Bird Cottage

by Eva Meijer

  “She’ll find one without you. She’s very attractive.” I pass my hand across my forehead, smoothing away my frown.

  “Well, she could try a little harder.” She takes a large draught from the glass that the waiter places in front of her. “Anyway, it’s good she’s still at home. At least she hasn’t deserted her poor old mother.”

  I blow on my tea.

  “And how is love treating you?”

  “Mama, please.” On the table in front of me there’s a red napkin with golden stars, folded into a fan.

  “But if I don’t ask, you don’t like it either.” She purses her lips. “And you’re really quite presentable now.”

  “I’m too busy for all that.”

  “Quite presentable still. But you mustn’t wait too long.”

  “The menu, ma’am.” The waiter places two menus in front of us. My mother asks him if the lobster is truly as delicious as reputed.

  There’s a cough from the man at the next table. “If I may be so bold: the lobster is without equal.” His voice sounds too high-pitched for his body. He gasps for breath after speaking a few words. His belly touches the edge of the table.

  “So, I know what to order then.” My mother gives me a triumphant look.

  “I’d like to study the menu a little longer.” I smile at the waiter, who nods and leaves us.

  Our neighbour coughs again. He is wearing a gleaming dress suit and a red bow tie with green dots. “My wife has left me,” he says quietly to my mother. “Yesterday. She said she could no longer put up with it.”

  My mother looks shocked. “With what?”

  “Goodness knows.” He wipes his mouth with his napkin, then stands up. “Happy Christmas then.”

  “It is difficult sometimes,” my mother says, when he has gone. “He seemed a nice man, but so does your father. Here.” She pushes a package towards me. “I was supposed to give you this.”

  I carefully unwrap the shiny red paper. Birds of the City and Suburbs. Line drawings and advice on how to make our environs more welcoming for birds.

  “Do the ladies know what they would like to order?” The waiter leans over my mother, who gives him her best smile. I order game pie with Cumberland sauce. I’m not terribly hungry.

  At the end of the afternoon I take my mother to her train. As I walk back home it begins to snow at last. With the snow comes solace and expectation. Children are allowed out of doors a while; adults remember that they were once children. The sounds of the city swiftly diminish, become duller, thicker. Dirt disappears into the whiteness. I breathe the cold in, clouds out.

  The next morning I get up earlier than usual to make my own tracks, so I can walk without having to follow the tracks of others. A Crow flies cawing overhead—for a moment I miss Charles so intensely that I can hardly breathe. For a moment I miss Olive and my father, even Dudley and everyone else.

  When I’m inside the house again, I pick up my violin and use my fingers to search for what I’m feeling. I play until it’s over. As long as I do my best, I’ll be all right.

  * * *

  After the last performance of the year, we hurry through the rain to the bar. Stockdale orders punch all round. “Well played, all of you.”

  I hang my coat on the rack and sit down by Billie. She asks if I’ll go with them to a New Year’s Eve party. Then a gust of wind draws my attention to the door, where a woman in a green coat is entering, arm in arm with a man. Her silhouette seems familiar. I jump up and worm my way through the crowd towards her. She takes off her coat when she reaches the bar. Pearl necklace, gold chain and locket, dark-red frock. “Patricia?”

  “Hallo Len.” She laughs. “You did it!”

  “How wonderful to see you.” I embrace her, smelling perfume and cigarettes.

  “This is William.”

  I hold out my hand, and he kisses it, quite the gallant. “My husband.” Her tone is a little exaggerated, just short of being affected.

  I raise an eyebrow. “Surely not.”

  “Oh yes. I’ve caved in. To the charms of this heartbreaker.” She turns towards him. “Lennie and I swore that we’d never get married. That was in my wilder days, when all I wanted to do was write.” She lays her hand on my arm, and takes my wrist. “I do write,” she tells me, my disappointment lying between us like a cloud, visible but not tangible. “I’m writing a manifesto at present, on the position of women in marriage.”

  “For a year now,” William laughs. “For a whole year and nothing to show for it. But when the baby comes, she won’t be such a fidget.”

  She also laughs. “No baby. Definitely not.” She taps her finger against his nose. For a moment I see Paul in her—he left for London two years ago, and since then I’ve heard nothing more of him.

  “How is your brother?”

  “He’s well. He’s in Brighton now, by the sea again. His first collection came out last year.” She is still holding tightly on to my wrist. I hope she won’t let go, and I nod.

  “Yes, I’ve read about the book. It’s had good reviews.”

  “Sorry, I completely forgot to ask how you are. Do you still play the violin, Lennie?”

  William spots an acquaintance and excuses himself. She pulls me closer.

  “What on earth happened?” I ask her.

  “Purist!” She laughs.

  “Are you really expecting a child?”

  “In his dreams.” Perhaps it’s not my disappointment, but hers. Perhaps it can be felt, but not seen—wind, not cloud.

  “But is everything going well?”

  Her grip tightens before she lets go. “Not as well as for you. I’ve been ill. I’m…” She hesitates. William is coming back. “Not as strong as I’d like to be.”

  “Are you coming, darling? We should leave now.” He places his hand on her back. “We’ve bought tickets for the cinema,” he tells me.

  Sound. Sound is something you can feel but not see, unless it moves something else. I lean towards her, kiss her cheek, hold my face beside hers a little too long. She whispers something, but walks away before I can ask her what she means—the music is too loud and everyone is talking at the top of their voices.

  He holds her coat open for her, she wriggles herself into it, left arm, right arm, her face turns round further, till she sees mine, and she waves. Waving is unnecessary, so I smile at her and she smiles back.

  STAR 5

  The Great Tits would generally grasp my meaning very swiftly. If I was at table, eating a sandwich, a couple of them would always come for a look. If I did not react, then they would perch on the plate to take a morsel. If I sternly said no, they flew up. If I moved my hand when I spoke, they would fly away from the table entirely. If I was really cross, they would even fly out of the window. Then if I told them sweetly that they could come back, they quickly returned; if I said nothing at all for a while, they would also come closer, but slowly. If I said “Go on then”, they would immediately take a titbit. But with Star it often seemed as if she understood my meaning before I expressed it in voice or movement. She could read my facial expressions very well, just as well as my gestures and tone of voice. Her brain seemed to register my intentions even earlier than my own.

  Star was friendly with the other Great Tits and was rather playful, certainly in her younger days. But she would not let the other birds boss her around: if she wanted to build a nest somewhere, she made sure that no one else came near, and that was also the case with her other projects.

  In September and October the Great Tits always started their demolition work: tearing up paper and hammering holes in wood. They seemed to do this for pure delight. They had time to spare, because their youngsters could now look after themselves, and they had no need yet to prepare for the winter. In these games they displayed their own individual characters. There were some Great Tits who tore paper for fun and others who did it simply to attract the attention of another bird. Star was particularly zealous: her holes were deeper than those of the other Great Ti
ts and she could tear paper more swiftly than anyone else. But at the end of November the birds always stopped this pastime, because it took them more time to find natural food and they had to prepare for winter.

  1918

  “Are you coming too?”

  Thea is going to hand out suffragette pamphlets by the entrance of Holloway Gaol, because that’s where they’re force-feeding the women. She explains how they do it, with a tube in their throats and a funnel; it must be dreadful—two women have already died because it brought on pneumonia. I put my violin away, put on my coat. She pins a rosette to it.

  When we’re outside she links arms. “Peter’s asked me to marry him. What do you think?” Sometimes she’s just like a cat, round and purring.

  “Do you love him?”

  “Yes, quite a bit. I mean, not as much as Don. But enough maybe. And Don doesn’t want to be tied down.”

  A rag-and-bone man drives past, straight through a puddle. The wheels of his cart spatter water against our legs. He’s cursing and swearing at us—he must have seen the rosettes on our lapels.

  “Don and you are exactly like each other.”

  “Yes, but that’s precisely why it won’t work. Music is enough for you, but I need someone who puts me first. To make me happy.”

  We change shifts with our fellow protesters at the square in front of the prison. “How did it go?” Thea asks.

  “Boring. Just three men, and all of them prison officers. Can one of you p’raps give us a cig?”

  Thea takes a case from her coat pocket and the girl helps herself to a cigarette. She shares it with her pal while they walk away, taking it in turns for a drag.

  Thea asks if I’ll come and have a meal with her later this week, when Peter will be there, so I can get to know him better and perhaps give her some advice. “I’m so impulsive. I mean, I do think I love him, but it’s the same with all of them.” An aeroplane drowns out her tale. We both look up.

  Two soldiers are walking towards us. I recognise the one on the left. I think his name is Leo—he’s one of the chaps Kingsley used to play tennis with, in Aberdovey. Perhaps he’ll know something. I run towards him.

  “Yes?” his friend says, frostily. We’re allowed to protest here, but our presence isn’t appreciated.

  “Leo?”

  His face brightens as he recognises me. “It’s Gwen, isn’t it?”

  “Have you heard anything about Kingsley? We’ve heard nothing at all for a few months and most of the soldiers are back from France now, surely?”

  A cloud passes overhead. “They haven’t informed you?”

  “What about?” Beneath my feet the ground gapes open in slow motion.

  “The bombardment. The night before we were going to return. The whole camp was wiped out. We’re not exactly sure who was there. Perhaps Kingsley was with the first detachment and he’d already left, but all the records were lost. Perhaps he’s still in France, or on his way home. I was there too, but before Kingsley—so I don’t know if he was there then or not.”

  Thea stands beside me and folds me into her arms.

  “Kingsley is a strong, resourceful chap. It’s quite possible that…” He looks directly at me. “It’s chaos there. Perhaps he’s in a hospital somewhere. Or he’s making his own way home. No one knows exactly where they are and it’s not very easy to get away. Men are still coming home.”

  Coming home, hope, hold on, get a grip, Kingsley. My father and Olive waved us off from the station in Wales; we shared a bar of chocolate in the train. His face, so familiar, a stranger, a soldier, I read, he gazes out of the window. France, a farm, hold on to hope. Thea talks to me, gives me a cigarette, I’m all light-headed.

  “It can take weeks sometimes. One of my other mates got back just the day before yesterday. And it depends on how badly they’re wounded.” He turns to Thea. “No one’s reported that things have gone badly for him.”

  “You should sit down a moment,” Thea says. She towers above me, as my mother did before I fell asleep when I was little, as in those moments when my soul has almost let go of the day, grasps on to a few threads a little longer, and then yields.

  * * *

  The third time someone knocks at the door, I open it.

  “Miss Howard. It’s eleven o’clock already. I can’t control what you do in your own time, but we can’t keep breakfast waiting for you for ever.” Mrs Sewell’s face seems more deeply furrowed each week.

  I nod. This afternoon we’re starting to rehearse a new piece. I haven’t practised it enough yet.

  “Breakfast tomorrow will be at half past seven, as usual. If you wish for something else to eat today, then ask in the kitchen.”

  She turns around, thin and creased as crêpe paper. Her feet barely leave prints in the carpet.

  I go and sit on the windowsill. The late autumn sun makes the chestnut treetops luminescent—yellow, ochre, red, redder. A stabbing in my belly, in my diaphragm—perhaps he’ll never see this again. Thea kept insisting yesterday evening that we can’t tell what’s happened, that I mustn’t lose heart. She said it again this morning. Don’t lose heart, hope. He had no worries about the war, he wasn’t the type to worry about anything. A good soldier, not made of granite but certainly of solid wood. But no one could really imagine how bad it was, not even when the first stories reached us from the trenches, when the first soldiers returned, when the newspapers wrote reports—now we have photographs too.

  A military truck drives past in the street below, tooting its horn, and there’s a group of children at the roadside, cheering. A soldier walks past them, arm in arm with a nurse. Her laughter cuts off my breath.

  My dress is draped over the foot of my bed. The fabric feels cold for a moment, and then takes on the temperature of my skin.

  The banister rail gives some support. It’s colder outside than it seemed, so I go back for a warmer coat and my soft velvet bonnet, and try again. When the door slams shut behind me, it makes me jump. But it’s only on reaching the rehearsal room that I realise I’ve forgotten my violin. Stockdale lets Joan take me home. “We really don’t need you this week. Just make sure that you practise every day. It’ll do you good. Chin up.” He pats a little colour into my cheek.

  * * *

  “Gwen, we must go now. We’re already late.” Thea is at the open door. “Come on, darling. I know you’re not in the mood. But you can’t let the children down. Truly.”

  She takes my hand and tugs me up. I grasp my violin case and follow her downstairs, out of the front door, out of the street, to Don’s house. He’s started a little school for the children in his neighbourhood. They have classes twice a week, violin and piano. Thea helps Don with the piano classes, I help with the violin. They’re too small still for the cello. He has a rich uncle who has bought some second-hand violins for him, and some of the orchestra have donated old instruments.

  One of the youngest children, Paulie, is standing at the door waiting for us. “Thea!” He throws his arms around her waist and presses his filthy little body against hers.

  “Clever boy—you’re here already!” She asks if his sister is here too. He doesn’t know, scratches a scab off his cheek; the black dirt from his nails remains in the wound. His pals run into the street, yelling; the smallest boy falls over, seems to want to cry for a moment, then swiftly races towards us with the others.

  There are twelve children in all. We put them in a circle and start warming up. We always begin with a little song. “Happy or sad?” “Happy,” half of them shout. “Sad,” the other half cry. For a few minutes it casts its spell on them. After that they’re allowed to play. We’re halfway through ‘Frère Jacques’ now. Michael is concentrating so hard that his tongue sticks out. Paulie is distracted and is running around. Thea sits him down again, with his violin. The girls are really doing their best. Bert and Timmy are always laughing. Once a week isn’t enough. They have no other stimulus. These children aren’t from the worst families: they have shoes; their teeth ar
e mostly white, not black; they’re not as thin as the street urchins who live behind Mrs Sewell’s house. But they all have too many brothers and sisters and only Paulie and Timmy regularly go to school.

  Timmy is the first one to get it right. Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, dormez-vous? The other children clap in time for him, and he has to play it again, for the group now. His eyes shine; he licks his lips and plays it one more time, almost perfectly. The other children stand up to clap and he moves his shoulders up and down, full of bottled-up pride. Thea praises him, and I do too, and then we carry on with the lesson, going back to basics, for the other children. Timmy plays along, very seriously now; he’s no longer fooling around with Bert.

  On the other side of the window grey shifts into grey: stone, street, smoke. I must keep on watching the children.

  When the lesson is over, I put on my coat.

  “Aren’t you going to stay for tea?” Thea is in the little kitchen. “Don will be home soon.”

  I shake my head. “Sorry.”

  She takes hold of me and presses me to her for a moment. “Look after yourself, won’t you? I’ll see you later.”

  Timmy runs towards me when I’m at the door and flings his arms round me. “Can I come with you?” I kiss his head and say we’ll see each other soon.

  I walk through the garden to the back street, then into the next alley. Stone on stone. My feet sound louder than is pleasant. I know that the back street is always the same width and isn’t narrower today than on other days, but it feels so. Before I reach the shopping street I can hear already how busy it is—people, carts, buses, carriages, everyone moving through each other—I quicken my pace, simply looking ahead, that is quite enough, more than enough. Two men with umbrellas—I only realise that it’s raining when I see them—a woman holding a child’s hand, another child in her wake, a horse and cart on the other side of the road. Bang. I turn round and see a Pigeon wing fluttering, walk back to it—the other wing is broken, its abdomen torn open, the Pigeon is still alive, looking at me from one eye, she can’t move her head—this Pigeon is going to die, there’s really nothing to be done—I look around, there’s a pile of bricks against one of the houses a little further on, I can’t see any other option, so I take a brick, meanwhile everyone simply walks on, no one has noticed the Pigeon, carts drive back and forth, coachmen guide their horses just past it—I must hurry, that poor creature, the Pigeon looks at me again when I return, sorry, I say, I’m terribly sorry, and I kneel down and slam the brick onto the Pigeon as hard as I can, smash the skull to pieces in a single blow, and I strike again although the Pigeon is already dead, the Pigeon is now truly dead—I stand up and put the brick back on the pile against the wall, blood making small feathers stick to its underside, another Pigeon is watching some way off, its mate, probably, and I whisper sorry once again and then I walk on and people are still acting as if they haven’t seen anything at all, though there really was something to see, and now I’m probably weeping but it’s raining and so my tears can’t be seen, and no one looks closely enough anyway.