A Summer Bird-Cage

by Margaret Drabble

  It was she who first thought of anything to say. All this avoiding of the weather has its points, with certain people at least.

  ‘I was thinking,’ she said, ‘of that wedding we watched in that church in Milan, where we went to look at the frescoes. What was it called?’

  ‘I can’t remember,’ I said. ‘The Guide Bleu stopped at Florence. San Bartolomeo, was it, or San Ambrosio? Some polysyllabic saint.’

  ‘Wasn’t it nice? And wasn’t she charming? And weren’t we relieved that she was charming?’

  ‘It was so nice of her to smile at us on the way out.’

  ‘Brides should always be beautiful, if they insist on getting married like this. For the sake of the guests. I must say that old Louise is certainly doing her stuff.’

  ‘Yes, she is isn’t she?’

  ‘She looks wonderful.’

  ‘That’s all very well,’ I said, ‘but I don’t think it’s very dignified, really, all this to-do. I mean to say, not for someone like her.’

  ‘Oh, if you go by appearances . . . ’

  ‘I’d much rather get married in a registry office. Wouldn’t you? Or rather didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, we did,’ said Gill, curtly. ‘Yes, of course we did.’ Not being stupid, I quickly noticed that something was amiss, and said, ‘Why, what’s the matter, is something the matter with Tony? He’s here all right, isn’t he?’

  ‘Oh, yes, he’s somewhere around here,’ she said. ‘I think I’ve noticed him around somewhere.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, didn’t you know?’ she said, coldly but appealingly. ‘Didn’t you know that Tony and I had separated?’

  I hadn’t known, obviously, and was completely taken aback: they were the last couple in the world about whom I would have sensed any unease or catastrophe. They were everything that Stephen and Louise weren’t, spontaneous, happy, comprehensible and so forth. I was appalled.

  ‘How awful,’ I said, glad that at least I knew her well enough to ask her what had happened instead of retreating in confusion from my faux pas. ‘How entirely awful, what on earth happened? I thought you were both so wonderful . . . ’

  ‘That’s what we thought too,’ she said, with an odd little smile, that turned into a grimace: she has a coarse-featured face, very mobile and gay, and all her expressions give away everything. ‘Oh yes, that’s what we thought too. But I don’t think we think so any longer.’

  ‘What happened? When did it happen?’

  ‘Oh, months ago 1 Months ago. I can’t believe you don’t know about it. I thought everyone knew. I was amazed when your mother sent the invitation to both of us together.’

  ‘Oh, she wouldn’t know anything. I suppose I didn’t hear because of working for exams, and then I went to Paris at the end of term.’

  ‘Oh yes, I heard you were in Paris. I had a letter from Simone, she said she’d met you on the Gare du Nord. And congratulations on your degree, we were terribly impressed . . . ’

  ‘Oh nonsense. Don’t be silly. Haven’t you seen Louise recently in town? I’d have thought she might have told me about you.’

  ‘I haven’t seen her for months. Certainly not since I left Tony. She mixes with frightfully smart people now, you know. What was Paris like, Sarah?’

  ‘Oh, it was fun really. Pointless. But fun. Don’t let’s talk about Paris, tell me about you.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know what to say about it really . . . I don’t know how it happened. It was so odd . . . we seemed to be getting on fine at first, just a sort of prolonged Oxford but with London instead—and then we started to quarrel. It sounds so silly. We used to quarrel a lot before, but nothing like this. It’s so sordid, quarrelling. We used to quarrel about such stupid things like money and food . . . and then he was painting all the time and he seemed to think that I ought to be happy just sitting around in the nude and letting him paint me, and cooking him the odd meal. And it got so bloody cold, posing, especially when they cut the electricity off and the fire wouldn’t work. Oh it was awful. I wanted to do things too, I didn’t like just waiting on him. I kept saying, “You could pay someone to do that.” Which wasn’t in fact true of course because he hadn’t any money, but then I thought facts counted less than principles and it was the principle of the thing . . . It was ghastly. It got worse and worse. Once he said to me, “Put the kettle on,” and I said, “Put it on yourself, I’m reading”; and he said, “Put it on, what the hell do you think you’re here for?” Isn’t it unbelievable? That Tony should be like that? Tony of all people? I thought he hadn’t a preconception in the world. Isn’t it unbelievable?’

  I nodded. It was. He was the last man I could picture saying a thing like that to anyone. Stephen Halifax, yes, my father yes, even cousin Michael in a bad temper, but not Tony.

  ‘You don’t know,’ she said, ‘what a difference it makes not to have meals provided. To know that if you don’t start peeling potatoes there won’t be any potatoes. You haven’t been out long enough to know.’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘It’s too dismal. I kept saying things like that I’d be quite happy to cook if we could afford nice things, wine and pheasants and herbs and so forth, but that nobody could be happy with bread and potatoes and spaghetti—that was a lie too, though again it was true in principle—but five shillings a day, it was a bit much. I began to feel so humiliated and degraded, I can’t tell you. He simply didn’t see that painting and being painted aren’t equally amusing . . . Anyway one day I said my parents were right, and that I’d got what I deserved, marrying a bloody foundling.’

  ‘You didn’t.’

  ‘Oh yes I did. I knew you wouldn’t believe it, we both behaved so incredibly. It was such a bloody thing to say to anyone. And the stupid thing is that I’ve never had the slightest feeling about his not knowing who his parents are, I mean to say it never even crossed my mind from one month to the next. It didn’t seem to matter about him at all, not nearly so much as him being a painter, or having a hairy chest, or that sort of thing—but of course as soon as I said it he immediately thought I’d been harbouring a deep-seated grievance about it, some repulsion in the blood or something—and I couldn’t convince him that I didn’t care at all. I said to him, “I didn’t say it because I meant it but because I knew it was the only thing that would really hurt you and I had to hurt you somehow.” But he didn’t believe me.’

  ‘Poor Gill. Was that the end of it then?’

  ‘Not quite. We mouldered on till the end of March, when I discovered the crowning insult, which was that I was pregnant. Think of that. I’d never thought it would happen to me, though why I thought it was so unlikely and impossible I can’t imagine. I felt ruined. I cried for days and days, and in the end I told him and said I’d have to get rid of it.’

  ‘Oh no,’ I said. I wasn’t really shocked, but I was shocked by her saying it there, when wedding guests might have overheard. But she seemed oblivious. She wouldn’t have cared if they had listened.

  ‘Well, what could I do? He was terribly upset and rather nice about it really, and lent me the money, and asked if I was sure that that was what I wanted. I said yes. I really thought it was. It seems so stupid because I’m one of the only people I know who really wanted children. But I didn’t want them like that. Sort of accidentally and without my consent. Poor kid, I hated it so violently, it almost stopped me hating Tony—I felt it was a leech sucking my blood. Is that abnormal? I suppose it’s not, really. I did want a baby so, but I wanted it to be all proper and intentional with pink nurseries and flowers in hospital, you know. Not tied up in bits of old nightgown and smelling of turpentine.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have minded,’ I said, with questionable tact and questionable truth.

  ‘Oh yes it would. It’s all very well living one’s own sordid way, you can’t expect babies to understand. So I got rid of it, and when I came home that afternoon I said to Tony, “Well, that’s that, and now I’m moving out.” To tell you the trut
h I’d hoped he’d throw his arms round me and plead with me to stay, but he didn’t, he just patted me on the shoulder and said, “Well, if that’s what you want.” He sent me to bed, and he brought me some Ovaltine. That was nice of him, I suppose.’ Her voice trailed off, unintentionally pathetic. She meant that it was nice of him. She really did expect so little.

  ‘But, Gill,’ I said, ‘how could he throw his arms round you when he must have thought you hated him so? He wouldn’t have known you wanted him to.’

  ‘Perhaps he didn’t. I never can realize that he doesn’t know how much I love him. I always feel so at a disadvantage, loving him so much. But I suppose that time I’d shaken him. Perhaps he thought I didn’t love him any more.’

  ‘Where did you go after that?’

  ‘Oh, I went and stayed with Peter and Jessica for a bit, and then I was rather ill so I went home, and when I was better I moved back to London. I’m living there in Highgate now at the Studio with James and Rose and Jeremy and all that crowd.’

  ‘Are they all still painting?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ She smiled. ‘God, they’re terrible. So’m I, but at least I know it. They really think they’re serious artists. It’s so funny. I keep dabbling, but I know it’s only for me. Still, it’s nice to try. Tony made me feel so useless. Once I said to him, “I feel like a still life, I want to do something”, and he gave me a bit of canvas and a few paints and said, “You paint me then.” It was awful, I was so offended, it was just the same as when my mother used to give me a handkerchief to iron with my toy iron on washday, so I could be grown-up like her. And the truth is that my stuff is like child’s painting when you compare it with his. You know what I mean? It used not to matter but it does now. Everything matters so much.’

  ‘How did your mother take it?’

  ‘Oh, with Christian forgiveness. You know.’

  I did know. I knew Gill’s family life almost as well as I knew my own, by a mixture of association and intuition: her parents, like mine, were middle-class, respectable, apparently cultured—her mother in fact was cultured, she was a very nice woman, a prison-visiting Quaker, one of those who actually do what they talk about doing. Gill had done her a grave injustice in her suggestion that she had objected to the marriage on the grounds that Tony had once been in an orphanage, since this was the one feature in Tony’s history and personality that had really appealed to her. She had said to me once, in a curious tête-à-tête at a college sherry party—Mrs Webster was an Old Girl of our college—that she didn’t object to Tony’s being Nobody, in such a startlingly literal way, nor to his being a painter, but that she did object to his total lack of responsibility and social conscience, and his habitual promiscuity. How she got to hear of the latter I can’t imagine, nor can I imagine how we ever got round to talking about it, as I am sure no definite words came up during our conversation: but we both knew that that was what we were discussing. I had defended Tony as much as I dared, though really there wasn’t much defence to make, and I would have been slightly perturbed by the last allegation myself if I had been either Gill or her mother. All I could say was, helplessly, defending our generation, ‘Yes, I’m sure you’re right, I’m sure that from every practical point of view you’re right, but I’m equally sure that he is reliable, on some deeper level. I’m sure he is. And it isn’t security that Gill wants, not security of that sort, I know it isn’t.’ And now, it seemed, I had been wrong. He hadn’t been reliable on any level. He was as unsound with people as he was with things and sex and money. It seemed a nasty victory to common sense, and I asked myself if it justified Louise, and then realized that Mrs Webster was as alien to Louise as she was to Tony. Why did I want to reconcile everything? Why couldn’t I jump for the unreliable with both eyes shut, as Gill had done? Why did I want to have my cake and eat it, as far as security was concerned? How could one expect people to be reliable about some things and not about others? Qui fidelis est in parvo, I expect, though the idea nauseates me.

  Depressed by this sad story, I asked Gill what she was going to do next: she seemed neither to know nor to care. I was impressed by her nonchalance. Her hair had begun to escape from its pins, shaken out of its elaborate backcombed beehive by the vehemence of her denunciation of her husband: she looked more like herself. She said, loudly, ‘I expeat everyone’s been listening in to this little chat, don’t you think? It ought to warn people off. Talk about blighting the marriage hearse with a few odd tears.’

  The phrase had crossed my mind too, but I try to resist the temptation to talk in quotations. Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me, the ability to think in quotations.

  I wanted to get away from Gill in order to find Tony, so I deftly introduced her to Michael, who was lurking around, and slipped off with some phrase about looking for Louise. I did in fact find Louise, on the same errand: she and Tony were talking to each other in a corner. They were so engrossed that I had to tap Tony on the shoulder to interrupt: when he saw it was me his response couldn’t have been more gratifying. He opened his arms and enfolded me, and I felt champagne from his glass trickling down the nape of my neck.

  ‘Tony,’ I said, ‘you’re spilling things on me.’

  ‘Am I?’ he said, as he released me and looked at me and kissed me on the cheek, making the most of everything as he always does.

  ‘I should be careful,’ said Louise, sourly. ‘He’s very tight by now.’

  ‘Of course I am,’ said Tony, ‘of course I am, with all this lovely free champagne, and drinking healths to Louise, my beautiful first love. She really was, too, you know,’ he said, turning to me. ‘She was my first love. When I first went up, I saw Louise walking along the street in some tight cream trousers and a tight white jersey, and I said Aha, what a girl. I tracked her for days, to and fro along the road to that dismal place of yours I grew to know so well, with my heart in my mouth, wondering what she’d say if I accosted her. I didn’t dare to draw near, I was quite ill with undeclared passion.’

  ‘You great liar,’ said Louise. ‘I met you at Sebastian’s.’

  ‘Yes, I know I did. But that doesn’t mean I hadn’t followed you for weeks, does it?’

  ‘You’re a great liar. As well as everything else.’

  ‘Oh, those were the days,’ said Tony. ‘Those were the days, you in those trousers, and lectures, and gowns, and bicycles, and you the most beautiful girl in Oxford. And to think you’ve gone and got married. It’s a tragedy, that’s what it is.’

  ‘Well you did it yourself.’

  ‘So I did. How foolish of me.’

  ‘What should I have done otherwise?’

  ‘Oh, don’t ask me. Something grand and wicked.’

  Louise smiled. She smiled and looked down at her hands, and twisted the shiny unscratched wedding ring, sitting so neatly by the great lump of diamonds. Then she said:

  ‘I don’t know, it’s all rather vulgar, isn’t it, getting married? I don’t know what faint memory of good taste stopped me painting my nails. I was going to do them orange. Oh, but then, of course, that wouldn’t have gone with my other dress . . . oh, there’s always a reason for things, isn’t there?’

  ‘You couldn’t look vulgar if you tried,’ said Tony. ‘You look like the picture of the Snow Queen in my first fairy story book. Ice within and ice without, the aristocrat of the nursery world, none of that Cinderella or Hansel and Gretel plebeian stuff, you know.’

  ‘Oh, pack it up,’ said Louise. ‘I’m sick of being called heartless. I’m very tender-hearted, you know.’

  ‘Oh yes, oh yes,’ said Tony. ‘That wasn’t what I was calling in question. I’m sure your heart is all that it should be. And now, perhaps, you’d like to drift off and talk to your guests while your sister and I have a little chat?’

  ‘Do you think I should?’ she said, very wide-eyed and very annoyed. ‘Yes, perhaps you’re right, perhaps I should. I’ll be seeing you some day, I suppose.’

  ‘I suppose so,�
� said Tony. And she disappeared.

  ‘Honestly,’ said Tony, as she receded, ‘she should go on the stage. She really should. She’d bring the house down. Tender-hearted, indeed. She probably is, to insults. All really selfish people think they’re tenderhearted, because they get hurt so often. They mistake the pangs of wounded pride for the real thing.’

  ‘Oh, she’s all right,’ I said, vaguely. I enjoyed hearing Tony treat her with such little respect. It reduced her. He really seemed to think that she was silly: I didn’t know how he had the nerve, but I admired him for it. Well, no, I didn’t exactly admire him for it, but I liked him for it. I liked him so much. I really did think he probably had treated Gill very badly. And yet, in some way, it was impossible to mind. He has that knack of suspending judgement, which is what some people mean by charm. He doesn’t deceive, he simply suspends one’s judgement. He is a great opportunist both with girls and with money, and yet he always gets away with it: I doubt if people ever feel wronged by him, despite the obvious incriminating facts. On the contrary, girls in particular usually seem to feel they have let him down, because what he wanted was clearly something more than mere change, and they feel guilty because he hasn’t found it with them. This made the Gill affair all the more curious, because she and I, before I had seen him, had felt that he was deeply in the wrong. Perhaps there is something in the very name of marriage that had altered the case: I had had different expectations, despite my high protestations of freedom from reverence. Perhaps, in that, my sin of preconception was greater than his. Anyway, whatever the explanation of the moral undertones, the fact is that when Tony turned to me, after his comment on Louise, and said, ‘Look, Sarah darling, I saw you talking to Gill and let’s not us go over all that nonsense, shall we?’ any annoyance that was left ebbed out of me: under the solid heaviness of his presence it seemed unreal, theoretical, a mere head-idea, and I was where I had always been, friendly and overcome with delight that such lovely people exist. Also, I must confess, at the risk of sounding a fool which I am not, that when he said darling to me the word hit me in the stomach: it isn’t a word he uses casually, and he had said it with real intimacy, which is so rare a thing that it brings the tears to my stupid eyes whenever it is proffered. And so, thawed, I smiled and said, ‘Well, then, what shall we talk about? Did you send Lou away so that we could talk about her?’