The Birds of the Innocent Wood

by Deirdre Madden

  It is a day in summer now, in the year of their mother’s death, and Catherine is standing by the kitchen window, next to a bright red geranium in a brass pot. Catherine is not looking at her sister, she is speaking slowly and snapping leaves off the geranium, withered ones to begin with but when these are all gone she continues with the fresh leaves and the blossoms, snap, snap, and Sarah is too amazed to pay any heed to this, for her sister is saying that she is going to enter a convent, she is quite decided and nothing will stop her. For a moment Sarah cannot reply, for the thought of being so parted from her sister is too much for her, so that when she does speak she has to hide the pain of this in anger.

  ‘And what about me?’ she asks. ‘What about me? Am I to be abandoned here with Dada and the cattle?’

  ‘Perhaps … I suppose so … unless you go somewhere else.’ And Catherine is now caressing the brass flank of the big pot with the palm of her hand and saying, ‘You must lead your own life … you must decide.’

  Sarah is about to tell her how selfish she is when Catherine turns from the window and says fretfully, ‘Oh don’t scold me! Let me be! I know it’s madness but what can I do? I have no real choice. I believe in God and I love Him, and you have to follow through love and belief. You know that, don’t you? I can’t deny what I feel, nor what I know. I mean, if you don’t put your life in line with what you believe – with what you love – what’s the point in living at all?’

  And as Sarah remembers this now she bangs the kettle down upon the drainingboard with such force that her father glances up in surprise from the soup bowl. Love! How dare he – how dare Peter talk to her about love? If ever he does such a thing again she will say to him softly, ‘Why yes, yes, of course. I love you,’ and make him reply in kind; and then she will put her hand to his throat and she will say to him, ‘So what, pray, are you going to do about it?’

  *

  Now it is night. Sarah goes to the parlour where Catherine is watching a chat show on television. Two of the guests are sisters who have lived apart for all their lives. They came to know of each other’s existence only when one sister realized that the precise hour of her birth had been recorded on her birth certificate, and that she therefore probably had a twin. A long and difficult search led at last to a happy reunion. They also discovered that they have a brother who is still alive, but with whom they have not yet been reunited. And when they say this the host of the programme smiles and says that he has a surprise treat for the sisters, for the lost brother has been found, and he is here in the studio. The host invites him to come down from the audience to join his sisters, and as the orchestra plays a few bars of sentimental music and the audience dap their hands, a small man stands up in their midst. Looking nervous and a trifle apprehensive he trots down the steps to the front of the studio. His sisters stand up, and as they greet their brother there is, for the first few seconds, a feeling of formality and embarrassment, as if they cannot overcome the fact that they have been strangers for so long. The greeting is performed solely for the cameras and for the public: it is the expected thing. But in that moment when they first embrace all restraint vanishes. They put their arms around each other and they huddle tightly weeping in a knot, their backs forming a circular barrier against the world, indifferent now to the presence of the cameras, indifferent to everything but each other. As Sarah watches this she feels that she is going to cry, and she is taken aback when Catherine suddenly jumps up and turns off the television.

  ‘I don’t know why they show things like that,’ she says, slowly, moodily, in the following silence. ‘Things so private. It’s obscene – horrible – feeding off other people’s emotions. I don’t know why they do it.’

  In the cottage across the fields, Peter is watching the same television programme, and he is thinking of the sisters, for it reminds him of them, and he wonders if it reminds them of the same scene. For as he watches he thinks of Sarah and Catherine and James, their father, on the day of Jane’s burial. They too had stood in just such a pose with their grief, locking out the rest of the world. He had made excuses to himself for his feelings, saying that the death of his own father when he was too young to remember him was at the heart of his unease. It makes him feel uncomfortable now to think of how he had then felt jealous and resentful of the family; had wanted to force his way into the circle and be locked there with them in their grief. And worse: as they stood there Catherine had been stroking her sister’s back, slowly and gently moving her hand, clenching and unclenching in her fist the cloth of her sister’s coat; and Peter must now admit to himself that it was while watching this that he felt for the first time an inkling of sexual desire for Sarah. Because of the circumstances Peter was immediately horrified at himself. He thought his feelings unnatural and disgusting and at once suppressed them; kept them quashed for two years. Even now he hates to consider it, and he is glad when the television programme comes to an end.

  Shortly afterwards he goes to bed, resigning himself to a wakeful night, for Peter suffers from insomnia He fears the night as a little child might do, and he fears sleep as others fear death. The bedroom will remain illuminated until morning because he is afraid of the dark. If the room had been all blackness he would have had extra fears beside the fear of sleep: foolish, irrational fears. Peter would imagine that things are coming out of the wardrobe to attack him; that cold hands will suddenly touch his brow; that pale faces will appear, smiling, unbidden, at the window. He therefore takes particular care to pull the curtains and close out the darkness, but he does not realize that light from his room is seeping out through a crack in the curtains, and he does not know that at that very moment Sarah is looking at the line of light which indicates his window. She is watching from her own bedroom window, for she, too, is just on the point of going to bed.

  As she lets fall the curtain and switches on the light someone knocks gently upon the door. It is Catherine.

  ‘Are you in bed? I don’t want to disturb you. Can you lend me a pen?’

  ‘Come in.’ Sarah crosses to the dressing-table, and as she begins to rummage Catherine says, ‘I have to fill in my diary.’ But when Sarah finds a pen and turns to hand it to her sister (and sees how very thin she looks in her dressing-gown) Catherine starts, is confused and embarrassed, and taking the pen she says nothing but leaves the room. Sarah is puzzled by this, until she catches sight of herself in the dressing-table mirror and sees, low down on her neck, the mark of a little bite. She swears under her breath: thinks, Well, at least now she’ll have something to write in her precious diary, and then, for the second and final time that night she puts out her light.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘Entreat me not to leave you or to return from following you, for where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge, your people shall be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die and there I will be buried. May the Lord do so to me and more also if even death parts me from you.’

  Jane frowned beneath her veil as she listened to the first lesson and wondered if she was making a mistake, but the feeling lasted only for a moment. She was married in white before a small congregation, made smaller still by her aunt’s protestation of illness on the morning of the wedding. Closing her eyes, she tried to pray. She did not think that the sacramental significance of the occasion and the smug sense of personal triumph which she felt were mutually exclusive. The girls whom she had invited from her office did not know her real motives. ‘And why not me?’ she had wanted to cry as she watched them pass her engagement ring from hand to incredulous hand. ‘Why shouldn’t I marry? Why should I be different to any other woman?’ Strange, she thought, as she watched James put the plain gold ring upon her steady finger, that she should kneel in apparent white submission at such a moment.

  Through all the wedding arrangements, James had expressed a strong preference in one matter alone, and that was in the choice of their honeymoon hotel. He elected that they spend a week at a particular fishing village in the nor
th and Jane readily agreed. After arrangements had been made he remarked that it was the same hotel where his parents had spent their honeymoon.

  The village was small and unfashionable, the hotel shabby. Jane suddenly felt foolish as she stood in the chilly reception, and she tried to avoid seeing her reflection in the stained mirror which hung behind the desk, for she looked too young, too thin, and overdressed in her light linen suit and her little veiled hat. The very confetti caught in her hair seemed contrived, as if she had lifted some strands with a comb and carefully arranged the little bits of coloured paper.

  The middle-aged woman behind the desk betrayed the low status of the hotel by her over-familiarity. ‘You look starved to death, daughter,’ she said as she handed over the key. ‘Once you get settled in you come down again and we’ll see about getting you a nice hot cup of tea – or something stronger, if you prefer.’

  But Jane drew back from such maternal solicitude, for as the woman looked at her Jane could see in her eyes something more than kindness. She saw pity: and as she turned to follow James up the stairs she had to fight the urge to go back and say to the woman, ‘Keep your pity, for I neither need nor want it. Never in my life have I less needed pity than I do now.’

  The little hotel was on the top of a high cliff, and the room in which James and Jane were to stay was on the seaward side of the building: perpetually they heard the sound of the waves’ rumble on the beach below. The room was cold, cramped and harshly lit by an unshaded bulb which made no shadows and put into sharp relief the simple furniture. The bed was made up with sheets of hard cold linen, a bed so big that it almost filled the tiny room, and embarrassed them both. When James touched her Jane stiffened and said, ‘It’s too bright in here.’ Drawing away from him she switched out the light. But she was unprepared for the blackness which followed: a blackness and a quietness which was strange to her, for always in the city the noise of the traffic and the rays of the yellow street lights filtered up from below.

  The following morning she was brushing her hair while James dressed, and she noticed suddenly that James was looking at her. She stopped with the brush still caught in her hair, and looked at him, but she could not define what was in his stare. James looked away quickly, as if to pretend that he had not been watching her, but as she started slowly to brash her hair again he made the mistake of glancing once more in her direction, and found that she was still staring at him, her eyes steady and unperturbed. Now he was embarrassed and confused. Slowly she stood up, and crossed the room to him. Then she put up her hand and very gently she touched his shoulder as if he were something she had dreamed, and whose substantial reality she had to prove.

  When they went downstairs the same motherly woman who had given them the keys of their room now served them with breakfast: two large, greasy fries, each with a soft fried egg. Jane would not eat, but sat with her eyes fixed subversively on the salt while her food grew cold and congealed before her. The woman bustled back and forth with tea and toast, chattering to James as she did so. Jane resisted all attempts by her husband to draw her into the conversation, and remained in stubborn silence. As she removed Jane’s untouched plate the woman made a light remark, saying that she ought to eat better, that she needed to ‘keep her strength up’. At this, Jane raised her head and fixed the woman with a cold, steady stare, full of outrage. The woman was deeply embarrassed at the idea of having given offence to the little girl on her honeymoon; and she apologized profusely. And as James accepted these apologies, ‘Of course we know that you meant no offence,’ Jane lifted her eyes and gave him a look which demanded that he choose sides. He fell silent. When they left the table Jane was the only one who felt any degree of satisfaction. Secretly she was proud of how, without uttering a single word, she had bested the maternal woman. The incident had shaken James too: she was glad of that.

  Later that day, they went walking along the cliff top. They knelt down and saw far below them the gulls squatting on their untidy nests in cleft rocks of the cliff face. Over their heads more gulls wheeled, mean-eyed birds with stiff pink legs and plump white bodies. Caught between the sea below and the sky above; the white foam of one and the white clouds of the other; the sound of the waves below and the cries of the birds above, Jane felt a strange sense of disembodiment. She felt lonely too, and realized then that she wanted to heighten this sensation rather than defeat it. Far below them there was a little ledge. It was extremely narrow, and was accessible only by a beaten path which wound down dangerously from where they were sitting. ‘I’m going down there,’ she said suddenly, and as she moved to go James put his hand on her arm, tried to restrain her. She pushed him away.

  Gingerly she made her way to the ledge, and she heard James calling to her to come back. She ignored him: knowing that he would be too afraid to follow her was ultimately what had made her go down the path. If her only escape that day had lain within a ring of fire, she would have stepped into it without a backward glance.

  On reaching the ledge she sat down. A stiff salt breeze blew her hair across her face, she pushed it aside and looked out to the west, saw a beach: a long pale sickle of sand separating the green sea from the green land, and she thought, I’ll always remember this. She knew then that in this thought was the significance of the scene before her. Things had once happened of which she now had no memory, but what was known could never be unknown: it could only be forgotten. As a child she had wept for the want of memories, but now she saw that they could be a curse, chaining her to the past. If only she could forget all those years of longing to remember! Now she wished passionately that she could be like a thing which had burst ignorant from an egg a second before; a thing that would live and at once forget and so be always new. What alternative was there? She raised her head and glanced up at the sun; was blinded and looked away. Perhaps to be like that: to be hidden in brightness, to be bright as God, living for eternity in unapproachable light. She wished that she could stop believing still that her parents lived in such a light. They above all were what she wanted to forget; and yet now they seemed to be everywhere, as they had been when she was a child. That presence had then been a comfort, but it was no comfort now to feel her mother’s eye in the hot sun above her, or to sense her in the sea breeze or in the musty smell which emanated from the hotel’s dank cupboards and clung to her clothes. Look, then, thought Jane fiercely. Just look at me, I’ve made a life for myself after all. I’m going to be happy. I hope that you can see me for every second of every day.

  When she edged her way back up to the top of the cliff she could see at once that James was afraid and angry, but before he had time to speak she put her arms around him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I promise that I’ll never do anything like that again.’

  They walked back holding hands, and when they reached the hotel she stopped him on the step, kissed him very tenderly and then they pushed open the glass door. They walked through the shabby hallway to the stairs, past the desk where the woman in charge of the hotel pretended not to notice them.

  But that night when James told her that he loved her, and when Jane opened her mouth to reply in kind she could not say the words. No matter how much she willed herself to say it she could not; but other words came out instead.

  ‘You’re never to think that you can hide anything from me because you can’t. Perhaps I don’t know everything about you now, James, but I will know, I’ll know everything. Soon there’ll be nothing about you that I don’t know, and don’t think that you’ll ever be able to hide anything from me, because you won’t be able to. You’ll never be able to deceive me. Never.’

  When her voice ceased, they looked at each other in amazement, then Jane said quietly, ‘I don’t know why I said that I don’t know where it came from.’ She began to cry. James brought her a glass of water and as she drank he stroked her head.

  ‘Are you angry?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m really sorry.’

  ‘That’s
all right.’

  But when she looked up she saw that he was disturbed and frightened by what had happened. In silence they finished preparing for bed.

  The following morning the woman who served them breakfast was as quiet as she could be, and the few remarks which she made were constructed so that no secondary meaning might be construed. It was of little consequence: Jane and James paid her no heed at all. They gazed at each other across the table with the apparent self-absorption of lovers. What they really felt was fear. They saw the gap that lay between them and were wondering already if it could ever be breached. When they looked at each other it was in blind terror, not blind love.

  As they left the dining-room Jane said, ‘It was a mistake ever to come here. Let’s leave now. Let’s go to the farm and start again: start properly.’

  James agreed. They left the village later that day and drove to their home. And when James’s father opened the door of the farm to them, Jane felt that she was looking into the future and seeing James as he would be in old age: seeing him as she would never see him in reality.

  *

  The shock of marriage did not diminish, but increased as Jane tried to settle into her new life and home. Like a Hindu woman she found herself in an arranged marriage, bound by passive acquiescence to a stranger: but it was she who had done the arranging. She had not, for example, given any significant thought to the fact that she and James would be sharing the farmhouse not only with her father-in-law, but also with the farm hand, Gerald. His presence rankled greatly with Jane, but James was quite implacable in the matter. It would have been foolish to have him lodge in some other farmhouse, he said, and it was also a more economical idea. They were able to give him a smaller wage because he had the spare room, and also was given his meals in the house. It meant, too, that if there was an emergency on the farm, he was on hand. If a cow got sick at night, or if a dog made its way in amongst the sheep, Gerald could deal with it. Jane did not see the logic of this, for when there was a crisis James invariably went to help Gerald, although it was rarely anything which one man could not have managed alone.