A Summer Bird-Cage

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘are you really? Then perhaps you might get me a part in this film.’ I didn’t think she was serious, but theatre people are so odd, and I believe she very nearly was: she went on, ‘I think Sappho Hinchcliffe is playing the girl, and they want John Connell to play the man.’

  ‘How on earth did you hear all this?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, gossip. The grapevine. Everyone knows. John Connell wants to do it, but can’t because he’s under contract to the Watford people, and although the Happy Hours play is coming off in December he’s still tied up with them for the next play they’re putting on. So it’s a question of whether or not they release him.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, though I didn’t. I was getting more and more put out by all this talk of babies and sisters and Stephen, which weren’t at all the chords I had meant to touch: I had meant to have a festive evening. The talk about art galleries had faded out, and I now realized that my heart hadn’t been in that either, as it would once have been. Film talk with this girl threatened to prolong itself, and I felt boredom creeping up on me: I was very relieved when a quite charming journalist friend of David’s, whom I had never met before, wandered over with the oblique but evident purpose of asking me to dance. I finished my half-pint mug of wine and accepted: I love dancing with attractive people that I don’t know well, especially in confined spaces. Like being on Tubes and trains in the rush-hour, if the person next to one happens to think the same way.

  He danced rather nicely, this writer man, and held me in an appreciative kind of way, and said he liked my dress: when the music stopped he got me a drink and I drank it, and then we danced some more. He seemed as pleased to get off with me as I was to get off with him, and yet he wasn’t particularly troublesome and didn’t touch anything that I hadn’t for years known was there. We both drank rather a lot and talked about all the other people in the room. He said the yellow girl with Tony was a friend of David’s called Beatrice, and that Tony had stolen her the week before: I said had David minded, and he replied, ‘Oh no! he just shook his shabby head and put his hands deeper in his raincoat pockets.’ This answer enchanted me completely, and I said, ‘I adore you,’ and he said, ‘I’m so glad, I’m so glad, I adore you too,’ and went on dancing. And when, at the end of the next record, he suggested going to sit somewhere I accepted. He seemed to know the terrain pretty well, and we ended up in David’s bedroom, which was already occupied by several other couples lying on the floor and bed and chairs. My man was quite undeterred by the occupied look of the place, and went and sat down on the end of the bed, giving a great push at the red velvet-covered bottom of the girl next to him, and saying, ‘Hey, shove up.’ She did, surprisingly, which I thought terribly funny: indeed, I couldn’t stop laughing. There wasn’t much room, but we sorted ourselves out and lay quite comfortably in the end. I felt very sleepy. Nobody else was talking, but the room was filled with vague amatory noises. Nobody seemed to notice that we were laughing. Jackie got as far as saying that the girl next to us had very big hips, and when there was no response from her he pinched her bottom, and she pushed his hand languidly away as if a fly had settled on her. After the pleasant passage of an indistinct amount of time, when I was almost asleep, my friend said, ‘Look, are you still awake? Shall we go and have another dance? I feel like death all of a sudden.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said, and staggered to my feet. He pulled me into the corridor, where the light of the thirty-watt bulb made me blink like an owl, and said, ‘Just stand there and wait for me, will you?’

  ‘All right,’ I said, running my hands through my rumpled, sticky hair, and preparing to prop up the door till his return. I was very meek. When he got back we wandered back to the dancing-room, and as we shuffled round he remarked on the changing social ambiance of the party. ‘It’s all these actors,’ he said. ‘There were just the out-of-work ones before, but now all the superior ones with jobs are arriving.’

  I realized the force of his remark when I looked round and saw John Connell standing in a corner with a tall, red-haired, pale kind of man, surrounded by a group of sycophants: he saw me, as we approached their part of the room, smiled with heavy charm, and said, ‘Evening, Sarah. Evening, Jackie.’ As we moved away once more, my partner and I exchanged looks: ‘At school with me,’ said Jackie briefly: ‘Best man at my sister’s wedding,’ I as briefly returned, and was surprised by how irrationally and how nearly I had said ‘He married my sister.’ I kept directing odd glances at John for the next half-hour, not sure why he interested me so much, and I tried to picture him as the anti-hero of The Decline of Marriage. He was looking very self-assured, and I sensed that he was being rude to people and getting away with it: he was very much the biggest fish in the bowl. I had no intention of going to add my small words to the circle of dislike and admiration which success attracts, and I was distinctly surprised when he intercepted one of my glances and started over to the corner where Jackie and I were sitting, with our sour cigarettes, holding hot hands.

  He stood before us, huge and dark like a colossus, shutting out all the dim red light from our corner. I felt like a child: the fact that I was on the floor and he standing put me at a disadvantage. I felt, literally, small.

  ‘Are you dancing?’ he asked me, ‘or have you given up for the night?’

  ‘I haven’t given up yet,’ I said, without presence of mind.

  ‘Then do you mind getting up from there? Excuse us, Jackie.’

  I rose to my feet, dazed by the shock treatment: my reactions were slow that night. I murmured ‘Wait’ at Jackie Almond, who sat there, apparently waiting: I felt as though a head boy or a lord of the manor had removed me by right of place from a fifth-former or a serf. The minute John took hold of me I began to regret my feebleness: I badly wanted to sit down, as I didn’t feel at all steady on my feet, nor at all able to engage in conversation. Also I was soon busy detesting myself for the faint frisson that came from dancing with the best-known and in a certain style the best-looking man in the room. He managed to hold me far more aggressively and personally than my nice Jackie person, and seemed to crush all the movement out of me. I felt squashed in his grasp, squashed and angry. He wasn’t even dancing properly, he was just ambling around with me. It was only after a couple of minutes that I realized he wanted to talk, not to dance. The first thing he said was, ‘Well, I saw your sister last week.’

  ‘Oh, did you?’ I replied.

  ‘Yes, I did. She was in Paris. With Stephen, still with Stephen.’

  I couldn’t say less than ‘Oh?’

  ‘Amazing, isn’t it? An old sod like Stephen.’

  I didn’t know how to comment on this either: I sensed danger on every side. I was subdued by the way he kept his hand hard on my back ribs, and pushed me ever so slightly backwards, so that I felt off balance and defeated.

  ‘I went to see them,’ John continued, ‘because Stephen wants me to be in a film of his, called The Decline of Marriage. A very good title, don’t you think?’

  ‘They’ll never call the film after the book,’ I said, priding myself on a faint glimmer of conversational tactics. ‘They’d never go for that in Kidderminster or Cheltenham.’

  ‘He wants me to be in it,’ said John, with a carefulness that made me realize with relief that he was as tight as I was, ‘because I’m his oldest friend.’

  ‘Is that the only reason?’

  ‘Oh, he’s very loyal, is Stephen. That’s his other oldest friend over there, talking to your boy-friend. Wilfred Smee. Ever met Wilfred?’

  ‘That is not my boy-friend,’ I said, childishly. All the same, I located Wilfred: he was the pink, sandy-eyelashed man I had noticed with John earlier.

  ‘Wilfred is very worried about Stephen.’

  Wisely, I didn’t ask why. I didn’t even say, ‘Oh?’ After another long pause, he said, ‘Well, aren’t you going to tell me what Louise is up to?’

  ‘What do you mean, up to?’ I asked, full of dim guesses and forebodings.


  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘No, I don’t. I’d be the last person to know anything about Louise. I haven’t seen or heard from her since she was married. And apparently you have.’

  ‘I saw her last Sunday. I flew over.’

  ‘Clever of you, wasn’t it.’

  ‘Not as it turned out. It was a failure. Not what I’d been given to expect at all. What’s your big sister up to?’

  ‘I’ve told you before, I don’t know,’ I said, acutely uncomfortable under the open hostility that had broken out. I was totally out of control, and wondered if I was imagining everything. In the end, taking a little courage, I said, ‘Anyway, what are you so interested for?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You look like her, in a way.’

  ‘No I don’t’

  ‘You do. Hard as nails, both of you.’

  ‘Do you mind.’

  I was hurt and offended, and moreover I had more or less guessed what he was talking about, though I had no desire at all to proceed any further. It was odd that I didn’t immediately know all the facts, then, at once, because when I did finally see the whole thing it didn’t come with a shock of surprise but much more with a shock of inevitable familiarity. Rather as though I had been told it before and tried to forget, so that when I saw it I could no longer evade my own foreknowledge. Like children finding out about sex: they are shocked, surprised, and yet oddly certain that it must be so, because they have always known the unbelievable truth. And so I must have known about John and Louise, from the moment when I met Louise on New Street Station on my way home from Paris.

  ‘You do look like her,’ he repeated. He let go of my hand and took hold of my chin with his fingers, pinching it hard and painfully, and tilting my face towards the light: but I had had enough of being bullied, and I pulled away and said, ‘Just let go of me, do you mind, just let me alone.’

  He released me, as he had to, as I was standing stock still and quite unmanoeuvrable. ‘Thank you for the dance,’ I said, and started off back towards Jackie Almond and Wilfred Smee. He followed, and I tried very carefully to walk straight: I felt red in the fac; from drink and I remembered Louise’s lily-like bloom. Jackie looked like an old friend when I rejoined him. I was introduced to Wilfred Smee, but could hardly bring myself to be civil, not that I had anything in particular against him: he seemed more sensitive to my state than John, and shortly they both removed themselves, at his instigation.

  I sat down on Jackie’s knee, weak with relief. He kissed my arm for a few minutes, intermittently and absent-mindedly, and then said, ‘Come on, I’ll take you home.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ I said. ‘I don’t need taking.’

  ‘I always take girls home after parties.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Always.’

  ‘Do you like doing it?’

  ‘I suppose I must.’

  He helped me to stand up, and led me into the hall. I was very glad he hadn’t taken what I had said about going home alone seriously, as I didn’t feel like being submerged in depression alone in the small hours. Also I wasn’t at all sure how to get back to the flat, and was happy to shelve the problem. As it happened, there was no problem, as this man called Jackie Almond, whose virtues and uses had increased with my exhaustion, actually possessed a car.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ I said, as he opened the door and put me in. ‘I simply don’t believe it.’

  ‘This is why I always take girls home from parties,’ he said, pulling out the starter thing.

  ‘Why? Because it’s easy for you?’

  ‘No. Because it’s easy for them.’

  This charming answer quite disarmed me: the old-fashioned, well-brought-up chivalry of him, together with the comfort of sitting in a warm car instead of walking the cold streets looking for non-existent taxis, effected a sag in the moral nerve that I had subconsciously braced to meet the cold and the walking: I had been ready to go home alone, on foot if need be, and the unexpected blessing of a car upset me. I started to cry. I felt terribly stupid, sitting there and crying: crying after parties is a habit I gave up at least a year ago.

  ‘God, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘How stupid of me. How stupid. It’s just that I’m so glad I haven’t got to walk.’

  I was sniffing, as I always do when I cry, and I couldn’t find my handkerchief, so he lent me his. It was almost like having Francis there.

  ‘I get so terribly fed up,’ I said, as I blew my nose, ‘of being alone. I am sorry, please don’t notice, I am sorry.’

  I really meant it, too: there was a time when I would have cried really, I suppose, for attention, but this time I simply couldn’t help it. More honourable, in one way, but more degrading.

  ‘Most girls cry after parties,’ he said, suddenly, as the car started forward in the dark.

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘Most of the sort of girls that I take home.’

  ‘What sort are they?’

  ‘You would be offended, wouldn’t you, if I said your sort?’

  I sniffed and hesitated, and then said, ‘Yes, I suppose I would. One likes to be distinct, at least.’

  ‘Even if it were the nicest sort of girl?’

  ‘What sort is it then? Apart from being my sort?’

  ‘Which you wouldn’t recognize as a sort?’

  ‘Not except as an insult.’

  ‘Isn’t there any sort I could say you belonged to that would please you?’

  ‘I don’t want you to please me. I want you to tell me what you mean.’

  ‘Oh, of course. I understand that. But discounting what I mean, isn’t there anything that would please you if I did say it?’

  ‘If you said it and meant it, do you mean?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘No, I don’t think there is. I don’t want to be the sort of girl that you take home. Now tell me what you were thinking of.’

  ‘Oh, nothing very much. You make the whole business sound rather terrifying, but then that’s one of your qualities. You and your sort. The high-powered girls, I would call you. I like high-powered girls, particularly at parties. I like them all the time, but they never seem to like me.’ He pulled a mock-pathetic face, which I think was rather serious, but I wasn’t really thinking of him. I was thinking of me as a high-powered girl. For some reason the phrase didn’t offend or threaten me, but seemed to say something true, something that connected up with me and how I had been, and moreover connected me with how other people were. It was this last connexion that really mattered: it expressed one quality of living that I would really like to have. I would like to be high-powered, in a way that I wouldn’t like to be or to be called Bohemian, or bourgeois, or intellectual, or promiscuous, or any of the other charges that I had laid myself open to. I was, in a way, all these things, I suppose, but I didn’t belong to them. I only belonged to them relatively, depending on who was watching: Daphne, Francis, Louise, David Vesey . . . But to being high-powered I hoped I did belong, and he had caught me in a pattern of behaviour that I would like to hold to, he expressed my community with people that I would like to belong to, people like Simone and Gill and one or two others that I have met. His words seemed to dispel a little of the isolation of behaving as I do, a little of the classlessness and social dislocation that girls of my age and lack of commitments feel. I sat silent, amazed by the recognition of how much I missed community, and how deeply I felt my social loneliness. I had no colleagues, no neighbours, no family.

  After a while he said, ‘Well? Why do you think they don’t like me?’ and I realized that he had of course been thinking of himself.

  ‘I’m sure they do,’ I said. ‘If I am one, they do.’

  ‘Do you really?’

  ‘Of course I do. Why did I spend the evening with you?’

  ‘Convenience?’

  ‘Did you spend it with me for convenience?’

  ‘No, I did it because I like girls like you.
I like you.’

  ‘And I did because I like men like you. Chivalrous men.’ He winced at that, but what could I say? ‘Anyway,’ I went on, ‘I’m sure all high-powered girls must like you, out of self-defence, because so few people will put up with them. There aren’t many people I could meet at a party who would put up with the whole lot from me, drink and bad dancing and weeping on the way home and all. One must be grateful.’

  ‘Oh, one must. I suppose I must be grateful that girls need this kind of attention.’

  ‘Yes. And there we are.’

  ‘Mutual gratitude.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You don’t think that’s rather sordid?’

  ‘Not really. Why should it be?’

  He didn’t reply to this and I drifted off again on a private tack: I was thinking that despite all, despite the dislocations that made this sort of contact so necessary in its ephemeral way, the contact itself was worth it. Driving along a street I’d never seen with a man I’d never met in the dark of considerable understanding was worth a lot of the rest of life. I am never really happy unless lost in this way, and connected in this way. It’s not that I don’t like playing social games: I enjoy playing at cashmere cardigans or First Nights, or superior restaurants, or literary teas, or jazzy nightclubs, but while playing these things I never have any sense of connexion with the other people doing them, and am always more aware of the event making me than of me making the event. Whereas now, alone in the dark with this man, who assuredly didn’t mean anything permanent to me, nor I to him, I felt liberated, as though I were drawing a little on his energy and he on mine. I don’t know what I am missing in my life of permanent and valuable contact, though I feel its absence, but at least from time to time I get something that I would never get were I not so displaced—the sudden confidence, the momentary illumination of feeling, ships passing and moreover signalling in the dark.

  It’s all compensation, I suppose. But then I wouldn’t have most of the things that it’s compensation for. Excepting Francis. And who knows, respecting Francis I sometimes think I may be able to have my cake and eat it.