A tiny bird was there; it watched Janet. Janet watched the bird. Its eye was bright and anxious; it opened and closed its beak, beseeching, soundless. Gently she picked it up. It was a jackdaw nestling, not even fledged, and its beak was crossed. It had been flung to the ground to die. Janet thought that there was little hope for it, but she took it indoors to the warmth of a haybox on the back of the Aga. To her surprise and delight the bird survived. Soon she was able to move the box to her bedroom where she tended the incessant cheepings night and day. She decided that he was a male bird; his name was Claws. Now when she entered the room he came hopping to meet her, wings outstretched in welcome, beak agape. She took her old doll’s house from the nursery. At last it had a purpose. She had never played with it and its only previous use to her had been on the long-ago occasion when a friendly rat had sauntered up to Francis in the woodshed. He had brought it in, and he and Janet had installed it in the doll’s house, where it crept about on its belly, peering balefully out of the latticed windows and gnawing the staircase. They secreted liberal quantities of mince and stew in their table napkins and ferried them up the stairs to the voracious and grateful rodent. Lulu had become suspicious of Janet’s sudden interest in the despised mock Tudor residence; she opened the house when no one was around, saw the rat with delight, and stroked its tremulous snout. It sank its teeth into her plump pink thumb. She was rushed to hospital for injections against Weil’s disease and the rat was banished back to the woodshed. Word spread through the village; rats teeming in the very nursery at Auchnasaugh. Just what they would have expected. When Francis and Janet took their rat its evening meal beneath the fragrant wood pile, they found it murdered, ripped apart by other rats, maddened by the taint of mankind. “Like King Lear,” pronounced Janet. “Someone says, ‘O let me kiss that hand,’ and he says, ‘Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality.’ ” “That’s not what he means,” said Francis. “Yes, it is,” said Janet. It was what Lear meant, and it was what she meant too.
When the doll’s house had been scrubbed out and flooded with Jeyes Fluid, it was handed over to Lulu and Caro, who could be trusted to use it sensibly. Now they shrieked with fury as Janet tipped their furniture onto the floor and contemptuously shook out their apple-cheeked happy family. “You’re far too old to play with it. What do you want it for? I’m going to tell on you.” “Shut up, it’s mine,” snapped Janet. It was just the right size for Claws and his personal furbishments, at this stage of his development. She left the windows and doors open so that he could come in and out as he wished. The house needed a name. She loved addresses; she had memorised the St. Uncumba’s list of five hundred, imagining each one, furnishing it, in some cases providing gardens or parkland, in others, lamplit alleyways where assassins prowled. Her favourites were the ones which sounded suburban. She imagined soft, deep wall-to-wall carpets, imitation log fires which gave out real heat and did not burn holes in carpets, divan beds, perfumed bathrooms with pastel accessories en suite (unlike the looming, glacial Elderslie Washdown which clanked and gurgled in the mildewed nursery bathroom at Auchnasaugh); in such places the feminine mystique might flourish like the green bay tree, which would be growing in a neat tub by the diamond-paned porch. As usual she felt guilty and treacherous for these thoughts. Her allegiance was to Auchnasaugh. But there was no reason why Claws’s residence should not be named for that discreet, charming, and muted world. Carefully she painted “8, Belitha Villas” above the front door.
Alas for human aspiration. Claws grew apace and although he could stalk about quite comfortably in his villa he made it clear that Janet’s whole room was to be his territory. He skittered about the floor and clambered, flailing his wings, onto the bed. He was fascinated by the dressing table and spent much of his time grimacing in the mirror and overturning the shiny little pots and bottles which Vera had bought for Janet on their day in Edinburgh. At feeding times he nestled in her lap while she dropped squamous delicacies down his throat from a silver salt spoon. She stroked his stubby, growing feathers. Soon he must learn to fly and to feed himself. She worried about his crossed bill.
He taught himself to fly, launching himself from the gable of his villa and hurtling onto Janet’s shoulder as she sat reading. Each fine afternoon she took him down to the terrace garden where she had found him, so that when the urge came he might go, take up the life of a jackdaw, forget her. He hopped about, pecking at the earth, and she was glad to see that his damaged beak was only a slight handicap. He could fend for himself. He flew farther now, sometimes out of sight among the trees, but he always came back, fluttering and drifting down to the azalea bushes. The day came when he did not return. With heavy heart, Janet tramped up the steep path; she had dreaded this necessary parting and although she knew she must be glad for him she could not restrain her tears. Listlessly she began to reassemble her ravaged bedroom. Claws hurtled through the open window and skidded across her Greek dictionary. “Kya,” he observed, settling on the Anglepoise lamp.
After this they were seldom apart. When Janet walked up the great staircase, Claws hopped beside her; he could have flown up the stairs but he never did. She carried him along the corridors, fearful of the cats. Out of doors he would fly to great heights, turn and plummet out of the clouds to her shoulder. He came to her call. To call a bird from the sky! It seemed beyond a mortal’s lot. If he was outside and she was inside he would search for her, peering in through every window until he saw her; then he hovered, knocking on the pane with his crossed beak until he was admitted. If she went off in the car he would follow, making darting swoops at the car windows so that they had to stop and take him back and shut him in his villa. Janet could not understand how he knew that she was in the car at all, for on many of these occasions he had been indoors when she left, in the care of Rhona or the boys. On walks or rides he flew far ahead, exploring; sometimes he hopped companionably alongside her or perched on the front of the saddle. He was free to range wherever he wished; always he came back to her and at night they repaired to her room, where he roosted like a guardian spirit on the iron rail of her bed. He was a magic bird. She loved him more than she had loved anything, anything or anyone.
Her room looked like a rock in mid-Atlantic.
declaimed the girls. On Saturday evenings they danced together in the boot room to the strains of someone’s record player. “Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket” or “Once I had a secret love.” Janet remained aloof from this, as always, but was now surprised to find herself stirred by romantic impulse. It was as though her intense love for her jackdaw had unlocked her heart and left it open to the weather. “Set me as a seal upon thine arm,” she wrote in her book. “Set me as a seal upon thy heart. For love is strong as death.” She also inscribed the closing lines of Medea: