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

the flowering privet fresh and shining from the night’s rain, glimpsed the racing liberated sky and been appalled by a moment of glittering joy, as intense as any she had ever known. She wondered sometimes whether she had gone mad then and stayed mad ever since, since in order to tolerate the intolerable it was necessary to change the rules, or at least one’s conception of them. She had heard the cuckoo that spring too, while she was walking down the lane. ‘Jesu Grist,’ the roadman had said, busy giving the hedgerow a short-back-and-sides. ‘There’s bad luck.’ It seemed it was only safe to hear the cuckoo call while you stood on greenery – leaves or grass, even a sprig of parsley. To hear it while you walked on barren ground was a poor omen. Mary wished he’d told her earlier. She would never have left the garden, would have made her shoes of salad stuff.
    ‘Sit on the bench,’ said Mrs Marsh. ‘You’ll be nice and sheltered there.’
    The bench circled the cedar that grew in the middle of the little lawn. To the cedar’s unprotesting trunk was nailed a shingle – cut obliquely to retain the greatest amount of bark – deeply incised with the gilded words ‘Honeyman’s Close’. It interrupted the flow of the squirrel as he poured up and down collecting the delicacies that were put out for him by the residents. Sometimes he sat on it, and his benefactors took photographs of him to send to their relations in New Zealand. Round the lawn stood a dozen new little houses in what had been the garden of a larger house. The high surrounding wall remained, but the garden was cut up into gravel paths wide enough for cars and the cedar was all that was left of the original trees. New trees and shrubs had been planted – all evergreen, because they were better value for money, retaining their decorative properties the year round and not dropping their messy leaves all over the place like the spendthrift deciduous varieties.
    Mary was quite alone. Most of the neighbours were childless. Some had grown-up children who had long since left home, and those who had young children had been careful to have so few that they could afford to send them to boarding school and take them away on holidays. No tricycles lay about, no balls, no discarded garments. God, thought Mary. There were only the birds, summer-fat in midwinter in this bird-loving environ ment. There were no cats; and dogs were discouraged, except for old Miss Jones’s scottie, who was permitted, because his mistress was said to be of county descent and therefore at once deserved him and could be relied upon to look after him. The people at No. 5 who owned a chain of hairdressing shops had originally moved in with a Bedlington, a boxer and a dachshund, looking like an incomplete set of old-fashioned pictorial cigarette cards, but although there had been no unpleasantness they had soon realised that dogs didn’t fit in to the Close and had given them away to friends who lived in ampler surroundings. There had been angry consternation when the Close heard that a policeman was to move in to the house next door to Mrs Marsh’s. The neighbours were relieved to learn that he was a Chief Inspector, but still they wished he’d chosen a different place of retirement. ‘He’ll bring his alsatian or his dobermann pinscher,’ prophesied the lady from No. 5. They were all quite surprised when he didn’t.
    The squirrel was accepted – nay, loved – since he was a solitary celibate squirrel and caused no trouble at all, living as he did up a tree, an honorary bird. Had he been one of a group, things would have been different and the council called in. As there were no children there were no pet rabbits. Moles, voles and mice were severely discouraged, and any resident of the Close would have died if he had met a rat. Foxes were said to forage occasionally in the dustbins of people who lived nearer to the downs, but they hadn’t yet ventured in to the Close. There