The Birdcage (13 page)

“You will not be asked to go back. Nobody wants you back, Jane Fudge.”

“Do you know whether Mr. Laverick is alive? Or where we could get in touch with him?”

Perry and Mercy drew their knees up to their chins, and were silent for a while. Then Mercy said, “You have bread in your hands, Jane Fudge. Dispense your bread to God’s creatures, the birds, and put away such notions.
I
do not wish you to go back. I am too old for the anxieties
attendant
upon theatrical production.” Jane Fudge left the
room, and the ferret followed her. Perry said, “John Lambert is dead. He died in the first Great War. He was exploded by Germans. I do not suppose you would
remember
that war.
We
remember it intensely.”

“And Mr. Laverick?”

“Even at the time, we knew very little of him. He came to our house. We did not go to his. It is not certain he had one.”

“I don’t suppose you have a copy of the play?”

“As to that, you may look in the study cupboard. Jane Fudge has the key. But we shall pay no money; be sure of that.” They shook their heads at him as he left, and Mercy put in her teeth.

The key was stiff in the lock of the study cupboard. When the Independent Theatre had been wound up, all scripts, all records had been locked in that cupboard, and there had been no occasion since to open it. Jane Fudge used sunflower oil, and the key turned. God’s creatures, the mice, had nested in the cupboard, and had drawn upon the scripts for nests elsewhere. When the door was opened, the mice ran out, and one of them was eaten by God’s creature, the ferret. All that remained were droppings and the shreds of paper.

*

Aubrey had left his briefcase at the office. By the time he had returned from Cornwall Gardens, a chatter of
secretaries
was already moving down the stairs and out of the lift. Aubrey went back upstairs against the current. Norah Palmer was still working at her desk.

“How did it go?” she said.

“It went.”

“You must have found
something
.”

Aubrey told Norah Palmer how it had gone. He told her of the Abbot-Hansteads and of Jane Fudge. He told her of
the ferret. He told her that the manuscript of
The Forgotten Men
, together with many other MSS. of plays perhaps equally significant, had become a nest for mice. He had taken a pad with him on his visit, and had made notes. He told her in detail, as they sat together in a glass stall on the third floor, and the secretaries were gone, and the stairs were silent, and cleaners moved among the desks, putting waste-paper in sacks for salvage. “At least it had a
gruesome
sort of interest,” Norah Palmer said.

Aubrey could do without that sort of interest, thank you very much. But he did see that he’d be able to tell the story at parties for a while until everybody had heard it.

“What was that about a Ministry?”

Aubrey consulted his notes. “There was somebody called Lambert, who was killed in the war. And they didn’t go to Laverick’s house; he came to theirs.”

“No, it was about making tea at a Ministry.”

“Here it is. He was something to do with the Civil Service, but not a civil servant, whatever that means. And then he was Lambert’s student.”

“Must mean evening classes.”

“I suppose.”

“Not a civil servant in
their
sense … I suppose the people in post-offices are civil servants, if you think about it, but they never get C.B.E.s.”

“I think they’d have said if he’d been a postman. I mean, they’d have noticed the uniform.”

“You know, every Ministry must have its own
equivalents
for the people behind the counters in post-offices. One doesn’t hear of them, but they must be there. Do they get promoted?——”

“Search me.”

“—or do they just go on doing the same sort of thing for a bit more money as they grow older? There must be
some sort of a record kept of these people. There must be Personnel Officers for them.”

“The Abbot-Hansteads didn’t say what Ministry,” Aubrey said quickly. “They didn’t say a Ministry at all, as a matter of fact. I mean, for all we know there may be civil servants without Ministries. Just sort of on the strength.”

Norah Palmer said, “The sort of people who become civil servants usually go on being civil servants. They go into it because they want security, and they stay in it for the same reason. Not much money, but it comes in every week, and there’s a pension at the end of it. It’s very difficult to dismiss a civil servant. I don’t think they have any procedure for that.”

“Anyway he wouldn’t still be with a Ministry. He’s retired long ago. He’s almost certainly dead.”

“And their sons go into the civil service after them. And
their
sons. Odd. You’d expect rebellion, wouldn’t you? The ritual slaughter of the father.”

Aubrey didn’t know what she was talking about, but assumed it to be something intellectual. “Dead or retired,” he said.

“You really have done wonderfully well, Aubrey,
gruesome
as it must have been. I’ll ask Paul”—Head of Drama—“to tell Mr. P. you’re on the track of something.”

“I can’t go round all the Ministries, Norah; I really can’t. I mean, things do pile up, you know.”

“Poor Aubrey! I’m so sorry. Do you want me to put someone else on it?”

Bitch! bitch! bitch
! Mr. P. would be just about waiting for that. It would be what he needed to justify the way he blocked Aubrey all the time. “No. I’ll do it,” he said.

“What about expenses? You haven’t been charging.”

“I’ve kept a note. It’s only taxis.” Bitterly. “I
haven’t had the opportunity to take anybody out to lunch.”

If Aubrey thought that Norah Palmer
liked
taking people out to lunch, he was bloody mad as well as bloody stupid. Eating more than one wanted to eat in the middle of the day! Drinking gin before the meal and wine with it,
because
not to drink would embarrass one’s guest! Fighting against sleepiness in consequence all through the
afternoon
! … But one doesn’t know these things until one has done it. No blame to Aubrey. If one only did it occasionally and with people one liked, expense-account lunching would be a great pleasure. Norah said, “Let me buy you a drink anyway. I expect you can do with one, and I know I could.”

“Well….” The embarrassment.

“We’ll go to a club I know, and then there won’t be any bother about my having to slip you the money. Don’t worry. It’s just a drinking club, not a Club in the grand sense, I do belong to a Women’s Club as a matter of fact, because it’s somewhere to sleep if I’m stuck, and anyway I’m a feminist at heart, so I keep on paying the
subscription
and never go, like belonging to the Howard League and not have time to read the
Journal
.”

“Well——”

“You’ll probably know some of the people. Do come. I’ll just get washed first.”
Get washed
. Why couldn’t she say, “powder my nose” like everybody else?

And why had she asked him, Aubrey wondered. She had never asked him to have a drink before. There was
something
suspect in it. As for Norah, washing her hands in the Ladies’ Lavatory,
Why did I ask him?
she wondered. He was such a boring boy. But he had sounded so envious about the lunches.

Later they sat on stools at a bar, while somewhere a tape
called
In Sentimental Mood
unwound to make them music. Norah Palmer drank gin and water, and Aubrey (to show he knew his way about, and had been to the south of France) drank a mixture of gin and St. Raphael. Both ate crisps and stuffed olives from glass dishes.
After the first death, there is no other
went irritatingly round and round in Norah Palmer’s head like a jingle as she listened to Aubrey, and made the right responses, and assured him that he must not attempt to buy a drink for himself because this was on the firm.
After the first death
… but it all gets blurred, and easy to do, and nobody notices death or an emptiness if they are not looking for it, and really, if only one will listen, and play the game, eat an olive and take another drink, one doesn’t even notice oneself.

Norah Palmer inclined her head a little to one side, and listened to Aubrey, who told her that he had always been good at English when he was at school, and that he could have gone on if he’d wanted to do so, but one missed a great deal by wasting all that time at a university, Aubrey said, because it wasn’t like life, was it, whereas he, Aubrey, had had nothing but life ever since he was sixteen. First there had been the Travel Agency, and then the Pay Corps in Austria. I mean, you meet all sorts in the Army, even though Aubrey had himself managed to get a commission because of his accent and that sort of thing, which rather took him out of contact with the Other Ranks; it was nonsense really because, I mean, nobody could have been more inefficient than he at imprests and all that, and he’d relied on his sergeant to do most of it for him, and just sort of taken the responsibility, which is what an officer is basically for. And then there’d been stage-management, and going on tour and that sort of thing. The sorts he’d met in the theatre had certainly been all, from actors
themselves
, who were a pretty mixed crowd, to provincial
stage-hands
,
and above all the landladies of theatrical digs. His landlady in Coventry had taken him Olde Tyme dancing, and seduced him, as a matter of fact, when she brought the early morning tea. She’d sat on his bed, stroked his head, and said he was looking pale; after that, one thing had led to another.

Norah smiled, tilted her head the other way, drank gin and water, ate a crisp. A man Aubrey actually knew, a sort of film director or something, recognized Aubrey, and nodded to him in a very friendly way, and Norah Palmer turned out to know him also, so the man joined them for a couple, and then went away. Aubrey told Norah Palmer that he himself had been a fool not to get into films, because once you were in, you were in, but that now the Unions would keep him from getting any job in films that was comparable in salary or status to the job he had at present. Aubrey said that he wasn’t a Conservative—he had no politics, as a matter of fact; he didn’t see that it made much difference—but that people ought to realize that the Unions had throttled the cinema industry, and that pretty soon they’d get a stranglehold on television as well. Just look at New York, Aubrey said. Just let Norah Palmer look at what the Unions had done to the theatre on
Broadway
. If Aubrey had an ambition—and he had; he had a lot of ambition, if Norah Palmer wanted to know—if he had an ambition, it was to visit New York, because in New York someone like Aubrey could get on, and would not be held back by not having been to a university. Aubrey didn’t suppose that Mr. P. would ever send him to New York, the way Mr. P. had sent Paul to New York, and so many others, but if Mr. P. ever did send Aubrey to New York, then Aubrey wouldn’t bother to come back, and Norah Palmer might as well know it.

Norah Palmer said:

“What?”

“Nothing. Sorry. Just a jingle. I’m fascinated by jingles this evening.” Norah Palmer began to wonder what she was to do with him. She had started something, and ought to stop it, but that would take effort, and it was so much easier to drift when one had had a hard day. Because, for Christ’s sake, who
cared
? “We’d better get something to eat, I suppose,” she said.

“Let me.” He couldn’t remember how much money he had in his wallet, but surely there would be enough? Perhaps he could get to the loo to count it before
suggesting
a place.

But Norah said it would be easier to go back to her place, and make an omelette.

Do I want to? Do I really want to?
she thought, watching across the kitchen table. Wouldn’t it complicate matters at the office? Aubrey was handling his fork with too much care, chewing his food with too little.
Really, that boy has no chin at all
, she thought. If she herself were only a little more sober, she would be able to think of some way of getting rid of him without wounding his pride.

Aubrey knew well enough why Norah Palmer had asked him back to her flat. He didn’t mind, he supposed, if that was what she wanted, though she must be at least eight years older than he. He hoped it wasn’t going to complicate things at the office. Once or twice would be all very well, but he hoped she wouldn’t always be expecting him to…. After all, at Coventry he’d been moving on in a week, never to return, and Mrs. Thing had made all the running. He didn’t mind—well, going to bed and all that, but how was he expected to lead up to it? Most of Aubrey’s sexual
experiences so far had come quite naturally out of heavy necking, usually at parties or after a dance. He didn’t know if he could carry through the same sort of routine with somebody so senior to him in every way. He said, “You must let me help you wash up.”

Some ninety minutes later, Norah Palmer said, “Really, it doesn’t matter. Please don’t feel…. I mean….”

“I’m awfully sorry, Norah.”

“Really, it doesn’t matter.”

“I hope you’re not disappointed.”

So he was crass, on top of everything else.

Aubrey said, “I suppose it was having so much to drink. I mean, it does affect people like that sometimes, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s nothing to do with you or anything.” A silence. Then awkwardly, “I mean, you’re awfully nice.”

For a moment she considered telling him not to worry, to go to sleep, and that everything would be all right later. But that would mean his staying the night. The bed was too narrow to sleep both of them comfortably (or probably at all), and as for that “later”, it would be too humiliating if she had to put up with this ineptitude all over again. He said, “I suppose I’d better be on my way.”

“Let me make you some coffee.”

“No.” Quickly. “No, you just stay where you are. I’ll manage. Don’t get up.” Clumps and bumps of Aubrey, dressing in the dark. He had lost a sock. Heavy breathing as he searched for it. Norah switched on the bedside lamp, and there he was, rumpled in Y-front underwear. He finished dressing, hesitated, considered whether it would be good manners to kiss her good-bye, decided against it, and was gone. Norah went almost immediately to sleep.