The Bird Woman (41 page)

I get up from the bed and go cautiously out to the kitchen. Anne’s face is soft and bright when she sees me. I hold the tea
tray in my hands, and she smiles and asks if I want more.

I shake my head.

She says Aunty Doreen and Uncle Tom and Aunty Hazel are in the front room along with some cousins and neighbours. She says
she thinks Brian will like it a lot if I go in and sit with them. If I don’t mind too much, that is?

So I go into the front room, and Brian looks up and smiles for all the world as though he’s pleased to see me. He shows me
into an armchair, and I sit there like Lady Muck, doing nothing to help at all.

People come and go. There are colleagues from school, as well as relations and neighbours. They come with quiet faces to say
that they’re sorry, they sit for a while then they leave.

I see that Brian and Anne have no friends that are only friends. There are people they’re close to, and some of their colleagues
and neighbours they love as friends, but there’s no one like Catherine has been for me.

What had Catherine been to me before she turned into the woman who’d slept with my husband?

Someone who sought me out and spent time with me when she didn’t have to. Who liked me enough to keep coming round until something
alive and wholly itself had grown up between us. And all this without much response from me and before she fell for Liam.
Of that I was certain now.

These jolts we get that open a crevasse right behind the place where our feet are planted. A crevasse so wide and deep that
everything that went before lies now on the other side forever. Her death had opened this crevasse, and I couldn’t cross back
over.

So I sit in Anne’s cream-coloured armchair making conversation. Sometimes the aunts shoot quick, shrewd looks at me, but the
uncles’ eyes are kinder.

T
HURSDAY NIGHT GOING ON
F
RIDAY

T
he kitchen is swept, the dishes are done, the girls are away up the stairs to their beds.

Brian and I are drinking whiskey. Anne has a pot of tea set down on the hearth beside her. Linda made it. Those girls are
minding their mother as though she’s next on the list. We’re all so tired we aren’t tired anymore, we’re in that odd, lucid
drifting state that is way past tiredness.

Brian’s talking about Daddy’s funeral. Anne’s listening. All this was away before her time, she hadn’t any place in it. Neither
had I, or not that I remember, but Brian keeps telling me I had.

“It was June—hot, but a stiff wee breeze blowing, the chestnuts tossing about. He was buried from Doreen and Tom’s—Gran’s
house, the house where she was reared. When I think of that house it’s always the chestnuts I see. People came from all over,
they were that shocked—he was young, he’d never been sick, no one had thought of his heart. Sometimes I think it might have
been easier for her if he’d been shot or blown to bits at a customs post, which was happening a lot at that time. Compensation
money and special status. Someone to blame when the going was tough.”

Brian bends and refills his glass. He waves the bottle at me, but I shake my head.

“There were benches and chairs set out in the yard for the overspill But the minister looked at the day and he looked at the
crowd and he told us he’d say the service outside. D’you not remember that at all?”

I shake my head again. I don’t remember.

“She never wanted you there, she said you were too young, but you had her tormented. Then Doreen took your side, and the end
of it was she gave in. She was sorry, but. You started roaring and crying the minute he talked about Daddy. Doreen had to
take you inside and away up the stairs to put a stop to your noise.” His eyes have that inward look people get when they’re
remembering.

“I stood beside her all through the service. I wanted to stay with her afterwards, but Gran sent me off with the men, to walk
behind the coffin. I remember turning my head to look back, I remember big splashes of sun and shade on the road, and the
trees, a green tunnel…. She was there, away off at the end of the tunnel, standing stiff as a ramrod in front of the women.
She never cried, not once, and her hair blazed red in the sun. It wasn’t as red as yours is, Ellen, but it fairly blazed that
day—I’ll never forget it. The next morning she had Hazel cut it all off, and she never grew it again. Inside six months it
was white. When I try to place things that happened round then I call up her face, and if her hair was red it was before and
if it was white it was after. But I can’t ever see
him,
no matter how hard I try. All I see is that framed photo of him she had in her room in the house in the Glen. Can you see
him, Ellen? Or is it the photo for you as well?”

I suppose there is always someone who wants to remember everything, because overwhelmingly they have loved whoever it
is that has died and they’ve long since passed into that love all that was hard for them at the time. So the hard things aren’t
hard anymore, they are changed for them by this love, and it doesn’t seem to occur to them that it’s not like this for us
all.

And I suppose there’s also always someone like me—caught up in a chaos of feeling, so that every memory’s a touch that falls
sometimes on scars and sometimes on opened flesh-It’s painful for me, this remembering. But there’s something between us now
that’s never been here before, and might not be again. So I shut my eyes tight and I try.

It’s no good, my mind won’t go back there, it’s stubbornly parked in this room.

“I don’t remember a thing, Brian. You’re telling me I was there so I believe you, but I don’t remember him even dying, only
that he was dead. And I only remember that because we moved. For years I thought that’s what happened, that everyone got to
live in a new house after their Daddy had died. I was only eight years old.”

“Eight’s not so young. There’s plenty I remember from when I was eight.”

“Well I don’t. And I don’t remember feeling anything either. Only that he went off and left us with
her.”

Brian gives me one of his looks.
Only ever thinks of herself,
the look says.

“Why was he buried from Gran’s house?” I ask him, changing the subject. “Why not from our house, where he’d lived?”

Brian shrugs. “I don’t know. He wasn’t from here, remember, he was from Glasgow, and our house was small and only rented.
I suppose it seemed natural to her to bury him from her first home.”

“But she owned that house we moved to in Derry?”

“She did. She paid the deposit from his insurance money. The mortgage came out of what she earned.”

I nod, satisfied at hearing him reiterate what I already knew. “She always thought we were better than other folk because
our house wasn’t rented,” I tell Anne. “She tormented the life out of us with her standards.”

“She wanted to do the best she could by us,” Brian says. “To make up for us having no father.”

“She could have given us one, easy enough. No one was stopping her marrying again.”

Brian looks shocked, and even I think I’m out of order. I don’t know what made me say it except the old habit of getting a
rise out of Brian. Besides, it’s a stupid remark, she wasn’t the type to go courting a second time.

“I don’t think she could have done that,” he says slowly, from out of a small pool of silence.

“Because of the way she felt about him?” Anne asks.

He shakes his head. “Not even that, though he was the world to her, and his death must have been some shock. No, I think it
was more that in marrying him she’d gone against all she’d been reared to. Then there she was, a widow, still only in her
thirties. About the age you are now, Ellen.”

Even through the exhaustion and whiskey I feel something stir in me. Some knowledge I don’t want.

He looks at me then, but his gaze is still turned in.

“I think she was strange about it,” he goes on, his voice hesitant, as though he’s feeling his way over rocks. I see his small-boy
self now—his blue T-shirt and his bare legs. Seawater, rainy white light.

“She told me once she thought she’d been punished for marrying out,” he says. “Punished by God. I don’t think she ever trusted
life after that.”

“Marrying out?”

Brian looks at me, his face neutral.

“Daddy being a Catholic,” he said evenly. “Did you not know?”

Of course I didn’t know. Why else would I be sitting here, mouth open like a fish?

And he knows I didn’t know. I’m wise to Brian—look at the cunning way he’s slipped it in.

I catch myself on and close my mouth. I’m not about to give him the satisfaction of seeing the shock he’s given me. Or at
least of him seeing any more of it than he’s already seen.

“You mean he turned?”

Alright, he might have been Catholic once, years ago, before ever he was my father. That was possible. Just.

“It was a mixed marriage, Ellen. Exactly like you and Liam. He never turned, he was always a Catholic.” Brian is speaking
slowly, spelling it out. “He just didn’t go to chapel.”

“I don’t believe it,” I say furiously, yet I do. Somewhere, I don’t know where, the missing piece of some arcane mechanism
has been reinserted into the place where it belongs. I hear the interlocking of tiny cogs and wheels, feel the mechanism beginning
slowly, slowly to revolve.

But still I protest. “It isn’t true,” I say. “It can’t be, it just can’t—”

“Why not?”

I search around desperately. “He used to say
our church.
He used to say,
one of our own
—”

“I thought you’d forgotten it all?” he says, a sneer in his voice.

“Not all,” I tell him. “Only the things you’re trying to bully me into remembering.” I turn to Anne. “I’m right, he knows
I’m right. Daddy said those things, so he did. He talked of Protestants as
our own.”

Anne’s head rests on the back of her chair, she looks too tired
to speak. But her eyes are on me, full of unspilled tears. I turn away. If Anne’s looking at me like this then it must be
true.

“Think about it, Ellen, think about it a wee minute.” Brian is leaning forward now, persuading. “You’re right, he did say
our church,
but that was for her, he never went inside that church. And the same with the other side—his own side. He never went to any
church at all.”

“But why would he have pretended like that? I’m married to Liam, I haven’t turned, I’ve never pretended to be a Catholic,
and I never will.”

“But you might have thirty years ago,” Anne says. “You might have if you’d lived in the North.”

I shake my head furiously.

“I think maybe he started it to make life easier for her,” Brian says slowly. “He was from Glasgow, remember. It’s the same
there, he’d have known the score. And this was a temporary posting. They thought they were going to England, they never thought
he’d be made permanent
here.
^”

He pauses, sighs. “Maybe once they’d started it the moment never came to stop…. Think of it, Ellen.
Hold on now, I’m not one of yous at all, I’m a Taig.
Maybe the secret closed around them. Her mother was strict, remember. She had no time for mixed marriages, and Grandda was
the same. He wasn’t long dead when she married Daddy. She was awful fond of him; it must have been hard flying in the face
of his beliefs.”

“Where were they married?” I try to call up a wedding picture and fail.

“Glasgow. Nobody went. When I was fifteen I got it into my head that she must have been pregnant. I went through her things,
found the certificate. It was a Registry Office, but she wasn’t pregnant. I know they told Doreen and Tom the truth, and they
helped her keep it from Gran, but I don’t know if she ever
said a word to Hazel or Elizabeth. For all I know they may both be in the dark to this day.” Brian stops abruptly, sits back
from his leaning pose, sighs deep into himself. He looks straight at me, his eyes intense. “And, Ellen—don’t you remember?
He always said that there wasn’t a choice, you were born into one or the other, and no one should ever be blamed for what
they were—”

I nod. I can’t speak, but I remember those words. The grandfather clock draws itself up and begins to whirr. It came from
Gran’s house, and it chimes every quarter, I know it from the front room of our house in the Glen, and I never liked it. I
look at my watch. One in the morning. It chimes all the quarters, then strikes the hour. When it’s through I wish it would
start again.

“How do you know all this?” I ask into the silence.

“She told me. Years ago—I was about seventeen. She didn’t like the company I was keeping, she thought I was getting involved.
She wanted to shock me into staying well clear of the paramilitaries, and it worked. She made me promise I wouldn’t ever tell
you.”

“You’re telling me now.”

“I am. But she’s gone now, I’ve kept my word.”

“She’s here in this room.”

“I know that, Ellen, but she doesn’t mind anymore and it’s your story too. Perhaps I should have told you a good while back.”

“She gave me a hard time about Liam…. Yet she’d done the very same herself—”

“She never said a word against Liam, not once, not in all these years. Not even when you were living with him and still married
to Robbie.”

“She said nothing at all, not a bloody word, and you know what that meant.” I am angry now, the pain of these old, fierce,
worn-out secrets makes me suddenly savage. “It meant what you’d done was so bad she wouldn’t soil herself even mentioning
it.”

Brian sighs and leans forward again in his chair. “She was a Presbyterian, Ellen, and she believed it. She had nothing against
Catholics—nothing at all—but she didn’t like Rome and she didn’t like graven images and she didn’t think priests should stand
between God and the people. She didn’t want your children raised Catholics—not because she didn’t like Catholics, but because
she didn’t want them taught idolatry by priests. Don’t blow out your breath like that—that’s how she saw it, and you know
it. She had nothing against you marrying Liam, but she thought if she’d taught you right then your children wouldn’t be Catholics
now.”