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

might do to her child: no fires could defeat the damp, seeping cold; and in winter the rats would enter unchecked through the rotten floorboards and doors.
    When Ellen was twelve, her father, overwhelmed by debts, took an ornamental revolver out to a ruined gazebo in the grounds of the house. His wife heard the report, and it was she who found her husband with half his head blown away. (The deed was, of course, in reality performed with a shotgun in the back yard: the revolver and gazebo were gothic fancies which Jane could not resist adding.) He was not buried in the family grave, but at the foot of the hill, in a patch of ground set aside for the bodies of suicides and unbaptized infants.
    Jane’s father-in-law said that all the villagers had presumed Ellen’s mother would leave as soon as possible after theincident, but to everyone’s astonishment, she made no move. She closed down most of the rooms of the big house, and lived with her daughter in one small wing. She no longer employed a housekeeper, but the woman who had filled that post remained her only friend in the village. The former housekeeper frequently visited the big house, and in return Ellen and her mother often visited the woman in her cottage. The bond between Ellen and the housekeeper was particularly strong; she filled for her the function of a grandmother, and often the child stayed overnight with her. It so happened that she was staying with the woman on the night fire broke out in the big house, and had she been at home, she would surely have died with her mother. The fire started in the wing to which they had confined themselves, but it spread rapidly, and by morning Ellen had no father, no mother, no home and no money. She was fifteen years old.
    After the funeral, the housekeeper told Ellen that she was to come and live with her. The girl gladly did so, and continued her studies at the local school. The woman and the girl lived together happily, and when the woman died some years later, Ellen was as grieved as she had been by the death of her natural mother. She inherited the cottage, and was at that time just old enough to begin work, so she completed her studies in music and was fortunate enough to secure a teaching post at her old school in the nearby town. She continued to live quietly at the cottage.
    ‘And are you sure that the fire was an accident?’ said Jane.
    ‘Of course it was,’ her father-in-law replied. ‘What would a fine woman like that want to kill herself for?’
    ‘So then she’s buried in the family grave?’
    ‘No,’ he said reluctantly. There was fools then that thought as you did – and bigger fools that thought she would want to be buried with that weak, drunken scut just because she had made the mistake of marrying him.’
    ‘So she’s at the foot of the hill too?’ Jane said.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Odd that she did want to stay in the village after he died, wasn’t it?’
    ‘Yes,’ said her father-in-law, but the telling of the tale hadevidently wearied him, for he would say no more.
    *
    Jane’s new life did not lose its sense of strangeness with the passage of time. She did not feel that she belonged in the big, cold farmhouse, and could not become used to the cruelty of nature, nor to the harshness of country life. Yet always there was a sense of distance which to some degree protected her, and she felt this in small matters as well as in more important things, so that when she opened the door one morning and found at her feet a disembowelled rat, left there by the farm cat, she could think, This isn’t really happening to me . It was some other woman who had found herself living in a house where such things were commonplace, where there were slugs in the kitchen and enormous spiders in the bedrooms, and Jane was somehow able to observe this woman’s plight with a peculiar intimacy.
    But it was Jane who failed to know and be known by her husband. She knew then that the sense of distance did not protect her,