The Birdcage (14 page)

Next morning Squad, washed and shaved, but wearing silk pyjamas and a frogged dressing-gown, walked into
the kitchen where Norah was breakfasting on coffee. “
Well
!” he said, “Such adventures, my dear!”

“Oh, Squad, don’t.”

“Not my taste at all, I must say.”

Norah said sadly, “Not mine either, I’m afraid. It all turned out rather badly.”

“There’ll be red ears on the third floor this morning. I’ve brought your letters. There’s only one. The postmark says ‘Chard’, if that’s likely.”

“In Somerset. It’s from my mum.” Norah Palmer opened the envelope with that slight lowering of the spirits her mother’s handwriting always induced in her, and began to read the letter. Norah’s mother wrote that Norah had been naughty not to have told her at once of what had happened, but that she could understand this because Norah never had been able to admit a mistake. (Did Norah remember that time with Miss Bossy’s cat? They could laugh about it now, but it had been a great old tragedy then, hadn’t it?) Norah’s mother wasn’t going to say any more about it, because what’s done is done, and anyway she never had thought it was any of her business, Norah being old enough to look after her own life, and Norah’s mother having taken a vow long ago never, never, never to interfere with her children. As Norah knew, Norah’s mother never had been able to write letters, although she loved to get them. What Norah’s mother felt was that probably Norah would want to have a good old chin-wag with somebody—not about this business particularly, but about things in general. Sometimes it did help to talk things over; even if it decided nothing, one felt a bit clearer in one’s mind, and could begin to see the wood from the trees. Anyway, whatever Norah felt about that (and it was up to
her
entirely) Norah’s mother had been thinking of coming up to London to have a real old go at
the shops, not having had a real old go for ages, and they’d have a real old go together if Norah could make the time for it. Norah was not to put herself out in any way,
because
Norah’s mother didn’t expect to stay with her, and perhaps Norah would find a good,
cheap
hotel somewhere nearby, and would book her in. She had great plans now that Auntie May had let them
all
down over New Zealand, but they could talk about all that during her visit. She would arrive on Sunday week, if that suited Norah. She said nothing about going.

Norah Palmer put her head down on the table, and wept, and Squad went off to the bathroom to fetch her an
Alka-Seltzer
.

I
f you will look back to the end of Chapter I, you will find there a hint that more had occurred than Peter Ash had told of the episode of the threatening gondolier. In arranging the story for telling, Peter Ash had ommitted some details and altered others. On that evening in Venice he had drunk, it is true, “a couple of coffees and a little Kummel”, but he had followed the Kummel with four brandies, and they had combined with the bottle of
Soave
he had consumed at dinner to make a clouded restlessness in him.

Yes, it had seemed “ridiculously early to go to bed when the concert was over”, but what else was there to do in Venice, with all the cinemas showing dubbed versions of
Abbot and Costello Meet the Werewolf
, and with the Fenice Theatre closed for the summer? For a while he had sat where he was at Quadri’s, and he had watched the people passing and re-passing in the Piazza. Certain young men, he noticed, seemed to pass and re-pass more often than anyone else, doing a leisurely sentry-duty from one end of the Piazza to the other. They were not tourists, or, if they were, they were Italian tourists, and tourists without the attachments of families or friends, without even cameras, and without the bright summer plumage in which tourists are usually clothed. For lack of any other focus of interest, he began to pick out individuals among them, and follow
their progress. There was the one in dark blue. He was walking west, and passed two Americans walking east: the Americans were men in their early thirties, wore checked jackets of Madras cotton, and seemed prosperous. Peter Ash noticed that, after Bluey had passed them, the two Americans stopped. Bluey also stopped, looked back for a moment, then walked on rather more slowly. One of the two Americans flipped a coin on the back of his hand, which both examined. Then he who had flipped the coin smiled, shrugged and continued his progress to the east. His companion turned, walked rapidly west, and soon drew level with Bluey. There was a moment’s conversation between them. Then both walked south together into the Piazetta, and out of sight. Peter Ash found that his imagination followed them.

Forty-five minutes later, Peter Ash was in a gondola with a boy called Mario, whose home, he said, was in Milan. Mario told Peter Ash that he liked the English very much, considerably more than he liked the Germans, who were not
sympatico
. He had an English friend, and the friend had promised Mario that, if Mario ever came to England, he would find a job for him. Mario produced from his wallet a grubby piece of paper, on which was written in (unhappily indelible) pencil an address in Chingwell. Mario did not yet have the money for the fare, but he was saving for it. Peter Ash understood Mario very well, and a price was arranged. A price was also arranged for the gondola, and the gondolier, as it seemed, had become blind and deaf by long experience of this sort of encounter. It was a most disagreeable surprise for Peter Ash when, once they had reached the middle of an expanse of water that may have been the Giudecca Canal, the climate of the affeir so suddenly changed.

The rest of the story had been much as he had told it to
Norah Palmer next morning, except that, if one truly considers it, Peter Ash had been more brave than he suggested, since he’d had not only the gondolier, but Mario to contend against. It had been an humiliating and a comic episode, but it had left no scar, since he had come out of it so well. It was an incident now, a story to be told at parties with the details altered; he felt no distress at remembering it. Only for us—for me writing it, for you reading it—for us for whom this novel is, among other things, a
finding out
, the incident cannot be isolated. It has connections with the past, and points to the future.

Peter Ash restless, Peter Ash fuddled, Peter Ash on the loose for the evening, Peter Ash determined to end his nine years’ affair with Norah Palmer, had looked for a young man to pass the time away, so you may at least assume that he was following a preference. For nine years this preference had slept; now in this combination of circumstances, in this foreign city, on this warm summer evening, it woke, stretched, opened one eye, looked about and saw, first Bluey and the American as an example, then Mario as an opportunity. The preference reaffirmed its existence, and then went back to sleep.

As a young man, Peter Ash had been what is called “a practising homosexual”, but Norah Palmer was one of those women who make it a minor vocation to “cure” homosexuals, and, moving as she did among intellectuals and creative artists, found plenty of opportunities to exercise it. It was all a
waste
, Norah Palmer thought, an appalling waste: so many of those who thought themselves to be homosexual were no more so than she was. Fashion or accident, she thought, might tilt a young man one way before his emotions had settled down, and then a sense of doom, or a reaction against the censure of society or simply the fact that he had undertaken responsibilities to another person,
or made friends within a particular circle—all these factors might keep him tilted, when there was no need for it and it was all waste. Norah Palmer disliked waste. If, by offering her own body for use, she could prevent it, she would do so. She had no notion of the body as an altar. If by a little affection, a little patience, a casual and undemanding attitude to sex, she might show a better way to some of those who were not (she felt sure) by nature homosexual, then why not for goodness’ sake? She had brought reassurance, if not actual “cure” to an Economics don, a B.B.C. Talks Producer, a poet (but he, as it turned out, was alcoholic as well, and there was no doing anything with him) and a man from Chatham House, and then she had taken up with Peter Ash, and at last, as it seemed, the cure had worked, and her vocation been justified.

I have so far presented Peter Ash to you as a person in the main dislikeable, but people are not usually dislikeable for no reason. You must consider that Norah Palmer lived with Peter Ash for nine years, and she was a human being as we are, and could not have done so if he had been entirely a monster. Peter Ash’s homosexuality, when Norah Palmer first met him, was part of the total Peter Ash, and the reasons for it were also the reasons for what you may have found dislikeable in him. I do not suggest that they would account for homosexuality in anyone else, man or woman, for I do not know what causes this state of affairs. Anyone who has read Mr. Gordon Westwood’s excellent little book,
A Minority
, will know that, in the histories of the people Mr. Westwood interviewed, he could find no significant correspondences that would allow him to form a hypothesis as to cause; there seemed to be as many “reasons” for homosexuality as there were homosexuals. Indeed, even the word “homosexual”, Mr. Westwood tells us, cannot properly be used to describe a person,
but only an action, and Norah Palmer’s poet had, as she discovered, been capable of rollicking in bed with her on Sunday night, to spend Monday afternoon with equal enjoyment in the arms of a long-distance lorry-driver with a wife and two-year-old daughter in Devizes. So all the possible reasons you may find in the various studies on the subject were irrelevant to Peter Ash except two, and those two were relevant to more than his sexual deviation. Peter Ash was selfish, and he was, to use the jargon word, “insecure”—that is, he was frightened that at any time he might lose what respect and affection he had from people, because he did not believe that he deserved it.

These reasons, you may say, are not reasons at all; they explain immediately, but not finally. Why was he selfish? Why was he insecure? The two are linked, of course: a person not self-obsessed does not demand the moment-
by-moment
reassurance that other people like and respect him. For the self-obsession, I offer no final, all-explaining whys. Some factor in the genes … a childhood of deprivation … a father dead, divorced or defeated … a mother possessive or neglectful … an only childhood … siblings better loved…. You may take your pick of those and others, or a combination from those and others, for I am not God to know everything, even about a character I have imagined, and this is an exploring not an explaining. I tell you only that Peter Ash, after enduring a not particularly distinguished war in the R.A.F. Regiment was demobilized, used his Education Grant for a dramatic school, and led for a while the shifting life of a young actor of only moderate talent, and that by that time he had already fallen into a particular way of sexual life, which was at once easy and unbearably difficult. Afraid at all times of committing himself, afraid of being tied, afraid of being found out yet compelled somehow to undertake what, if he were found
out, would bring him the greatest shame, he had passed from periods of abstinence to brief adventures—in trains, in the wooded places of public parks, in the bed-sitting-rooms of strangers, in cinemas, once in a beach-shelter at Scarborough when he had slept afterwards wrapped for warmth in newspapers salvaged from the litter-bin.

He was not a satyr. He did not usually seek adventures, but was unable to resist accepting them when they occurred. He did not like leading this sort of life, and did not like himself for leading it. But he was frightened of attachment, for in an attachment he would be found to be (he knew) the kind of sub-person that he “really” was. When Norah Palmer undertook him, and he discovered not only that he was capable of heterosexual behaviour and could take pleasure in it, but that it did not at all bind him, that she had her own life and intended to lead it, that she would not be dependent, then the advantages of a continued attachment grew clearer and clearer to him, and he himself came to depend—to depend on Norah Palmer, who was an intelligent women as all the world knew, and took it quite as a matter of course that he should be respected. And since he had no daemon, no itch, and was not driven to acts of sexual deviance as gestures against society or any of that jazz, he did not relapse. The need had gone. Their relationship grew, and changed, but continued. There were frets and chafes, but they were contained within it, and only after nine years, only when Norah Palmer, seated on a chair of plaited plastic in the Piazza San Marco, told Peter Ash that she respected nothing about him, only then did the frets and chafes become so concentrated as to break the relationship altogether, and leave Peter Ash to go it alone.

*

To go it alone. But he was not alone; he had friends; he
had a great many friends. He could spend at least a part of most evenings in company if he wished, and return to the flat to sleep. He was a lion, and need never languish for lack of invitations.

As for women, well it was true that most of his friends were married, and one didn’t go about interfering with the marriages of one’s friends. But there were plenty of unattached women in London, who would be glad to go to a theatre with Peter Ash, to bed with Peter Ash. Unattached … glad…. There was the rub. Unattached women are glad of an attachment of some sort. Not necessarily marriage; one must not be so
naïf
as to suppose that; but there are other attachments than marriage. We have come a long way towards sexual egality in our society, but not so far that the word “spinster” has lost it pejorative associations; unattached, unmarried women most usually need a defence against that word. Peter Ash had already, as we know, made up his mind to drop Bunty, and when Bunty suggested that he might like to spend a week-end at her home in Taunton, his determination was reinforced. It was not at all difficult to end the affair. No tears, or none that he saw. No scenes, or none in which he was involved. It was usual for them at the end of one meeting to arrange a date and time for the next. “See you Thursday? 7.30? In the foyer?” and Thursday it would be, if she were not on duty. If no arrangement were made, there would be no meeting. And so, one morning, Peter Ash found that he could make nothing definite; he was all tangled up with boring things; he would give her a ring at the Section House when he was free. Since he never did give her a ring, it is to be presumed that he was never free.

Bunty might have telephoned him at the flat, but she did not. He had known that she wouldn’t; she was a sensitive little thing. He did not consider, it did not occur to
him to imagine how Bunty would wait for him to ring her at the Section House, how she would not go out for any kind of recreation in case she missed his call, how she would inquire at the desk of the Section House when she came back from duty whether there were any messages for her, and how she would pretend that she had not really expected there to be a message, how, after a while, she would
not
ask, because her asking so often had been noticed and made a subject of chaff and she already guessed that there would be no message, how she would fight against her own wish to speak to him, how she would write letters in her head but not on paper, how she would keep fourpence in her handbag, but would never use it for a phone call, how she would stay away from the local Odeon. Peter Ash did not think in such terms; it did not concern him to do so. He told himself that she herself had intended to end the affair that time when she came late to dinner, and now he had done so for her. She had been right at the time, and his fault, if there were one, had been in prolonging matters. When, later on at Christmas, among the ninety-seven cards Peter Ash received, there was one from Bunty (who had given in so far, but sent no message with it), he was surprised.

But he knew that he could not expect to free himself as easily from any fresh attachment. He must be circumspect. If life were only a series of holiday cruises, how easy affairs might be. As one moved from each to the next, a gate would slide shut, the past cease to exist, and the future be only three weeks long. How passionately one might love during each three weeks, how outrageously behave! But Peter Ash was known. His home was settled. He had a continuing responsibility to the public. He could always be found. He could not move on. Philandering was well enough for irresponsible, shifting people; he himself had
too much sensibility to philander, even if he were not responsible and rooted. He knew philanderers—men who moved from one affair (and often one address) to another, making conquests and breaking hearts,
lying
—Peter Ash could not lie; he could not bear to lie. He could not pretend, or persuade himself, as a philanderer must, that each new affair was for real. He could not enjoy the game of courting and parting. He could not hurt people—or at least, he could not endure to see them hurt.