A Summer Bird-Cage (11 page)

So when I went over to join Michael and Stephanie, and found them deep in Nuclear Disarmament with a junior civil servant and an unknown girl, I couldn’t quite meet their fervour. ‘Yes, I know,’ I kept saying, as ever, when Stephanie turned to me for support, ‘but what does civilization
mean
? What is it, exactly?’ I was slow at grasping their concepts: for example, liberty, which means something very significant when applied to everyday life, means very little to me with reference to political institutions or secret police. After all, one is always free to be shot. Always. Which puts liberty, compromisingly, within. They didn’t see it like that, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have done had I been in a police state: moreover, as Stephanie used often to say, I am subject to subversive capitalist pressures from magazines like
Vogue
which make me want things I don’t want. But I am still free not to buy them. Ah yes, says Stephanie triumphantly, but you’re not free not to
want
them. And she has a point there, I can’t deny.

I did very much enjoy seeing them again, and drinking white wine, and feeling moral concern and uplift. We exhausted the H-bomb, and passed on,
via
the death of culture, to whether people ought to keep works of art in their houses, or in museums for the whole world to enjoy: I was rather reluctantly Fascist about the problem, and kept saying annoying things like What do the Working Classes want with Botticelli. The other girl, who appeared to be an out-of-work friend of Ildiko’s, was inspired by this to various utterances on the economics of the theatre, and we were just about to engage ourselves with the next absorbing series of problems (the Arts Council, state finance, the
Comédie Française
, the Moscow Arts) when Stephanie suddenly broke the circuit by an abrupt digression.

‘Did you see,’ she said to me, ‘that picture of Louise in the
Tatler
?’

‘Louise? No, what on earth was she doing in the
Tatler
?’

‘Well, it was really about her husband, at some sort of conference in Paris. Didn’t you see it?’

‘No, I don’t take the—’

‘Neither do I, but I happened to see it at the doctor’s. I forgot to tell you, Sarah, I’m having a baby. Or so the doctor says. Isn’t that nice?’

She said this, blandly smiling her smooth English smile, as though she were announcing her plans for an impending holiday, and as I congratulated her I had a sudden pang about Gill, the tears and the turpentine, the horrible operation in the red plush room with the classic but suggestive nudes on the walls, and her sitting alone in the empty flat while Tony clutched a girl with a yellow fringed dress to his bosom. It was a slow tune, as Stephanie spoke, and I could see Tony at the other end of the room, swaying and nibbling the yellow girl’s ear. He didn’t even look sad and embittered, he looked as if he were enjoying himself. Some people are born to a smooth life, I thought, as Stephanie brushed the smooth, gleaming loop of hair from her cheek as she leant forward to tell me about what the doctor had said and what the baby would be called. She was incapable of falling in love with a man like Tony, and that was why she was safe. She would wear pretty maternity dresses and be an excellent mother. It made me want to cry, and I even felt the tears rising, tears for Gill and for Francis and for me and for the baby I might some day bear, which would be born of blood and sweat and tears or not be mine. To stop this awful inappropriate sequence, I turned back to Louise, once the subject of babies had been decently dealt with, and said that I had thought that she was still in Rome, and did the
Tatler
say when the conference in Paris had been.

‘Oh, I think it was at the beginning of the month,’ she said. ‘Louise looked quite ravishing, in a coat without a collar and a wonderful fur hat. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. It said they were going to film
The Decline of Marriage
.’

‘
Film
it?’
The Decline of Marriage
was Stephen’s first novel, and as pretentious and clever as its title.

‘That’s what it says.’

‘They can’t possibly film it, it hasn’t got a
trace
of a plot. It’s totally unfilmable. Did they say who was making it?’

‘I don’t remember. It said that Stephen Halifax was working at the moment on the script.’

‘He must be mad. It’s gone to his head. Honestly, it really is a joke, the way I never hear anything about my relatives until the whole world knows.’

‘You should read the
Tat
.,’ said Stephanie.

‘I suppose I should,’ I said.

‘Do I gather,’ said the strange actress girl, ‘that Stephen Halifax is your brother-in-law?’

‘That’s right,’ I said, suddenly angry and embarrassed about it: it was all very well for Louise to make herself a living out of Stephen’s novels, but I didn’t see why I should be implicated, why I should be compelled to experience spurious and vicarious satisfaction on their behalf. I am far too conceited to take any true pleasure out of any such connexion.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘are you really? Then perhaps you might get me a part in this film.’ I didn’t think she was serious, but theatre people are so odd, and I believe she very nearly was: she went on, ‘I think Sappho Hinchcliffe is playing the girl, and they want John Connell to play the man.’

‘How on earth did you hear all this?’ I asked.

‘Oh, gossip. The grapevine. Everyone knows. John Connell wants to do it, but can’t because he’s under contract to the Watford people, and although the Happy Hours play is coming off in December he’s still tied up with them for the next play they’re putting on. So it’s a question of whether or not they release him.’

‘I see,’ I said, though I didn’t. I was getting more and more put out by all this talk of babies and sisters and Stephen, which weren’t at all the chords I had meant to touch: I had meant to have a festive evening. The talk about art galleries had faded out, and I now realized that my heart hadn’t been in that either, as it would once have been. Film talk with this girl threatened to prolong itself, and I felt boredom creeping up on me: I was very relieved when a quite charming journalist friend of David’s, whom I had never met before, wandered over with the oblique but evident purpose of asking me to dance. I finished my half-pint mug of wine and accepted: I love dancing with attractive people that I don’t know well, especially in confined spaces. Like being on Tubes and trains in the rush-hour, if the person next to one happens to think the same way.

He danced rather nicely, this writer man, and held me in an appreciative kind of way, and said he liked my dress: when the music stopped he got me a drink and I drank it, and then we danced some more. He seemed as pleased to get off with me as I was to get off with him, and yet he wasn’t particularly troublesome and didn’t touch anything that I hadn’t for years known was there. We both drank rather a lot and talked about all the other people in the room. He said the yellow girl with Tony was a friend of David’s called Beatrice, and that Tony had stolen her the week before: I said had David minded, and he replied, ‘Oh no! he just shook his shabby head and put his hands deeper in his raincoat pockets.’ This answer enchanted me completely, and I said, ‘I adore you,’ and he said, ‘I’m so glad, I’m so glad, I adore you too,’ and went on dancing. And when, at the end of the next record, he suggested going to sit somewhere I accepted. He seemed to know the terrain pretty well, and we ended up in David’s bedroom, which was already occupied by several other couples lying on the floor and bed and chairs. My man was quite undeterred by the occupied look of the place, and went and sat down on the end of the bed, giving a great push at the red velvet-covered bottom of the girl next to him, and saying, ‘Hey, shove up.’ She did, surprisingly, which I thought terribly funny: indeed, I couldn’t stop laughing. There wasn’t much room, but we sorted ourselves out and lay quite comfortably in the end. I felt very sleepy. Nobody else was talking, but the room was filled with vague amatory noises. Nobody seemed to notice that we were laughing. Jackie got as far as saying that the girl next to us had very big hips, and when there was no response from her he pinched her bottom, and she pushed his hand languidly away as if a fly had settled on her. After the pleasant passage of an indistinct amount of time, when I was almost asleep, my friend said, ‘Look, are you still awake? Shall we go and have another dance? I feel like death all of a sudden.’

‘Fine,’ I said, and staggered to my feet. He pulled me into the corridor, where the light of the thirty-watt bulb made me blink like an owl, and said, ‘Just stand there and wait for me, will you?’

‘All right,’ I said, running my hands through my rumpled, sticky hair, and preparing to prop up the door till his return. I was very meek. When he got back we wandered back to the dancing-room, and as we shuffled round he remarked on the changing social
ambiance
of the party. ‘It’s all these actors,’ he said. ‘There were just the out-of-work ones before, but now all the superior ones with jobs are arriving.’

I realized the force of his remark when I looked round and saw John Connell standing in a corner with a tall, red-haired, pale kind of man, surrounded by a group of sycophants: he saw me, as we approached their part of the room, smiled with heavy charm, and said, ‘Evening, Sarah. Evening, Jackie.’ As we moved away once more, my partner and I exchanged looks: ‘At school with me,’ said Jackie briefly: ‘Best man at my sister’s wedding,’ I as briefly returned, and was surprised by how irrationally and how nearly I had said ‘He married my sister.’ I kept directing odd glances at John for the next half-hour, not sure why he interested me so much, and I tried to picture him as the anti-hero of
The Decline of Marriage
. He was looking very self-assured, and I sensed that he was being rude to people and getting away with it: he was very much the biggest fish in the bowl. I had no intention of going to add my small words to the circle of dislike and admiration which success attracts, and I was distinctly surprised when he intercepted one of my glances and started over to the corner where Jackie and I were sitting, with our sour cigarettes, holding hot hands.

He stood before us, huge and dark like a colossus, shutting out all the dim red light from our corner. I felt like a child: the fact that I was on the floor and he standing put me at a disadvantage. I felt, literally, small.

‘Are you dancing?’ he asked me, ‘or have you given up for the night?’

‘I haven’t given up yet,’ I said, without presence of mind.

‘Then do you mind getting up from there? Excuse us, Jackie.’

I rose to my feet, dazed by the shock treatment: my reactions were slow that night. I murmured ‘Wait’ at Jackie Almond, who sat there, apparently waiting: I felt as though a head boy or a lord of the manor had removed me by right of place from a fifth-former or a serf. The minute John took hold of me I began to regret my feebleness: I badly wanted to sit down, as I didn’t feel at all steady on my feet, nor at all able to engage in conversation. Also I was soon busy detesting myself for the faint
frisson
that came from dancing with the best-known and in a certain style the best-looking man in the room. He managed to hold me far more aggressively and personally than my nice Jackie person, and seemed to crush all the movement out of me. I felt squashed in his grasp, squashed and angry. He wasn’t even dancing properly, he was just ambling around with me. It was only after a couple of minutes that I realized he wanted to talk, not to dance. The first thing he said was, ‘Well, I saw your sister last week.’

‘Oh, did you?’ I replied.

‘Yes, I did. She was in Paris. With Stephen, still with Stephen.’

I couldn’t say less than ‘Oh?’

‘Amazing, isn’t it? An old sod like Stephen.’

I didn’t know how to comment on this either: I sensed danger on every side. I was subdued by the way he kept his hand hard on my back ribs, and pushed me ever so slightly backwards, so that I felt off balance and defeated.

‘I went to see them,’ John continued, ‘because Stephen wants me to be in a film of his, called
The Decline of Marriage
. A very good title, don’t you think?’

‘They’ll never call the film after the book,’ I said, priding myself on a faint glimmer of conversational tactics. ‘They’d never go for that in Kidderminster or Cheltenham.’

‘He wants me to be in it,’ said John, with a carefulness that made me realize with relief that he was as tight as I was, ‘because I’m his oldest friend.’

‘Is that the only reason?’

‘Oh, he’s very loyal, is Stephen. That’s his other oldest friend over there, talking to your boy-friend. Wilfred Smee. Ever met Wilfred?’

‘That is
not
my boy-friend,’ I said, childishly. All the same, I located Wilfred: he was the pink, sandy-eyelashed man I had noticed with John earlier.

‘Wilfred is very worried about Stephen.’

Wisely, I didn’t ask why. I didn’t even say, ‘Oh?’ After another long pause, he said, ‘Well, aren’t you going to tell me what Louise is up to?’

‘What do you mean, up to?’ I asked, full of dim guesses and forebodings.

‘You know what I mean.’

‘No, I don’t. I’d be the last person to know anything about Louise. I haven’t seen or heard from her since she was married. And apparently you have.’

‘I saw her last Sunday. I flew over.’

‘Clever of you, wasn’t it.’

‘Not as it turned out. It was a failure. Not what I’d been given to expect at all. What’s your big sister up to?’

‘I’ve told you before, I don’t know,’ I said, acutely uncomfortable under the open hostility that had broken out. I was totally out of control, and wondered if I was imagining everything. In the end, taking a little courage, I said, ‘Anyway, what are you so interested for?’

‘Don’t you know?’

‘No.’

‘You look like her, in a way.’

‘No I don’t’

‘You do. Hard as nails, both of you.’

‘Do you mind.’

I was hurt and offended, and moreover I had more or less guessed what he was talking about, though I had no desire at all to proceed any further. It was odd that I didn’t immediately know all the facts, then, at once, because when I did finally see the whole thing it didn’t come with a shock of surprise but much more with a shock of inevitable familiarity. Rather as though I had been told it before and tried to forget, so that when I saw it I could no longer evade my own foreknowledge. Like children finding out about sex: they are shocked, surprised, and yet oddly certain that it must be so, because they have always known the unbelievable truth. And so I must have known about John and Louise, from the moment when I met Louise on New Street Station on my way home from Paris.