A Summer Bird-Cage

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘Don’t say it. It sounds awful.’

  ‘Well, to some people it is. To Stephen, for example. It offends his high church leanings.’

  ‘I didn’t know he had any. How can he have, and write books like that?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Oh well,’ I said, as nastily as I could, ‘I suppose you can say this for Anglicanism, that at least it’s rich and respectable. I can’t see Stephen believing in anything ridiculous, like God. He chooses to believe in something good, solid and social, like the sacrament of marriage instead.’

  Wilfred must have noticed that it wasn’t really in my nature to be rude about other people’s friends, because he said, ‘I’m sorry, Sarah, I can see I’ve upset you.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right,’ I said. ‘I think I’ve been hatching this bit of awareness for months. I’ve probably known it since their wedding-day. It has upset me, I admit it’s upset me, but I can’t think why, as I don’t think I care very much for Louise, and I don’t think I care very much about marriage, in the abstract. I can’t think why I mind so much. Perhaps it’s just a hangover from those days before I was ten. When everything she did affected me. Because I knew I’d have to do it too, one day. When my family were a part of me.’

  ‘You’re sure they’re not now?’

  ‘Well, the shock of this is almost enough to make me wonder. It is amazing, I get taken by surprise by myself in the most extraordinary ways . . . Who would have thought that an emancipated girl like me should actually feel concerned about a trivial thing like this? I almost feel it my duty not to feel concerned.’

  ‘Why on earth?’

  ‘Oh, for so many reasons. For so many principles, really. The principle of non-interference. The principle of not caring twopence about anything Louise ever says or does again. The principle of marriage not binding those who don’t want to be bound. And so on.’

  ‘But in practice, to use your own word, you are shocked?’

  ‘I suppose that must be it. My stupid cowardly little super ego at it again. If I don’t tame that nasty creature soon it will get the better of me. In fact, you know, I admire Louise for having bashed hers up so successfully. She doesn’t seem to hear any little whispers from the past ages of morality during the long night watches.’

  ‘Are you sure ol that? You think her conduct leaves her completely without qualms?’

  I hesitated, and thus significantly belied my own response.

  ‘Oh, I’m quite sure. I’m sure Louise is quite above such pettiness.’

  ‘All magnificent ego?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘It’s an odd ideal.’

  ‘Is it? That’s what I would like to be. If I understand the terms correctly, not having read Freud. But tell me, you said just now that you knew why Stephen had married Louise. Do tell me, because it’s always puzzled me . . . I should have thought he simply wasn’t the marrying type. In fact, since I’ve exposed so many nïavetés to you already, I might as well go the whole way and tell you that at one time I seriously wondered if he weren’t queer. I think that’s what anyone would guess, from reading his books. Their funny social bitchiness, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes, I do know what you mean.’

  ‘Tell me why he married her.’

  ‘I think because he loved her. He’s always been attracted by her peculiar brand of—how shall I put it—her peculiar desperateness. She’s not, in any sense, a frivolous person. Of course, she has all the obvious qualities that Stephen wouldn’t marry without—beauty, popularity, even notoriety—and then on top of it all she has this intenseness. She overdoes all her emotions. Or seems to. Stephen’s always been attracted by girls of that type—at Cambridge there was a succession of them, high-powered, pretty girls, the daughters of earls and artists, all despising life and themselves and fanatically in pursuit of happiness . . . you get the picture?’

  ‘What happened to them all?’ I asked, and as I asked I had a flash of intuition, and answered my own question. ‘I know what happened to them,’ I said. ‘They all met very highly-sexed men and fell in love and got reconciled to life and got married. Right?’

  ‘Absolutely right.’

  ‘And the problem in this instance is, why did Louise marry Stephen instead of the requisite highly-sexed man John?’

  ‘The problem is complicated by the fact that John had already abducted one of these girls, years ago. Perhaps you’ve heard of her. She calls herself Sappho Hinchcliffe.’

  ‘The actress?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What was she like?’

  ‘Oh, she was a highly intelligent girl, one of the best. I was in love with her myself. She and Stephen had a kind of morbid affection for each other . . . John always said that she felt all the emotions that Stephen was incapable of, and wh ch he wanted to write about. A sort of extended aesthetic insight. And then John became interested, and Sappho couldn’t resist him, and there was a lot of heartache right through Tripos. She and Stephen had desks immediately next to each other for nearly all the papers, and she would sit there crying and chewing her pen, and would walk out an hour early from each to go on the river with John . . . oh, what a life. It was all very romantic. I suppose it all still sounds reasonable to you, instead of absurd. I must be getting old. I can’t think of it as anything but absurd.’

  ‘I can see it all,’ I said. And I was thinking, but for Francis, there went I.

  ‘But she didn’t marry either of them.’

  ‘Oh no. She had a career instead. Not a very steady one, but distinguished. I see her from time to time. So does Stephen.’

  ‘Is she happy?’

  ‘Yes. Very.’

  ‘And you three have remained friends through all this to-do?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘That sounds a little sick to me.’

  ‘Sick?’

  ‘Unhealthy.’

  ‘Perhaps it was. Civilized behaviour is sick isn’t it?’

  ‘Is that intended to reprove me?’

  ‘Not really. I must confess that even I felt at times that it would be a lot better if somebody hit somebody. And now, in this present situation. I am very much concerned that somebody will.’

  ‘Stephen?’

  ‘No, I was thinking that Stephen might get hit.’

  ‘Oh dear. And what will happen to Louise?’

  ‘If she’s not careful she may well get herself into a first-class scandal.’

  ‘Oh, surely not. None of them are important enough for that.’

  ‘Well, a second-class scandal. That would be bad enough.’

  ‘You don’t think she might like it? Don’t you think it might be rather the kind of thing she thrives on? Like desperation?’

  ‘I don’t think she would really like it at all. Though she might think she might, I agree. But in the end she would find it humiliating. Though really, you know, I’m not at all concerned about her—I’m concerned about Stephen. I think he does feel humiliated, and he’s taken enough humiliation in his life. If anyone’s sick, he is—he’s what you’d call a sick man. He’s not been looking at all well recently, and I’m afraid it may break out. He never talks about Louise, and he’s not writing—he hasn’t written a word since he met her, I don’t think. His last novel came out three years ago. If you ask me, I think he’s heading for some kind of collapse. You know John went over to Paris for the weekend to see them—he told me it was pathetic to see them both, Louise as bored as hell, telling other literary men how good she thought her husband’s books were, and about this film, and wasn’t he brilliant and promising and so forth, and Stephen doing nothing but look miserable and watch her whoever she was talking to and try to overhear what she was saying—I definitely think there’s a serious danger he might collapse.’

  ‘You really surprise me. I thought only intense people had collapses.’

  ‘Intense people collapse, but they also survive. They feed on disaster. So did Sappho and all the
other girls. But for Stephen it isn’t a game. With him it isn’t a question of pushing to see how far he can go. With him it might mean permanent disablement.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  I was horrified by this glimpse of abysses so beyond anything I had ever imagined.

  ‘When I said that Stephen was a sick man,’ Wilfred went on, ‘I didn’t mean that he found life faintly tragic or mildly meaningless, or anything like that—I mean that he really is a psychological case. People use the word neurotic to describe anything they like, and forget that some people really are neurotic, and have real illnesses of the mind. And a real case isn’t glamorous or intense or anything like that—he’s just ill and cut off and unapproachable. That’s what Stephen is like. I know him well, and I know. It isn’t interesting, it’s sad and boring. He’s been getting worse. There used to be days when he would emerge and face what was happening to him—now he never does, never, and there’s nothing his friends can do except stand around and try to stop him getting hurt. It’s like looking after a chronic invalid or a baby. I’m not even interested any more, except for the sake of the past, and because someone has to be. I feel responsible. I know it’s presumptuous of me to assume that I know more about it than his wife, but I feel sure that she’s precisely the kind of person who would be incapable of appreciating how bad he is, that he really can’t feel things normally at all . . . do you understand me?’

  ‘Not really. Only very vaguely. If Stephen is as bad as you suggest he is, how on earth can he write books?’

  ‘Well, his art isn’t exactly of the most human kind, is it? And then, a lot sicker men than him have written a lot better books. Look at John Stuart Mill. And then again, he’s not writing at the moment, which worries me more than anything—I’m convinced he used to find some kind of release in writing, a sort of substitute existence, full of emotions and humanity and so forth, and above all full of people—’

  ‘I’m out of my depth,’ I said.

  ‘You aren’t with me at all?’

  ‘It’s so completely out of my world of reference—I’ve never been faced with anything like this before. Do you mean he’s mad?’

  ‘You do put things bluntly, don’t you, my dear. No, I don’t mean precisely that . . . I do, however, mean that he’s a case for a specialist, not for all our amateur guesswork. Don’t you feel that there are whole areas of his personality that never come to light?’

  ‘I always felt he was meaningless. Sort of nothing and meaningless.’

  ‘That’s one way of describing it.’

  ‘But what is it that’s wrong with him? Is it curable?’

  ‘I don’t know. I doubt it. I’m afraid he’s one of those unfortunate people who are always one up on their doctors, and so beyond help—’

  ‘But as to what it is . . . ’

  ‘My dear child, you’re a silly girl. You think you’re brave and can take everything, don’t you? You don’t like to be spared, do you? Well, I am old-fashioned enough to be able to decide that it would be better for you if I didn’t go into it.’

  ‘Perhaps I’m grateful to you. Perhaps I don’t want to know.’

  ‘I’ll tell you this much. You know that all these words one uses so gaily at parties, like masochism and sadism, have real meanings, don’t you? Real, factual meanings, like mumps and measles?’

  ‘Yes, I knew that.’

  ‘Then you see what I mean.’

  ‘Yes, I see what you mean.’

  ‘Then you see that I am justified in feeling concern on his behalf?’

  ‘I suppose so. You think that Louise is going to precipitate some ghastly crisis and everything will snap.’

  ‘In a way.’

  ‘Will it matter?’

  ‘Of course it will matter. Things are bad, but not as bad as they might be, by a long way.’

  ‘Just tell me, what do you get out of it?’

  ‘Out of what?’

  ‘Out of all your concern?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing but the satisfaction of having tried. Nobody else is interested, so somebody has to be. It’s not very exciting, I agree.’

  ‘It’s like being God,’ I said.

  He smiled. ‘Yes, I sometimes feel tempted to feel that. But unlike Stephen I don’t believe in God, so either I take an interest myself or consign him to the human rubbish-dump.’

  ‘How terrible.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Is there nobody that cares but you? I thought John Connell was a friend of his too?’

  ‘Ah yes, but their relationship is only one of mutual aid . . . this film they talk about, but will never make, rather aptly symbolizes it . . . and anyway, under the circumstances, it would take a remarkable degree of detachment, I think . . . ’

  ‘So nobody cares but you?’

  He paused. ‘Doesn’t it strike you as odd that you, the sister of his wife, should be asking me that?’

  I had to think for a moment before I realized what he meant. ‘Yes. Yes, of course,’ I admitted. ‘Husband and wife, husband and wife. Not that I have any faith in the idea at all with those two. I suppose that it’s just conceivable that on some deeper level she cares about him, but I think it’s terribly unlikely. He would need someone self-sacrificing and devoted, wouldn’t he? Somebody more interested in him than in herself.’

  ‘And for that Louise wouldn’t qualify?’

  ‘Well, would she?’

  ‘Oh, I agree. I never had any hopes of her.’

  ‘She’s a taker, not a giver.’

  ‘Perhaps you can tell me what, in marrying him, she expected to take?’

  ‘Now there’s a question. I’ve thought about this several times, believe me. Do you know what I decided in the end? That she didn’t know what else to do so she got married. It sounds too bourgeois to be true, doesn’t it, just the kind of thing that all that higher education ought to have knocked out of us—but the fact is that when she came down a couple of years ago she had no idea of what to do with herself. There wasn’t any career she was passionately interested in, so she just messed around for a year, in and out of people’s beds I don’t doubt, and then started a job in advertising. I ask you, Louise sitting in an office trying to sell things—the idea was ludicrous. And yet, what could she do? I didn’t quite get this at the time because I was still up myself and overflowing with love and optimism—but since I came down I see what she was getting at. She was far too intelligent to do nothing, and yet too beautiful and sexy to do all the first-class things like politics or law or social sciences—and she was naturally afraid of subsiding into nothingness, I suppose. Or that’s what I guess she felt, from what I myself am feeling. Our situations are very similar.’

  ‘But not your ways of solving them?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t solve things. I just drift and struggle as the weeks float on.’

  ‘But Louise thought that marrying Stephen was her way out of doing nothing?’

  ‘I think so. After all, he is very different from all the boys in Birmingham that we might have been marrying, and he has a lot of money, and he is famous . . . or does all that mean that she just succumbed to social pressures? I suppose it does. But on her own terms, that’s the point. I think she’s getting her pound of flesh from society for not letting her live as what she is.’

  ‘Via Stephen?’

  ‘Yes, admittedly, via Stephen.’

  ‘It’s hardly very generous of her.’

  ‘I don’t think she has the objectivity to be generous. She thinks her own life is so much more interesting than anyone else’s that she has a right to sacrifice others—she has a point, too I think, but I agree that she ought not to be endangering her husband’s sanity, if you really think she is doing something as melodramatic as that . . . it’s a pity she didn’t pick someone better able to look after themselves. But it all seems so unlikely to me. I would have thought that of the two she was much more unstable.’

  ‘Would you really? I had concluded, from I admit a much br
iefer acquaintance, that she was hard as nails.’

  I pondered this description, and decided, ‘Yes, in a way I think you’re right.’

  I was at this point remembering discussing normality and extremes with Stephen at his wedding: it seemed peculiarly ironic that I had then thought of myself as being more eccentric than he was.

  ‘Does he know himself that he’s in such a bad way?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yes, I think he knows all right. Sometimes he seems to be perfectly lucid about his own state of mind, but much more often he seems to think that everyone else is like him—he must do a lot of double thinking.’

  ‘What did he hope to get out of marrying Louise?’

  ‘How should I know? Perhaps he hoped to catch a little of her intensity. To live off her energy. Perhaps he hoped she would understand him. Perhaps he simply wanted to get hold of her, to appear as her owner, when she’d turned down so many others. Including John. It must have looked to him at one point as though he’d beaten John.’

  ‘What on earth do you think will happen?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Couldn’t you try asking Louise what she’s up to?’

  ‘Oh God no, don’t ask me to interfere, you can’t imagine what bad terms Lou and I are always on, I couldn’t talk straight to her to save my life.’

  ‘No. Somehow I didn’t think you would.’

  ‘Why don’t you try finding out from John?’

  He laughed. ‘That wouldn’t be quite the same thing. Do you think she’s in love with him?’

  ‘I’ve really no idea.’

  ‘I think John is quite seriously taken with her. But it won’t last. He’s a great one for passing passions. Being so attractive himself, he can afford to be.’

  ‘He is attractive, isn’t he?’

  ‘Do you find him so?’

  ‘Oh, fabulously.’ The more I thought about this, the truer it seemed. ‘He’s one of those people,’ I said, ‘that I resent because they’re so obviously wonderful. You know, he just gives you a look and you start twitching.’

  ‘Dangerous, isn’t it?’

  ‘Perhaps Louise is in love with him. Is he a serious kind of person?’

  ‘Oh very, I suppose.’

  ‘Because she couldn’t be in love with anyone less serious than her.’