The Birds of the Air

by Alice Thomas Ellis

  ‘Well, she can’t be controversial,’ said Mrs Marsh, observing her daughter’s expression. ‘You haven’t been to church for ages,’ she added, taking the offensive. Both her children had been brought up in their father’s faith, but she herself had never converted and Barbara had naturally lapsed when she married Sebastian.

  Her mother’s train of thought satisfied Mary that she was right in estimating that the belief in monarchy was religious in character rather than secular and patriotic.

  ‘I’ll get Father Whatsit to pop in and see you later this week,’ Mrs Marsh said rather threateningly. ‘All right,’ said Mary placidly. She wasn’t an enthusiast. She was resigned to faith rather than a believer, having no doubts – no doubts, that is, as to the existence of God. Of his mood, his intentions, she wasn’t sure. She saw no reason to suppose that he meant her well in the accepted meaning of that term. He didn’t, as her mother did, wish her a nice house, a nice husband, nice children, a well-trained pet, happiness, longevity and a sherry in the evenings. Nor did she want any of these things. She sometimes thought he might have left her Robin, but that wasn’t his way. Her anger stopped short of God and was sustained by her hatred of death and the little demons in whom she saw herself reflected: destructive, gleeful, purple-tongued and bloody-mouthed – eternally mindless and beyond appeal. There was no point in fearing these unpleasant little gods since she knew they were subject to the limits of her consciousness and would never make it across the wilderness. Even Death, the jaunty jester-king, would flag before he reached the end of the wilderness. God was beyond the wilderness, but God without Robin was not enough and Mary, like an abandoned dog, couldn’t decide whether to stay in life, where she had last seen her darling, or to set off in pursuit.

  Sebastian, Barbara and Kate went for a walk, surprising everybody with this evidence of family solidarity. Barbara wanted to clear her head before Hunter arrived. She had begun, inevitably, to wonder, as the time approached, whether her dreams were capable of realisation. Would The Bear, for instance, be open on Christmas Day? Would Hunter invite her to accompany him to The Bear? Did he even know of its existence? Could she suggest that he accompany her? Hardly. She began to construct a new fantasy in which all her family went for a walk – Mary could go to sleep – leaving Hunter time to begin to woo her. That would be enough to start with. The thought of illicit sexual congress in the Close made her nervous. A glance, a touch, would be enough, thought starving Barbara, sweating slightly in her sheepskin in the damp dull day.

  Sebastian said nothing. He muttered occasionally, but not of his mistress. He was thinking of his work. Kate, at her most determinedly winsome, gambolled. She picked leaves and remarked on their symmetry; she nibbled berries and made faces; she pointed out features on the houses that they passed and recited bits of poetry. Even Barbara began to find her annoying and to wish she had left her behind. But it wasn’t impossible that Mrs Marsh and Evelyn would also leave the house and that Kate, her ewe lamb, would be alone with Mary. In Barbara’s mind her sister had taken on a mythic, fairy-tale quality, a witchlike aspect, step-motherly, greedy and cruel. Because surely, she muddled, anyone so bitterly bereft must be dangerous. It was true that Mary had within herself that ill-will which only the primitive fully understand that the dead bear to the living. She was spoiled as the raped, or the dead themselves, are spoiled – changed beyond all chance of worldly repair – but not dangerous. She didn’t care enough about anything to be dangerous.

  *

  Mary had offered to do the sprouts, since there seemed to be no reason why she shouldn’t.

  ‘You don’t need to cut crosses on their bottoms,’ said her mother, gasping for breath as she flew about. ‘I found out years ago it isn’t necessary.’

  ‘Oh good,’ said Mary.

  Evelyn caught Mrs Marsh by the sleeve as she sped past. ‘This is the first Christmas since –’ she said in a spraying hiss.

  Mrs Marsh stared at her.

  ‘Since – you know.’

  Evelyn shrugged meaningfully at Mary, who was listening. When the elderly grew deaf they never seemed to realise that their condition wasn’t universal.

  ‘It’s not natural,’ said Evelyn. ‘She should break down.’

  Mrs Marsh was inclined to agree with her, but wasn’t prepared to say so. ‘Well, she wouldn’t do it now,’ she said. ‘She’s far too considerate.’

  They all knew this to be untrue.

  Mary smiled down on the sprouts. No one understood that she was incapable of grieving sufficiently for Robin, whose death had seemed so preposterously catastrophic that all the acceptedly appropriate reactions were inadequate. The advice, commonly offered, that she should give herself up to it and just let go, struck her as incomparably fatuous. She bore herself with care, like a glass already singing which would shatter at a touch; and she smiled quite often, for it was useless to deny that the situation had its humorous side. There had, after all, been only one little death.

  Evelyn was basting the turkey. Mrs Marsh wished she wouldn’t as she was never quite sure that Evelyn had washed her hands, but it was impossible to stop people helping if they really wanted to.

  By midday Mrs Marsh had performed prodigies of tidying. All the crumpled wrapping and boxes were in a sack, and the tangerine peel and half-eaten chocolates had been safely gathered up. The little tables in the front room were laid ready, crowded and festive with the best mats and table napkins, scarlet crackers and centre-pieces of silvered holly. Avocado pears laved in oil and lemon juice stood in special little dishes on the kitchen cabinet, and the potatoes, ready for roasting, gleamed whitely through the water in a blue saucepan.

  The time had come, they considered for a sherry.

  Mary shuddered. So much food. The little gods fed on human blood – those dark gods in whom joy and sorrow, good and evil, mercy and malice were as irredeemably mixed as the breadcrumbs, onion, sausage, sage and celery in the force for the turkey. But they were, she assured herself, merely a mark of man’s confusion, a symbol of that gloomy theory, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which suggests that all construction, movement, endeavour merely hasten that time when the world and all its works will be utterly undone, a whirling mass of dust in an infinite desolation.

  There had been another feast once, a long time ago . . . in Melys y Bwyd . . . in the time of the old people, the dream time . . . It had become an anti-feast, a reversal of the Law, a kind of resurrection – irritating alike to the hungry and to the rational. Mary closed her eyes . . .

  A number of ladies and gentlemen had sat down in a high chamber with a great fire, and since they had fasted through Advent they longed for the feast to start and looked hungrily at the middle of the board where stood a wooden charger bearing a roast engastered swan, the erstwhile lord of the lake. Within this swan were concealed other birds, each containing one smaller. And at the very centre of all, where once had been the swan’s liver, was a wren’s egg, boiled.

  The master of the feast had just raised his knife when a cold wind swung through the hall, drifting and swirling the smoke and making it plain that someone had opened the door. As all the expected guests were present this could only be a traveller, who must be invited to join the feast. It was not only the draught that chilled the company, for they were very hungry and all peered through the cloudy dimness of the hall to make sure that there was only one traveller to accommodate. Sometimes bands of pilgrims came by, cockle-shelled, flat-hatted and sandalled, telling tales of foreign lands where there lived men who had fathered one son and possessed only one milch goat for the sustenance of that child, and who when visited by strangers, even were those strangers hostile, slew the innocent goat to entertain them. The feasters were not yet so far advanced in civilisation that they could afford to laugh too heartily at such tales, and no one wished at this moment to be put to the test.

  Most were reassured to see a single figure approach and to know by the haggard features, the threadbare garments and the evil sme
ll that this was a holy person, accustomed to frugality. Some, more worldly wise than the rest, thought bleakly that this holy person might well consume more of the feast than the invited guests together.

  The master bade him sit, and all were relieved to see him place his hands each in the opposite sleeve. Even then, long before anyone had heard of the germ theory of disease, no one wished to see his filthy hands dipped in the communal dish, and each looked surreptitiously to see if he carried the short knife necessary to spike the pieces of meat that were placed on each person’s manchet. Even the servants who sat below the salt, and for whom the bread was eventually destined, raised their chilled bottoms slightly from the bench to look anxiously at the holy person and wonder about his table manners.

  He had a cold grey gaze when his hood was back, and his head was very bony.

  On his right sat the sweet-faced lady with the white hair, who smiled at him kindly and was good enough not to fear the lice that were even now calculating the distance between him and her in their own determination to survive – for he had grown hopelessly thin and juiceless. He is one of those who range the wilderness, she thought approvingly, living on nuts and berries and the roots that only such people know of. A holy, holy person.

  ‘Tell us a story,’ she asked, knowing that such good people, starved and sanctified, were implicit with wisdom.

  He was silent, and the sweet-faced lady picked at her manchet with her thin fingers before turning to the man on her right. That man, angered at the incivility of the holy person, leaned before the sweet-faced lady and said, ‘I pray you tell us a story’, his hand on the hilt of the knife he used to settle arguments. He was already in a bad, nervous frame of mind because he feared that the Prince of his district thought he was growing too powerful and was plotting his destruction. In the end, he knew, the Prince would prevail, since the Prince’s people had ruled these few acres from time immemorial and the warrior himself came of foreign stock. In the small hours of the cold ill-smelling nights he would lie awake wondering whether he could elect to die by the Blood Eagle as his forebears in similar case had done. In those days before the invention of aspirin, gas ovens, plastic bags, this form of euthanasia involved the willing cooperation of the victim who, lying face down, would consent to have his ribs sprung from his backbone and his heart removed. Although brave, the warrior often wondered how much this would hurt and whether it would not be wiser to permit the Prince’s heavies to club or spear or garotte him to death. It was a matter of pride and a difficult problem to resolve. He had heard a raven croaking in an inauspicious manner only that morning – the raven whose image rode high on his coat of arms, dominating the scallions rampant on a field argent. The warrior felt himself surrounded by treachery and scowled threateningly at the impertinent holy person.

  The sweet-faced lady patted his leather-clad arm. ‘Aquila non captat muscas,’ she told him in a reassuring whisper. ‘Eagles don’t catch flies.’ (Her chaplain had been reading to her from ancient books (the tenth book of Pliny was his favourite) and her head was stuffed with foolish saws and a mass of error.)

  The holy person laughed, an unpleasant sound. He spoke.

  ‘God’s angels have a keen nose for prayer,’ he said.

  The guests smiled and relaxed a little, thinking that this was a witless holy person – there were many such – since they all knew ‘that God and his angels had ears for prayer.

  But the holy person continued. ‘The angels in Heaven,’ he said, ‘when they smell the prayers rising from the mouths of the righteous to the throne of God, cry: “Oh God, be still. Do not reply, let us breathe in that delectable breath. Oh God, be silent. Oooohh, ahh . . .” But when the unrighteous pray, then “Oh,” cry the angels, “this stench is insupportable. Dear God, answer that prayer at once or we will fall from your heaven like poisoned wasps. Dear God, we implore you, give them what they desire or their foul breath will make us sick.” And so . . .’ continued the holy person composedly, ‘as I am on the side of the angels I will show you a story.’

  Most of the guests merely reflected, a little bewilderedly now, that stories were to be heard, but the man on the right of the sweet-faced lady who, although a warrior, was no fool, rose, his face contused with the blood of rage.

  ‘Black, blasphemous, nameless, mannerless outsider . . .’ he began.

  He stopped. For the holy person had stretched out his skinny hand over the board, had directed the gaze of his cold grey eyes at the centre and was plainly, although quite motionless, up to something.

  There was a stirring in the depths of the swan, a mild, gentle, barely perceptible stirring, and out from its vent rolled the wren’s egg. It moved just a little, to and fro. There was a minute sound, a crack like the tiny cracking of a sprig of heather responding to the first spring sunshine. The shell broke, and out – with a movement between a hop and a stagger – came a wren chick.

  ‘Oh, how enchanting,’ cried the ladies.

  But the sweet-faced lady was first. She picked it up, very carefully, and broke off a corner of her manchet. She hollowed it out and put the chick in it and pulled out a little of her white hair to line the sides of the exposed crust.

  All were spellbound, even the angry man. The tale of this trick would enliven many another banquet. All present planned to feast out on it for months to come, saying to the sceptical: ‘There were many of us there. You can ask so and so, and so and so, if you don’t believe me – and so and so . . .’

  But the holy person’s story was not over. Suddenly he flung up his left hand, stiff-fingered, and a shower of dry dead skin fell to the table.

  The swan heaved slightly, and out came a scorched, plucked, mutilated, part-melted coot. It complained and fluttered blindly and nakedly, until the holy person stretched out his long arm and anointed it with a smear of grease and gravy from the dish – whereupon, restored, it flapped into a pitcher of ale and splashed contentedly.

  ‘A joke is a joke . . .’ said the warrior, who by now desperately wanted his dinner and could see it diminishing in a wholly unnatural fashion; ‘but this has gone far enow.’

  It was quite useless. The holy person, it seemed, was enjoying himself.

  The sauce – the lovely thick, succulent sauce – was gone. The cows in the byres lowed with astonishment as their udders filled instantly with warm milk faintly onion-flavoured. The swarthy inhabitants of Pamplona were astounded to discover a full crop of almonds on a picked tree on the day of Christ’s nativity. Being human, they had to have a reason for everything, and so they attributed this miracle to the piety of the recently repentant town whore who had developed thrush – called in those days St Cunno’s fire after a certain saint, coeval with these events. (He had found an abandoned nest. The parent bird (a storm petrel named for St Peter because it seemed to the observer in the days before binoculars that these birds walked on water) had been killed by local fishermen, who thought it was the spirit of a piratical lord from the mainland who had regularly demanded the catch and ravaged the settlements on the island each autumn, leaving the few inhabitants to face near death from starvation until they had drowned him by sneakily holing his boat. The saint had lit a small smouldering fire of sea-wrack and eglantine in the rock below and had himself crouched, legs akimbo, over the eggs in the teeth of the raging Atlantic gales until the nestlings hatched.) The whore had abandoned her calling to spend her nights flat out on the cathedral steps. She couldn’t sleep anyway, she was so uncomfortable. She died in a traffic accident quite soon after that, on the day they were running the bulls, being much too tired to skip out of the way – and in the course of time they canonised her.

  The onions were back, safely entombed in the icebound earth. The herbs shivered in the Christmas air. The currants, undesiccated, unwrinkled, gleamed in their dark pristine grapeness on the slopes of Agadir, where the natives marvelled briefly at the mercy of Allah and carried on as usual. The spices were back in the souks of Samarkand, the honey back in the comb. Even the spi
teful cook’s spit returned to his mouth as he was speaking evil of his master in the down-house, surprising him exceedingly as it was still boiling-hot from the sauce boat. The flour on its way back to the wheatfield was winnowed again by the wind and blew away with the snow.

  In the great hall the master, the warrior and most of the guests had fallen asleep, now half-stunned, half-bored by this impossible happening. When they awoke they would say they had dreamed.

  The sweet-faced lady with the white hair still watched. A pigeon had followed the coot on to the table, immaculately wrapped as for Ascot. (How the guests would have enjoyed Ascot had they been born in a later age!) A hen, indignant as hens often are, strutted the board as one seeking somewhere to lodge a complaint. A duck – a worthy duck, fat and bosomy, since he had been the lady’s pet and each day ate white wheaten bread from her fingers – golloped the water from the warrior’s beaker. A heron, a widgeon, a bustard, a crane stood around preening the last traces of their once-cooked blood and gravy from their offended feathers. Bird droppings lay everywhere and the hall was taking on the characteristic odour of the aviary.

  And at last, the swan, the lord of the lake, cast from his beak the gilded quince which had held it agape, tossed from his head the crown of gingerbread, threw from his wings the wreaths of thyme and flung himself with majestic ease into the smoke-laden air of the rafters.

  The smoke dispersed, the hall door swung open with the mighty draught. The birds flew. The swan, before he left, with one beat of his great wings broke the right leg of the sweet-faced lady with the white hair, and then was gone to the water. He had forgotten to tear from his splendid throat the necklace of dried peppercorns, and to this day on that lake are to be seen swans with speckled necks . . . The duck never recovered his trust in his mistress and refused all her blandishments. She didn’t really mind, since she had been looking forward to eating him, and the sight of him sloshing around in the green pond-weed made her nervous . . .