Birdcage Walk

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘There will be no position like it, Lizzie. You will wake and see from your window a prospect that artists travel a hundred miles to paint.’

  There was so much to do that he could barely bring himself to sit down. He lived on cold beef and ham, eaten as he walked. But we would dine together every night, he said, once our house was ready.

  ‘But how will you live here?’ Mammie had asked, last time I took her to see the house. We had to scramble over rubble and jump across potholes, but Mammie never minded that. It was the rawness of it that daunted her. She had not seen the drawings, as I had. She had not heard Diner talk about the curve of the stairwell and the setting of the windows. ‘This terrace is not even a quarter built. There will be nothing but noise, dust and dirt for months. You cannot live here, Lizzie.’

  ‘The first houses are already sold,’ I told her, but didn’t say how few these were. Only four buyers had put down money so far. But there was a great deal of interest, and the rest would rush to buy as soon as all the roofs were on and the glory of the terrace was clear to everyone. Mammie refused to understand Diner’s financial concerns, and so I could not explain to her how bold he had been – and brave too – in his speculation.

  ‘We’ll be rich, Lizzie!’ he’d said, but the money was only part of it. He brought me to share his pride in the fine curve of stone that would rear itself where there had been only a scrub of grass and hawthorn. Mammie talked of the green fields that were being trampled, while Diner drew for me high pavements, mounting-blocks, retaining walls and vaulted cellars that would run out beneath the street. When the building was complete, even Mammie would see the glory of the high-slung terrace as it floated above the Gorge. And I would live in it.

  Diner’s face was dark when at last he came home.

  ‘Have you eaten?’ I said, putting my work aside. ‘Let me make you something.’

  ‘We have Sarah to do that,’ he said.

  ‘Sarah and Philo have gone to bed. It’s past nine o’clock.’

  ‘Then wake them, Lizzie.’

  I knew he was not serious, and said I would go down to the kitchen and make something for him myself.

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘You will be when the food is in front of you. I’ll make you buttered eggs.’

  I took up a candle and he followed me downstairs. It was dark but still warm. Sarah had banked up the fire, and I broke open its crust with the poker, stirred it up and set butter in a pan to heat while I beat the eggs and salted them. Diner nipped a piece of sugar off the loaf, and held it in his mouth while he drank his wine. Once the butter was melted, I tipped in the beaten eggs and stirred until they set. The fire was too slack for toast, so I put the buttered eggs on to slices of bread. Diner ate hungrily. We sat on each side of the deal table and I thought again how well we did here in the kitchen, much better than we did upstairs. We seemed more ourselves.

  He wiped his mouth and sat back in his chair. ‘And how was your mother?’

  I would not give him the satisfaction of seeing my surprise. I glanced at him but said nothing, and after a moment he had to disclose himself.

  ‘You were out walking after dark again.’

  ‘With Hannah.’

  ‘You are not living with your mother now.’

  ‘Of course I know that. But she was ill – tired – and so I visited her.’

  ‘She tires herself,’ he said, but gently, so that I wasn’t certain that it was a criticism.

  ‘She has so much to do,’ I said. I had been hearing it all my life, from Hannah, from her friends, and lately from Augustus. My mother was the spinning jenny who span out words to clothe the ideas that burst and bubbled in their brains.

  ‘But to what end, Lizzie? They are all talking to themselves, and nothing will remain of it but a heap of dusty papers.’

  I knew that wasn’t what he truly thought. He suspected and disliked the power of what came from my mother’s pen. She attacked the majesty of kings, and the armies that defended the realm. Such words questioned the good order of life on which we all depended. And in my mother’s case, there was mockery in the questions which gave them a subtle, disturbing power. But order would not be overturned. The French might tear down the edifices which had served them for a thousand years, but here we had more judgment.

  Diner came back and back again to the subject, as if picking a scab each time it healed. Augustus he discounted. He thought him a fool and a windbag.

  ‘She is writing what she believes to be true,’ I said.

  ‘And do you believe it, Lizzie?’ He was leaning forward now.

  I could not think about it clearly with Diner looking at me.

  ‘My mother and her friends want the world to be a better place,’ I said, and heard the simpering idiocy of it as soon as I had spoken. I clenched my hands in anger. How could I so demean Mammie’s plain rooms, her clear, eloquent writing, the complexity of her thought?

  ‘And so do I,’ he said, still holding me, fixing me. His brows drew together. His anger came down quickly, like bad weather. ‘What can change the world for the better more than buildings of beauty and purpose? It is impossible to build without order. Your mother should have stayed longer in Paris, to see what comes of making the world a better place without setting one stone on top of another. They tear down the Bastille, but can they build it again? Augustus would not be able to put a roof on a doll’s house. Does he know how to dress stone? Can he turn a lathe? Can he judge the proportions of a window and set it into a wall so that every eye that sees it will be satisfied? Can he lay a flagstone floor? No. He depends upon those who can. He is as much a guest in the world as a three-year-old child.’

  ‘But it’s more than two years since my mother and Augustus were in Paris.’

  ‘A strange choice for a wedding journey, at such a time.’

  ‘Augustus has many acquaintances there.’ Again I heard weakness in my voice. I ought to defend my mother, even if it quickened his temper.

  ‘I’m sure he has. And now I read that women are demanding pikes and pistols, in order to defend Paris. What does your mother think of that?’

  ‘She does not want bloodshed.’

  ‘Yet she writes on the abolition of privilege. Does she imagine that it will abolish itself without bloodshed? Be honest, Lizzie. No man will let me take as much as a slice of bread out of his hand without grappling me for it. Does she think that the extraordinary rights she demands for women will be freely given?’

  We had had this exchange, or something like it, so often that each of us could predict the other’s words. It wearied me and by the end I felt ashamed, as if I had failed. I lacked eloquence. Perhaps my mother had hoped that one day I would work at her side, as Hannah did. Hannah was past fifty now, deaf in one ear and growing old.

  Next Diner would ask me about Augustus’s meeting with Tom Paine. I could predict it. Once he had begun he went on scratching the sore. If he was so curious, I thought, why didn’t he talk to my mother and Augustus? They would be glad of it. My mother especially. I could picture the glow in her face if he showed an interest in her work. Diner would discover how clear-minded she was, and sober too, for all her boldness of thought.

  Diner knew where I had been. I thought of how he had watched me secretly in the night. But he could not watch me going about the streets. It was absurd to think of him following me. Perhaps he had come back earlier, found me not at home and questioned Sarah.

  ‘Kings and armies do not abolish themselves,’ he said, looking into the lazy fire. And then all at once his mood changed and he smiled at me. ‘Come here, Lizzie. Come and sit on my knee. I have wanted you all day long.’

  His arms came around me, so much stronger than my mother’s. He grasped my waist and hips and pulled me against him. His voice, too, was tight.

  ‘Do you love me, Lizzie?’

  ‘You know that I love you.’

  ‘But do you love me truly?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘A
third time, Lizzie, and let’s have the truth from you. Do you love me more than anything in the world, as a wife should love her husband?’

  But I was thinking of Diner watching from the shadows as I passed along the pavement with Hannah. I could not prevent a half-second’s hesitation. It was enough for Diner. He pushed me off his knee as if he were sweeping a cat from his lap.

  ‘Enough of that,’ he said. ‘Let’s go to bed.’

  He calls the house Eldin. He thought of carving the name into the stone above the front door, but he decided not. It is to be just for ourselves.

  In the night I could not sleep. I heard my own voice saying the words to my mother, like a girl newly besotted with her sweetheart and wanting the whole world to share her love. Mammie indulged me, and I think she must have warned Hannah and Augustus too, because no one spoke of the woman Diner had married before he ever met me. Lucie. They had stood up together in the church and made the same promises that Diner and I had made. I could not bear to think of it. It was not Diner who seemed sullied by that earlier contract, but myself. I was second and I would always be so. Death had put her in a place from which she could never be shifted.

  Once only, before we were married, my mother broke her silence on the subject. She said, ‘He is a widower, Lizzie, don’t forget that.’

  I kept my eyes on the pages I was checking for Augustus before they went to the printer. Much as I disliked this work, I preferred to do it rather than have Mammie tax her eyes with yet more reading and writing. ‘I have not forgotten it,’ I said, but she would not be put off.

  ‘You must not try to possess all of him, Lizzie.’

  ‘Did you say this to Augustus, before you married him?’ I said, knowing it would wound her, but she refused to react.

  ‘It would have been better if I had. You will be happy if you understand that you cannot have the past. And you have no need of it, Lizzie. Leave it alone.’

  In her eagerness she had laid her hand on my arm. I twisted from her and the pages slid from my lap. They fanned down, muddling themselves on the floor. I was on my knees, putting them in order, and she could not see my face. I wondered if Augustus left the past alone, or if he tormented himself with thinking of the young and handsome man my mother had first married. My father. Did Augustus wonder how much she had loved him? And imagine the past in which he had no share? Did he glorify that past, perversely, as I could not help doing, and put a shine on to it like a May morning?

  Did Augustus understand that he would never see my mother as my father had once seen her?

  You have no need of it, Lizzie. Leave it alone.

  I made no reply, but her words stayed with me. It was a rare piece of advice from my mother. She never spoke of Diner’s first marriage again, or asked any question about his earlier life.

  Diner’s first wife was younger than me when he married her, after he met her in France. I don’t know what he was doing there: building, I suppose. He did not tell me which part of France Lucie came from, but when I asked him he said: ‘It was close to Bordeaux. A little place.’

  She must have been quick in every way to have had the courage to leave her family and friends and come to England. I wished there were a drawing of her, but there was nothing. He had no locket or letter. I would have liked to know how she looked. There is no grave to visit, because she died in France, on a visit to her family. A short illness but a savage one, was all Diner ever said to me on the subject. He sent money to set up her gravestone but he has never seen it and the way things are in France I doubted that he would do so now. I found this thought comforting, although I was ashamed of it. He had not been with her when she died.

  Perhaps they were not happy together, and that was why she went alone to visit her family? Perhaps they had begun to chafe against each other.

  I added up these thoughts when I was alone and there was nothing else to fill my mind. I scratched at them like a sow tearing at bark to get at the smooth skin of the tree. I said nothing and then I wondered if Diner was saying nothing too, but thinking of her, as I did. Lucie means light in every language.

  He has never talked to me about her, after that first explanation. He hides her from me in a place which belongs only to the two of them. When we sit by the fire together in the evenings and he raises his head from his calculations, I wonder what he sees.

  4

  I visited Mammie every day. Each time she was in bed but sitting up with her writing-board to hand, and so I was reassured. The weather turned again and the promise of spring vanished. We had frost at night and clear skies by day. Hannah stoked the fires, and although Mammie said that she longed for air I was not allowed to open her window.

  When I knocked at the front door there would be a pause before Hannah came down the stairs to open up for me. Later it occurred to me that in that time she must have gone into my mother’s room and said, ‘It is Elizabeth. Let me raise you up on your pillows,’ and then she would have quickly wiped my mother’s temples with lavender water and smoothed back her hair.

  But that is speculation. All I know is that Mammie faced the bedroom door with a smile as I came in, and although she was pale I could believe that she looked a little better each day. She laid her writing-board aside, put her pen on the table and patted the bedclothes for me to sit down. I told her how the weather was and what I had done. After a while I no longer smelled the frowsty air of her room, or the lavender water. ‘And then?’ she asked me. ‘And then?’ There was no detail of my life which was too slight or too dull for Mammie, but it seemed to me that she avoided talking about herself. I wanted to know every loaf that had been baked in her kitchen and every word she had written, as I used to do when I read her words through with Hannah before they went to the printer. I wanted it back again: the old home, the three of us with Augustus not yet thought of and Diner elsewhere, building his first houses and not thinking of me. I liked to picture him at work, where Lucie had never been. I saw his face as he spoke to the workmen, preoccupied but cheerful too, because he was succeeding. He was young then. One day, of course, we would meet: but not yet.

  I laid my head against Mammie’s shoulder, and stroked her arm. ‘I think I’ll stay with you tonight,’ I said.

  ‘No, Lizzie, you are married now.’

  I thought that if my heart were taken out of my body there would be many cuts in it: sharp, distinct, each of them in a different place. Mammie was right. This was not my home any more. I had fought them all and got free of them. It had been a silent battle, mostly, full of things not said. I would have done anything then, if it had given me Diner.

  ‘I will come again tomorrow, Mammie,’ I said.

  The next day was the fifth in the run of bright, cold mornings, and Diner said to me: ‘We will walk over to the house today, Lizzie.’ The frosts were holding up work all along the terrace, because the mortar would not set. Diner told me that was because of the lime in it. The ground was hard where foundations were still to be dug. Diner consulted the barometer night and morning and each time turned away from it in silence. A day lost meant more money to be found.

  However, today he seemed in good spirits as we picked our way alongside the half-made track to the terrace. It had been churned by the builders’ carts, and now the ruts were frozen. I hopped over them while Diner held my hand to steady me. My blood tingled and I wished the house were five miles distant so that we could keep on walking like this, side by side. Long ago, before the first turf was cut, Diner had said that one day the track would be a fine smooth road for us to drive down in our carriage. It was a strange thought to me: a foreign thought, and not altogether pleasing. I liked to walk. I would set out over the Downs, into the fields and woods. I liked to walk alone better than with anyone, unless it were with Diner on such a day as this.

  The high pavement was still unmade. When we reached the first house of the terrace we climbed the steps and walked along the rough surface where one day there would be stone paving slabs.

  ‘This
is where you will walk each morning,’ said Diner, ‘from one end of the terrace to the other. That will be your promenade.’

  I could not help laughing. ‘But where is the sense in walking and going nowhere?’

  He stopped and swept out his arm. ‘Look there, Lizzie.’

  We gazed out at the plunge of the Gorge. From here we could not see the river crawling in its bed, but we saw the dark curve of the trees on the other side. The forest was so thick that I never wanted to enter it. It seemed as if anything might live within it.

  ‘That is virgin forest,’ said Diner. ‘It has been there since the beginning of time.’

  ‘Perhaps there are wolves and bears, or wild men living in caves.’

  He turned round. ‘Never go there alone,’ he said.

  ‘I am not serious.’

  ‘You roam too far, Lizzie.’

  I was about to contest this, but the clouds were down on his face again as they were when he looked at the barometer. I wanted this to be a fine morning for us and so I pointed towards the horizon and asked, ‘Are those the hills of Wales?’

  ‘Of course.’

  We stared together at the soft blue heaping of hills in the distance.

  ‘I can see so far … It must be fifty miles.’

  ‘No need to go wandering, then, when it lies all before you here. You will come out of your house on a morning such as this, and walk the length of the terrace, to and fro, and see all the way into another country.’

  I smiled. ‘Yes,’ I said, knowing that instead I would walk away in my stout boots, down into the city perhaps, or out into the fields, as I had always done. I would never confine myself to a pavement, no matter how fine the view.