The Birds of the Innocent Wood Read Online Free PDF Page B

before turning away from the window, and when she does she studiously avoids looking her sister in the eye. As she bends to pick up a box she does not see how sad Catherine is as she looks down at her, and even if she did see she would not understand.
    Catherine wishes that Sarah would not go to the cottage that afternoon, and wishes that she could say, ‘Please don’t go – don’t ever go again – stay here with me instead,’ and that her sister would comply without asking for reasons.
    That same morning Catherine herself had been obliged to go to the cottage with a letter which had been brought in error to the farmhouse. The scene comes back to her vividly now and she is again at the cottage door. Ellen is making tea and insists that Catherine join her. She does so with great reluctance. From behind the closed door of the parlour comes the soft, tinny sound of a Chopin Nocturne being played with merely technical competence on an old piano. Humming gently to this, Ellen pours the weak, golden tea into two cups which are so thin and translucent that Catherine can see the china darken as the level of the tea rises.
    Inwardly she sneers at their excessive gentility: Ellen with her toy cups and her paper doilies and her linen napkins and her china-handled cake slice: grounds for contempt, perhaps, but nothing more. Yet what Catherine feels towards Ellen is much stronger than contempt. Paper doilies are far too light to hold the weight of hatred. She watches Ellen over the rim of her teacup, and suddenly she realizes the strangeness of the situation. For here she is, quietly drinking tea with a woman whom she would happily see damned. An eternity of outer darkness scarcely seems adequate punishment for Ellen, and Catherine can think of no suffering from which she would spare her if it lay within her power to do so.
    Catherine then remembers that she truly wants to be good:but when this hatred of Ellen comes over her, she feels as if a black, dreadful flower is opening in her heart. Her capacity for hatred fills her with awe. But it is her duty to forgive. If I were to die now, Catherine thinks, I too would deserve damnation .
    ‘Do you feel all right, dear?’
    ‘Yes.’
    Catherine sips the tea and takes a slice of cake from the plate which Ellen holds out to her, but she only crumbles the cake in her fingers, for she cannot eat it. As they sit there listening to the music from the parlour she imagines Peter’s fingers, his clean square-nailed fingers pressing down softly on the cool piano keys. She knows that above the piano there is a photograph of Ellen’s wedding, and she is glad that she does not have to look at it. Catherine has never been able to understand why her mother loaned Ellen her wedding dress. She knows that she flatly refused to be her matron of honour, Catherine and Sarah’s father had been best man at the wedding, and in the parlour photograph there is a shadow on the groom. The dress and the marked resemblance which Ellen bore to Jane, the mother of the two girls, makes the photograph look uncannily like the pictures which they have of their own mother’s wedding. Catherine feels that she could not bear to look at that photograph now, it hurts her deeply even to think about it.
    Suddenly Ellen says, ‘I suppose that you still miss your mother a great deal?’ Catherine feels tears come to her eyes and she hopes that Ellen knows they are caused by anger and hatred rather than grief. She turns her head aside and she does not speak. Ellen also remains silent, and for a moment Catherine thinks, She must suffer too, but she quashes this thought at once. She does not want to feel any compassion for the woman.
    The music draws to a gentle conclusion, and after a moment’s pause the parlour door squeaks softly open. Peter enters hesitantly. ‘I heard voices,’ he says, ‘I thought it was Sarah.’
    You mean you were afraid it was Sarah, Catherine thinks, and she wants to say aloud, ‘No, but