The Birdcage

by Marcia Willett

  Shuffle hop step tap ball change. Shuffle hop step tap ball change. Shuffle hop step, shuffle step, shuffle step, shuffle ball change.

  She could hear, inside her head, the dancing mistress shouting the steps above the clatter of tap shoes, accentuating the beat; her body could remember the rhythm, arms swinging loosely, head up. She couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. How she’d loved the music, the movement, the disciplining of the body; the barre that had been fixed to the wall in the attic room forty years ago was still there where Lizzie had once performed her daily exercises, her little routine: pliés, battements, port de bras, watching herself in the glass on the opposite wall. She still did a regular workout.

  ‘But not this morning,’ she muttered as she dressed quickly, pulling on jeans and a black T-shirt.

  An appointment with the hairdresser hurried her down the stairs for coffee and some toast. The brochure was lying where she’d left it but she glanced away from it, humming to herself again, concentrating on what Jim had told her about the possibility of work with a touring company in the autumn. Could she cope with the arduous routine, the travelling, the same performance night after night?

  ‘Just what you need, heart,’ he’d said reassuringly. He was very kind, very professional and insisted that his extravagant speech and flamboyant behaviour were simply by-products of a lifetime working with actors. Lizzie adored him.

  ‘I feel a bit wobbly,’ she’d told him before she’d left London. ‘I need a break. I’m going to Bristol.’

  ‘Back to the Birdcage?’ That’s what the tall, narrow house had been dubbed back in the early sixties once the agency had learned that three women lived in it, one of them called Pidgeon.

  Standing in the kitchen, drinking black coffee, waiting for the toaster to fling its contents on to the floor, Lizzie thinks of Angel’s delight at the joke and how she pleads for them to change the address officially.

  ‘It’s all very well for you,’ retorts Pidge, ‘but how would you like your letters to be addressed to “Miss Pidgeon, The Birdcage”? Have a heart.’

  Instead, Angel finds a pretty, gilt birdcage – from some prop room? – complete with two brightly painted, little wooden birds perched on a trapeze. Shortly afterwards an even smaller chick, made of soft yellow material, is added.

  ‘That’s you,’ says Angel to Lizzie. ‘See? You’re a swinging chick. How do you like that?’

  The birdcage hangs above the piano in the sitting-room for years. It becomes a symbol, an in-joke.

  ‘That’s us,’ Angel tells visitors. ‘Three little birds in a gilded cage. Well, one chick and two old boilers . . .’ she adds – and waits for the inevitable denial, the compliments.

  The birdcage is such a part of their lives together that it is impossible to imagine either Pidge or Angel getting rid of it. When Angel dies of complications following the onset of pneumonia, Pidge lives on alone until she, too, dies after a series of strokes. She leaves the house with all its contents to Lizzie.

  ‘I can’t sell it,’ Lizzie tells Sam. ‘I just can’t. Not yet, anyway.’

  ‘No need,’ he answers easily. ‘It will be useful as a little bolt-hole.’

  ‘That’s about right,’ she agrees. ‘I always bolted back to it. Between productions, after your disastrous love affairs. I always finished up in the Birdcage with Angel and Pidge.’

  ‘That’s not quite what I had in mind,’ he says, putting an arm round her, knowing how hard she is taking Pidge’s death. He makes a face, rolling his eyes, guying a saucy leer, hoping to make her smile, holding her closer. ‘More of a love nest, perhaps, than a birdcage?’ and she laughs at his feeble joke, winding her arms about him.

  Ten years ago since Pidge died, thought Lizzie, swallowing her toast with difficulty. And less than two years ago Sam and I were here together. And now?

  She began to clear her breakfast things, the action distracting her from such thoughts, concentrating instead on the missing birdcage. It would be good to see it again; to hang it up as a gesture to the past. She decided that as soon as she was home again she would have a thorough search for it.

  All the while, as she collected her keys, hunted for her bag, the photograph seemed to cry continually for her attention. Reluctantly, almost fearfully, she paused to look at it again. ‘The Yarn Market is octagonal and dates from the fifteenth century . . .’

  Lizzie bent closer to look at the smaller, inset picture. Another fragment, just like the scene in the shop, slid clearly into her mind.

  The Yarn Market. She remembers running in through the doorless entrance, calling to Angel, who stands on the cobbles outside in the sunshine, and leaning through the big window spaces.

  ‘Look at me? Can you see me?’

  ‘I can see you, sweetie, I can see you.’ But Angel is looking up the High Street, her eyes darting from shop doorways to peer at the occupants of a car; distracted, preoccupied, always on the watch.

  Lizzie feels the slubby crispness of her yellow and white gingham frock, bare feet in sandshoes, and her long plait, thick as Angel’s wrist, knocking against her back as she jumps along beside her mother down the sunken, narrow, cobbled pavement. They pause beside the hotel, with its big medieval porch, before crossing the road to the Yarn Market. It is cool and dark beneath the slated roof and she dances, singing breathlessly to herself, a small, bright flame of colour amongst the shadows, whilst Angel waits, watching and watching. But for whom?

  This question occupied Lizzie as she walked into the town: as she chatted to the friendly girl who blow-dried her hair; as she did her shopping; all the while she was trying to pin the memory down, to capture it. If she could remember which year it had been, then other things might fall into place; but why should Angel, of all people, decide to take a holiday in a tiny town on Exmoor? Angel liked bustle, unexpected outings to restaurants or pubs, friends dropping by for impromptu drinks: she became restive and bored after ten minutes up on Brandon Hill. Nor did she consider it necessary for Lizzie to be taken on holiday except during the summer of that one year. That Dunster year.

  Back at home, Lizzie kicked off her shoes, put away the shopping and collected the ingredients for her lunch. Mostly she couldn’t be bothered to eat formally – it seemed such an effort for just one person – but today she felt a need to prepare something almost as a rite to the shades of Pidge and Angel rather than for herself. Just now, here in the Birdcage, she felt that they were very close to her: Angel, eyes closed, stretched along the sofa in the window, with Pidge sewing nearby, arguing across the table or perhaps pottering in the kitchen. Pidge was responsible for most of the cooking, although Angel liked to experiment – either disastrously or brilliantly. ‘I am never commonplace,’ she’d say grandly, shovelling her mistakes into a newspaper whilst Pidge, resigned, began to make an omelette. ‘I don’t do things by halves.’ Because of going down to the theatre each evening, mealtimes were movable feasts and Pidge remained flexible at all times.

  Now, as Lizzie set the table, she felt as if she were making them an offering, a simple little puja: smoked salmon with chunks of lemon, rings of tomato in a vinaigrette with herbs, thin slices of cucumber in mayonnaise, and new brown bread. She chose the dishes with care: round, white bone-china for the salmon; oval, blue earthenware for the tomatoes; a yellow bowl for the cucumber. Oddly, the palette of colour and texture worked. Lizzie felt that Pidge and Angel would have approved. Unable to afford the best, each of them had made a point of buying and using things that caught her attention and appealed to her own particular taste.

  Pleased with her puja, Lizzie poured herself a glass of chilled Sancerre and sat down.

  ‘I know I shouldn’t be eating this because it’s for you,’ she said aloud so as to placate the shades of Pidge and Angel. ‘It’s not a real puja but it’s the best I can do.’

  The little meal was delicious. Afterwards, she cut herself some cheese and made coffee, strong and black. Sitting quietly, she stared out across the room, through
the branches of the plane tree outside the window, to the rooftops and the sky beyond, listening to other things beside the city’s sounds.

  Later, she climbed the steep stairs to the attic room. Once her own special eyrie, now it was full of those things that had been put aside for later use – ‘It might come in,’ Pidge had been fond of saying – as well as the items which, out of sentimental attachment, they’d simply been unable to throw away. It was years since Lizzie had used this room and it was here she hoped to find the birdcage. Which one of them would have decided that the joke was too stale to want to keep it hanging above the piano? Perhaps, after Angel died, Pidge had found it too painful a reminder.

  Lizzie moved slowly between cardboard boxes, bulging bin-liners and small pieces of furniture. Old books, with broken spines and ragged leaves, were stacked on the small bookcase she’d used as a child, whilst a chair with a broken leg held a faded tapestry stool in its lap. There was no sign of the birdcage. It was too big to be stored in the boxes which were marked clearly with felt-tip pen; too bulky for the bin-liners, weighty with their burden of old curtains and blankets, which she moved carefully aside in case they’d been piled on top of it. She peered into a tea-chest, which was packed with sheet music and theatre programmes, and stared for a moment at the cardboard box bearing the legend ‘LIZZIE’S TOYS’. To distract herself from the mixed emotions that this evoked, she turned aside and glanced along the shelf at the books. Amongst these battered copies were several Reprint Society editions. Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day, two Rumer Goddens, Maugham’s Theatre and an Iris Murdoch.

  Lizzie leafed through the Bowen and then picked up Theatre. She remembered that Angel had given it to Pidge as a birthday present and, still feeling their shades close at hand, she decided to take the book down to read later. She looked about her, frowning: the birdcage was nowhere to be seen and she was acutely disappointed. It was foolish and irrational but she’d cherished the hope that she would discover it here amongst these artefacts of the past, but suspected now that it must have been thrown away. Angel’s rooms, which Lizzie now used, had no cupboard large enough to conceal it and Pidge’s quarters, cleared out and redecorated, were let to a young woman taking a post-graduate course at the university.

  Lizzie went into the sitting-room and lay full-length on the sofa. She felt deeply hurt that the birdcage had been disposed of without her consent.

  ‘After all,’ she said aloud, crossly, as if to admonish the accompanying shades, ‘I was part of it too.’

  She can imagine it quite clearly. The two little wooden birds have been so delicately painted that it seems that the feathers, blue and green and yellow, must stir; that at any moment the wings might be stretched for flight. Angel, professional as always in the setting of a scene, places a tiny bowl of seed on the floor of the cage and hangs a round mirror beside the trapeze. Pidge refuses to let her put a second bowl of water beside the seed.

  ‘It’ll get stale and smell,’ she says firmly, ‘or get knocked over when people peer in.’

  Angel grumbles, her artistic sensibilities affronted, but Pidge won’t budge. There is only just room on the swing for the yellow chick, probably an Easter toy from a cardboard egg. She leans rakishly, her bright orange feet wound about with wire so as to attach her to the wooden bar, her fluffy wings poised as if she fears that she might tumble from her precarious perch.

  How Lizzie loves them: to begin with, tall though she is, she has to stand on the piano stool so as to see them properly. Angel is the bird whose head is thrown back, beak parted in joyous song: Pidge has her head on one side, as if listening. Lizzie is thrilled to be a part of this little tableau: the chick, safe within the confines of the cage, not quite ready for flight.

  Lizzie stirred. Now that she was back in Bristol, her earlier instinct – to block the past, to hum and dance away from those dreams and memories – was beginning to change very gradually into an acceptance; even into curiosity. The mad conception that, somehow, Pidge and Angel were here in the Birdcage with her was beginning to be a comfort rather than a threat.

  ‘Crazy!’ she announced to anyone who might be listening.

  ‘Potty. Nuts. Doolally.’

  She hitched herself a little higher on the sofa, found that she was still clutching Theatre, and, holding it by its spine, shook the book gently so as to dislodge the dust. The pages clapped lightly together and a card slipped from between its sheets and fell to the floor. Lizzie picked it up and looked at it. Even in black and white the Yarn Market was instantly recognizable. The castle’s towers and battlements rose from behind the trees on Castle Hill and across the street from the Yarn Market stood the Luttrell Arms with its high medieval porch.

  Shocked and disbelieving, Lizzie stared at the postcard. Its appearance at this moment, hedged about with mystery and coincidence as if it were some sign or portent, knocked her off balance and it was some time before she could bring herself to turn it over, so hopeful was she that it should contain some kind of message for her. The ink was faded but Angel’s writing was clear enough.

  Darling Pidge,

  So here we are and the cottage is sweet.

  Lovely weather but it’s rather a trek to the beach for poor little Lizzie’s legs. Dunster is the most gorgeous village but – you’ll be relieved to know! – not a sign of F. I haven’t given up hope, though!

  Love from us both. Angel xx

  There was no date, only the word ‘Tuesday’ scrawled across the top of the card and the postmark was blurred. Lizzie reread the message anxiously, as though by further study the words might give up some secret; the answer to her question: why the holiday in Dunster? The first lines were innocent enough; it was only the words ‘not a sign of F’ that held the clue to the mystery.

  Lizzie lay down again, holding the card, closing her eyes, remembering. Gently, as in that Looking-Glass world of backstage, with its silently collapsing walls and revolving staircases, her memory began to open, layer upon layer, before her inward eye. It was a long while before she stirred, rousing slowly to the sounds of evening outside the window, aware of the coolness of the shadowy room. She shivered a little, reaching a long arm for Angel’s yellow silk shawl, her eyes still dreamy and unfocused.

  It was strange that a part of her life once so vital could be so completely written over, hidden beneath the palimpsest of subsequent experiences. F was for Felix: oh, how could she have forgotten someone she loved so much? The smell of him was in her nostrils, the feel of him beneath her fingertips, which clutched the postcard. For years he was a part of their lives here in the Birdcage; joking with Pidge, bringing presents for the small Lizzie, going down to the theatre with Angel. He’d arrive at the Birdcage on Sunday evenings; Pidge would be thinking about supper whilst listening to the Palm Court Hotel orchestra on the radio. Nothing could have persuaded Lizzie to go to bed until after she’d seen him and very often she was allowed to stay up late as a special treat.

  ‘Hello, my birds,’ he’d say, holding out a bottle to Pidge, fielding Lizzie with his other arm, looking across at Angel with that tiny heart-stopping wink. ‘How’s life in the cage?’

  Perhaps, after all, it was Felix and not Angel’s agent who had named it so? For years – or so it seemed – that one Sunday in the month was the high spot of her small existence. Lizzie frowned, drawing the shawl about her, still holding the postcard. There could be no doubt that F stood for Felix – but what had Felix Hamilton, her mother’s lover, to do with Dunster? She sat up, feeling about with her toes for her shoes. Placing the card on the table beside the brochure, she went into the kitchen to pour herself a drink and, sitting down with it at the table, she stared at the postcard as if by sheer willpower she could wrench an answer from its picture of Dunster and the faded inky message.

  Closing her eyes, Lizzie groped towards the words that defined Felix: the smell of his tweed coat; the feel of his long brown fingers holding her hand; the queer sensation of an emotional stability. Crazy! For years s
he hadn’t given him a thought whilst now, for some reason, the memories had come crowding back, green and fresh, and filling her with an unsettled longing; a need to see him again. It wasn’t so odd that, back in Bristol, she should feel the presence of Pidge and Angel – even her sudden passion to find the birdcage was not unreasonable – but this desire to seek Felix out, talk to him and tie up loose ends, was extraordinary. But why Dunster?

  Lizzie opened her eyes; the question continued to puzzle her. The postcard lay face upwards and, as she looked at it, suddenly the tiny cameo, that sliver of the past, slid back into her mind: Angel staring at the woman in the grocer’s shop whilst she and the little boy gazed at one another. She recalled the atmosphere of tension, communicated by the sudden tightening of Angel’s hand on hers and the expression of resentment on the woman’s face. Her memory made another connection: Felix explaining why he couldn’t be her daddy, telling her about his son with the odd name who lived in the country.

  Gasping with a kind of triumphant relief Lizzie leaned back in her chair, the pieces of the puzzle clicking neatly into place. It seemed clear, now, that Angel had gone to Dunster hoping to see Felix and almost certainly against Pidge’s advice: . . You’ll be relieved to know! – not a sign of F. I haven’t given up hope, though! It was the kind of mad plan that would have appealed to Angel. Perhaps Felix had been on holiday from the office for a while with no excuse to visit Bristol: perhaps his passion had been cooling off a little. Had Angel hoped that, by appearing on his home ground, she might force his hand? Lizzie longed to know what had happened between Felix and Angel; why had he stopped coming to the Birdcage? Frustration seized her. Why, when it was too late, did she feel this passion to unearth the past? She picked up the postcard with its faded message. Were they still there, in Dunster somewhere, Felix and his son – and that woman with the bitter, resentful face?

  It suddenly occurred to her that Felix, like Angel and Pidge, might be dead. In remembering the young Felix she’d forgotten that he would have grown old too. Only then did she realize how much she’d been counting on finding him again; of talking to him once more. An unexpected and inexplicable sense of despair galvanized her into action. She reached for her mobile and, peering at the page in the brochure, dialled a number.