O Caledonia

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.

Miss Buss and Miss Beale Cupid’s darts do not feel.How different from us,

Miss Beale and Miss Buss.

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:

Many are the Fates which Zeus in Olympus dispenses;Many matters the Gods bring to surprising ends.The things we thought would happen do not happen…

The gods whom Janet had chosen played tricks on mortals for their pleasure; this she had not considered. She believed that she could control her destiny. She dreamed of unutterable, unearthly love, passion of the spirit, not of the flesh, a pure and searing fire. She did not expect to find an object. She brooded upon poets distanced by death, heroes of legend, demon lovers, powerful yet insubstantial.

Her life seemed to have entered a period of calm, a stretch of slow, clear-flowing water, illuminated by her love for her jackdaw and quickened by her apprehensions of romance. It was her last year at school and she was able to spend most of her time in the library, an ancient building overlooking a garden of weeping trees and lavender. The scent of rainy leaves hung in the mild air. Another window looked down onto the street. On the sill stood a wide glass carafe, half full of water, and in the water she could see the miniature and upside-down reflection of everything that happened far below and out of sight. Columns of girls passed through it, hurrying to their houses. They looked like swarms of midges. Once a bride and her attendants came from the church and drifted like petals across the greenish depths. When dusk fell, the street lamps were golden sea anemones. Janet was happy there, working on into the evening. When she came out, the frosty night sky filled her with excitement; she felt intensely alive. Her hair had now grown long enough to touch her shoulders, and it crackled and stood on end as she brushed it; electric sparks whirled about her head.