The Birds of the Innocent Wood (13 page)

Sarah insists from the first that Catherine is to be told nothing of this visit; above all that she is not told of the intelligence which Sarah has brought with her. The Mistress of Novices questions this at first, and asks if Catherine has not got a right to such knowledge. Sarah hesitates, as she will hesitate for weeks and weeks to come, wondering at her own right to withhold this
knowledge from her sister. Then she says resolutely, ‘No. She must not know. At least, not yet.’ Perhaps a time will come when it will be easier to tell her, or when she will guess for herself, and Sarah will only have to give confirmation and comfort. In any case, the doctor has told her not to tell her yet, that the time will come and that until then Catherine is not to be worried or stressed. The nun at last agrees.

Sitting there in the tranquil parlour, the two women make their pact of what is to be done and not done; what is to be said and not said: together they construct a future. When she is ready the nun takes her into the hallway and asks her if she would like to visit the chapel before she leaves. Sarah at once refuses, and she sees the surprise and hurt on the face of the nun, who had thought her question a formality. Already she has half-turned to go down the dim corridor, but Sarah stands her ground. ‘No,’ she says again, and then more quietly, ‘I don’t want to go: not now. Please don’t force me.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ says the nun, ever so slightly arch, but then she puts her arm around Sarah and kisses her before opening the heavy door and ushering the girl out into the street’s brightness.

Sarah walks away through the city, feeling more guilty than she has ever done before in all her life. She goes into a public park and sits for a while upon a bench. Summer is ending, but still there are flowers, and the air is light and scented. People are walking back and forth, laughing and talking in the sunshine, and Sarah can hear music from a distant bandstand. As she sits there she opens and closes her eyes several times: closes them when the sight of all this life which is to be lost becomes too much for her to bear; opens them again when she can no longer tolerate the blackness.

When she goes back to the farm that night, she feels so guilty that she can scarcely look her sister in the face. Catherine is putting the dinner out on the table when Sarah walks in, and when she looks up with her mild, trusting eyes Sarah at once looks away, thinking that now she knows what it must feel like to commit adultery. For the rest of that evening she covertly
looks at Catherine until she cannot bear it, then looks away until the lack of her sister is unbearable, and she is forced to look back. Catherine, sitting reading by the fire, is lonelier than she knows, and she is twice betrayed. Her own deepest secret is being withheld from her, and Sarah wonders how she would feel if the same thing were done against her. She believes that she would never be able to forgive such an act. Sarah broods on the new sisterhood she has forged that afternoon, the sister in Christ and the sister in blood making a complicity from which Catherine is excluded, conspiring about that which concerns her most deeply.

Over six months have passed since Sarah went to the convent, and still Catherine does not know. It seems that her decline has been slowed by her ignorance, for she is too preoccupied by other things to guess what is happening to her. It is the strain of waiting for that inevitable moment of revelation that has driven Sarah from her home.

Her tea has gone cold before her. She hears a shrill whistle below: she has missed the second train to the east.

By now it is noon. She waits for another hour, then she goes again to the telephone booth and she dials her home number. Again, she is on the point of getting through when she replaces the receiver. As she walks slowly back to the bench, she imagines the scene to which she has almost linked herself, imagines the life of the farm which is going on without her, for the lives of her father and sister are not dependent upon her presence or even her existence. Dada will by now be in from the fields, he will have finished his lunch and Catherine will be down in the back scullery. Sarah can see the scullery and the kitchen, she can smell the gas and dampness; Dada slitting his eyes against the smoke of his own cigarette, Catherine leaning against the steel sink and winding a coil of her hair around her index finger.
What need have
they of me
? she thinks, and she knows the dishonesty of this: if it were true, she would not have had to steal away under cover of darkness.

She goes back to the buffet, and she buys another cup of tea. As she drinks it, she looks at the other people, realizing gradually how little they mean to her.

For the third time, she goes to the phone booth and dials her number, this time forcing herself not to hang up, and when the ringing noise is cut, she convulsively pushes the coin into the slot.

‘Sarah? Is that you? Was it you who tried to phone earlier today?’

‘Yes,’ she says, and she listens now not so much to what her sister is saying as to the sound of her voice, so intimate and familiar, but weird, too, as a voice at a seance. It shocks her to hear this loved, intimate voice coming mechanical out of the filthy black receiver, as if Catherine has been refined away to nothing, as if her body has wasted, becoming thin, thinner, translucent, transparent, gone: until only a voice remains, an innocent voice which does not know the pity and grief which it provokes in Sarah.

‘Sarah? Sarah? Hello, are you still there?’

‘Yes.’

‘I thought we’d been cut off. At what time will you be home this evening?’

‘Six.’

‘Are you all right, Sarah?’

‘Yes.’

‘Bring me some fruit, will you? Bring me some oranges.’

‘Yes. I’ll see you this evening.’

Three shrill pips, and the buzz of disconnection. Sarah replaces the receiver, leaves the booth wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. She has missed the latest train to the east, but that is now a matter of no importance. She throws away her ticket, and then leaves the station, walking through the rain until she comes to the city centre. She visits four fruit shops in turn, rejecting the goods of each as not being good enough, until in the fifth shop she finds what she has been looking for. She chooses and pays for twelve huge and perfectly unblemished oranges, which she puts carefully into her bag. In another shop she buys some chocolate for herself and her father, and then she wanders aimlessly around the town until it is time for her bus to leave.

On the way home, she feels both tired and foolish. How could she ever have considered seriously, even for a moment, the possibility of escaping? When she goes back to the farm, it is in a state of complete resignation, knowing that she will have to stay there until the very end. And now she wants to stay.

She is surprised by two things that evening: firstly by the conviviality of the family, for the first lambs of the year have been born that day, and they are happy about that. After dinner, they remain in the kitchen. They pull chairs round by the stove and they talk; they eat the chocolate and they peel and eat the immaculate fruit.

And she is surprised, too, to realize that when she goes up to her room that night and sees the light in Peter’s window in the cottage across the fields, that it is the very first time since that morning that Peter has entered her mind at all.

The Christmas following Jane’s illness was white, but the coming of the new year brought milder weather. There was no more snow, but throughout the month of January rain fell, persistent and heavy. At first, James took this for granted, as he took for granted Jane’s silence and apparent indifference to all around her. For weeks she did little but sit by the fire, or at the window looking out at the grey curtains of rain. Reason told him that with time winter would end and Jane would recover from her depression, but it was a belief difficult to sustain in the face of her sadness and the heavy rain. Often he would wake in the night and hope to catch them both unawares; hope to find her face relaxed in sleep while a harsh, dry wind blew around the farm, but he was never successful in this. He always woke not to the stertorous sound of her breath in sleep, but to the noise of a heavy night rain beating down upon the slates, and Jane lying wide awake beside him, her eyes open and her sadness as great as ever it was in the daytime.

In time, she began to do a few household chores, and gradually did more each day. In the evenings she sewed a little or read, but always in the same dogged manner, as though she were obliged to do these things. When James watched her with her head bowed over some little piece of mending, he suddenly saw her as a child who had suffered a terrible trauma, and was now pretending to play again, although games meant nothing to her. Her silence lacked the tension of the time leading up to her illness, now she was resigned and exhausted. Still she prayed every night, but with the same air of duty which she now brought to everything she did.

One night, as she put her prayer book up on the shelf above the stove, James said, ‘All the holy pictures and statues are up
in the attic, from when you told me to put them away. Do you want me to bring them down again now?’

‘No,’ she said quickly, ‘leave them where they are, please.’ The matter was never mentioned again.

She met the news of Ellen’s pregnancy with a shrug of indifference; and a letter telling of her aunt’s death in the city elicited a similar response. She never lost her temper, and never became worked up into any state of high emotion. One day, on coming in from the farmyard, James found the kitchen empty as it had been on that day in autumn when she had fallen ill. With a mounting sense of panic, he looked for her, this time beginning with the cupboard under the stairs, but she was not there. He found her sitting in their bedroom. She made no sound at all, although the tears came from her eyes as though wrung out. When James saw her like this, he realized that what he generally saw was only the surface of her distress, was the silence and stillness in which she tried to live, protected.

In February, she began to go for long walks every day, at first insisting that she go alone. James would watch her from the window as she plodded slowly through the fields with her head bent. She brought home the things which she found: a bird’s nest; fragments of a clay pipe; broken bits of blue and white delft; and tufts of sheep’s greasy wool which she untangled from the barbed wire fences. Once she brought home a little glass marble with a multicoloured twist, and she stood for a long time by the window, holding it up to the light and turning it this way and that, to see how the colours changed. He asked her why she brought these things home, and she said very quietly, ‘I don’t know why. I just do it.’

For the first few months after her illness, they did not make love. There was no indication of any sexual feeling on her part, so much so that James did not dare show any such feeling to her, because he was afraid of how she would react. Every night she kissed him, but always in the same detached manner of her first night at home from the hospital. Once or twice he tried to kiss her mouth, but she turned her head aside so that the kiss fell on her face. She did, however, develop the habit of clinging
to him, and at night would fall asleep lying half across him, with her arms around his neck and waist. This physical closeness made James more aware of the huge emotional distance which there was between them, and he wondered if this distance, this silence and formality, would continue for the rest of their lives. Was this to be his punishment?

As the year progressed, there developed a shift in balance between the couple, which was discernible even to Gerald as he took his lunch in the farmhouse. Jane did begin to recover, but her recovery was matched by the steady decline of her husband, as though he were taking on all her tension and unhappiness. They were themselves conscious of this, but observed it as though it were something happening outside their own selves, as one might have observed the change from winter to spring which was taking place at that time. For just as there are days in winter when early buds are seen; and days in spring when one is surprised by the unexpected severity of a night frost, so too Jane would remark an outburst by James over some trivial matter, and he too would sometimes see in Jane a sudden return to the bristling silence of a day’s duration, as though she had completely reverted to the early stages of her illness. And as there are days between the two seasons which are too grey and indifferent to be either winter or spring, so too by late March a visitor to the farm would have found it impossible to tell whether it was Jane or James who had recently suffered from severe depression.

It was on a day in early April that Jane gathered daffodils to put in the parlour, and she was dealing with them in the back scullery when James came in. The flowers and foliage were lying on the wooden drainingboard, and he saw that only on one or two had the tight, greenish yellow petals cracked through the brittle parchment in which they were encased: all the rest were intact and still bright green.

‘Jane?’

‘Yes?’

‘I’ve just been speaking to Gerald. He told me that Ellen had her baby last night. A boy.’

‘Oh.’ Jane picked up a vase and filled it from the tap, then one by one she began to put flowers into it. Suddenly she stopped and looked at him sideways. ‘It has nothing to do with us, has it?’ she said languidly.

She resumed working with the flowers, and James did not reply. He turned to walk away, but had barely reached the kitchen when he heard her crying behind him. He at once turned back, they put their arms around each other, and they both cried.

Then she pointed to the vase upon the drainingboard and she said, ‘Wasn’t I foolish? I gathered these specially in bud, because I thought that it would be nice to see them open out in the warmth of the house, but I was wrong. They look horrible. They don’t look like flowers, they just look like things – stupid-looking green things.’ And taking them up in her hand, she snapped off the unopened head of each daffodil in turn.

Loneliness was habit, and habit was comforting. The loneliness of her youth had been so frightening that she married only to escape it, but the image or idea of union did not make union itself. Deep down, the idea of breaking from this habit of loneliness into a new habit – the habit of not being alone – had been more frightening still. She had stayed as she was, almost cherishing her loneliness because it had become, through habit, a part of herself. Now, she genuinely wanted to break out, and accepted that this would mean breaking something in herself.

‘It’s not a question of children,’ she said to James that night.

‘Don’t you want to have children?’ he asked.

‘That’s not what I meant,’ she replied. ‘It’s not a question of having or not having children. If we do I’ll be happy, but if not, well, so be it. But it’s not the most important thing. You must know that, James. That’s where I went so wrong before.’

‘What is it then?’

‘I don’t know. I mean, I know, but I can’t find the words for it. It has to do with just you and me.’ She picked up his hand and she kissed it, then stroked it against her face. ‘I wish that I could become you, James. I wish that I could be you, while still somehow being myself. Do you understand that?’

‘I think so.’

‘Do you think that it’s possible?’

‘I don’t know.’

Spring became undeniably spring, with tulips, lambs and rain. Jane planted a small vegetable garden and worked hard to weed and tend it. As she worked, James watched her, and he wished that her illness had left her more tangibly wounded, wished that she had some outward weal or scar so that he could touch the sore place and show that he was not frightened or disgusted. But he realized that this would not have worked; for where he meant a request for forgiveness, Jane would have understood only a show of pity.

Jane noticed how her husband habitually watched her, but she did not understand what it meant. Any attempt to interpret it was complicated by her seeing it in a wider context, for a while James watched her, Jane was conscious that they were both being watched by Gerald. It was a strange experience, for she felt, rather than saw, what was happening, yet knew for certain that it was not just a feeling but a fact. While she worked in the garden or stood by the scullery sink she would suddenly realize that he was looking at her, even if he was out of her line of vision at the time. Stranger still was to notice how particularly he watched James, something of which James appeared to be completely unaware. Jane did not speak of this matter to her husband, because the effect, rather than the act itself, was impossible for her to define. When she felt that they were being watched as a couple, she gave it a name – ‘jealousy’ – although she knew that jealousy was just a word and not the right word.

But in time she realized that because of her knowledge and her wilful silence, she held the biggest degree of power in the situation. By pretending not to know that she was being watched, she was able to control what Gerald saw, and she ensured that he saw very little. When he watched them as a couple, Jane was careful never to show any sign of intimacy or even affection towards James, for she guessed that that was what Gerald wanted to see, although she could not tell why. Failure to see what he was looking for forced him to watch more
carefully still, but Jane was more than a match for him. The situation had a curious effect upon her, and reminded her of something in her past, although at first she could not remember what it was. Then it occurred to her that the sensation created was exactly the same mixture of pleasure and distress which she had known before, but the past cause was a reversal of what was happening now, for she remembered how, before she was married, when she and James would kiss in public, she would feel strangers watching them, and the more she disliked this, the more exciting it made the kissing become.

As spring wore into summer she began to wonder if her wilful use of the wrong word ‘jealousy’ for what she saw in Gerald could not perhaps be rightly applied to her own feelings towards the family at the cottage. Jane and James never spoke to each other about Ellen and Gerald and Peter, the baby, but Jane thought about them frequently. She could not understand the fascination which they held for her. She did not believe that they were a particularly happy family, so why should she envy them? She felt that she and James would be happier if they could cut the couple out of their lives for ever, but she knew that that would not happen, as they could not leave the farm, and Gerald and Ellen had no intention of leaving the cottage.

She came to James one night at dusk, when he was in the farmyard. All the hay had been cut, and he was standing by the gate, looking out over a field of stacked bales. Jane was about to speak, when James unexpectedly said, ‘That Gerald’s a fool man. You’re never to pay heed to anything he says, Jane. He’s not half right in the head. He hasn’t said anything to you lately, has he?’

‘About what?’

James shrugged. ‘About anything. I don’t know what sort of rubbish he thinks, but I wouldn’t listen to anything he tells you.’

‘He hardly ever talks to me at all.’

‘Good.’

‘James?’

‘Yes?’

‘I have something to tell you.’

‘Tell me, then.’

‘I’m going to have another baby.’

James did not speak for some moments, and then he said, ‘Are you happy about that, Jane?’

‘Yes.’ She tapped nervously with her fingernails upon the iron bars of the gate. ‘Yes, I am happy. But I’m frightened too.’

Her attitude to this, her second pregnancy, was completely different from her attitude to her first. She made no effort to prepare the nursery, and did not sew or knit clothes for the baby, as she had done before. She was even reluctant to buy baby clothes, and it was only after gentle coaxing from James that she made a brief shopping trip to the city.

‘Well, that’s that done,’ she said to him on her return. She did not remove the shop wrapping paper from the large parcel which she carried, but tossed it unopened into a spare wardrobe.

‘Did you get what you wanted?’ he asked her.

‘I got what will do. I bought a made-up layette rather than bother choosing things individually.’

She was glad to have the chore done, but two weeks later, she had had to go back to the city to buy some more baby clothes, for the doctor had told her that she was going to have twins.

As summer ended, she would walk through all the rooms of the empty house, looking into the mirrors and touching the furniture. In the silence she tried to imagine it as the home in which a family – her family – would live, but she always failed to overcome the idea of it as a place bound to the past. She could think only of the people who had lived there and were now dead, rather than of the people who would live there, and who were yet to be born. Because she had not seen her first baby, the idea of her children was still something abstract to her. Remembering how, as a child, she had longed to see someone whom she resembled physically, she realized that this wish would now perhaps become a reality. But the idea did not fill her with pleasure, and instead she felt frightened to think of it.

The apple crop that year was unusually heavy. Jane gathered up the windfalls in buckets, and James plucked the sound
apples from the branches, put them in a big laundry basket and carried them to the attic of the house for Jane to put them in store. She spent many hours sitting there in the gloom of the low-ceilinged room, where the air was sweet with the mingled smell of apples and straw. She sorted the sound fruit from the damaged, wiped the greasy green skins with a clean cloth, and then packed them away in straw, ensuring that no two apples touched. The monotony and the silence of the task soothed her, and as she worked, she thought of nothing.