A Summer Bird-Cage

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘Oh no! Not her. I thought we might note all the guests. All their qualities.’

  ‘We might,’ I said, ‘if desperate for other topics.’ I didn’t mean that: I loved noting people, especially with somebody else. Tony and I had spent many a happy hour sitting on bridges and punts taking sociological surveys, and now, as I looked round with him at all the hats and bow-ties and champagne glasses, everything became suddenly full of the subaqueous glamour of existence, no longer gestures, but the things themselves.

  ‘I’d have thought they were rather good material for noting,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen such a fabulous mixture of varieties of money. I must be the only pauper here. Why aren’t there any more people from Oxford?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. They’re all abroad, or working, or can’t afford the train fare, I suppose. Or perhaps they can’t be bothered to come. Why did you come, in any case? I’d never have expected a lazy lump like you to come all this way.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I come? I was asked.’

  ‘Yes, I know you were.’

  ‘Oh, I came for various reasons. Somebody was going up to Birmingham in a car, and I’ve got to see someone else in Stratford tomorrow. And then I wanted to see Louise at her final exit. And I wanted to see you. You’re old friends of mine, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well, in a manner of speaking. But don’t tell me that friendship overcomes inertia.’

  ‘Not by itself, naturally.’

  ‘I suppose I came all the way from Paris myself, now I come to think of it. Pretty stupid thing to do, just for Louise. When Paris was so nice.’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘Oh, heaven. I can’t think why I left. I met an absolutely wonderful man called Martin who worked in a bookshop, and he spoke such wonderful French that everyone thought he was, he could talk as quickly as they do and without thinking. We had a wonderful time. He knew all the odd people, you know, American painters and vagrants and so forth. Why do I always like vagrants more than inhabitants? More than sensible, solid, respectable people like Stephen?’

  ‘Sensible, solid and respectable, did you say? That archetypal madman?’

  ‘He’s not mad. Do you know him?’

  ‘I’ve met him. We have friends in common. A ghastly chap called Wilfred Smee. And believe me he’s neurotic all right.’

  ‘Who wouldn’t be with a name like that?’

  ‘I meant Stephen.’

  ‘Oh. Oh. No, I don’t agree, I think it’s you that’s neurotic, not him.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, you. He’s in with the world, you’re not.’

  ‘What do you mean by that? If anyone’s in with the world, I am. I love it. I’ve got both my hands round it, believe me, Sarah. I can taste what I’m drinking and see what I’m seeing. I’m fantastically well-integrated.’

  ‘Not what I call integration.’

  ‘Perhaps you mean social integration?’

  ‘Perhaps I do.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, you girls. You’re just like Gill. Always worrying about who fits where. And if things don’t fit, you’re lost.’

  ‘That’s just what I’ve been saying,’ I said, ‘but you don’t listen. I like things that don’t fit. I like people like Martin and you and Simone. I like people without any social bearings.’

  ‘Oh well, if you mean people like Simone . . . ’

  Simone. She’s not a fair counter, not even on the subject of vagrancy. Nationless, sexless, hopelessly eclectic, hopelessly unrooted: her very name puts things out of perspective.

  ‘Simone,’ he repeated. ‘When did you last see Simone?’

  ‘On the Gare du Nord. At about five in the morning.’

  ‘What on earth were you both doing there?’

  ‘Oh, it was very odd and charming. I’d been up all night with Martin and a boy called Yves and an American girl called Linda, one of those nights when everyone is in love with everyone else, so nobody can go to bed because that would mean deciding who to go or not go with—I liked Linda best, honestly, I was terrified of losing her to either of those men—and so we stayed up, walking around and hobnobbing with Algerians, and we ended up in the Gare du Nord trying to get a cup of coffee. They were washing those big stone ladies on top, it was just light enough to see. The coffee was foul and tepid because the machine had only just warmed up for the morning. We were just beginning to get really gritty, dirty and disagreeable when in walked Simone. I was so amazed.’

  ‘Where had she come from?’

  ‘She’d been sitting on a soldier’s knee all the way from Marseilles, she said. She was wearing a nineteenth-century admiral’s topcoat with silver buttons that she’d got out of one of her grandmother’s attics in Rome.’

  ‘He must have been a very brave soldier. To offer her his knee.’

  ‘Oh, people don’t notice on trains. They really don’t. They don’t employ any discrimination about who they pinch or offer their bed to or who they buy meals for. They just don’t notice.’

  ‘Not even when someone looks like Simone?’

  ‘Apparently not. Though she can deal with people much more quickly than me. If they start anything she just spits. With real old aristocratic vehemence. There’s class for you. I’m too bourgeois, I wouldn’t know how to spit. Usually I daren’t even protest.’

  ‘Poor little Sarah. She lets people lift up her skirts on the Metro because she’s too well-bred to object.’

  ‘That’s just about it. But you should have seen Simone. She looked so extraordinary. She made poor Linda look like a schoolgirl. You know what, she gives me such a sense of tradition and salons and Henry James. And yet she doesn’t belong anywhere. Or perhaps she belongs everywhere. I’d like to be irresponsible like that. To be able to go on like that for ever.’

  He looked at me, sharply. I was sorry I’d said what I had said, or at least those last two phrases of it: I know that Tony despises people who don’t like being exactly what they are and in many ways I sympathize, though one does need more of a tension than he will admit. And I didn’t want to be Simone, or only at times.

  And I didn’t want to leave him, but I felt I should, and said so. The speeches and cake-cutting were due to start before long and I had to get back to Daphne and Louise for the photographs. So we parted, but before we did so Tony asked me if I’d like to spend the following day with him in Stratford. I was delighted and said yes, without thinking of Gill at all: she had dropped out of my mind. Then, feeling pleased with myself for having fixed up this infinitesimal bit of my future, I rejoined the family side of the affair. We had lots and lots of photographs and speeches, all very witty and tedious, and we drank healths: I was feeling a little hazy by this time, and full of goodwill. After that I had an impression that the etiquette book thought I ought to help Louise to change, so I followed her when she tripped off to do so. I found her giggling to herself as she struggled with her row of little buttons: ‘Oh, Sally, what a joke,’ she said. ‘What a ghastly joke, I’ve drunk pints and Stephen’s been on orange juice all day long.’

  She trampled the dress to pieces as she was getting out of it, and she left it all heaped on the floor. Then she dressed up again in lilac; lilac to the eyeshadow: as she was standing in her skirt and bra, just about to put on her jacket, there was a knock at the door.

  ‘Who’s that?’ she said.

  ‘John,’ was the reply.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, dropping the jacket on the back of the chair. ‘Come in.’

  ‘May I?’

  ‘Oh yes, go along, come in.’

  He came in, and stood in the doorway staring at her. He looked as if he too had had too much to drink. She stared back. ‘Hello,’ she said, after a moment. ‘What d’you want?’

  ‘Oh, I just wanted to know if your case was ready to put in the car.’

  ‘Trying to get rid of me?’

  ‘You know I am.’

  ‘All right, all right, you can have it. The white one. You’ve got the others.’<
br />
  ‘Yes. I’ve got them.’

  He picked up the case and started to go, but she suddenly said, ‘Wait, wait, I’ve forgotten to pack my hairbrush. Wait while I do my hair.’

  And then she took every single pin out of her hair and let it all down, out of its immaculately tidy arrangement, and started to brush it. She brushed it with long sweeping movements, throwing her head back at the end of each stroke, so that she showed an appalling white expanse of neck and underchin and bosom. He watched her while she did it. When she had finished brushing it she threw me the brush to pack, and started putting it all up again. When she had put it up, she put on the jacket of her suit and smiled at him, blinking and sweet. He took the suitcase and went out without a word. I thought to myself that I had never witnessed such crude and awful vanity in my life.

  They got off in the end, Stephen and Louise: they drove away through the yellowing trees at forty mph towards London and the airport and Rome.

  As I went to bed that night, I wondered why social events are for me such a sea of blood, sweat and tears, from which I salvage perhaps two floating words, set afloat by a providence which will not let me drown with empty hands.

  4

  The Move

  I SPENT A couple of hours in Stratford with Tony and his friend the following day. His friend was a spear-carrier. Stratford was pretty, with a smell of falling poplar leaves down by Clopton bridge. We had drinks at the Duck and I heard a lot of gossip about this and that and John Connell, and a lot of theatrical jokes about missed cues, forgotten lines, and other hilarious topics. Tony seemed gloomy and depressed, largely I think because of a gloomy painter we met who was painting backcloths for the theatre and bewailing his wasted talent. He kept saying, ‘Oh, I had illusions once.’ I was quite impressed by how well-known and well-anecdoted John appeared to be: even I carried an aura of vicarious theatrical OK-ness through being the sister of the woman to whose husband he was best man. If you see what I mean. John was evidently somewhat of a legend-maker, always behaving outrageously on and off stage, falling asleep when he had nothing to say and so forth. I suppose I must be jealous of people like that because I got sick of hearing about him, especially as nobody had ever seen him do any of these remarkable things, but merely knew other people who had seen him. Somebody hinted that he was having an affair with an Eurasian nightclub singer, but somebody else swore that he was constantly seen with a tall and fashionable deb. I really couldn’t work up much curiosity after the first halfpint or so. And I began to get positively bored when Tony started going on about Stephen. ‘The trouble with that man is that he’s dead from the neck down,’ he kept saying, to anyone who wanted to hear, in aggressively virile tones. I began to feel annoyed with him once more for what he had done to Gill. Also, some latent sense of loyalty to Louise made me reluctant to hear such things said in public on the day after her marriage. I wondered how far they had got. To Rome? Not yet, perhaps.

  In the end I had had enough of Tony and was glad to leave. I caught a convenient bus home, and we went through the fields and past the trees: the seasons had a lovely rhythm and I had none at all. As we went I thought about Louise and Stephen and John, and my thoughts became gradually clearer, somehow harmonized by the colour of the corn and the sound of the trees brushing their branches against the upstairs windows of the bus. I remembered the first and only other time when I had ever seen them all three together. It had seemed significant even at the time, but I had thought it was significant only as itself, for what it was to me, then, in my life. It had been only a few months earlier, in May or June, while I was working for Finals at Oxford. It was a Saturday morning: I was sitting in the college library with a great pile of books and a few pieces of file-paper trying to make notes on something when Simone came in. I gave her a faded smile and looked down again but she came over to me and said, ‘There’s your sister and two men wandering around looking for you downstairs. I showed them to your room.’

  ‘Who?’ I said, incredulously.

  ‘Your sister and two men.’

  ‘How the hell did they get in?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Simone was being offhand about the situation.

  ‘Oh damn,’ I said. ‘I’d just got so nicely settled down.’

  ‘Don’t go then,’ said Simone.

  By this time everyone was looking up from their books and staring at us, which didn’t trouble her, though it troubled me, so I got up to go. I wanted to take all my books with me, as it had taken me hours to assemble them, so I had to write slips out for each one of them, under the eye of the librarian, who must have known that I had approximately three times my quota of books in my room. I was afraid Louise, never very assiduous in her pursuit of me, would have gone by the time I got there. It was a good quarter-mile of corridor to my room, and on the way I began to grow conscious of my early-morning-in-college, un-made-up, bedroom-slipper, academic look. I was even more conscious of it when I arrived, pushed open the door, and saw Louise and her two men. It was a sunny day and my room looked delightful, full of dust, flowers, books and unmade bed. Louise was sitting on the window-seat, in white trousers and a white shirt, and the two men were standing around in the fireplace region. They all started as I came in: they had obviously been talking about something. I recognized Stephen, but I had never met John before, though I knew who he was.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Just visiting,’ said Louise. She didn’t move a muscle. The sun was shining through the window into the room: she looked dazzling, as though the light were shining through her too.

  ‘Just visiting. We thought we’d call on you.’

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ I said, and put my pile of books down on the top of my desk.

  ‘I trust that we haven’t interrupted your studies?’ said Stephen.

  ‘Not half,’ I said. ‘I was just settling down for a quiet day in the library.’

  ‘On a day like this?’

  ‘It’s always like this at exam time,’ I said.

  ‘You haven’t met John, have you, Sarah?’ said Louise, still from her distant point of sunny vantage. ‘This is John Connell. John, this is my little sister Sarah.’

  ‘How do you do,’ I said.

  ‘How do you do,’ he said.

  You couldn’t deny that he was stunning. He seemed to fill the room, and Stephen looked more nebulous than ever by his side.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘shall we all have a cup of coffee?’

  ‘I thought we’d go out,’ said Louise.

  ‘Come to that,’ I said, ‘how did you get in?’

  ‘Through the back door.’

  ‘Well, I hope nobody saw you. My name will be mud.’ Men weren’t allowed in college during the mornings.

  ‘Oh, nobody saw us,’ said Louise, ‘I know my way around here.’

  They all looked so odd in my room, so much older than anyone I ever remembered having been in it before, so much older and so much smarter.

  ‘Where are we going out to?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. In Stephen’s car. To the country.’

  ‘Where on earth have you all come from?’

  ‘Oh, from London. It seemed a nice day to go out.’

  ‘Do you really want me to come?’

  ‘Yes, of course we do. That’s why we came to pick you up.’

  ‘Oh.’ I said. ‘Well, if we’re going out I’ll have to change my skirt.’

  ‘All right,’ said Louise, ‘carry on.’

  And they really seemed to be expecting me to carry on, and as I hadn’t the nerve to throw them out in the corridor, apart from the risk of their being discovered there, I did so. I didn’t at all mind taking off my tatty old skirt in front of John, for some reason, possibly because he was an actor and with actors such things hardly register, but I very much minded in front of Stephen. Even though I was wearing a totally opaque black petticoat. They all looked the other way as I got a reasonable skirt out of the wardrobe and put it
on: there was something in Stephen’s personality that made any attempt at informality a mockery, even though he himself was ostensibly a Bohemian type, at least in dress and opinion. I simply didn’t know what kind of behaviour he expected from me.

  As I brushed my hair and dabbed on a little lipstick, Louise got up and wandered over to my desk, and started reading my essay, the one I had been making notes for in the library. She read the title out aloud: ‘In the Leviathan, Hobbes demonstrates nothing adequately except the limitations of his own study-bound conception of human nature.’

  ‘Well, well, well,’ she said. ‘That’s quite a thing to write about, isn’t it? Where’s the quotation from?’

  ‘I made it up,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t find anything I wanted to write on, so I made it up.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, dryly, ‘it gets you a long way, that kind of thing, writing essays on human nature, you know. You really find an awful lot out, studying other people’s study-bound conceptions of human nature in your own study, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I think you do,’ I said, crossly. I thought it was rather low of her to start taking it out of me for being academic, when she had been through it all herself. And especially mean at exam time. ‘I think I’m going to write rather a good and original essay, if you really want to know.’

  ‘I’m sure you are,’ she said. ‘I’m sure it’s all very valuable.’

  And I am sure I detected a note of wistfulness and nostalgia in her voice at that moment, a nostalgia that she covered up the moment after with, ‘Really, Sarah, do you always leave your underclothes strewn about the room?’