The Birds of the Innocent Wood (9 page)

By now the kettle has begun to screech, and the kitchen is filled with steam. The cold window is all misted over, and she releases him so that he can lower the gas and attend to the tea while she returns silently to the parlour. But when he walks in a few moments later carrying the tray, the room is empty. Her boots have gone from the hallway, and when he looks out of the cottage window, he can see that she is well on her way home, pushing the laden barrow before her.

When his mother returns that evening, Peter is so quiet that she thinks something is wrong, and asks him what has happened.

‘Nothing,’ he replies, ‘nothing at all.’ And technically it is no lie, for next to nothing has happened. The afternoon’s incident was probably the most tentative and inconsequential physical encounter that he has ever had with a woman, but its potential significance far outweighs the event itself. Perhaps she has been quiet and strange for these past few weeks because she has been working round to this: or perhaps she acted purely on impulse, because she was lonely and he was the only man available. Maybe at this very moment she was regretting what she had done, and would be too embarrassed to come to the cottage again. Or perhaps she would return and try to pretend that nothing at all had happened. He certainly never imagined that such a thing might develop. By that night, he has decided that he will let matters take their own course. It is up to Sarah now: it was she, after all, who made the first move.

During the succeeding week, he thinks about the incident less and less, and by Saturday has persuaded himself that she will not come to the cottage again.

But she does return, and she puts her arms around him again. She continues to visit the cottage every Saturday, so that by the new year a pattern has been well established. Peter knows that
he is quite passive in this whole affair, and that Sarah alone directs the relationship and sets its pace. They do just what she wants, and talk only on the limited topics of her choice. Yet so skilfully does she manipulate the situation that at times Peter feels she can control his will indirectly; as though without her telling him he knows what she wants him to do, and he dumbly complies. He sees suddenly that he has no dignity in this matter, and that this lack of dignity is all his own fault.

Peter feels that the whole thing could stop again as quickly as it started. He does not know why Sarah has made the friendship take this particular direction, any more than he did on that first day, when she gathered the holly. Once, she actually stopped at the door and said, ‘Peter, I want to tell you …’ But then there was a long pause, broken only when she hit the door jamb hard with her fist and said, ‘Nothing.’

Again he sees her lying on the sofa, holding that shell, and in his memory, Sarah says, ‘If only pain were like a shell or a stone. We could pick it up, but we could put it down too, we could cast it away. The hardest things are always the things you can’t touch or smell or see or hear. You begin to wonder then if this terrible thing is perhaps just imaginary.’

She is quiet for some time, then thanks him again for the gift. He has no inkling of the nature of the pain she wishes to make tangible. Until then, he had not realized that she was so very unhappy.

He glances up, and sees that the children have discreetly begun to tidy away their books in anticipation of the bell. Peter replaces the fossil on the sill, and in the relief he feels at his hand’s sudden emptiness thinks how right Sarah was. If only all his loneliness and discontent could be instilled into a little thing which could be set down quietly on a shelf and abandoned for ever. But when he crosses the room, back to his position of authority at the teacher’s desk, all his worries go with him. Waiting for the bell, he realizes that he is every bit as anxious for it to ring as the children are, for it marks the start of the weekend. Tomorrow is Saturday, and Sarah will come to him.

The dock hand moves to the quarter hour, and the electric bell
rings throughout the school with a loud, steely sound. The children explode out of the biology lab, and as Peter gathers together his own books, he sees that only one child remains. Fair-haired Katie gives him a sweet smile as she lingeringly replaces all her coloured pencils, one by one and side by side, in their flat tin box.

On the morning after the funeral, James rose first from the bed, and as Jane lay there watching him dress, she hoped that in the coming days she would be able to hide the relief which she now felt. Jane was grateful for the quietness and privacy afforded in the house by the death of her husband’s father, and knew that James would be hurt to think that she greeted the death so gladly. She thought tenderly of how she would ease her husband through his loss.

Jane was astonished, therefore, when later that day she found the old man’s tobacco pouch and pipe under a cushion where he had tucked them away: when she took them in her hands she began to cry uncontrollably, so that it was James who had to comfort her. The early elation passed very quickly, and Jane felt a deep sense of loss. She had not realized how much she depended upon his company while she did household tasks around the kitchen, and James and Gerald were out working in the fields, had not realized until now, when it was too late and he was gone.

But she felt anger too, for she envied James his father’s death as much as she had envied him his life. He had had the comfort of living with his parents for over twenty years, and now he had had the further comfort of their deaths and burials.

‘Being Jane’ had always meant being on more than nodding terms with death: it had meant being familiar with it in a very particular way. All her life she had defined herself in terms of death, because she was the child of dead parents (and that had always seemed to hold the possibility of their being no parents at all). Reluctantly now, she had to admit that her knowledge of death was knowledge by default. She knew it only by its absence, while James knew it more intimately by its occasional intrusion into his life. His mother had died there in the
farmhouse when he was twenty. It was James who shot the wildfowl and gutted fish: Jane could not have killed an animal to save her own life. James often went to wakes around the countryside, and was familiar with the sight of dead people, but before the death of her father-in-law, Jane had never seen a dead person. Death had not been a presence, then, but a lack: lack of family, lack of love, lack of a real home. This had made her feel particularly conscious of life itself, and of how terrible it was always to have to live in that state of lack and need.

It was difficult to break away from old habits: despite the fact that they now had the whole house to themselves, they still only felt truly at ease in their bedroom, and could never bring themselves to speak of James’s father in any other place. They felt as though it would be a violation to talk of the man’s death in the rooms which they had once shared with him. And Jane dreaded the way that her husband went back to the subject time and time again.

One night when they were lying in bed in the darkness he whispered to her, ‘Tell me about it. Tell me how he died.’

‘I’ve told you before, James. There’s not really a lot to tell.’

‘What were his last words?’

‘I don’t remember,’ she said, but she said it too quickly. James had been stroking her shoulder, and stopped when she said this. He knew that she was lying.

‘Perhaps he said “Help me”,’ she said. ‘He was in pain. It was some little thing he was saying, I don’t remember the last words exactly, James. I’m sorry.’ He started to stroke her shoulder again, and there was a silence so long that she was beginning to think with relief that the matter was ended for another night, when he said, ‘Tell me exactly what happened, Jane.’

‘I’ve told you before, James,’ she said wearily.

‘Again. Please, Jane. I know it’s hard for you to go over it all again, but please – for me.’

‘When the music started,’ she said very slowly and evenly, moving closer to him as she spoke, ‘we went out into the grounds of the hotel. We walked for a little time, and then sat
down. We talked. We talked for some time, and then he said that he would sit there and rest because he was very tired. I was still stiff from sitting all through the wedding and the meal, so I went for a walk – just a short walk, and when I came back, he was bent over a flower bush. When I went up to him he collapsed. As I say, I think he may have said something like “Help me”, but I can’t say for sure. He held on to me very tightly when I put my arms around him, and he died very quickly. He died just the moment before you found us.’

They were both silent for a long time, and again she hoped that he was placated, when again he spoke, softly and persistently.

‘And before you left him?’

‘Yes?’

‘You were talking?’

‘Yes.’

‘What were you talking about, Jane?’

Jane wanted to wail, ‘I promised that I wouldn’t tell!’ but she knew that this would open up a breach between them that would last for the rest of their lives. Of course James’s suspicions were correct. She moved even closer to him, grateful for the blackness.

‘James, I know what you’re thinking about, and you’re right,’ she lied. ‘When I went into the garden with your father, he had had a bit too much to drink. Because it was Ellen’s wedding, we were talking about Ellen. He told me that she had once had a great notion of you, that she even wanted to marry you, but that you would have none of it.’ James did not speak. ‘Isn’t that what you’re thinking about?’

‘Yes.’ She let him stay silent, and at last he said, ‘I didn’t tell you, because it didn’t seem important at first. It was just one of those things. Often people have all sorts of things in their past, and it’s foolish to think that just because you marry a person or because you love them, that you have to tell them about those things, when they’re long over and gone. That would be foolish, wouldn’t it, Jane?’

‘Yes,’ she replied, and she could hardly get the little word out
for anger and jealousy; wanted to wring from him any other little secrets which he might happen to be hiding.

‘I was going to tell you about Ellen because she lived so near, and then I didn’t because I thought that you might be hurt. I was afraid on both counts, for I was afraid that you might hear gossip that would make it sound worse than ever it was; and I thought that if I didn’t tell you then perhaps no one would. Daddy had promised me that he would say nothing, so in the end I decided to leave well alone. Particularly after you met Ellen and didn’t take to her. It seemed cruel and pointless to annoy you with something that’s finished and gone. Are you angry with me now because I didn’t tell you?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘no, of course not.’ It was true: any jealousy she felt was killed by the relief of knowing that he would never again pester her to know what his father had told her on the day of the wedding.

James was moved by her generous forgiveness. ‘I’m glad that you were with him when he died,’ he said. ‘He was very fond of you, you know. He couldn’t have loved you more, not if you had been his own daughter.’

‘I was very fond of him too,’ she said, ‘but when I die, I want to die alone.’

‘Jane!’

‘I do. I don’t want anyone to watch me dying. Will you promise me that, James? That is if the circumstances are such that you can, that you’ll leave me in peace?’

‘This is foolish. You’re being morbid.’

‘I’m not being morbid, or silly, I’m quite serious. Promise me.’

‘I don’t know that I want to.’

‘Well, you have to. Promise, no, swear, that when I’m dying that you won’t stay and watch me, but that you’ll leave me to die alone.’

‘Very well then,’ he said. ‘I promise.’

‘Swear it, James.’

‘All right then, silly – and you are silly, and morbid too. I promise and I swear, and there’s an end to it.’

About a week after this incident, Jane began the process of
clearing out and taking over the house to make of it the home she wanted. She began in the room which she hated most of all – the parlour – and she began surreptitiously, so that it would not upset James too much. While making plans in her mind, she rummaged through cupboards and drawers, some of which she had never even opened since coming to the house. On the first day of her task, she found at the back of a musty press a little cloth bag which, when she tipped it out on to the kitchen table, she found to contain about a score of sea shells. After careful thought, she left them there as a wordless suggestion to James of the process which she had set in motion. And when James did come in a few hours later he was on the point of speaking, but on seeing the shells he did not speak. Instead, he sat down at the table, and for a long time he simply looked at them, piled there in disorder, looked at them in silence. When at last he did stretch out his hand to touch them, he did so with hesitancy and restraint. He picked up one shell and clinked it against another, as though sounding a coin, then stroked the ridges and curves with the tips of his delicate fingers, and began to push the shells around on the table, very slowly and deliberately. As he did so, Jane noticed that, for the very first time since the death of his father, he was crying, although he made no sound at all. She saw, too, that he was pushing the shells carefully into a pattern. He took his time, and when he was finished, the cold, white shells were laid out in a perfect circle. This done, he fell again to simply looking at them in silence.

Jane felt as though he had hit her hard with his fist.

She could not bear to stay in the kitchen, and although she wanted to run away, she forced herself to leave very quietly. She went out of the house and went down to the orchard.

Time and time again, she had come to a point in her life when she thought that at last she was in control: everything had changed, and everything would be all right. She had felt like this on the day she was confirmed, on the day she met James, even on the day her father-in-law died; but now she knew that nothing had changed and that nothing would ever change. Once, to realize this would have made her feel bitter and afraid,
but now she felt peaceful and resigned. For the first time ever, she could accept the dignity of James having had a family, and of his having happy memories which she could never share. She respected the privacy of these memories, and felt that if he were to come out to her now and tell her the name of the resort where they had gathered the shells, or try to tell her some little anecdote about a rock pool, that she would cover her ears with her hands, and scream so that she might not hear; she would tell him that he ought to do nothing with his memories but cherish them. Even as she thought this, she felt as though she had unclenched her fist, and spread the palm wide, so that something which had been trapped there for years arose, lighter than air, lighter than light, floated, vanished, and that she was the better person for having had the courage to let go.

There is a certain futility in loving the dead, and a certain hopelessness in loving them too much. Jane remembered the strangeness of those years in the convent when she had loved so much two people who were dead, and in the moments when she was not loving them, she was trying to convince herself that they had ever existed. Jane now saw how the dead abandon the living, and that their going is a last lesson. In the face of their letting go, she too had to let go; had to meet their abandon of her by abandoning them. She would have to look to what was left to her – what was, like her, alive, and choose to love that.

She left the orchard and she went back towards the house. When she entered the farmyard, she found that James had left the kitchen, and that he was standing by the back door, leaning against the jamb. Jane went up to him, and without speaking she put her hand into his small hand. After a few moments, still tightly holding his hand, she led him out across the farmyard to the side of the house, where a hawthorn was growing. With her free hand, Jane caught hold of one of the branches, and gently pulled it down.

‘Look,’ she said.

She showed him something which she had found that morning, and which had touched her deeply, despite her usual revulsion for the creatures. At once she had resolved to keep the
knowledge to herself, but now she was pleased at the secret she shared, and the memory she created as she made the screen of bright leaves recede, revealing to the couple a small mossy nest wedged in the crook of a branch. The nest contained three fledglings, whose red beaks gaped wide for food. They looked at them for a long time, then Jane carefully released the branch, and the nest was again hidden from sight.

The summer after the funeral was the happiest time of her life. The weather continued to be fine. They kept open the doors and windows of the house and the air, sweetened with the scent of flowers, blew through all the rooms. Jane found that her senses were heightened now, as if the death had made her more alive, her skin thinner and the impression of each smell, sight and sound was much more vivid than ever before. She found it easier to accept life in the country, and began to notice details which had previously escaped her notice. In the fold of a leaf she saw a ladybird, bright as liquid, wedged there like a drop of blood which had taken legs and life. The sound of the birds no longer had the power to frighten her, and she even found it comforting to see the little lumpish nests of house-martins stuck up under the eaves of the house. At dusk each evening she sat by an upstairs window to watch the mayflies as they drifted in hazy, mumbling clouds along the bay, like a light grey smoke.

She now felt closer to James than ever before, and no longer wanted to force him into opening his mind to her. Although often when they were together they were as silent as they had been in the strained, early days of their marriage, the silence now was easy and relaxed. (And Jane, who had learnt throughout her life all the varied qualities and textures of silence, was highly conscious of this.) When James’s father died, it was as if a part of James himself had been cut away and buried. James was stronger for this, however, not weaker. He could not properly love his father now, and having no family, he found a family in Jane and she in him. She was by turns his wife, his sister, his daughter; and he to her was the brother, son and father she had never known, as well as being her husband. But there were
often times when the significance which they had for each other went beyond names, when any word or label would have been a barrier, a limit and a lie, for the importance of each person to the other was beyond time, definition or language. Without any act of will or artificiality, they had come to a point where their lives and their selves were so bound up together that mere physical distance from each other meant nothing. When James was out working in the fields, or away at a market in the next town, Jane no longer fretted about him as she once might have done. A field or a few miles of countryside could not part them in any important sense.