The Birds of the Innocent Wood (8 page)

Those days were like a dream. The people who had been to the wedding now came back, sombre and in dark clothes. The priest who had solemnized the marriage now said the prayers for the dead. It seemed to Jane that every room in her house was now full of strangers. There was an unending round of tea and sandwiches and little buns. Sleepless for two nights, Jane found herself wishing that all this would end: that all these people would go home and that Gerald and her father-in-law would come back and let the house slide into its normal routine – and then she realized that that life had gone as absolutely as her life in the convent.

And then, suddenly, it was all over, and they were alone. In the evening they made a meal and then, exhausted, Jane and James went upstairs. They undressed and went to bed, curled up in each other’s arms like weary children, and immediately they fell into a deep and dreamless sleep. They were so tired that they did not even close the door of the room or draw the curtains, so that when they awoke the following morning all the silence of the house, and all the emptiness of the rooms flooded up to their door. She could hear the muffled beat of the grandfather clock in the hall. It had measured out every moment of those last difficult years, and now she felt that she had awoken not only from the nightmare of the preceding two days, but of those two years. She felt as if they might as well have lasted for no more than two beats of the clock, and to measure all that past suffering in terms of time was meaningless. She lay back and let the emptiness of the house wash over her, while the dawn light
streamed through the high, uncurtained windows, and fell upon the bed. Now they could begin. For the first time, the noise of the birds did not sound alien, but natural as music. She burrowed up against James until he too awoke. They looked at each other rather solemnly, and they did not speak. He touched her face and then her hair, which lay webbed out across the pillow, touched her gently, as if she were a new creature who had appeared by his side during the night, and whose reality he had to prove. And then she began to touch his body and to kiss him, her mouth opening softly and her tongue gently probing into his mouth; her hair falling like a dark veil across his face. They made love in the empty, sunlit house with more abandon and more tenderness than ever before in all their married life, and afterwards they lay in each other’s arms, silent and naked, while the wild birds still cried out over the water.

Peter walks into the room and sits down. Before him on the desk is a large Perspex block, like an outsize paperweight of the type that usually contains dried grasses, or tiny seashells. This one, contains a dead rat: supine and with its belly split open, its skin peeled elegantly back, and its veins and arteries stained a violent shade of blue and red. All its parts are neatly labelled. Shuddering, Peter quickly puts a book on top of it, and pushes it to one side. He looks up at the children before him, and against his will his glance wanders past them and around the room, which contains many other distressing sights: a gaudy wall-chart depicting a dissected eyeball; a shelf bearing the skulls of some small mammals; a little tank in which resides a small, glum toad. Peter nervously glances back at the children. They stare at him unblinking, and he tells them to sit down. The absent biology teacher has left work for them to do, so they take out their books, open them, and begin. It is three o’clock on a Friday afternoon, and the children fidget frequently: they are bored with work, and are eagerly anticipating the weekend. Peter sympathizes with them, for he shares their feelings, but he hopes-that they will be able to contain themselves for the next hour, and allow him to maintain order. He too opens a book, but he only pretends to read, as many of the children before him only pretend to study.

Sitting directly in front of him is a girl named Katie. Discreetly, he leans forward to see what she is drawing in her book, and feels faintly revolted when he realizes that she is laboriously copying out of her textbook a diagram representing the human embryo. He likes Katie. She is idle, stupid, good-natured, and he prefers her to the diligent, intelligent and sly girls whom he has to teach. The older the classes are, the less comfortable he feels in their presence, and he is truly afraid of the sixth formers.
Katie lifts her head, and in reaching for ruler and rubber notices that her teacher is watching her. Peter is quite taken aback by the wide, suggestive grin which she gives him. He continues to watch her. A brace of thin, cheap bangles (the school rules forbid all jewellery) tinkles seductively along Katie’s plump forearm as she neatly labels the diagram, and then begins to write notes on the facing page in her sprawling, childish handwriting. Peter looks down upon the crown of her head: her thick blonde hair is held back from her face by two absurd little clips with plastic flowers attached to them. Peter is about to smile, when suddenly he remembers another fair head adorned in just such a childish fashion. The face of the girl concerned is buried in a pillow and she is weeping so loudly that Peter thinks in alarm that he has, in his ignorance, perhaps done her a serious physical injury. He moves to stroke the shuddering head, but she pushes him away and cries even more bitterly. Remembering this, Peter does not smile, but winces.

Peter has other memories of things which he would prefer to forget. Another fair-haired girl watches him as he prepares to leave her room. She watches without any display of feeling or emotion, and he cannot help but imagine the contempt and disgust she must feel. He crosses the shabby room until he is standing close by her, and he looks down at her face, at the bleached hair, the hard mouth and the tired eyes.

‘I suppose that you hate men very much,’ he says.

The fair-haired girl’s face still shows no feeling as she replies, ‘No more than you hate women.’

Peter is fool enough to be shocked by this, and even more of a fool to protest, but the girl interrupts him. ‘Next time you see a little boy playing in the street with a toy gun, watch him carefully. Watch him until a woman comes along. Watch him wait until she has passed him by a safe distance, and then, watch his glee when he shoots her in the back.’

Abruptly she turns aside and she yawns, passing her hand across her mouth with a certain lazy little gesture which Peter has seen an infinite number of times before this, for when Peter’s mother yawns, she too puts her hand to her mouth in
exactly the same way, her fingers at just such an angle for precisely the same few seconds. To see this woman make this gesture sends a tremor of shock through Peter: for a moment, he can almost believe that she
is
his mother, and that he is the child who will never escape, who will be watched forever, no matter how shameful or intimate the moment. In his anger, he moves to strike the yawning girl, but she flinches away and he misses. For a few moments there is silence, and then, for the first time that evening, a show of genuine feeling comes across the girl’s face: she smiles. Then she gestures towards the door, silently bidding him to go.

Yes: his way of seeing women dates from that particular night. How easy, he thinks, it had been until then, for looking at his mother he simply saw his mother, and looking at any other woman he simply saw a stranger’s face. But since that night, the barrier dividing his mother from all other women has been broken for ever. On going home, he might see in her loved and disappointed face the look of a girl he has tried to seduce a few nights earlier, and whom he thought he had already forgotten; and in the face of another such girl the following week, he might suddenly see through to such loneliness that he can think only of his mother, lying wakeful and alone in the cottage bedroom, as she has lain alone, night after night, for twenty years. He sees his mother’s life as a wheel, turning around him, the graceless, ungrateful hub. He remembers the real panic which he felt as he entered his final year at training college, knowing that soon he will have to make a conscious choice about what he will do on leaving. But what alternative is there to going home? He has no great desire to stay in the city, for his life there is empty. He has a few male friends and with women he feels ill at ease, believing that there ought always to be a sexual dimension. Yet every time he goes back to the cottage his mother’s love greets him like a furnace, belies the love of any other woman for Peter or of Peter for them; and he goes back to the city more wounded and empty than ever before.

But then, in the early spring of that final year, he begins a relationship with a girl which does not end quickly, like so many
others, but continues on. Peter pleads excessive work as his exams approach, and does not go home for the weekends, but soon he is telling himself that even if he did go back, the relationship is strong enough to withstand the force of his mother’s love. For the first time ever, he believes himself to be happy. The affair is an end in itself, and they drift on thoughtlessly, until the day comes when the girl tells him that she thinks she may be pregnant.

Nothing could have prepared Peter for the shock of this: no, not shock: sheer horror. For two days he walks around dazed and almost physically sick. His supposed love for the girl of course dies at once, like a candle in a high wind, and he wonders what his mother will say.

He phones her that night, perversely and against his better judgement, and he wants to weep when he hears the softness that comes into her voice as soon as she realizes that she is speaking to her son.

‘Peter!’ No one else has ever spoken his name with such sincere tenderness, and he feels guilty to think that he can give her such enormous pleasure simply by phoning her. Almost at once she asks, ‘Is there anything wrong, Peter?’

‘No,’ he replies nervously, ‘why should there be?’

‘You sound a little worried.’

‘My exams begin in three weeks,’ he says, which is a true statement, but not an honest response to her implied question. She tells him not to overwork, and he promises moderation.

But Peter in turn can tell by her voice that she is excited about something, and she hesitates to say what it is, until the very moment when he is about to hang up. Then she interrupts him, and says very quickly that the post of English teacher has been advertised for the local school, to begin in the autumn. She adds nothing further, and Peter says ‘Oh.’

She does not reply. In the silence from her end of the phone he can sense her loneliness and tension, and he breathes deeply.

‘Well, be sure and get me an application form,’ he says.

‘I have one here,’ she replies. ‘I’ll post it in the morning,’

Thereafter, Peter dumbly follows fate. The girl comes back and tells him that the pregnancy was a false alarm. The affair is concluded but only after a most bitter row, in which the girl says many cruel and perceptive things which wound Peter deeply. The form arrives and he fills it in; he works for his exams; sits them; passes them. He is appointed to the post in the local school. Privately and indefinitely he renounces women; then packs his bags, leaves the city and goes home to his mother.

Peter hears a snigger: a loud snigger. He realizes that it must have been growing as a groundswell for some time now, but he has been too immersed in his own thoughts to notice it. He silences them now with an anger which startles even him, and he is annoyed to feel his face go warm and red. Peter has been teaching for just over six months, but already he feels that he has never known any other reality but this little world of ink and chalk and books and desks and power and bells and children.

Rising from his desk, Peter walks across the room, and he does not take a book with him, not even for the pretence of work. He stops by the window and stands for a long time with his back to the class, and he looks out over the playing fields. A cold winter dusk thickens the air, and some drops of rain spit against the glass. The window-sill is cluttered with an array of dusty fossils and shells, out of which Peter carefully selects one: a little grey ammonite. It lies in the heart of his cupped hand like an egg in a nest, and gradually he feels the coldness of the dead stone take on the warmth of his small, live hand. How he detests his dainty little hands! Ridiculously out of proportion to the rest of his body, they look like the hands of a young girl. Now, however, as he gazes into his palm, Peter finds himself forgetting the rest of his body to the point where it no longer seems to exist; all his life has gone into this feminine hand, for which he now feels a new empathy, an acceptance, never before known. And in that moment, the physical knowledge of what it is to be a woman goes through him and is gone. He is left standing hurt and bewildered, knowing that this has happened only seconds before, yet already he has forgotten it.

The little grey fossil is lying still in his palm, and now he
thinks of Sarah lying full length upon the parlour sofa in the cottage. It is the last Saturday before Christmas, and she is holding in her hand the smooth, speckled sea shell which he has just given to her.

How strange and unexpected all this business with Sarah has been! He has always taken her for granted. Throughout his life, she had been a very infrequent friend. Of all the family at the farm, she is the only one who has ever found the company of his mother and himself at least tolerable, let alone agreeable. At times he wonders if she visits him just to be perverse, to annoy her mother, and, more lately, Catherine. The difference that there can be between sisters! And twin sisters at that! The fondness he has always had for Sarah is offset by his deep dislike of Catherine, a dislike which has grown in recent years into contempt.

At least I made an attempt, he thinks, remembering a day the preceding summer, when he took the rowing boat out on the lough. Catherine, out for a walk, had chanced along, and he had felt obliged to ask her if she wanted to go out too. She did go: perhaps out of politeness, and she spoke to him with a shy formality until they had been on the water for about twenty minutes, when suddenly she would speak no more. She scrambled out hastily when they reached the shore again, did not offer to help him beach the boat, did not thank him or say goodbye, but quickly walked away across the fields, heading for the farmhouse. Since then, Peter has paid no heed to her, and himself barely deigns to speak when they meet. Strange that she did not go off to the convent after all, when that was what she had wanted so much. Place for her too, Peter bitterly thinks, closed away for the rest of her life. Might as well be dead as live like that, and damn the loss she’d be to the world. But Sarah will not speak of the matter. He sees her again standing at the cottage door on a day in autumn, when her visits had again become frequent and regular. Incidentally, almost, she says as she leaves:

‘By the way, my sister won’t be going into the convent after all.’

‘Oh?’

‘No.’

‘Why did she change her mind? She was so set on it …’

But Sarah interrupts him, frowning slightly and she says, ‘I didn’t say that she changed her mind. I just said that she won’t be going away.’ She frowns more deeply, and she leaves the cottage, the subject never to be mentioned again.

Since his return from training college at the start of the preceding summer, Sarah has been a frequent visitor, coming first on the occasional Saturday, when Peter’s mother was away giving music lessons, but by early autumn she had begun to call every week without fail. In retrospect, he thinks that Sarah also changed slightly around that time. She was quieter and more abstracted (although often more irritable too), and her conversation was somehow more impersonal and inconsequential than it had been until then. But it is only a month or so now since things really began to change. Peter goes back in his mind to that particular mid-December day. The weather is bitterly cold, and Sarah is gathering holly. From the cottage window he watches her pull down branches from the tall hedge, and then load them into a little wheelbarrow which she has brought with her. Her task complete, she pushes the barrow to the cottage door, and Peter lets her in. For a while they sit talking by the parlour fire, and he sees that her hands are cold and hurt, livid and scratched by the holly. He leaves her there to continue warming herself, while he goes into the kitchen to make tea. He puts the kettle on the hob, and while he waits for it to boil he remains in the kitchen, looking idly out of the window.

The whole weight of his body is leaning upon his hands, which rest upon the edge of the work surface, when suddenly a red, scratched hand comes to rest very hesitantly and gently upon one of his rather small hands. Startled, for he did not hear her walk softly from the parlour, he turns around and immediately she puts her arms around him, still very gentle and hesitant, as if she expects him to pull away in shock or disgust at any moment. He does not reject her: but he is shocked. He has not been touched by a woman for months. She does little more than
stand there and embrace him, but she does lean her head against his shoulder, and he is further transfixed. He cannot tell how long they have been standing there before it occurs to him to put his arms around her, and he does this, awkwardly. She looks up then, and she smiles at him. He smiles back.