitchen door James, who was sitting drinking tea at the table, looked up in surprise. He had been encouraging her to rise for some days now, but she had given no indication that she would do so. He smiled at her, but she did not return the smile. She crossed in silence to the armchair beside the stove, and sat down.

‘Would you like a cup of tea? There’s some left in the pot.’

She shook her head.

‘Is there anything I can get for you?’

Again the same response, and then Jane fixed her gaze on a point in the middle distance, somewhere past James’s head. While she looked away, James continued to drink his tea and watch her, until suddenly he realized that this was how it had all started in that café, four years ago. He wondered now what he would have said if, on that day, someone had told him of all that was to happen between them, and that yet, four years later,
they would be sitting together in an identical pose, as if nothing whatever had changed, as if they were still strangers and in each other’s company by mere chance of circumstance.

He remembered that day vividly and with guilt, for what had interested him first in Jane was a self-possession so complete that it withdrew all feeling and all personality from her face, and he felt that he was looking at a mask: a familiar mask. The large blue eyes, the high forehead, the pale skin: these features formed a face which was, to James, so passive and lifeless, that as he watched, he found himself grafting on a personality and a past life which belonged to someone else, but which, oddly, seemed to fit.

He was so absorbed in this task that when the young woman at last turned to him and spoke, he was shocked and quickly became confused. He knew that he had done something wrong. He engaged her in conversation and listened politely when she spoke, as though to give some credit to the reality of her personality. He remembered the horrible little tingle of fear he had felt when the woman lowered her eyes and with seeming artlessness told him the story of her life; for it was no more than a variation of the life he had given her. When she stood up to leave he felt a sense of panic: if he lost her now, for the rest of his life he would wonder if she was real, knew that soon he might believe her to be nothing more than a creature of his imagination, conjured up out of his unhappiness and loneliness. So he had quickly asked to see her again: Jane had said, ‘Yes.’

Often since that day he wished that when she finished her tea and rose to leave the café, he had said no more than ‘Goodbye’. Often since that day little instances of her lack of feeling had horrified him. He had tried to understand the misery of her loneliness, and the strange, sad life which had made her the woman she was. But as he looked at her now, sitting stiffly in the chair beside the stove, he knew that her new grief would do nothing to soften her. She had put herself beyond the power of his comfort, and she would keep herself rigidly there; nor could she be a comfort to him. And James felt a great sense of pity
which encompassed them both as he looked at her, and remembered that they would be husband and wife until death.

In the following weeks, their lives began to get back into some semblance of order. Jane found that the routine chores of the farm allowed her to slip back into a life identical to the life which she had lived since first coming to the house. She went through many of the motions and emotions which she had experienced at the time of her father-in-law’s death, and her sadness now was that the baby had left so little mark upon the house: there was so little to be done. Over a year ago she had cleared out the old man’s cluttered bedroom, and had been amazed to think that all these things would never be needed again. Now, she had to dismantle the nursery which she had so carefully prepared.

She remembered sorting through her father-in-law’s clothes, remembered the strange intimacy of that, for they smelt of sweat and tobacco, they were creased and the cuffs were grimy, and they would never be any more smelly, crumpled or dirty than they were then. But now she was faced with another pile of clothes to be disposed of, and although their owner was dead too, the pain here was that the clothes were all perfect, all clean, untouched, unworn. There were thick piles of soft white nappies, little jackets and hats and boots, most of which she had herself knitted, and a long white christening robe, the newness of which she resented most of all. The clothes were all so soft and tiny that it seemed ludicrous, unbelievable, that their owner could be dead. Dead people were old people, people like parents who had worn out their clothes, their bodies, their lives. Kneeling by the side of the bed, she buried her face in the heap of baby clothes, feeling their softness and wishing that they could be pervaded with the warm, milky, sexless smell of a baby, but she knew that they would never be; knew that there would never be anything more than this smell of newness and clean wool. People in the village said to her that she was young, she would have another child, but that did nothing to placate her. She could not yet bear to think of the possibility of having another baby, of going through all that long waiting again,
perhaps to face at last that same sadness and disappointment. But even if she did have another baby, she knew that she would never again have
that
baby, the baby who was dead. And these clothes belonged to that baby: she felt that it would be a violation to allow another child to wear them.

One afternoon in July, she lit a fire in the yard, and then, one by one, she carefully fed each little garment into the flames. When they were all gone, she realized that the only material proof she now had that the baby had ever existed were two pieces of paper: one a birth certificate, one a death certificate. There were also some little silvery stretch marks upon her body.

James was angry about the burning of the clothes. She had thought that he might be, and so she made a point of doing it while he was out across the fields working, and also of telling him what she had done as soon as he came back to the farm. He was angry, hurt and angry; and these were the responses she had expected and desired. They were back again at the point to which they had been brought by the death of his father: they had no one but each other. Now, however, Jane did not want to cling to him, but to wound him. Since that first death she felt that they had become truly married; felt that he was a part of her and she was a part of him, and so she now wanted to hurt and wound him because she wanted to hurt and wound herself. Seeing his pain, and seeing that she worsened it, gave her a bleak form of satisfaction.

One day in July when she went out to the byre to call him for lunch, she found him weeping. She did nothing to comfort him. Although she wanted to go over to him and embrace him, wanted to do that more than anything else in the world, she beat this feeling down, and she stood there in silence, coldly watching him. She saw that he was ashamed of his tears, and that her silence only made his weeping sound the more pathetic and weak. At last, still crying, he pushed past her out of the byre and across the yard.

Jane, of course, also cried: often she would be engaged on some simple chore in the house and think that her sadness was not worse than any other time, when suddenly whatever was
before her – a basin of potatoes which she happened to be peeling, or a piece of mending on which she was engaged – these things would suddenly blur and vanish before her unexpected tears. When this happened she did not seek out her husband, but fell back on the perverse strength of her childhood, and hid herself away until she had willed herself over this brief loss of face.

One morning when they were sitting in silence at breakfast, James suddenly said to Jane, ‘It’s not my fault that the baby died, you know. I’m not to blame.’

Jane did not reply. The tense atmosphere was not eased by the arrival of Gerald some moments later. Without him ever saying so, it was evident throughout that summer that his own marriage with Ellen was proving to be intensely unhappy. Jane noticed this, but it barely surprised her, and she did not care. Her own misery kept her fully occupied, and the same was true of James, who did not have the necessary strength both to bear his loss and to humour Jane. Perhaps he did not realize that she needed to be humoured, for he did not understand the nature of her grief, did not understand that she was translating it into anger and deflecting it on to him. Her anger, her coldness, her sullenness made James feel hurt and resentful. By the time summer was at its height, relations between them were worse than they had ever been before.

Jane’s resentment of her husband grew in proportion to her regret that she had not looked at the child; and that regret grew fast, until it soon reached the point of obsession. Night after night she would dream about the baby. In her dreams the child was sitting upon her lap and facing away from her, but when she tried to make him turn his head, the child strongly resisted. At last she would succeed, only to find nothing: only to find that the front of the child’s head was as blank as that of a tailoress’s dummy. She began to cry, and then the faceless baby vanished.