A Summer Bird-Cage

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘But she used to get such horrid things for us. Or they seemed horrid. Do you remember that olive-green pinafore dress we had? I think it got handed on to you—rather the same colour as that dress you’re wearing now—I used to hate it so violently that once when she made me go out to tea in it I took another dress in a paper bag and changed in the loo. Looking back, it must have been one of the nicest things we had. It’s a lovely colour.’

  ‘I used to hate it too. Wasn’t it a hand-on from Daphne?’

  ‘That would explain it. Perhaps it was.’

  ‘I met Daphne a week or two ago in the Tate.’

  ‘What on earth was she doing there?’

  ‘She’d come up for a conference.’

  ‘Her as well. What a socially committed family we are. I believe you’ve even got a job?’

  ‘Sort of. We can’t all marry millionaires.’

  ‘We can have a damn good try. Shall I introduce you to one?’

  ‘Do you know any?’

  ‘I don’t think I do. But I know quite a lot of people who would do.’

  ‘No thank you. Really. I’d rather wait for Francis.’

  ‘Isn’t it very awful, waiting for Francis? Or do you get around?’

  ‘Oh, I get around. It isn’t quite a question of un seul être me manque et tout est dépeuplé.’

  ‘It never is, is it? The world seems quite heavily populated whatever happens. It cheers me up sometimes, to think of that.’

  ‘Yes. It cheers me too. I say, Loulou, have you got a fur coat?’

  ‘For goodness’ sake, I’m not fifty yet, you know. Also we’re not millionaires ourselves, all this décor cost a pretty penny, and then making films and so forth, it seems to spend itself somehow . . . I have got rather a miraculous leather coat, though. Would you like to come and have a look at it? I’ve been dying to show it to someone. I haven’t dared to wear it yet, I can’t think where to go in it first—I got it in Paris. Could you bear to come and have a look?’

  ‘I’d love to, if you don’t mind leaving all your guests . . . ’

  ‘Oh, they’re all right, he can deal with them. Come on, you can put your things on while we’re there.’

  So we left the drawing-room and went off to the bedroom, which was empty, brightly lit, and piled with other people’s clothes. ‘It looks rather nice like this,’ said Louise, ‘sort of encamped and temporary.’

  Strangely, I didn’t feel it was her house at all, I felt as though odd circumstances had drawn us together in a hotel bedroom. There was no air of permanence in the room. She flung open one of the wardrobe doors, and I realized that what it really looked like was a film set. It was tidy and new inside the wardrobe as well as out. She searched through the row of beautiful-looking garments and eventually lit on what she was looking for: ‘Look,’ she said, drawing it out with a kind of comic reverence, ‘Look at that, isn’t it heaven, isn’t it worth waiting for, isn’t it the most perfect garment you ever saw in your whole life PI went in to buy a pair of shoes and I came out with this, this in a paper carrier just like a pair of pants from Marks, isn’t it a joke? The shop-ladies said when I tried it on, “Formidable, Madame.” I’ve never been so utterly enraptured, so vain in my life, I walked around for the rest of the day in a coma thinking about it . . . ’

  ‘Put it on for me,’ I said, ‘please put it on.’

  She unbuttoned it to try it on for me with a real glittering elation; I wondered if she had been drinking, or whether it really was the coat, or whether she was simply in a mood. When she had got it on she did look superb; it was a lovely thing, in very dark brown, and the leather looked soft and alive like skin. But the most extraordinary thing was her glitter, which was almost feverish; it was years since I had seen her behave so spontaneously and vividly before me, with no trace of distance or wariness. Anyone watching us would have seen a normal sisterly scene of clothes gossip and giggles in the bedroom, with no more than a trace of deliberate I’m-older-and-smarter-than-you provocation on her part. I couldn’t understand why she had chosen me to show it to, unless she thought I would die of envy, and that wasn’t implied in her manner at all. ‘It’s perfect,’ I said. ‘You look absolutely perfect.’ She gave a little shake as I spoke and stopped looking at herself raptly in the mirror; she turned round to me quickly and said, ‘It is, isn’t it?’ Then she gave a curious hop and a skip as though she was about to start dancing, broke off abruptly, stood absolutely still for a minute while her face composed itself into its usual classic composition, and started to undo the buttons down the front. She put it back on the hanger in silence, and I, sensing that the little game was over, turned away to unearth my own coat from the pile on the bed. When I turned back to her she was staring at herself again in the mirror, unsmiling, gravely, as though she were some object foreign to herself. I didn’t interrupt, but put my things on in the prolonged silence; when I was ready to go she said, ‘Well, I’d better go back to all the rest in there. Will you be able to get back all right?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘It isn’t far to the Tube, is it?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It isn’t far. Second on the right, first on the left.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’d better go. Will you thank Stephen for me?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll thank Stephen for you.’ She held open the bedroom door and we went out and walked slowly along the hall. At the front door she said, ‘Why don’t you come and see me sometime?’

  ‘I’d love to,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll give you a ring some day,’ she said.

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll be seeing you then.’

  ‘Yes. Thank you for the party.’

  ‘I’m glad you came.’

  ‘I’m glad I came too.’

  ‘It’s frightfully hot in here, isn’t it? I envy you, going out. Perhaps I’ll go and switch the central heating off.’

  ‘That sounds a good idea,’ I said.

  ‘Good-bye. Remember me to Francis.’

  ‘Good-bye.’

  She shut the door behind me and I stood out there on the landing and breathed in a deep breath of relief. It had been stifling in the flat, smoky and airless, though I hadn’t noticed it until she had said so. I went slowly down the stairs and through the front door where the coldness met me like another element, like the unexpected touch of cool water. I undid the top button of my coat and let the air in on my neck. Then I took off my shoes and my sore feet drank in the smooth-grained surface of the step. I took a step or two forward, a shoe in either hand, and when I was down to the pavement I began to run through all the grand spaciousness and calm of the street, as though chains had been loosed from my ankles, as though a burden had been lifted from my back.

  9

  The Information

  I PUT MY shoes on again to go down the Tube, and was just buying my ticket when I heard someone approaching me from behind, somewhat out of breath. I looked round and it was Wilfred Smee: he too had been running.

  ‘I only just caught you,’ he said. ‘You run frightfully fast.’

  ‘I do, don’t I?’ I said, faintly embarrassed that he had overlooked my barefoot exhibition.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you,’ he said. ‘Have you eaten yet this evening? Perhaps we could go and have a meal somewhere?’

  ‘All right,’ I said. I thought I didn’t like him, but I wasn’t sure, and I was hungry and wanted to hear what he had to say about Louise.

  ‘We’ll eat round here, shall we?’ he said, and started to direct me out of the Tube station. He walked very quickly: I had to do a kind of jog-trot to keep up with him.

  ‘I saw you leaving,’ he said, ‘so I decided to come after you. Did you enjoy the party?’

  ‘In a way,’ I said. ‘It was interesting.’

  He laughed. ‘But not amusing?’

  ‘Oh well, it wasn’t my kind of party, that’s all.’

  ‘What is your kind of party?’

  ‘Oh, the David V
esey kind that I met you at last, I suppose.’

  ‘The drink wasn’t as nice. One thing that one can say for Stephen, he always provides enough of the right kind of thing. Whatever criticisms one might make of the company.’

  I was strongly reminded of something Louise had once said, but couldn’t at the time remember it.

  ‘What criticisms would you make of the company?’ I asked, suspecting that he had probably had a lot more of the drink than I had, to be talking to me so gaily.

  ‘Oh, they were a lot of bores, didn’t you think? Not really what you might call a brilliantly intelligent gathering.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘They were most of them so much older than me that I couldn’t tell.’

  He laughed again. ‘You mean you can only tell when people are dim if they’re your own age?’

  ‘Oh, not exactly that. Anyway, it isn’t intelligence that matters at parties, is it?’

  ‘What is it then? It is to me.’

  ‘I like people to be amusing.’

  ‘You like a good laugh?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘How odd. I’d have thought you were just the type for intense chats about films or books or so forth.’

  ‘Would you? I suppose I am, but nobody ever gets quite intense enough for me. Sometimes I suspect that I must be so bloody brilliant that everybody else inevitably seems to be at half pressure. Isn’t that a terrible thing to say? But you know what I mean, and that’s why I gave up looking for Dostoyevskys in corners. Now I prefer a good laugh.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re not as unlike your sister as you look,’ he said, but I couldn’t take him up on that as we had just arrived at our goal, which was a reasonable-looking restaurant called La Calabria. When we were settled in and waiting for the minestrone, he said, ‘I suppose you really are the clever one. Stephen’s always going on about how clever you are. He admires that kind of thing.’

  ‘Oh, Louise is clever too,’ I said. ‘But she did the wrong subject.’

  ‘PPE, I believe?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I can’t imagine. Perversity? A passing fit of seriousness?’

  ‘You got a first, however?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Therefore, the clever one.’

  ‘Not at all. Louise would certainly have got a first too if she’d read the right subject. She got a very good second as it is, which is pretty remarkable on the amount of work she did.’

  ‘Indeed. Indeed.’ He smiled. ‘I hadn’t pictured such solidarity.’

  ‘You picture us tooth and nail?’

  ‘I’m sure that I picture you correctly.’

  ‘The clever one and the pretty one?’

  I said that to embarrass him, but I didn’t succeed.

  ‘Only a blind man could make that mistake,’ he said, urbanely and literately, if not pedantically. I warmed to him. How could I help it?

  ‘I have always tried,’ I said, ‘not to be like Louise. Or at least from the age of ten onwards.’

  ‘You don’t admire your sister?’

  ‘I used to. Until I was ten.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Have you any brothers and sisters?’

  ‘No, I was an only child.’

  ‘How very simple for you.’

  ‘Not if you knew my parents.’

  ‘Do you know anyone who likes their parents?’

  ‘No. Do you?’

  ‘One or two. Not as many as I’d like to. Do you think it’s a tragic fact of life or a tragic fact of the English middle classes?’

  ‘I’d never thought of it in that light. Do you think it matters?’

  ‘Oh, desperately. I mean, it affects everything. Whether marriage means anything, and whether one ought to have children, and all sorts of practical things like that. Think how awful, to have a baby that didn’t like you.’

  ‘Are marriage and babies practical questions for you?’

  ‘You mean, am I considering them?’

  ‘That is more or less what I mean.’

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact I’m more than considering it. I’m definitely going to get married when my fiance gets back from Harvard.’

  ‘An academic?’

  ‘Yes, but not your line of country. Or mine. He’s a historian.’

  ‘So you’re going to be a don’s wife?’

  ‘No. I’m going to marry a don.’

  ‘And what will you be?’

  ‘How should I know? I will be what I become, I suppose.’

  ‘You don’t find that a problem?’

  How could I tell him that it was the one thing that kept me strung together in occasionally ecstatic, occasionally panic-stricken effort, day and night, year in, year out? I was on such dubious ground already, what with asserting flat out like that that I was going to marry Francis, that one lie more or less didn’t matter, and I bravely made it.

  ‘Oh,’ I said grandly, ‘It’s no problem at all. It just happens. What happens to one, and what one does, one becomes. It’s simple.’

  ‘It sounds simple, I agree. And what about Louise? Is she, do you think, a novelist’s wife?’

  I thought for a moment, and then I said, ‘I’m rather afraid that, oddly enough, that’s all she is.’

  At this point the soup arrived, and we were momentarily distracted by the Parmesan cheese and the desire to eat. I was beginning to realize that I was slightly tighter than I had thought: I was feeling very gossipy, clear-headed and garrulous, and hoped I wasn’t going to say anything I would regret.

  Several minutes later, during which I tried to deal discreetly with subjects like poetry, I couldn’t resist attacking the flag that he had so much earlier held out.

  ‘And what did you mean,’ I said, ‘by calling my sister inconstant but invariable?’

  ‘I wondered when you would get back to that,’ he said. ‘My words must have struck deep for you to have remembered them so accurately.’

  ‘I suppose they must have done. Though I really don’t know what you meant by them.’

  ‘Don’t you? Surely it must have occurred to somebody of your intelligence that your sister is hardly the most faithful of wives?’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, bending my eyes intently on my plate, ‘as a matter of fact it hadn’t.’ I think I was blushing.

  ‘Oh surely,’ said Wilfred Smee, ‘my suggestion hasn’t taken you by surprise. I mean a girl like your sister and a man like Stephen, surely the consequences . . . ’

  ‘The consequences?’

  ‘I see,’ he said, rather gently, ‘that I have taken you by surprise. Would you rather not go on talking about this? It’s entirely up to you.’

  ‘Oh please go on,’ I said. ‘You can’t stop now.’

  ‘I really thought you must have been over all this in your mind as often as I have . . . ’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’ve been over a lot of things in my mind. But I hadn’t quite got to that.’

  ‘Then where, may I ask, had you got?’

  ‘Oh, just to the general oddness of the whole thing. I mean, Louise and a man like that . . . But I’d better be careful. He’s a friend of yours, isn’t he?’

  ‘His being a friend of mine doesn’t prevent him from being, as you put it, a man like that.’

  ‘But evidently you must think of Louise as the tiresome factor. Don’t you?’

  ‘In a way. I don’t know her at all, whereas I know Stephen quite well. And while it seems to me to be perfectly evident why Stephen married her, I can’t for the life of me imagine why she married him—especially in view of the way that she apparently intends to lead her married life.’

  ‘Please tell me what, precisely, you mean by that.’

  ‘I mean, I suppose, that she is at the moment, and has been since, I believe, before the wedding, very blatantly having an affair with John.’

  ‘John Connell?’

  I must have known it because the information didn’
t come in any way as a surprise, but rather as a confirmation of everything I had expected. Nevertheless, it took my breath away, to hear it stated like that. He simply nodded to my query, and all I could say was:

  ‘How odd. How very odd. I might have known it.’

  ‘It is odd, isn’t it? I mean, there was no need at all for her to marry Stephen. She could probably have married John if she had wanted to. It all seems unnecessarily tortuous.’

  ‘When you say blatantly, do you mean that everyone knows but me?’

  ‘A lot of people do know. She certainly makes no attempt to conceal it. In fact, she seems to display it to the world at large, as though she enjoyed the situation . . . ’

  That rang a bell. ‘I’m sure,’ I said quickly, ‘that she does. It’s the sort of thing she would enjoy. She likes drama.’

  ‘That, of course, is one of the possible explanations.’

  ‘But one would hardly marry to enjoy having an affair with someone else.’

  ‘It does sound a little far-fetched, I agree.’

  ‘Not too far-fetched, though.’

  ‘Well, you would know.’

  I raised my eyebrows at that. ‘About her, I mean,’ he explained. ‘That’s all I implied!’

  ‘No,’ I repeated, ‘it really isn’t too far-fetched.’

  ‘She’s always been like this?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Keen on provocation.’

  ‘Oh, madly. She’s one of those that enjoy it more than the real thing.’

  ‘The real thing?’

  ‘Love. That was what I meant. Love.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘When you say that a lot of people know, does that include Stephen?’

  ‘Oh, I think so. I don’t know how long he’s known, but he certainly knows by now.’

  ‘And what does he think about it?’

  Wilfred smiled, a tolerant smile, which made me feel childish, but which also betrayed a deeper anxiety than I had yet suspected in him.

  ‘Naturally,’ he said, ‘he is more than a little disturbed. I don’t think anyone enjoys having their wife commit adultery with their closest friend.’

  ‘That word sends a real Old Testament chill through me,’ I said.

  ‘What? Adultery?’