Free The Birds of the Innocent Wood by Deirdre Madden

sly, insinuating questions of the villagers, and always presented a face as blank as the fronts of the painted houses that watched her. Paranoia developed so that even when goodwill was shown to her she would not see it. She distrusted everyone, imagining a sneer in every greeting, and sarcasm in response to every remark she made. She felt that they hated her city accent and her different ways. The closed circle of the community would not open to admit her, and at last the day came when she flungher bags upon the kitchen table and said pettishly to James, ‘You’re to do the shopping from now on. I don’t want to go back to the village again.’ It took a good deal of questioning and coaxing before she would reveal what had finally made her so cross.
    ‘I overheard two women talking,’ she said at last. ‘I’m sure that they were talking about me. They said that I was as odd as a pet hen.’
    And when James laughed at this, she became angry and sulked for the rest of the day.
    James had hoped that a strong friendship would develop between Jane and Ellen, the woman who lived in the cottage near by, but when they met for the first time it was with spontaneous and mutual antipathy, staring at each other with identical blue eyes.
    The meeting took place at the cottage, and Ellen presided queen-like over a china teapot, with a gentility that made Jane hate her; and she hated her too for the prettiness of her small, dim cottage.
    ‘I want to know all about you.’ Ellen said. ‘James has told me next to nothing.’
    And so Jane began to tell the story of her life with her usual quiet confidence and secure belief in her powers of eloquence. But as she told her tale (which she could do now without giving much thought to either the matter or the method of the telling), she was unnerved to notice two things: first, that Ellen bore a distinct physical resemblance to herself; and second, that she obviously did not believe a word of what Jane was saying. The fire, the convent, the attic, the office: she thought that Jane was making it all up to solicit pity, and to give herself the spurious respectability of actually having had a past life. The combined effect of these two factors was that before she had finished speaking, Jane felt that she was listening to herself, and disbelieving the story of her own past life. She had never used this ploy for any other reason than to elicit sympathy, and never, until now, had it failed.
    When she finished, Ellen picked up her teacup and beforetaking a tiny sip threw two words into the silence, like small stones. ‘How sad.’
    ‘At least it has a happy ending,’ said Jane. ‘I was lucky to find James.’
    ‘Yes, you were,’ said Ellen flatly. There was an unpleasant pause.
    ‘You must find it very lonely over here. Don’t you find it lonely?’
    ‘Not really – I have my job to do, and I have friends in the village. Gerald comes to see me sometimes. No,’ said Ellen, ‘I’m not lonely.’ Jane said nothing. Ellen smiled sweetly at her and offered her more tea.
    ‘We didn’t get on,’ Jane said flatly that night when James asked her how the visit had fared.
    ‘Oh?’ he said.
    ‘No.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘That’s no sort of an answer, Jane.’ She shrugged her shoulders crossly.
    ‘She didn’t like me. I could feel it, and that made me dislike her, I don’t know why it happened. You can’t always know why you dislike another person, James, any more than you can always tell why you do like others.’
    He did not reply, but it was obvious that he was disappointed by the outcome of the visit.
    One curious result of the incident was that it brought Jane and her father-in-law much closer together, ‘Stuck-up baggage,’ he said. ‘You’re better off without her for a friend.’
    Jane’s antipathy towards Ellen was mixed with a considerable degree of curiosity, and she wanted to know all about her background. James would tell her nothing, but his father was