The Birds of the Innocent Wood

by Deirdre Madden

  ‘It suits us,’ Jane shrugged.

  ‘Marriage. A funny kind of marriage, if you ask me, with three husbands to cook and care for.’

  ‘I enjoy it,’ she lied.

  ‘Three husbands and no children. Any on the way?’

  ‘No!’ Jane snapped.

  Now it was her aunt’s turn to shrug. ‘Funny kind of marriage,’ she said again.

  ‘It’s none of your concern.’ Jane struggled to find the right words. ‘And I’m very happy here with James.’

  ‘Say that often enough and you might begin to believe it,’ her aunt replied. ‘Say it too often, and people will know for sure that you don’t.’

  Late that evening, James found Jane leaning on the gate at the bottom of the yard, apparently just looking out across a field of barley, but when he spoke to her and she turned around, he saw that she was crying. She cried for the rest of that night, and for most of the next day. James thought that it was due merely to her aunt’s visit, and that the woman’s presence had reminded Jane of a part of her life which she very much wanted to forget; and Jane let him think this, even though it was not the true matter of the case. For when her aunt spoke of children, she had forced into speech a topic about which Jane had not even allowed herself to think. Now she could think of little else, and soon persuaded herself that the lack of children was not just another of her troubles, but the principal cause.

  If they had a baby, things would be better. Then they would have a real marriage, and not this parody of a family in which she now lived with, as her aunt had so neatly, cruelly put it, three husbands and no children. If she were to become a mother, she thought, she would have more power in the farm. She would be able to lay for ever the ghost of James’s mother, whose presence she still felt too strongly in the house, and which she could not accept (At night Jane always sat by the kitchen stove: nothing would have induced her to relax in that mausoleum of a parlour.) If she became a mother, then she was bound to be more than just the keeper of the house. Then things would have to change.

  The farm had four bedrooms: one was shared by Jane and James, one was for James’s father, one for Gerald, and the fourth lay empty. It was to this last room that Jane now began to go at odd moments of the day, for it was this room, more than any other in the house, which she now wanted to change. In her mind, she had designated it as a future nursery, and would sit there in the dusty silence, while sunlight fell on faded wallpaper, thinking of how it would look when refurbished. There would be curtains with rabbits on them, soft rugs and a white cradle; instead of this dreary wallpaper, the high, wide bed, and the cupboard like a confessional.

  But nothing happened. Once more she was finding that there were matters in which the strength of her will was useless. Her body continued to fail her, month after month. She could not bring herself to speak to James about it, but before long suspected that he knew what was troubling her. When his father one day, speaking of the farm, said lightly, ‘I wonder if there’ll be another generation to work the land when we’re not here,’ the temper and embarrassment with which James responded confirmed her suspicions. From then on, the problem was acknowledged between them, but still without words. James became short with his father and with Gerald, but increasingly protective and defensive about Jane. They made love more frequently, but it became a mechanical procedure, and by this time Jane hated her body so much that she wanted no pleasure from it. She saw it as a thing apart from her, a thing that was failing her and she wanted to punish it.

  But she never lost hope completely. Every time they made love she could tell herself afterwards that perhaps the problem was over, perhaps she was already pregnant and it would only be a matter of time before she knew it But she grew to put too much store by that ‘perhaps’, and every time another month passed, her grief on discovering that she was still not pregnant was easily matched by her astonishment.

  James found her one afternoon crying on the bed of the spare room.

  ‘You ought to go to the doctor, Jane,’ he said awkwardly.

  ‘Why just me?’ she said at once, ‘It might be your fault.’ And as soon as the words were out she knew that they would not go, and she knew why. She could hear the doctors putting the blame on one or other of them. Although the uncertainty in which they now lived was a torment to her, still she knew that it was preferable to the scientific certainty which the doctors might provide. Her hope was slender, and foolish, but it was there, and she was not ready to risk losing it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to go to the doctor’s – not yet a while, anyway.’

  They were well into the second year of their marriage by this time. Gerald was still a frequent visitor to Ellen in the cottage, but Jane paid little heed to the pair, as she was too preoccupied with her own problems. She did not appear to be particularly interested when James came into the scullery one day and said, ‘I’ve just been talking with Gerald. He says that himself and Ellen are getting married.’

  ‘Bully for them,’ said Jane flatly. James frowned.

  ‘Ellen says that you can be her matron of honour, if you like.’

  Jane smiled at the way in which the offer was phrased. ‘I don’t think that I’d be worthy of that.’

  ‘Gerald asked me to be his best man. I said yes, of course.’

  Jane did not reply.

  Because of the manner in which she received the news, James was astonished when Jane said casually a few days later, ‘I went over to see Ellen today, to congratulate her on her marriage. I asked her if she’d like to borrow my wedding dress.’

  ‘That was very kind of you,’ said James. Jane shrugged.

  ‘She was surprised, I think, but she said that she’d consider the offer. It is a very nice dress.’

  The couple were to be married in the early summer. The weather became warm and then hot – unnaturally hot for the time of year. Jane noticed that James was becoming increasingly moody and tense, and that he was finding it more difficult all the time to conceal these feelings. Then, one day in June, she was standing by the door of the house looking out across the flat land with James by her side. Before them was a big tree, and it was full of starlings: twittering and screeching, they made the whole tree seem alive with the weight and the noise of them. James suddenly pushed past her into the house, and emerged a moment later with his shot-gun. He fumbled as he slotted two cartridges into it, then snapped it shut, aimed and fired twice. Jane’s ears boomed with the noise of the gun’s report, and as she watched the birds went up in a cloud of black, screeching in terror. After a few moments she went over to the rutted path where some of the birds had fallen. James ambled after her, the gun now broken across his arm. She was afraid to count the birds that were dead, there were so many of them. One bird was still alive. Its speckled feathers were clotted with blood, and it opened its beak again and again as if trying to cry, but no noise came. James saw it. He walked over to the bird, and put his foot upon its breast. He steadily pressed it down into the rutted mud, pressed harder and harder until blood spurted from the bird’s silent, gaping beak. Jane felt that she ought to look away, but could not bring herself to do so: she watched unblinkingly while her husband crushed the starling under his foot. When it was done, he turned and walked back to the house without speaking a word.

  Four days later, Ellen and Gerald were married. The coolness of the little village chapel should have been a respite from the heat of the day, but Jane felt a suffocating warmth as she sat by her father-in-law, waiting for the ceremony to begin. Looking around her she saw the coloured figures of mild saints burn in stained glass, and above the pew where she was sitting there was a window depicting the baptism of Jesus in the river Jordan. A bee had flown into the church, and was trapped at this window, striving for the light. Jane watched it obsessively, vainly, and she felt for it as it battered its little woolly body against the glass and nervously buzzed. Then the church organ groaned into life: the wedding party had arrived.

  F
or Jane, the ceremony was a nightmare. Ellen had accepted the offer of the wedding dress, and the gesture now backfired against Jane, for she felt that she was watching herself being married, and married to the wrong man. As she stared at Ellen’s narrow white back, this feeling grew so intense that she could feel stiff white lace around her wrists, and she could see the altar close to and through a veil. Jane breathed in deeply, heard the bee buzz and her father-in-law cough beside her; closed her eyes, opened them, and again Gerald was kneeling by her side. Helpless, she watched the wedding progress. James produced from his pocket a golden ring, while his wife’s soul floated back and forth through the tiny chapel, from the prie-dieu in the sanctuary, to the hard pew beneath the coloured window, where the anxious bee was still trapped.

  At the wedding breakfast, James in his role of best man was obliged to sit at the top table, and so Jane again sat beside her father-in-law. Neither of them was happy: Jane felt shy and ill at ease amongst the crowds of boisterous wedding guests; her father-in-law was discontented about everything. He complained frequently about the heat, and squirmed miserably in his good suit and stiff shirt and tie. While the speeches droned on they caught each other’s eye and smiled sadly; and when the music began, it was more than they could bear. Together they slipped out of the room, and went out into the gardens of the hotel where the wedding breakfast was being held. They linked arms and walked for a short distance, then sat down upon a bench beneath some trees. The old man loosened his tie and undid the top buttons of his shirt. Then he said something completely unexpected.

  ‘She had a great notion of James, once.’

  ‘Who had?’

  ‘Who do you think? Ellen, of course.’

  ‘Ellen?’

  ‘Aye, Ellen. She’d have married him too, if she could have managed it.’

  Jane did not reply. She was too amazed. Never had she imagined such a thing, but she did not feel angry or jealous. She felt elated. James had chosen her, and not Ellen. In her marriage, Ellen was resigning herself to a husband who was second choice, second best.

  ‘When was this?’ she asked curiously.

  Neither Jane nor her father-in-law realized that at that moment James was watching them from a window of the hotel. He was surprised to see his wife and his father under the trees, so deep in conversation; but before he could think much about it, someone came up to speak to him, and led him back into the centre of the room, where his presence was requested. James did not see, therefore, that the conversation in the garden continued for a very long time. It would have been apparent, even from the distant window, that they were speaking with increasing intensity; that the old man was becoming upset, and that Jane was attempting to soothe him. Eventually she stood up, stood with her hand on his shoulder for quite some time, then turned and walked away through the grounds of the hotel.

  The heat of the day and the strain of the occasion had given her a headache. Jane found another shaded bench, far distant from the one on which she had previously been sitting, and she stayed there for a long time, hoping that the pain would go away. Instead, it grew even worse, and at last she decided to go back into the hotel, where perhaps someone would have tablets: at least she would get a drink of cold water. She wanted to avoid seeing her father-in-law again, but the grounds were deceptively small, and when she rounded the corner of the building, she saw him on the other end of the gravel path on which she was standing. He was bent over a flower bush as though admiring the blossoms, and she was wondering if she would be able to slip past unnoticed when she saw him sway. Before she could reach him, he fell to the ground. He was speechless with pain.

  ‘I’ll go and get help,’ she said, but he caught hold of her hand and would not release her from his tight grip.

  Ellen and Gerald were leaving on their honeymoon. In the distance was the sound of voices and laughing as the wedding party came out on to the steps. Jane cried aloud for help, but no one heard her and no one came.

  A few moments later, James came around the side of the hotel. He was puzzled and annoyed by the absence of his father and his wife. People had been asking where they were. He thought that they could have made a greater effort to participate. As he walked through the garden looking for them, he was prepared to be angry. He was not prepared for what he found: Jane kneeling at the end of a gravel path, with his father, dead, cradled in her arms.

  *

  A day later, his body was brought home to be waked. They laid him out in the room which Jane had designated the nursery. Because of the hot weather they kept open the windows of the room: from the garden the smell of stocks drifted up at dusk. Once, when Jane went into the room, she found James there alone, looking at his father.

  ‘He told me once that when I was born – here in this very room – he was waiting outside. The midwife came out and she was carrying a basin. It was full of blood. She told him to take it downstairs and pour it into the drain, then bring the basin back up to the room again. He told me that when she was lying dead in this same room.’

  Those days were like a dream. The people who had been to the wedding now came back, sombre and in dark clothes. The priest who had solemnized the marriage now said the prayers for the dead. It seemed to Jane that every room in her house was now full of strangers. There was an unending round of tea and sandwiches and little buns. Sleepless for two nights, Jane found herself wishing that all this would end: that all these people would go home and that Gerald and her father-in-law would come back and let the house slide into its normal routine – and then she realized that that life had gone as absolutely as her life in the convent.

  And then, suddenly, it was all over, and they were alone. In the evening they made a meal and then, exhausted, Jane and James went upstairs. They undressed and went to bed, curled up in each other’s arms like weary children, and immediately they fell into a deep and dreamless sleep. They were so tired that they did not even close the door of the room or draw the curtains, so that when they awoke the following morning all the silence of the house, and all the emptiness of the rooms flooded up to their door. She could hear the muffled beat of the grandfather clock in the hall. It had measured out every moment of those last difficult years, and now she felt that she had awoken not only from the nightmare of the preceding two days, but of those two years. She felt as if they might as well have lasted for no more than two beats of the clock, and to measure all that past suffering in terms of time was meaningless. She lay back and let the emptiness of the house wash over her, while the dawn light streamed through the high, uncurtained windows, and fell upon the bed. Now they could begin. For the first time, the noise of the birds did not sound alien, but natural as music. She burrowed up against James until he too awoke. They looked at each other rather solemnly, and they did not speak. He touched her face and then her hair, which lay webbed out across the pillow, touched her gently, as if she were a new creature who had appeared by his side during the night, and whose reality he had to prove. And then she began to touch his body and to kiss him, her mouth opening softly and her tongue gently probing into his mouth; her hair falling like a dark veil across his face. They made love in the empty, sunlit house with more abandon and more tenderness than ever before in all their married life, and afterwards they lay in each other’s arms, silent and naked, while the wild birds still cried out over the water.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Peter walks into the room and sits down. Before him on the desk is a large Perspex block, like an outsize paperweight of the type that usually contains dried grasses, or tiny seashells. This one, contains a dead rat: supine and with its belly split open, its skin peeled elegantly back, and its veins and arteries stained a violent shade of blue and red. All its parts are neatly labelled. Shuddering, Peter quickly puts a book on top of it, and pushes it to one side. He looks up at the children before him, and against his will his glance wanders past them and around the room, which contains many other distressing sights: a gaudy wall-chart depicting a dissected eyeball; a shelf b
earing the skulls of some small mammals; a little tank in which resides a small, glum toad. Peter nervously glances back at the children. They stare at him unblinking, and he tells them to sit down. The absent biology teacher has left work for them to do, so they take out their books, open them, and begin. It is three o’clock on a Friday afternoon, and the children fidget frequently: they are bored with work, and are eagerly anticipating the weekend. Peter sympathizes with them, for he shares their feelings, but he hopes-that they will be able to contain themselves for the next hour, and allow him to maintain order. He too opens a book, but he only pretends to read, as many of the children before him only pretend to study.

  Sitting directly in front of him is a girl named Katie. Discreetly, he leans forward to see what she is drawing in her book, and feels faintly revolted when he realizes that she is laboriously copying out of her textbook a diagram representing the human embryo. He likes Katie. She is idle, stupid, good-natured, and he prefers her to the diligent, intelligent and sly girls whom he has to teach. The older the classes are, the less comfortable he feels in their presence, and he is truly afraid of the sixth formers. Katie lifts her head, and in reaching for ruler and rubber notices that her teacher is watching her. Peter is quite taken aback by the wide, suggestive grin which she gives him. He continues to watch her. A brace of thin, cheap bangles (the school rules forbid all jewellery) tinkles seductively along Katie’s plump forearm as she neatly labels the diagram, and then begins to write notes on the facing page in her sprawling, childish handwriting. Peter looks down upon the crown of her head: her thick blonde hair is held back from her face by two absurd little clips with plastic flowers attached to them. Peter is about to smile, when suddenly he remembers another fair head adorned in just such a childish fashion. The face of the girl concerned is buried in a pillow and she is weeping so loudly that Peter thinks in alarm that he has, in his ignorance, perhaps done her a serious physical injury. He moves to stroke the shuddering head, but she pushes him away and cries even more bitterly. Remembering this, Peter does not smile, but winces.