The Birdcage (20 page)

One had only to keep patience. Everything cleared itself up in time. There was no reason why she should not sleep, yet she did not.

Children were not perfect; you could not expect it; you were a fool if you did. She, of all people, with her experience, had every reason to know that children were not perfect, just as no child was ever entirely bad, whatever
they were saying nowadays in the Sunday papers about spotting criminals at the age of six. She had done her best for Gerald and for Rosemary. She had brought them up sensibly. She had not spoiled them; you could not spoil your own children, if you were a teacher, because you had to give too much love and attention to other people’s children to be able to stifle your own with it. They were not brilliant, but they had done well enough in life so far, and would go on doing so. Their manners were good—better than the average these days—and their accents would pass, and they had, as far as she knew, a healthy attitude to—well, morals and that sort of thing. She could not expect them to be perfect. It was quite natural for young people to be excited at the idea of money, and having one’s name in the papers or on the television. It was natural, but it disturbed Daphne. It was as if they had deceived her for so long into thinking that their own home and the things of
her
providing were good enough for them, only to discard them immediately at the hope of something better. New things were to be planned for, and the money to buy them had to be earned; it had no
business
to
appear
suddenly and make everything else seem shabby. It was greed; she disliked greed; she had not expected the twins to be greedy; they ought to have grown out of that; it was a reflection on her. One read of people who had won vast sums with the Football Pools,
and they had not been happy
. Such people, Daphne had often heard, had been ruined by wealth. Two or three hundred pounds was not the same thing, but the lesson was there.

And father. Daphne had looked after her father entirely, ever since their return to London from Chesterfield. She had clothed him,
kept
him, refused to deduct a penny from his old age pension when he became eligible for it. That had been her pride. It was right that children should look
after their parents in old age; it was the natural thing; she was glad to do it. If now her father were to become a person of means, if he were to go around the place giving them television sets and that kind of thing, that would threaten their relationship, and unsettle the children. One wouldn’t, of course, put it in such words, but there could be only one head to a family. Daphne preferred matters as they were.

It was no good. She could not sleep.

She heard Rosemary clump up the stairs to bed, and then Gerald to his room at the attic, and she anticipated and then heard the running water, the flushed water closet, the opening and shutting of doors that attended their retirement. It was not late. Rosemary’s light would be off by now, but she would not be asleep. Daphne felt that to talk to somebody might help to settle her, and decided that she might as well talk to Rosemary.

Yet, even as she put a woollen dressing-gown over her nightdress, she hesitated, for cosy chats between mother and daughter were not usual in that family. When you are a Headmistress, even of so small an educational unit as a Primary school, and your working life is spent among children, every one of whom is an individual battling for intimacy and deplorably ready to take advantage of it, you do not usually develop in your own family that
mother-and
-daughter relationship which is one of the glories of British family life; you do not giggle together, and gossip, and wear each other’s clothes. Nor, when your husband is dead and your father dependent on you, do you need to make a kind of feminine international against “the men”; your daughter is neither your ally nor your confidante. So Rosemary might be a little surprised at her mother’s appearance, late at night, for a good old heart-to-heart.

On the landing, Daphne hesitated. How should she explain
it? Rosemary had gone to bed. But there was, she noticed, a light none the less, shining beneath a door, only it came from her father’s room, not Rosemary’s.

He never kept his light on. He did not read in bed. He had gone up at ten, and should by now be asleep. Something was wrong, if father’s light were still on.

Had he fallen? Was he helpless? A stroke? She knocked lightly on the door, and went quickly into the room. Her father had not undressed. He was sitting beside the bed on a straight chair, reading a manuscript. Reading?—No, he was not reading. The pages were disordered, and her father sat there, resting one elbow on the bed, and his head on his hand, staring down at them. Daphne said, “Is that the play, Father? Have you been reading your play?”, and Edward Laverick replied in a small voice, “It’s no good. It’s no good at all. I can’t take it in.”

In life, responses are not often immediate, but are more like what happens in Greater London, when a subscriber on the Knightsbridge telephone exchange dials a Gladstone or a Holborn or a Fleet Street number, and waits for as much as seven seconds after dialling while somewhere in all that great web of hidden mechanism, stimulus searches for response, until at last one hears the ringing tone, and knows that the hunt is done. So the words came on waves of sound from Edward Laverick, and set up a resonance in Daphne’s ears, and this resonance was decoded into meaning by the cells of her brain, and then Daphne stood for seconds where she was, suspended in feeling while time went on, until at last idea became emotion, and Daphne knew first that she was certainly feeling something, and then that this something was relief.

Edward Laverick said, “I’ve been sitting here reading it. I don’t know what to say to them. I don’t truly.” The
play was written on lined foolscap in careful copy-book longhand, and corrections had been made in the margin. This was the original from which the prompt copy (since eaten by mice) had been typed by a genteel lady from the Pitman School in 1904. Daphne said, “It’s a mystery to me where you’ve been hiding it all this time.” She put one arm around Edward Laverick’s shoulders, and said, “Now come along, Father. You must get some sleep, you know.”

He allowed Daphne to help him undress, turning his back as he pulled on his pyjama trousers under his shirt. Once in bed he sat up straight against the pillow, looking, in his striped pyjama top and his spectacles and his earnest vulnerability, like a school boy who has irresponsibly drunk the magic potion and aged sixty years without growing up. Daphne took his spectacles off him, and laid them on the dressing-table, while Edward Laverick put his teeth in a tumbler. “That’s enough reading for tonight,” she said. “We’ll have a glass of hot milk, both of us,” and went downstairs to prepare it.

When she returned, he was as she had left him, the manuscript sheets still scattered on the coverlet. Daphne arranged a dressing-gown over her father’s shoulders, and helped him to drink the milk. He said, “Gerald said there’d be three hundred pounds.”

“We don’t need it.”

“I’d have liked to have had it. I’ve been thinking about it since….”

Daphne said, “The children didn’t mean anything. It’s your money. They know that really. It’s like a game they play—If I Had A Million Pounds.”

Edward Laverick supped his hot milk. He said, “Everything coming at once. I can’t explain it. It’s like a feeling in your stomach; like something physical, something that’s wrong with you. It’s like a sort of dizziness.” He said,
“I’ve always saved to give them something at Christmas and on their birthday. I like to find out what they want, and get it for them. I’ve no use for money. Not for myself. You don’t need money at my age.”

“I know.”

He said, “I’m not greedy for money, Daffy. You know I’m not greedy for it. I gave up my pension, and didn’t care
that
.”

He had said, “Daffy” to her. “Daffy Down Dilly” had been her name when she was very small, “Daffy Down Dilly” up to her mid-teens before she had grown into responsibility, their special name when they would play swinging games together and jumping games, and shared the weekly treat of listening to ‘Monday Night at Seven’ on the radio. It was thirty years ago, all that. Daffodil hair had grown dull in thirty years, and a daffodil stem grown thicker. Daphne sat on the bed beside her father. She said, “I couldn’t sleep. I was too upset.”

Edward Laverick said, “Then I found I wanted the money. Just to have it. Not to do anybody any good, but just to feel I had it. When that young man came, I wanted to know how much…. I’ve never asked for money. Never asked anyone. I’ve been above that all my life…. I knew quite well where the play was, but I told him I’d have to look for it. I wanted to see for myself what it was worth. I’ve always kept it; I don’t know why. I’ve got all my old examination papers from night school, but I never look at them.”

Daphne said, “It can’t be bad, Father, if they put it on in the theatre.”

“I don’t know about what’s good and bad in plays; I never did. Mr. Lambert used to say,’ You just write what you know. Write truthfully, and it’s sure to be right.’ I deceived him then,” Edward Laverick said bitterly. “It’s
not the truth. Not what I wrote. I deceived myself too, I suppose.” He picked up one of the foolscap sheets, and crumpled it. “It’s not true; it’s all made-up,” he said. “It’s all pushed about.”

Daphne said, “We’ve never wanted for anything. We’ve never gone short.”

“Oh, I’ve
wanted
. You always want what you can’t have. You want to give something…. Or you think you do; you think that’s what you want—to give. Then, when you can do it, you find out all you wanted was gratitude.”

Daphne shivered. She said, “Was it because I didn’t take your pension? Did you want me to take some of it?” He did not reply, and she said, “I’m sorry, Father.”

This time it was Edward Laverick who put an arm round his daughter’s shoulders, and she snuggled a little closer to him, a middle-aged, bossy woman, prematurely grey, resting her cheek against her father’s white stubble, and as unconscious of the unsuitability of it as middle-aged lovers in Hyde Park. Edward Laverick said, “I’ll tell them I’ve lost it, Daffy. All that’s forgotten, that play. Maybe I thought it was all right when I wrote it; maybe I thought it was true then, and maybe I was right. But it’s not like Shakespeare. Time passes, and the life goes out of things. You couldn’t act it now, and make it true, not for any money. I’ll tell them I couldn’t find it, and they must leave us alone. I didn’t ask them to go looking for my play. We’re all right here as we are, my Daffy. We do very well as we are.”

*

As for Norah Palmer, she did not understand the decision at all.

At first the old man said that he had lost his play. Well, that was inconvenient, but it did not matter. If the company
were able to produce an authorization by Edward Laverick himself, the Lord Chamberlain’s Office would certainly allow them to copy the play.

But the old man would not give an authorization. It seemed that he had been lying. He had not lost the play. He had a manuscript of the play at home, but had not brought it with him to the company’s office. He had kept the play all this while with other papers (of no importance, as far as Norah Palmer could tell) from his student days, but he did not want them to read it.

Friendliness and common sense were part of Norah Palmer’s professional equipment. Besides, one had to admire what she took to be integrity, and in any enterprise that involved the arts, one had to be prepared for integrity to hold matters up for a while. It was right that it should. Norah Palmer herself was prepared to go a long way in allowing for integrity; she had not been to Dr. Leavis’s lectures for nothing. She said, “I do understand, Mr. Laverick. I don’t mind telling you that there are poems I wrote myself when I was an undergraduate that make me blush today.”

“Yes?”

“And yet they probably have a quality that I’d be the only one who couldn’t recognize; do you know what I mean? A sort of freshness that one’s bound to lose.”

“Yes?”

“And, you know,” Norah Palmer said. “A play isn’t really what’s
said
; it’s what happens.”

“It’s people talking,” said Edward Laverick, who knew at least that his own play was people talking.

“Yes indeed, but more people than talk, wouldn’t you say?” He didn’t understand. “I mean, the people and the relationships between them are the
what
. The talk is only the
how
. Naturally, the
how
is important, but it can be
changed, whereas, if you took away the
what
, you wouldn’t have a play.”

This was Norah Palmer’s manner with her own contemporaries, and it was not working with Edward Laverick. He could tell that she wished him well, but could understand little of what she was saying. It seemed as if she might be wanting him to rewrite his play, but he was too old for that, and all that business of evening classes was long ago.

Norah Palmer said, “We really aren’t doing anything more at this stage than asking to read the play. After we’d read it, you and I could talk again.” Edward Laverick was glad he hadn’t brought the manuscript with him.

He said, “I looked it out last night. I stayed up to read it. It wasn’t any good. You wouldn’t like it at all. It wouldn’t go these days. It’s not the thing.”

“Oh, you’ve no idea what goes these days, especially on the box.” What box? “Besides, if we liked it, we’d plan to use it in a special series of plays of social protest, probably picking one play from every five-year period since 1900, excluding the two wars.” She wished she didn’t have to remember to keep using the phrases of the order of “if we liked it”, but she knew that she must promise nothing. The old man’s play might turn out to be truly awful.

“There were some good plays in those days.”

“Yes, indeed.”

“You’d find a lot of good plays in those days, I should think,” Edward Laverick said, being too polite to add, “without badgering me for mine.”

She wished that she could make him understand that whether his play were any good or not was not for him to decide. That was her decision. She was the Script Editor. He seemed to have no notion at all of their relative
responsibilities to this matter of his play. “Why don’t you let me read your play anyway?” she said. “I promise to tell you quite frankly if I don’t like it.”