The Birdcage (6 page)

More than this (so complex are the considerations which govern the professional lives of businessmen!), each of the companies is not merely a business for selling an audience to advertisers, but is also a public service under the control of Parliament, and therefore ultimately of the audience it is
selling. It wants to be liked by the people. It wants the people, as well as the manufacturers, to have an
idea
of it, and, since one can’t entirely disassociate people from manufacturers, it would save a great deal of confusion if this
idea
, this image, the manufacturers had were also the image the people had.

Commercial television in Britain came by stages. There were so few companies to begin with that, to the mass of those who watched, commercial telly was simply
commercial
telly; it was what you watched on Channel Nine, if you’d had your set adapted; it was the telly with the adverts. Time passed. More and more parts of Britain were reached by a network of more and more companies. Since the best (or at least the most expensive) of every company’s
programes
is transmitted over the whole network, and for most of the time, most of the people who are watching commercial television continue to see the same picture, hear the same sounds, with T.W.W. viewers watching Granada on the network, A.T.V. watching
Associated-Rediffusion
, most people still do find it difficult to
remember
—far less to care—which company is which. But the companies care. By its choice of what programmes it originates, by advertising, by public relations, each
company
works at “projecting an image”. That image is
something
far more special than merely the picture of a company which is not the B.B.C. Simple enough, it would be, to project
that
image. The B.B.C. already has an image—an image of “They”, complex enough in its way, but
permeated
with the flavour of Old Folk’s Homes and the teaching profession. All the commercial companies are “we”, not “They”; they began with that advantage. But that is not enough for them. They would like the public to know which “we” is which.

The policy of Norah Palmer’s company was ingenious.
It was to be the “we” of “They”—or perhaps the “They” of “we”; no one had formulated it in quite those terms. The B.B.C. Charter lays a duty on that great corporation to “inform, instruct and entertain”. But this is from the top; this is what is called an “Establishment” activity. Those who planned the programmes for Norah Palmer’s
company
thought highly of instruction and information, but they saw themselves as the heirs, not of Lord Shaftesbury, not of Disraeli, but of Place and Lovett, of William Cobbett, the heirs of that great movement of self-
education
in the nineteenth century that found its final flower in
Tit-Bits
. Hence the search for genuine originals. Hence those great pieces of television polemic, the
Time-Exposure
series of documentaries on the Public Schools, the Church of England, Oxford and Cambridge, Cricket and the Foreign Office. Hence (and here we return to Norah Palmer and Mr. Laverick’s play)
The Fore-Runners
, a series of television revivals of plays of social protest, some of which had had a success of sorts on the stage, some of which had failed, but all of which had passed and perished in the ruck of “Establishment” theatre until the great dawn of what the company’s prestige advertising in the literary weeklies and quality Sundays called “the theatre of conscience” in the nineteen fifties. It seemed to Norah Palmer that Edward Laverick’s
The Forgotten Men
, played on the stage for a single Tuesday afternoon in 1904, noticed by Shaw, but remembered by nobody, might be a real fore-runner, a real find, and a scoop for her Department.

First they must find the play, and read it. Well … plays did not disappear; it must be somewhere. “The Avenue Theatre,” Norah Palmer said. “There isn’t an Avenue Theatre any more. What happens to theatres nowadays. You can’t turn your back on one without somebody’s pulling it down.”

“Ask Richard Findlater. He’s bound to know.”

Norah Palmer said, “Even then we’ll have to find the author. That’ll be a rare piece of detection after fifty-seven years.” She wrote, “Ask R. Findl abt Avenue Th” on her memo pad. Squad said, “Dear Richard Findlater! Thank God for
him
. But wasn’t I clever to find that notice?”

“Yes, you are clever, Squad. I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

“Keep paying me enough, and you’ll never have to find out. Now let’s go and have lunch. I’ve decided I’d rather eat something Spanish than boring old lettuce, so you can take me on expenses, and we can look at the flat afterwards.”

“All right. Let me go and wash.”

“And I’ll tell you
what
, my dear,” Squad said wickedly as they waited for the lift. “If you
are
going to have a
crise
with that gentleman of yours, you need a bit of detective work to take your mind off thing.”

*

Mrs. Halliday knew a man with a van. Well,
he
didn’t have the van; a friend of his had the van, but the man Mrs. Halliday knew had the use of the van, and would drive it. As for the man with the van himself, he would come along with the driver, and would bring a couple of West Indians for the heavy work. It wasn’t worth getting the movers in, Mrs. Halliday said, not with the few sticks Miss Palmer had to move. Movers—the only advantage of movers was that you
was
insured in the matter of breakables, she said, but being as Miss Palmer wasn’t taking the breakables, being as the breakables was to be left with Mr. Ash, Miss Palmer would do better, in a manner of speaking, to save the expense of movers, leaving the actual what you might call moving to be done by the man with the van.

So Norah Palmer agreed to employ the man with the van, and the man Mrs. Halliday knew who knew the man
with the van, and the two West Indians, both on vacation from Nottingham University, where one was studying medicine, the other agriculture.

“This sofa going, is it?” said the man with the van. “You’re taking the sofa, then?” asked Mrs. Halliday. “Or was you intending to leave it?” Norah Palmer was taking the sofa. Agriculture grasped one end of it, Medicine the other. They lifted. They moved forward, bearing the sofa. They stopped. The sofa was too wide for the door. “I suppose it come
in
,” the man with the van said. “I suppose it done
that
, eh? Come in, like? You didn’t need a block and tackle, I suppose?”

“Not to get it
in
,” Mrs. Halliday said. “There was some men delivered it, as I remember. You remember, miss? The men? They didn’t have no trouble, did they, not with getting it in?”

Norah Palmer said, “I think the legs are removable.” Medicine and Agriculture put the sofa down gently. The man with the van removed one of the legs of the sofa. “This one is,” he said.

The man Mrs. Halliday knew appeared at the door. He said, “There’s a copper outside says I can’t park this side of Beaufort Street on Wednesdays.” “I could have told
him
that,” Mrs. Halliday said.

Norah Palmer was taking the sofa. It had been designed for her and for Peter Ash by an architect. They used to say jokingly to their guests that it was the only
architect-designed
sofa in the country, but this was no longer true, because many of their friends had been so taken by the notion of an architect-designed sofa that they had borrowed the plans, and had sofas made up for themselves. The architect who had designed it was, Norah Palmer and Peter Ash decided, probably more a friend of hers than of his, which was why she was taking the sofa, in spite of the
fact that the friend who had designed the fabric with which the sofa was covered was more of a friend of his than of hers. However, the same fabric had been used to re-cover the two armchairs from Heal’s, so Peter Ash was keeping those. Norah Palmer was taking the basket chair they had bought from Danasco.

“You don’t want to lose these legs, miss,” the man with the van said. “I’ll put them in a bag, shall I? I expect there is a bag for them somewhere.”

“I’m afraid I’ve no idea where.”

“Then I’ll put them with the sofa in the van. Wouldn’t look right, would it, a sofa with no legs?”

Now that they had made a division, there was not so much to go. What there was probably would not fill the van. The sofa. The basket chair. A coffee table. A table lamp. A lithograph by Miro (number 86 of 200) bought in Paris and framed in the Edgware Road. An original modern painting bought on the instalment plan from a gallery in Lisle Street. Cushions. Clothes. Books. The record-player and a cabinet of long-players (Peter Ash had kept the television set). A portable transistor radio. A chest-
of-drawers
. A writing-desk. A dressing-table (Peter Ash had the built-in cupboards). She had left the crockery, cutlery, pots and pans. She had left the little chandelier in the hall. She had left the Gio Ponti chairs in the dining-alcove and the rosewood dining-table. She had left the curtains, the carpets and the rugs. She had left the Scrabble set, and the wine rack, and the fridge and the filing-cabinets. She had left much more than she was taking, and Peter Ash had given her a cheque for the difference. She had resigned to Peter Ash so much of what they had bought together, of what they had discussed for days before buying, of what they had had second thoughts about after buying, of what they had used until it had become habitual to them. She
was taking with her only, as it seemed to Norah Palmer, a token of her household possessions, of those
own things
among which it is so important to live. Yet, as those things were borne away by Medicine and Agriculture, and she saw how the flat looked without them, she did not envy Peter Ash. There were four indentations in the carpet where the sofa had stood. The lithograph by Miro and the original modern painting bought by monthly instalments had left light patches on the wall. The chest-of-drawers, the dressing-table, the writing-table, each had left its own marks. Everything she was taking from the flat had said
I have been here. Remember me
. Peter Ash might buy another sofa; new pictures; he might have the wall repainted. But the new pieces would look wrong in that room. Behind the new pictures, beneath the new sofa, the message would still be there,
Remember me
. In her new flat, what Norah Palmer was taking of the old would give a continuity to her life. New pieces in the old flat would only remind Peter Ash of the discontinuity of his. No, if anyone had to go (and she had not
wanted
to go), she would rather it were herself, and he must stay behind.

“All done in here, then?” said the man with the van.

“Yes, I think so.”

“You be careful of that mirror. Seven years bad luck if you break it,” Mrs. Halliday said to the back end of
Agriculture
, who was carrying the dressing-table downstairs. Norah Palmer wondered how much she should tip them. Would students be insulted by a tip? Not nowadays; not when so many of them worked in coffee-bars. Perhaps ten shillings to the man with the van would cover everything. Or a pound? But if she were going to tip as much as a pound, she might as well have had the movers in the first place. “Mr…. er … I’m awfully sorry! I’ve forgotten your name,” she said.

“Stan,” said the man with the van.

“Yes…. Well, I think I’ll go on ahead now, so as to be ready for you in Ovington Square.”

“They’ll want their teas.”

“I’ll expect you in about half an hour, then. Or an hour?”

“Say forty-five minutes.”

“You have the address?”

“Oh, yes,” said the man with the van, and Mrs. Halliday said, “They’ve got the address all right.”

“I’ll say good-bye, then, Mrs. Halliday.”

She would say good-bye, but she was not sure how. Mrs. Halliday had been coming in to clean for them for so long; she was as near as one came in 1961 to an old retainer. What did Mrs. Halliday feel about all this? She had never referred to the unmarried state of Peter Ash and Norah Palmer, had seemed to take it for granted, double bed and all. People of Mrs. Halliday’s class, Norah Palmer supposed, were far readier to accept unconventional
behaviour
than the suburban lower-middles would ever be.

Norah Palmer hated saying good-byes. She
had
everything
, she supposed—her hand-bag, her hat, the light coat she had decided to wear instead of packing it. The door to the stairs was already open; she had only to go through it for the last time. She said, “Thank you very much, Mrs. Halliday, for all you’ve done,” and almost added, “Look after Mr. Ash,” which would have been
too
silly and insincere, for Peter Ash was no concern of Norah Palmer’s now, and she had better get used to that.

Mrs. Halliday said, “I’ll look after him, miss. Don’t you worry.”

“What? … Oh…. Thank you.”

“Men! They don’t know what’s good for them. I’ve got your address. And the telephone. I’ll let you know if
anything
happens.”

“Well….” But one couldn’t explain. “I’m sure we’ll meet again,” Norah Palmer said. She must get away before phrases like “We must keep in touch” came popping out of her mouth like toads, to encourage Mrs. Halliday to Lord knew what confidences and what connivance. “I’ll get a taxi in the Fulham Road,” she said, and went quickly down the stairs.

“You wait here,” said Mrs. Halliday to the man with the van.

Mrs. Halliday went down to her own basement. There was a birdcage on the kitchen table. The cage was empty; Mrs. Halliday had bought it at Woolworth’s the day before. She took it off the table, and went back upstairs where the man with the van was waiting. “Haven’t got all day, you know,” he said, but Mrs. Halliday only replied, “Five minutes won’t kill you,” and went past him into the kitchen of the flat. She filled the drinking-tray of the new cage with water from the tap, and the food-tray with
birdseed
from a packet in the cupboard. The new cage had cost ten shillings and ninepence. It stood in the same relation to the cage in which Fred and Lucy lived as Mrs. Halliday’s three-piece suite did to the Heal’s chairs and the
architect-designed
sofa. But it was a cage; it would contain a bird.