The Birds of the Innocent Wood

by Deirdre Madden

  She remembers visiting the cottage as a child, and then too the picture had been a frightful mystery to her; then too the visits had been clandestine. Her parents had never forbidden her to call on Ellen and Peter, but they had not approved of such visits either. When Ellen gave her an apple or a bun she had always known to hide or eat the evidence before going home. The kindness of such gifts was never appreciated by her parents, and to this day she cannot understand why. Since her mother’s death her father has been too sad or distracted to notice or care what Sarah does, but Catherine, she realizes, seems to be trying to supplant their parents. Sarah knows that her sister has always been uncomfortable in Ellen’s company. She had once thought it no more than an unreasoned habit which she had picked up from her mother. But Sarah has felt this disapproval strengthen since the summer of their mother’s death, more than two years ago. It is as if Catherine wants to draw her back from any possible involvement outside the family, and just as she thinks this Peter says, ‘Your sister was over here this morning.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. She brought a letter. Sarah – is there anything wrong with Catherine?’

  She immediately moves away from him and says, ‘Wrong? What do you mean, wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says, embarrassed now. ‘She just seemed a little … strange, and I wondered if something was wrong.’

  ‘Perhaps you read too much into what my sister says and does simply because you don’t like her.’

  He opens his mouth to deny this, but she looks at him angrily and turns her back on him. They stand in silence.

  After a few awkward moments she turns to him again and says politely, ‘How’s school?’

  ‘Fine,’ he replies, and then he begins to tell her in some detail of how his teaching is progressing. It is three days now since the beginning of the new term, and Sarah only half listens to his lies. No matter what he says she knows that he hates teaching as much as she hates working on the farm. Once he was more honest: while still at teacher-training college he often told her that he doubted his capacity to be a good teacher. But since mid-December, when their friendship changed, they are both less likely to tell the truth when they are talking to each other, and she feels a reserve, almost a politeness between them which is becoming worse each week. It increases in direct proportion to the degree of physical intimacy reached; and she thinks of the day when they will talk about the weather. But when Peter asks her what she is thinking of, and why she is smiling, she does not answer him. Instead, she once more crosses the room and kisses him. After some moments he says to her very hesitantly, ‘Sarah, do you …’

  She anticipates the question, and with a deep sigh she interrupts him. ‘Do I what?’ she says wearily, and this time it is he who draws away from her.

  ‘Nothing,’ he says sulkily. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Make me some tea, then,’ she says.

  She follows him into the kitchen and as they wait for the kettle to boil Peter gazes out of the window at the dark lough. At last he speaks, almost as if he were thinking out loud in an empty room, and he says, ‘A more cruel creature than you never existed.’

  ‘No,’ she says, in a voice as soft and disinterested as his own.

  ‘No, I don’t suppose they come much worse than me.’ There is another moment’s pause, and then they simultaneously look at each other and smile.

  But a short while later as they sit in the parlour drinking tea she thinks seriously, I am very cruel: I am. When she looks across at Peter she knows that she is guilty, and she wonders if he feels used. She wishes that she could feel a genuine interest in his life and well-being, wishes that she could bring herself to confide in him. It would be for his sake alone, not hers: such confidence would give him a sense of being trusted.

  But where to begin? With her mother? It would be good, she thinks, looking at him steadily, if she could bring herself to speak of the time of her mother’s death. Would he be shocked or sympathetic if she told him the truth? The death had been sudden, and for the first few days Sarah had been grieved and stunned. Every morning when she awoke the loss of her mother had been the first thought in her mind, and she now remembers how incongruous simple things had been: the sound of the wild birds crying out over the lough; the way the morning light lay dappled on the pillow and quilt; the sweet intimate smell of the sheets: to lie quietly in bed and think that these things, and that every other little thing in a house as familiar to her as her own body had not changed, but that one great change had been permitted – that her mother had died and would never be seen in the house again – had seemed shocking to her. It was an affront to reality.

  On those first mornings she lay and felt grief descend like a great weight upon her heart and mind, and she knew that throughout the day ahead that grief, that heaviness would still be there, made worse by the sight of her father’s suffering. He could hardly bear the loss of his wife, and it frightened Sarah to see him suffer so much.

  And then, amazingly, on the fifth day after the death, she awoke in the morning to the exact converse of these feelings, for she felt relief and a great sense of lightness, as though some terrible constraint had been lifted from her. Rolling over in bed, she had whispered into the pillow, ‘Thank God she’s dead.’

  Throughout the following day she could scarcely hide her happiness, and Catherine was shocked when she found her sister humming pleasantly to herself as she sifted through the letters of sympathy. After that, Sarah had tried to be more discreet, but she found it difficult to contain these feelings, and she tried to explain them to herself. ‘I did love Mama,’ she thought, ‘I did, I did.’ But only now when her mother was safely dead could she admit to the knowledge which qualified that; she had been afraid of her too, and had often even hated her for her cold self-possession. She had been quietly scornful of anyone who fell short of her own level of self-sufficiency. Against the sadness of loss Sarah had to set the honest relief of knowing that her mother would never again sit there, pretending to read or knit or do a crossword, while secretly watching every move her daughters made, watching and silently judging. All her life, Sarah now saw, had been an unconscious struggle against her mother, for she had been afraid that she would grow up to be just like her: just as cold, just as calculating and just as self-contained. Perhaps if she had lived she would have beaten Sarah and made of her what she wanted; but her death was her failure, her death gave victory to her daughter. Sarah could not feel or even imagine her mother’s spiritual presence after her death, nor did she want to. She even found it hard at times to take seriously the great grief of her father and sister and often she wanted to say to them, ‘Can’t you see that this is for the best? We will get over the loss of her, and we’ll be much happier without her than we ever were with her.’ But she could never bring herself to speak like this until one afternoon when she and Catherine were standing by their mother’s grave. Catherine cried while her sister looked indifferently at the fresh dark earth and the fading flowers, and suddenly she heard her own voice say, ‘I don’t care that she’s dead. We’re not. We’re alive.’

  But if her mother did not defeat her, and had not made of her the monster she wanted, why has Sarah come to the cottage today? Why does she come every week? To confide in Peter would be to admit that she still has something to prove and, what is worse, that she is using him to prove it. As awareness of this breaks over her she feels deeply ashamed: nothing could be lower than to use another person’s love to bolster up one’s own faults, and she feels no love for Peter, only a mild fear that he will one day discover how little he means to her. And the thought now comes to her, quite cold and objective: I have nobody and I have nothing. The loneliness which follows this thought is so terrifying that she hastily puts down her teacup and flings herself against Peter, clinging and crying. All along he had been watching the sadness on her face, watching and not understanding, but now he tries gently to console her, which only makes Sarah feel worse. Full of self-hatred and sti
ll sobbing she thinks, Mama, dead as you are, I wish you were here, I wish I could believe that you’re watching me now, and very gently she presses her mouth against Peter’s, After a few moments she draws away and then kisses him again.

  And later, when they are sitting on the sofa with their arms around each other, Peter notices that she is gazing blankly away from him, and leaning over he whispers, ‘What’s wrong, Sarah? Why won’t you tell me what’s bothering you?’

  She wishes that she could tell, but this is too dangerous for words. If she were to name this thing and talk about it she would give it definition and in some mysterious way make it real. And if she does not speak perhaps it will not be real, perhaps it will not happen, perhaps she can find some protection in silence. And there is a danger, too, that it will perhaps bring him closer.

  Closing her eyes she says very quietly, ‘No.’

  ‘Please,’ he urges her, ‘please tell me.’

  But still she refuses to look at him and again she refuses to tell. ‘No,’ she says, and then she adds wearily, ‘Peter, you ask me too much.’

  *

  When Sarah returns to the farm that afternoon she finds Catherine in the back scullery, coughing as she ladles greasy chicken soup into a bowl of thick blue and white striped delft.

  ‘Is that for Dada?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Catherine puts the soup, together with a plate of bread, upon the kitchen table, then calls her father in from the farmyard to eat. This done, she goes upstairs, while Sarah pretends to be busy, for the pot of tea which she makes is only an excuse to remain in the back scullery. As she waits for the kettle to boil she stands with her back against the sink and looks through the open scullery door to the kitchen where her father sits drinking the soup. When she interrupted Peter that afternoon he had been on the point of asking her if she loved him, and she almost laughs to think of it now. Love! The poor fool! What did he know about love? Little enough if he could even ask such a question. What in honesty had he expected her to say? Yes? Could even Peter’s foolishness go to such a point?

  Sarah has only ever loved her family, and her family has made her suffer. Looking through the open door to where her father is sitting is like looking into a seashell which is coiled and chambered. Each chamber is a memory, its size and brightness in accordance with its position on the coil of time which stops with the shell’s sharp apex: the moment of her birth. But beyond that there is a wide yellow shore scattered with shells, and she can see but she cannot touch the huge shells which contain her father’s secret memories. She cannot imagine what it would be like to move through those vast coiled systems of chambers, seeing with her father’s eyes the eighteen years which make the sum total of her own brief life, and then before that those early, mysterious years which lie beyond the scope of Sarah’s memories: the years of her parents’ marriage prior to the birth of their children; the years of his life before his marriage, spent on the farm alone with his father; the years of his boyhood and youth spent with both his parents, prior to his mother’s death, and then these shells also come to the still point of his birth and are ended. But before this were the lives and memories of his parents, and their parents before that, and their parents before that: the shells of these memories have been sucked back into the sea by the tide, and some have been dashed by waves against the rocks and have been broken; some have fallen to the sandy bed of the sea, and some will drift forever and forever. And Mama: she wonders what has happened to the poor misshapen shell of her mother’s life, and she wishes that she could have saved it above all from the cold blue infinite sea.

  Now, on this winter’s evening, she has to force herself to look from the back scullery up into the kitchen, and force herself to go into each chamber of her memory. She goes first to the kitchen where her father now sits alone, drinking his soup, and then she goes beyond it to the times when he sits alone in the same empty kitchen far into the night. He has developed this habit since his wife’s death, and it saddens his daughters very much to see him so lonely. If they chance to enter and speak to him he does not reply but sits there until long after darkness has fallen. He smokes incessantly: as Catherine and Sarah go up to bed they can see from the stairs the tiny orange glow of his cigarette moving through the blackness from his hand to his mouth. In the morning when they come down they find the room filled with the smell of stale cigarettes. She remembers sadly how at first they had tried to console him, but nothing worked: they have had, at last, to abandon him to his strange refusal of all possible comfort.

  Frequently on the mornings after these solitary vigils he claims that he is sick and refuses to get out of bed so that all the farm work falls to Sarah. His illness is a lie: he is too depressed to face life on those days, and too ashamed to admit it. He will not hire a farm hand, and on the days when her father cries off, Sarah is stiff and exhausted by nightfall. Once she asked him, ‘What would I do if you were very ill for a long time? What if you died?’ and had felt despairing when he had merely said, ‘You’d carry on the farm, of course,’ and would not discuss the matter further. Only on one occasion has she broken through to him on this subject, and that is another of the chambers into which she must now force herself to go. She goes back to a particular day in November: a cold and bleak day. Her father has refused to get out of bed and as usual Sarah has undertaken all the farm work alone. In the course of the day four cows break out of a field. For over an hour she searches for the animals in a thick fog and chill, seeping rain, finds them, drives them home and puts them back into the field, but as she stretches a strand of barbed wire across the gap through which they escaped the damp wire slips through her fingers and one of the barbs tears into the flesh of her wrist.

  When she bursts weeping into the kitchen she finds her father there in his dressing-gown, poking disconsolately in the bread-bin, but he turns around in surprise as she enters.

  ‘Look at it. Look at it, Dada. You did that. That’s your fault.’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ He backs into a corner, but his fear only makes her more excitable.

  ‘Look at it! Look at the blood! This wouldn’t have happened if you had been there with me. Good God,’ she sobs, ‘I’ve had as much as I can take. So you wanted a son to carry on the farm, did you, Dada? Well, hard luck, because you didn’t get one, you got me and Catherine, and she’s not fit for this and neither am I. Do you hear me, Dada? Are you listening? Stop trying to make a man of me. It won’t work. If you want a son you may hire one from someone else.’

  Perhaps this might have made him angry so that he swore at her or even struck her, but instead he puts his head in his hands and cries and cries. He makes no attempt to control his grief, but lets his cries rise to an hysterical edge which frightens his daughter. And what frightens her most of all is the altruism of it, for as he weeps she hears her own cries rise up to meet and match his grief, independent of her will, and joining to his weeping so that suddenly she does not know where her own grief ends and his begins: in the terrible noise that fills the kitchen she cannot distinguish her own cries.

  ‘Stop that, Dada. Stop it now.’ Catherine goes over to her sister and picks up her hand. ‘Go and get dressed, Dada. We’ll have to take her to the hospital for an anti-tetanus injection, so go now and get ready. Go!’

  Still crying, he leaves the room. The two noises are prised apart, and now she can hear the distinct sobs of her father as he goes upstairs. Catherine speaks harshly to her sister as she crosses the scullery. ‘Oh, you stop your miserable snivelling too, for goodness sake, and put your wrist under this.’ She turns on the cold tap, and the icy water hammers noisily into the steel sink.

  Obedient but wincing, Sarah holds the wound under the clear stream of water while her sister goes to fetch a bottle of antiseptic and some cotton wool. While she swabs her sister’s wrist there is silence, save for the occasional sob which escapes Sarah.

  ‘You should have known better,’ Catherine says eventually, ‘for you know what he’s like.�
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  And the memory of the clinical smell of the antiseptic and the absolute silence in which they drove to the hospital takes her back to the night of her mother’s death when they follow the ambulance in just such a tense silence. On arrival, they are made to sit on plastic chairs in the corridor outside the room where the doctors are working to save her. As they wait, they hear a noise: double doors at the end of the pale corridor split, and two white figures enter, pushing a bed. As they draw level with the waiting family the occupant of the bed is clearly visible. It is a little child, no more than four years old, who is dressed in white like the two figures who conduct her. She is tucked with almost mathematical precision between white, sterile sheets. On her head is a plastic hat which covers all her hair, and her wide brown eyes are steady and cold in a little face which is pale, sick and stoical. The wheels of the bed squeak as it moves along the corridor to the next set of double doors which open, close, and the bed has gone: there is nothing again. Sarah feels a pang of regret. In the few seconds while the bed passed she had something to think about, apart from the fact of her mother dying. And now that it has passed it is her father she thinks of, and not her mother. When she thinks of this night afterwards she will remember shame, not grief: shame to think that this is the first time ever she has seen her father as a man first and as her father second, the first time that she has truly considered her parents as people. She will always be ashamed to think that her mother has had to reach the point of death before her daughter is woman enough to see this. She sees the love of her father for her mother as a thing apart from her, from Sarah, and that love is mysterious and shocking as a love observed must always be. That love makes her feel lonely. Love: a word they shy away from in the family. And to think of that forces her out of that chamber of her memory, and brings her to the latest and perhaps the most painful chamber of all, for its full implications have not yet been resolved.