A Summer Bird-Cage

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘Find her a drink,’ said Louise, as the doorbell rang again: as I was led off to the bedroom I saw her greeting the next arrivals with an effusive embrace and ‘Darling Zoë, darling Harold, how enchanting to see you, how very kind of you to come.’ She sounded happy. At least she hadn’t tried to kiss me. As Stephen and I progressed towards the bedroom, I was struck by the extreme newness and beauty of all the furnishings: ‘What a marvellous flat,’ I said, and he said, ‘It is nice, isn’t it? Haven’t you been here before?’ I didn’t reply, and he left me in a big double bedroom, with instructions about how to get to the drawing-room: ‘When you arrive,’ he said, ‘come and find me and collect a drink.’ It sounded as though he expected me to take at least half an hour doing my hair, which I hardly felt to be necessary. There was another woman in the bedroom, busy powdering her nose: we smiled at each other tentatively, and I started to take off my coat. She was about thirty, and dressed in black, which made her look sophisticated, not sallow at all. The things round her neck were probably diamonds. She looked terrifying, but dull. Mentally I congratulated Louise. If one has money to spend, one might as well spend it with courage.

  My coat looked extraordinarily shabby, lying on the big double bed amongst everyone else’s furs, pale knitted coats, theatre evening coats, and so forth. It wasn’t a bad coat in itself either, and I detest furs: it was annoying to see it made look old, in the same way that even the most hideous new shoes in shoe-shops can make one’s whole outfit look decayed. The bedroom was rather impressive: when the woman in black had departed, with another noncommittal smile, I felt free to look round. It was a big, high room, with a white plaster frieze and cupids on the ceiling, and it was all decorated in stone, terracotta, and pale egg blue. In front of the wide, lavishly curtained windows stood Louise’s dressing-table and on it were all sorts of strange and expensive-looking glass bottles and jars. There was nothing in cut-glass. Everything was modern and faintly Scandinavian. It didn’t look a bit like Louise’s taste at all—not that Louise would have gone in for cut-glass powder bowls and enamel-backed brushes herself, but I didn’t think she would have chosen these strange, artistic objects either. There was a brush, mirror and comb with the backs done in a most extraordinary kind of heavy pottery. I remembered Louise’s dressing-table at home, littered with spilt powder, old orange-sticks, hairpins, cigarette ends, countless jars and bottles bearing the proud trade names of Rubinstein, Arden, Lancôme, Max Factor and so forth. She had never been tidy behind the scenes, as it were, but only for show. Even allowing for the fact that she had made a great effort to tidy everything away for the party, the situation looked radically changed. Presumably all the lovely bourgeois cosmetics had disappeared into these discreet, nameless glass jars—or perhaps she had risen to heights where the things one puts on one’s face don’t have names. I don’t suppose such heights exist, but it seems incongruous and comic to picture queens and film stars and high sophisticates wearing make-up out of shops. Perhaps it was all Stephen’s doing. I couldn’t picture him sleeping happily in a room with a dressing-table that looked like a counter out of John Lewis’s. I couldn’t in fact picture him sleeping in a room with Louise at all, who had plenty of off-moments, no matter how statuesque an impression she could produce for occasions.

  Suddenly I felt rather guilty and inquisitive, sitting there in their bedroom and speculating on what they looked like in bed, as if I had been reading a diary instead of simply receiving unrejectable impressions, so I hurried to reinsert a few hairpins, picked up my bag, and made my way back towards the drawing-room. It seemed full of people, but not noisily full: I saw Stephen standing by a table full of bottles and went across to him to claim my drink. Usually I drink whisky if there is any, but for some reason it seemed inappropriate so I had a gin and vermouth instead. I was surprised that all the drinks weren’t in decanters: perhaps even they hadn’t enough. Stephen and I exchanged a few idle remarks about Paris. He seemed rather harassed; his thin grey face was thinner and greyer than ever. After remarking that the French novel hadn’t got over the basic deadlock of philosophic inversion (I think) he abruptly broke off, without even finishing his sentence, and said, ‘Come on, I promised to introduce you to my old friend Wilfred Smee, he’s very interested in modern youth.’ I couldn’t work out whether he was so imbecilic as to think I was representative of modern youth, and, thinking it, to tell me so, or whether he was simply offering the subject as a talking point, but I followed meekly in his wake without bothering to say that I had met this man already. Stephen leads me completely out of my depth: either he never, never says anything he remotely means, or else he is really stupid, and his novels are some weird trick of fate, like mediumistic writing. I can’t begin to get a grasp on him: I can’t picture what he thinks or does when he’s by himself: I can’t even remember what he says. Somehow the decor of the house, if he really was responsible for it and not Louise, seemed to reveal more about him than anything I had ever seen him do.

  He introduced me to Wilfred Smee, and we said we had met before, and he said oh had we: also to the girl Wilfred was talking to when I arrived, whom I had seen on the stage recently in a celebrated primitive drama which had managed to hit the headlines. She had been extremely good, and I told her I had enjoyed it, which pleased her: to my disappointment she seemed a very silly girl, and the oddest thing of all was that she looked exactly like what the character she had played would have looked like had she come into some money. She was wearing a tight purple dress with big bows on the shoulders, very high heels, and one of those little bits of black veil on her head with an enormous purple velvet rose stuck in the middle of it. Her stockings were black fishnet. The whole effect was very bizarre, and somehow I was delighted to see her looking like that amongst all those other subtle women, in that subtle Greek decor. She looked ghastly, but I preferred her ghastliness to everything else I felt around me. When she drifted off and the conversation seemed to flag, I asked Mr Smee if Stephen had worked out the decorations for himself: ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘he’s rather good at colours and surfaces. Do you like it?’

  ‘Very much, aesthetically,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘It’s just that I don’t know if I’d like to live in it.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘you believe in the separation of art and life.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Don’t you want to live in beautiful surroundings?’

  ‘Yes, very much. Somewhere like Italy, for example.’

  ‘Then why do you object to someone trying to make their home look beautiful? You agree that it is beautiful?’

  ‘Oh, yes! It looks like Greek vases and things.’

  ‘How very discerning of you,’ he said, and he was sending me up, which I liked. ‘As you say, it looks like Greek vases. Perhaps you only like them in museums?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think I do. Or else in Greece.’

  ‘It’s very narrow-minded of you to want to banish a whole colour-scheme merely on account of its antiquity.’

  ‘But everything’s so new here. There aren’t any antiques at all.’

  ‘You would like a few objets d’art?’

  ‘Yes. Distinctly. Yes, that’s just what I’ve been missing. It’s silly to have all this money and not to buy any objects.’

  ‘But once you start on objects, you have to buy them all in the same period, or you end up with an artistic and historical mess.’

  ‘Oh, a historical mess wouldn’t worry me.’

  ‘It would worry Stephen. He looks everything up in books. You couldn’t put anything in this except a Grecian urn.’

  ‘Is the whole flat the same?’

  ‘Everywhere.’

  ‘Even the kitchen?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘And everything’s new?’

  ‘Again, I believe so. I can’t see why you should object to its being new, if you also object to its antiquity. I thought you were a modern girl,
I thought you would approve of patronizing contemporary curtain materials instead of ancient brocades.’

  ‘That’s just it. Contemporary curtains for contemporary colour schemes. Greek pots for Greek colour schemes.’

  ‘But don’t you think your sister has rather the right style for it all?’

  ‘Classic, you mean?’

  ‘Well, roughly speaking.’

  I looked round for Louise, and saw her talking to a group of people amongst whom I located John Connell. She did in fact go very well with the decorations, though she would have gone even better if she hadn’t put on the lipstick: suddenly, I was glad that she had. Her dress looked rather like a toga. I was appalled at the notion that she had bought it to go with the curtains.

  ‘She has the style at the moment,’ I said. ‘But she’s very variable.’

  ‘Is she? I hadn’t noticed that she was variable.’

  ‘Perhaps she’s not, any more. She used to be.’ I felt, strangely enough, the impulse to defend her, which I don’t remember ever having felt before, having been too busy defending myself for the past few years.

  ‘I would have thought,’ said Wilfred Smee, ‘that she was invariable. Inconstant, but invariable.’

  This, of course, was the most fascinating remark I had heard for weeks. My whole attention was abruptly engaged, and I had the feeling that he was about to say something of immense significance, which would reveal a whole new order of things: I waited for him, but he said nothing more, so I said, ‘What do you mean, what do you mean by that?’

  He looked at me and said, ‘I’ll tell you sometime.’

  ‘Tell me now.’

  ‘No. Not now. Not here.’

  ‘Tell me. You can’t make remarks like that and then not tell me.’

  ‘I will tell you sometime, Sarah.’

  His use of my Christian name shut me up. I felt suspicious, as though he were about to make a pass at me, though I realized a moment later that perhaps it only meant that he didn’t think of me generically, as a little sister, as Louise and John and Stephen surely did. It was conceivable that he did think of me as a human being, as he was used to my type and age, being a don. I also noticed, to my surprise, that he was rather tight. I wasn’t myself, despite the ferocity of the cocktails.

  I understood his reluctance to discuss Louise, for a moment later Stephen arrived, carrying a jug. A grey Finnish jug.

  ‘How are you getting on?’ he said to Wilfred, with something like bonhomie.

  ‘Fine, fine. Talking to your wife’s sister. As you told me to.’

  ‘She’s a clever little girl, isn’t she?’ said Stephen, as though I wasn’t there. I knew this was only a conversational affectation, but it succeeded in annoying me.

  ‘I’m only three years younger than Louise, you know,’ I said.

  ‘And how many inches shorter?’

  ‘About three, I suppose.’

  ‘Interesting. Interesting. Well, well. Tell me, Sarah, what do you think of Wilfred? What marks would you give him for intellect?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ I said. I don’t want to make Stephen sound a total fool, but that really is the way he talks.

  ‘He’s clever too,’ said Stephen. ‘He knows everything there is to know about the rise of the Liberal Party in the eighteenth century.’

  ‘Does he really?’

  ‘Oh, everything.’

  Perhaps Stephen talks like that because he is shy. Certainly he is a dead loss socially. And yet he seems to get on with people quite well. Everything he ever says, as distinct from writes, is always lacking in subtlety. He has a few ploys, a few classifications, and that is that. And yet I know he is neither stupid nor unsubtle. How or why can a person appear so little to be what they are? I cannot understand it: how should I, when my every instinct is for self-revelation, my every desire to strip myself and spill myself before the eyes of others?

  I chatted a few moments more to Wilfred and Stephen, trying to be witty and unsubtle about the Liberal Party, and then Stephen removed me to talk to two television scriptwriters. He introduced me to those two with the words, ‘This is my clever young sister-in-law, just down from Oxford. I’m sure she writes plays herself in her spare time.’

  It made the going easy, oddly enough. Perhaps crudeness has its points, at least with the crude. I was well through my second gin by now.

  Nothing of note happened for the rest of the evening really. Stephen and Louise never appeared to speak to each other once. I had a mild conversation with John about his contract and Stephen’s proposed film, which apparently wasn’t at all settled, owing to legal muddles: as soon as I had been talking to him for more than two minutes Louise appeared on the scene with a predatory, possessive look that was hard to mistake, though I managed, almost, to mistake it. I noticed that along one wall of the room was a bookshelf full of Louise’s books: a complete set of Henry James, Lawrence Durrell, Baudelaire, an enormous new arty book called The Face of Cleopatra and full of paintings of same, and a complete set of Stephen’s novels. This last I thought a great error of taste. I was rather preoccupied with errors of taste all evening, but I don’t think it was my fault, I think it was the fault of the atmosphere generated by the furniture and the people and the hair-styles of the women. I ended up totally unenvious of Louise’s new menage, and somehow strangely sympathetic towards her. I didn’t know why, as it was Stephen that looked harassed. But I felt that it was she that was suffering. I don’t know why, but it was only then that I began to realize she was vulnerable. It seemed at the time like a clever and perceptive discovery, but I suppose that in fact it was extremely belated.

  I don’t seem to be able to describe how that party was at all. It ought to be easy, because everything is very distinct in my mind: I can visualize most of the clothes that the women wore, and how they had their hair, and that kind of thing. I can remember how people talked, in a way, and I could tell who was successful and who wasn’t and who was intelligent and who wasn’t. But there was something in the air that eluded me. It was almost like being in a foreign country, where distinctions are in one sense much clearer and brighter, and yet in another sense strange and very hard to assess. I think that the something in the air was a certain sort of worldliness to which I was unaccustomed and uninitiated, even though I had known for some time of its existence. Put more simply, I was socially out of my depth. I have just re-read, while thinking about this problem, one of Stephen’s descriptions of a function of this kind, and I find it very hard to know precisely why I would be incapable of writing one like it. I feel it ought to be easy to sit down and write a Stephenesque account of his ménage and friends, but it isn’t. It isn’t really a question of observation. In the passage of Stephen that I have just been looking at there is a description of a left-wing, Bohemian, sexy-type girl, familiar enough in style and intention—the girl is made to seem very immature, very self-deluding, and so on. Yet he doesn’t actually say anything about her thought processes: the whole thing is implied from various observations about her badly cut hair, the fit of her skirt over her hips, the nicotine on her fingers, and the somewhat crass, provocative things that he makes her say. The point is that I could observe these things but I could never achieve the tone or the conclusions. I could write up the actress with the purple velvet rose in these terms, but I could never feel I’d got her down on paper when I’d done it. There are hundreds of things I could say about Stephen himself—the way he holds a bottle when he is pouring out of it, very gently and yet at the same time clumsily, with no sense of shape, the way he sways slightly when he talks, the way his eyes select a spot just to the side of one’s eyes when he talks to one, so that he gives the impression of contact without risking it—but they don’t seem to add up to anything. They don’t imply the truth.

  Satire won’t do. Worldliness won’t do. But until you can do them both you can’t do anything. Immaturity is no good, and they made me feel immature, all those people, even those I could see through: they caugh
t undertones I couldn’t, though they didn’t even know they were doing it. The thing is that I couldn’t start to feel them in my terms because I couldn’t really feel them in theirs, and one needs the double background. Perhaps it can be learned by long apprenticeship and dedicated exploration: I hope so. Perhaps nobody is born with it. Perhaps it is only me that takes refuge in things like chance, unchartered encounters, cars in the night, roads going anywhere so long as it’s not somewhere that other people know better. You can’t judge or despise or even really get at something that you don’t know and haven’t thoroughly got, because of the fear of despising it because it’s not yours. The sour grapes principle, in fact. It applies to everything. Only when one has got everything in this life, when one is eaten up with physical joy and the extreme, extending marvel of existing, can one trust oneself on the subject of the soul.

  I didn’t stay very long. I had a brief interchange with Louise before I left: I sought her out to thank her for the lovely party, etcetera, and instead of letting me make a quick exit as I had expected she would, she seemed suddenly inclined to launch into family matters. She asked me when I had last seen our mother, and I said not since late September, when she had come up to London for some meeting or other, and to buy a new coat.

  ‘What sort of coat?’ said Louise, at once, with surprisingly normal curiosity. It was exactly the question that I would have asked.

  ‘Oh, a kind of black curly one. Persian lamb, I think it’s called. Really rather nice, as furs go.’

  ‘Sounds rather a good idea. I hope she won’t fill it too full of mothballs. Do you remember how that other one she had used to smell on speech days and things. I used to be terrified to go near her.’

  ‘I used to think she looked marvellous in it, I don’t know why—I must have been very susceptible to her opinions because I don’t remember noticing that I didn’t like things till I was about thirteen.’