The Birds of the Innocent Wood (10 page)

All that summer, it was obvious that Ellen and Gerald were unhappy together. Jane said nothing, but hoped that things would improve for them. Thinking back to how bad her own marriage once had been, she hoped that she and James would never again feel so distant from each other, for she did not think that she would be able to bear that again.

Sometimes Jane would make a great effort to be fully conscious of the passage of time. She counted the days, the weeks, the months since the death, noted her precise age as a little child might do, and watched her own life pass. And she noted these things with such particular care, because on other occasions it was a matter of total indifference: time meant nothing at all. The sensation of this came most clearly to her one afternoon in late summer. She had fallen asleep in an armchair in the kitchen, and when she awoke, for a few moments her life was completely without context. She did not know if she was in bed beside her husband or not, did not know the time of day or night, nor the year nor the season. She could have been a child, a single woman, a wife or a widow, and it did not seem to her to have a jot of importance. A moment later, when she came to full consciousness, it was like birth; like falling out of nothingness to a precise point in time and space, as if her whole life had been sublimated so that she came from birth to this place in time with a complete personal history, like a gift which had been given to her. It was as though her past was not something which she had lived, but which was a story put in her mind to placate her, and
to make her be – or appear to be – like other people. She lay back in the chair and she closed her eyes, protecting herself for a few moments from time and action.

Near to the house there was a hedge, and she had watched it all that summer, as though it were a slow clock which showed the seasons instead of the hours. The hedge was made of hawthorn, thick and laced through with ivy, bindweed and briars. The briars grew throughout the summer so fast and so long that one could almost see them growing, and they at first bore flowers; pinkish pale flowers which faded and left hard, green fruit, which grew bigger, reddened, grew softer and darker, until they were black and rotting upon the hedge. The air became colder and the nights began to close in. Leaves faded and fell, and all the apples in the orchard ripened and grew big. Some fell to earth one night in a storm, but many more remained until the trees were bare of leaves and only the fruit was left, hard and green and bright. The shooting season began again. And when the autumn wore into winter, Jane thought of how she forgot each season as soon as it was over. At the height of summer, it was inconceivable that there should ever again be deep snow in the orchard, and in winter she found it hard to imagine summer’s heat. Nothing was real but the present moment. For the first time in her life she did not dread the coming of winter.

And towards the end of that year, she told James that she was going to have a baby.

Now it is February; now it is night. Catherine wakes in darkness and in pain, but neither disturb her as she is used to both. The pain is acute and she steadies her breathing, tries to distract her mind by concentrating on a memory, as others might recite a rhyme for the sake of its simple rhythm. Perhaps if she clings hard to the memory, it will pull her up out of the pain.

In her mind, Catherine is a child again. She is sitting in the orchard with her mother and sister, and they are playing cards: Snap, Old Maid, Happy Families. All the cards have floral designs on their backs, and each pack has a different coloured background: red, green, blue. Their mother is happy and laughing. She is wearing a white cotton dress with a wide skirt, which is overprinted with a black lattice and huge pink roses. But the woman’s face is a blur, and although the scene is a memory (it is not something which Catherine has dreamt or imagined) her mother’s face has that mysterious quality of a face in a dream. She can see that she is laughing but she cannot see her face, has remembered everything, even the fact of her mother’s happiness and laughter: but the face she has forgotten.

Their father is there too. He is not playing cards, but he creeps around behind the children, looking at everyone’s hands and whispering advice in the children’s ears on the strength of what he sees, helping them to cheat until they realize that he is fooling them too, playing all three women off against each other. By this time he has brought the game to a point of hopeless confusion, and the cards fly into the air as they pounce on him, beating and tickling him until he roars for mercy. Then they all fall breathless upon the grass, while the light dapples through the branches of the trees.

And as the memory breaks over Catherine of their exploding upon their father, shrieking and pummelling him, she feels
again the joy of that time, and is about to cry aloud when the pain intensifies. It stabs sharply then fades away; and as it goes the bright scene in the orchard also fades, as though it were a picture worked in stained glass, and night is falling, bleeding away the colour.

Catherine remembers little of her childhood, and she feels that she has lost those years as absolutely as one might lose a stone in the long green grass of a field. Catherine sometimes finds things when she is out walking: marbles of coarse green glass which once stoppered bottles; fragments of blue pottery, pieces of clay pipe; and she wonder now if her memories are lost only to her, wonders if perhaps in years to come someone will find and preserve them: perhaps make sense of them and understand them as she has never been able to understand the fact of their absence.

She can hear the night rain beat down upon the slates as she thinks of an alternative to this forgetfulness. What if it were impossible to forget, so that she remembered everything with such clarity that the memory became life itself? Memory then would be no comfort but a trap, forcing her to live again and again things that should be long past. To have such a faculty would mean that lying here in bed would be to lie as in a coffin, with the past shovelled on to her, as heavy and as dark as six foot of soil. When she remembers her mother’s death, she is grateful for her fallible memory; more grateful still when she thinks of other memories, quite recent, and so discomforting that her mind shies away from them even in their imperfection. The thought of the mark on her sister’s neck brings with it other thoughts and things remembered. If only now she could get rid of her last few memories and truly have a mind as blank as she pretends it is, perhaps she could be happy. All memory lost! She feels angry for failing to be honest even with herself, even in the privacy of her own mind, at night, in the blackness, for while her memory is poor, she has not forgotten everything; oh yes, she still remembers much.

The pain returns, as if in punishment for her failure to see things honestly, to look as if she truly wanted to understand, no
matter how much the truth will hurt her. The orchard flutters again (cards, grass, a lattice of flowers and light), fades and is gone, and the pain goes too. She breathes deeply and turns upon her side.

She thinks now,
I could kill the goat
. In spring the goat is out in the field, stretching itself to the end of its tether to eat a perfect circle of grass. But Catherine thinks that perhaps the only way to solve her problem would be to kill the goat.

She would say to her sister, ‘Look’. She would lead the creature into the farmyard, look for a moment into its crafty eyes, and then slit its throat. She would cut open its belly and pour its hot purple entrails out upon a flat stone, play to the full the part of the eccentric holy woman. Then she would poke through the entrails and speak the words of the haruspex, the craftiness of the dead goat going into herself. She would say then what she had seen elsewhere, say it without any crossing of a palm with silver, and with the accuracy of knowledge which no other fortune teller could provide. It was too much to hope that her sister would be impressed with this gift. Perhaps later she would be amazed, and when the shock of what she was told had worn off, she would think with wonder of the feat which her sister had performed. And Catherine would tell Sarah nothing but the truth. She always told her the truth: when she told her anything.

The slyness was that when one spoke the words aloud, one did not necessarily look at the same sign where one had first read or interpreted the truth. But what of that? Did it make such a difference that Catherine could tell the future by seeing the past, by looking at a pair of hands pulling on oars, rather than by looking at a pile of entrails?

But why should I have to be the one to tell her? Perhaps she will never forgive me for that. She will be shocked at her own stupidity. Why has she not also guessed long before now? A more sinister thought now comes to Catherine: perhaps Sarah
has
guessed the truth, but chooses to ignore it. Catherine quashes the idea at once. No, Sarah cannot know. Neither of them know. But because I know, I am guilty. If anything happens it
will be my fault for denying the truth of the past. I will be the one who allowed time to repeat things which are wrong.

Catherine knows her punishment. Because she denies the past, she is denied a future. She has a vision – not a memory or a dream, or a thought, but a vision – and she has been surprised to find that her sister also has such a vision which comes to her mind again and again, often at the most unexpected times. It comes without any feeling of emotion or desire. A war has torn the whole world asunder but for one country, and in that last remaining country is her last remaining friend, the last person who cares for her. In her vision Sarah crosses that continent, crosses water and risks danger, is without food or sleep or money, and she comes at last, wounded and dirty and tired, to the house of the person whom she had sought. And at that house she is welcomed and washed and fed and forgiven, and then left to sleep upon a couch.

‘And then what?’ Catherine had asked.

‘And then: nothing. That’s all there is,’ her sister replied.

But Catherine can never reciprocate, because her vision is much more sinister. As with Sarah’s, it comes to mind unbidden and seemingly without reason: but no. Again she must be honest. This vision does come at a particular time: it comes when she tries to look into her own future. Catherine finds herself looking down what ought to be a sculpture gallery, where there should be symmetrical rows of marble busts upon wooden plinths, dark paintings in heavy gilt frames, a marble floor and a high vaulted ceiling of wood. But instead there is nothing at all: only the horror of a bright white light from which she cannot escape. She cannot close her eyes or turn away, for the light is still there. This light and this emptiness is her punishment and her future. Tomorrow will come: she will peel potatoes and milk the cows and find that she can do nothing to break through the loneliness of her father and sister, and when she goes back into her own mind she knows that she will find there no comfort for the future. She will find nothing there but this unbearable light. When she remembers this, the prayer which they say for her mother, asking that perpetual light may
shine upon her, seems like no prayer at all and no blessing, but the most terrible curse.

Catherine is not fully convinced of her mother’s immortality. She cannot imagine or conceive of a place or a state where she now might be. Catherine has come to the limits of her orthodox religion: she cannot believe in resurrection. She can only hope that somewhere her mother still exists, and that she is at peace; but if Catherine was forced to choose, she would rather see her annihilated than omniscient. She does not know how her mother could ever be at rest if she knew what Catherine knows, and if she could really see what Catherine can only see by implication and imagination. She fears the nothingness of pure light; but in her greatest fear she feels close to her mother, for she, too, must be in a state of utter timelessness, beyond place and pain, if she is anywhere at all. Every day in her life Catherine is conscious of the emptiness of light, and she struggles against it. Her diary is a proof, at least to herself, that she still has a life, but she dreads the day that will come when she will have nothing to write, not even the unhappy things with which she now fills the pages, together with casual notes of when the swallows come and go, and the date of when the lilacs begin to fade. The day will come when she will have nothing to write, not even the word ‘nothing’, and thereafter will be an unfinished book, all the pages blank. It frightens her even to imagine the whiteness of each succeeding sheet of paper, and she thinks that thumbing through the blank leaves will be like looking in a mirror, only to find that one had no reflection.

At what precise point of time did this happen? When did she lose her future?
When the nuns turned me down for the convent,
she thinks. She sees herself on that day last autumn, waiting in the neat little parlour, and thinking with pleasure that soon this will be her new home. The Mistress of Novices enters. Nothing could have prepared Catherine for the shock of refusal. Not this year, but perhaps next: ‘We’ll see then.’ We’ll see. Words to use to placate a child, words that mean ‘No’. Treated in this way Catherine becomes petulant as a child,
answering, ‘We’ll see’ with ‘You promised!’ The sister almost smiles, but she looks very sad and she is utterly intransigent

‘They don’t want me,’ Catherine says that night when she walks into the back scullery. Sarah looks up from the pan in which she is frying eels.

‘Why not?’ she asks.

‘I don’t know.’

The smell and the heat of the eels fills the scullery, so that the very air feels greasy. Sarah wipes her hands on her apron.

‘Perhaps next year,’ she says.

‘That’s what the nuns said,’ Catherine replies, ‘but I don’t believe it.’

Sarah pokes in the pan with a long fork. ‘I’m really sorry, Catherine.’

Catherine does not believe this either.

She did not cry then, but she cries now at the memory of it, and propping herself up on her elbow, she reaches under the pillow for a handkerchief. Finding it, she wipes her eyes and lies down again, but she can think only of Sarah’s opposition to her, and she can only cry to think of it.

She remembers a day the previous July. She is standing in the farmyard and Sarah is at a slight distance from her, near to the water butt at the side of the byre. As is her custom now that she knows she is leaving, Catherine closes her eyes and tries to keep in her mind an accurate image of the scene before her. As always she fails, for on looking again, what she sees is slightly but significantly different from what she had for an instant remembered. After a few moments, she walks over to Sarah who does not acknowledge her presence, but continues trailing her fingers through the soft green scum on the water of the butt.

‘I won’t be here this time next year,’ she says.

‘Lucky you,’ replies Sarah flatly.

But when Catherine begins to say how difficult it will be far her to leave, her sister interrupts, speaking quietly, ‘You want to leave us and you want that more than anything else, so don’t try to pretend otherwise. Mama’s dead, and now you’re going to break up the little that’s left of that family to which you like to
pay such great lip-service. It’ll not really be a family after you’ve gone, but that doesn’t matter, does it? Nothing matters except that you have your own way, so as to save your own soul. Isn’t that right?’ She does not pause to allow Catherine to justify her actions, but she continues speaking and she continues stroking the slimy surface of the water. ‘Christ said that He came to divide families, didn’t He? Something about not bringing peace on earth but a sword, and setting parents against children and children against parents. I’m sure that you know the details better than I do. In which case, you’re only doing as He said. You must feel very proud, Catherine.’

But when she lifts her head and looks at her sister, the most painful thing to Catherine is not the distance of anger and misunderstanding that there is between them, but the closeness which she feels. For when Catherine looks at Sarah, she sees herself divided. It is as if all the doubts and misgivings which she had tried so hard to suppress and ignore have been exorcised from her and cast into another, physically identical woman, and that other self is now standing before her, demanding justification. There is nothing for Catherine to say.

The only possible comfort she can feel as Sarah walks away from her, is that if she shares so perfectly the misgivings Catherine has, then surely, deep down, she must also feel Catherine’s conviction, must understand what her sister feels and desires.

This belief is confirmed towards the end of that year, when she sees the relationship develop between Peter and Sarah. Now it is in a sense too late, for it is some months since she has been refused admission to the convent, but still Catherine wants to take her sister aside and say to her, ‘Now do you see what I wanted? Now do you see what I needed so much?’ Religious love, sexual love, what did it matter? Just so long as it was something more than family love: something other than that. And as though to want that other love were weakness, she is comforted to see that someone else is similarly weak: she can almost feel relieved to watch her sister.