Now, two years after the death, she sits in the kitchen and she says to her sister, ‘Do you know, I never really noticed the noise of the birds until Mama died. Now I notice it all the time.’
Catherine replies, ‘Mama once told me that on the first day she came to this house, before she was married, the sound of the birds was the very first thing that she noticed. Isn’t that strange?’
Catherine does not add that until her mother died she had never known what it was to be lonely. Since then, she has known little else.
Again they fall silent, and they are both thinking the same thought: ‘Tell her now.’ The intimacy and the honesty of the night is unexpected and unusual, and both sisters feel that if ever they can confide in each other, it must be now. Still they do not speak, but they can sense a curious tension, for as they strain for the courage to tell they each become conscious that the other is not sensing this and opening herself to listen, but that she also seems to be on the point of confiding something. And each suddenly feels that the other knows her secret; that she will speak and her sister will reply, ‘I know.’ The silence strains for a moment longer, then Sarah abruptly begins to fold up the two pieces of paper which are lying on the table. At precisely that moment Catherine rises to her feet, saying, ‘I must go on up to bed now. I’m very tired.’
‘Yes, you must be. Off you go. Goodnight.’
They both look at each other for a fraction of a second, and they both know that they have failed. They know too that such an opportunity will probably not come again.
‘Good night, Sarah. Sleep well.’
*
‘Do you know that you have two great big dark rings under your eyes? Didn’t you sleep well last night?’
‘No,’ replies Sarah.
‘You’re worried about something,’ says Peter, putting his hand up to touch her tired face. ‘Tell me what it is.’
And when Sarah hears this she wants to weep, for she remembers that Peter asked her exactly the same question at the start of the year. Soon it will be Easter. All those intervening months now seem to be a failure and a waste, a stupid attempt to pretend that time is not passing. Against the flow of the weeks she has struggled to keep life – all their lives – in stasis. And what frightens her now is to see how nearly she believed that she had succeeded in this. It had been a genuine shock to see in Catherine’s face an inkling of knowledge. Now she knows that she had believed and not believed in what she knew about her sister, believed it in her heart, but thought that her silence could hold off reality for ever. Her belief in her sister’s fate had been like the belief in resurrection which she had thoughtlessly held from childhood until the day when she looked at her mother’s corpse, for she knew then that she could never believe that the dead will rise from the grave. For a moment she wonders if she could be mistaken: could Catherine know something else? But no, she thinks, that is only a cowardly wish and not a realistic hope. Her failure to broach the matter the previous evening fills her with disgust.
And Peter. What of Peter? She has forced him into the same situation; she has made progress of any kind impossible. In January he had wanted to know why she was worried and she did not reply. Now, four months later, when he asks her the same question, still she cannot or will not answer him. If I do not make things change, she thinks, they will change in any case. I cannot control my life or other people’s lives by doing nothing. I will tell him now.
She takes his hand in her hands and she steels herself to speak. ‘Peter, I …’ She breaks off and falls silent. Lifting up his hand, she looks at it, then rubs it against her face. Closing her eyes she holds his hand in hers as a child might hold on to a parent, and she strokes the base of his thumb. Then she opens her eyes and she looks at his hand again, turning it curiously this way and that, scrutinizing the length of the fingers and the shape of the nails. Peter is puzzled and embarrassed.
‘It’s one of a pair, you know,’ he says at last, holding up his other hand. Sarah smiles. ‘What do you find so interesting in them?’
‘Nothing,’ she says, now frowning slightly. ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry, Peter. That must have seemed very odd.’ She strokes the back of his hand once more against her face, and then releases him. Glancing up at the clock on the wall she says, ‘I must be going now.’
But Peter stops her at the door. ‘You were going to say something to me, Sarah. What was it?’
Sarah turns. ‘Yes, I was going to say something, Peter. I think that all this has dragged on for far too long, going nowhere. I think that next week, we ought to go to bed together.’
*
As Sarah is walking home through the fields that afternoon, she finds a bird’s nest, blown to her very feet by a fresh spring wind. She stops, stoops and picks it up; cradles it in her hands and admires the beauty of it. The nest is made of interwoven twigs and fine green moss; inside it is smoothly rounded. She will bring it home and show it to Dada: he will be able to tell her what type of bird built it. Suddenly, here in the cold field, she remembers a visit made to the Natural History museum shortly after the death of her mother. She remembers the building’s oppressive warmth and the eerie stillness of the stuffed animals, but remembers above all the shock she felt when she saw a bird’s nest in a glass case. It was strange that this, the most inanimate object in the museum should be to her the most poignant, but she felt tremendous sadness to look at the dusty, antique nest, and its three blown eggs. Beside the nest was a scrap of yellowed paper, bearing in spiky black writing a date from the end of the last century, a woman’s name, and the name of an old demesne familiar to Sarah. Vividly she sees the demesne on a summer evening. The woman is walking. She is wearing a long dress and her hair is pinned up in heavy coils. At a particular tree she stops, and, parting the branches, she reaches up behind soft young leaves to lift down an empty nest. For some moments she stands looking at the nest as it lies there cupped in her hands, and then she decides that she will keep it.
As the sun declines the woman walks home through the innocent wood, while the hem of her long dress trails through the damp grass, and birds sing.
Now the woman and the singing, building birds are all dead, and only the nest remains, holding time like a chalice, holding that summer day, precisely dated on the piece of faded paper, and holding all the lost years that followed until the moment when Sarah stood bereaved before a glass case in a hot, dry museum, envying the woman who found the nest. Two years later, as she stands in the cold field, she knows that were she to put this nest, which she now holds in her livid hands, into a glass box and preserve it for one hundred years, at the end of that time some yet-to-be-born fool would look at the nest and envy Sarah; finding it impossible to take seriously Sarah’s suffering, for no other reason than Sarah’s distance from her in time.
Why did the woman in the long dress walk alone through the demesne? Did she seek out the nest or did she find it by hazard? Did she hold it in her hands and see in it her own mortality? Even as she touched it, did she not know that the nest would long outlast her, and that another woman would look on it when she had become forgotten dust with the bird that built it?
The woman is standing in her bedroom. The thick coils of hair have been unpinned and brushed out, and show long and dark against her white nightdress. She picks up the nest once more and looks at it, then places it on the window-sill and gets into bed, between stiff white sheets, which smell of lavender. She dims the lamp until the room is filled with perfect darkness. Lying alone in bed, the woman begins to cry quietly.
Sarah starts to walk again, and as she plods along, another meaning for the nest comes to her, a bawdy meaning, and it suddenly seems curiously apt that the nest should have been blown to her feet as she walked from the cottage today.
When she reaches the farm, Catherine is not in the scullery, nor in the kitchen, nor in the parlour. Sarah looks in all the rooms of the house, and at last she finds her sister lying in bed.
‘What are you doing here, Cathe
rine?’
‘I came up to lie down for a while. I felt tired.’
‘Just tired? Sarah asks.
Catherine looks at her sideways. ‘I had a slight pain here, but it’s gone now. I just need to have a little rest. In any case,’ Catherine says in almost apologetic tones, ‘I’m going to see the doctor again on Tuesday. What’s that you’re holding in your hands, Sarah?’
They both know that she is trying to change the subject. Sarah replies shortly, ‘A bird’s nest.’
‘Oh, let me see it.’
Catherine props herself up on her elbow, and takes the nest into her hands. As she examines it, Sarah looks down on the crown of her sister’s bowed head, and she wonders just how much Catherine knows, just how much she has guessed.
‘Where did you find this?’
‘In the field. Lying on the ground. It must have blown out of the hedge.’
To ask would be to tell. Sarah knows how shrewd Catherine can be, knows that her sister can see and understand things where others would remain ignorant. It seems impossible that she does not know: but if she does, could she really lie here so calmly looking at the nest? Only an hour ago Sarah had been convinced that Catherine knew the truth, but now she is not so sure. Perhaps she scarcely suspects what is wrong.
‘It’s very pretty.’ Catherine lifts her head, and as she hands the nest back to her sister, Sarah knows that she has understood nothing from it.
‘Rest a while longer,’ she says. ‘I’ll see to Dada’s tea.’
Quietly, she leaves the room.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
On the afternoon of her daughters’ sixteenth birthday, Jane watched James as he worked in the farmyard. She did not watch him directly, but by means of a large mirror which hung on the kitchen wall, facing the window. James’s glance was suddenly reflected straight into her eyes without any flicker of recognition crossing his face, and only then did she realize what she was doing. When James looked through the window he could see only her back: he did not know that he was being watched. Once, Jane would have been proud of such a trick, but now she felt ashamed to have done it, even inadvertently, and she moved away from the mirror.
Only the previous evening she had surprised Sarah before it, for on coming into the room she had found her daughter staring transfixed at her own reflection. Jane had said-nothing in the face of Sarah’s confusion, but now she wondered what her daughter was looking for; wondered if Sarah needed to stare so intently to see what she, Jane, had glimpsed so vividly in a cheval glass when she herself was little older than Sarah. My children are not children any more, she thought: or rather, they are shaking off childhood in the odd ways of adolescence. While Sarah stared at herself in mirrors, Catherine obsessively kept a huge diary, and Jane frowned as she thought of the latter. She often wondered about Catherine: there was in her a piousness, a priggishness almost, which her mother disliked, and which seemed to be at odds with other aspects of her personality. For Jane, what was so frustrating about her daughters was that she felt she ought to understand them, and quite often she almost did, but could never get beyond that ‘almost’. Some little points of knowledge or sympathy always shimmered just out of Jane’s access or understanding, and the older her daughters became the more conscious she was of this. She tried not to let it upset her, or make her resentful: but it did make her feel strange. Strange too was the sensation of seeing fragments of herself and James in their daughters’ faces and bodies, in their habits and mannerisms, and in the inflexions of their voices. Perhaps it frustrated her not to be able to fully understand her daughters, because it felt like a failure to understand herself. She realized now that when she looked into the face of either Catherine or Sarah, she felt as though she were looking into a mirror, the reflection of which was not quite true. The essence of herself was hidden in her daughters, and she could never quite find it. She wished that today she could say to Catherine and Sarah, ‘Have I been a good mother to you?’ but then felt sad, because she realised the futility of such a question.
Crossing to the window, she looked out into the farmyard where James was working. He was removing the downspout from the wall of the shed, and this puzzled her, for he had not mentioned that it needed to be mended, nor had she noticed anything wrong with it.
Having worked loose the last screws, James wrenched the downspout free from its brackets and shook it hard. A little brown sparrow tumbled out stunned upon the ground. It lay there for a moment, made a few abortive hops across the yard, lay again, and then made a short, uncertain flight to a nearby wall, where it was out of reach of the farm cat, and could sit to recover itself fully before flying away. Jane saw James watch the bird’s shaky progress, then he turned back to the downspout, and began to fix it to the wall again.
Suddenly she said aloud to James, ‘It wasn’t my fault.’ But she had forgotten the pane of glass which separated them, and James worked on oblivious. It was two months to the day since her pains had begun, pains which she kept secret from everyone, for her childhood fear of hospitals remained, and this was sufficient to help her hide her illness from all around her. Gripping the edge of the window-sill, she slowly counted to twenty. The pain subsided, but she knew in her heart that she could not hold it off for ever simply by secrecy and silence.
James had finished his work at the downspout, and was coming towards the farm. Turning away from the window, Jane prepared to smile and greet him.
*
Five nights after their sixteenth birthday, Catherine and Sarah awoke just after midnight to the sound of their father’s voice.
‘That’s blood, Jane,’ he was saying, ‘nothing but pure, pure blood. Christ, Jane, don’t die on me … don’t die, please don’t die.’
The sisters arose from their beds and hurried to their parents’ bedroom. The door was open and the light was on. Jane lay on the floor where she had evidently fallen, and James knelt beside her, half cradling her in his arms. The bottom half of Jane’s nightdress and an alarmingly large part of the carpet on which she lay was darkly stained with blood. Her face was very pale and she was shivering, but she was fully conscious. When her daughters came into the room and stood staring in horror, she looked at them askance, as though they had surprised their parents in something intimate, and should have had the decency to go away again at once.
‘Go one of you downstairs and phone for an ambulance,’ said James.
‘No,’ said Jane quickly.
‘Do as I say!’ James shouted. Sarah ran from the room.
‘I want a drink of water,’ Jane said, and Catherine was about to go and fetch one for her when James said, ‘No. When you get to the hospital, they might want to operate on you, and you’re not allowed to drink before an operation.’
‘I’m not going to the hospital,’ Jane said stubbornly. She was still shivering. ‘I want a drink.’
‘For Christ’s sake have sense, Jane,’ James cried. ‘You can’t lie here on the carpet until you bleed to death. Of course you’ll have to go to the hospital.’
Jane began to cry querulously.
‘I don’t want them to operate on me. I don’t want to go to hospital. It’s not fair, James. I want a drink of water, and I’m cold.’
More gently now, James said to her, ‘Jane, you don’t know what it is to me not to be able to give you a drink, but I can’t. Your life might depend on it.’ Reaching behind him, he pulled two blankets off the bed and wrapped them around Jane. He held her tightly in his arms and told her not to cry.
By the time the ambulance arrived, she was too weak to protest about going to hospital, and the two blankets, like the nightdress and the carpet, were heavily stained with blood. She was taken away by strangers: the family followed behind in the car.
At the hospital, they were made to wait for a long time in the corridor while the doctors worked on Jane. When at last they went into the stiflingly warm little ward, they tried hard not to show the shock which they felt to see the wires, the flickering monitors, and th
e little plastic bagful of blood which hung above the bed, and which was connected to Jane’s arm by a thin tube. She was, despite all this, still conscious.
‘I feel a bit better now,’ she said. ‘I’m not as cold as I was when I was in the house.’ Her voice was very weak, and James had to put his ear close to her mouth to hear what she was saying.
‘Tell the girls to go out again for a moment,’ she said. ‘I want to talk to you alone.’
Catherine and Sarah left the little ward. A nurse hovered around the other bed, while James leaned over his wife.
‘James,’ she whispered, ‘I’m going to die.’
‘No you’re not,’ he said desperately. ‘I thought you might in the house, but now you’re going to be all right. Now you’re in the best place.’
‘I’m going to die, James, I know it.’
‘Perhaps you shouldn’t talk, Jane. You’re only upsetting yourself. Try to save your energy.’
She closed her eyes and was quiet for a while, until James began to wonder if she had fallen asleep, or even into a coma, when she whispered something more. He did not catch what it was, and he leaned over her more closely.
‘I said: what will you do without me?’
‘Don’t ask me that,’ he pleaded. ‘You’ll be better, Jane, in time.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘You’ll be lonely, James. Once it would have worried me. When I was young, I was jealous: you know that.’ There were long pauses between each sentence, and she smiled faintly. ‘If I had been dying in the first years after our marriage, my biggest worry would have been that you would marry someone else. That or you’d many Ellen.’
The Birds of the Innocent Wood Page 15