The Birds of the Innocent Wood

by Deirdre Madden

  James smiled uncomfortably, and stroked her hand.

  ‘I could marry her yet,’ he said teasingly, but as soon as the words were out, he regretted them. Jane did not seem upset, however, but thoughtful.

  ‘No, you couldn’t. A man can’t marry his half-sister. Your daddy told me that. In the garden. At the wedding. When was that, James? How long ago?’

  He did not answer.

  ‘I’m confused now,’ she whispered. ‘And I’m tired. I’m so tired, James.’

  The nurse came over to the bed, and asked him to leave the ward for a moment.

  When James stepped out into the corridor, he was crying. Catherine and Sarah, on seeing his face, understood something different, and when the doctor came out some time later to tell them that Jane had died (and died more suddenly at the end than they had expected would be the case), he was surprised to find that the whole family was already in tears.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Sarah is standing before the kitchen mirror. She has been looking at the reflection of her own face for hours, until it has become strange to her, until it has disintegrated and become meaningless; and until it has become familiar again. Enormous self-hatred is born of this familiarity; it is more than she can bear. Raising her arm she walks towards the mirror, but when she strikes it it does not break. Instead, the mirror yields as though it were made not of glass but of vertical water, and Sarah passes through to the other side. She thinks with relief, It’s over now: I will never again have to look at my own hateful face, but when she turns around she finds to her horror that the back of the mirror also offers a perfect reflection. In anger and fright she beats upon the mirror, which now behaves as the glass which it is, and shivers into a million bits. The broken shards cut into her hands and her wrists, but still she continues to thrash forwards, until her hands are dripping with blood.

  She awakens to the warm, empty silence of her bedroom at night, and her soft, clenched hands are intact and not bleeding. For a moment she is frightened, not because she thinks that she is dreaming still, but because in the confusion of waking she thinks that she is lying still beside Peter. She feels again for a moment the shock of that, for after they had made love what she felt was not a mild sadness, but a devastating loneliness, and despair to find that the complete oblivion which she had wanted had passed her by.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Sarah does not reply, and Peter moves to kiss her again, but she turns her head aside and she wishes for the blackness which there is now, in the night, when she is again alone. But turning back quickly she leans her face against him thinking, life, what is it only this? A steady beat in the chest rather than silence, a body that is warm and moving rather than one that is still and cold.

  When she arrived at the cottage that afternoon, he had brought her to his bedroom and left her alone there for some moments. She had not been in his room for years, and although she recognized certain of his possessions, the overall effect was of great strangeness. She felt as though she were in a stranger’s room. All the objects which she saw there should have given her clues about the identity and personality of the room’s owner, but instead confused her. Picking up a book from the table beside the bed she turned aside. It seemed impossible that the person who would read such a book would choose to wear the clothes she saw hanging on the back of a chair. The apparent incompatibility of all these things made her doubt the truth and reality of the person for whom she waited. The created persona did not ring true. She was suspicious and frightened. But I do know him, she thought, I know him better than I know anyone else, apart from Catherine and Dada. When she called to him then, she tried to be casual, and was surprised by the panic in her own voice which she found she could not control. ‘Peter,’ she said loudly, ‘Peter, come here to me now.’

  Was it because she had been so foolish as to imagine all these things that his face looked ridiculously familiar when he came back into the room (a room which at once looked perfectly natural as his home, a room utterly artless in its arrangement)? He did not merely look familiar: he looked too familiar, and now, in the night, as she remembers that moment, Sarah remembers also the moment in the dream from which she has just awoken, when the image of her own face was over familiar to her, and disturbing. How well do I know him? she had thought as he came towards her. In some ways I know him as well as I know myself, and in others, I don’t know him at all. In the dream mirror the thick glass had been bevelled at the edges, and caught the light in colours, which showed as they would show in the water, air and light of a rainbow, but when she moved her head there was a point, a fine, fine line at which the colours vanished, and then she could see only the thick green of the glass. When she made love with Peter, her knowledge of him shimmered on just so fine an edge, between knowing everything and knowing nothing.

  *

  When she thinks of it now, already she can think of it with a certain cold distance, for already it is in the past. That distance was already there when she left the cottage to come home. She had thought that she might feel shame, guilt or regret, but instead she felt nothing at all. The feelings of strangeness and loneliness had passed, and she sensed only that she had failed in whatever her obscure purpose had been.

  On returning to the farm, Sarah found the kitchen empty. She went to Catherine’s room, fearing to find her in bed again, but that room was also deserted. She stood for a few moments looking around her sadly, as she had looked around Peter’s room. The same feeling of strangeness and contrivance was there, the same difficulty in believing the reality of the person who lived there. I know Catherine. She is my sister. I know her. Her gaze came to rest upon the big thick diary which sat upon the bedside table. A little thought then spawned in her mind. Shocked, she quashed it, and turned away.

  But the little thought returned and returns; comes to her now in the night, and it grows into schemes which she turns over shamefully in her mind as she lies here in the blackness. She does not reject these plans, but perfects and attempts to rationalize them, even though she knows that what she is considering is wrong.

  The following day is Sunday, when Catherine rarely does any work, but today she does nothing at all, and leaves the preparation of all the meals to Sarah.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Sarah asks.

  ‘I’m tired,’ is all she will reply.

  Sarah does not dare to press her further, but now it is of supreme importance that she knows the extent of Catherine’s knowledge. On the Sunday night she again lies awake for hours, and the memory of Peter barely enters her mind: instead she is thinking of her sister, and thinking of her plan.

  On the Monday morning Catherine does not appear in the kitchen. Sarah goes to her room, and finds her awake but still in bed.

  ‘Will I call the doctor?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sick …’

  ‘I’m sick, but I’m not so very sick.’

  Sarah leaves her, and does the morning chores on the farm. On the kitchen table, Catherine’s diary is sitting where Catherine wrote in it the night before, and neglected to put it away. Its usual place by her bedside is due to habit and convenience, not mistrust of her family. Sarah’s every second thought is with the book, and her glance is drawn to it again and again.

  In the early afternoon, Catherine says to Sarah, ‘Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps you should phone for the doctor.’

  ‘I probably won’t be able to get him now. You should have allowed me to call him this morning.’

  ‘He’ll come for me,’ says Catherine quietly. Sarah knows that she is right, and her sister’s confidence frightens her. It is later, when the doctor is with her sister, that she decides what she will do, and her resolution is as firm and as cold as her choice concerning Peter. When the doctor has finished, she politely sees him out, and is uneasy when he tells her that he has given Catherine a shot which will make her sleep until morning. It is as if fate is conspiring with her in what she is planning to do. She waits that night un
til her father has gone to bed, and then she sits down at the kitchen table, and she draws Catherine’s diary towards her. She is fully conscious that what she is doing is irrevocable, and that she is unlikely ever to forget anything which she is about to see. Then she thinks of Peter, shrugs, and opens the book.

  Sarah turns at first to the most recent pages, and finds in essence what she had hoped and expected would be there. Catherine knows that she is ill, but is not aware of just how ill, although the doubt and suspicion is clearly there: ‘I wonder sometimes just how serious it is, for I cannot believe that something so painful and which has gone on for so long can be insignificant. But how serious is serious?’ Her sister’s want of full knowledge makes Sarah want to weep, and she is sad to learn that Catherine has suffered much more than she has ever admitted.

  So she does not know. But this thought is at once followed by a realization that simply because Catherine’s diary is written for herself alone it is not by necessity honest. Perhaps her need to lie and to conceal her knowledge of the truth from herself is even greater than her need to hide it from her sister. Sarah knows then the emptiness of her act. She has broken faith with her sister, and she has learnt nothing.

  But health is not her sister’s only preoccupation. As Sarah leafs through the diary she is surprised at the frequency with which her own name and Peter’s occur. She tries to resist reading in detail, but just as she is about to close the book she sees a paragraph in which their names are mentioned together.

  Sarah does not doubt for a moment the truth of what Catherine has written. She knows now what she should have guessed long ago; what her sister guessed and knew from the same too-familiar features which so recently puzzled her. Sarah quickly closes the book and pushes it away from her.

  The following morning, Catherine wakes early. She lies in bed thinking of the doctor’s visit; and she remembers falling into a deep sleep soon after his departure. She can hear Sarah moving about in other parts of the house, but she does not come to her sister’s room. Catherine waits. Time passes, and still Sarah does not come. Catherine begins to feel afraid. She resolves to wait until her sister enters of her own free will, but at last her nerve breaks. Hearing her sister’s step outside her door she calls loudly, ‘Sarah? Sarah, come in to me here.’

  Sarah quietly enters the room. She does not look up. She has been crying, and she does not speak. Catherine had planned to ask her straight out: ‘What did the doctor say?’ but she cannot manage it; nor can she manage the fatuous requests which she had held in reserve: ‘Will you open the window for me, will you bring me a drink?’ She says nothing at all, but she turns her face away, and instinctively puts her hands over her eyes.

  The door of the bedroom clicks closed as Sarah goes out.

  EPILOGUE

  ‘Did you rise before the dawn to see the sun dance?’

  It is Easter Sunday morning. Catherine is holding a cup of tea, and on the bedside table there is a chocolate egg wrapped in brightly coloured tinfoil. Both of these things have just been given to her by her sister, who smiles now and says, ‘Of course I didn’t. I say every year that I will, but you know that I never do.’

  ‘I should have risen myself,’ says Catherine, ‘this year above all.’ Sarah does not reply, and Catherine sips the hot, sweet tea. Suddenly, Sarah leaves the room, and Catherine lies back upon the pillows, utterly dispirited. But she is wrong in what she has understood by this, because Sarah returns quickly, carrying the delft bowl in which five pink tulips have blossomed to perfection. She clears a space on the bedside table, and sets the bowl down. For a moment, the sisters admire the flowers in silence.

  ‘The nice thing is,’ Catherine says at last, ‘that when the flowers fade, you can plant the bulbs out in the garden, and then they’ll come up again year after year, like the daffodils on the big demesne.’

  ‘Yes.’

  When Sarah glances from the stiff formal tulips to her sister’s face, she sees there suddenly her own mortality. The previous night she had gone to church in the hope of finding some comfort, but in the ceremonial fire, the water and the light, she had found instead that there were things beyond comfort Now she knows that such things must be recognized, and that to seek to be comforted for them is worse than cowardly, it is merely banal. She also knows to hold her imagination well back from any notion of redemption, resurrection, or how the look of the room will affect her when her sister is gone.

  ‘Sarah?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Open the window for me, please.’

  The spring air is cool, and the sisters can hear more clearly now the noise of the birds.

  ‘Will you leave me now for a while? I want to sleep again.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Sarah lifts the empty teacup, and Catherine says, ‘Thank you again for the chocolate egg.’

  As she speaks, Sarah is crossing the room. She stops by the door, turns and looks back at the thin face upon the pillow. The sisters both smile. Then Sarah shrugs, and she says lightly, ‘Happy Easter, Catherine.’

  ‘Happy Easter.’

  About the Author

  Deirdre Madden is from Toomebridge, Co. Antrim. Her novels include The Birds of Innocent Wood, Nothing is Black, One by One in the Darkness, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and Authenticity. Her novel Molly Fox’s Birthday also was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She teaches at Trinity College, Dublin and is a member of the Irish Arts Academy Aosdana.

  By the Same Author

  HIDDEN SYMPTOMS

  REMEMBERING LIGHT AND STONE

  NOTHING IS BLACK

  ONE BY ONE IN THE DARKNESS

  AUTHENTICITY

  Copyright

  First published in 1988

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2012

  All rights reserved

  © Deirdre Madden, 1988

  The right of Deirdre Madden to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–29806–8