A Summer Bird-Cage Read online

  I like my cousin Michael. We are exactly the same age, to a couple of weeks, and we got on very well as children. Daphne is three years older, Louise’s age, a plain bespectacled girl, now a schoolmistress, and one of those I imagine who bring despair to the hearts of young girls as they view the narrow grey horizons of maturity through such lenses. It had been one of my only holds over Louise in our early childhood, that Michael was my friend, not hers: when we went to stay with my aunt during my parents’ too frequent holidays without us, I used to gain in stature and to expand, while Louise would retire irritably with a book and refuse to play with Daphne at all. I didn’t realize then, though I do now, that she must have been very jealous of me and Michael; usually at home I was always pestering her to talk to me or to take me with her on expeditions, but at Aunt B’s I had no need to trouble her. Indeed, part of my pleasure in playing with Michael was relief at not having to disturb Louise, who always used to snap at me or bully me or ignore me when I did: but in reality I suppose she missed my timid, obsequious attentions. Anyway, some of the old bond between Michael and me remained: he was a rugger boy, but of the very nicest type, and he and I had quite a talk about Paris, and he told me about his new girl. He said he was going to France himself next month and I thought I would give him Martin’s address. And while we all talked and sipped our Cointreau and rejoiced in our smugness, Louise sat on the rose tapestry chair in the corner and wrote thank-you letters in her wild enormous handwriting at my mother’s desk.

  It was when I went to bed that I felt the biggest pull of the comfort thing. There is something so alluring about my own room that—after French beds and cigarette ends all over and wine on the counterpane—is utterly demoralizing. After undressing in front of an unnecessary gas fire, I wandered round opening drawers and looking at clothes I had forgotten and old letters, and myself in the large subservient mirrors. Then I got into bed, and as I lay there reading in the clean tight sheets in a spinsterish delight, I wondered why on earth I disliked being at home so much.

  2

  The Wedding

  I FOUND OUT, of course, in the morning. After the first glow of welcome came the usual nags, complaints, demands and grudges: my mother complained to me unendingly about Louise, about the guests she invited who never replied, about the way she left packing straw all over the hall, and about our Swedish girl Kristin: my father told me my mother was run down and that my place was at home and what did I mean by arriving only two days before the wedding: Daphne peered and chatted at me and told me heart-breaking, pathetic stories about the classics master at the Boys’ Grammar School who apparently took her to the cinema from time to time. Louise ignored me and everyone else completely. Aunt Betty was as quiet and mournful as ever, uncomplaining and forbearing and worn to a shadow by her widowhood. She was everybody’s stooge: everybody took it out of her. The whole set-up seemed so fossilized and gloomy that I decided that the gleams of goodwill had as ever been pure hallucination, and that I had better get out as soon after Louise had departed as possible. The only consolation was Michael, who walked with me round our rather Elizabethan garden, full of camomile and gillyflowers and pease-blossom, pulling flowers off plants in a way that drives Mama mad, and telling me what he thought of Stephen. What he thought wasn’t much, as I had expected, but he said with enviable cynicism, ‘Oh, she probably knows which side her bread is buttered.’ Michael and I used to amuse ourselves by a little mild flirtation: although he was such an old acquaintance we were both well aware that we were more than relations and that the prayer-book said we could get married if we wanted. We didn’t want, but it added a little incestuous spice to family life to think about the possibility. The year before he had even tried to kiss me, but I think we were both rather disgusted by the event, and had since confined ourselves to innuendo and accidentally brushing hands and provocative chat about other girls of his or men of mine.

  With everybody else being in such a bad temper about one thing and another, I managed to hit the right note of irritation by getting really annoyed about my bridesmaid’s dress. It was very smart, and it fitted perfectly, but I thought it was rather tarty, and was surprised at Louise until I remembered that she wasn’t wearing it herself. Her dress was quite lovely, or seemed to be through its plastic bag in the cupboard; it was made of wild silk and was simple and floating. I knew she would look so extraordinary that I wished I could be generous and admire her just for a couple of days without grudging it. But she was so ungenerous herself that I couldn’t. Until I went up to Oxford I always believed that the defensive, almost whining position that she invariably pushed me into was entirely the fault of my own miserable nature, as I admired her fanatically: it was only at university that I realized that it was she that forced me into grudgingness. In fact, I never realized this of my own accord at all: it was explained to me by a friend, and it took me a very long time to grasp the idea and to live with it. I always have birth-pangs over new ideas, prolonged sickness, headaches and misery before the final painful delivery: but after that the idea is with me for ever, kicking and alive. I could never thank Peter enough for delivering this idea about Louise: his theory was, I think, essentially the right one, and it lifted a load of dependence and clinging inferiority from my shoulders. It was at Oxford that I began to forget her: I didn’t think about her for whole days together: I didn’t think people were being kind when they complimented me on my appearance. I was always a one for seeing things in extremes, and because I wasn’t as beautiful as Louise I assumed I was as plain as Daphne: whereas in fact if there is a barrier down the middle of mankind dividing the sheep from the goats I am certainly on Louise’s side of it as far as physical beauty goes.

  It was a horrible day. A day of bad temper, and in me of age-old, cradle-born superfluity. A day of old feuds. The thought of Louise getting married the next day seemed to annoy everybody, including Louise. We all went to bed fairly early, wishing Louise a solemn good night: at dinner my mother had suddenly and unexpectedly turned sentimental, reminiscing about her own honeymoon in a solitary unsupported monologue. I felt sorry for her as my father wouldn’t cooperate at all: poor brave twittering Mama, pretending everything had always been so lovely, ignoring the facts because they were the only ones she knew. My father is a bit of a brute and that phrase really fits him; at such times he rudely and abruptly dissociates himself from everything Mama says, so she has no retreat except repellent Louise and soft, dishonest, indulgent me. So I asked the right questions and listened to the old stories, which would have been charming if true, and went to bed feeling sick with myself and sick with the whole idea of marriage and sickest of all with Louise, who didn’t even seem to realize the courage and desperation of Mama that underlaid the nonsense and fuss and chirruping.

  I fell asleep quickly and was awakened at four in the morning by noises from downstairs. I lay there for a few minutes in a headaching bad temper wondering what on earth it was, until it occurred to me that it might well be Louise suffering from traditional bridal sleeplessness. I tried to get to sleep again, but couldn’t, and after tossing and turning and switching the light on and off several times I decided to get up and investigate. I put on my dressing-gown—and crept to the top of the stairs: the hall light wasn’t on, but the light in the music-room was, and I could see Louise walking firmly and regularly from one end of it, along the hall to the front door, and back again, backwards and forwards, like an animal in a small cage trying to take exercise. She had bare feet and was wearing a white nightgown that looked like part of a trousseau; it had a black ribbon threaded round the lace at the neck. There was something padding and rhythmic in her step that suggested she had been there for a long time, walking up and down. She was smoking and dropping cigarette ash on the floor as she went. I watched her make her short pilgrimage two or three times more before I said, ‘Lou,’ and she looked up as she reached the bottom of the stairs and saw me: ‘Who’s that?’ she said, with a little giggle, and I said ‘Sarah,’ and she said, �
��Oh, that’s all right!’ with a sigh of relief. Then, with the same subterranean giggle in her voice, she went on, ‘Come on down then, come and join the party.’

  She sounded very approachable, so I went down and we went into the music-room where the light was. She sat down on the settee, very heavily, and said, ‘Look, Sally, I’m drinking in the dawn.’ And she was too: she had halffinished a bottle of whisky: she handed it to me with a kind of bonhomie that was quite unprecedented, and said, ‘Go on, have a drink.’

  I obeyed, though the stuff tasted very sour and odd in my half-asleep mouth, and then I looked around. Everywhere was littered with ash, little grey worms of it all over the carpet, and Louise herself looked quite fantastic, her long hair all wild and tangled up with two odd curlers stuck in the top, and her skin glistening white and deathly with cold cream.

  ‘What the hell do you think you are?’ I said. ‘Lady Macbeth?’

  ‘How did you guess,’ she said, ‘how did you guess. And how did you know I was here?’

  ‘I heard you. You woke me up.’

  ‘Oh Christ, that must have been when I fell over the piano stool. I’m not really making a noise.’

  ‘Oh no. And look at that ash.’

  She looked at it, comically helpless.

  ‘Yes, it is rather a mess, isn’t it. What on earth can I do with it? And all that whisky. Could I fill it up with water, do you think?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, you’ll be in Rome before it’s discovered.’

  ‘Yes, so I will. So I will. I keep forgetting.’ She paused and belched. ‘I say, Sally, I feel ghastly.’

  ‘I’m sure you do,’ I said, primly. ‘Would you like me to make you some coffee?’

  ‘Oh, Sarah, be an angel. I’d love some. I could just do with some. Do make me some, I need looking after for once in my life, I’m too weak to switch the gas on. Do be an angel, I’ll love you for ever if you make me some coffee.’

  I could have done with that too.

  It was soft of me, I suppose, but I was so honoured by her drunken accessibility that I took her into the kitchen and sat her down at the table, made her some Nescafé, and swept up all the ash quietly with a dustpan and brush. Then she started to moan about her hair so I fetched the rest of her curlers and put it all up for her. She looked only faintly ridiculous even with her hair full of iron rolls and her face shining with grease: somehow she managed to look dramatic rather than at a disadvantage. She looked as though she were in a film or an air raid. She was more communicative than I had ever known her, and kept muttering about Rome and loving, honouring and obeying: she said nothing about Stephen except, ‘Stephen knows such gorgeous people in Rome,’ which came up from time to time as a refrain. I envied her, for her honeymoon if not for her husband, and told her so: ‘I wouldn’t mind larking about in first class hotels for a bit,’ I said. She was pleased that I was impressed. After a while the blodginess and irritation of being up in the middle of the night left me, and I fell in with the isolated moment, the dark kitchen, Louise leaning on her elbows with her face in her hands, the smell of ash and cold cream, and the sudden disruption of twenty-one years of family life, during which I had never been up at that hour except when ill. Louise kept going on so about Rome that I too started to think of it: there is something about Italy that fills me with such desire: even the names are so incantatory that they put me under—Florence, Arno, Ferrara, Siena, Venice, Tintoretto, Cimabue, Orvieto, Lachrimae Christi permesso, limonata—just the sound of them reminds me that I am not all dry grit and deserted hollows. As Kingsley Amis might put it, I am a nut case about abroad. I love E. M. Forster for loving it: I love George Eliot for her monstrous dedicated ardour in Romola: I love those two lines of Keats which I first found used to illustrate some long-forgotten figure of speech in a grammar textbook—

  ‘So the two brothers and their murdered man

  Rode past fair Florence.’

  Fair Florence, with the sculpture and the water-ices. I gave myself up to the idea of it, I wallowed in nostalgia—stupidly, as I had only got back from abroad the day before and was due in fact for a spell of English Victoriana-worship—I envied Louise for going there the minute that trivial business of getting married was over. A honeymoon and Rome, what an embarras de richesses. I would have changed places in a flash, if only I could have chosen a different man. I could have made good use of those nice little stapled booklets of tickets.

  I must say, in justice, that there was something so almost gay in the way Louise talked about those gorgeous people, and her trousseau, and the hotels, that I was quite prepared to believe that everything was perfectly normal and happy, and even that she might be in love: certainly that life would be beautiful and exciting and highly-coloured for her, which for other people may well be just as good as love. I did not think that the drabness and despair which threatened to ooze over my life in every unoccupied second would ever swamp Louise: she was way off, wealthy, up in the sky and singing. Louise, Louise, I mutely cried as we went up to bed for the last two hours of the night, Louise teach me how to win, teach me to be undefeated, teach me to trample without wincing. Teach me the art of discarding. Teach me success.

  Her wedding morning was bright and promising. She got up earlier than usual, looking wax-coloured and stiff. She came down to breakfast, one of those lapsed middle-class events which she normally used to miss. This had been one of my mother’s grievances, and I thought never again will she have that to complain about. We could never see what difference it made if we came down to breakfast or not, as we were quite prepared to fast if we got up late. But mother didn’t see it that way. Our domestic help at that time consisted of one lonely Swedish girl, not a bit clean and brisk as they look on travel posters, but dim, melancholic, and I suspect suicidal: she used to weep into the washing-up. She said she wept for homesickness, but I thought it was something much more cosmic and tried to talk to her about it, but she disliked me for being indirectly her employer and would simply scowl when I approached her. She couldn’t deal with breakfast for all of us, poor girl, and was always half-asleep and yawning as she swayed in with the eggs and coffee. Once Papa called her a slut—not to her face, of course, but he said it—and Mama immediately launched into tirades of abstract liberal fervour while I burst into tears, totally unexpectedly, and I never knew whether it was because I hated to hear my father be so brutal or my mother so rhetorical, or whether (as I hope it was) I cried because I felt so sorry for her, depressed amongst the alien dishes. I kept telling myself that she could leave if she wanted, but it did not comfort me, for where is a gloomy young foreigner to go? I had been au pair myself and knew what it could feel like. She wore long black jerseys with loose sleeves rolled back, and had prominent (not protruding, prominent) white eyes, rather like a large bird—a goose or a seagull—staring and blind. She was not ideal company at the breakfast table: she seemed to echo Louise’s own un-made-up pallor. The toast was hard, there was an egg short so I had to go without, and Daphne’s hair had clearly been in overeffective rollers. I felt too dreary to express until I discovered amongst Louise’s plentiful post a card from Martin.

  It said, platitudinously enough: ‘Dearest Sarah, I hope you had a good crossing and enjoy the wedding. I miss you here. Please write soon. Much love, Martin.’

  Not much in the way of passion, perhaps, but these uninspired words lifted me out of my gloom and restored my faith in life: I felt a great pang for Martin and vin ordinaire which managed to put Louise and hard toast in their place again. It detached me, that unimpressive little postcard, and my detachment lasted until I had actually zipped myself into my bridesmaid’s dress half an hour before we were due to leave for church.

  I began to get involved again when I went to see if I could help Louise dress. This was one of the tasks which books on weddings expressly allocate to the chief bridesmaid, which I assumed I was, though nobody had ever said anything about it; and I have always been conscientious. Our school motto was Qui fidelis est in
parvo, in multo quoque est fidelis. I didn’t knock on her bedroom door when I went in, and surprised her standing quite still and looking at herself in the mirror. Her dress was on, but open all the way down the front.

  ‘Can I help?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You can do my dress up down the front.’