The Birds of the Air

by Alice Thomas Ellis

  The squirrel was accepted – nay, loved – since he was a solitary celibate squirrel and caused no trouble at all, living as he did up a tree, an honorary bird. Had he been one of a group, things would have been different and the council called in. As there were no children there were no pet rabbits. Moles, voles and mice were severely discouraged, and any resident of the Close would have died if he had met a rat. Foxes were said to forage occasionally in the dustbins of people who lived nearer to the downs, but they hadn’t yet ventured in to the Close. There were no toads, frogs or newts, since the garden pond had been filled in. And as for bears – fierce, unfriendly, foul-breathed and not very bright (when transfixed by the spear of the plucky Finn, they would grasp the shaft in their long-clawed paws and, rather than attempt to wrench it out, push it further into their black ursine heart) – it was inconceivable that a bear should venture within a thousand miles of Innstead. Yet in every house in the Close there were effigies, icons and books of tales about all these animals; china statues of moles and toads in bonnets and shawls; watercolours of mice up cornstalks and rabbits and frogs in rings with fairies. Each resident had kept his own or his children’s teddy bear and the children’s classics which had sustained their youth. One year the toy manufacturers had intro -duced a new line of teddies bearing the facial similitude of the Poet Laureate (himself a teddy-bear fancier), and a number of children had been badly frightened.

  The totem of the English was a small animal – furry, stuffed and articulate. Winnie the Pooh vied with the Queen (God trailing in the distance) for the forefront of the mind of the English middle class. An English diplomat imprisoned in a foreign country, kept for month upon month in solitary confinement, thrown into spiritual confrontation with himself, emerged from captivity and wrote a book about a baby seal who preferred T-bone steak to fish. Even the leaders of the political parties had come to resemble little animals. On the left an old teddy; his stuffing, his credibility, leaking a little now. On the right a mouse – a shop mouse, her head stuck in a yellowed meringue, a mean little mouse bred on cheese rind and broken biscuit and the nutrition-less, platitudinous parings of a grocer’s mind. The erstwhile leader of the middle party was a fox – rather tired now – his fine brush matted and drooping, his cunning mask despondent. Did any other people, Mary wondered, apart from Red Indians, make such a fuss of creatures which in reality they were in the habit of chasing, shooting, poisoning, trapping or beating to death with sticks? Mrs Marsh had bought Kate a book about rabbits, ‘suitable for the older child’ but widely read by supposedly normal adults.

  Barbara’s car must be quite near now. It would probably be inching down the crowded derelict road that led out of the metropolis, past boarded shop windows, car-hire firms, Chinese take-aways, shops selling saris, pram and bicycle shops, stretches of Georgian houses ruined and blackened by despair, municipal offices neat and well lit, small factories, the baths, very low churches (theologically speaking) with very large notices of warning and exhortation aimed principally at the godfearing immigrant community. Then it would follow a stretch of road lined with huge pubs, small houses and car dumps. This was a route that missed the best of Innstead – the private schools, discreet hospitals, well-tended gardens and the old village street, so carefully restored and maintained. It merely cut across a small section of the downs and came out again into a wilderness of intersecting highways mad with cars speeding through the dead common, asphyxiated bushes and bleached grass that shrank away from the roadside. Stained paper drifted about these bushes. Under them lay old petrol cans and – mysteriously – the rusting discarded organs of motor cars. This was dangerous country, where no one walked save for the occasional amateur botanist in search of the elusive winter aconite, or young couples driven from the comfort of the three-piece suite by men and boys intent on Match of the Day. The walkers would be as likely to stumble upon the tights-strangled bodies of young women thrust into plastic bags and bound with electrical flex as find the aconite or peace with each other. It was always bad ground, ill-used and perilous, that lay between town and country. Even the piglets that sometimes escaped from the few decaying farms eschewed it and ran squealing down the road that led to the coast. It was astonishing, unbelievable, that a short though nervous and hurried walk across the intersections and through the five sets of traffic lights would bring the pedestrian in a minute to the saccharine silence of Honeyman’s Close, to the unique, inimitable cleanliness and warmth of the small, prosperous suburban home, to the well-appointed, walled, enfoliaged, grass-laid peace of modest but sufficient wealth – neater, more stable and more contained than great riches, and far more comfortable, but not like the wild sweetness of Melys y Bwyd, ‘Sweet is Life’ . . .

  The sudden loud rebuke of a motor horn gave Mary warning. Whenever Sebastian was in the car something happened to Barbara’s driving that caused other motorists to sound their horns, swear or take evasive action according to temperament.

  With a splash of gravel Barbara drew up.

  They looked oddly at home, thought Mary – not at all out of place, as her own few friends always did. This cloistral suburb had more in common with the university than she had realised. Intellect was lacking here certainly, but exclusivity and the calm conviction of rightness were not. Honeyman’s Close too had its own aims, values and customs set apart from the rest of the world. Therefore it ill became Sebastian Lamb to gaze about him with such weariness. Only Sam was incongruous, and Mary found it no easier than anyone else to imagine a situation in which he might not be.

  The worst was over now. Her relations had leapt into the silence with noisy cries of greeting, like people on first reaching the sea, but now were merely moving about in it, talking in normal tones.

  Two opposite doors stood open in the Close, Evelyn framed in one and Mrs Marsh running from the other.

  ‘You’ve arrived,’ announced Evelyn welcomingly.

  Sebastian was forced to respond in agreement since Barbara, Kate and Mrs Marsh were all mixed up together and Sam seldom responded to anything. Sebastian raised and lowered his hand, his tweed hat still on his head. Hatraising had gone out, but Evelyn hadn’t been told so and thought him very rude for an educated man.

  ‘I’ll see you all later,’ she said in the voice she used on the telephone, and closed her door.

  Barbara stood with her mother and daughter in the middle of the little bedroom hoping she wasn’t going to cry again. It was so warm and soft and gently lit, and her mother was so pleased to see her. Barbara was just beginning to recover from her lifelong and entirely mistaken conviction that Mary was their mother’s favourite, only to be presented by Sebastian with a new, even more dangerous, rival. It wasn’t fair.

  Mrs Marsh fussed, full of joy, about the double bed upon which, obscuring the pale-green counter-pane, lay an assortment of things which she was going to give to her younger child. ‘Aunt Gwennie’s fur,’ she said, ‘and some beautiful underwear she never wore. And the cashmere sweater she bought in the summer sales – I know because I went with her to get it – and her dear little watch, and her jade brooch . . .’

  She stopped, aware of a lack of enthusiasm. Kate had seized the watch and was crying, ‘Oh Mummy, look. Oh Granny, what a dear little watch. I always wanted a little watch . . .’

  Mrs Marsh looked slowly at Barbara with the begin nings of apprehension. Another sad daughter would be too much to bear. Mary had been quite indifferent to all the pretty things. ‘It looks as though there’d been a cat burglary,’ she’d said, ‘rather than a death. All those little thievables.’ Mrs Marsh had wondered then what Mary had done with Robin’s belongings – but there hadn’t been many . . . She had begun to understand, with real fear, that Mary was waiting – such terrible, greedy waiting as she had never contemplated. The woman who had been her pretty, merry little daughter was waiting for the dead to return and, failing that, was waiting, as a lover waits, for death to come and get her.

  Mrs Marsh could think of no suitable reb
uke to fit such a case. ‘The coat is a bit big on me,’ she said uncertainly to Barbara, ‘but you’d look lovely in it.’

  Lovely. Suddenly Barbara’s misery fell away. She would look lovely on Christmas Day. Hunter was coming. They would walk together up the hill to the old village and she would drink something sweet in the nice pub with the open fire and the genial landlord. Seb would come to find her and see her laughing at Hunter’s conversation and Hunter sitting a little too close. Then she would choose between them . . .

  She put on the coat and straightened her shoulders.

  ‘You look lovely, Mummy,’ piped Kate.

  ‘A perfect fit,’ said Mrs Marsh.

  Poor Mary was looking very plain, thought Barbara irrelevantly.

  Mary was tired – so tired she felt she would crumble to ash at a touch, like a burnt message. Perhaps the Grim Reaper was after her in earnest now. Death had kept very close all year – taken Robin, friends, aunts, a cousin. Even the Pope had died twice that year. It had been like autumn for people.

  ‘I get very tired,’ she said decisively to Seb and Sam. She didn’t think they would want to follow her into her room and make conversation, but it was as well to be on the safe side.

  Seb sat down in an armchair in the little front room, and Sam idled about the kitchen and hallway. All three people on the ground floor wondered with varying degrees of desperation how they were to survive the next few days.

  ‘Don’t touch, Sam darling,’ said his grandmother, coming downstairs.

  Sam moved away from the arched and illuminated recess with its glass shelves of treasures – china shepherdesses, little bowls and netsuke – and they edged round each other.

  ‘Why don’t you go for a run in the Close before it gets dark?’ suggested Mrs Marsh. ‘Call on Evelyn and she’ll show you her alligator.’

  She had no hope at all that Sam would do this and so wasn’t surprised when he didn’t. ‘Go and unpack your things,’ she said. ‘You’re sleeping in the same room as your father.’

  No one but Kate was entirely pleased with the sleeping arrangements, but Sam was horrified. He was shy of looking at his father. Knowledge of the Thrush hung between them like soiled sheets.

  ‘Shleep on de shofa,’ he offered.

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Mrs Marsh, who had just replaced the still immaculate Tudor print covers with a rather cooler pattern of cream roses on a green ground to match the carpet.

  ‘Shleep on de floor,’ said Sam hopelessly.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Sam. There are two very comfortable beds in that room and you’ll sleep in one of them.’ She was glad she’d had daughters. Boys were too difficult.

  The evening passed off quietly enough. It started early with a simple supper of omelettes and peas and toast, followed by stewed apricots and cream, which they all ate standing up in the kitchen, except for Mary and Seb, who had theirs on trays in the back and front rooms respectively. Sebastian had a little stilton too, out of a jar – an early Christmas present to a lady at the W.I., who hadn’t liked it at all and had passed it on to Mrs Marsh, knowing that she would have a man staying over the holiday.

  Sebastian took his papers to the pub. Sam lay in the front room and watched television. Evelyn came across for company, and they all crowded into the kitchen and made the mince pies.

  Mary thought about what Sam would doubtless describe as ‘birf ’n’ deaf’. Robin’s death, the sudden absolute cessation of vaulting, joyful life, seemed to her quite as astonishing and worthy of remark as that other more widely acclaimed and admired miracle, birth. Despite her anger, she thought that God deserved more notice for this extraordinary trick. Even inclined as she was to side in rebellion with the Son of the Morning, she couldn’t but praise God for his infinite invention. It was as funny, that sudden shocking silence, as Jack in the Box, a sleight-of-hand performed by a master.

  Mrs Marsh felt strange the next morning, coming into the hallway through the front door instead of down the stairs, taking off her coat and gloves before she made a cup of tea. The tea she had drunk at Evelyn’s had been wishy-washy. Her egg had been under-cooked, and she had had to scrape her spoon surreptitiously with her nail before using it. Evelyn didn’t rinse the washing up, and her sink and draining board were faintly scummed with dirt. She was the only slovenly resident in the Close – but also, allowed Mrs Marsh, the kindest, in spite of her irritating ways.

  Mrs Marsh hoped briefly that the bed had been aired, and set about putting her own kitchen to rights. Barbara or Kate had left the washing-up brush on the wrong side of the sink and the teapot on the draining board instead of the shelf above the fridge. Remedying these little errors, she began her annual litany aloud. ‘Sprouts . . .’ she recited. ‘Chestnuts, sausages, extra bread, extra milk, nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, eggs, lentils, enough potatoes, enough sherry . . .’

  She paused as Barbara came into the kitchen. ‘Hello, darling . . . Peas, coffee, onions, chocolate, preserved ginger . . . brown sugar . . . cornflour . . . cream . . .’

  Mary, lying awake next door, could visualise her mother, thumbnail hitched under her top teeth, squinting concentratedly at the shelves of the kitchen cabinet. ‘Enough salt, brandy for the pudding . . .’ She’d forgotten something. There was a muted shriek and a scurry. ‘Barbara,’ she said, ‘I’ve got no sponge fingers and no glacé cherries for the trifle . . . oh.’

  ‘I’ll get them,’ said Barbara, sharing her mother’s serious appraisal of the deficiency, ‘and I’ll get some more butter and some biscuits, in case we run out of bread, and some crumpets for tea time and some mushrooms for breakfast. Have you got cloves?’

  Sam rose astonishingly early for him and left the house at midday before his mother and Kate returned from the shops.

  ‘Goinasee a frien’,’ he told his grandmother nonchalantly.

  ‘All right, dear,’ she said without thinking, as she peeled chestnuts, hot from boiling water.

  ‘Where’s Sam?’ asked the returned Barbara as she pulled off Kate’s woolly hat and removed her own sheepskin coat.

  ‘Gonna – gone to see a friend,’ said Mrs Marsh, realising simultaneously that Sam had no friends in Innstead.

  ‘He’s gone to London,’ said Barbara in a fright. Sam had friends in London – the children of Seb’s publisher. They were awful, with spiky hair and pink eyes. Hunter had once brought them down for the day to give his boss a bit of a rest. She had been pleased until they arrived, thinking a publisher’s children would be nice friends for hers. She had had such a shock. They wore black plastic clothes hung with steel chains and had all perfected the use of the glottal stop.

  ‘I’ll ring Hunter,’ she said, conscious even through her panic of pleasure at the thought of speaking to him.

  ‘Why?’ asked Mrs Marsh puzzled.

  ‘Because . . .’ began Barbara. ‘Oh never mind. Sam’s gone to see Seb’s publisher’s children.’ It sounded so respectable, spoken aloud. ‘He’s Hunter’s boss.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Mrs Marsh.

  ‘If he’s not back by five I’ll ring Hunter then,’ said Barbara, calming a little. She didn’t want to appear hysterical to Hunter: frail and unjustly treated, yes – but not a nuisance.

  She rang the office at five, but Hunter had left. She rang his house, but he hadn’t got back yet. Having drinks with some literary woman, she thought savagely, while I’m out of my mind with worry.

  Sam returned at seven. And when he did, his hair was green.

  ‘Aaargh,’ said Barbara, quite unaffectedly, as she opened the door and the outside light shone on him.

  Mrs Marsh tottered back, her hands to her mouth, realising, not for the first time, that it was quite possible thoroughly to dislike one’s grandchildren for the trouble and pain they caused one’s own child.

  ‘S’a fash’n,’ said Sam complacently.

  ‘It looks very Christmassy,’ said Mary.

  ‘Sebastian,’ called Barbara. ‘Sebastian.’ When the door of the front
room remained closed, she opened it herself and thrust her verdant-haired son through it. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Look what he’s done. He’s dyed his hair green.’

  Sebastian glanced up from his papers. He found his wife’s twitching face far more irritating than his son’s green head. He looked a little disgusted but merely remarked that it would doubtless grow out if it didn’t rot, and requested everyone to be quiet as he was trying to work.

  ‘But . . .’ said Barbara, gasping, and after a while, as she still stood there, he got up and closed the door in her face.

  Mrs Marsh watched quietly, admitting to herself that she found her son-in-law loathsome. She even went in to speak to him and was treated to the faint weasel gleam of his smile. ‘Barbara worries too much about the children,’ he told her.

  Mrs Marsh stared speechlessly at his pale face, his gold-rimmed spectacles and his pale hair. His head looked as though it had been lightly buttered – so sleek, so unguent and so slight. He made her think of hard roads under a film of rain, shallow and dangerous; of slugs and Nazis and the minister she sometimes met in the terminal ward of the cancer hospital when she was arranging the flowers . . .