The Birdcage

by Marcia Willett

  Slowly her ebullience began to subside beneath a wave of compassion for Piers. It was one thing knowing his father had had an affair, quite another for the mistress’s daughter suddenly to appear on the scene. She pulled the towelling robe more closely around her, suddenly chilly, although the evening was still warm. Surely talking about those happenings of so long ago couldn’t be too painful? Lizzie shook her head: remembering Felix’s face, knowing that this was simply wishful thinking. The trouble with burying emotions very deeply was that, once re-exposed, they were liable to be fresh and raw and every bit as sensitive as when they’d first been hidden beneath thick layers of denial. Even Felix, who was ready to accept the damaging results of his behaviour, had clearly found it difficult to talk to her about certain aspects of the past. How much more daunting it would be to have this dialogue with Piers.

  Lizzie began to feel that she needed a drink. She looked at her wrist-watch: not yet half-past six and a good hour and a half until she met with Felix. It had been thoughtless of her to insist on that meeting, knowing that he was to have such an encounter, yet it had been such a joy to see him again that she’d hated leaving him without his promise. Pulling on her jeans, together with a loose linen overshirt, Lizzie tucked her big key into her bag and went downstairs.

  The heavily beamed room, with its only window looking into a high-walled court, was dim and it wasn’t until she was at the bar, ready to order, that she saw Piers beyond the shoulder of a burly fellow with his back to her, who was leaning with his elbow on the wooden counter. Piers was listening intently, watching his pint, but as Lizzie moved into his line of sight, he raised his eyes and looked at her.

  Their glances locked with an impact that shocked each of them equally. His face brightened, as if in recognition – and even pleasure. She instinctively smiled back at him and then, swiftly pulling herself together, she looked away – slowly, count the beat, don’t overdo it – still smiling, though rather vaguely now, as if embracing the other occupants of the bar with the same casual friendliness. The young barman moved towards her, greeting her cheerfully, but even as he mixed her vodka and tonic, adding the ice and slice of lemon, she was aware of Piers’ attention. His companion – noticing that sudden change of expression – had glanced briefly over his shoulder but was now continuing his conversation whilst Piers, though taking his part, still watched her as she took her drink to the small table near the door.

  Her heart beating like a clock, Lizzie sat down. Unable to resist, she looked at him again: again that impact! Calmly, she opened her bag and took out the novel she’d put in earlier as a protection against the chatty couple and, opening it, began to read at random. The words jumbled meaninglessly before her eyes whilst her thoughts scrambled about inside her head: it was impossible that he should be so balanced, so ready to be friendly, after such an interview. After all, there was no-one else present with whom he could confuse her and yet he watched her with such ease and, she had no doubt of it, a readiness to speak to her once his drinking companion finished his conversation. Her stomach churned at the prospect and she seized her glass and drank some vodka.

  At this moment the friendly couple came into the bar and immediately embarked upon a series of proprietorial enquiries. They hoped that the walk to the church hadn’t tired her further? She was looking more rested. They were meeting up with friends but would be thrilled if she felt she could join them. She couldn’t? A guest to dinner? Oh, they quite understood. Perhaps another time?

  Hardly were they seated at a table just behind Piers when their friends arrived; there was a great deal of cheerful greeting, followed by a matey jostling as to which of the males should get the first round in, and at last they all sat down together. Pretending to be absorbed in her book, Lizzie was aware of their little nods in her direction, their voices lowered now as they boasted of their acquaintance with her. The second couple stared across the bar in undisguised interest and Lizzie could feel a faint wash of colour rising in her cheeks. Presently the burly man shook Piers’ hand and went out and Piers, picking up his glass, came towards her.

  She glanced up at him with the merest lifting of brows, a faint suggestion of surprise, almost enquiry – ‘After all,’ she told herself grimly, ‘I am an actress’ – but he smiled down at her so openly that she could feel her facial muscles relaxing into a wide answering beam.

  It’s OK, she told herself, weak with relief. He knows and it’s OK.

  ‘You must think I’m a bit of a prat,’ he said – oh, how like Felix’s voice his was – ‘to stare at you like that. You know, I really thought I recognized you—’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ she interrupted eagerly, ‘I felt exactly the same.’

  ‘And then I heard that couple talking,’ he went on, ‘and I realized that I did recognize you but not the way I imagined. You must be sick to death of people forcing a conversational opening on the strength of it but I have to say I love the advert and that brilliant sitcom.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said after a moment. ‘That’s . . . so kind. Actually, I’m a very sad person and I love it when people recognize me.’ Her voice gathered strength as she recovered from the shock, realizing that he had no idea who she was in relation to Felix and wondering how he’d described her without mentioning her acting career. ‘I wish I could be blasé about it but it’s a very nice change to be known, actually.’

  ‘How refreshingly honest.’ He hesitated, glancing at the empty chair, and she indicated that he should join her. ‘I’ve never met a celebrity before so you mustn’t mind if I rather revel in it.’

  She chuckled. ‘You haven’t met one now,’ she told him, ‘but thanks, anyway.’

  ‘But you were saying that you felt the same thing? Sorry, I just wanted to get my explanation in first so that you knew where I was coming from. Did you think you recognized me too?’

  She stared at him: if she said no, then later he must discover that it wasn’t true. Confused, with no time to think clearly, she nevertheless felt very strongly that it would be quite wrong to lie to him.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. I recognized you. You’re very much like your father, Piers.’

  He gave a little crack of delighted laughter. ‘This is the first time that I can honestly say that I’m very pleased to hear it. But how do you know my name? Look here, this is very mysterious.’

  It was at this point she understood that the confrontation with Felix hadn’t taken place: that Piers had made no connections because there were none to be made.

  ‘I knew your father when I was a little girl,’ she told him, cursing herself for her stupidity, for not realizing at once that he couldn’t have spoken to Felix about her. ‘I haven’t seen him for thirty-five years but I met him again this afternoon in that little memorial garden behind the church. My name is Lizzie Blake. My mother was Angelica Blake, the actress.’

  His warmth had faded visibly as she spoke, and now he watched her warily. She was grateful that his back was turned to the other occupants of the bar and was careful to keep her own expression pleasant so that no-one should guess that anything might be amiss.

  ‘You met this afternoon? By chance?’

  ‘I came to Dunster to find him,’ she answered steadily. ‘I had no idea whether I would be able to track him down. It was . . . extraordinary to discover that he was so close.’

  ‘Extraordinary,’ he agreed drily.

  ‘I took him completely by surprise and we talked about old times but I know that he wanted to tell you about my unexpected arrival,’ she’d nearly said ‘warn’, and bit her lip. ‘He said that you were calling in and he would explain it to you.’

  As she listened to her voice saying all the wrong things she watched the battle of anger and fairness being played out on his face; noticed the hand resting on the table clench itself into a fist, the thumb caught between the middle fingers.

  ‘I didn’t give him the chance,’ he said at last. ‘I was in a rush and there was no opportunity.’

&nb
sp; ‘I am so sorry, Piers,’ she said. ‘I know that it’s not easy – and you’ll probably think it was quite wrong and tasteless of me to come here – but I did rather hope that, after all this time, we might be friends.’

  He gave a little smiling frown, as if such a suggestion was preposterous, yet he didn’t speak. Instead he picked up his glass and finished his beer in one swallow.

  ‘After all,’ he spoke as if he were finishing off some kind of debate with himself, ‘none of it was your fault.’

  ‘No,’ she agreed, ‘but then it wasn’t yours, either.’

  ‘That’s true.’ He looked at her with a hard, bright look. ‘But it doesn’t really change anything, does it? Will you forgive me if I disappear? I think I should have that talk with my father after all.’

  She watched him go – and then turned back to see the other residents gazing at her with interest. Guessing that she was to be invited to join them for a drink, she smiled brightly, indicating the time, ruefully indicating the need to hurry away and change for dinner. She stood up and, taking her glass with her, went upstairs to her room.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Piers crossed the High Street, without glancing up, and took the stairs two at a time. Felix was waiting for him by the window.

  He thought: It has come at last. It is now . . .

  ‘I changed my mind,’ Piers said, still standing near the door. ‘I thought that perhaps we’d better have that talk after all.’

  ‘You met Lizzie.’ It was better, Felix thought, to be direct: no stumbling about in a morass of pretended misunderstandings or apologies. ‘I hoped to prepare you but it never occurred to me that you were meeting John Clarke in the Luttrell Arms. It must have been rather a shock.’

  ‘Just a bit.’ Piers’ voice was brittle. ‘I made an utter fool of myself, actually.’

  Felix frowned, surprised. ‘How was that? I guessed that you’d met or else you probably wouldn’t be here now but . . . did she introduce herself?’

  ‘Oh, no, don’t worry, she didn’t make the running. I introduced myself to her. I recognized her from that advert, you see, although I couldn’t quite place her at first, but when I realized I went dashing up like a dog with a bone, positively delighted.’

  ‘It was a natural enough thing to do.’ Felix kept his voice deliberately flat, aware that Piers was scorching with embarrassment, trying to remove the sting from his humiliation. ‘Of course, being Lizzie, she’d have been thrilled that you recognized her professionally. Success is rather new to her, I gather.’

  ‘I can’t say that her gratification is of paramount significance to me,’ Piers said angrily. ‘There are other issues which are rather more important.’

  ‘I quite agree,’ said Felix quietly. ‘I was simply making an observation about Lizzie’s probable reaction. This is the very last thing she wanted to happen, although she was so hoping to meet you at some point. From what she told me I gather that she lost her husband recently and the shock and the loneliness has made her introspective; going back over the past and trying to remember certain things. She decided to look me up, came down on spec and we met quite by chance in the memorial garden. I promised that I would explain her presence here to you when I saw you, so by the time you introduced yourself she would have assumed we’d had this talk.’ He gave a frustrated snort. ‘She must be feeling pretty confused too. I hope she was . . . intelligent about it.’

  Piers was silent for a moment, apparently reflecting on their meeting. ‘To be honest,’ he said slowly, ‘she was. I . . . liked her.’

  Felix stood quite still with his hands in his pockets. Aware of a huge liking for his son and great admiration, yet he remained where he was, waiting for Piers to make the next move. Finally Piers raised his head and looked at him.

  ‘Is she my sister?’ he asked.

  Shocked and dismayed, Felix withdrew his hands from his pocket and held them out in an involuntary gesture of absolute denial.

  ‘Good God, no! Of course she isn’t. My dear boy . . .’ He remembered the scene with Marina – her question: I suppose she isn’t yours, by any chance? and the shadow by the door – and closed his eyes in a moment’s pain: all these years, Piers had lived with this terrible suspicion. ‘My dear boy,’ he murmured again, ‘I swear to you that there is absolutely no question of that. Lizzie was at least six years old when I first met her.’

  Piers took a deep, deep breath and gave a gasping sigh; his shoulders seemed to sag a little and Felix moved forward, taking him by the arm, almost pushing him down into the wing-chair. He began to talk, pouring two shots of whisky, needing to tide them over this dangerous moment.

  ‘They were living in a funny old house in Bristol up near the university. Pidge lived in a flat on the ground floor and Angel and Lizzie rented the first floor and the attic. It was a bit of an odd set-up but it worked very well for all three of them. Pidge could look after Lizzie when Angel was at the theatre.’

  As he clattered about with glasses and the decanter, he shot a swift glance at Piers: he sat quite still, staring at nothing in particular, his hands clenched into fists resting on his thighs.

  ‘To make sense of it I shall have to tell you who Lizzie’s father was or it might give the wrong impression, but you must give me your word that you don’t repeat it to Lizzie.’ Piers looked at him, frowning but concentrating now. ‘Her father was General Sir Hilary Carmichael.’ Felix nodded a confirmation in response to Piers’ disbelieving expression. ‘Angel never told me his name but I guessed very quickly. He was a war hero with a tragic private life. His wife had been badly hurt in a riding accident. She was not only a cripple, her brain had been damaged in the fall, but he looked after her as well as he could and refused to let her be put away into some institution. I knew of him during the war, of course, he was tremendously popular amongst the troops and everyone called him “Mike”, rather like everyone called Montgomery “Monty”. Angel simply referred to him as Mike, but once she’d described his background I knew who it was. Pidge had been his driver at the end of the war and he told her when the flat fell empty at the house in Bristol. He owned it, you see. The family owned a great deal of property. Well, after the war he and Angel met and had an affair and, by mismanagement or bad luck, Angel became pregnant. Mike had been very clear that there was no future for her with him and she accepted the situation but decided that she wanted to have the baby. Mike was prepared to support Lizzie financially, up to a point, and saw to it that Pidge and Angel got together in the house in Bristol. Lizzie thinks that the house was Pidge’s and that she left it to her when she died but it was simply another of Mike’s ways of looking after his daughter.’

  Felix pushed the tumbler into Piers’ hand and took a much-needed sip from his own glass.

  ‘And Lizzie never asked questions about it?’

  Deeply relieved that his ploy to distract appeared to be working, Felix sat down opposite.

  ‘I don’t think so. She accepted what Angel told her: that her father was a soldier and he was killed in Korea. Angel and Pidge went so far as to say that he was a King’s Messenger, which Mike was at one point and which added a certain lustre to the story, but you have to remember that Lizzie would have grown up amongst war orphans. I think she longed for a father but, as far as I know, she never questioned their version of him.’

  ‘And you fulfilled the role? Up to a point?’ His voice was dry.

  ‘If I did then it was inadequately.’ Felix wondered how much of the truth should be told and decided to hold nothing back. ‘She suggested once that I might like to be her father but I explained that I couldn’t, that I was one already. She wanted to know all about you.’ He stared down into his glass so that he shouldn’t know whether his son was disgusted or angry at this breach of confidence. ‘I haven’t seen her since she was ten or eleven years old.’

  ‘Four years. You were lovers for four years?’

  Felix bit his lip. ‘Not in the sense you’re probably imagining. Angel was luc
ky to have two or three seasons with the Old Vic in Bristol but after that she went off to one of the other classical repertory companies and I rarely saw her. But although she was away, in Manchester if I remember rightly, I still used to visit Pidge and Lizzie when I was in Bristol. I was fond of all of them, you see, it wasn’t just . . . an affair.’

  ‘But why?’ At last the question was framed: his voice full of bitterness. ‘How could you continue with the affair for so long when you saw how it hurt Mother?’

  ‘Everything hurt her,’ answered Felix slowly. ‘To begin with it was puzzling when Marina refused to speak to me because I’d been friendly to another woman at a party or while paying a bill, or by simply holding a door open for a pretty girl. When I realized that she was a deeply jealous woman, I tried to help her out of it but nothing worked and, after a while, I was at a complete loss as to how to help her.’

  ‘So you thought that having an affair might do the trick?’

  Felix knew that it was Piers’ own pain that infused the question with such a heavy note of sarcasm but, nevertheless, he felt a quick deep stab of anger.

  ‘Don’t be too quick to judge the frailties of other men,’ he said. ‘If you have never lived without affection or warmth, never been regularly subjected to icy silences and searing contempt as a punishment for acts of ordinary human kindness or friendliness, then you can’t imagine how very lonely and isolated you can feel. Oh, yes, I know that I should have continued to manage without love, content in the knowledge that my wife was loyal, competent and a good mother, but I was weak. Please don’t imagine that my affair with Angel was simply a matter of sex. I was offered love and warmth and laughter. There was friendship, human weakness, generosity – oh, so many tempting things in that little house with those three women and I accepted them gratefully.’