The Birds of the Innocent Wood

by Deirdre Madden

  It was difficult to break away from old habits: despite the fact that they now had the whole house to themselves, they still only felt truly at ease in their bedroom, and could never bring themselves to speak of James’s father in any other place. They felt as though it would be a violation to talk of the man’s death in the rooms which they had once shared with him. And Jane dreaded the way that her husband went back to the subject time and time again.

  One night when they were lying in bed in the darkness he whispered to her, ‘Tell me about it. Tell me how he died.’

  ‘I’ve told you before, James. There’s not really a lot to tell.’

  ‘What were his last words?’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ she said, but she said it too quickly. James had been stroking her shoulder, and stopped when she said this. He knew that she was lying.

  ‘Perhaps he said “Help me”,’ she said. ‘He was in pain. It was some little thing he was saying, I don’t remember the last words exactly, James. I’m sorry.’ He started to stroke her shoulder again, and there was a silence so long that she was beginning to think with relief that the matter was ended for another night, when he said, ‘Tell me exactly what happened, Jane.’

  ‘I’ve told you before, James,’ she said wearily.

  ‘Again. Please, Jane. I know it’s hard for you to go over it all again, but please – for me.’

  ‘When the music started,’ she said very slowly and evenly, moving closer to him as she spoke, ‘we went out into the grounds of the hotel. We walked for a little time, and then sat down. We talked. We talked for some time, and then he said that he would sit there and rest because he was very tired. I was still stiff from sitting all through the wedding and the meal, so I went for a walk – just a short walk, and when I came back, he was bent over a flower bush. When I went up to him he collapsed. As I say, I think he may have said something like “Help me”, but I can’t say for sure. He held on to me very tightly when I put my arms around him, and he died very quickly. He died just the moment before you found us.’

  They were both silent for a long time, and again she hoped that he was placated, when again he spoke, softly and persistently.

  ‘And before you left him?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You were talking?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What were you talking about, Jane?’

  Jane wanted to wail, ‘I promised that I wouldn’t tell!’ but she knew that this would open up a breach between them that would last for the rest of their lives. Of course James’s suspicions were correct. She moved even closer to him, grateful for the blackness.

  ‘James, I know what you’re thinking about, and you’re right,’ she lied. ‘When I went into the garden with your father, he had had a bit too much to drink. Because it was Ellen’s wedding, we were talking about Ellen. He told me that she had once had a great notion of you, that she even wanted to marry you, but that you would have none of it.’ James did not speak. ‘Isn’t that what you’re thinking about?’

  ‘Yes.’ She let him stay silent, and at last he said, ‘I didn’t tell you, because it didn’t seem important at first. It was just one of those things. Often people have all sorts of things in their past, and it’s foolish to think that just because you marry a person or because you love them, that you have to tell them about those things, when they’re long over and gone. That would be foolish, wouldn’t it, Jane?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, and she could hardly get the little word out for anger and jealousy; wanted to wring from him any other little secrets which he might happen to be hiding.

  ‘I was going to tell you about Ellen because she lived so near, and then I didn’t because I thought that you might be hurt. I was afraid on both counts, for I was afraid that you might hear gossip that would make it sound worse than ever it was; and I thought that if I didn’t tell you then perhaps no one would. Daddy had promised me that he would say nothing, so in the end I decided to leave well alone. Particularly after you met Ellen and didn’t take to her. It seemed cruel and pointless to annoy you with something that’s finished and gone. Are you angry with me now because I didn’t tell you?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘no, of course not.’ It was true: any jealousy she felt was killed by the relief of knowing that he would never again pester her to know what his father had told her on the day of the wedding.

  James was moved by her generous forgiveness. ‘I’m glad that you were with him when he died,’ he said. ‘He was very fond of you, you know. He couldn’t have loved you more, not if you had been his own daughter.’

  ‘I was very fond of him too,’ she said, ‘but when I die, I want to die alone.’

  ‘Jane!’

  ‘I do. I don’t want anyone to watch me dying. Will you promise me that, James? That is if the circumstances are such that you can, that you’ll leave me in peace?’

  ‘This is foolish. You’re being morbid.’

  ‘I’m not being morbid, or silly, I’m quite serious. Promise me.’

  ‘I don’t know that I want to.’

  ‘Well, you have to. Promise, no, swear, that when I’m dying that you won’t stay and watch me, but that you’ll leave me to die alone.’

  ‘Very well then,’ he said. ‘I promise.’

  ‘Swear it, James.’

  ‘All right then, silly – and you are silly, and morbid too. I promise and I swear, and there’s an end to it.’

  About a week after this incident, Jane began the process of clearing out and taking over the house to make of it the home she wanted. She began in the room which she hated most of all – the parlour – and she began surreptitiously, so that it would not upset James too much. While making plans in her mind, she rummaged through cupboards and drawers, some of which she had never even opened since coming to the house. On the first day of her task, she found at the back of a musty press a little cloth bag which, when she tipped it out on to the kitchen table, she found to contain about a score of sea shells. After careful thought, she left them there as a wordless suggestion to James of the process which she had set in motion. And when James did come in a few hours later he was on the point of speaking, but on seeing the shells he did not speak. Instead, he sat down at the table, and for a long time he simply looked at them, piled there in disorder, looked at them in silence. When at last he did stretch out his hand to touch them, he did so with hesitancy and restraint. He picked up one shell and clinked it against another, as though sounding a coin, then stroked the ridges and curves with the tips of his delicate fingers, and began to push the shells around on the table, very slowly and deliberately. As he did so, Jane noticed that, for the very first time since the death of his father, he was crying, although he made no sound at all. She saw, too, that he was pushing the shells carefully into a pattern. He took his time, and when he was finished, the cold, white shells were laid out in a perfect circle. This done, he fell again to simply looking at them in silence.

  Jane felt as though he had hit her hard with his fist.

  She could not bear to stay in the kitchen, and although she wanted to run away, she forced herself to leave very quietly. She went out of the house and went down to the orchard.

  Time and time again, she had come to a point in her life when she thought that at last she was in control: everything had changed, and everything would be all right. She had felt like this on the day she was confirmed, on the day she met James, even on the day her father-in-law died; but now she knew that nothing had changed and that nothing would ever change. Once, to realize this would have made her feel bitter and afraid, but now she felt peaceful and resigned. For the first time ever, she could accept the dignity of James having had a family, and of his having happy memories which she could never share. She respected the privacy of these memories, and felt that if he were to come out to her now and tell her the name of the resort where they had gathered the shells, or try to tell her some little anecdote about a rock pool, that she would cover her ears with her hands, and
scream so that she might not hear; she would tell him that he ought to do nothing with his memories but cherish them. Even as she thought this, she felt as though she had unclenched her fist, and spread the palm wide, so that something which had been trapped there for years arose, lighter than air, lighter than light, floated, vanished, and that she was the better person for having had the courage to let go.

  There is a certain futility in loving the dead, and a certain hopelessness in loving them too much. Jane remembered the strangeness of those years in the convent when she had loved so much two people who were dead, and in the moments when she was not loving them, she was trying to convince herself that they had ever existed. Jane now saw how the dead abandon the living, and that their going is a last lesson. In the face of their letting go, she too had to let go; had to meet their abandon of her by abandoning them. She would have to look to what was left to her – what was, like her, alive, and choose to love that.

  She left the orchard and she went back towards the house. When she entered the farmyard, she found that James had left the kitchen, and that he was standing by the back door, leaning against the jamb. Jane went up to him, and without speaking she put her hand into his small hand. After a few moments, still tightly holding his hand, she led him out across the farmyard to the side of the house, where a hawthorn was growing. With her free hand, Jane caught hold of one of the branches, and gently pulled it down.

  ‘Look,’ she said.

  She showed him something which she had found that morning, and which had touched her deeply, despite her usual revulsion for the creatures. At once she had resolved to keep the knowledge to herself, but now she was pleased at the secret she shared, and the memory she created as she made the screen of bright leaves recede, revealing to the couple a small mossy nest wedged in the crook of a branch. The nest contained three fledglings, whose red beaks gaped wide for food. They looked at them for a long time, then Jane carefully released the branch, and the nest was again hidden from sight.

  *

  The summer after the funeral was the happiest time of her life. The weather continued to be fine. They kept open the doors and windows of the house and the air, sweetened with the scent of flowers, blew through all the rooms. Jane found that her senses were heightened now, as if the death had made her more alive, her skin thinner and the impression of each smell, sight and sound was much more vivid than ever before. She found it easier to accept life in the country, and began to notice details which had previously escaped her notice. In the fold of a leaf she saw a ladybird, bright as liquid, wedged there like a drop of blood which had taken legs and life. The sound of the birds no longer had the power to frighten her, and she even found it comforting to see the little lumpish nests of house-martins stuck up under the eaves of the house. At dusk each evening she sat by an upstairs window to watch the mayflies as they drifted in hazy, mumbling clouds along the bay, like a light grey smoke.

  She now felt closer to James than ever before, and no longer wanted to force him into opening his mind to her. Although often when they were together they were as silent as they had been in the strained, early days of their marriage, the silence now was easy and relaxed. (And Jane, who had learnt throughout her life all the varied qualities and textures of silence, was highly conscious of this.) When James’s father died, it was as if a part of James himself had been cut away and buried. James was stronger for this, however, not weaker. He could not properly love his father now, and having no family, he found a family in Jane and she in him. She was by turns his wife, his sister, his daughter; and he to her was the brother, son and father she had never known, as well as being her husband. But there were often times when the significance which they had for each other went beyond names, when any word or label would have been a barrier, a limit and a lie, for the importance of each person to the other was beyond time, definition or language. Without any act of will or artificiality, they had come to a point where their lives and their selves were so bound up together that mere physical distance from each other meant nothing. When James was out working in the fields, or away at a market in the next town, Jane no longer fretted about him as she once might have done. A field or a few miles of countryside could not part them in any important sense.

  All that summer, it was obvious that Ellen and Gerald were unhappy together. Jane said nothing, but hoped that things would improve for them. Thinking back to how bad her own marriage once had been, she hoped that she and James would never again feel so distant from each other, for she did not think that she would be able to bear that again.

  Sometimes Jane would make a great effort to be fully conscious of the passage of time. She counted the days, the weeks, the months since the death, noted her precise age as a little child might do, and watched her own life pass. And she noted these things with such particular care, because on other occasions it was a matter of total indifference: time meant nothing at all. The sensation of this came most clearly to her one afternoon in late summer. She had fallen asleep in an armchair in the kitchen, and when she awoke, for a few moments her life was completely without context. She did not know if she was in bed beside her husband or not, did not know the time of day or night, nor the year nor the season. She could have been a child, a single woman, a wife or a widow, and it did not seem to her to have a jot of importance. A moment later, when she came to full consciousness, it was like birth; like falling out of nothingness to a precise point in time and space, as if her whole life had been sublimated so that she came from birth to this place in time with a complete personal history, like a gift which had been given to her. It was as though her past was not something which she had lived, but which was a story put in her mind to placate her, and to make her be – or appear to be – like other people. She lay back in the chair and she closed her eyes, protecting herself for a few moments from time and action.

  Near to the house there was a hedge, and she had watched it all that summer, as though it were a slow clock which showed the seasons instead of the hours. The hedge was made of hawthorn, thick and laced through with ivy, bindweed and briars. The briars grew throughout the summer so fast and so long that one could almost see them growing, and they at first bore flowers; pinkish pale flowers which faded and left hard, green fruit, which grew bigger, reddened, grew softer and darker, until they were black and rotting upon the hedge. The air became colder and the nights began to close in. Leaves faded and fell, and all the apples in the orchard ripened and grew big. Some fell to earth one night in a storm, but many more remained until the trees were bare of leaves and only the fruit was left, hard and green and bright. The shooting season began again. And when the autumn wore into winter, Jane thought of how she forgot each season as soon as it was over. At the height of summer, it was inconceivable that there should ever again be deep snow in the orchard, and in winter she found it hard to imagine summer’s heat. Nothing was real but the present moment. For the first time in her life she did not dread the coming of winter.

  And towards the end of that year, she told James that she was going to have a baby.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Now it is February; now it is night. Catherine wakes in darkness and in pain, but neither disturb her as she is used to both. The pain is acute and she steadies her breathing, tries to distract her mind by concentrating on a memory, as others might recite a rhyme for the sake of its simple rhythm. Perhaps if she clings hard to the memory, it will pull her up out of the pain.

  In her mind, Catherine is a child again. She is sitting in the orchard with her mother and sister, and they are playing cards: Snap, Old Maid, Happy Families. All the cards have floral designs on their backs, and each pack has a different coloured background: red, green, blue. Their mother is happy and laughing. She is wearing a white cotton dress with a wide skirt, which is overprinted with a black lattice and huge pink roses. But the woman’s face is a blur, and although the scene is a memory (it is not something which Catherine has dreamt or imagined) her mother’s face has that mysterious
quality of a face in a dream. She can see that she is laughing but she cannot see her face, has remembered everything, even the fact of her mother’s happiness and laughter: but the face she has forgotten.

  Their father is there too. He is not playing cards, but he creeps around behind the children, looking at everyone’s hands and whispering advice in the children’s ears on the strength of what he sees, helping them to cheat until they realize that he is fooling them too, playing all three women off against each other. By this time he has brought the game to a point of hopeless confusion, and the cards fly into the air as they pounce on him, beating and tickling him until he roars for mercy. Then they all fall breathless upon the grass, while the light dapples through the branches of the trees.

  And as the memory breaks over Catherine of their exploding upon their father, shrieking and pummelling him, she feels again the joy of that time, and is about to cry aloud when the pain intensifies. It stabs sharply then fades away; and as it goes the bright scene in the orchard also fades, as though it were a picture worked in stained glass, and night is falling, bleeding away the colour.

  Catherine remembers little of her childhood, and she feels that she has lost those years as absolutely as one might lose a stone in the long green grass of a field. Catherine sometimes finds things when she is out walking: marbles of coarse green glass which once stoppered bottles; fragments of blue pottery, pieces of clay pipe; and she wonder now if her memories are lost only to her, wonders if perhaps in years to come someone will find and preserve them: perhaps make sense of them and understand them as she has never been able to understand the fact of their absence.