A Summer Bird-Cage

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘Doesn’t one ever have enough?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘You can’t beat the material world by excess?’

  ‘Ah well,’ she said. ‘That’s an idea, isn’t it. I can’t say it isn’t an idea.’

  She paused, smiling at her own reflection in the taxi mirror, as we approached Grosvenor Square. ‘Whatever happens,’ she went on, ‘you can’t buy the past. You can’t buy an ancestry and a history. You have your own past, and the free will to deal with it, and that’s all. It can’t be bought with money.’ She paused. ‘In fact,’ she said, irrelevantly, ‘Stephen doesn’t like some of the clothes I buy. He can’t stand this lilac effect. He was furious when my going-away clothes were lilac. Just right for Birmingham, he said, the old snob. So I wear it when he’s away. He says it makes me look like a deb. He prefers the classic mode.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he like debs?’

  ‘Oh, they’re too easy to make fun of—you must have noticed, in his books—no, he doesn’t like any social manifestation. He only likes the timeless in his own life.’

  ‘Doesn’t he . . . ’ I stuck, looking for the right inoffensive word.

  ‘Doesn’t he what?’

  ‘Oh, nothing.’

  The taxi had reached the streets behind Charing Cross Road, where John’s present theatre was. It was very glittering and Christmassy. Louise asked him to drive round to the stage door, and when we got out I didn’t offer to pay. There didn’t seem to be any point. We had obviously got there before the curtain, as there was no crowd of disgorged spectators thronging the pavement. We went in through the stage door, and Bert, sitting behind a sort of hatch, said, ‘Good evening, Mrs H.’ It seemed very familiar.

  ‘Evening, Bert,’ she said. ‘It’s very cold out.’

  ‘It’s cold enough in,’ he said.

  ‘I see we’ve beaten him to it.’

  ‘Oh yes. He won’t be off for another four minutes. It’s running a bit late tonight.’

  ‘Good house?’

  ‘Not bad for a Tuesday.’

  ‘Have you had another win yet?’

  ‘No such luck.’

  ‘Bert won seven and sixpence or something stupid on the pools last week,’ she said, turning to me. ‘Everyone else had filled it in right too.’

  ‘What a shame,’ I murmured, dutifully.

  ‘This is my sister, Miss Bennett,’ said Louise, and the man stood up affably and we shook hands. It was all too matey for words, and had a real charm, I am loath to admit. Stage door worlds aren’t exactly familiar to me, and I am always rather reluctantly touched by the sentimentality and goodwill and cheek-kissing that goes on. Louise seemed to have taken it in her stride all right. Perhaps the theatrical element in her nature had gravitated naturally to its own level. She certainly would be more at home amongst actresses than amongst female novelists and poets.

  After looking at the notice-boards she said, ‘Come on, let’s go up and give him a surprise.’ Again I said that perhaps he wouldn’t like my being there, but she brushed this aside as peremptorily as before, and started off up the stairs. They were cold and shabby and bleak, and we seemed to go up for ever.

  ‘I thought he was a star,’ I said, crossly. ‘Surely they’ve got a dressing-room further down than this?’

  ‘It’s an old theatre,’ she said, ‘and Hesther’s in the one on the floor below.’

  When we got there, it said John Connell, Dressing Room 2, on a typewritten slip in the door. Louise pushed it open and a warm fleshy odour of greasepaint and clothes and whisky and sweat met us. It was a small room, but big enough for a chaise longue along one wall, which Louise promptly sat on, and lit herself a cigarette. There was a pile of letters at one end of the thing, and she picked them up and started to go through them, just as if I hadn’t been there. I sat down on the chair in front of the mirror, and looked at myself, my cheeks and nose inelegantly pink with cold. I dabbed at them with some powder, but to little effect. Then I studied the telegrams and notes stuck all round the mirror. They said things like ‘Darling John, all the best for a fabulous success’ or ‘Darling John, it’s going to be a Wow’. There were, as well as the telegrams, a lot of cards portraying bunches of flowers, little ducks, or jokey pictures. There was almost something retarded about the whole thing, to my ignorant eyes. Under the mirror was a litter of Kleenex, cotton wool, powder, sticks of Leichner, and dirty glasses. Also a bottle of whisky, a pretentious-looking book called Morality and the Middle Classes, and a lot of old Biros. It was very messy and very human. Quite different from Stephen’s meaningless Greek womb. I began to see why Louise fled there so often for refuge. Whatever it lacked, it had life in excess, dirty, exaggerated life. I could hear the play coming over that loudspeaker arrangement: John was blustering on about something or other while Hesther Innes wept or sniffled in the background. It was obviously very near the curtain; indeed, as I listened, John delivered a dying fall, there was a long pause, and muffled clapping broke out. Even before it faded away we heard the noise of feet rushing up the stone stairs, and John broke violently in. He wasn’t expecting to see us there, and he stopped on the threshold, panting and dishevelled: but he wasn’t an actor for nothing.

  ‘Darling, darling,’ he said, and opened his arms to Louise. She got up from the chaise longue and walked into them, and they embraced rather lengthily, kissing each other on the lips I noticed. ‘Darling, what a marvellous surprise,’ he said, as he let her go. ‘What are you doing here? And what have you brought Sarah for?’ He kissed me too, less effusively, on the cheek.

  ‘I don’t know the answer myself,’ I said, as it seemed to be me that he was asking. I felt de trop in any case, and would willingly have disappeared, if I could have thought of an excuse for doing so. Unfortunately Louise knew I had nothing else to do: I had told her so before the project of theatre visiting had been raised.

  ‘We just came along,’ said Louise. ‘We were having supper and then we got bored so we just came along. You’re pleased to see us, aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course, of course. Sit down, I’ll be changed in a moment.’

  We sat. He really did look pleased to see us—or at least to see Louise. He was obviously excited by her presence: he kept whistling to himself as he washed his hands and started to rub the greasepaint off his face. Their eyes met from time to time in the mirror. I watched him too: in that small space I couldn’t pretend to watch anything else. He ripped off his shirt—a white one, but now streaked with brown round the neck and sleeves—and stood there in a string vest as he dabbed at his eyes with cotton wool. His shoulders were huge and covered in black hair. Then he went over to the wash-basin and ran the cold tap: he put his face under it and came up wet and spluttering. Everything he did seemed to make a noise: all his actions were larger and more physical than other men’s. I wondered if that was because he was an actor, or whether he was an actor because of that. When he dried himself on a towel, one got the impression that he had just been for a long swim. When he ripped off his trousers I did try to look the other way, but as he seemed quite happy to wander round in his underpants my delicacy seemed out of place, if not positively tactless. He got dressed in his own clothes, which weren’t indeed very different from the things he had worn on the stage—the play was about a docker, and John now studiously dressed himself in a check flannel shirt, threadbare round the collar, a pair of dirty jeans, and one of those dark blue dustmen’s jackets with leather patches on the shoulders. When he had finished he did look very striking: not quite a docker but far too hefty for a motor-cycling youth. While changing he scarcely said a word: he simply grunted from time to time as he did up a button or reached down to put on his socks. When he was dressed he went over to Louise and stroked her hair and said, ‘Well, where shall we go for the evening?’

  ‘You must want something to eat,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I can do without.’

  ‘But we would come with you.’

  ‘Will you? All right then,
let’s go. After you.’

  We filed out again, but on the way down John suddenly said, ‘Just a moment, let’s go and look at Hesther’s baby.’

  ‘Hesther’s what?’ said Louise, as we paused outside Dressing Room 1.

  ‘Hesther’s baby. She brought it with her.’ He knocked on the door, and the girl inside shouted, ‘Come in.’ We went in and there was the girl who played opposite John, sitting in a dressing-gown and smoking. She was terribly pretty in a sad, shadowy way, the kind of girl I would have loved to be. She looked a little like a very feminine Simone. John introduced me, and Louise kissed her: ‘We’ve come to look at the baby,’ said John.

  ‘Have you really? There he is, in his basket. The girl couldn’t get back from her day off today so I brought him with me. Isn’t he an angel?’

  The baby was lying in a blue basket with pink palm trees on. He was lying on his side, asleep, with his little hands clenched by his mouth. His eyelashes lay on his cheek, enormously long. We were all silent and we could hear him breathing, very lightly and quickly.

  ‘God, he’s adorable,’ said Louise.

  ‘Has he been asleep all evening?’ I asked.

  ‘The whole evening,’ she said. ‘He went to sleep after I fed him at six, then he slept all the way here in the taxi, and he’ll probably sleep all the way back. They’re amazing.’

  ‘How old is he?’ I asked, entranced.

  ‘Four months.’

  ‘He’s so beautiful,’ I said.

  ‘He is, isn’t he?’ she said. I liked her a lot.

  When we went out, I said to John, ‘What a nice person she is.’

  ‘Isn’t she a sweetie?’ he said, which wasn’t quite what I meant.

  ‘Do they let you just bring a baby to the theatre like that?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It seems so odd—I mean, it seems so easy that there must be some reason against it . . . ’

  ‘Oh, there always seem to be babies about in the theatre. I took one on once. It belonged to the wife of one of the extras in Henry IV at Oxford, when I was being part of a crowd too, and I took it on.’

  ‘Did it cry?’

  ‘No. It liked it. It smiled at me.’ I found myself almost liking John, so touched had I been by his taking us to show the baby and his appreciation of it. I shall never forget the way it lay there with its tiny curled fingers and its skin transparently blossoming, a little pool of absolute stillness and silence in all the dirt and bustle. She remains my image of motherhood, Hesther Innes, with her little baby, sitting in her dressing-gown with a cigarette waiting for the bath. Whenever I think how utterly awful it must be to have a baby I think of her. And yet, someone recently told me, when she found that that baby was on the way she tried to gas herself, and was only saved because her husband got home from work several hours earlier than she expected him. She was afraid that the baby would ruin her career. But the baby won, it existed, and when I think of mothers and babies I nevertheless think of her.

  When we got outside, after bidding Bert goodnight, it was colder than ever. John put his arm round Louise, and I remembered how warm and comforting it was when Francis used to put his arm round me on a cold night. I felt acutely lonely: everyone had lovers and babies and husbands but me. But the loneliness didn’t make me feel miserable: I almost enjoyed it, as the dreary edge was taken off the sensation by the darkness and glamour of the night, and the strangeness of being with my sister and her man. Nothing so strange is ever really unbearable.

  We were walking towards Covent Garden, through those old streets that feel like the most ancient part of London. A lot of the West End is just like any other large city, but more ugly: but the courts and inns and markets have a history and a flavour of their own. Walking along a road like Long Acre, I can imagine Dr Johnson up at night with nowhere to sleep, or drinking with Beauclerk, or visiting actresses or Garrick in the Green Room after the show. I can picture centuries of people coming out of Drury Lane with their husbands and lovers, to talk about the play and to go thankfully, idly, for a drink. Theatrical life has such continuity, as does the life of selling vegetables, because, despite cinemas and frozen foods, the main product is ephemeral and always in demand. So Covent Garden and Drury Lane go on, next door to each other, and though the details change, the way of life is the same. I realized, as we walked there, that what Louise was doing was a reversal of roles: she was taking the man’s part, calling at the theatre instead of being called for. She was in the tradition, but she had reversed it, instead of opting out completely, as most girls are now obliged to do. I felt a glow of admiration: she was, after all, striking a blow for civilization in her behaviour, not, as it first had seemed, for anarchy. Why that should be admirable I didn’t go into, but I was sure it was: it was braver than to abandon the game completely. To force marriage into a mould of one’s own, while still preserving the name of marriage—it seemed an enterprise worth consideration. Indeed, there was almost something classic in her position, something more deeply rooted in the shapes of life than the eternal triangle of a woman’s magazine. Her position was certainly a lot more classic than mine, and therefore more beautiful and more gracious: mine, I couldn’t help feeling, was a truly unprecedented mess, which no girl 180 before this century could ever have landed herself in. No doubt I over-emphasize my isolation, but there can be no doubt that Louise herself realized that she was part of an unbroken line, rather than a freak. And she drew real pleasure from that concept, as she drew pleasure from the idea of Grosvenor Square, and model dresses, and entertaining.

  Louise and John were discussing where to eat. John, apparently, had a leaning towards egg and chips, which Louise hadn’t.

  ‘The thing is,’ Louise was saying, ‘that you only like the idea of it, and when you get there you always say the food is greasy or the tables are dirty. You might just as well go somewhere clean.’

  ‘Well, where?’

  ‘There must be lots of places.’

  ‘Of course, we’re quite near the Waldorf,’ he said, mocking.

  ‘What about Rossi’s?’

  ‘You are odd, that’s just as dirty as all the egg and chip caffs.’

  ‘Yes, but it doesn’t look it.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘Foreign dirt is all right, somehow.’

  ‘Well, so long as we know where we’re going. It’s freezing.’

  As we quickened our step I found myself wondering what sort of place Rossi’s was—I couldn’t picture Louise and John going to such an utterly ordinary place as it turned out to be. When we got there, it was nothing but one of those tiny coffee bars with Espresso machines and plants in pots, and a menu with Spaghetti Bolognaise, 3s 6d; Veal Escalope, 5s 6d; Ghoulash, 4s 6d. It was very crowded, but we found an uncomfortable little corner and settled in—the seats were rooted to the ground. As if anyone wanted to steal chairs. The other two seemed to know half the clientele, who were all obviously actors and hangers-on—I was amazed by the easy familiarity with which everyone treated Louise. She was evidently a well-established fact. The terms of her relationship with John were now completely unambiguous, and I wondered how I could ever have doubted the state of affairs between them. They held hands under the table and kicked each other in the leg from time to time: they made jokes with undertones, and from one or two remarks I gathered that this had been going on for some time. Wilfred had hinted that it started before Louise married, I remembered. They were undoubtedly a very striking couple, and fitted together very well—both tall, and dark and sexy, both strange and affected in their clothes, though choosing different affectations. They looked by Louise’s own definition, very predatory. For some reason they seemed to enjoy my company, and I guessed, from watching them, that they needed an audience to build up the striking, wicked image of themselves. In fact, I was playing at being a herbivore for a while, and gazing with admiration into the dangerous caves of the fiercer breed. I didn’t mind. It soothed my conscience. Perhaps I am a herbivore at hea
rt, and only predatory by conviction.

  In fact, I was so content to sit quiet and play at being an impressionable chaperone that I was taken aback when Louise and John actually started to talk about me and to ask me questions. They asked me about my job, and I felt mildly flattered, and replied as though to a kind aunt who had taken me out to tea and asked me obligatory, conversational things about school and lessons.

  ‘But do you find it satisfying?’ asked John. ‘Really satisfying?’

  ‘Of course I don’t,’ I said, deciding to abandon the ‘It’s-very-interesting’ line I had hitherto pursued. ‘Of course it’s not satisfying. It’s so pointless that I can’t even think what I do do all day. It’s one of those time-fillers. It bears about the same relation to anything I want to do as painting backcloths must bear to painting canvases—’

  ‘Then why the hell don’t you get out of it?’

  ‘And into what? Suggest something else. And I will. Suggest me something nearer my heart’s desire that will also pay the rent and I’ll be off tomorrow.’

  ‘I never understood,’ said Louise, vaguely, ‘why you didn’t stay on at Oxford.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Oh, research and so forth . . . ’

  ‘Did you ever take a look at all the people who did stay on and do research and so forth? Because they’re my reason. I like the place and I like the work but I don’t like the people. I wouldn’t like to be one of those. It’s the same with teaching.’

  ‘There must be something you want to do.’

  ‘Why?’