A Robin Came Inside the House the Day My Father Died

My father did not believe in signs. He was a plumber for forty years and his religion was that things had causes you could find if you got down on the floor and looked. So I want to be clear that what I am about to tell you would have annoyed him enormously.

He had been ill for a while. Heart. We knew it was coming but not when, the way you never really know when. That last week he was mostly in his armchair by the back window, dozing, waking to complain about the tea being cold, dozing again. My mother and I took turns sitting with him.

The morning he died I came downstairs first, about seven. It was February and freezing and the house was silent. And there, on the back of his empty armchair, was a robin. A real robin, red breast, bright black eye, sitting perfectly still and looking straight at me.

I stood in the doorway and I could not work out how it had got in. The back window had been painted shut since before Christmas. The door was locked. There was no draught, no open flue, nothing. The bird did not panic when it saw me. It did not flap around the room the way a trapped bird does, throwing itself at the glass. It just sat on his chair and watched me, and then it hopped once, and looked at the stairs, and looked back at me.

I went and woke my mother. When we came down together the robin was still there. It let us get quite close. Then it flew, once around the room, easy and unhurried, and out through the kitchen where I found, only afterwards, that the small top window was open a crack. It had not been open the night before. I would swear to that. My mother swears to it too.