The Birds of the Innocent Wood

by Deirdre Madden

  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 Sara
h 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.

  By now the kettle has begun to screech, and the kitchen is filled with steam. The cold window is all misted over, and she releases him so that he can lower the gas and attend to the tea while she returns silently to the parlour. But when he walks in a few moments later carrying the tray, the room is empty. Her boots have gone from the hallway, and when he looks out of the cottage window, he can see that she is well on her way home, pushing the laden barrow before her.

  When his mother returns that evening, Peter is so quiet that she thinks something is wrong, and asks him what has happened.

  ‘Nothing,’ he replies, ‘nothing at all.’ And technically it is no lie, for next to nothing has happened. The afternoon’s incident was probably the most tentative and inconsequential physical encounter that he has ever had with a woman, but its potential significance far outweighs the event itself. Perhaps she has been quiet and strange for these past few weeks because she has been working round to this: or perhaps she acted purely on impulse, because she was lonely and he was the only man available. Maybe at this very moment she was regretting what she had done, and would be too embarrassed to come to the cottage again. Or perhaps she would return and try to pretend that nothing at all had happened. He certainly never imagined that such a thing might develop. By that night, he has decided that he will let matters take their own course. It is up to Sarah now: it was she, after all, who made the first move.

  During the succeeding week, he thinks about the incident less and less, and by Saturday has persuaded himself that she will not come to the cottage again.

  But she does return, and she puts her arms around him again. She continues to visit the cottage every Saturday, so that by the new year a pattern has been well established. Peter knows that he is quite passive in this whole affair, and that Sarah alone directs the relationship and sets its pace. They do just what she wants, and talk only on the limited topics of her choice. Yet so skilfully does she manipulate the situation that at times Peter feels she can control his will indirectly; as though without her telling him he knows what she wants him to do, and he dumbly complies. He sees suddenly that he has no dignity in this matter, and that this lack of dignity is all his own fault.

  Peter feels that the whole thing could stop again as quickly as it started. He does not know why Sarah has made the friendship take this particular direction, any more than he did on that first day, when she gathered the holly. Once, she actually stopped at the door and said, ‘Peter, I want to tell you …’ But then there was a long pause, broken only when she hit the door jamb hard with her fist and said, ‘Nothing.’

  Again he sees her lying on the sofa, holding that shell, and in his memory, Sarah says, ‘If only pain were like a shell or a stone. We could pick it up, but we could put it down too, we could cast it away. The hardest things are always the things you can’t touch or smell or see or hear. You begin to wonder then if this terrible thing is perhaps just imaginary.’

  She is quiet for some time, then thanks him again for the gift. He has no inkling of the nature of the pain she wishes to make tangible. Until then, he had not realized that she was so very unhappy.

  He glances up, and sees that the children have discreetly begun to tidy away their books in anticipation of the bell. Peter replaces the fossil on the sill, and in the relief he feels at his hand’s sudden emptiness thinks how right Sarah was. If only all his loneliness and discontent could be instilled into a little thing which could be set down quietly on a shelf and abandoned for ever. But when he crosses the room, back to his position of authority at the teacher’s desk, all his worries go with him. Waiting for the bell, he realizes that he is every bit as anxious for it to ring as the children are, for it marks the start of the weekend. Tomorrow is Saturday, and Sarah will come to him.

  The dock hand moves to the quarter hour, and the electric bell rings throughout the school with a loud, steely sound. The children explode out of the biology lab, and as Peter gathers together his own books, he sees that only one child remains. Fair-haired Katie gives him a sweet smile as she lingeringly replaces all her coloured pencils, one by one and side by side, in their flat tin box.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  On the morning after the funeral, James rose first from the bed, and as Jane lay there watching him dress, she hoped that in the coming days she would be able to hide the relief which she now felt. Jane was grateful for the quietness and privacy afforded in the house by the death of her hu
sband’s father, and knew that James would be hurt to think that she greeted the death so gladly. She thought tenderly of how she would ease her husband through his loss.

  Jane was astonished, therefore, when later that day she found the old man’s tobacco pouch and pipe under a cushion where he had tucked them away: when she took them in her hands she began to cry uncontrollably, so that it was James who had to comfort her. The early elation passed very quickly, and Jane felt a deep sense of loss. She had not realized how much she depended upon his company while she did household tasks around the kitchen, and James and Gerald were out working in the fields, had not realized until now, when it was too late and he was gone.

  But she felt anger too, for she envied James his father’s death as much as she had envied him his life. He had had the comfort of living with his parents for over twenty years, and now he had had the further comfort of their deaths and burials.

  ‘Being Jane’ had always meant being on more than nodding terms with death: it had meant being familiar with it in a very particular way. All her life she had defined herself in terms of death, because she was the child of dead parents (and that had always seemed to hold the possibility of their being no parents at all). Reluctantly now, she had to admit that her knowledge of death was knowledge by default. She knew it only by its absence, while James knew it more intimately by its occasional intrusion into his life. His mother had died there in the farmhouse when he was twenty. It was James who shot the wildfowl and gutted fish: Jane could not have killed an animal to save her own life. James often went to wakes around the countryside, and was familiar with the sight of dead people, but before the death of her father-in-law, Jane had never seen a dead person. Death had not been a presence, then, but a lack: lack of family, lack of love, lack of a real home. This had made her feel particularly conscious of life itself, and of how terrible it was always to have to live in that state of lack and need.