The Birds of the Innocent Wood (15 page)

‘Just tired? Sarah asks.

Catherine looks at her sideways. ‘I had a slight pain here, but it’s gone now. I just need to have a little rest. In any case,’ Catherine says in almost apologetic tones, ‘I’m going to see the doctor again on Tuesday. What’s that you’re holding in your hands, Sarah?’

They both know that she is trying to change the subject. Sarah replies shortly, ‘A bird’s nest.’

‘Oh, let me see it.’

Catherine props herself up on her elbow, and takes the nest into her hands. As she examines it, Sarah looks down on the crown of her sister’s bowed head, and she wonders just how much Catherine knows, just how much she has guessed.

‘Where did you find this?’

‘In the field. Lying on the ground. It must have blown out of the hedge.’

To ask would be to tell. Sarah knows how shrewd Catherine can be, knows that her sister can see and understand things where others would remain ignorant. It seems impossible that she does not know: but if she does, could she really lie here so calmly looking at the nest? Only an hour ago Sarah had been convinced that Catherine knew the truth, but now she is not so sure. Perhaps she scarcely suspects what is wrong.

‘It’s very pretty.’ Catherine lifts her head, and as she hands the nest back to her sister, Sarah knows that she has understood nothing from it.

‘Rest a while longer,’ she says. ‘I’ll see to Dada’s tea.’

Quietly, she leaves the room.

On the afternoon of her daughters’ sixteenth birthday, Jane watched James as he worked in the farmyard. She did not watch him directly, but by means of a large mirror which hung on the kitchen wall, facing the window. James’s glance was suddenly reflected straight into her eyes without any flicker of recognition crossing his face, and only then did she realize what she was doing. When James looked through the window he could see only her back: he did not know that he was being watched. Once, Jane would have been proud of such a trick, but now she felt ashamed to have done it, even inadvertently, and she moved away from the mirror.

Only the previous evening she had surprised Sarah before it, for on coming into the room she had found her daughter staring transfixed at her own reflection. Jane had said-nothing in the face of Sarah’s confusion, but now she wondered what her daughter was looking for; wondered if Sarah needed to stare so intently to see what she, Jane, had glimpsed so vividly in a cheval glass when she herself was little older than Sarah. My
children are not children any more,
she thought:
or rather, they are
shaking off childhood in the odd ways of adolescence
. While Sarah stared at herself in mirrors, Catherine obsessively kept a huge diary, and Jane frowned as she thought of the latter. She often wondered about Catherine: there was in her a piousness, a priggishness almost, which her mother disliked, and which seemed to be at odds with other aspects of her personality. For Jane, what was so frustrating about her daughters was that she felt she ought to understand them, and quite often she almost did, but could never get beyond that ‘almost’. Some little points of knowledge or sympathy always shimmered just out of Jane’s access or understanding, and the older her daughters became the more conscious she was of this. She tried not to let it upset
her, or make her resentful: but it did make her feel strange. Strange too was the sensation of seeing fragments of herself and James in their daughters’ faces and bodies, in their habits and mannerisms, and in the inflexions of their voices. Perhaps it frustrated her not to be able to fully understand her daughters, because it felt like a failure to understand herself. She realized now that when she looked into the face of either Catherine or Sarah, she felt as though she were looking into a mirror, the reflection of which was not quite true. The essence of herself was hidden in her daughters, and she could never quite find it. She wished that today she could say to Catherine and Sarah, ‘Have I been a good mother to you?’ but then felt sad, because she realised the futility of such a question.

Crossing to the window, she looked out into the farmyard where James was working. He was removing the downspout from the wall of the shed, and this puzzled her, for he had not mentioned that it needed to be mended, nor had she noticed anything wrong with it.

Having worked loose the last screws, James wrenched the downspout free from its brackets and shook it hard. A little brown sparrow tumbled out stunned upon the ground. It lay there for a moment, made a few abortive hops across the yard, lay again, and then made a short, uncertain flight to a nearby wall, where it was out of reach of the farm cat, and could sit to recover itself fully before flying away. Jane saw James watch the bird’s shaky progress, then he turned back to the downspout, and began to fix it to the wall again.

Suddenly she said aloud to James, ‘It wasn’t my fault.’ But she had forgotten the pane of glass which separated them, and James worked on oblivious. It was two months to the day since her pains had begun, pains which she kept secret from everyone, for her childhood fear of hospitals remained, and this was sufficient to help her hide her illness from all around her. Gripping the edge of the window-sill, she slowly counted to twenty. The pain subsided, but she knew in her heart that she could not hold it off for ever simply by secrecy and silence.

James had finished his work at the downspout, and was
coming towards the farm. Turning away from the window, Jane prepared to smile and greet him.

Five nights after their sixteenth birthday, Catherine and Sarah awoke just after midnight to the sound of their father’s voice.

‘That’s blood, Jane,’ he was saying, ‘nothing but pure, pure blood. Christ, Jane, don’t die on me … don’t die, please don’t die.’

The sisters arose from their beds and hurried to their parents’ bedroom. The door was open and the light was on. Jane lay on the floor where she had evidently fallen, and James knelt beside her, half cradling her in his arms. The bottom half of Jane’s nightdress and an alarmingly large part of the carpet on which she lay was darkly stained with blood. Her face was very pale and she was shivering, but she was fully conscious. When her daughters came into the room and stood staring in horror, she looked at them askance, as though they had surprised their parents in something intimate, and should have had the decency to go away again at once.

‘Go one of you downstairs and phone for an ambulance,’ said James.

‘No,’ said Jane quickly.

‘Do as I say!’ James shouted. Sarah ran from the room.

‘I want a drink of water,’ Jane said, and Catherine was about to go and fetch one for her when James said, ‘No. When you get to the hospital, they might want to operate on you, and you’re not allowed to drink before an operation.’

‘I’m not going to the hospital,’ Jane said stubbornly. She was still shivering. ‘I want a drink.’

‘For Christ’s sake have sense, Jane,’ James cried. ‘You can’t lie here on the carpet until you bleed to death. Of course you’ll have to go to the hospital.’

Jane began to cry querulously.

‘I don’t want them to operate on me. I don’t want to go to hospital. It’s not fair, James. I want a drink of water, and I’m cold.’

More gently now, James said to her, ‘Jane, you don’t know
what it is to me not to be able to give you a drink, but I can’t. Your life might depend on it.’ Reaching behind him, he pulled two blankets off the bed and wrapped them around Jane. He held her tightly in his arms and told her not to cry.

By the time the ambulance arrived, she was too weak to protest about going to hospital, and the two blankets, like the nightdress and the carpet, were heavily stained with blood. She was taken away by strangers: the family followed behind in the car.

At the hospital, they were made to wait for a long time in the corridor while the doctors worked on Jane. When at last they went into the stiflingly warm little ward, they tried hard not to show the shock which they felt to see the wires, the flickering monitors, and the little plastic bagful of blood which hung above the bed, and which was connected to Jane’s arm by a thin tube. She was, despite all this, still conscious.

‘I feel a bit better now,’ she said. ‘I’m not as cold as I was when I was in the house.’ Her voice was very weak, and James had to put his ear close to her mouth to hear what she was saying.

‘Tell the girls to go out again for a moment,’ she said. ‘I want to talk to you alone.’

Catherine and Sarah left the little ward. A nurse hovered around the other bed, while James leaned over his wife.

‘James,’ she whispered, ‘I’m going to die.’

‘No you’re not,’ he said desperately. ‘I thought you might in the house, but now you’re going to be all right. Now you’re in the best place.’

‘I’m going to die, James, I know it.’

‘Perhaps you shouldn’t talk, Jane. You’re only upsetting yourself. Try to save your energy.’

She closed her eyes and was quiet for a while, until James began to wonder if she had fallen asleep, or even into a coma, when she whispered something more. He did not catch what it was, and he leaned over her more closely.

‘I said: what will you do without me?’

‘Don’t ask me that,’ he pleaded. ‘You’ll be better, Jane, in time.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘You’ll be lonely, James. Once it would have worried me. When I was young, I was jealous: you know that.’
There were long pauses between each sentence, and she smiled faintly. ‘If I had been dying in the first years after our marriage, my biggest worry would have been that you would marry someone else. That or you’d many Ellen.’

James smiled uncomfortably, and stroked her hand.

‘I could marry her yet,’ he said teasingly, but as soon as the words were out, he regretted them. Jane did not seem upset, however, but thoughtful.

‘No, you couldn’t. A man can’t marry his half-sister. Your daddy told me that. In the garden. At the wedding. When was that, James? How long ago?’

He did not answer.

‘I’m confused now,’ she whispered. ‘And I’m tired. I’m so tired, James.’

The nurse came over to the bed, and asked him to leave the ward for a moment.

When James stepped out into the corridor, he was crying. Catherine and Sarah, on seeing his face, understood something different, and when the doctor came out some time later to tell them that Jane had died (and died more suddenly at the end than they had expected would be the case), he was surprised to find that the whole family was already in tears.

Sarah is standing before the kitchen mirror. She has been looking at the reflection of her own face for hours, until it has become strange to her, until it has disintegrated and become meaningless; and until it has become familiar again. Enormous self-hatred is born of this familiarity; it is more than she can bear. Raising her arm she walks towards the mirror, but when she strikes it it does not break. Instead, the mirror yields as though it were made not of glass but of vertical water, and Sarah passes through to the other side. She thinks with relief,
It’s over now: I will never again have to look at my own hateful face,
but when she turns around she finds to her horror that the back of the mirror also offers a perfect reflection. In anger and fright she beats upon the mirror, which now behaves as the glass which it is, and shivers into a million bits. The broken shards cut into her hands and her wrists, but still she continues to thrash forwards, until her hands are dripping with blood.

She awakens to the warm, empty silence of her bedroom at night, and her soft, clenched hands are intact and not bleeding. For a moment she is frightened, not because she thinks that she is dreaming still, but because in the confusion of waking she thinks that she is lying still beside Peter. She feels again for a moment the shock of that, for after they had made love what she felt was not a mild sadness, but a devastating loneliness, and despair to find that the complete oblivion which she had wanted had passed her by.

‘Are you all right?’ Sarah does not reply, and Peter moves to kiss her again, but she turns her head aside and she wishes for the blackness which there is now, in the night, when she is again alone. But turning back quickly she leans her face against him thinking, life, what is it only this? A steady beat in the
chest rather than silence, a body that is warm and moving rather than one that is still and cold.

When she arrived at the cottage that afternoon, he had brought her to his bedroom and left her alone there for some moments. She had not been in his room for years, and although she recognized certain of his possessions, the overall effect was of great strangeness. She felt as though she were in a stranger’s room. All the objects which she saw there should have given her clues about the identity and personality of the room’s owner, but instead confused her. Picking up a book from the table beside the bed she turned aside. It seemed impossible that the person who would read such a book would choose to wear the clothes she saw hanging on the back of a chair. The apparent incompatibility of all these things made her doubt the truth and reality of the person for whom she waited. The created persona did not ring true. She was suspicious and frightened.
But I do
know him,
she thought,
I
know him better than I know anyone else,
apart from Catherine and Dada
. When she called to him then, she tried to be casual, and was surprised by the panic in her own voice which she found she could not control. ‘Peter,’ she said loudly, ‘Peter, come here to me now.’

Was it because she had been so foolish as to imagine all these things that his face looked ridiculously familiar when he came back into the room (a room which at once looked perfectly natural as his home, a room utterly artless in its arrangement)? He did not merely look familiar: he looked too familiar, and now, in the night, as she remembers that moment, Sarah remembers also the moment in the dream from which she has just awoken, when the image of her own face was over familiar to her, and disturbing.
How well do I know him
? she had thought as he came towards her.
In some ways I know him as well as I know myself, and
in others, I don’t know him at all
. In the dream mirror the thick glass had been bevelled at the edges, and caught the light in colours, which showed as they would show in the water, air and light of a rainbow, but when she moved her head there was a point, a fine, fine line at which the colours vanished, and then she could see only the thick green of the glass. When she made
love with Peter, her knowledge of him shimmered on just so fine an edge, between knowing everything and knowing nothing.

When she thinks of it now, already she can think of it with a certain cold distance, for already it is in the past. That distance was already there when she left the cottage to come home. She had thought that she might feel shame, guilt or regret, but instead she felt nothing at all. The feelings of strangeness and loneliness had passed, and she sensed only that she had failed in whatever her obscure purpose had been.

On returning to the farm, Sarah found the kitchen empty. She went to Catherine’s room, fearing to find her in bed again, but that room was also deserted. She stood for a few moments looking around her sadly, as she had looked around Peter’s room. The same feeling of strangeness and contrivance was there, the same difficulty in believing the reality of the person who lived there.
I know Catherine. She is my sister. I know her
. Her gaze came to rest upon the big thick diary which sat upon the bedside table. A little thought then spawned in her mind. Shocked, she quashed it, and turned away.

But the little thought returned and returns; comes to her now in the night, and it grows into schemes which she turns over shamefully in her mind as she lies here in the blackness. She does not reject these plans, but perfects and attempts to rationalize them, even though she knows that what she is considering is wrong.

The following day is Sunday, when Catherine rarely does any work, but today she does nothing at all, and leaves the preparation of all the meals to Sarah.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ Sarah asks.

‘I’m tired,’ is all she will reply.

Sarah does not dare to press her further, but now it is of supreme importance that she knows the extent of Catherine’s knowledge. On the Sunday night she again lies awake for hours, and the memory of Peter barely enters her mind: instead she is thinking of her sister, and thinking of her plan.

On the Monday morning Catherine does not appear in the
kitchen. Sarah goes to her room, and finds her awake but still in bed.

‘Will I call the doctor?’

‘No.’

‘Well, if you’re sick …’

‘I’m sick, but I’m not so very sick.’

Sarah leaves her, and does the morning chores on the farm. On the kitchen table, Catherine’s diary is sitting where Catherine wrote in it the night before, and neglected to put it away. Its usual place by her bedside is due to habit and convenience, not mistrust of her family. Sarah’s every second thought is with the book, and her glance is drawn to it again and again.

In the early afternoon, Catherine says to Sarah, ‘Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps you should phone for the doctor.’

‘I probably won’t be able to get him now. You should have allowed me to call him this morning.’

‘He’ll come for me,’ says Catherine quietly. Sarah knows that she is right, and her sister’s confidence frightens her. It is later, when the doctor is with her sister, that she decides what she will do, and her resolution is as firm and as cold as her choice concerning Peter. When the doctor has finished, she politely sees him out, and is uneasy when he tells her that he has given Catherine a shot which will make her sleep until morning. It is as if fate is conspiring with her in what she is planning to do. She waits that night until her father has gone to bed, and then she sits down at the kitchen table, and she draws Catherine’s diary towards her. She is fully conscious that what she is doing is irrevocable, and that she is unlikely ever to forget anything which she is about to see. Then she thinks of Peter, shrugs, and opens the book.

Sarah turns at first to the most recent pages, and finds in essence what she had hoped and expected would be there. Catherine knows that she is ill, but is not aware of just how ill, although the doubt and suspicion is clearly there: ‘I wonder sometimes just how serious it is, for I cannot believe that something so painful and which has gone on for so long can be insignificant. But how serious is serious?’ Her sister’s want of
full knowledge makes Sarah want to weep, and she is sad to learn that Catherine has suffered much more than she has ever admitted.

So she does not know
. But this thought is at once followed by a realization that simply because Catherine’s diary is written for herself alone it is not by necessity honest. Perhaps her need to lie and to conceal her knowledge of the truth from herself is even greater than her need to hide it from her sister. Sarah knows then the emptiness of her act. She has broken faith with her sister, and she has learnt nothing.

But health is not her sister’s only preoccupation. As Sarah leafs through the diary she is surprised at the frequency with which her own name and Peter’s occur. She tries to resist reading in detail, but just as she is about to close the book she sees a paragraph in which their names are mentioned together.

Sarah does not doubt for a moment the truth of what Catherine has written. She knows now what she should have guessed long ago; what her sister guessed and knew from the same too-familiar features which so recently puzzled her. Sarah quickly closes the book and pushes it away from her.

The following morning, Catherine wakes early. She lies in bed thinking of the doctor’s visit; and she remembers falling into a deep sleep soon after his departure. She can hear Sarah moving about in other parts of the house, but she does not come to her sister’s room. Catherine waits. Time passes, and still Sarah does not come. Catherine begins to feel afraid. She resolves to wait until her sister enters of her own free will, but at last her nerve breaks. Hearing her sister’s step outside her door she calls loudly, ‘Sarah? Sarah, come in to me here.’

Sarah quietly enters the room. She does not look up. She has been crying, and she does not speak. Catherine had planned to ask her straight out: ‘What did the doctor say?’ but she cannot manage it; nor can she manage the fatuous requests which she had held in reserve: ‘Will you open the window for me, will you bring me a drink?’ She says nothing at all, but she turns her face away, and instinctively puts her hands over her eyes.

The door of the bedroom clicks closed as Sarah goes out.