The Birdcage

by Marcia Willett

  He’d bent to stroke Jake’s head gently with one finger. ‘If you mean Alison,’ he said, after a moment, ‘let’s just say that I think the timing was perfect. He’s a terrific present, Tilda. The best. It’ll be fun watching him and Jake growing up together.’

  They looked at each other, both thinking about David, each aware of the fact. In a rare gesture he held out an arm to her and she slipped into his embrace, hugging him tightly, her face hidden against his dressing-gown. He stared over her head, his own face momentarily bleak, but when she raised her head he smiled at her, touched his cheek to hers, grimaced and said, ‘Oh, hell, I need a shave.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ she said, courage restored, comforted by the sharing of their unspoken grief. ‘See you later. Bang on Saul’s door as you go past.’

  She put the toast in the rack and poured some orange juice, found the honey and sat down at the table. The door opened and Teresa appeared, pretty and tidy as always, looking refreshed and ready for action.

  ‘Darling,’ she began – and paused to give a little cry of delight at the sight of Lion curled beside Jake’s chair. ‘Oh, isn’t that sweet? I heard him whining earlier, poor little soul, but I felt it was best to leave him to Piers.’

  ‘He came down earlier.’ Tilda spread the honey on her toast and took a large bite. ‘Did he keep you awake with his whining?’ she asked somewhat indistinctly.

  ‘No, not really.’ Teresa pushed the kettle onto the hot plate. ‘Don’t get up. I don’t want any breakfast yet, I need coffee, that’s all. No, I went off to sleep quite quickly last night but I did hear him this morning, poor fellow, and then I heard someone moving about down here and guessed that Piers had come down. Coffee for you?’

  Tilda shook her head. ‘No, I don’t have it very often at the moment. Jake doesn’t care for it. The bread’s beside the toaster.’

  ‘In a minute. Coffee first.’ Teresa sat down opposite her daughter. ‘I think it all went off very well, don’t you?’ Their eyes met. ‘I have this feeling that you won’t be seeing much more of Alison at Michaelgarth.’

  Tilda grinned. ‘I have that feeling too,’ she admitted. ‘I wondered if I’d been too high-handed, bringing Lion in like that, without asking Piers first, but he was saying earlier that it was the best present he could have had.’

  ‘Good for Piers.’ Teresa hitched her chair a little, almost conspiratorially, and lowered her voice. ‘Do you think he and Lizzie have got something going?’

  Tilda frowned thoughtfully, finishing her slice of toast with evident relish. ‘They seem terribly well attuned,’ she said after a moment. ‘Sort of easy together and very happy. They make little jokes and they seem so . . . well, comfortable and then again it seems that they’ve only just met each other again after years and years. It’s odd.’

  ‘Do you know how long it is since she lost her husband?’ asked Teresa carefully, aware that she was moving on to sensitive ground. ‘I just wondered, you know . . . ?’

  ‘She doesn’t talk about it but when I mentioned it to Felix he said he thought that it was fairly recent. As far as I can tell it was because of her bereavement that she decided to look him up again.’ She smiled sardonically. ‘It’s probably too early to start dusting off your wedding hat, Ma.’

  ‘Wedding hat? Who’s getting married?’ Saul came into the kitchen, heavy-eyed, a towelling robe tied over a T-shirt and shorts. ‘Piers just hammered on my door and then disappeared into the bathroom. Bastard.’

  ‘Don’t get up, Ma.’ Tilda started on her second piece of toast as Teresa, flustered, began to rise to her feet. ‘Saul can make his own tea. And no-one’s getting married. We were just talking about Alison’s frustrated plans.’ She winked at her mother. ‘We were congratulating ourselves on our tactics. Or our strategies. Or whatever.’

  Lion woke up, staggered to his feet and began to pad purposefully round the kitchen.

  ‘Quick,’ said Tilda to Saul, ‘head him out into the garth before he widdles on the floor. Go on, Saul.’

  Saul seized the puppy as if he were a rugby ball, and sprinted away through the scullery whilst the two women laughed and Teresa got up to make some toast. Presently Piers and Felix came in together and the day began in earnest: breakfast was made, plans were discussed. Saul said that he could stay to lunch but needed to be away by tea-time; Felix, on the other hand, wondered if he might go rather earlier if it fitted in with everyone else. He looked content but rather tired, and Teresa offered to drop him at the flat on her way back to Taunton.

  ‘I simply have to get back before lunch,’ she said, ‘if that’s not too early for you, Felix?’

  ‘You’re very welcome to stay,’ said Piers, wondering if they were being tactful. ‘At least help us to finish up the leftovers for lunch.’

  ‘I’ll take Lizzie some coffee,’ said Tilda, thinking with relief that at least Alison wouldn’t come bursting in this morning, ‘and then I shall have to go and feed Jake. Don’t disappear just yet, Ma.’

  She went out, carrying a mug of coffee, and Saul came in with Lion at his heels, chasing the flapping, trodden-down backs of Saul’s slippers.

  ‘It’s the most fantastic morning,’ he said. ‘We went a little way out on to the hill and the view is breathtaking. Ouch!’ He jerked his heel out of the reach of the puppy’s needle-sharp teeth. ‘How will you manage to keep Lion inside the garth, Piers? If you could get a gate up it would be perfect for him.’

  Before Piers could reply, Tilda reappeared, still carrying the mug of coffee.

  ‘Lizzie’s not there,’ she said, staring round at them anxiously, putting the mug on the table. ‘Where can she be?’

  There was a short silence.

  ‘Perhaps it was her that I heard going out earlier,’ offered Teresa. ‘Lion might have disturbed her and she decided to go for an early morning walk.’

  ‘But her things are gone and the room’s quite empty.’ Tilda looked puzzled. ‘She’s completely disappeared.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  It took Piers a few moments to control his shock and, more tellingly, the fear of loss that twisted his gut. He heard Saul saying that he’d check to see if Lizzie’s car had gone and Tilda telling him that she’d left it out on the drive rather than in the barn; was aware of Teresa putting forward several theories, but it was to his father that he instinctively turned. Felix was watching him with the familiar look of compassion and affection.

  ‘She’ll have left a message,’ he said firmly, as if in answer to Piers’ unspoken question. ‘If she’s gone there will be a reason for it. There will be a message.’

  A message: Piers was seized with new hope but it was Tilda who found the card propped against Piers’ breakfast cup and saucer. She passed it to him and, with barely a glance at the picture of the Yarn Market, he turned it over to read what she had written on the back. His eyes swiftly scanned the lines whilst the others watched him eagerly and Saul came back to report that Lizzie’s car had gone.

  ‘It says that when she checked her mobile after the party last night she had several urgent messages from her agent.’ Piers cleared his throat. ‘He was expecting her back at the weekend and she’d completely forgotten to let him know she’d extended her stay. Apparently she has to be in Manchester first thing Monday morning for some filming and she needs to stop off at Bristol on the way to collect clothes.’ He paused and then read directly from the card. ‘“I imagine you’ll all be sleeping late after such a wonderful party so I’ll probably sneak away, trying not to disturb anyone. I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed myself. I’m so sorry this has blown up but please give my love to everyone and my thanks.” So there it is.’ He looked around at them, trying to hide his crushing disappointment.

  ‘I suppose that’s how life is,’ Teresa was saying, ‘when you’re famous. She was telling me last night that they’re making another advertisement as a kind of follow-on to the first one.’

  ‘But even so,’ Tilda sounded nearly as disappointed as
Piers was feeling, ‘I wish she could have stayed to say goodbye.’

  ‘It’s a long drive to Manchester,’ Saul said, ‘and if she has to stop off in Bristol she hasn’t got a lot of time to spare. It would be silly, not to say irritating, hanging about hoping people are going to wake up. After all, we might all have slept until midday.’

  ‘Chance would be a fine thing with Jake around,’ said Tilda, almost crossly. ‘Not to mention Lion. I expect it was Lizzie going out that disturbed him.’

  Piers remembered the noise of the door closing and the sound of the car in the lane. He still held the card in his hand, unwilling to put it down to be read by the others: ‘It’s meant so much to meet you at last, Piers,’ she’d written. He wanted time to study it again in private and suddenly he needed to be quite alone.

  Felix got up from the table. ‘How would you feel if we went off shortly?’ he asked Teresa. ‘I don’t want to be tiresome but I feel that a long rest is the order of the day as far as I’m concerned.’

  If he’d hoped to deflect the attention from Piers and the card his plan was a success. Tilda looked at him anxiously and her mother rose at once.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘You must be exhausted, Felix. Not in pain, I hope?’

  ‘No, no.’ He smiled at her reassuringly and shook his head ruefully, as if in despair at his own weakness. ‘I’m so sorry to break up the party. If Saul doesn’t mind collecting it, my bag is ready packed.’

  Teresa and Saul went upstairs together, Tilda began to clear the table whilst Piers and his father wandered out into the garth where Lion was sniffing curiously at a bee. Roses turned their papery faces to the sun, two swallows sat gossiping together on the barn roof but, in the middle of this tranquil scene, it seemed to Felix that Piers was the centre of seething mental activity: he could almost hear the thoughts churning in his son’s head. His arms were folded across his chest, his hands bunched, whilst the thumbs were clenched between the centre fingers of each fist. Felix waited, watching the puppy, who had now found the discarded ball of newspaper, which he nose-butted gently across the cobbles.

  ‘It seems so odd,’ Piers said at last, ‘her hurrying away like that.’

  He kept his voice low and Felix glanced at him, frowning a little.

  ‘You don’t believe her message? It seemed quite reasonable to me.’

  ‘There was something wrong last night,’ said Piers. ‘Not early on but later, when she came back downstairs right at the end of the party. I’ve been wondering if that’s when she picked up her messages but, if that’s the case, why didn’t she tell me then that she’d have to be going first thing in the morning? It doesn’t make sense. There’s another thing . . .’ he hesitated as if trying to decide just how significant this thing was that haunted him. ‘She hasn’t left an address or a telephone number.’

  ‘I see.’ Felix looked thoughtful. ‘Of course, if she dashed off in a rush she might not have thought about it. She’ll probably telephone when she gets to Bristol. One does these crazy things, you know, in moments of stress.’

  ‘I wondered about that.’ He paused. ‘But you know her address anyway, don’t you?’

  ‘Well,’ said Felix, taken aback, ‘I did once but I’m damned if I can remember it off-hand. I didn’t write to . . . any of them very much, you know. Christmas cards, birthday, that kind of thing. I telephoned sometimes, from the office. You see, Angel was generally at the theatre in the evening so the best time to get hold of her was in the afternoon, just after lunch . . .’

  He felt a tiny pain in his heart as he remembered. Oh, those conversations. Him in the empty office, receiver held close to his mouth, hunched over the pad on his desk on which he doodled little matchstick figures: Angel in bed, cigarette smoke curling from the ashtray, hair spread on the pillow: ‘Oh, sweetie, you can’t imagine how much in need of soothing I am . . .’

  Felix opened his eyes to see Piers staring at him.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he asked. ‘Can you remember it?’

  Confused, Felix stared back at him. ‘Remember it?’ he repeated, still thinking of those afternoons, talking, talking, always so much to say. How could he ever forget it?

  ‘The address,’ Piers reminded him. ‘Can you remember it?’

  Felix swallowed, pulling himself together. ‘I can’t,’ he admitted. ‘It’s gone. They lived in a pretty little square up near the university.’

  ‘Well, anyway, you know where the house is. You could guide me to it, couldn’t you, if I found a street map of Bristol?’

  Felix raised his eyebrows, taken aback at Piers’ insistence.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ he said. ‘Yes, I suppose I could. But, goodness, it’s more than thirty-five years ago . . .’

  ‘But you went to collect the birdcage.’ Piers joked his father’s memory. ‘How long ago was that?

  ‘Fifteen years?’ Felix hazarded a guess. ‘The trouble is that places change. One-way systems, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Cities don’t change that much,’ said Piers firmly. ‘Not in the residential areas. I’m sure that between us we’ll find her.’

  Felix smiled at him, secretly delighted by his total acceptance of Lizzie and all that she represented.

  ‘I’m sure we will,’ he agreed. ‘Of course, we could check with the Luttrell Arms. She’d have given them her address, wouldn’t she?’

  Piers looked at his father with admiration. ‘Brilliant,’ he said, ‘but would they give it to us?’

  ‘I’ll ask,’ said Felix. ‘After all, they know me well enough. I’ll give it a try when I get into Dunster and I’ll ring you.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Piers looked suddenly self-conscious. ‘I’m probably over-reacting,’ he admitted, ‘but I’ve just got this feeling that something is wrong. Why did she come now, Father? Did she actually tell you?’

  Felix frowned, trying to remember the meeting in the garden. I came to Dunster to find you, she’d said. Because it was as if he’d been waiting for her – because it seemed so right that she should be there – he hadn’t questioned her. Not then. Later, when he’d tried to talk about her own life, she’d looked sombre. Don’t ask, she’d said. Angel, Pidge, Sam. Oh, Felix, I’ve lost them all.

  ‘She said something about losing her husband,’ he said. ‘And, of course, Angel and Pidge are gone. I assumed that after her husband’s death – being all alone, clearing things out in the house in Bristol, she’d started down that road to the past that we sometimes go along after a trauma in our lives. We try to reconnect to things or people we’ve lost along the way; we look for our youth in old photographs and letters.’

  He remembered Pidge’s last words to him: Remember the way we were.

  ‘I think,’ he said carefully, ‘that for a short period in Lizzie’s life I was important to her and, in her grief, that particular time came back to her. I know it sounds odd but I never went deeply into the question of why. You didn’t ask her?’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ he answered. ‘She talked about trigger points; that when something grim happens you re-evaluate your life. She didn’t actually talk about her husband, if I remember correctly, she simply said that with Angel and Pidge dead she decided to find you in the hope that you’d fill in some of the gaps for her.’ He shook his head frustratedly. ‘At times like that you’re not really thinking straight enough to cross the t’s and dot the i’s, are you?’ He gave a short laugh. ‘Well, I wasn’t.’

  ‘You’d had a shock,’ began Felix cautiously – but Piers smiled at him.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘No more recriminations. I just don’t want to lose her now, that’s all.’

  At that moment, Tilda and Teresa came out into the garth, followed by Saul carrying Felix’s overnight case, and Felix could do no more than grip Piers’ hand in gratitude and relief.

  ‘Give me a buzz later,’ Piers murmured, ‘when you’ve had a rest.’

  They went out in a group to Teresa’s car; there was a flurry of kissing and farewell and then the
car moved off, everyone waving.

  ‘I’m going upstairs to find the playpen.’ Piers scooped up the now-recumbent puppy from the cobbles and settled him on the bean bag in the scullery. ‘Bed,’ he said firmly.

  Lion opened a sleepy eye and stretched comfortably.

  ‘He and Jake will be able to go into the playpen together,’ observed Tilda. ‘That should be fun.’

  Piers went away upstairs but, as Tilda and Saul reached the kitchen, a car passed the window; the engine was switched off and a door slammed. Tilda hurried to the scullery door, with Saul close behind her, both wondering if Lizzie might possibly have returned. To their surprise they saw Marianne crossing the garth. Her face was grim and over her arm she was carrying what appeared to be a rug.

  ‘Hello, Tilda,’ she said, ignoring Saul. ‘Is Gemma here, by any chance?’

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  They gave way before Marianne, backing into the kitchen, where she stood looking about her as if she suspected that they’d hidden Gemma in a cupboard.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ asked Tilda, mystified by Marianne’s expression. ‘I’ve just told you that she’s not here. She and Guy went yesterday morning before the new people arrived in the afternoon. Saturday’s changeoever day.’ She stared at the rug that Marianne held. ‘Did she leave that behind? Did you manage to get together after all?’

  ‘Yes and no,’ said Marianne. She flung the rug on the table as if it were a gauge of war. ‘I mean yes, she left her rug behind, but no we didn’t manage to get together. We didn’t, she and I, but she managed to get together with Simon. She got together very intimately with him, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘No,’ said Tilda after a moment. ‘I don’t think I do.’

  Saul said nothing: he stared at the rug.

  ‘I see that Saul has no contribution to make.’ Marianne folded her arms but Tilda could see that her hands were shaking. ‘Well, it’s a wise man who knows his own sister, isn’t it, Saul?’