A Summer Bird-Cage (2 page)

‘Oh, Louise.’

‘Well, it’s true.’

‘Where are they all at the moment?’

‘Having tea.’

‘Oh, I see. Well, you’d better go and join them.’

‘See you,’ said Louise, and rang off. Not for her a diminuendo of ‘Well, it’s been nice hearing you, and you too, thank you for ringing, good-bye, good-bye, good-bye, ’bye then, see you, ’bye then,’ off.

I went and bought myself an
Evening Standard
and got on the train, where I read it and
Tender is the Night
(beta minus) and watched the monotonous countryside enlivened only by the occasional ancient church-spire. I began to get gritty and sticky and confused in my mind, and to think petty niggling thoughts about bridesmaids’ dresses and our ghastly cousin Daphne and why on earth Louise was getting married at home instead of in London. I mean to say, why have hundreds of guests and white veils and champagne in Warwickshire? There must have been some point of etiquette involved too subtle for me to understand: Louise is a great one for etiquette.

So, my mind thus nastily occupied, I arrived at New Street, and stoically, irritably, heaved my cases down from the rack and carried them along the platform. I was just about to think ‘Of course she isn’t on time’ when I caught sight of her, with her back to the train and platform, playing with one of those letter-punching machines. She seemed dozing and abstracted. The usual envy filled me as I took note of her beautifully pinned and coiled hair, the clear beige and neatness of her jersey, and the uncreased look of her linen trousers. I was wearing linen trousers too, but mine were of the baggy at the knee variety, and I suddenly felt shabby and travel-stained, reduced to a schoolgirl with twisted belt, mac down to ankles, and one plait undone. She always does that to me. Always. I put my cases down, pushed the hair out of my eyes, and said ‘Hi, Loulou.’

She turned round and said, ‘Oh, there you are.’ Then she turned back to her machine and pushed the button. A metal tag came out. She looked at it and dropped it on the platform. I glanced down at it. It said
LOUISE BENNETT XXXXXXXX
.

‘I wondered if I’d got the right train,’ she said.

‘You certainly had,’ I said. ‘It was a horrible train. Thank heaven that’s over, I’m fed up with travelling.’

‘Well, come on then,’ she said. ‘Let’s get a porter.’

Unprotesting, I let her collect one, which she did with ease as all the available ones were gaping at her anyway. Then she ambled off like an heiress, and I shuffled behind like Cinderella or rather one of her ugly sisters after the pumpkin episode. Louise didn’t say anything till we got to the car (I had to tip the porter with one of my last shillings); there, she switched on the engine, looked at herself in the driving mirror with that withdrawn narcissistic nonchalance she has, adjusted it, and said, ‘Well, what was Paris like?’

I wished she could manage to sound just a little more interested.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Pretty marvellous really, I suppose.’

She drove off. She drives quite well, I think.

‘I suppose you associated with all those beatniks,’ she said, after another long pause.

‘Beatniks come from America,’ I said. ‘It’s existentialists in Paris.’

‘Still?’

‘Why not?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’

‘Anyway, I didn’t. I spent most of the time with some rather smart silly girls I was teaching, and a man called Martin who was working in a bookshop.’ I thought back to Martin, and became expansive: I told her about how we used to meet for breakfast in the bar under my bed-sitter, and how he spoke such wonderful French that everyone thought he was, though he just learned it at school like everyone else, and about the day we went to Versailles and our train got stuck in a siding. I amused myself by recounting it, even though I didn’t much amuse her. She gave very little in exchange—a few odd remarks about cousins Daphne and Michael and Aunt Betty, my mother’s sad widowed sister, and about wedding presents. Not a word about Stephen. After a while we lapsed into silence.

I looked out of the window. The country looked so different from the car: it looked unique and beautiful, not flat and deadly. Once one gets through the industrial landscape, which I think very impressive and dignified, the rusticity is enchanting. It was getting towards dusk, and the autumnal colours were deeper and heavier in the sinking light: the fields of corn were a dark brown and gold, dotted ecstatically with poppies. I was moved by their intermingling tones. The sky was purplish, with breaks of light coming somehow closer in front of a sombre, solid background of clouds that looked like plush. Oh, it was beautiful, very much England and beautiful. Why aren’t they enough, why won’t they do, things like that, rainbows and cornfields.

I always enjoy arriving home however much I hate it when I get there. Hope certainly springs eternal in the human breast, and I think after every absence that my family will have improved, though it never does. A faint warm and cosy feeling overcame me as we drove up the drive and saw Mama, who had heard the car, standing at the doorway. She was so delighted to see me, so touched and excited by my arrival, that I caught her enthusiasm. She always liked me best. I despise myself at times for giving in to the bargain comfort of meals provided and beds made, but she sees nothing wrong in it all. She doesn’t think it’s weak to like being looked after, she thinks it’s natural, she thinks I’m mad to prefer the dirt and weariness and loneliness that I am prepared to suffer in order to gain a sense of hope. It always takes me a day or two, though, to realize why there is no possibility in my home, and so I sat down that evening quite comfortably amid the faces and furniture of the drawing-room to eat my plate of cold chicken, and thought how pleasant and unobjectionable fitted carpets and curtains with pelmets and wall-lights like candles and chiming doorbells really are. I persuaded my father to open the bottle of liqueur I had brought for him, and we drank it with the coffee, and told anecdotes and listened to wedding problems and looked at wedding presents. I had brought them each something—the Cointreau for Papa, perfume for Mama and Aunt Betty and Daphne, five yellow-backed books for Louise and a tie for Michael, not chosen by me. He seemed to like it: it was the only thing I had had doubts about. Some of Louise’s wedding presents were wonderful, blissful glass objects and hotplates and silver. But she didn’t seem very interested in them herself. She didn’t seem concerned.

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

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.’