The Birds of the Air Read Free

and his boy. Like everyone else, she. had transferred her atavistic terror of the woods and wilderness to the city. Great Pan had left the deserted places, put on black face and gone into the streets to become a mugger. The fearful desolation of the tower block had supervened upon the awful terror of the grove. It was to the country that people now went to seek the safety that they would once have found in the company of their fellows. People who double-locked and chained the doors of their town houses slept contentedly in fields in open tents.
    ‘You loved them,’ claimed Mrs Marsh, misled by her daughter’s protestations of forgetfulness. Her little girls had been so sweet in their summer frocks, walking up the lane to a Sunday farmhouse tea, believing her answers to their every question. ‘It will be strawberry jam for tea and homemade cake,’ she had told them; and ‘That little white flower is called coltsfoot’; and ‘It will be perfectly all right. Its mummy will come and take it back to the nest and make it better.’
    Wandering fondly down this memory lane she came to a sudden halt – even recollection shadowed and chilled by the black yews that crouched enormously in the churchyard. Robin, she thought angrily. It was so difficult to remember the sequence of events – she must be getting old. She glanced guiltily at Mary, but her daughter looked perfectly composed, eating bread and butter.
    Mary remembered the lane, pretty as a wedding, when she was a child: great laces and nets of umbels flung joyously down, meadowsweet and cow parsley; the wind whispering sentimentally on the crisp bosom of the blackthorn and sighing through the handkerchief-scented grasses; wild roses every shade of bridesmaid from riotous, hoydenish pink to the frailest nervous pallor; the matronly mother-of-the-groom purple of foxgloves; the urchin trails of ragged robin; something borrowed in the straying rape, something blue in the garter button of speedwell; new leaves, old trees ranged like solemn guests, and blown petals floating in the dark puddles.
    It was a long time ago. Since then, down that wedding lane, dazed with summer, Robin had come, borne in a slow black hearse sorrowful with dying wreaths – Robin passive beyond understanding, disguised as stone. Stone-faced, calm, closed and cold; marbled with dissolution and grave with the gravity of earth, all flowering ceased.
    How brave I was, thought Mary derisively – consoling those who loved me, for my loss. You must never let the bugger think he’s got the upper hand, she had told them, speaking of Death, and burning with crazy joy like a torture victim who must feel something and can only feel pain. She had carried a carnation which a friend had stolen from the wreath of someone else, recently interred, to enliven her blackness and cheer her up. She had bent each of its little knees the length of its stem so that it genuflected while the words went on and the holy water was sprinkled. She still had it – brown and flattened between the pages of her missal.
    ‘You caught a chill at that funeral,’ accused her mother, growing crosser and abandoning the pretence that neither knew what the other was thinking.
    ‘It was eighty in the shade,’ said Mary.
    ‘Why you had to have a funeral in the country . . .’ her mother was saying. ‘Father’s buried here . . . all that way . . . so tiring . . .’ Mrs Marsh had imagined for a while that bereavement would change Mary, that Mary would now understand her and grow closer, but Mary had burned, as remote as a salamander in a blazing exaltation of grief, seeming to draw energy from what should have devoured her, and when she emerged she had, it is true, changed, but she was no closer.
    ‘A waste of money,’ concluded Mrs Marsh. She looked almost with dislike at the strange woman in whom her little daughter was now subsumed. Not for the first time she mourned that daughter as though she were already dead.
    ‘Put your