The Bird in the Tree Page 5

  For that, she thought, was the mission of a grandmother. It was for that purpose that twenty years ago she had bought Damerosehay. She belonged to the past and she had bought for her setting an old house in a strip of country rich in history. The past, she knew, is inviolable, one of the few things in life that cannot be marred by present foolishness, and in it the present may find its peace.

  — 4 —

  And so she had made Damerosehay for her grandchildren, and especially for David. The day when she had found Damerosehay, and the days leading up to that day, bound up as they were with the greatest anguish of her life, were almost the most vivid of all her memories. Swiftly, her eyes closing again, she re-lived them.

  Only a few weeks before she found Damerosehay she had sat by the deathbed of her son Maurice, watching him die after weeks of pain so hideous that even now she dared not let herself think of it, lest she should be once more the mad woman she had been at that time. It had been April 1918. Maurice had been wounded in France, and his wife, as worn by his pain as he was, had died from the spring scourge of influenza only a few days before. Lucilla’s son Roger had died at Jutland and of her remaining three sons, Hilary, George and Stephen, only Hilary the parson, badly wounded as a chaplain in the early days of the war and now relegated with his wooden leg and his injured lungs to a country parish in Hampshire, was in a place of safety. “Spring,” she said to herself that day. “Spring.” And she gazed stupidly at a patch of sunlight on the wall. Maurice was already unconscious and beyond her reach, Maurice who had been the most gay and gallant and vividly alive of all her children. He would have loved life to the full, enjoying it as none of the others would; yet she had borne him only for agony and death. If only she and James had known, in those far-off days when they had had their children, for what purpose it was that the delicate bodies of their sons were shaped in the womb, that their minds unfolded and their spirits grew, if they had only known, then they would have seen to it that their union was unfruitful and rejoiced that their line died with them. She was glad that James was dead. She was glad that he did not know.

  She supposed that there were other people with her in the room, but she did not notice them, she only watched the patch of sunlight on the wall. She hated it. “Spring,” she repeated stupidly. How dared the spring break through again upon an earth drenched in the obscenity of war? How dared the sun shine upon men and women mad with pain? . . . Surely God mocked. . . . The shadow of a bird’s wing flashed across the patch of sunlight on the wall and they told her that Maurice was dead.

  Such little things can loom so large in life, and it was that shadow of a bird in flight that saved her reason in the days that followed. She saw it constantly, blue against the patch of golden sunlight, so brief and so fragile an appearance yet instinct with such joy. The picture of it in her mind was almost more vivid than the picture of her dying son; when that second memory swept over her, threatening to destroy her, the first came quickly upon it, drawn over it as a fair sheet is drawn over the face of the dead. “Look not upon that but upon this,” it had seemed to say, and she had looked and been comforted.

  And when she had to tell the five-year-old David that now his father as well as his mother had left him, groping a little desperately among the symbols of angels and heavens above the stars with which grown-ups try to comfort the stricken children, it was the symbol of the bird’s wings that helped her most. “They fly away,” she told David. “They fly away and are at rest.”

  “Birds,” said David, savouring the word. “Birds. I like birds. There are lots of birds in the country. Grandmother, shall we go to the country?”

  And then Lucilla knew what she was going to do with the rest of her life. She was going to build some sort of a refuge, somewhere, to which her children and her grandchildren could escape. Not a permanent escape; even in her grief she still knew that a selfish isolation is the sure road to hell; but that temporary one which is the right of every man. They were talking a lot just now about the war to end war, and a country fit for heroes to live in. She thought they deceived themselves. She had seen now what life could be, and what man could do when the devil was in him. She had not much hope of any wholesale change; only of the creation of isolated homes of beauty from which, please God, the loveliness should spread. Such a home would she make for her children and her grandchildren. They should come to it weary and sickened and go away made new. They should find peace there, and beauty, and the cleansing of the sins.

  “It sounds very far-fetched and absurd,” she said to her eldest son. “But what it boils down to, Hilary, is just that I want a house in the country.”

  “Come and stay with me,” Hilary said, “and we’ll look for it.”

  So she and her daughter Margaret, and Ellen, and little David who was to live with her now, went down to the ugly red brick vicarage of Fairhaven, in Hampshire, where Hilary lived contentedly in a state of discomfort and confusion which seemed to him, after the mud of Flanders and the rigours of the slum clergy-house that had preceded it, the height of luxury. Plenty of women would have been happy to undeceive him but Hilary was, and had always been, one of those born solitaries who can live to the full only in loneliness. He was very like his father. It was partly because James had been like that, only without Hilary’s good sense in realizing it, that Lucilla, naturally gregarious, had not been very happy with him.

  But Hilary, like his father before him, was very practical and very kind. He had provided for Lucilla photographs and descriptions of all the desirable residences in the neighbourhood, taking great care that they should be well within her means and of a type that Margaret, who was to be her mother’s housekeeper, would find easy to run. . . . But Lucilla, when taken to see them, hated the lot. . . . None of them had either that loveliness or that unearthliness for which she was looking.

  “They’re no good,” she said one evening wearily to Hilary. “They are all far too ordinary.”

  “You know, Mother dear,” Hilary said gently, smiling at her, “I am afraid your ideas are a bit too large. You can’t afford the sort of house you want, darling. You’ll just have to put up with the best that we can do.”

  “I will do no such thing, Hilary,” Lucilla said, aggrieved. “I will have what I want for my children and my grandchildren or I will have nothing.” And she cast all her “Orders to view” despairingly upon the floor.

  Hilary and Margaret looked at each other and smiled and sighed a little. It was almost impossible to make Lucilla understand that though before this horrible war she had been a comparatively rich woman she was now not so well-to-do as she had been. Investments had gone down. She couldn’t expect to get the price for the town house that she was selling that she would have done in days of peace. “Why not?” she had asked. They had tried to explain why not, but she hadn’t bothered to listen. She was too tired. And all her life long those about her had exerted themselves to spare her the tiresome details of practical affairs. . . . She was too lovely to be bothered with such things, they had thought, and she had quite agreed with them. . . . So now she couldn’t take these things in. She had lost the habit of it.

  “Wouldn’t you consider this one, Mother?” Margaret asked a little wistfully, pushing forward the photo of a particularly hideous modern house. “It was so convenient inside. I could run it quite easily with two maids.”

  “That!” cried Lucilla in horror. “You expect me to buy that thing as a home for little David? Are you mad, Margaret?”

  Margaret propped her aching head on fingers that trembled a little, and her eyes, again seeking Hilary’s, filled with tears. She was absurdly sensitive and Lucilla, who seldom cried come what might, always had great difficulty in keeping her patience with her. At this moment, worn out as she was and not quite normal in her grief, she almost hated these two children of hers. They were worthy and good but oh, so distressingly plain. Hilary at thirty-nine was already bald and stout, and Margaret, w
ith the only man who had ever loved her dead at Gallipoli and what small good looks she had ever had destroyed by years of strenuous war nursing, was now at thirty-five quite the dowdiest frump Lucilla had ever seen. She could not conceive how she could have produced these two. Only Maurice of all her children had had beauty. . . . Maurice. . . . Maurice. . . . Suddenly she got up and left them, fumbling blindly for the door. They heard her stumbling on the stairs.

  “Let her alone,” Hilary said sternly to Margaret, who with her usual tactlessness would have flown after Lucilla. “Let her alone. It’s all we can do.”

  Margaret, her thin elbows set upon the litter of Hilary’s study table, hid her face in her hands and cried. “It is so dreadful,” she sobbed, “not to be able to give her what she wants. I would die to do it, Hilary, if I could. You know I would.”

  Hilary, taking his pipe from his mouth, limped round to her and held her head clumsily against the tobacco ash that strewed his waistcoat. “I know you would,” he said, and suddenly wondered if Margaret was not a much finer woman than anyone ever suspected. Everyone loved Lucilla so much that they seldom noticed Margaret. . . . And Margaret did not mind. . . . Surely it was rather fine of her not to mind. He would have liked to tell her so, but he couldn’t find the words. He rubbed his hand over his rough, thinning hair, stuck his pipe back in his mouth and bent patiently to pick up the papers that Lucilla had thrown upon the floor.

  “What a mess,” he said tolerantly.

  “Darling Mother,” said Margaret, and laughed a little through her tears. The childlikeness of Lucilla was a perpetual delight to her children. Even in their grief they could rejoice in it. It kept them young.

  And in the end it was David who gave Lucilla what she wanted. “Grandmother!” he cried, leaping up and down in his cot in her room at five o’clock the next morning. “Grandmother! I want to go to the seaside!”

  This was a grievance with him. They had been in the place four days, only a mile from the sea, and they had not been near it. Instead they had gone rattling about the inland country in the village Ford looking at hideous houses that interested him not at all. At least the grown-ups had looked at them. He hadn’t looked at them. He had had more sense. He had stayed in the car playing bears under the back seat and wanting to go to the seaside.

  “The seaside!” he yelled now, smacking an imperious fist upon his pillow.

  “Certainly,” said Lucilla, and got out of bed.

  She had also not been to the sea yet. There was nothing at Little Village, Hilary had told her, except a handful of cottages and a harbour. It was rather pretty, and he would take her there one fine day when the house question was settled. And she had acquiesced. But now, of course, she saw the iniquity of keeping a small boy of five and the seaside separated for longer than was absolutely necessary.

  “I’m so sorry, darling,” she said, pulling on her stockings. “We’ll go to the seaside.”

  “Now,” commanded David.

  “Of course,” said Lucilla. “As soon as we’re dressed.”

  “Right,” said David. “I can take off my own ’jamas.”

  They performed extremely sketchy toilets, crept downstairs very softly so as not to wake Margaret and Hilary and let themselves out into the garden, all wet and glimmering and deliciously scented with the rain and the sun and the flowers of April. David giggled his peculiarly entrancing giggle. Grandmother was great fun. She never used those hateful words “Presently” or “Perhaps.” She understood that if you wanted to do a thing you wanted to do it now, while you remembered about it, and not tomorrow or next week when you would probably be wanting to do something entirely different. Daddy had been the same. Daddy also had always wanted to do things “now.” He could remember that once he and Daddy had played cricket out in the street at four in the morning because they felt like that, and had subsequently gone to bed at three in the afternoon because they felt like that too. Mummy, he remembered, had had difficulty in understanding their point of view.

  “Grandmother,” he said suddenly, the thought of Daddy bringing another thought to his mind, “will there be birds at the seaside?”

  “Lots,” said Lucilla. “Sea birds. White ones.”

  “A blue one?” he asked.

  “They’re not generally blue at the seaside,” said Lucilla, “but as it’s so early in the morning we might see a blue one.”

  “Is it easier to see blue birds early in the morning?” asked David.

  “At dawn and sunset,” said Lucilla, “one sometimes sees beautiful things that one does not see at other times.”

  “Why?” asked David.

  “One just does,” said Lucilla.

  “Right,” said David, and accepted her statement He was not as yet old enough to be one of those tiresome children who have to go on asking why until they have plumbed the utter depths of adult ignorance. He was still an explorer, finding the world so full of wonders that it was all his small mind could do to accept these wonders without fatiguing itself to ask questions about them. “Come on,” he continued, pulling at Lucilla’s hand. “It’s nice.”

  It was indeed. The lane that led from Big Village to Little Village was an enchanting place at half-past five on an April morning. The thick high hedges of sloe and briar and hawthorn, blown all one way by the wind from the sea, so that the sea-ward hedges tossed long sprays of emerald green leaves like foam across the lane, were bright and sparkling with sun-shot raindrops, and nestling in the shelter of them were celandines and speedwells that were still asleep. Through gaps in the hedge they could see the east still barred with gold, and the sky curving up through lovely gradations of colour that ended over their heads in a clear deep blue that was reflected on the earth below, by the pools in the lane and the polished surfaces of the wet green leaves, as though the depth of the firmament was something the earth must at all costs reach up and catch hold of. The light was the strange light of dawn, cool and bright yet deep and warm, the light of the sun and the moon and the stars mingling together for a moment as the dominion of the one yielded to the rule of the other.

  There were numbers of birds already, little ones that sang praises madly in the hedges and big ones that moved in long lines against the golden east, flying from north to south in slow rhythmical ecstasy. Some of them were black and some were white. “Crows and gulls,” said Lucilla, “and they fly like that because they are so happy that the sun has risen. They can’t sing like the little birds and so they have to praise God with the movement of their wings.”

  “What an awful thing it would be,” said David, “if suddenly one morning God forgot to tell the sun to get up.”

  “I think that’s what the birds feel,” said Lucilla. “They do get so excited, don’t they, when they find it’s all right and He hasn’t forgotten.”

  “Could He ever forget?” asked David anxiously.

  “Of course not,” said Lucilla. “He always remembers everything.”

  “How clever He is,” said David. “See me jump this puddle.”

  And then the lane topped the crest of a little hill and suddenly, breathlessly, they saw the marshes and the sea. They stood still for a moment, clutching each other, and then quite silently they took hands and ran. They did not stop until they reached the harbour wall, where they sat down very suddenly and looked about them. The gorse was out, flaming under the sun, and all the colours of the dawn were caught in the waters of the harbour and in the pools and channels in the marsh. The gulls were everywhere, and as they watched the swans arrived from the Abbey River, flying one behind the other, their great wings touched with gold. From the old grey cottages behind them a few spirals of blue smoke crept up from the chimneys, and over to their left the sun touched the coral buds of a twisted oak-wood to points of beckoning flame.

  “And Hilary said this was rather pretty,” gasped Lucilla. “Rather pretty! Oh, my poor Hilary!”


  She said no more for David was pulling at her hand again, and she was running with him towards the oak-wood. They were through the broken gate and their feet were running silently on the moss-grown drive. The gnarled boughs stooped about them, gathering them in and closing the ranks behind so that they should not turn back. To their left was an old red-brick wall and to their right, through the delicate patterning of twigs and buds, they could see the sea. Then the wall turned at right angles, they with it, and they stood before a grey house where a porch with a battered front door within it faced across the marshes to the silver line of the Estuary. Lucilla, who when all was said and done was fifty-eight years old, sank down upon the stone horse-block that stood there, utterly out of breath, but David flung himself against the door like a wild thing.

  “It’s locked!” he shouted. “It’s all shut up! Open it, Grandmother! Open it!”

  Instantly Lucilla, an utterly unscrupulous woman when in pursuit of what she wanted, was up and smashing the hall window with the heel of her shoe. Then she put her hand through, unlatched and opened it, and climbed in, David after her.

  They were in the hall of an eighteenth-century house, empty, mildewed and desolate, but with a fine shadowy moulded ceiling and a broken fireplace that the Adams might have designed. A wide, shallow, curving staircase led away into the darkness above, the carved banisters festooned with cobwebs that drifted like grey ghosts in the soft breath of dawn. But Lucilla and David were not dismayed. They took hands and went forward.