by Ann Cleeves
She came out of the bathroom to choose a dress to wear. Oliver, standing by the window, turned to face her. Julia pulled her bath robe more closely around her body. Her attitude to love-making was much the same as to her weekly aerobics class. As soon as she started she wished it was over, but she supposed the exercise was good for her. Tonight, in this heat, she could not bear the thought of it. She snatched a dress from the wardrobe and returned to the bathroom, locking the door behind her. Oliver, saying nothing, turned back to the window and to his memories.
Texas had been the last stop on a three month trip. They had hit Houston after a two day drive from the Big Bend, via Aranzas, for the whooping cranes. Sci-fi City they’d called it, though the skyscrapers then had been nothing compared with the glittering towers which had been built more recently, and they’d moved on as soon as they could.
They had graduated the summer before then worked like lunatics until January to get together the money. Rob had put in eighteen-hour shifts at an all night filling station on the Great North Road, Mick had been general dogsbody at the holiday complex his parents ran and Oliver had been taken on as porter in the hospital where his father was a consultant surgeon.
His parents thought the trip to the States was a mistake, but they hadn’t made a fuss. They could understand that he wanted to travel before he settled down. They weren’t like Mick’s parents who thought a trip to Barnstaple was an adventure.
Oliver had met Julia in the hospital. She was a student nurse though he realized now that she wasn’t committed in any way to her work. She’d seen it as a stop gap between her undemanding girls’ school and marriage. She’d never enjoyed nursing – it was too much like hard work – and she probably wouldn’t have passed the exams. But she’d looked good in the part, he had to admit. It was the early seventies and she’d worn her uniform short. He’d fallen for the legs in black nylon and the neck with the hair scraped from it and the little white starched cap. He’d fallen for the flattery. Those days she’d listen to him talking for hours, her lips slightly parted, as if his opinions were the most important in the world.
She didn’t live in the nurses’ home, which from the beginning had seemed to him a good sign. Mummy and Daddy had bought her a flat which she shared with two other girls, picked by her parents from a list of applicants because they came from ‘ nice homes’. But although she had her own place she’d kept him hanging on, wanting some sort of commitment from him, driving him mad so in the end he’d have done anything to get inside the strait-jacket of her nurse’s uniform: ‘Of course I love you Julia. Of course I do.’
The first time had been on Christmas Eve. A Christmas present. She’d been round the wards in her cape, with her lantern, singing carols. Even then she’d been a member of the choir. He’d been working and he’d caught glimpses of her all evening – at the end of corridors, in the middle of a ward with her head thrown back to sing, her mouth wide open.
And in the flat she had let him do it. Of course he hadn’t asked if she was on the pill. She was a nurse, wasn’t she?
She wouldn’t have been interested in him if he’d just been a hospital porter. He’d made the mistake of telling her who his father was. She’d have found out anyway. She still had a facility for finding out the details of other people’s lives, hoarding them as if one day they might be of use to her.
Rob hadn’t been able to stand her from the beginning. The ‘Dumb Blonde’ he called her, or, if he was feeling less charitable, the ‘Snooty Bitch.’ Oliver cared what Rob thought. He was pleased that his relationship with Julia would have a natural ending. By the end of January when they set off for America, he was beginning to be bored by her. He told himself it had been an amusing fling, something to fill in the time between university and the serious business of birding in the States.
The phone call had come while they were in Houston in a cheap motel on the way out of the city. They’d hoped to make it all the way to High Island but in the end they’d been too knackered and they’d holed up in a room next to the freeway with the noise of the traffic rumbling through the walls. On a whim he’d phoned home and got his father, unusually frosty, probably embarrassed, asking if there was a phone number which could reach him because Julia had something urgent to say to him.
‘Julia?’ Oliver had said, because he had almost forgotten about her. ‘Oh, yes. Julia.’
And he had sat in the motel reception waiting for the phone to ring while the others went to buy food.
The call came much more quickly than he had expected. Julia was breathless, weepy, pleading but in a strange way jubilant. He didn’t realize then that it was what she had planned all along.
She wouldn’t have an abortion, she said, with a show of dignity. It was against her principles and anyway she couldn’t. She wanted the baby. So it was up to him what happened next. She supposed she could manage with the child by herself though it would be a struggle and it would break her parents’ hearts. Or they could get married.
By this point she was quite calm and business-like. Daddy would buy them a little house and give them an allowance until Oliver had qualified as a solicitor. Then she said she supposed he would want to think about it. She expected him to phone her the next day at her parents’ home. She gave him the number slowly as if she were speaking to a child and replaced the receiver.
He had known at once that he was trapped without quite understanding why. Rob had said that he was being ridiculous. What did it matter what people might think? This was his life he was talking about. But Oliver could not see it like that. He thought marriage would give a point to a life, which had always frightened him with its aimlessness. With a wife and child to care for perhaps he would become decided and purposeful like his father.
Early the next morning Oliver had phoned Julia and formally asked her to marry him.
Then they had headed off down the road to High Island and Laurie and a week at Oaklands waiting for the weather to turn.
When Julia came out of the bathroom, dressed and made-up, ready for dinner, Oliver was sitting on the bed, still in his shorts and T-shirt watching the television.
‘What are you doing?’ she cried, taking out all her irritation and discomfort on him. ‘Why aren’t you ready?’
He seemed hardly to notice her presence. ‘ It’s the weather forecast,’ he said dreamily. ‘Look at that cold front sweeping down from the Great Lakes.’
‘What does that mean?’ she asked, as if she knew how to be polite but she couldn’t care less, actually.
‘Migrants,’ he said. ‘Bucketfuls of migrants falling out of the sky and into the trees. Tanagers and vireos and bright, bright warblers.’
At dinner that was all the men talked about. Not the past – Julia was at least spared that – but the prospect of a fall. They sat together at a large round table in the corner of Mary Ann’s restaurant, lingering long after the other residents had gone to bed.
Laurie did her best to change the subject. She broke into a discussion on the identification of Swainson’s warbler and demanded their attention. Julia thought it was rather brave.
‘Mick and I are doing some work for a new non-profit organization,’ she said. ‘It’s a real exciting venture. It came out of the Rio summit, you know. A partnership between the West and the Third World. We were wondering if we might make a presentation to the English guests at the hotel. I know they’d be interested. Some of them might even want to be involved. You wouldn’t mind that, would you Rob? Or you, Mary Ann?’
She looked around the table but the men seemed hardly to have been listening.
‘Hey, Laurie,’ Rob said. ‘This really isn’t a good time. I can’t think about that today.’
She was about to persist but Mick caught her eye. She sat down. Only Julia saw how angry she was.
‘What’s the name of your charity?’ Julia asked. Manners were important even out here and it pleased her to think that Laurie too was being ignored. Mary Ann had opened a door into the garden a
nd the men stood on the threshold listening for the wind. The two women sat alone at the table.
‘The Wildlife Partnership,’ Laurie said. She brightened and seemed about to launch into her sales pitch. ‘If you’d like more details I can take you through it.’ She stretched under the table and like a magician brought out a glossy brochure.
Julia had experience of dealing with sales people and broke in: ‘My husband specializes in charity law,’ she added, rather cattily. ‘But I expect you knew that.’
Chapter Six
In the morning it was cooler. Rob noticed the drop in temperature as soon as he woke. But the cloud was thin and it had not rained so he thought there was no hurry. Even if the cold front was on its way from Canada it had not yet arrived. He had time for a civilized breakfast.
In the dining-room a matronly waitress with flat feet asked him where he would like to sit. At a table by the window Russell and Connie May were watching him eagerly and he asked to join them. Since he had fixed their shower in Houston they had treated him like a hero. Now they poured him coffee. Connie still seemed tired and washed out but Russell couldn’t keep still. He had finished his breakfast and he took up his binoculars and began to clean the lenses with a soft cloth and a photographer’s brush. Rob thought he was as excited as a boy on his first bird club field trip.
‘Well this is it, lover,’ he said, over and again to his wife. ‘After all this time we’re here.’
Rob had decided to take them to Boy Scout Wood first. It was more organized than Smith Oaks Wood and more prepared for visitors. Although it was within walking distance he would borrow the hotel’s mini bus. He didn’t fancy the idea of shepherding his party down the 124 like a kindergarten group.
‘We’ll go then,’ he said, ‘as soon as everyone’s ready. I’ll meet you outside in twenty minutes. If you could tell the others …’
But Russell was already on his feet, rounding up the members of the party with the enthusiasm of a sheep dog, harrying them until they were all ready to go.
When Rob had come to High Island the year before there had been a young woman in the group. He couldn’t remember her name now. She hadn’t been his type. But she had called Boy Scout Wood ‘The Secret Garden’ and for him the name had stuck. It was very small and compact, hardly more than a garden, so you could wander out of it quite easily and find yourself in the yard of a neighbouring house. And the tangle of trees came as a surprise. You turned off an ordinary street of tidy houses and found yourself in a wilderness.
The street was full of birders’ cars. They were covered with stickers, some with distinctive birders’ licence plates. Rob ignored the queue at the information booth and set his group up at Purkey’s Pond, the only permanent surface water in the wooded part of the reserve. There was a gallery of tiered benches, overlooking the water. It was crammed with people leaning forward, binoculars focused. There were Dutch birders and Swedish birders and birders from all over the States. But most of all there were British birders and Rob waved to people he had last seen at Cley, in Norfolk, or shared a beer with in the observatory on Fair Isle.
‘What have you got?’ Rob asked an obese American. He had a backside which sagged either side of the bench.
The man chewed on a piece of gum. ‘A couple of yellow billed cuckoos,’ he said, then paused before adding, ‘Nice enough, but I guess by the end of the day there’ll be too many birds to count.’
Rob set up his telescope so he could show the more inexperienced members of the group the birds. He was beginning to know his party as individuals now. There were the dreadful Lovegroves, the middle-aged, spinster sisters, who bickered like a married couple on the brink of divorce. There was a seventy-five-year-old retired doctor from Inverness who had the build of a mountaineer and a bigger world list than Rob. And there was Ray, an ex-miner from Nottingham who was determined to see as many birds as he could until his redundancy money ran out.
Connie seemed worried about Ray. Although it hadn’t started raining she was wearing a transparent plastic raincoat and a rainhood of a design Rob had not seen since his childhood. She might have been at a Mother’s Union picnic at Weston-Super-Mare.
‘Haven’t you got family then, my dear?’ she asked the miner.
‘Bugger the family,’ Ray said. ‘They’ve lived off me long enough. I don’t doubt they’ll still be there when I get back.’
And Connie had given an odd little laugh as if she were not shocked, but confused.
All morning the sky grew darker. Still the rain did not come. Rob thought he would be let down again and prepared himself for another anti-climax. He became tense and anxious and bummed a cigarette, although he had given up smoking months before.
When Mick and Oliver didn’t arrive, he worried that there was a rarity in Smith Oaks. He convinced himself that he was missing out. But when he asked the other birders who swept in a tide between the two reserves, they said no, it wasn’t very different at Smith Oaks. It seemed that everyone was waiting for the migrants to fall from the sky.
Once he thought he saw Mick and Laurie standing hand in hand at the end of a trail but there were so many people that he could not be sure. There was no sign of Oliver.
The rain started when they were in a clearing in the woodland called the Cathedral, though it was more the size of a small chapel and not so much the shape of a nave but of a boat, with a wooden bench running around the edge as if round a deck rail. From the boardwalk it was possible to look right up into the tops of the trees.
The rain started slowly, with heavy individual drops, but then became a downpour. And with the rain came the birds. Suddenly there were twenty rose-breasted grosbeaks in the tree next to where Rob was standing and from the undergrowth all around came the mewing calls of the catbirds, competing with the sound of the rain.
In the roof of the Cathedral there were flashes of black and orange and Rob was calling to his group, ‘Look! A flock of northern orioles!’
But in the excitement of the fall the group seemed to have scattered, responding to shouts from all over the reserve:
‘Cerulean warbler. Down by the pool.’
‘Who needs Blackburnian?’
So he was pointing out the orioles to strangers and when he turned to see who he was talking to, the wood was full of birders straining to see the forty red-eyed vireos on the willow by the pond, the black and white warblers against the trunk of an oak. In the end he gave up responsibility for showing the birds to his group and he went with the flow, along the boardwalks and the trails, taking care not to tread on the birds which had landed exhausted, at every step adding a new species to his day list. And all the time he was looking for the big one. Swainson’s warbler which he had never seen in the world before, never even come close to. But while he was listening to the babble around him in case the shout went up that one had been seen, he was frustrated, thinking that half these birdwatchers wouldn’t know a Swainson’s warbler if it bit them.
He pushed his way down a narrow trail to the Prothonotory Pool, a lake of stagnant water with dead, silver trunked trees, emerging from it. There Oliver appeared. Out of nowhere like the migrants, the rainwater glistening in his face like tears. He came up to Rob, laughing, and threw his arms around him.
‘Isn’t it magnificent!’ he yelled, and perhaps he was crying after all. Rob thought they had all gone crazy. ‘ Twenty years of waiting and it was all worth it.’
They took the trail back into the trees and still the birds were arriving. Now they could hardly hear each other speak above the mewing of the catbirds.
‘Where’s Mick?’ Rob cried. ‘And Laurie? The four of us should be together for this.’
‘We came from Smith Oaks together. We knew you’d be here. But as soon as the rain started and things began happening we got separated. You can see what it’s like.’
‘We’ve got to find them. We’ll never get a chance like this again.’
Rob saw that they were back by the entrance of the reserve, and
that Oliver had reverted to type. The excitement had left him.
‘I can’t,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I can’t come with you to look for Laurie and Mick,’ Oliver spoke calmly. ‘ I promised Julia I’d see her at Oaklands.’
‘Sod Julia!’ Rob was furious. ‘You said it yourself. This is what we came for.’
‘It’s not that easy.’
‘We’ve dreamed of this for twenty years and now you’re leaving?’ Rob realized he was screaming. He tipped back his head so he was looking Oliver in the face and rain dripped down his neck.
‘Tell me,’ he said more quietly. ‘What is it that Julia has on you Oliver? Why don’t you just piss off and let her get on with it?’
‘I’ve already told you,’ Oliver said. ‘ It’s not that easy.’ In his lightweight Barbour jacket and his green wellies he looked like an English county gentleman out for a day’s shooting. Rob looked more like a hunt saboteur.
‘It can’t just be the money,’ Rob persisted. ‘Tell me it’s not just that.’
Oliver turned away and Rob could hardly make out his voice above the rain.
‘It’s important stuff, money,’ he said lightly and he strode away into the street as if he had a spaniel at his heels.
Chapter Seven
When Oliver left, Rob supposed he should gather his group together but he could not face the chattering Lovegroves, even the good natured enthusiasm of the Mays. He realized that he had been expecting too much of this trip. He had thought they could recreate an old friendship which probably hadn’t even been important to the others. He was a sad case. No wife or steady girlfriend. And all his real friends had been made twenty years before. But he wasn’t so desperate, he thought, that he was going to brood about Oliver Adamson during the most brilliant fall in history. He looked about him to make sure none of his group was around, then took an overgrown path through water oak, willow oak and hackberry trees. Bird watching needed concentration and he preferred to be alone. In the distance he heard American voices calling to each other, but the trail he followed was narrow and empty.