A field with Greylag Geese. I can smell his jacket beside me, the damp wool, once the coat of another creature. “You’re always welcome,” I tell him.
On the way back I see our footsteps in the soil, preserved for one night at least.
I sit in the old brown chair by the window until it is dark. The fabric on the armrests is wearing through; the threads beneath are visible, the veins. I haven’t seen Monocle for a few days—that often happens, but she’s getting older now, and I feel uneasy about it. Birds can simply vanish, in an instant. We always think there’s a goal, a reason, that somehow or another everything is for the best, that there’s some kind of point. But most lives are little more than an accumulation of chance happenings, moments within the great nothingness.
I walk to the kitchen, past the cardboard boxes where the Great Tits roost—packaging for sugar or grain; people throw such things away when they’re perfect for little birds—and I pour myself a glass of champagne. The windows are propped open. The house hasn’t yet cooled down. Although the birds were restless, the storm hasn’t broken. I wipe the perspiration from my forehead, skin across skin. Slowly the seasons here have lodged inside my body; I move with everything that returns: spider’s webs in the hedge, frost flowers on the windowpanes, snowdrops, light till the evening’s end. Just as once upon a time music also possessed my body. The violin stands in a corner, a relic of a former life. Last year I did go and listen to the orchestra again. Stockdale was as red in the face as ever, but thinner. He seemed smaller. He told me he’d seen my book in a shop somewhere, but didn’t ask how I was. I couldn’t enjoy the music because suddenly I deeply missed performing. Billie was no longer playing in the orchestra. Nobody knew what she was doing now.
Outside the air feels fresher, driving the heat away. I lay a cushion onto the garden bench. The sky is clear. The newspaper said that there’d be falling stars tonight. I’ve nothing to wish for, yet I still scan the night sky. I take a sip of champagne, but don’t enjoy it.
Clouds pass across the moon, turning the pale white birches into ghosts. In the distance an Owl cries; perhaps it’s the Tawny Owl I saw a week ago.
In the morning Star will once again be the first to visit. Her fledglings have flown the nest. She has more free time now and comes to see me more frequently. It’s like this each year, and each year it’s just a little different. I shouldn’t ask myself whether what I’m doing is useful, or whether it’s enough. The birds show me that time is not the straight line that humans make of it. Things don’t come to an end, they just change form. A feeling becomes a thought, a thought an action, an action a thought, a thought a feeling. The first feeling returns, traces lines through the new one. The first thought sleeps a while, then crops up again later. This is how times intermingle; this is how we exist in different moments all at once.
In bed my heart beats too swiftly. The alcohol traces lines through my body, from my hands to my head to my feet, an unstructured network, nerves. The sheet is cool for only a moment. When sleep comes, I go to the place where memories dwell when we don’t think of them.
In late summer Julian Huxley, the biologist, visits me. He wants to ask some questions about my investigation and is curious about my house. He has brought a student with him, a lanky young man with a thin little moustache above his harelip. He makes notes with his fountain pen in a large notebook and rustles the pages so much that in one fell swoop he drives all the Great Tits away. I ignore him until he topples his teacup over the table and even Inkey leaves the room. “If you carry on like this, then they won’t come inside again for the next two days,” I snap at him. Huxley laughs. “And what are you laughing at?”
“You were just telling me how highly strung the birds are and that you know precisely how to deal with them, that your body knows what to do, that you don’t even have to think now about your movements. And here you have a young student who is on his first field trip with me and you don’t at all see that it’s exactly the same for him.”
The young man hunches himself over his notebook.
Yes, but he is a human being. I shrug my shoulders a little. “Perhaps we should go outside a while. It’s almost dry. Then I can show you the various nesting places.” Outside the noise can dissipate and the birds know where to hide themselves; this is their own terrain, where they have the advantage.
Huxley takes a camera with him, discusses with the young man what he should look out for—he points to the birds, describes their postures, their movements, their vocalisations: that’s what they do to strengthen their ties; that’s a warning signal; that’s what it does to let others know where it is. I guide them through the garden, pointing out the places already described in my book. They encounter a number of Great Tits, the Magpies and the Wood Pigeon who has been living in the oak tree for two weeks now. The Blackbirds don’t show themselves.
They’re so large. I realise they’re unable to move more elegantly, but they could at least try. Huxley has a deep, heavy voice, the young man a shrill one. They talk as if they can’t hear themselves, as if they don’t understand how much space they take up. As if they can’t hear space. We should be able to move noiselessly, like cats; our bodies are soft enough, but we simply don’t use them correctly. Joker flies to the window and then back into the garden when she hears the men.
“Do you think your experiment is replicable?” Huxley asks.
“No. Someone could choose to live somewhere remote, like me. They could get to know the birds, build bonds of trust. But the birds would be different. And that’s what I was trying to say just now about individual intelligence. I can’t generalise, for example, about whether it’s the female of a pair who initiates contact or the male, because it depends precisely on who encounters whom and in what kinds of circumstances. It’s the same for the nesting place and all the other choices they make. And whether they’re introverts or extroverts. There are some universals. Sparrows are bossy creatures. Magpies and Crows prey on the young of smaller birds. But that’s more or less it. As far as Great Tits are concerned, I certainly see an enormous amount of individual variation.” The young man makes careful notes on everything I say. My attention is drawn to a Magpie in the apple tree, not far from Dusty’s nest box—an old petrol can. I stand up. If he comes too close, I’ll have to drive him away.
“I’m sorry, would you like us to leave?” Huxley tries to catch my eye.
“No. I’m just keeping an eye on that Magpie.” Huxley exchanges a glance with the boy. I don’t care. This is my research. My house.
The Magpie flies off. We can go inside again. Someone has pooped on the piano. I go to the kitchen to fetch a dishcloth.
The young man looks at me when I return. I frown.
Huxley leafs through his notes. “Do you think you can actually understand these birds?”
“You don’t have to be the same as someone to understand them, although perhaps you do have to resemble one another. But I know what you’re driving at: the idea that I’m anthropomorphising the birds. Listen, the fact that Great Tits are members of a different species doesn’t mean that we don’t have things in common. Darwin wrote long ago that the difference between man and other animals is a question of degree.”
“But we can talk with our own species,” he counters. The boy gives a nod of agreement from above his notebook.
“They can talk quite as well as we do. With their voices, bodies, movements. Moreover, human language is no guarantee of understanding.” Words can gloss things over, cover things up, and long after you’ve spoken them they suddenly start to lead their own life. “Are you almost done?”