The Birds of the Innocent Wood

by Deirdre Madden

  Jane felt ill at ease in the big house, which was draughty and uncomfortable. Mainly because of her father-in-law she could not put in motion the domestic changes which she desired: fresh wallpaper, new carpets, and brightly coloured paint. She sensed that James’s father – and James too – liked the house to remain as it had always been. Her presence did nothing to change the womanless air of the place, and even she was struck by the oddness of it.

  One day, not very long after their marriage, she came into the kitchen to find James cleaning out a large brown and black double-barrelled shot-gun.

  ‘What’s that for?’ she asked falteringly.

  ‘What do you think it’s for?’ he replied laughing. ‘Killing things, that’s what,’ as he closed it with a click and playfully levelled the empty gun at her.

  That night the weather was stormy, and the following morning James rose long before the dawn to go out wildfowling. When he had gone from the dim room Jane moved over to his side of the bed, into the warm depression which his body had made. Breathing in a smell of his absent body from the sheets and the soft pillow she listened, as she so often did, to the sound of the birds, but now their cries were broken by the sounds of the men’s guns. She was surprised to find how much this upset her, for until then she had always associated the bird cries with hostility: often she had wished for a natural silence. She felt ill at ease in the countryside, for it was not ‘nice’ as she had vaguely imagined it would be, any more than marriage was ‘nice’. The flat earth and the wide, wide sky frightened her, and to her the noise of the birds was the noise of nature: implacable, uncompromising, cruel: something which could not be contained or controlled. She was surprised, therefore, at the great pity which she felt for the birds as she lay in bed and thought of them, wounded and crying and frightened out there in the raw morning.

  Later James came home, shamefaced at his lack of success. He threw a single mallard on the kitchen table, and Jane was shocked. She had never seriously thought of the birds as living creatures until that moment, when she saw one dead. She had considered them distant creatures and thought of them in terms of sound rather than of touch. At dusk she had watched them fly across the sky, pale against the turbid clouds: always something multiple, distant, untouchable. Never before had she been so close to a wild duck, and it filled her with wonder. For a long time she stood looking at the dead bird with a mixture Of admiration and revulsion. Plump, solid and heavy-looking, its little dead eyes glittered, and its fabulous glossy feathers deflected the light. Forcing herself to put out her hand and stroke it, Jane thought gladly of all the other birds which were still out there, in the water and in the air: alive.

  James’s father plucked and cleaned out the bird and presented to Jane a lump of flesh that looked like nothing so much as a dismembered baby. It took the full power of her will to make her roast it in the oven. When it was ready she could not bear to watch the men eat the fowl, it make her sick even to think of it.

  And then someone gave them a gift of fish and she had to cook that too, and then someone gave them a parcel of eels wrapped in thick black polythene which rolled and wriggled along the back step until James’s father opened the package up and killed and skinned them. All this was a revelation to Jane: that you could live comfortably with nature to such a degree that it did not threaten you but that you threatened it: only when she realized this did Jane feel that she was beginning to understand this strange place where she was to spend the rest of her life.

  Jane found it no easier to make friends in the country than she had in town: in fact, she soon found herself longing for the city’s anonymity. At first she merely disliked going to the village to do shopping, but gradually the dislike grew to the point of dread. As she walked along the quiet main street she felt that someone peeped from every window. In shops she parried politely the sly, insinuating questions of the villagers, and always presented a face as blank as the fronts of the painted houses that watched her. Paranoia developed so that even when goodwill was shown to her she would not see it. She distrusted everyone, imagining a sneer in every greeting, and sarcasm in response to every remark she made. She felt that they hated her city accent and her different ways. The closed circle of the community would not open to admit her, and at last the day came when she flung her bags upon the kitchen table and said pettishly to James, ‘You’re to do the shopping from now on. I don’t want to go back to the village again.’ It took a good deal of questioning and coaxing before she would reveal what had finally made her so cross.

  ‘I overheard two women talking,’ she said at last. ‘I’m sure that they were talking about me. They said that I was as odd as a pet hen.’

  And when James laughed at this, she became angry and sulked for the rest of the day.

  James had hoped that a strong friendship would develop between Jane and Ellen, the woman who lived in the cottage near by, but when they met for the first time it was with spontaneous and mutual antipathy, staring at each other with identical blue eyes.

  The meeting took place at the cottage, and Ellen presided queen-like over a china teapot, with a gentility that made Jane hate her; and she hated her too for the prettiness of her small, dim cottage.

  ‘I want to know all about you.’ Ellen said. ‘James has told me next to nothing.’

  And so Jane began to tell the story of her life with her usual quiet confidence and secure belief in her powers of eloquence. But as she told her tale (which she could do now without giving much thought to either the matter or the method of the telling), she was unnerved to notice two things: first, that Ellen bore a distinct physical resemblance to herself; and second, that she obviously did not believe a word of what Jane was saying. The fire, the convent, the attic, the office: she thought that Jane was making it all up to solicit pity, and to give herself the spurious respectability of actually having had a past life. The combined effect of these two factors was that before she had finished speaking, Jane felt that she was listening to herself, and disbelieving the story of her own past life. She had never used this ploy for any other reason than to elicit sympathy, and never, until now, had it failed.

  When she finished, Ellen picked up her teacup and before taking a tiny sip threw two words into the silence, like small stones. ‘How sad.’

  ‘At least it has a happy ending,’ said Jane. ‘I was lucky to find James.’

  ‘Yes, you were,’ said Ellen flatly. There was an unpleasant pause.

  ‘You must find it very lonely over here. Don’t you find it lonely?’

  ‘Not really – I have my job to do, and I have friends in the village. Gerald comes to see me sometimes. No,’ said Ellen, ‘I’m not lonely.’ Jane said nothing. Ellen smiled sweetly at her and offered her more tea.

  ‘We didn’t get on,’ Jane said flatly that night when James asked her how the visit had fared.

  ‘Oh?’ he said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘That’s no sort of an answer, Jane.’ She shrugged her shoulders crossly.

  ‘She didn’t like me. I could feel it, and that made me dislike her, I don’t know why it happened. You can’t always know why you dislike another person, James, any more than you can always tell why you do like others.’

  He did not reply, but it was obvious that he was disappointed by the outcome of the visit.

  One curious result of the incident was that it brought Jane and her father-in-law much closer together, ‘Stuck-up baggage,’ he said. ‘You’re better off without her for a friend.’

  Jane’s antipathy towards Ellen was mixed with a considerable degree of curiosity, and she wanted to know all about her background. James would tell her nothing, but his father was happy to oblige. One winter’s night as they sat by the stove, he told her the story of Ellen’s past. Jane listened attentively and later she would run over it again and again in her mind, embellishing the tale with little added details of her own, imagining certain scenes with particular
intensity. Every time she saw Ellen thereafter, she would think of what she knew, conscious always that it was partly truth and partly her own invention.

  Without ever knowing its history, Jane had frequently seen Ellen’s birthplace. It stood on the outskirts of the village, and in its day had evidently been a fine house, with extensive lawns, tennis courts and a summer-house; elegantly furnished within and meticulously tended without. But its days of glory were long since over, for the house was now nothing more than a blackened, burnt-out shell. The neglected gardens grew wild, and where ladies had once played croquet, cattle now munched the grass and scratched their necks against the trunk of a sprawling white lilac.

  Ellen had not been raised in luxury. The fall of the family had begun with her grandfather, who drank and gambled away a great deal of the family fortune. After his death his only son, Ellen’s father, married and led a life of dissipation far surpassing that of his father’s. Jane thought frequently of how greatly Ellen’s mother must have been taken in by marriage. James’s father spoke highly of the woman, and said, ‘She made the most terrible mistake of her life in marrying that fool.’ From the daughter, Jane was able to create in her mind a picture of the mother: frail, blue-eyed, refined. How utterly duped she must have been when first she saw the house! Jane imagined her coming to tea, intent on marriage and blinding herself to everything that might endanger the illusion in which she longed to believe. Later perhaps she would lie to herself, saying that it was dusk when they took tea in the drawing-room, and in the failing light she could see the maid’s black and white uniform, but not the stains on her apron or how badly her cuffs were frayed; could see the Dresden china, but not the silverfish which flickered across the saucer when she raised her cup; could see the silver salvers on the dresser, but not the fact that they were yellow and tarnished. She knew in her heart that the dusk was a lie, for it had been an afternoon in summer: sunlight poured through the high windows. Ellen’s mother saw then only the gentility she wanted to see: but when she came back to the house as a wife, she saw things very clearly indeed.

  By force of necessity the small staff became smaller still: the grubby maid was dismissed, then the gardener, then the cook, until only the housekeeper remained. This woman did not live on the premises, and after her departure each evening, husband and wife would be left alone together in the huge, empty house. He drank heavily. Everything of value in the house (including the tarnished silver plate) was sold to meet increasing debts, and everything else began to decay. With a morbid interest, Jane tried to imagine how the woman must have felt at the creeping and inexorable decay of her home. She thought of her moving from one cold, empty room to another, watching as the big house rotted around her, and she could do nothing to stop it. Her reflection looked back at her from huge oval mirrors of bevelled glass, the mercury of which was stained brown. In the drawing-room, patches of damp spread across the parquet, and mildew crept up the velvet curtains. Books burst their spines in the damp library. Before her eyes, the painted faces of her husband’s ancestors disintegrated and crumbled, just as their corporeal faces had long since rotted away in the family’s ostentatious grave. One by one, the windows in the conservatory were broken until nothing remained but a frail cage of rotting white wood. After the birth of her daughter the woman must have wept to think of the harm the house might do to her child: no fires could defeat the damp, seeping cold; and in winter the rats would enter unchecked through the rotten floorboards and doors.

  When Ellen was twelve, her father, overwhelmed by debts, took an ornamental revolver out to a ruined gazebo in the grounds of the house. His wife heard the report, and it was she who found her husband with half his head blown away. (The deed was, of course, in reality performed with a shotgun in the back yard: the revolver and gazebo were gothic fancies which Jane could not resist adding.) He was not buried in the family grave, but at the foot of the hill, in a patch of ground set aside for the bodies of suicides and unbaptized infants.

  Jane’s father-in-law said that all the villagers had presumed Ellen’s mother would leave as soon as possible after the incident, but to everyone’s astonishment, she made no move. She closed down most of the rooms of the big house, and lived with her daughter in one small wing. She no longer employed a housekeeper, but the woman who had filled that post remained her only friend in the village. The former housekeeper frequently visited the big house, and in return Ellen and her mother often visited the woman in her cottage. The bond between Ellen and the housekeeper was particularly strong; she filled for her the function of a grandmother, and often the child stayed overnight with her. It so happened that she was staying with the woman on the night fire broke out in the big house, and had she been at home, she would surely have died with her mother. The fire started in the wing to which they had confined themselves, but it spread rapidly, and by morning Ellen had no father, no mother, no home and no money. She was fifteen years old.

  After the funeral, the housekeeper told Ellen that she was to come and live with her. The girl gladly did so, and continued her studies at the local school. The woman and the girl lived together happily, and when the woman died some years later, Ellen was as grieved as she had been by the death of her natural mother. She inherited the cottage, and was at that time just old enough to begin work, so she completed her studies in music and was fortunate enough to secure a teaching post at her old school in the nearby town. She continued to live quietly at the cottage.

  ‘And are you sure that the fire was an accident?’ said Jane.

  ‘Of course it was,’ her father-in-law replied. ‘What would a fine woman like that want to kill herself for?’

  ‘So then she’s buried in the family grave?’

  ‘No,’ he said reluctantly. There was fools then that thought as you did – and bigger fools that thought she would want to be buried with that weak, drunken scut just because she had made the mistake of marrying him.’

  ‘So she’s at the foot of the hill too?’ Jane said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Odd that she did want to stay in the village after he died, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said her father-in-law, but the telling of the tale had evidently wearied him, for he would say no more.

  *

  Jane’s new life did not lose its sense of strangeness with the passage of time. She did not feel that she belonged in the big, cold farmhouse, and could not become used to the cruelty of nature, nor to the harshness of country life. Yet always there was a sense of distance which to some degree protected her, and she felt this in small matters as well as in more important things, so that when she opened the door one morning and found at her feet a disembowelled rat, left there by the farm cat, she could think, This isn’t really happening to me. It was some other woman who had found herself living in a house where such things were commonplace, where there were slugs in the kitchen and enormous spiders in the bedrooms, and Jane was somehow able to observe this woman’s plight with a peculiar intimacy.

  But it was Jane who failed to know and be known by her husband. She knew then that the sense of distance did not protect her, but was instead what was so fundamentally wrong with her life. As the weeks and months went by, she did not feel that she was becoming any closer to him, and she did not know how to go about creating that closeness. It almost drove her mad with anger to think that Ellen, by the simple fact of having lived near by for many years, probably knew him better than she did. They had so little time together. All day, both of them would be working, and in the evenings Gerald sometimes went across the fields to visit Ellen, while James’s father would go to the village pub for a few hours, but their socializing rarely seemed to coincide, and one or other of the two men always seemed to be around when Jane least wanted company. Even when she and James were alone in a room, there was always the possibility that someone would come in unexpectedly. The only real privacy they had was when they were in their bedroom, but Jane was dismayed to find that the longer they lived together, the mor
e uncomfortable they were in each other’s company. In time, she almost began to dread being with him, for the combination of affection and distance in which they lived upset her. It dismayed her to discover time and time again that there were so many things which she could not do. She could not bring herself to be open with him and honest; could not overcome the fear which she had of cultivating intimacy. It made her tell lies: one day when James unexpectedly asked her if she was happy she replied, ‘Yes, of course.’ They did not understand each other. The physical side of their marriage was unsatisfactory too, for although the house was old, the interior walls were thin, and the thought that either Gerald or James’s father might overhear their love-making embarrassed and inhibited them both. After many months together she wanted to say to him, ‘Is this it? Is this how it will always be?’ But she did not ask, because she was afraid of how he would answer.

  And then, a year to the day since her marriage, her aunt turned up, uninvited and unannounced, wanting to see what her niece had made of her life.

  ‘You never told me just how much of a wilderness you live in,’ were her aunt’s first words. The nearest life miles away, and that no more than a clutch of half-witted yokels, the most of them cross-eyed with inbreeding.’ Jane was inclined to agree with this, but she remained in sullen silence. She agreed with a surprising amount of what her aunt said in the course of her three-hour visit: they were things which Jane had thought to herself time without number in the course of the year, but she was outraged to hear her aunt articulate these damning judgements of Jane’s life. She sneered at Jane for the rough aspect of the house: cigarette burns on the clothless kitchen table; tattered cushions, dowdy curtains, and a few hens picking around the back door.