The Birds of the Innocent Wood (2 page)

She became conscious of the nuns as real women who had
renounced their homes, their families and the whole world to become brides of Christ. Habitually she would stare at the sisters when she thought that they were unconscious of her gaze, but she was always reprimanded: the nuns knew instinctively when they were being watched.

For years she accepted life in the convent because it was the only place where she had not been made to suffer, but this tolerance changed when one of the girls invited Jane home. She looked forward to this treat for days, but when it actually took place it shocked her. The child’s family was almost aggressively happy. Large in number, they lived in a small house so that their bodies, their personalities and their lives seemed compressed and intensified; and the degree of intimacy which Jane felt was quite horrible. Washing dripped from a clothes horse on the kitchen ceiling, the hall was cluttered with tennis racquets, bikes, shoes, footballs and a huge kite. A radio roared in the living-room, and the rich greasy smell of fried food filled the air. The father of the house was sick in bed, but made his presence felt with frequent petitions for food and drink. Jane knew that he was up there with an absolute certainty which she could never feel about her own father. The child’s mother was a cheerful slattern who, as the day progressed, filled an ashtray to overflowing with cigarette ends, stained with lipstick. Jane thought that she was wonderful, but later in the day when she absently ruffled Jane’s hair and tried to hug her, the child instinctively shrank back.

When she went back to the convent that evening, she hated the stillness, the silence, the cleanliness and the order of the place; and that night in bed she cried as she had seldom cried before. She felt as if something had been violently ripped from her.

In the ensuing weeks Jane slowly withdrew her friendship from the other girl until she was completely frozen out, and there was no longer the danger of a second invitation. She never again agreed to visit any of her fellow pupils at home.

Gradually she had outgrown the habit of tormenting the other little girls with the story of her childhood, but the terrible
craving which that habit had fed did not diminish. Instead, it grew to such a level that the mere pity of children whom she despised could do nothing to satisfy her. She therefore forced herself to cultivate an abnormally high level of self-control and detachment, and she brought to this all the strength and power of her will. The nuns watched uncomfortably as she slowly iced over.

One day, shortly before she left school, she met Sister Imelda in the corridor leading to the chapel. The nun said how short the years seemed since Jane’s arrival at the convent. Jane stared at her feet and said nothing. Suddenly Sister Imelda asked her, ‘Are you happy, Jane?’ Slowly the girl raised her head.

‘Happy? No. I have no one and I have nothing. Why should I be happy?’

‘You have God, child.’

‘Yes,’ she said dully, ‘I still have God.’

‘And you have your youth.’

Jane paused. She wanted to tell the truth: to say that her youth had been nothing to her but a wearisome burden. It had meant a lack of independence; frustration and a need to accept that the power to control her own life and destiny was not yet hers. But she would have that power, and would have it soon, so she lowered her gaze to her feet again.

‘Youth,’ she said demurely, ‘Yes, I still have my youth.’

On leaving school, Jane took a job in a city-centre office. At first she assumed that she would be expected to find a home for herself, and that her aunt would sever the last tenuous links. So it was a great surprise when her aunt politely asked Jane to live with her. Jane was about to refuse, but then she stopped to consider the alternatives. Her relief at leaving school was tempered with a certain fear, for much as she hated the routine of life at the convent, its very monotony had given her a feeling of security. She knew that the society of her aunt would be the nearest thing she could find to that curious combination of close physical proximity and emotional distance which she had been used to at school.

Jane therefore agreed to move back into the white attic on a
permanent basis. She would pay a fixed rent and maintain her independence; and her aunt was all compliance. This made Jane most suspicious. Before long she had guessed the reason for her aunt’s behaviour: her aunt did not believe that Jane would ever leave her. She felt quite sure that unless she severely antagonized her niece she would have her to care for her in her old age; and so she pretended to be docile. And when Jane understood this she knew that time would prove one or other woman to be right. She felt sure that it would be she.

But as time passed, she began instead to wonder if it would not be her aunt. Her independent working life did not fulfil any of the hopes which she had built around it; and before long she had slipped into a routine as narrow and as tedious as anything she had ever experienced at school. The office where she worked was cramped and dark; the tasks which she was given to do were simple and boring. She felt much more uncomfortable with her colleagues in the office than she had ever done with the girls in school. Often when she walked into a room silence would fall and she knew that they had been talking about her. Sometimes when she was bent over her desk she could feel the eyes of her fellow workers watching her. They thought her very odd: thought her cold and unfriendly. Some of the girls were even a little afraid of her. Certainly she had not been popular at school, but to a degree she had been understood and accepted there. Most of her schoolfellows had known her since the age of five, and having grown up with her oddness, took it for granted. They also, she now realized, had forgiven her much because she was an orphan.

At this stage in her life Jane dressed badly, the inevitable result of a life spent in uniform. The ugly gymslip of heavy bottle-green worsted which she wore when she was five was, apart from size, identical to the one which she wore when she was eighteen. She remarked upon this one day to one of the girls in the office. The girl was puzzled.

‘But why did your mother send you off to boarding school when you were so small?’ It was the opening Jane needed, and with the same apparent artlessness which she had employed so
many times before this, she told the girl about her unhappy childhood. The anecdotes had, of course, the desired effect: the girl was shocked and deeply sympathetic; she in turn told the other girls in the office and from that time on they were kinder to Jane, and more understanding.

But this, Jane discovered, was not enough. She was very lonely now, and wanted friendship, not pity, but did not know how to break through the careful mask which she had constructed throughout her childhood. Because she felt that she could blame no one but herself for this, her misery was compounded with guilt. In her early youth she had always had an unswerving faith that there would be a happy ending, and that she would find a contentment which would vindicate all this suffering, but now she had to confront reality. Her life was simply a life, not a fairy-tale or a romantic novel, and it was perfectly possible to live long – to live all one’s life – never knowing anything but futility and misery. The intensity of her loneliness frightened her.

The months and even years passed, and little changed, except that she began to have two recurring dreams. In the first dream she was trapped alone in an empty room. The walls, ceiling and floor were all painted white, and the room was harshly illuminated by artificial light. The only door was locked, and through the tightly sealed windows she could see people passing by. In the dream she felt that she had lived through a whole day, in the course of which she never ceased to beat against the windows, screaming and crying in ever-increasing panic, afraid that she would not be seen and rescued before darkness fell. But the people on the other side of the glass either did not see her, or, seeing her, they did not care, and when night came she was still always trapped alone in the room. And now, although she could not see the people she felt that they, out there in the darkness, were all gathered round to look at her. In silence they watched her, with derision and contempt and a total want of pity. Now when she stood by the windows of the brightly lit room she could see nothing out there in the night, nothing but her own hated face reflected back to her from the black glass.

In the second dream she was again locked in a room, but this time there was complete darkness and she was not alone. Although she could not see or hear anyone, she could sense another person there with her. In her dream she tried to find this person, and so for hours she felt her way around the room, searching blindly. Her outstretched hands grasped at the dark and empty air: sometimes she felt that she had been eluded by no more than a fraction of a second; sometimes she found that she was stumbling against the walls of the room. And yet her conviction that the other person
was
there never wavered. As the dream progressed her fear that she would not succeed increased, bringing her to a terrible pitch of frustration. Just when she felt that she could not bear the loneliness for a moment longer she would awake in tears.

One night, some three years after she had started work, Jane left the office in the company of one of the other girls, and as they walked along the pavement the girl suddenly stopped short before a shop window.

‘Oh, look at that,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that beautiful?’ Her eye had been caught by a wedding dress of white watered silk, frothed at the neck with lace and artfully lit to show at its best the sheen of the silk.

‘I wish I needed a dress like that,’ said the girl wistfully. ‘I’d love to be married. Wouldn’t you love to be married, Jane?’

Jane was still looking at the dress, conscious of the exaggerated shape of the dummy upon which it was draped, the bust too big and the waist too narrow to be natural. She imagined a row of clothes pegs running down the dummy’s back, nipping in the excess material.

‘No,’ she said at last. ‘I don’t think that I would like that.’

‘What do you want, Jane?’

‘I don’t think that I really know,’ she said, moving away from the window. She did not speak again after that, except to say ‘Goodbye’ when she parted from the girl.

Shortly after that she began to develop sharp physical pains which apparently had no organic cause, but would strike at any time and in any part of her body. On several occasions she fainted.

Then came the night which was to change her whole life. Standing in her aunt’s chilly bathroom she suddenly caught sight of her own naked body reflected in a tilted cheval glass. She was shocked because she saw it first distantly and objectively, as if it belonged to someone else, and then she knew that in that thought there was a wish and a refusal, knew, too, that it was foolish. That strange woman’s body with its breasts and the dark triangle of hair; that body, with all its implied, attendant feelings, that body, bare as a corpse, was hers, and she had to claim it. But she could not bear to look and she turned away horrified. Now you have to choose. The bath brimmed invitingly, squat upon its four clawed feet of iron. She looked away again, saw the light socket and began to cry; took a few steps towards the bath and as she wiped her eyes felt a softness and warmth in her hand which she did not want to feel; then again glimpsed her body in the mirror and saw a certain beauty which she did not want to see. She cried aloud and suddenly her whole life opened up before her: not her past life, as was supposed to happen at this particular moment, but her future life, and she saw in it a blankness and a mystery. Time would fill those empty years with something and if she now fulfilled her intention she would never know how it was all really meant to end
_?
‘But how can I bear to live all those years?’ she thought. She closed her eyes and put her hands across her face; again she cried and cried. But then she made her choice: then she said yes. Slowly she put on her nightdress. She drained the bath, put out the light, and she went to bed.

In the following weeks the pains and the two dreams about the dark room and the bright room continued, but her life was different because, for the first time since her school-days, she had a real hope that the future would be better. Her strong will reasserted itself to ensure that this would be so.

It was a few months after that night that she met the man who was later to be her husband. She was in the habit of calling into a café on her way home from work, and one day an excessive crowd had forced them, strangers, to share a table. For the first fifteen minutes she pretended to gaze into the middle
distance, while in reality she was carefully studying his reflection in a mirror which hung on the opposite wall. He was covertly staring at Jane (which she, of course, clearly saw in the mirror). She guessed that he was from the country, and when the waitress came to take his order his accent proved her right. She also guessed that he was shy, and was right in that too, for when she at last asked him to pass the sugar he was startled, and he blushed. Looking at her teacup she timidly engaged him in idle conversation. She would not let him go. From long, linked, insinuating sentences she made a web of talk which communicated nothing but which held him there, listening until she had created the right moment. Then she told him about her childhood: the fire; her aunt; the hospital; the convent. She told her story as though it had all happened to someone else, and told it so well that he could not fail to be moved. When she had drawn from him all the pity she wanted she lightly changed the subject; but still she kept talking, until again she felt (and this was more dangerous) that she had created the right moment. Then she stood up, and drew the conversation shyly, clumsily, to a close, as she gathered together her jacket and handbag.

Hastily he asked if he might meet her again. She looked surprised, and became quite flustered. But said, ‘Yes.’

They did meet again, and often. His home was over an hour from the city by car, and she was flattered to think of his travelling all that distance just to see her. He took her to the cinema, they went out to tea, they went walking in the park. In the course of these meetings she found out a little more about him. He told her that he lived in a farmhouse right by the lough’s shore. Like Jane, he was an only child; and he lived alone with his father, his mother having died some five years before.