The Birds of the Air by Alice Thomas Ellis Read Free Book Online

should be made that wasn’t capable of precise utterance, and that anyone who couldn’t say exactly what he meant should keep his trap shut. In the heady days earlier in the century when this novel idea first began to gather adherents, it was held by them that a massive, invincible engine was being constructed that would overturn all false, all mistaken structures of human thought – such as religious belief – and clear the ground for true human progress. But as time passed it began to seem that this tool resembled not so much a mighty bulldozer as that useful but scarcely earth-shaking, and indeed slightly anachronistic, implement – the thing for taking stones out of horses’ hooves. Sebastian didn’t care. His philosophy perfectly fitted his personality, and he had nearly finished his latest book –
would
have finished it, if it hadn’t been for Christmas.
    ‘Would you go in the back, Seb?’ asked his wife.
    ‘
I’m
not going in the back,’ said Seb, getting in the front.
    ‘Then you children mustn’t quarrel,’ said Barbara. ‘It’s dangerous when I’m driving.’ Her mother used to say to her and Mary: ‘Birds in their little nests agree.’ Mary at a young age had denied it, pointing out that birds in their little nests spent most of their time trying to shove the other birds over the edge. Mary had always been cynical – and ungrateful – thought Barbara, hot with anxiety and resentment that so many of her relations should be so unsatisfactory.
    Sam suddenly felt furiously sorry for his mother. In her sheepskin jacket and her sheepskin mittens she looked like an inverted bell-wether. (All the university wives wore sheepskin when they drove or shopped because they thought it unassuming and practical and ladylike; but, if they had only realised, it was actually merely sheeplike.) Also, her dark curly hair was in a mess and the end of her nose was red. He kicked Kate, who immediately howled.
    ‘Oh,’ cried Barbara, on a breaking note, earning herself a look of disgust from Sebastian, who turned to address his children . . .
    Mrs Marsh beat around the house like a moth. Her movements, though disciplined and deliberate, were to Mary as irritating and alarming as the pointless vacillations of a large insect. She was flapping dusters over spotless sur -faces, counterpanes over immaculate beds, embroidered guest-towels over the bathroom rails, thin little rugs on the gleaming slippery parquet of the hall. There was so much useless cloth in this house.
    Mary thought nostalgically of winding sheets, of linen ripped for bandages, of sails – of taking to the sea uncluttered and cold as a rafter of bones. Housework should be done in secret or not at all. A busy woman was a reproach, insistent and disturbing, a reprimand to the silent scholar or the idle dead, announcing with each flourish that life was to be lived, that there was no room in the habitations of the living for the grey peace of dust and decay, that the virtuous must polish and wash and sweep and scrub – scouring and mopping, relentless as time.
    Mary just sat by the window. Pain and rage and guilt lay in her mind as still as fish in a stagnant pool. In the dull depths she could also discern the untidy lineaments of shame. During the painstaking unravelling of feeling into thought, she had realised that she would have preferred Robin to live on, suffering, rather than herself suffer the anguish of loss. There’s love, she said, astonished. What a peculiar thing! Yet she neither wished nor had the time to dislike herself. It was hardly worth the trouble. She had never bothered to rejoice when she had been ‘lucky Mary’ – so lucky that passing people asked (or so it seemed) ‘Who is that lucky one? Is it some princess?’ and she would answer, not triumphantly, ‘No, it is lucky Mary. She has found her heart’s desire and this is her happy-ever-after.’ She was unsuited to life. Perhaps, despite the evidence of her mother’s