Free The Birds of the Innocent Wood by Deirdre Madden Page A

happy to oblige. One winter’s night as they sat by the stove, he told her the story of Ellen’s past. Jane listened attentively and later she would run over it again and again in her mind, embellishing the tale with little added details of her own, imagining certain scenes with particular intensity. Every time she sawEllen thereafter, she would think of what she knew, conscious always that it was partly truth and partly her own invention.
    Without ever knowing its history, Jane had frequently seen Ellen’s birthplace. It stood on the outskirts of the village, and in its day had evidently been a fine house, with extensive lawns, tennis courts and a summer-house; elegantly furnished within and meticulously tended without. But its days of glory were long since over, for the house was now nothing more than a blackened, burnt-out shell. The neglected gardens grew wild, and where ladies had once played croquet, cattle now munched the grass and scratched their necks against the trunk of a sprawling white lilac.
    Ellen had not been raised in luxury. The fall of the family had begun with her grandfather, who drank and gambled away a great deal of the family fortune. After his death his only son, Ellen’s father, married and led a life of dissipation far surpassing that of his father’s. Jane thought frequently of how greatly Ellen’s mother must have been taken in by marriage. James’s father spoke highly of the woman, and said, ‘She made the most terrible mistake of her life in marrying that fool.’ From the daughter, Jane was able to create in her mind a picture of the mother: frail, blue-eyed, refined. How utterly duped she must have been when first she saw the house! Jane imagined her coming to tea, intent on marriage and blinding herself to everything that might endanger the illusion in which she longed to believe. Later perhaps she would lie to herself, saying that it was dusk when they took tea in the drawing-room, and in the failing light she could see the maid’s black and white uniform, but not the stains on her apron or how badly her cuffs were frayed; could see the Dresden china, but not the silverfish which flickered across the saucer when she raised her cup; could see the silver salvers on the dresser, but not the fact that they were yellow and tarnished. She knew in her heart that the dusk was a lie, for it had been an afternoon in summer: sunlight poured through the high windows. Ellen’s mother saw then only the gentility she wanted to see: but when she came back to the house as a wife, she saw things very clearly indeed.
    By force of necessity the small staff became smaller still: the grubby maid was dismissed, then the gardener, then the cook, until only the housekeeper remained. This woman did not live on the premises, and after her departure each evening, husband and wife would be left alone together in the huge, empty house. He drank heavily. Everything of value in the house (including the tarnished silver plate) was sold to meet increasing debts, and everything else began to decay. With a morbid interest, Jane tried to imagine how the woman must have felt at the creeping and inexorable decay of her home. She thought of her moving from one cold, empty room to another, watching as the big house rotted around her, and she could do nothing to stop it. Her reflection looked back at her from huge oval mirrors of bevelled glass, the mercury of which was stained brown. In the drawing-room, patches of damp spread across the parquet, and mildew crept up the velvet curtains. Books burst their spines in the damp library. Before her eyes, the painted faces of her husband’s ancestors disintegrated and crumbled, just as their corporeal faces had long since rotted away in the family’s ostentatious grave. One by one, the windows in the conservatory were broken until nothing remained but a frail cage of rotting white wood. After the birth of her daughter the woman must have wept to think of the harm the house