Bird Inside

by Wendy Perriam

  She wandered down the passage, still furious with Christopher, yet tempted by his glass. She had never seen the panels finished and installed. He had planned to take her with him the first day of the fixing, maybe let her watch awhile on several subsequent days, as part of her training in the various stages of stained glass, but she’d never gone at all, in fact. It had been very close to Christmas, and the artist was het up, getting really jittery that the job would not be finished before he left for France. Then the chief glazier, Big Joe – whom he trusted and respected – had phoned to say he’d gone down with pharyngitis and would have to send a substitute. Christopher had blown his top, turned on her as well when she tried to put a word in, told her not to waste her breath when she didn’t understand the problems. A less experienced glazier might handle a panel carelessly, or even line them up wrong, and with the ‘bloody fucking rain’ on top of everything, he doubted they could start the job at all, let alone complete it in well under a week.

  She had escaped to the Mackenzies’, offended by his language. Isobel had hugged her, tried to calm her down. He was always in a state, she claimed, when any major work of his was due to be installed; always feared the worst – that he’d somehow got the scale wrong, or had measured incorrectly, so that the panels wouldn’t fit. He was a perfectionist, said Isobel, who criticised himself even more harshly than the glaziers; picked on tiny footling faults which no one else would notice – a nose was overpainted, or a fleck of red too bright. She had let herself be comforted, but decided none the less to keep away; simply listened to the hassles, as Christopher reported them – the uncertainty of working with aluminium glazing-bars, the continuing heavy rain, the surliness of Big Joe’s callow stand-in.

  Christmas brought its own problems, submerged the whole kerfuffle, switched her thoughts from Adrian’s house to that villa in the South of France. But now she was experiencing the artist’s fears herself, as she stopped outside the leisure-centre, hand nervous on the doorknob. Supposing he was right, and the panels looked a mess? That might well explain why he’d been so brusque and stroppy. Perhaps he’d spent his Christmas not cavorting with wild females, but brooding over failure.

  She pushed the heavy door, bewildered for a second by the total striking change in the whole impact of the room. The plain glass wall behind the pool had been replaced by whorls of colour; Adrian’s bare and wintry garden no longer even visible, but overlaid by exotic scarlet birds – birds plunging, soaring, spiralling, wrestling with each other in a dance of love or war. She knew those birds so well, had shared the studio with them, studied them a hundred times on Christopher’s design. Yet now they’d been translated from a small-scale paper sketch and from unfinished separate panels to a full-fledged panorama, and the effect was shattering. Leisure-centre was no longer the right word. The whole room was busy, agitated, goaded to a frenzy. It looked bigger, somehow, yet also felt confining, as if she were trapped with those oppressive birds, their jagged beaks and talons menacing her personally. The colours seemed alive – aching purples, strutting reds, frisky crowing yellows, so delighted with themselves that they’d flung their bold reflections on the water, and she could admire them in the pool as well, upside-down and quivering.

  She took a few steps forward, so she could look more closely at the leads, try to grasp the way he’d used them – to give an added sense of urgency and movement. Those around the birds were all swooping down diagonally, to suggest flight, or gusts of wind. You never saw that in medieval glass, which used the leads more strictly to outline shapes and figures, not expressively, as he did. She walked right up to the glass, touched a feathered head, ran her finger round an eye-socket, traced a gaping beak. She couldn’t get away from him, despite the fact she’d just stalked out; all the things he told her vibrating in her head; his skills licking at her fury and thawing it, like ice.

  ‘Rose!’ Nick hollered, bounding through the door. ‘I’ve been calling till I’m hoarse.’

  She whirled round in confusion, had totally forgotten Nick, lost all sense of why she’d come to Adrian’s. Even now, she couldn’t leave the birds, kept gazing at the panels as she backed away reluctantly; asked Nick what he thought of them.

  ‘Pretty wild!’ he grinned, though he wasn’t even looking. Probably no one in this house had paid true homage to them, or really understood how much skill and effort they had cost, or how Christopher’s own energy had sparked that swirling movement in the glass. They were just another acquisition, more icing on the cake.

  ‘Now, about this cleaning job,’ said Nick. ‘I’ve had a word with Adrian and he says he’s thrilled that Santa’s sent you. Apparently, he wrote a note to Santa Claus, asking for a cleaner, and got a Maserati instead, but he’s glad to know that Santa’s sorted out his priorities, at last.’ Nick jingled his loose change, to accompany his laugh. ‘Could you hoover the whole place, Rose, not just the offices, but the top two floors as well? Adrian says they’ve not been touched for weeks.’

  She nodded, chewed her thumb. Did she even want the job now, or should she gallop back to Christopher, tell him how she loved the birds, how thrilled she was, how …? No. He’d probably still be tetchy, refuse to listen, or fling her own words back at her – she was leaving, so he understood, and had advised him to employ another woman. Safer to wait till he’d left for home himself. Then she could creep back to the studio in peace, spend the evening deciding what to do. Meanwhile, a bit of hoovering would help – mop up her spare energies, stop her fretting over Nice – and other women.

  ‘Have a word with Sally first. She’ll show you all the cleaning gear. If you go along that passage, her office is the third door on the right. Okay? See you later.’

  She returned Nick’s jaunty wave, then crept along the passage, embarrassed by her cold. She shouldn’t really spread her germs, especially in an office full of vital people who probably couldn’t afford to be off sick. She had better ring her leper’s bell, warn Sally and the others to keep a cautious distance. She paused outside the first door on the right, could hear Adrian talking on the phone, his voice far more decisive than it was in conversation. She peeked in as she passed, saw Aubrey sitting on the desk, swilling back a Coke, and dressed in the same canary-yellow waistcoat he’d been wearing at the private view. Did he work here now, she wondered, or simply follow Adrian like a fond and faithful dog? She shrugged, walked on. What was it to her that Adrian had a boyfriend? The grown-up world was like that – nothing what it seemed. She’d get used to it in time.

  She knocked on Sally’s door, explained her presence, explained about her cold.

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ve got a stinker too, Rob’s gone down with flu, and Adrian’s top client has landed up in hospital with a very nasty case of glandular fever. Your germs will hardly count, Rose.’ Sally pushed back her fair hair, which was now an exotic shade of platinum, and looking even brighter against her sultry black crêpe top. ‘How are you otherwise? Did you have a decent Christmas?’

  ‘Pretty good,’ she lied, ‘How about you?’

  ‘Terrific! I spent Christmas Day and Boxing Day just lazing, then I went to Lanzarote with my boyfriend, and he bought me this really fabulous ring. I’ve also got a new company car – a BMW convertible. It’s out of this world. Here, come and take a look at it before you get stuck in to the hoovering. I’m showing it off to everyone.’ She gestured to the window, pointed out a stylish silver car. ‘Isn’t it fantastic?’

  Jane joined her at the window, too surprised to speak. The car she was admiring was the one she’d thought was Anne’s. The registration was the same, as well as just the colour and the shape. She had remembered it distinctly because the last three letters were her father’s initials, A.R.N. Anne and Sally must be friends, and if they’d both been home on Christmas Day, perhaps they’d got together for a drink or cup of tea. Christopher had told her that he and Anne had known Adrian for years, so Sally could have met Anne here, or at one of Adrian’s parties. Anyway, in this cosy part of Sussex, ev
eryone knew everyone else – Isobel, for instance, with bosom friends all round her, neighbours popping in, and a network of acquaintances stretching ten or twenty miles. She suddenly felt lonely, a strange creature like a wyvern – which she’d seen in a heraldic window – who didn’t have a mate, didn’t belong in any habitat, and would be labelled an enigma and an outcast.

  ‘You haven’t said a word, Rose. Aren’t you into cars?’

  She turned back from the window, tried to put some gusto in her voice. ‘Well, I don’t know much about them, but yours looks really great. And a bit faster than my 1950s bike.’

  ‘You bet! Tell you what, when we break for lunch, why don’t we take a run in it, go up to the pub, and put it through its paces on the bypass?’

  ‘Great!’ said Jane, meaning it this time. If Anne and Sally were friends, she could spend the lunch-hour not just trying out a swanky BMW, but solving a few mysteries. She must steer the conversation back to Christmas, listen very carefully to see if Nice was mentioned.

  ‘I’d better get a move on, then. It’s not that long till lunch, and I’ve got three whole floors to clean.’

  Sally smoothed an eyebrow with her pen. ‘We’ll have our lunch latish, if you like, then you can do the offices while the others are all out. It makes it so much easier. Start with the first floor, Rose. It’s mainly empty rooms up there, apart from Adrian’s bedroom and the bathroom. Come with me and I’ll show you the glory-hole where we keep the hoover and the mops and stuff.’

  Jane lugged the hoover up the curving wooden staircase. She’d become quite an expert char in just the last few days, though there was more sense of satisfaction in sprucing up a Jacobean manor house than in de-cobwebbing a barn. She always felt that Adrian’s stately mansion needed a devoted slave or nanny, somehow permanent, full-time, who cared passionately about it; would keep the parquet shining and the panelling well-polished, and have time to fuss with brass and flowers and silver.

  The first floor seemed conspicuously bare, compared with the opulence downstairs; no paintings on the walls, or antique furniture; and Adrian’s bedroom in particular looked spartan in its simplicity. She was touched by that in one way: the sturdy single bed and ancient wardrobe, the rough-hewn wooden crucifix hanging on the wall. This was Adrian the monk, compared with Adrian the financial speculator. Perhaps his house and treasures – and even his stained glass – were simply business assets, bought to impress his clients, provide an appropriate setting for bankers, brokers, millionaires, whereas the real and private Adrian preferred things plain and simple.

  She plugged in the hoover, lined up Jif and Ajax on the windowsill. She had better clean as thoroughly as possible, prove she didn’t ‘bungle’ every job she touched. She’d move the bed to start with, vacuum underneath it, as her mother always did. It was difficult to move – an old bed with no castors – and was sticking at the headboard end. She bent down to try to shift it, saw something glinting in the bedsprings; what looked like a gold chain, caught up in a coil of wire. She worked it free, stared in shock at the tiny antique cross with its border of seed pearls – Anne’s cross – the one she’d bought the week she was confirmed. She heard Anne’s gentle voice, saw her friendly guileless smile. ‘I never take it off, except in bed.’

  She sank down on the bed herself, the hoovering forgotten. Had Adrian taken Anne to bed; had they lain between these very sheets while the artist was in Nice? Impossible. Anne was older than Adrian, at least a decade older, and had just become a Christian – publicly, officially – wearing crosses round her neck to tell the world she shunned such sins as adultery, deceit. Jane glanced from the gold chain to the large cross on the wall. And Adrian was similarly devout, a self-proclaimed believer who prayed daily in his chapel and had dared criticise the artist for mocking that great Faith of his. The hypocrite! To sleep with Christopher’s own wife, then invite him round to dinner and play the role of faithful friend. She lurched towards the wall, slammed her fist against the dying Christ.

  ‘Fool!’ she told herself, as she nursed her reddened knuckles. She was overreacting, jumping to conclusions, had no real proof of anything. Anne might have come up to his bedroom just to comb her hair – except the mirror and the dressing-table were nowhere near the bed, and even if her chain had come undone, it would have fallen on the carpet, not got tangled in the bedsprings. It was obvious, wasn’t it, that they’d been to bed together, however much she loathed the thought?

  She stuffed the chain in her pocket, dragged over to the window, staring out at the bare and shivering trees. It was the hypocrisy she hated, the total sham of people mouthing one thing, but actually behaving quite contrary to their principles, kicking out all sense of trust, all loyalty and openness. Yet wasn’t she as bad, deceiving Anne, deceiving Isobel, deceiving even Adrian – posing to the lot of them as an innocent young virgin? And what about her one-night stand with Hadley, the lies she’d told to Christopher to explain her disappearance on that giddy Monday night; all the lies she’d told in general since she’d run away from home? Perhaps lying was simply part of growing up, an adult skill you had to learn, like cooking, driving, typing. She could develop the new skill, try to get an ‘A’ in it, then take a cynical line, relish her discovery of Anne’s affair with Adrian, since it left her free to sleep with Christopher. She could hardly wreck a marriage which was already headed for the scrapheap.

  She grabbed her cleaning rags, started attacking all the surfaces, whisking off every trace of dust, climbing on a chair to reach the upper walls, determined to purge and purify the room. She hurtled back downstairs to fetch different cleaners – stronger ones – disinfectants, scourers, heavy cloudy bottles promising to kill every dangerous germ. She moved on to the bathroom, sluiced the basin, scrubbed the floor. Anne had probably gone in there as well, washed herself, prepared herself. Or perhaps she and Adrian had wallowed in the bath together – afterwards, before. She tipped antiseptic into the bath, swabbed down every inch of it, then marched back to the hoover, vacuumed the passage, all the other rooms. She had to restore this house to its former pristine state – an impregnable and spotless house with a chapel at its core; its owner praying on his knees, not bonking in a rumpled sweaty bed.

  ‘Good God, Rose! It smells like Sussex County Hospital up here. Are you trying to put me off my lunch?’ Sally tottered on to the landing in high stiletto heels, brandishing her car-keys, buttoning up her coat. ‘We’d better get off now. I know I said a late lunch, but Adrian wants me back by half past two. Just leave everything, and you can carry on this afternoon.’

  ‘I can’t go out like this. I look a fright.’

  ‘Yes, you can. If you want to put your war-paint on, do it in the car.’

  ‘But I haven’t got …’

  ‘Borrow mine. Stop fussing. We’re only going for a drive, not taking part in Miss United Kingdom.’ Sally coaxed the duster from Jane’s reluctant hand, then towed her down the stairs. ‘I only hope Adrian hasn’t nicked the car ahead of us. He seems to have taken quite a fancy to it, despite the fact he’s just swapped his Aston Martin for a Maserati coupé. Crazy, isn’t it? He buys the thing for me, then hogs it himself. He used it over Christmas, wasn’t going to tell me, but he scratched the paint quite badly, so he had to own up. I was livid, I can tell you, but I couldn’t really say anything, when he’d been decent enough to get it in the first place.’

  Jane stood stock-still on the stairs. Things were slotting into place, perfectly, revoltingly. It wasn’t Sally who had called on Anne for a drink on Christmas Day, but Adrian in Sally’s car. Anne hadn’t gone to Nice because she preferred to stay at home and entertain her lover – in the marriage-bed, this time. Maybe Adrian was the one who had persuaded Anne to be confirmed, so they’d have a little more in common, could swap prayers and crosses, as well as beds and bodies.

  ‘What’s wrong, Rose? You look awful.’

  ‘I … I’m feeling a bit weird.’

  ‘Sit down for a moment. You’ve probably overdone
it, with that rotten cold and everything.’

  ‘No, I need the loo.’ She dived along the passage and out through the front door, grabbed her bike, started pedalling furiously, before Sally could realise she wasn’t in the lavatory. She didn’t want a BMW speeding in pursuit of her; had to see the artist, had to pour things out to him – the whole tangled hopeless mess; all her fears, disgust and misery – had to share them with him, even if it ended in some disastrous explosion.

  She burst in at the door, hair tangled round her shoulders, cheeks flaming from the wind, nose running like an urchin’s, right into her mouth. She wiped it with her hand, slumped against the wall. Christopher was tracing still, the brush poised in his hand, the feathers on the Angel’s wing exquisitely defined. All the time that she’d been agonising, struggling with the hills, the cold, the turmoil in her mind, he’d been quietly painting, worshipping the god of Art. He didn’t seem the slightest bit upset that she’d flounced out in a fury, calling him a liar and threatening never to return, but was standing there serenely, continuing with his work.

  Slowly, he looked up, raised one ironic eyebrow. ‘Back already?’

  The storm of words raging in her head dwindled to a feeble mocking breeze. The vital things she’d planned to say seemed futile now, hysterical. ‘I … I need to talk to you,’ she stammered out half-heartedly.

  ‘I don’t think now’s the time, do you? You’re unwell and over-wrought, and I need all my concentration for my work.’

  ‘I’m not unwell. I’ve only got a cold. And it’s never the right time. You’ve been away for ages, and now you’re trying to shut me up.’ She could hear her voice rising – the storm again, and perhaps a highly dangerous one – a squalling hurricane which could strike down Anne and Adrian, if she let rip with raging words. She gripped the workbench, hard, trying to ground herself, control herself, by hanging on to something strong and solid. ‘Listen, I think we ought to …’