…Have you kept birds? If you haven’t, all this must sound, perhaps, exaggerated. People have the idea that birds are heartless, cold little creatures, not like dogs or cats. My washerwoman used to say every Monday when she wondered why I didn’t keep ‘a nice fox terrier’, ‘There’s no comfort, Miss, in a canary.’ Untrue! Dreadfully untrue! I remember one night. I had had a very awful dream – dreams can be terribly cruel – even after I had woken up I could not get over it. So I put on my dressing-gown and came down to the kitchen for a glass of water. It was a winter night and raining hard. I suppose I was half asleep still, but through the kitchen window, that hadn’t a blind, it seemed to me the dark was staring in, spying. And suddenly I felt it was unbearable that I had no one to whom I could say ‘I’ve had such a dreadful dream,’ or – ‘Hide me from the dark.’ I even covered my face for a minute. And then there came a little ‘Sweet! Sweet!’ His cage was on the table, and the cloth had slipped so that a chink of light shone through. ‘Sweet! Sweet!’ said the darling little fellow again, softly, as much as to say, ‘I’m here, Missus. I’m here!’ That was so beautifully comforting that I nearly cried.
…And now he’s gone. I shall never have another bird, another pet of any kind. How could I? When I found him, lying on his back, with his eye dim and his claws wrung, when I realised that never again should I hear my darling sing, something seemed to die in me. My breast felt hollow, as if it was his cage. I shall get over it. Of course. I must. One can get over anything in time. And people always say I have a cheerful disposition. They are quite right. I thank God I have.
…All the same, without being morbid, or giving way to – to memories and so on, I must confess that there does seem to me something sad in life. It is hard to say what it is. I don’t mean the sorrow that we all know, like illness and poverty and death. No, it is something different. It is there, deep down, deep down, part of one, like one’s breathing. However hard I work and tire myself I have only to stop to know it is there, waiting. I often wonder if everybody feels the same. One can never know. But isn’t it extraordinary that under his sweet, joyful little singing it was just this – sadness? – Ah, what is it? – that I heard.
A Walk in the Woods
Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) was an Irish novelist and short story writer. She published her first book, a collection of short stories entitled Encounters, in 1923. During World War II Bowen wrote the novel, The Heat of the Day and a collection of stories, The Demon Lover and Other Stories, which won her universal praise for the depiction of wartime London. She was awarded a CBE in 1948. Her final novel, Eva Trout, or Changing Scenes won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1969 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
The mysterious thing was that the woods were full of people – though they showed a front of frondy depth and silence, inviolable and sifted through with sun. They looked like a whole element, like water, possible to behold but not to enter, in which only the native creature can exist. But this was a deception. Once inside them, it was only at a few moments that the solitary walker could feel himself alone, and lovers found it hard to snatch unregarded kisses. For those few moments when nobody was in sight, the glades of bronze bracken, the wet, green rides leading off still seemed to be the edge of another world. The brown distances, the deep hollows welled with magic, forlorn silence, as though they were untrodden. But what was likely to be the last fine Sunday of autumn had brought Londoners, or people from suburbs on this side of the city, in hundreds into these woods, which lay open, the People’s property – criss-crossed by tarmac roads on which yellow leaves stuck. The people who came here were mostly well-to-do, for you needed a car to get here without effort. So saloon cars, run off the roads between the wide-apart birch-trees, were packed flank to flank, like shining square-rumped tin pigs, in the nearby glades. Inside a few of these cars people remained sitting with the wireless on – but mostly they had got out, yawned, stretched, and scattered in threes and fours.
Most of the Londoners lacked a sense of direction. Directly they were out of the sight of the road, an atavistic fear of the woods invaded them. Willing or unwilling they walked in circles, coming back again and again to make certain they had not lost their cars – in which had often been left a tea-basket, an overcoat of some value, or an old lady, an aunt or a grandmother. Not to be sure where one is induces panic – and yet the sensation of being lost was what they unconsciously looked for on this holiday – they had come to the woods. The sounds of bolder people whistling to dogs, of mackintoshes rustling against the bracken reassured them made them strike in deeper.
Walking between the pillars of the trees, the men squared their shoulders – as though they inherited savage dignity. The matronly women, heavy in fur coats – which, just taken out after the summer, shed a smell of camphor – protestingly rolled as they walked on their smart heels. They looked about them, dissatisfied, acquisitive, despising the woods because they belonged to everyone. Had they not profoundly dreaded to trespass, they would have preferred the property of some duke. Now and then, recalling a pottery vase at home, they would strip off their gloves and reach for a fanlike spray of gold beech leaves. Or, unwillingly stooping, they tugged at a frond of bracken – but that is hard to pick. Their faces stayed unrelaxed: there is no poetry for the middle-class woman in her middle years. Nature’s disturbing music is silent for her; her short phase of instinctive life is over. She is raising, forcing upward the children she has, and driving her man on. Her features become bleak with narrow intention: she is riveted into society. Still, to touch the edge of Nature stands for an outing – you pack baskets and throng to the edge of forest or sea. The still, damp, glittering woods, the majestic death of the year were reflected in the opaque eyes of these women – hardly more human, very much less pathetic, than the glass eyes of the foxes some of them wore. In family parties the women and men parted; they did not speak to each other. The women walked more slowly to act as a brake. Where tracks narrowed between thickets or bracken the families went in files. The children escaped and kept chasing each other, cat-calling, round the trees. They were not allowed to run down the wet green rides.
Sometimes the thud of hooves was heard, and young people on horseback crossed the end of a glade in coloured jerseys, with chins up, flaunting their bold happiness. The walkers, with a sort of animal envy, lowered their eyes and would not look after them. From couples of lovers clashing through the bracken, or standing suspended in love, fingers touching, in patches of sun, eyes were averted in a commenting way.
The riders thudding, across a glade were heard, not seen, by a couple in a thicket. These two, in a secret clearing at the foot of an oak, sat on a mackintosh eating sandwiches. They were very hungry. They had come to the edge of the woods in a Green Line bus, struck in and wandered for a long time now, looking for the place their fancy wanted. The woman, a city woman, refused to believe the woods had no undiscovered heart, if one could only come on it. Each time she had sighted the black of another tarmac road she had let out a persecuted sigh. The young man saw she was flagging, and he was hungry. He had found what she wanted by fighting through this thicket to the foot of the oak, then pulling her after him. In here they at least saw no one. They had spread the mackintosh, kissed, and opened the sandwiches.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘There go people riding.’
‘Did you ever ride?’
‘I did once.’
‘On that farm?’
‘Yes, that time,’ she said, smiling quickly, touched that he should remember. She spoke often about her childhood, never about her girlhood – which was past, for she was ten years older than he. And her girlhood had been brief: she had married young. She watched him reach out for another sandwich, then gently and wilfully detained him by making her thumb and finger into a bracelet round his thin wrist. He pulled his wrist up to his lips and kissed the joint of her thumb. They enjoyed this play as seriously as lions. She shut her eyes, dropped
her head back to let the sun through the branches fall on her forehead – then let his wrist go. He took the sandwich he wanted; she opened her eyes and saw him. ‘You greedy boy.’
‘Yes, I am greedy,’ he said. ‘You know I’m greedy.’
She thrust both hands up to her cheeks and said: ‘That’s no good – here.’
‘No, we’ve struck unlucky. I thought woods in winter—’
‘It’s still autumn. It’s the fine Sunday.’ Her face went narrow, as though she heard the crack of a whip: she opened a gap in their thicket by bending a branch back. With cautious, angry eyes they both looked through. A party of five people were filing through the bracken, about ten yards away. ‘There they go,’ she said. ‘There go the neighbours. That’s my life. Oh, God! Henry—’
‘They can’t hurt us.’
‘You know they can. Look, eat that last sandwich, do.’
‘What about you?’
‘I don’t want it: I cut them for you. Turkey and ham, that should be.’
‘I’m a spoilt boy,’ said Henry, taking the sandwich without any more fuss. She crumbled up the paper, drove it with the point of his stick into the soft earth at the foot of the oak and earthed it up alive. Then she brushed crumbs from the mackintosh with a downcast face, making a bed in which they dare not be. But Henry drew his long legs up, scrambled round like a dog and lay across the mackintosh with his head in Carlotta’s lap. She stroked his stubborn dark hair back, leaned her bosom over his face and stroked his forehead with a terrible held-in tenderness. The whole weight of his body seemed to have gone into his head, which lay as heavy as a world on her thighs. His clerk’s face was exposed to her touch and to the sky – generally so intent, over-expressive, nervous, the face was wiped into blank repose by her touch. He flung one hand across his chest and held a fold of her skirt. His spectacles, by reflecting the sky’s light, hid his eyes from her, so she leaned over further and lifted them off gently. She looked into the blotted darkness of his pupils which, from being exposed like this, looked naked. Then he shut his eyes and put on the withdrawn smile of someone expecting sleep. ‘You are so good,’ he said.
‘Sleep then… go on, sleep… ’
‘Will you?’
‘Maybe. Sleep… ’
But she watched, with the bend of her spine against the tree, while he lay with his eyes shut. She saw that his will to sleep was a gentle way of leaving her for a little. She felt a tide of peace coming in – but then the tide turned: his forehead twitched. A bird trilled its unhopeful autumn song. He opened his eyes and said: ‘It’s awful, having no place.’
‘But we make a place of our own.’
‘But I get so tired – all this doesn’t seem natural.’
‘Oh, Henry – what’s the good?’
‘Well, you’ve often said that.’
‘Then you’ve said, what’s the good?’
‘It was all very well at first,’ he said, ‘just knowing you. Just coming round to your place. Seeing you before Joe got back, or even: with Joe. I used to like you to have a place of your own – that was why I’d rather go with you than a girl.’
‘That’s what you want,’ she said, ‘just mothering. That’s what Joe thinks; he doesn’t think any harm. “Here comes your boy,” he says; I think he’s right, too: that’s all you’re really after.’ She gently outlined his mouth with one of her fingertips.
But his mouth tightened. ‘No, it’s more than that now,’ he said. ‘You know it’s more than that.’ He stared at the sky with his unfocused eyes – like a hare’s eyes. ‘I wanted what I’ve got; I wanted that all the time; I wanted that from the first – though it may once have been mixed up in the other dung. But ever since that, ever since we—’
‘Do you wish we hadn’t?’
‘You don’t know what you’re saying. But I used to like your home; it was such a snug little place. I was happy there in a way: that’s all gone now. I used to like Joe, too, one time. And now – it’s awful… This isn’t what I imagined the first time I saw you. Hiding in woods like this – it isn’t fit for you… really.’
‘It’s my only life. You’re my only life. My only way out. Before you came, I was walled in alive. I didn’t know where to turn, I was burning myself out… I don’t mind where we go; so long as we get away from them… And we do have these days when Joe’s gone to his mother’s.’
‘But we’ve got no place… When I was young I used to believe there was really some tremendous world and that one would get to it. A sort of a Shakespeare world. And I heard it in music, too. And I lived there for three days after I first met you. I once used to believe—’
‘But you’re young still.’
‘Well, perhaps I do still.’
‘I always have. That’s our place.’
‘But we ought to have some real place – I mean, I want you.’
‘Oh, shut up,’ she said. ‘I—’
‘Look, come on,’ he said, getting up. ‘Better walk on. This does no good. Let’s walk on into the woods.’
‘They’re so full.’
‘But they look empty.’
‘Kiss once—’
They kissed. It was he who pulled apart. He gathered up her mackintosh on his arm and began to fight a way out for her through the thickets. As she stepped between the branches he held back, her lips shook and she looked quite blind. Her look attracted the notice of Muffet and Isabella, two schoolgirls who, walking arm-in-arm through the woods, had already started to stare and nudge each other on seeing the thicket of purple leaves shake. Any man and woman together made them giggle. They saw a haggard woman with dark red hair and a white face: something in her expression set them off giggling all the more. Henry disentangled the mackintosh from the last of the thicket; his consciousness of the girls staring and giggling made him look very young. His pride in Carlotta was wounded; his pity for her abased him. She was a married woman out with her neighbour’s lodger. They both came from a newly developed suburb, and had met at the local debating society.
As he saw the girls’ pink faces stuck open with laughter he saw why Carlotta hated her life. He saw why she towered like a statue out of place. She was like something wrecked and cast up on the wrong shore. When they met she had been one of these women going through life dutifully, and at the same time burning themselves up. Across the hall where they met, her forehead like no other woman’s forehead, her impatient carriage, her deep eyes and held-in mouth, had been like a signal to him. He could not turn away. When they had talked, she excited, released, soothed him. Pride and a bitter feeling of misdirection had, up to that meeting, isolated them both. Passion broke down a wall in each of their lives. But her spirit was stronger than his, and so he was frightened of her… Carlotta stumbled stepping out of the thicket, and put a hand on his elbow for support. Henry twitched his elbow away and strode ahead of her, lashing round at the bracken with his stick.
‘Henry—’
‘Look out, they’re looking. Those girls behind. Don’t look round—’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘We can’t be too careful, can we.’ Henry did not know if she spoke in irony or sheer pain.
Muffet was spending the Sunday with Isabella, whose family lived not far from the Green Line bus stop. The girls were friends at the High School. They both wore dark-blue overcoats and walked bare-headed; their lively faces showed no particular character. They were allowed by their mothers to walk in the woods so long as they did not get talking to men: they had been told what happens to girls who do that – their minds were bulging with cautionary horrors. They had neither of them got boys yet: when they had got boys they would stop walking together. At present their walks were gay and enjoyable – on fine Sundays the woods were a great show for them: too soon this would be over, winter silence would fall.
This afternoon, in a fairly retired glade, they had come on a lonely car in which a couple embraced. They also inspected cars parked nearer the roadside, squinting in at grandmothers and the picnic b
askets, running away in alarm from pairs of well-got-up women, upright in backs of cars like idols under glass cases, discontentedly waiting for their men to return. Or, intercepting a bar of wireless music, Isabella and Muffet would take a few dancing steps. They envied the thundering riders, the young lovers, the imperious owners of well-bred dogs… Isabella and Muffet, anything but reluctant, hopped with impatience where brook and river meet. They were fifteen. They stared at everyone. At the same time they had a sense of propriety which was very easily offended.
They peered at the broken thicket, then turned to stare after the couple.
‘My goodness,’ said Isabella, ‘she looked silly!’
‘Breaking trees, too,’ said Muffet. ‘That’s against the law.’
‘Besides being old enough to be his mother. She was old. Did you see her?’
‘Perhaps she was his mother.’
‘Mother my eye! But he gave her the push all right – did you see that? Did you see?’
‘Going on at him like that.’
‘Well, I call it a shame. It’s a shame on him. He’s a nice boy.’
‘No, I call him sappy. I mean, at her age. Fancy him letting her.’
The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories Page 48
