A Summer Bird-Cage

by Margaret Drabble

  He took me home, and I remember that we shook hands on parting. I wanted to ask him in for a drink, but I knew what would happen if I did so I didn’t, after a little thought. I felt bad, shaking hands like that.

  In bed I remembered that John had said Louise and I were alike. I wondered how right he was. It needed considerable discernment to see that we resembled each other at all.

  7

  The Next Invitation

  I HAD A bad time explaining about Tony to Gill the next evening. It didn’t seem helpful to say that he was well and happy, as though I had visited him in hospital. What I did say was that I had scarcely spoken to him, and that he had been dancing with a friend of David’s called Beatrice.

  ‘What was she like?’ said Gill, sitting on the floor and biting the quick of her nails.

  ‘She had a horrid yellow dress on,’ I said.

  ‘Really horrid?’

  ‘Yes, really horrid.’

  ‘He likes such awful people,’ she said.

  We spent a horrible evening, somehow typical of the temporary pointlessness of our lives: we listened to the wireless, and I tried to write to Francis. I then made us both a curry, which I thought was rather kind and unselfish of me, but Gill was furious when I put an iron casserole with rice in it on the coffee-table: she said it would burn a hole: I said so what, it wasn’t our table: she said she didn’t like looking at tables with holes burned in them: I said since when: she called me an undergraduate: I called her an undergraduate: and so on. I ended up feeling utterly childish and worn out, as though I weren’t old or disciplined enough to live without support, and so I went to bed. Girls shouldn’t share flats, but who else can they share them with?

  The whole of the next month went on in the same way, cluttered up with intractable material objects like dirty saucepans and shoes that needed new heels, and although I didn’t get any tidier I began to share Gill’s irritation with everything in the flat. I was relieved to get out to work in the mornings.

  The next thing that happened was an invitation from Louise. It arrived at breakfast-time on a Saturday morning in late November. I hadn’t heard anything of her since John Connell’s elliptic comments at David Vesey’s party: nobody seemed to have seen her, so I had assumed she was still in Paris. The invitation was for an ‘At Home’ at six-thirty on December the seventh. I was rather shocked by the unfamiliar, printed self-assurance of the words ‘Mr and Mrs Stephen Halifax’. She really had done it. There was a note in with the invitation: it said—

  24 Honeyman Gardens, SW3

  My dear Sarah,

  O to be in April now that England’s here. We seem to have returned to the rain of the whole year: we would have stayed, but for Stephen’s film, which I expect you know of. Do come to this party and look at our pretty flat.

  Amitiés sincères, as they say in France,

  Loulou

  I read and re-read this communication several times as I chewed over my cornflakes: it seemed surprisingly amiable, but I was so well-trained in suspicion that I searched for doubles entendres, the iron hand beneath the velvet glove, and so on. The sad thing was that, as always upon renewed contact with her after a gap of time, ninety-five per cent of me leaped forward, earnest and happy to greet any sign of friendliness: I did still want to like her: but the other five per cent had been so often proved right that it was getting increasingly hard to confuse. On the face of it her letter seemed to be friendly enough: in fact it seemed too friendly to be normal. We never corresponded unless we wanted something from each other, and we never invited each other to anything. Doubtless there are sisters who immediately rush to see each other after returning from abroad, and doubtless there are even more sisters who, if having a party, would invite each other to it as a matter of course, but we didn’t belong to either of these groups. It never occurred to us to approach each other. I had assumed that when she returned to London the sum of our contact would be odd meetings in shops, art galleries and coffee-bars, sometimes civil and sometimes not, occasionally prolonged into cups of coffee or drinks together, but more often not. This had been the pattern of things in our frightful year together at Oxford, and I hadn’t seen any reason why it should be changed. I wouldn’t have dared to change it myself: I had thought to avoid her even more insistently now she was married.

  It hadn’t always been like this, of course: there had been a time when, happily oblivious of my own undesirability, I had pursued her and waited on her and yearned for the crumb of her company that never fell my way. This had lasted from the age of eight until I was thirteen or so: before I was eight she used to play with me quite often, and after the age of thirteen I learned at least superficially to ignore her and to get on with my own life. But the humiliating period after she had cast me off and before I learned to appear to have cast her off I remember very clearly. Particularly I remember the ends of term, when she would come home from boarding school, while I was still going to the local girls’ school: I would cross the days off on my calendar for the last fortnight of term with growing excitement, and when the day came I would beg my parents to take me to Birmingham station with them to meet the train. They always did, touched by my enthusiasm, and I would stand on the platform counting the minutes till the train came in. When it was late I nearly died of suspense.

  I always had a lot of fascinating things to tell her and fascinating questions to ask her about school and her friends there. And every time she came there would be the same cold disillusion, the same sharp lesson in withdrawal. I remember her walking down the platform with her brown suitcase and her green school coat and hat, oddly detached from her school-friends, who were jabbering and giggling under the strain of meeting their families in full view of each other. No doubt she was even more selfconscious than they were, but by the age of thirteen she had learned not to show it. She would walk slowly and carefully, deliberately avoiding any appearance of haste: when she was within speaking distance a cool embarrassed little smile would cross her face. She would kiss my parents calmly, without fuss, rather as though they were strangers, and she would not look at me at all. Not once, ever. She ignored my existence completely.

  Perhaps, looking back on it, I was a distinct social encumbrance. Mama and Papa looked quite reasonable, even though Papa was only a businessman (a fact which later caused her great concern), but I looked like the typical little sister, scruffy, eager and dirty. My hair used to be in horrid little plaits which didn’t really work, and my shirts always escaped from my skirt waists. Doubtless in the brave show of independence and maturity which Louise managed to assume even below a school hat and amidst other uniformly hatted girls I was an almost insuperable humiliation. So I was ignored. I never understood why she wouldn’t talk to me, and all the way home in the car as we sat together on the back seat I would volunteer my scraps of information about the cat’s latest litter of kittens or our sickly and aged dog, but they never aroused any spark of response. I couldn’t believe that she wasn’t interested, so I went on telling her, though I wasn’t insensitive to her blankness: I suppose I was wound up to such a pitch of expectancy that I had to let it out somewhere. It usually took me only a day or two to swallow the disappointment, and to learn to leave her alone. I would stop knocking on her bedroom door and trying to talk to her when she was reading.

  I make myself sound pathetic, and I was. But she mishandled me: with a little skill or duplicity she could easily have persuaded me to run errands for her. Many other little sisters I knew or have since known were reduced to an inconspicuous, subservient position by a little tact. Perhaps Louise, by being openly sadistic, was merely being honest. At least she allowed me, by her manner, to salvage my dignity after a year or two, for I turned on her in the end. I used to laugh at her with my school-friends, to borrow her clothes without asking, and to steal her books. Once I read her diary. She would have read mine, had I kept one. In the end she taught me the art of competition, and this is what I really hold against her: I think I had as little
desire to outdo others in my nature as a person can have, until she insisted on demonstrating her superiority. She taught me to want to outdo her. And when, occasionally, I did so, her anger hurt me, but as I had won it by labour from indifference, I treasured it. And when, finally, I took over one of her men at Oxford, the game was out in the open, I thought, for the rest of our lives.

  And yet I don’t want to imply that we never met on any grounds at all. In many ways we have much more in common than most sisters have: our interests, our intelligence, our paths through Oxford have been remarkably similar. In fact, in everything that is personal and not generic we tend to agree. There is just this basic antipathy, this long-rooted suspicion, that kept us so rigorously apart. And at times, talking of a book or a place or a person, we would be in sympathy. At times.

  So the tone of her letter was really nothing new: we had quite a lot of shared jokes, of the sub-literary kind, consisting of allusions and vocabulary and suchlike. It was just that, somehow, I hadn’t expected to hear from her at all. And in spite of myself, in spite of all the mechanism of suspicion that had been set in motion. I was pleased. I wanted to tell Gill, so I picked up my cup of Maxwell House and went into the kitchen where I could hear her banging about. I’d thought she’d been cooking herself some breakfast, but found she was doing the washing-up from the night before. This annoyed me because, although I’d no idea of the time, I knew that she was due to leave for work, and we had always said that she was to leave everything for me at the weekends, as I didn’t work on Saturdays. I tried to tell from her manner whether she was being martyred or not, and decided from the way she banged the plates into the plate rack that she probably was.

  ‘I’ve had an invitation from Louise,’ I said.

  ‘Lucky you,’ she said, and removed the saucer from under my cup of coffee and started to wash it up.

  ‘I didn’t know she was back,’ I continued, peaceably.

  ‘Didn’t you?’ she said, and tipped all the cutlery into the washing-up bowl at once with a great splash.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘what on earth are you doing all that for? You know I always do it on Saturdays.’

  ‘I know you always say you will.’

  ‘Well, I always do, except for last week when I had to go out. And even then there was no need for you to do it, I hadn’t forgotten.’

  ‘How was I to know you hadn’t forgotten? When you come in in the evening and find everything just as it was at breakfast, you assume it’s been left.’

  ‘You knew perfectly well I wouldn’t leave it for you.’

  ‘I don’t care who you leave it for, you can’t expect me to come in and sit down with all that mess lying around.’

  ‘Why on earth not? There’s no need to sit in the kitchen and stare at it, is there? You could go in the other room and shut the door.’

  ‘You may be able to. I can’t.’

  ‘You should always be able to shut the door on things.’

  ‘That’s what you call repression,’ she said.

  ‘No it’s not. It’s you that’s suffering from repression. Or compensation. Or something unhealthy. It’s simply morbid not to be able to forget the washing-up.’

  ‘I think it’s morbid to leave it there lying around.’

  ‘Why? Just tell me why?’

  ‘It’s so messy. So uncivilized. And you have to do it in the end so why not do it before it starts to look such a disgusting mess? The egg dries on, too.’

  She reached for the wire pan-scrub, and started to scrub the remainder of last night’s omelette from one of the forks. The sight of it was too much for me: for one thing, I can’t bear to use a pan-scrub myself, except the sort with handles, because the feel of the wire and the washing-up water really makes me miserable, and yet there was Gill, washing up my plates without a trace of squeamishness, while I was attacking her for being sensitive to mess. For another thing, the cutlery happened to belong to me: it was a birthday present from my parents, and I was fond of it. It had wooden handles, and was very beautiful, not like that deformed and embryonic Swedish stuff, and I felt defensive about it because I had asked for it with the conscious thought of having it ready for when Francis and I got married. And yet if anyone had asked if we were going to marry, I would probably have said No. It was the accumulation of these false positions that made me shout at Gill, although I had fully intended to be forbearing, and had indeed been treading gently for weeks. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ I said, ‘stop nagging and complaining at me, you’re absolutely impossible to live with, I’m surprised Tony put up with it so long, and don’t you know that you shouldn’t put knife handles in water. They’re absolutely ruined from the way you keep washing them. I’d rather they never got washed at all.’ I wished I hadn’t as soon as the words were out of my mouth; she didn’t turn round at all but went quietly on to the next fork. I looked at the neat, work-tidy nape of her neck, and felt tears of shame rising to my eyes, and of regret for the evenings in college when we would sit amongst the cigarette ash and coffee-cups to talk about free, unencumbered things like people and paintings and stupid girls in hall. I was trapped and hopeless, and couldn’t think how to say the fault was mine and Francis’s, not hers and Tony’s, when she suddenly said, ‘Oh God, Sarah, what on earth are we going to do.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know at all.’

  ‘It’s hopeless. Utterly hopeless. If I’m like this with you what must I be like with other people?’ She turned round from the sink, and I could see that she too was on the verge of tears.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ I said. ‘It’s my fault, I promise you it’s my fault.’

  ‘That’s what I tell myself, but I don’t convince myself. I tell myself, how on earth can Sarah be like she was when she’s worried to death about Francis, and being lonely, and what she’s going to do with herself, but I still feel it’s my fault that you’re how you are, and that you’d be better if you were living with someone else, instead of me being worried myself all the time . . . you know what I mean, you seem to treat me as though I were an invalid, you never talk to me straight out as you used to, and I have to keep reminding myself that it’s because you’re anxious yourself, not because I’m not worth talking to any more . . . you know, you never tell me about Francis or how he is or how you’re getting on without him, and when I try to talk to you or ask you about Tony you cut me off as though I were a widow rambling about the dead. He’s still alive, you know. He’s still alive. But when I ask you to help me believe that he’s still alive, and that there’s still hope, you kind of politely change the subject.’ All this while she had been twisting a tea-towel in her hands: now, with a sigh, she dropped it and finished with, ‘You’re so bloody tactful, Sarah, that’s what it is.’

  ‘It’s because I was frightened of hurting you,’ I said.

  ‘Hurting me? I don’t mind being hurt. I don’t mind what you do to me, or Tony, or anyone. But I can’t bear to be ignored. You can’t treat me as though I were some other person who wasn’t married to Tony and who hadn’t gone and murdered their baby . . . no, I know what you’re going to say, I know it isn’t murder, I couldn’t care less about abortions in fact, but nobody can take their own line the whole time without weakening at all, and there were days when I wanted you to tell me that it didn’t matter, and that the things I thought were just the inevitable things that happen to anyone’s mind . . . one night I dreamed I had had it after all, and I’d put it down somewhere and lost it, and it was time to feed it and it would be dying of starvation, and I looked and looked, and couldn’t find it, though I could hear it crying and crying with hunger . . . I know it doesn’t matter, dreaming things like that, but it seems to matter. Because I have nothing else to care about. Like the washing-up seems to matter, although I know I’m being an idiot about it . . . don’t think I can’t remember eating off the floor, and having six sour half-pints of milk on the mantelpiece, I do remember but it only makes it worse, the fact that I have to notice
it now. All the dirt. And I thought you would understand things, because it was so marvellous to talk to you that day at Louise’s wedding, but somehow you only make it worse, because you remind me so much of everything . . . you know what I mean?’

  I did know too exactly what she meant. I was overjoyed that she had somehow broken through into speaking to me, despite the barriers that I had raised, or that had raised themselves between us.

  ‘It’s so terrifying,’ I said. ‘I thought you were so resilient. And I suppose that I was scared to death on my own account when I found that you weren’t, entirely. I felt to myself, if that happens to her, what on earth will happen to me?’

  ‘I felt you feeling it,’ she said. ‘That wasn’t very encouraging, either. It was rather like being one of those dead birds that farmers hang in fields to scare the live ones away.’

  ‘How frightful I must have been,’ I said.

  ‘And me too. I still am, I suppose. What time is it?’

  I looked at my watch and said that it was ten past nine. ‘Then I’m late for work,’ she said, ‘but I don’t suppose it matters. Yesterday I would have died rather than have been late. But it doesn’t seem to matter now. Tell me about Francis.’

  ‘Surely you ought to go?’ I said, anxiously, and she laughed, and said, ‘Honestly, Sarah, the joke is that you’re just as bad as me. You’re just as worried about being late and burning holes in landladies’ carpets as I am, but you can’t bear me to know it, so you always have to take the other side. Don’t tell me you don’t mind doing two days’ washing-up when you get in late at night . . . I know you do, you always lose your temper quite ferociously, and that’s why it annoys me so much when you take this moral line about not bothering about sordid things, leaving them till tomorrow, being late if you want to be, and all that nonsense . . . oh, I know it’s right, I know it is the moral line, but you can’t believe in it all the time yourself either, like the Catholics or whoever it is and God. You just pretend you don’t have any lapses of faith. That’s all it is.’