The Birdcage

by John Bowen

  *

  Aubrey had left his briefcase at the office. By the time he had returned from Cornwall Gardens, a chatter of secretaries was already moving down the stairs and out of the lift. Aubrey went back upstairs against the current. Norah Palmer was still working at her desk.

  “How did it go?” she said.

  “It went.”

  “You must have found something.”

  Aubrey told Norah Palmer how it had gone. He told her of the Abbot-Hansteads and of Jane Fudge. He told her of the ferret. He told her that the manuscript of The Forgotten Men, together with many other MSS. of plays perhaps equally significant, had become a nest for mice. He had taken a pad with him on his visit, and had made notes. He told her in detail, as they sat together in a glass stall on the third floor, and the secretaries were gone, and the stairs were silent, and cleaners moved among the desks, putting waste-paper in sacks for salvage. “At least it had a gruesome sort of interest,” Norah Palmer said.

  Aubrey could do without that sort of interest, thank you very much. But he did see that he’d be able to tell the story at parties for a while until everybody had heard it.

  “What was that about a Ministry?”

  Aubrey consulted his notes. “There was somebody called Lambert, who was killed in the war. And they didn’t go to Laverick’s house; he came to theirs.”

  “No, it was about making tea at a Ministry.”

  “Here it is. He was something to do with the Civil Service, but not a civil servant, whatever that means. And then he was Lambert’s student.”

  “Must mean evening classes.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Not a civil servant in their sense … I suppose the people in post-offices are civil servants, if you think about it, but they never get C.B.E.s.”

  “I think they’d have said if he’d been a postman. I mean, they’d have noticed the uniform.”

  “You know, every Ministry must have its own equivalents for the people behind the counters in post-offices. One doesn’t hear of them, but they must be there. Do they get promoted?——”

  “Search me.”

  “—or do they just go on doing the same sort of thing for a bit more money as they grow older? There must be some sort of a record kept of these people. There must be Personnel Officers for them.”

  “The Abbot-Hansteads didn’t say what Ministry,” Aubrey said quickly. “They didn’t say a Ministry at all, as a matter of fact. I mean, for all we know there may be civil servants without Ministries. Just sort of on the strength.”

  Norah Palmer said, “The sort of people who become civil servants usually go on being civil servants. They go into it because they want security, and they stay in it for the same reason. Not much money, but it comes in every week, and there’s a pension at the end of it. It’s very difficult to dismiss a civil servant. I don’t think they have any procedure for that.”

  “Anyway he wouldn’t still be with a Ministry. He’s retired long ago. He’s almost certainly dead.”

  “And their sons go into the civil service after them. And their sons. Odd. You’d expect rebellion, wouldn’t you? The ritual slaughter of the father.”

  Aubrey didn’t know what she was talking about, but assumed it to be something intellectual. “Dead or retired,” he said.

  “You really have done wonderfully well, Aubrey, gruesome as it must have been. I’ll ask Paul”—Head of Drama—“to tell Mr. P. you’re on the track of something.”

  “I can’t go round all the Ministries, Norah; I really can’t. I mean, things do pile up, you know.”

  “Poor Aubrey! I’m so sorry. Do you want me to put someone else on it?”

  Bitch! bitch! bitch! Mr. P. would be just about waiting for that. It would be what he needed to justify the way he blocked Aubrey all the time. “No. I’ll do it,” he said.

  “What about expenses? You haven’t been charging.”

  “I’ve kept a note. It’s only taxis.” Bitterly. “I haven’t had the opportunity to take anybody out to lunch.”

  If Aubrey thought that Norah Palmer liked taking people out to lunch, he was bloody mad as well as bloody stupid. Eating more than one wanted to eat in the middle of the day! Drinking gin before the meal and wine with it, because not to drink would embarrass one’s guest! Fighting against sleepiness in consequence all through the afternoon! … But one doesn’t know these things until one has done it. No blame to Aubrey. If one only did it occasionally and with people one liked, expense-account lunching would be a great pleasure. Norah said, “Let me buy you a drink anyway. I expect you can do with one, and I know I could.”

  “Well….” The embarrassment.

  “We’ll go to a club I know, and then there won’t be any bother about my having to slip you the money. Don’t worry. It’s just a drinking club, not a Club in the grand sense, I do belong to a Women’s Club as a matter of fact, because it’s somewhere to sleep if I’m stuck, and anyway I’m a feminist at heart, so I keep on paying the subscription and never go, like belonging to the Howard League and not have time to read the Journal.”

  “Well——”

  “You’ll probably know some of the people. Do come. I’ll just get washed first.” Get washed. Why couldn’t she say, “powder my nose” like everybody else?

  And why had she asked him, Aubrey wondered. She had never asked him to have a drink before. There was something suspect in it. As for Norah, washing her hands in the Ladies’ Lavatory, Why did I ask him? she wondered. He was such a boring boy. But he had sounded so envious about the lunches.

  Later they sat on stools at a bar, while somewhere a tape called In Sentimental Mood unwound to make them music. Norah Palmer drank gin and water, and Aubrey (to show he knew his way about, and had been to the south of France) drank a mixture of gin and St. Raphael. Both ate crisps and stuffed olives from glass dishes. After the first death, there is no other went irritatingly round and round in Norah Palmer’s head like a jingle as she listened to Aubrey, and made the right responses, and assured him that he must not attempt to buy a drink for himself because this was on the firm. After the first death … but it all gets blurred, and easy to do, and nobody notices death or an emptiness if they are not looking for it, and really, if only one will listen, and play the game, eat an olive and take another drink, one doesn’t even notice oneself.

  Norah Palmer inclined her head a little to one side, and listened to Aubrey, who told her that he had always been good at English when he was at school, and that he could have gone on if he’d wanted to do so, but one missed a great deal by wasting all that time at a university, Aubrey said, because it wasn’t like life, was it, whereas he, Aubrey, had had nothing but life ever since he was sixteen. First there had been the Travel Agency, and then the Pay Corps in Austria. I mean, you meet all sorts in the Army, even though Aubrey had himself managed to get a commission because of his accent and that sort of thing, which rather took him out of contact with the Other Ranks; it was nonsense really because, I mean, nobody could have been more inefficient than he at imprests and all that, and he’d relied on his sergeant to do most of it for him, and just sort of taken the responsibility, which is what an officer is basically for. And then there’d been stage-management, and going on tour and that sort of thing. The sorts he’d met in the theatre had certainly been all, from actors themselves, who were a pretty mixed crowd, to provincial stage-hands, and above all the landladies of theatrical digs. His landlady in Coventry had taken him Olde Tyme dancing, and seduced him, as a matter of fact, when she brought the early morning tea. She’d sat on his bed, stroked his head, and said he was looking pale; after that, one thing had led to another.

  Norah smiled, tilted her head the other way, drank gin and water, ate a crisp. A man Aubrey actually knew, a sort of film director or something, recognized Aubrey, and nodded to him in a very friendly way, and Norah Palmer turned out to know him also, so the man joined them for a couple, and then went away. Aubrey told Norah Palmer that he himself had been a fo
ol not to get into films, because once you were in, you were in, but that now the Unions would keep him from getting any job in films that was comparable in salary or status to the job he had at present. Aubrey said that he wasn’t a Conservative—he had no politics, as a matter of fact; he didn’t see that it made much difference—but that people ought to realize that the Unions had throttled the cinema industry, and that pretty soon they’d get a stranglehold on television as well. Just look at New York, Aubrey said. Just let Norah Palmer look at what the Unions had done to the theatre on Broadway. If Aubrey had an ambition—and he had; he had a lot of ambition, if Norah Palmer wanted to know—if he had an ambition, it was to visit New York, because in New York someone like Aubrey could get on, and would not be held back by not having been to a university. Aubrey didn’t suppose that Mr. P. would ever send him to New York, the way Mr. P. had sent Paul to New York, and so many others, but if Mr. P. ever did send Aubrey to New York, then Aubrey wouldn’t bother to come back, and Norah Palmer might as well know it.

  Norah Palmer said:

  “A knife and a fork and a piece of pork,

  That’s the way to spell New York.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Sorry. Just a jingle. I’m fascinated by jingles this evening.” Norah Palmer began to wonder what she was to do with him. She had started something, and ought to stop it, but that would take effort, and it was so much easier to drift when one had had a hard day. Because, for Christ’s sake, who cared? “We’d better get something to eat, I suppose,” she said.

  “Let me.” He couldn’t remember how much money he had in his wallet, but surely there would be enough? Perhaps he could get to the loo to count it before suggesting a place.

  But Norah said it would be easier to go back to her place, and make an omelette.

  Do I want to? Do I really want to? she thought, watching across the kitchen table. Wouldn’t it complicate matters at the office? Aubrey was handling his fork with too much care, chewing his food with too little. Really, that boy has no chin at all, she thought. If she herself were only a little more sober, she would be able to think of some way of getting rid of him without wounding his pride.

  Aubrey knew well enough why Norah Palmer had asked him back to her flat. He didn’t mind, he supposed, if that was what she wanted, though she must be at least eight years older than he. He hoped it wasn’t going to complicate things at the office. Once or twice would be all very well, but he hoped she wouldn’t always be expecting him to…. After all, at Coventry he’d been moving on in a week, never to return, and Mrs. Thing had made all the running. He didn’t mind—well, going to bed and all that, but how was he expected to lead up to it? Most of Aubrey’s sexual experiences so far had come quite naturally out of heavy necking, usually at parties or after a dance. He didn’t know if he could carry through the same sort of routine with somebody so senior to him in every way. He said, “You must let me help you wash up.”

  Some ninety minutes later, Norah Palmer said, “Really, it doesn’t matter. Please don’t feel…. I mean….”

  “I’m awfully sorry, Norah.”

  “Really, it doesn’t matter.”

  “I hope you’re not disappointed.”

  So he was crass, on top of everything else.

  Aubrey said, “I suppose it was having so much to drink. I mean, it does affect people like that sometimes, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s nothing to do with you or anything.” A silence. Then awkwardly, “I mean, you’re awfully nice.”

  For a moment she considered telling him not to worry, to go to sleep, and that everything would be all right later. But that would mean his staying the night. The bed was too narrow to sleep both of them comfortably (or probably at all), and as for that “later”, it would be too humiliating if she had to put up with this ineptitude all over again. He said, “I suppose I’d better be on my way.”

  “Let me make you some coffee.”

  “No.” Quickly. “No, you just stay where you are. I’ll manage. Don’t get up.” Clumps and bumps of Aubrey, dressing in the dark. He had lost a sock. Heavy breathing as he searched for it. Norah switched on the bedside lamp, and there he was, rumpled in Y-front underwear. He finished dressing, hesitated, considered whether it would be good manners to kiss her good-bye, decided against it, and was gone. Norah went almost immediately to sleep.

  Next morning Squad, washed and shaved, but wearing silk pyjamas and a frogged dressing-gown, walked into the kitchen where Norah was breakfasting on coffee. “Well!” he said, “Such adventures, my dear!”

  “Oh, Squad, don’t.”

  “Not my taste at all, I must say.”

  Norah said sadly, “Not mine either, I’m afraid. It all turned out rather badly.”

  “There’ll be red ears on the third floor this morning. I’ve brought your letters. There’s only one. The postmark says ‘Chard’, if that’s likely.”

  “In Somerset. It’s from my mum.” Norah Palmer opened the envelope with that slight lowering of the spirits her mother’s handwriting always induced in her, and began to read the letter. Norah’s mother wrote that Norah had been naughty not to have told her at once of what had happened, but that she could understand this because Norah never had been able to admit a mistake. (Did Norah remember that time with Miss Bossy’s cat? They could laugh about it now, but it had been a great old tragedy then, hadn’t it?) Norah’s mother wasn’t going to say any more about it, because what’s done is done, and anyway she never had thought it was any of her business, Norah being old enough to look after her own life, and Norah’s mother having taken a vow long ago never, never, never to interfere with her children. As Norah knew, Norah’s mother never had been able to write letters, although she loved to get them. What Norah’s mother felt was that probably Norah would want to have a good old chin-wag with somebody—not about this business particularly, but about things in general. Sometimes it did help to talk things over; even if it decided nothing, one felt a bit clearer in one’s mind, and could begin to see the wood from the trees. Anyway, whatever Norah felt about that (and it was up to her entirely) Norah’s mother had been thinking of coming up to London to have a real old go at the shops, not having had a real old go for ages, and they’d have a real old go together if Norah could make the time for it. Norah was not to put herself out in any way, because Norah’s mother didn’t expect to stay with her, and perhaps Norah would find a good, cheap hotel somewhere nearby, and would book her in. She had great plans now that Auntie May had let them all down over New Zealand, but they could talk about all that during her visit. She would arrive on Sunday week, if that suited Norah. She said nothing about going.

  Norah Palmer put her head down on the table, and wept, and Squad went off to the bathroom to fetch her an Alka-Seltzer.

  5

  The Night People

  If you will look back to the end of Chapter I, you will find there a hint that more had occurred than Peter Ash had told of the episode of the threatening gondolier. In arranging the story for telling, Peter Ash had ommitted some details and altered others. On that evening in Venice he had drunk, it is true, “a couple of coffees and a little Kummel”, but he had followed the Kummel with four brandies, and they had combined with the bottle of Soave he had consumed at dinner to make a clouded restlessness in him.

  Yes, it had seemed “ridiculously early to go to bed when the concert was over”, but what else was there to do in Venice, with all the cinemas showing dubbed versions of Abbot and Costello Meet the Werewolf, and with the Fenice Theatre closed for the summer? For a while he had sat where he was at Quadri’s, and he had watched the people passing and re-passing in the Piazza. Certain young men, he noticed, seemed to pass and re-pass more often than anyone else, doing a leisurely sentry-duty from one end of the Piazza to the other. They were not tourists, or, if they were, they were Italian tourists, and tourists without the attachments of families or friends, without even cameras, and without the bright summer plumage in which tourists are usually clo
thed. For lack of any other focus of interest, he began to pick out individuals among them, and follow their progress. There was the one in dark blue. He was walking west, and passed two Americans walking east: the Americans were men in their early thirties, wore checked jackets of Madras cotton, and seemed prosperous. Peter Ash noticed that, after Bluey had passed them, the two Americans stopped. Bluey also stopped, looked back for a moment, then walked on rather more slowly. One of the two Americans flipped a coin on the back of his hand, which both examined. Then he who had flipped the coin smiled, shrugged and continued his progress to the east. His companion turned, walked rapidly west, and soon drew level with Bluey. There was a moment’s conversation between them. Then both walked south together into the Piazetta, and out of sight. Peter Ash found that his imagination followed them.

  Forty-five minutes later, Peter Ash was in a gondola with a boy called Mario, whose home, he said, was in Milan. Mario told Peter Ash that he liked the English very much, considerably more than he liked the Germans, who were not sympatico. He had an English friend, and the friend had promised Mario that, if Mario ever came to England, he would find a job for him. Mario produced from his wallet a grubby piece of paper, on which was written in (unhappily indelible) pencil an address in Chingwell. Mario did not yet have the money for the fare, but he was saving for it. Peter Ash understood Mario very well, and a price was arranged. A price was also arranged for the gondola, and the gondolier, as it seemed, had become blind and deaf by long experience of this sort of encounter. It was a most disagreeable surprise for Peter Ash when, once they had reached the middle of an expanse of water that may have been the Giudecca Canal, the climate of the affeir so suddenly changed.