‘Has she always lived there?’
‘More or less.’
‘You must be very close friends,’ she said, hoping for a denial, but he said rather absently, ‘Yes, we are. She’s been like a sister to me. I’m sure you’ll get on well with her.’
‘Perhaps.’ Jane moved away from the window.
From the dim, slightly dank parlour, he led her through the hallway where a grandfather clock stood like an upended coffin, and into the kitchen. There, he introduced her to his elderly father who was sitting in an old broken-down armchair wedged in by the side of an Aga. On the other side of the stove there was a cardboard box containing a little lamb whose mother had died, and which James was rearing by hand. The whole house, Jane thought, was drab and uncomfortable. The kitchen smelt of sheep and tobacco. Its wall were painted half wine-red and half brown; and the cold terrazzo tiles beneath their feet were flecked white, ginger and black.
James’s father seemed to like her. They talked together while James made tea, moving between the stove and a little back scullery as he did so, and all the while she secretly watched him.
When the tea was ready he served it, together with slices of bought Angel Cake, and as they ate and drank and talked there was a feeling of peace in the room. She watched James watching his father as the old man broke the pastel-coloured cake into squares and nibbled at them. The resemblance between father and son was remarkable. She felt that she could cry with relief, having at last found a circle of affection which would open and take her in.
Afterwards, when they carried the tea things through to the back scullery, James said to Jane, ‘There’s something here which I want to show you. Look. Quietly now, or you’ll startle her.’
He pointed to a cardboard carton which had a grill from the oven placed over the top to form a makeshift cage. She peered through the bars and saw a scrap of an old jumper, and a little dish of milk, and there, huddled in a corner of the box, was a tiny robin. She gasped. The bird was so very near, its brown eyes burning and fine-feathered breast quivering. It seemed electric with life; so small, so still, but charged with an unstable energy.
But then she saw that the bird was wounded, its right wing hanging at a painful angle from its body.
‘The creature!’ she murmured. ‘What happened to it?’
‘It’s my fault,’ he said sadly. There was a rat in the shed outside and it was eating the meal, so I set a trap to catch it. But this morning when the door was open the bird flew in and ate the food I had set. The trap caught her on the wing. I hope she comes all right.’ He peered in anxiously at the bird in the box, and as Jane stood up to allow him space to look more closely, she glimpsed a shadow at the scullery window.
‘Who’s that?’ she asked James. He turned and looked.
‘Oh, that’s Gerald,’ he said vaguely. ‘He’s the farm hand. We only hired him a few months ago.’ He dropped his voice. ‘What with Daddy getting on a bit I thought we could do with the help.’ He turned his attention again to the robin, but when he straightened up some moments later, Jane was still looking out of the window at the farm hand.
Afterwards, they went back to the dingy parlour, and when they heard the outer door close behind James’s father, James put his arm around her waist and pulled her to him. Jane leaned against his shoulder, conscious of the musty smell in the room and thought, ‘I’ll change those curtains: brown velvet’s too much in here.’ She could hear the ticking of the clock in the hall; but she felt that she was caught in a space and a stillness which was beyond time, so that every tick was not another second, but the same second repeated, and repeated. She kissed him, drew away, kissed him again, and then rested her face upon his shoulder.
She could hear the wild birds clearly as they cried out over the water.
CHAPTER TWO
She can hear the wild birds clearly as they cry out over the water.
It is early afternoon on the feast of the Epiphany, and Catherine and Sarah are in the parlour, dismantling the Christmas tree and putting away the decorations for another year. Catherine, rather, busies herself with the tree while her twin has by now moved over to the window, where she stands idle. She made her contribution by collecting all the sprays of holly from behind the picture frames and mirrors and then burning them in the fire which Catherine had stoked up earlier.
It is now little over a month since the cold, wet day when Sarah gathered the holly, a day recorded in her diary with a little inked star. She remembers how she hacked it from the hedge. The leaves had been glossy and dark and the fleshy berries plump and rich and as bright as blood; but now the leaves are dry and have faded in colour to olive-drab; the berries have become shrivelled by the heat of the house. As she pressed the branches down into the flames she felt sad to watch the pale dead branches burn, and the dry leaves crackle and blister and blacken, and so she turned from the fire and crossed to the window where she now stands, looking out from the warm, untidy room into the cold landscape.
A few days after Christmas, heavy snow had fallen. Its first effect had been magical, for it fell straight down on a windless night and covered everything, absolutely everything down to the smallest leaf with a crust of airy snow which held the light and sparkled. Late on the last day of December more snow had fallen. Sarah dreaded the start of the new year, and shortly before midnight she had gone out across the farmyard and had leaned back against the gate to look up at the sky.
January began while she was looking up at the snowflakes, and admiring them as they silently fell in the moonlight, cold, countless, beautiful. It reminded her of summer when the mayflies swarmed. The nights then were warm and dear and the little grey flies formed a living grey snow which was not silent and which did not fall, but hummed horribly and trapped her as if in a pillar of cloud. The mayflies were like one of the plagues with which the God of Israel cursed Egypt, and as she thought of summer she looked up even more ardently at the snowflakes drifting noiselessly in the cold air, and she told herself, ‘Cherish this.’
It was foolish to long for the summer to come.
At its first falling the snow was beautiful, but the first days of the new year have now passed, and no more has fallen. The thaw has not begun, but the snow has gone from the roofs of the buildings, from plants and from branches, so that the trees in the orchard are now all black against the sky and the snow no longer sparkles but looks dull, unreflective and damp. Sarah looks past the edge of the dark orchard and across the level fields which stretch beyond it, to the little cottage which stands near the lough shore. She looks long and intently, pretending not to hear and trying not to think about the pronounced wheeze of her sister’s breath as she steadily works. Instead, she tries to concentrate upon the desolate sound of the wild birds.
This is her home.
The great sense of space given by the wide sky and the flatness of the land is belied everywhere by the melancholy want of colour. Now she is literally seeing the place in its true colours, for the brightness of spring will be spurious in an area which is truly sad, drab, and dead. If you have been born here you can never belong elsewhere. If you have been born elsewhere, you can never belong here. Sarah knows that she is trapped. Now, as she stands by the window, she feels unspeakably sad. Why, on this winter’s afternoon, should she feel so strongly that everything is ending? The year has barely begun, but she knows that it is foolish to expect that it will bring any hope; that it is always foolish to expect too much from the simple passage of time.
She is glad that Christmas is over, for it is a feast which she has never liked. Even as a child it was always a disappointment to her. She does not turn around – she does not need to – to see the decorations which will be stored in the attic until the following December. Their mother had bought these decorations when the sisters were tiny. In later years they always intended to buy some fresh ones and throw away the most bedraggled of the strands of tinsel, and the most tarnished of the little gilt stars. But each year comes and goes and the
same decorations adorn the tree year after year after year. By virtue of this it has become timeless, and the little Christmas tree with its strange apples of chill, pastel-coloured glass is as eternal as the trees in the orchard with their unfailing cycle of bud, blossom and fruit. Sarah does not turn around to look at the decorations for she remembers them all.
Catherine, on the other hand, forgets everything. Every year she forgets about the little elves whose bodies are made of pine cones, forgets the Chinese lanterns of coloured tissue paper. She cannot remember details of texture, colour, dimension and smell. Sarah cannot understand the way in which her sister’s mind works, nor indeed the way in which her whole life operates, when every experience becomes so quickly and so absolutely a thing of the past: a dead thing. It is even tempting to think that she has forgotten her disappointment of the autumn: but that is surely too much to expect. For a moment, Sarah allows herself to think of her sister’s life and of her future, and she feels a great sense of pity.
Because of her bad memory, Catherine keeps a diary, stout as a ledger, with marbled endpapers. In this she contains her past. Sarah now thinks that it is a good idea to keep a diary as comprehensive as this, for it gives Catherine a degree of power over her life. Leaning her head against the glass she thinks, Perhaps tonight I ought to write all this dawn, I too ought to try to recreate this afternoon on paper, and contain it all: the fire, the holly, the tree, the snow: and Catherine.
But even as she thinks this she knows that it is foolish to struggle against the passage of time. When Sarah thinks about the future she feels great confusion, and even greater fear.
‘Sarah?’
‘Yes?’
‘Give me a hand with these boxes, please.’
Sarah pauses for a moment before turning away from the window, and when she does she studiously avoids looking her sister in the eye. As she bends to pick up a box she does not see how sad Catherine is as she looks down at her, and even if she did see she would not understand.
Catherine wishes that Sarah would not go to the cottage that afternoon, and wishes that she could say, ‘Please don’t go – don’t ever go again – stay here with me instead,’ and that her sister would comply without asking for reasons.
That same morning Catherine herself had been obliged to go to the cottage with a letter which had been brought in error to the farmhouse. The scene comes back to her vividly now and she is again at the cottage door. Ellen is making tea and insists that Catherine join her. She does so with great reluctance. From behind the closed door of the parlour comes the soft, tinny sound of a Chopin Nocturne being played with merely technical competence on an old piano. Humming gently to this, Ellen pours the weak, golden tea into two cups which are so thin and translucent that Catherine can see the china darken as the level of the tea rises.
Inwardly she sneers at their excessive gentility: Ellen with her toy cups and her paper doilies and her linen napkins and her china-handled cake slice: grounds for contempt, perhaps, but nothing more. Yet what Catherine feels towards Ellen is much stronger than contempt. Paper doilies are far too light to hold the weight of hatred. She watches Ellen over the rim of her teacup, and suddenly she realizes the strangeness of the situation. For here she is, quietly drinking tea with a woman whom she would happily see damned. An eternity of outer darkness scarcely seems adequate punishment for Ellen, and Catherine can think of no suffering from which she would spare her if it lay within her power to do so.
Catherine then remembers that she truly wants to be good: but when this hatred of Ellen comes over her, she feels as if a black, dreadful flower is opening in her heart. Her capacity for hatred fills her with awe. But it is her duty to forgive. If I were to die now, Catherine thinks, I too would deserve damnation.
‘Do you feel all right, dear?’
‘Yes.’
Catherine sips the tea and takes a slice of cake from the plate which Ellen holds out to her, but she only crumbles the cake in her fingers, for she cannot eat it. As they sit there listening to the music from the parlour she imagines Peter’s fingers, his clean square-nailed fingers pressing down softly on the cool piano keys. She knows that above the piano there is a photograph of Ellen’s wedding, and she is glad that she does not have to look at it. Catherine has never been able to understand why her mother loaned Ellen her wedding dress. She knows that she flatly refused to be her matron of honour, Catherine and Sarah’s father had been best man at the wedding, and in the parlour photograph there is a shadow on the groom. The dress and the marked resemblance which Ellen bore to Jane, the mother of the two girls, makes the photograph look uncannily like the pictures which they have of their own mother’s wedding. Catherine feels that she could not bear to look at that photograph now, it hurts her deeply even to think about it.
Suddenly Ellen says, ‘I suppose that you still miss your mother a great deal?’ Catherine feels tears come to her eyes and she hopes that Ellen knows they are caused by anger and hatred rather than grief. She turns her head aside and she does not speak. Ellen also remains silent, and for a moment Catherine thinks, She must suffer too, but she quashes this thought at once. She does not want to feel any compassion for the woman.
The music draws to a gentle conclusion, and after a moment’s pause the parlour door squeaks softly open. Peter enters hesitantly. ‘I heard voices,’ he says, ‘I thought it was Sarah.’
You mean you were afraid it was Sarah, Catherine thinks, and she wants to say aloud, ‘No, but doubtless she’ll be over later,’ a temptation which she resists with difficulty.
‘We were just speaking of Sarah and Catherine’s mother. The girl’s the image of her, isn’t she?’
‘Remarkable likeness,’ says Peter, not smiling and not greeting Catherine, in fact barely glancing at her as he cuts a slice of cake for himself. Catherine correctly recognizes the words as a veiled insult, for she knows that Peter disliked her mother, finding her distant and cold, and he thinks that Catherine is in the same mould.
‘Now Sarah’s a different matter altogether,’ Ellen begins, but Catherine interrupts her rudely.
‘We’re twins,’ she flatly says. ‘Identical twins.’
Ellen purses her lips and then says coldly, ‘Well, yes. I suppose you are … in some respects.’
Catherine rises to her feet. ‘I must be going,’ she says, and in her haste to leave she almost shatters the frail little teacup. She knows that her departure is too abrupt to be politic; and in the last look Ellen gives her there is both bafflement and barely veiled hostility.
Now Catherine wonders nervously if Peter will mention her odd behaviour to Sarah when she goes to the cottage that afternoon. She knows that Sarah will go, for even as they lift the boxes to carry them upstairs for storage, Catherine sees her sister look out of the window again, and then glance at her watch.
*
A short time later, Sarah stands by her bedroom window watching the cottage. Every Saturday afternoon Ellen goes to the next town where she spends some hours giving music lessons in a rented room. Sarah waits patiently, as she waits every week for Ellen’s departure. As she stands there she idly takes in her hand the tiger cowrie shell which Peter gave to her as a Christmas gift. Bright, smooth, cold as a stone, she turns it over in her hand and watches it catch the light, then strokes it gently against her face. She likes the colours: soft and dark and dun, yet still it is hard and bright.
She finds it hard to believe that this is a natural object, a thing from the sea; hard to believe that there are places where such things can be picked up along the shoreline. She looks at the shell and thinks, What have we to touch this? The image of a gull’s egg drifts unbidden into her mind. Once they had gathered gulls’ eggs out on an island, and she remembers them vividly: dun, like the cowrie, but duller, frailer, and weighty with the life of the bird within. She sets the sea shell on the window-sill and she folds her arms.
She hates her eagerness to go to the cottage. Week by week the importance of these visits has grown,
until now they are the only things which make her life bearable. She wishes this were not the case. She knows that Peter does not realize how desperately she needs to visit him every week. While she resents his obtuse failure to see this, she is relieved too, for she knows that as soon as he notices her dependence he will also realize the power which he has to control her happiness. She fears and dreads that.
He must know that she will come to him that afternoon, for she goes without fail, and she wishes that for once she had the courage to stay at home. But even as she thinks this she sees the door of the cottage open, and Ellen comes out, bundled up against the cold and carrying a flat music case of tan leather. And as soon as Sarah sees this, she goes from the room to fetch her overcoat and boots.
*
Unlike her sister, Sarah loves the little cottage in which so little has changed over the years. The bobbled red cloth across the overmantel, the long brass fire-irons lying in the fender, the curtains of heavy silk and the tiny china cups: all these she remembers from her childhood. The self-consciously gentrified air of the place appeals to her, and she is glad of the absence of all things concerning farm life. Looking over to the window when she enters, she sees a table stacked with blue-backed school exercise books.
‘Am I disturbing you?’ she asks.
‘No, not at all,’ he says. ‘I can mark these later.’
Smiling, she walks across the room, puts her arms around him and kisses him.
The windows of the cottage are small, and the weak rays of the January sun barely penetrate the low-ceilinged room. The only other sources of light are a desk lamp and a small red lamp which burns perpetually before an oleograph of the Sacred Heart. Sarah can never become used to such pictures. Her mother strongly disapproved of them, and taught her children to pray before a candle or some flowers. Sarah cannot believe in a doe-eyed God whose hair curls prettily at the nape of his neck. At best, she finds such pictures foolish, meaningless or odd; at worst, she finds them shocking, and she wonders how people can live out their daily lives beneath them, seeing every day the wounds and the blood.
The Birds of the Innocent Wood Page 3
