The Birds of the Air

by Alice Thomas Ellis

  Dennis looked thoroughly uneasy. He had, of course, been told that Seb’s father was the Mr Justice Lamb and had been speaking to Seb with a curdling mixture of brusque bonhomie and deference. Twice he had referred to ‘this moment in time’, twice he had called Seb ‘Sir’ and once he had called him ‘Seb’.

  Sebastian, as was his way, had simply ignored him; and now the Chief Inspector sat on the edge of his chair, his elbows on his parted knees, twirling his glass in his fingers, while drops of sweat emerged on his temples and under his eyes.

  Vera was less nervous. Evelyn was talking to her, and sometimes Vera said, ‘Ooh, lovely.’

  Soon they would go, thought Mary. Christmas was like a storm washing people to and fro to end up, unwanted, in each other’s homes: Kate lying like flotsam on the rug, the extraordinarily alien American, the policeman hopelessly out of place, Sebastian bored almost insensible and Barbara lost in unhappy fantasy. What was needed was an ebb tide.

  Sam, with youthful charity, actually felt sorry for the Chief Inspector. He didn’t himself often suffer from social unease but he knew it when he saw it from his experience with his father’s undergraduates. While it was true that the Chief Inspector would probably be happier kicking some miscreant to death, it was still unfair to expect him to sit around in a little room talking to a clever, unresponsive man whose dad could probably have had him thrown out of the Force if he’d wanted to.

  Sam raised his eyebrows at Dennis, meaning to indicate ‘You don’t have to be polite. That’s only my father.’

  ‘Well, young man,’ said the Chief Inspector, feeling more on his own ground with this naughty-looking youth.

  Sam lowered his eyebrows. The Chief Inspector was incorrigible. His next words would probably be ‘We’ve been watching you for some time.’

  ‘Pig,’ muttered Sam again, not quite quietly enough.

  ‘Well, here’s to God,’ said Mary, creating a diversion and pouring herself a whisky.

  They stared at her, uncomprehendingly.

  ‘It’s his birthday,’ she said.

  Nearly everyone was shocked.

  Mrs Marsh felt a great desire to bang together the heads of her daughter and grandson. Christmas was bad enough without this sort of behaviour.

  ‘I didn’t notice you going to midnight Mass,’ she said very crossly indeed. As a rule, she avoided all mention of Catholicism in public, considering it, even after her years of marriage to her dear John, not quite nice.

  !I didn’t go,’ explained Mary.

  ‘The Queen, God bless her,’ toasted the Chief Inspector, seeing a raised glass and entering into the spirit of the thing. He felt much more at ease with a little formality: uniforms, gruff laughter and someone requesting that everyone should be upstanding.

  ‘Bless her,’ echoed Vera and Evelyn, hastily putting to their lips their empty glasses.

  There was nothing else for it. Mrs Marsh poured everyone another drink.

  ‘She looked lovely on telly,’ said Vera, moist-eyed.

  Sam stared at them in mingled disgust and disbelief.

  Mary sat down. Christ had no time for royalty. King Herod was, to him, not His Gracious Majesty, but – ‘that fox’. Today the little animals were in the shade, and the monarch to the fore, the madness of the English again evident but concentrated on their other obsession. This dimension of madness took the form of a grateful tender -ness towards the unimaginably rich and privileged; a tearfully joyous, knee-sore loyalty to the witless descendants of ruthless, incompetent, raging tyrants and murderers. Not since the Monk Guitand had anyone declined a favour from the hand of the monarch. This monk had hot-footed it home to Normandy, refusing the bishopric which the Conqueror would have thrust upon him, declaring that when he thought of the crimes by which England had been won, he ‘trembled to touch it, with all its wealth, as though it glowed with the fires of hell’.

  ‘What did Harold say at the Battle of Hastings?’ she asked, still lost in the mists of time but not of a mind to reveal her true thoughts.

  ‘“’old on ’arf a mo’,”’ said Sam. ‘“I’ve got some-fin’ in me eye.”’

  ‘Correct,’ said Mary.

  Grinning death was the king of the world and the preferment he offered was a too great change of status, transformation. His favouritism was feared beyond all else and his touch shunned.

  Mary mistrusted monarchs, but most of all King Death who had left his great halls and, in a horrid parody of democracy, walked among his subjects choosing randomly whom he should elevate.

  ‘You shouldn’t be drinking,’ said Mrs Marsh. ‘What did the doctor say?’ She was fed up with all the silly jokes. ‘I think we should go now and look at Evelyn’s pictures. Hunter and Mr Mauss will have to leave soon.’

  ‘Snow’s bad,’ said the Chief Inspector.

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Mr Mauss, looking through his porthole of condensation-free window. ‘It’s the sort the Lapps call pjff. You can’t drive in it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ demanded Mrs Marsh, thrusting him aside and peering out. ‘You’re probably used to American snow – Chicago, the Rockies. This is English snow. Yours is probably more like Swiss snow.’

  ‘My grandmother on my mother’s side was Swedish,’ said Mr Mauss. ‘And I know snow!’

  You don’t know English snow, thought Mrs Marsh wildly, refusing to contemplate the possibility that Hunter and his American might have to stay the night.

  ‘Be great for the kids in the morning,’ said Mr Mauss complacently. He nudged Kate, who lay gracelessly sprawled on the hearthrug in a mess of snakes and ladders, with an affectionate foot. ‘Build a snowman, huh?’ he said.

  ‘It’s probably only local,’ said Mrs Marsh. ‘It’ll be clear on the main roads.’

  The Chief Inspector and Mr Mauss both shook their heads with stolid certainty.

  Evelyn, seeing Mrs Marsh’s expression, was reminded of a lady lunatic at the asylum who went about all day, poor soul, crying in the most piteous, gentle and beseeching way ‘No more. Oh, no more’ – as though one further straw would be that final straw which would break her sad heart before she remembered to put it in her hair. It was so unlike Mrs Marsh’s usual expression that Evelyn was quite alarmed. ‘What is it, dear?’ she asked, following Mrs Marsh out of the room.

  ‘These people put years on me,’ said Mrs Marsh exhaustedly, sitting down at the kitchen table. ‘I think they’re going to have to stay the night – and it’s only a bit of snow.’

  ‘Not Dennis and Vera,’ said Evelyn, astonished.

  ‘No, of course not Dennis and Vera. They’ve only got to crawl through the hedge. Hunter, and that – American.’ Mrs Marsh was feeling acutely xenophobic and regretted the impulse which had led her to invite Dennis and Vera and agree to offer hospitality to Mr Mauss. She had a haunted, crepuscular sensation as of some encroaching disease or disaster. Influenza or a family crisis were imminent and strangers would undoubtedly get in the way.

  ‘Is it too tiring for Mary?’ asked Evelyn. ‘I know she doesn’t like seeing a lot of people. I suppose in the circumstances . . .’

  ‘What circumstances?’ asked Mrs Marsh wearily. ‘I don’t believe she’s as ill as she’d like to be. I don’t believe she’s going to die. She just wants to. She’s wicked,’ concluded Mrs Marsh in shame.

  ‘Cheer up,’ said Evelyn uneasily. ‘I thought she seemed bright enough today.’

  ‘Well, if she was, it’s because she doesn’t care,’ said Mrs Marsh obscurely.

  ‘Eh?’ said Evelyn, squinting.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Mrs Marsh. ‘There were some men in the war like that. John said they’d get these letters from home and then they wouldn’t care.’

  ‘Care?’ asked Evelyn, hopelessly puzzled.

  ‘They’d get these letters saying their wife had left them or got bombed or something, and then they wouldn’t care what happened – if they got shot or not or anything. They were suddenly brave, only it wasn’t really brave . . .’


  ‘Oh,’ said Evelyn in a false tone of enlightenment.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Mrs Marsh, pulling herself together. She’d said too much already. ‘We’d better get back to the others.’

  ‘You should stop frowning like that,’ Evelyn told her. ‘You’ll get terrible wrinkles.’

  ‘I’ve got wrinkles,’ said Mrs Marsh. ‘And no wonder.’

  ‘I’ll take everyone to see my pictures,’ said Evelyn. ‘We’ll get a better idea of the weather if we go out in it. Come along, all,’ she cried, doing a brief, but spirited and bracing gallop into the hall. ‘Coats, hats. We’re going to my house.’

  ‘I’ll stay here and tidy up,’ said Mrs Marsh.

  ‘No, you won’t,’ said Evelyn. ‘You need a breather and I’ll make you all a nice hot cup of coffee.’

  She was surprised to find that the two meekest members of the party were adamant in their refusal to join her. Barbara, sitting alone on the sofa and clutching a glass in one hand and a bottle of sherry in the other, so tightly that her knuckles shone, said that she had a headache, and didn’t, anyway, really know much about painting. Music – here her voice faltered – was her preference. Hunter, having declined politely, had, Evelyn suspected, locked himself in the bathroom since she couldn’t see him anywhere; but she could hardly follow him up and rattle the door handle. There was no point, of course, in asking Sam or Mary.

  ‘Come on,’ she urged as everyone struggled into their coats. ‘Be careful not to let kitty out. Oh, we should sing carols,’ she cried, as they trudged rather bitterly across the Close.

  Evelyn’s house smelt quite different from Mrs Marsh’s – faintly of past meals, rather than of meals in preparation, which was the only cooking smell which Mrs Marsh would permit. She had cold, glaring central ceiling lights, where Mrs Marsh had shaded table lamps, and her sitting room had only a square of carpet in the middle of the floor. The alligator (it was a mugger, Evelyn told them, on account of how its teeth were disposed) hung above the fireplace, flanked by two of Evelyn’s pictures. It gave the room an oddly propitiatory, explanatory air as though Evelyn were appealing: ‘I don’t cook or keep house very well, but you see I am a lovable eccentric and here is the proof.’

  It didn’t cut any ice with Vera. ‘What a horrible thing,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how you can bear to look it in the eye. It’d give me the willies.’

  ‘I like it,’ said Evelyn huffily. ‘I call him Claud.’

  Sebastian made one of his noises, expressive, probably, of limitless contempt, but Kate found herself envying Evelyn this reptile. ‘I think it’s silly,’ she said jealously. ‘My friend Jessica’s got a stuffed fox. Called Augustus,’ she added.

  ‘I’m gonna buy you a bear,’ said Mr Mauss, pinching Kate’s ear.

  ‘Ooooh,’ gurgled Kate, ‘a weal one?’

  ‘A-great-big-bear,’ vowed Mr Mauss, hugging her. They swayed together from foot to foot, repeating this phrase and giggling.

  ‘Weill’ said Evelyn loudly. ‘I’ve got pictures all over the house. Where would you like to start?’

  ‘Let’s start with coffee,’ said Mrs Marsh, sitting down at a square oak table, on a chair made of oak and artificial leather. She unbuttoned her coat and stretched her legs out. She hoped Mr Mauss wasn’t a paedophile.

  ‘Evelyn,’ she said boldly, ‘could you put up Hunter and Mr Mauss if the snow doesn’t stop?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Evelyn obligingly, ‘if they don’t mind sharing a room.’

  Mr Mauss seemed to take this offer for granted too. ‘That’s OK,’ he said, continuing to rock back and forth with Kate.

  It occurred to Mrs Marsh that they were both slightly drunk. ‘I’ll help you with the coffee,’ she said to Evelyn. ‘It’ll sober – warm us – up.’

  ‘Are you cold?’ asked Evelyn surprised. ‘I’ll turn on the log. I don’t really feel the cold – I think it’s because I’m so used to painting on the downs in all weathers.’ She emphasised the word ‘painting’ very slightly.

  ‘I like this one,’ said Dennis, closely inspecting a muddy study of some distant trees hanging to the left of Claud.

  ‘I did that in April,’ said Evelyn, putting out cups and saucers and teaspoons – rejecting one or two spoons after a closer look and putting them back in the drawer.

  Those would be the eggy ones, thought Mrs Marsh. She resigned herself to a time of undrinkable coffee and art.

  ‘Meanwhile the Protestants . . .’ said Mary. ‘What do you want to do, Hunter? Can’t you really drive in this?’

  ‘No,’ said Hunter.

  Barbara, posed on the arm of the sofa in the front room, shifted slightly. She had cleaned her teeth and put on fresh lipstick, but still felt unreal, blinkered and a little deaf. Knowing that Hunter had stayed behind, she was awaiting his declaration.

  After a while when he still hadn’t appeared she stood up. A mistake. She took a sip of brandy from the decanter to steady her head.

  ‘Hunter,’ she called. ‘Hunter.’

  Hunter glanced at Mary, faintly alarmed. ‘She’s awfully drunk,’ he said.

  ‘You’d better go and see what she wants,’ said Mary.

  He went into the front room and looked around.

  ‘Here,’ said someone, half whispering.

  He went back into the hall, and looked round there. Barbara was half way up the stairs, beckoning. Puzzled, he went towards her and she sped upwards to the tiny landing.

  Like a fool, he followed her.

  ‘Kiss me,’ she demanded as he drew level. She seized his lapel and breathed into his mouth.

  ‘Ugh,’ said Hunter, recoiling. She clutched him tighter and they struggled slightly on the tiny dais. Her foot slipped from the top step.

  ‘You must kiss me or kill me,’ she told him, gripping him now with both hands.

  ‘I will do neither of those things,’ said Hunter exasperatedly, trying to free himself.

  Abruptly Barbara let go and slid downstairs. Unhurt but quite crushed, she sat at the foot of the stairs, her legs splayed out like a Dutch doll’s, and wept.

  Sam, who was frying himself a plateful of eggs, emerged backwards from the kitchen to see what all the fuss was about. He was shocked to find his mother lying drunk on the floor, with that pooftah standing over her, looking annoyed. He went back to the stove and slipped his eggs on to two pieces of toast. Tears of embarrassment and rage and childishness made it difficult for him to locate the tomato sauce. He didn’t really feel hungry now but ate his eggs sitting at the kitchen table. He could just about get a whole egg into his mouth.

  ‘Mary,’ said Hunter plaintively, ‘what shall we do with Barbara?’ His neatness, his domestic efficiency wouldn’t stretch to coping with drunken and lecherous women.

  ‘She ought to sleep it off,’ suggested Mary. ‘She doesn’t usually do this, so black coffee would make her sick.’

  ‘Well, I’m not taking her to bed,’ said Hunter, wishing simultaneously that he had put that differently and waiting for Mary to frame some witticism.

  But Mary couldn’t be bothered. ‘I’ll put a blanket over her,’ she said. ‘With any luck she’ll come round before they get back.’

  She got Aunt Gwennie’s dark, soft tartan rug from her room and approached her sister.

  Barbara began to scream. The kitten in the kitchen by the warm stove started up, terrified, fur erect – perhaps thinking itself back on the black cold downs, small and open to the strange perverted predators of town-bordering heath.

  Sam sat quite still, gazing steadfastly at the tomato ketchup.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Mary, stepping back and clutching the rug.

  Barbara’s eyes hung low and red in her face. Her head was thrust forward, her skirt was rucked up and now she was speaking with unprecedented fluency. She spoke of jealousy and anger and love and loss and infinite perfidy.

  Mary stared at her. Having forgotten that anything but death mattered at all, she was bewildered by her sist
er’s anguish.

  Sam could bear it no longer. Seizing a jug from the draining board he filled it with water and loping the short distance from the sink to the stairs flung it over his mother.

  ‘You might have rinsed it out first,’ said Hunter, feeling again the onset of hysteria. Coffee grounds trickled down Barbara’s forehead and reposed above her collar bone.

  It was to this scene that the others returned.

  They saw Barbara lying on the floor, wet and dirtstreaked and weeping, Mary poised over her with a rug as though her sister was a budgerigar who would not be silent for the night, Hunter giggling feebly and Sam, his face white, clutching an empty jug.

  ‘What mischief is this?’ enquired Sebastian, smacking his son’s head.

  Barbara struggled to her knees, a primitive mother-instinct bared by drink. ‘Don’t you touch . . .’ she began, falling back against the newel post.

  Sam made for the door, pausing only to thrust his jug upon Mr Mauss. Kate flung herself after him into the night, crying in ringing thespian tones, ‘Sam, oh Sam, don’t do this!’

  ‘Will someone shut that child up,’ said Hunter, regaining his calm and slamming the door, nearly catching Kate’s nose as he hauled her in.

  ‘Ow,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll go after him,’ said the Chief Inspector.

  ‘No,’ said Barbara very loudly. ‘You leave him alone.’ She looked hot-eyed at Sebastian. ‘You go,’ she said to her husband. ‘You go and get him.’

  Sebastian was a small man but his violence darkened the hall, his cream pale face set in carven, god-like lines of anger and disgust. He was immovable, and Barbara understood that she could fall right over the edge of despair into death and he would still be immovable because he was an entirely reasonable man.

  She went, herself, into the Close.

  ‘Sam,’ she shrieked.

  Hunter followed her.

  ‘Pig,’ she shouted at him.

  The squirrel in his drey awoke and peered down, astonished, a querying paw curled against his breast. The quarrelsome birds, peaceful in the darkness, shifted in their puffed and staring feathers. The teddy bears in all the little houses clapped their cloth paws over their cloth ears.