Birdcage

by Victor Canning

  Over the meal he had told her something of himself, always talking lightly, never going into anything in detail, and never using her curiosity about him to return it with any that he held for her. His father had retired from the navy to become a tea-planter in Kenya. Both his father and mother were now dead. He had no brothers or sisters and only a handful of relatives in England. He had gone to school in England, flying back to Africa for holidays and he had done his national service in Kenya. Beyond that he was reticent about what he had done for a living, except that he had travelled a lot, spoke competently three or four languages and had never married and “. . . never made any money worth speaking of. No ambition, no drive.” Giving her a swift pursing of his lips and that ugly, warm smile.

  From somewhere far away a church bell struck three. In the convent now the bell for Lauds would be chiming and, since the order kept strict rule, the nuns would be rising to assemble in chapel. How often had she sinned at the small agony of rising which filled her body. And then castigated herself and her struggle for-grace, chanting with the others:

  O Lord, our Lord, how wonderful

  is thy name in all the earth;

  Thou who has proclaimed thy

  glory upon the heavens.

  Out of the mouths of babes and

  sucklings thou has prepared praise

  to confuse thy adversaries;

  to silence the enemy and the revengeful.

  She put down a hand and smoothed her belly through the silk of the new nightdress she had bought. Silk against her skin and sin within her. Tears moved in her eyes but she was lost to know their origin. Self-pity or self-deceit. In the eyes and manner of his doctor friend, Herman, she had read his thoughts and had known that she, too, in the last months had now and then not been stranger to them. Had she, so incredibly innocent of her own body, embraced a dream in order to escape from a reality which she could no longer tolerate? He had more than once found excuses for coming into the store-room, hot and stuffy, high under the hospital roof where the bed linen and blankets were kept and of which she had charge . . . from design more than accident, she sensed, had touched her hand or moved his body against hers while turning in the small space between the tiered linen and blankets. The room like a furnace with its steam pipes, knowing she was going to faint—as she had done once before—from the heat, and then fainting. She forced her mind to hold the memories, scourging herself with them . . . coming-to each time with her clothes loosened and free, but refusing to open her eyes while she knew he cradled her head and shoulders and his free hand moved over her skin until she groaned, shook her head and pulled herself up to open her eyes and meet his unmoving face while he said, “You frightened me. After this second time I’ll tell them you mustn’t work up here any more.” Then his smile and the seeming confirmation of everything as he touched her cheek gently, smoothing it with the back of his hand. And then the missing periods and the confusion in her mind a slowly growing hell. She sat up suddenly, groaned, and buried her head in her hands, remembering the look on the face of the other doctor, Herman; reading his thoughts because for a while they had been hers, her hope that the passing of each month inexorably stifled.

  She got out of bed, pulled Helen Holdern’s dressing gown about her and went to the window and opened it. A nightingale greeted her with a great sobbing of song . . . a stream of liquid, magic notes, their beauty filling her with a swift, unquestionable joy.

  At that moment, through her open bedroom door, she heard him half scream and then shout aloud, and go on shouting . . . shouting, shouting.

  Switching on the light she ran along the corridor to his room. The door was half-open and as she went in he shouted again, a sobbing, wildly passionate flood of hysterical words in some language unknown to her. She went to the bed and sat by him, putting her hand on his shoulder and shaking him and at her touch all sound went from him for a moment. Then, unaware of her presence, he sat up, his head bowed, and while he reached out automatically to switch on his bedside light he muttered, “Oh, Christ. . . Oh, Christ. . .”

  She shook him gently by the shoulder and he slowly looked up at her, his rugged face deeply shadowed by the oblique fall of the bedside light.

  “Are you all right?”

  He nodded and dropped his head a little to hide his face and he reached out—she was sure without knowing he did it—and took her hand for a moment or two. Then he looked at her, half-smiled and breathed deeply, bracing himself, and said, “Was I shouting like a banshee?”

  She nodded. “Was it a bad dream?”

  “Sort of. I’m sorry.” He grinned. “I left my door open so that I could hear if you called in the night. Worked the other way round. Pay no attention. I’m used to it. Been going on for years. You go on back to bed. I’ll be all right.” He reached out, held her arm and gave it a friendly shake. “You go back. I’ll read for a while.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  She stood up slowly, looking down at him. Her heart in that moment yearned for the chance to do something for him. She wanted to sit beside him, take him into her arms as though he were a child and comfort him, she wanted with a passion that had nothing to do with her woman’s body, to hold him to her and wipe away whatever memories or fears had racked his dreams. Hesitantly she said, “I could make you some coffee. Or get you a drink.”

  He grinned then, tight pressing his thick long lips and puffing them out with held breath. “No, thank you, nurse. I’m O.K. Really.”

  She went back to her room. The nightingale was still singing but now, almost as though in irritation, an owl called complainingly as well. She lay in bed, propped high against her pillows. In the darkness which melded sea and sky, in the agonising sanity of knowing she had wanted to live, she had screamed and shouted as he had done. And he had come to her. But this night he, too, had known terror and her presence and touch had drawn him from whatever horror haunted his sleep. There was a pattern, a deliberate shuttling of their destinies, being worked by some power. There was no hysteria in the thought. She knew and believed that it was all ordained. God or the Devil had drawn them together. It did not matter which. He belonged to her and had claim to all the love and service he might ask from her. Those were the terms written into the deed of her survival through him, and as surely as that was so, then as surely the way of her love and service would be shown to her. She lay there and the tears shone in her eyes and her body began to tremble with the power of her desire.

  When she awoke to the sunrise and the lusty calling of the cock who squired the hens in their pen she found that in the night she had been given the first sign that she was free from all restraint to serve him, free from any division of her love for him with any other.

  * * * *

  At mid-morning Farley walked over to Herman’s place. It was about a mile away inland on a slowly rising hill covered with holm and cork oaks. He took a footpath that avoided the roads and whistled gently to himself as he walked. He had left Sarah in her room where she was making some minor alterations to one of the dresses she had bought the day before. It was a cloudless morning, but with a faint touch of cold in the northwest wind coming down from the Monchique hills. The lupins were in bloom and here and there the walls around the cultivated patches were bright with patches of tricoloured convolvulus. Early purple orchids were showing through the pathside grasses. Once across the path ahead of him slid a harmless horse-shoe snake, the sun heightening the purple bloom of its black skin, its yellow spotting blurred to a golden line as it moved rapidly away from him. A woman came down the path, riding a mule side-saddle, and gave him a greeting, a big smile spreading over her walnut skin. Eight years he had been in the country and he knew nearly all of the people around. At a small cabin he stopped and talked to another woman who stood, tall for her race, carrying a plastic container filled with water on her head cushioned by a twist of rag made into a sogra. From somewhere distantly came the smell of baking bread.

  H
erman was hoeing between the rows of young maize with a tape recorder perched on an upturned bucket playing Spanish guitar music. He said, “I’m glad you’ve come. Let’s go and have a drink.”

  They sat under a bamboo-thatched awning and he brought a jug of white wine and a dish of black olives. He filled Farley’s glass and said, “What brings you up here?”

  “I felt like the exercise.”

  Herman pulled his long nose and smiled. “And our nun friend—didn’t she want a walk?”

  “No. She’s busy making alterations to some new clothes she’s bought.”

  “Marsox was up here. Told me you’d been out with her.” Herman flicked an olive pit at a lizard which slid under a clump of mesembryanthemum. “You advanced her some cash of course.”

  “Well . . . she’d got none of her own.”

  “Famous last words. The kind of woman you want is one who will take over and manage you and fill your dwindling bank account. I’m right, you know.”

  Farley nodded and smiled. “You’re always right, Herman. In fact, I’ve walked all the way up here just to tell you how right you were. Her woman’s thing started during the night. As you said. Just hysteria.”

  “She told you?”

  “When I took her breakfast. Didn’t make a thing of it. Just told me. Sitting up there, blue-eyed and fair-haired like a close-cropped Madonna. Made no fuss about it.”

  Herman shrugged his shoulders. “Well, that’s good. But I’m not surprised. There are still plenty of naive girls about who think they’ll conceive if a man kisses them. Well, now she’s got nothing to worry about and she’s free to travel. . . without any embarrassing luggage.”

  “You don’t like her—do you?”

  “It’s not like or dislike. I just have a feeling about her. That she’s not good for you. Bruxa”

  Farley chuckled. “You’re on Maria’s side now.”

  “No, I’m not. But I have a feeling about her. There’s nothing I’d like better than to see you shack up comfortably with a woman. Even better, get married. But not with this one.”

  “That kind of thing never crossed my mind.”

  “That’s what makes the situation dangerous. She’s got to have a very special feeling for you because you saved her life. That would be all right if she’d been out for a night’s fishing and fell overboard. You’d get a big thank you of one kind or another then—and that would be the end of it. But this is a woman who’s going to put you in the place of everything she’s rejected. Eight years a nun and she couldn’t take it, never should have tried it. Then she imagines herself—out of some innocuous incident probably—to be pregnant. Even makes her body think so for a while, and herself that the only way to maintain her honour or whatever she would decide to call it is to swim out to sea and drown. But when it comes to the point her real nature, the true woman, surfaces knowing she wants to live. And you give your life . . . coming to her over the face of the dark waters. Now she really has got something to hold on to. Something solid and real . . . someone she’ll convince herself, whether it’s true or not, needs her.”

  “For God’s sake, that’s going it a bit. I don’t need anyone. Anyway she’s got nothing to give me.”

  Herman shook his head. “Then what are you doing up here? You don’t come up more than once or twice in a year when the phone’s out of order. Why the morning stroll?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Of course you know. You could have told me about the period thing over the phone, or any time when I was down.”

  Farley raised his head and looked squarely at him and then he smiled, a warm, frank smile full of admiration for Herman. “You’re a clever old sod, aren’t you? You really should have gone on with doctoring. You’ve got a flair for diagnosis that could have made you a fortune.”

  Herman laughed. “There’s not a fortune or a diagnosis that makes a sound like a guitar. Listen to that——” he nodded at the tape recorder which he had brought from the garden with him and which was still playing. “That’s Zaradin. Every note is golden. So, stop side-stepping and tell me.”

  “I had a letter from the Holderns this morning. They’re coming back at the end of the week. He wants to play in some golf tournament at Val de Lobo so they’re cutting their trip a bit short.”

  “No problem. Move in here. You’ve done it before. You like music and you’re a good worker. Anyway, there are half a dozen people who’d take you . . . Ah, I see. I must be better than I thought I was. You told her.”

  “Yes. When I took her breakfast up. We had a chat. After all, the Holderns can’t be expected to keep her there. I said I would have to look for a new place and—well, what was she going to do?”

  “She’s got relations or friends somewhere, surely?”

  “She’s got a father in England but there’s no love lost there. She wouldn’t go to him. Some old family trouble. She didn’t go into it. Her mother’s dead, but she’s got an aunt who has a villa up in the hills, in the Monchique area.” He shook the little wine in his glass, than swallowed it. “She wants me to drive her up there.”

  “Then do it, and she’s off your hands.”

  “It isn’t as simple as that. Before I could do anything she was along to the Holderns’ bedroom and telephoning her aunt. Then she came back and told me that her aunt was over the moon at hearing from her. Apparently she’d heard the news about leaving the convent. And—this is the bit—she’d told the aunt about my being on the loose soon and the old girl—if she is an old girl, I don’t know, I didn’t ask—insisted that I should stay there for a while. Oh, you know the old gubbins. I’d done so much for her and so on. And she was so damned pleased and excited about it and, I suppose, about being able to do something for me in return that I . . . Well, I said—O.K.—if that’s what she wanted. Anyway,” Farley’s chin tightened stubbornly, “it’s a billet for a while. Besides, I’ve had it here. I thought I’d stay a while for politeness and then move on.”

  “Where?”

  Farley spread his hands wide. “Where? Well, I can’t go back to Kenya. I thought England, America . . . I don’t know. This place is getting as crowded as Blackpool or Cannes.” He reached for the jug and refilled his glass and then with his eyes on Herman, his face still and carved with thought, he went on, his voice edged with the small rasp of bitterness, “Damn it all, I’m near forty. I haven’t done a thing with my life. Not a thing, Herman. And I won’t unless I find something soon. All I’ve got in the world is a few thousand escudos, a car, a few clothes and some fishing tackle. I don’t even own a decent book. I put everything into that restaurant and when that went . . . well. So, I thought. Move on. Maybe the gods want it that way.” He grinned, his manner changing abruptly. “The sad story of one, Richard Farley, the eternal but not over-industrious optimist. But just wait for the next instalment. Rags to riches. Oh, Christ, what does it matter anyway?”

  * * * *

  Geddy got out of the lift on the third floor of the Savoy Hotel and began to walk the corridors looking for the number of Lord Bellmaster’s room. He was long over his irritation at being summoned to London at such short notice. Anyway, he had already made arrangements to improve the not exactly shining hour which he would have to endure with His Lordship by a pleasant divertissement of his own later in the day. Wryly he was thinking that once they had ever made use of you, no matter the lapse of years, they had a lien on you for ever and had only to raise a finger to have you come running. Not that they had bothered him much or importantly in the last ten years. Bellmaster, like himself, was no longer active with them, but he was still part of them. No one ever truly left Birdcage until death came.

  Turning a corridor corner he came on a small Arab boy, shouting, and pushing a vacuum cleaner (filched, no doubt, from the housekeeper’s storeroom) along the carpet, chasing an Arab girl who ran laughing ahead of him wheeling a toy pram. He side-stepped them both as an Arab woman came out of a suite and began to shriek at them, bearing down on them her head s
hawl and robes full spread like a dhow before the wind. The ghosts of Edwardians past, Geddy mused, must have long in distress given up haunting these corridors, their eyes blurred with phantom tears for the demise of an Empire. A faint smell of kous-kous made the still air piquant. The first kous-kous he had ever eaten had been in Tunis, a young territorial gunner captain enjoying the war-time escape from his father’s Cheltenham office. That was the day when Bellmaster—though not in person—had come into his life and he had been seconded to Intelligence. Bellmaster had arrived after the war when the marriage settlement with Branton had to be made. His choice as solicitor, he knew, had been no accident. The skeletons in the cupboard must be kept in the family.

  There was a DO NOT DISTURB notice outside the door. He knocked and Bellmaster opened it to him, greeting him with a puffy handshake, a big amused stare, and “My dear Geddy. How nice to see you.” The door closed with the notice still hanging on its knob.