A Summer Bird-Cage

Margaret Drabble

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780544285200
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Attractive and witty, Sarah has just graduated from Oxford and started a new job at the BBC. As she immerses herself in the excitement of 1960s London, her beautiful older sister, Louise, marries the famous, though admittedly difficult, novelist Stephen Halifax. Louise initially revels in the newfound wealth and glamor that her marriage affords her, but soon she finds her relationship the subject of bitter gossip and scathing tabloid headlines. Despite the distance that has always existed between the two sisters, Sarah finds herself bound to Louise as she faces the scrutiny of London society and the two begin to forge a connection they had previously thought impossible. With Margaret Drabble's signature eye for the subtleties and intricacies of everyday life, A Summer Bird-Cage is captivating, a dazzling, resonant portrait of two young women struggling to find their footing in a city as fickle as it is intoxicating.

11

The Collision

AT LOUISE’S I drank gin and tonic and talked a little bad Italian and soaked myself in the air of worldly well-being that emanated from that flat. Unobtrusive warmth, a choice of drinks, well-deployed lights, cigarettes in all the cigarette-boxes, books on all the bookshelves, and choice duck-egg blue towels on the towel-rails in the bathroom. This really feels like life, I said to myself. It was a pity the people were dull, but then one can’t have everything. Anyway, they very shortly left, and left Louise and me confronting each other among the ashtrays. We were talking fairly easily, having been broken in by the presence of others, about films and people and Oxford. She was wearing a lilac-coloured silky jersey. After an idle hour or so, in which we played Frank Sinatra and drank another drink—odd how the very thought of such idle boredom can later cause such pangs of nostalgia and desire—we decided to go and look for something to eat. The kitchen was indeed impressive, as Wilfred had told me at the party—it wasn’t in any way modern or streamlined, but very oldy-worldy, with pestles and mortars and jars of herbs and copper pans. It gave the impression of French country cooking. I was pleasantly surprised when Louise opened a cupboard and displayed such normal fare as tins of sardines and beans and ravioli. However, Louise said she felt like cooking, so we had spaghetti: I stood aghast as she tipped wine and garlic recklessly into the sauce, and splashed tomato puree on to her smart shirt affair. Life must be totally different if one doesn’t have to think about cleaner’s bills. And grocer’s bills.

‘The funny thing is,’ she said, ‘that I really love cooking. I’m just greedy, I suppose, but I really love it. The smells and the mixtures. But I won’t do it, you know, because it’s beneath my dignity. So I have to let Françoise do it most of the time.’

‘That’s ridiculous. I hate it, and I have to. Let’s swap.’

‘Why don’t you eat out?’

‘I don’t like eating out alone.’

‘Why not?’

‘People stare.’

‘You little timid. Why don’t you just let them?’

‘I don’t like being stared at. I would like to be ignored.’

‘I don’t mind being stared at.’

‘I know. That’s because you’re always bloody sure of the reason why.’

‘Well, what’s wrong with that?’

She started to strain the spaghetti through an enormous sieve. I always have to use a small red plastic colander, and everything eels into the sink as often as not. We sat down to eat at the kitchen table, which was covered with a choice orange tablecloth.

‘It doesn’t go with your blouse,’ I said.

‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ she said furiously. ‘You can’t have everything matching all the time.’

The spaghetti was most delicious, and when we had finished it we went back into the sitting-room and played Frank Sinatra again. I was struck as we sat there by the charming convention of the scene—sisters idling away an odd evening in happy companionship. It was like something out of Middlemarch or even Jane Austen. I was just flicking through the pages of Harper’s (which was concealed, along with all other papers, in a drawer in a strange off-white cabinet) when she suddenly switched off the gramophone and said, ‘Come on, Sarah, let’s go out.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Where?’

‘Let’s go and meet John after the theatre.’ She looked at her watch. ‘He’s off in about half an hour. If we get a taxi we’ll catch him before he leaves.’

I covered my astonishment and said, ‘Won’t he mind if I’m there?’

‘Why should he mind? Of course he won’t. Come on, I can’t spend a whole evening in.’

She went and put on her coat, and then said, ‘I’d better just make sure I catch him,’ and started to make a ’phone call. When she got through she said, ‘Hello, is that Bert? . . . This is Mrs Halifax. I wonder if you’d be an angel and tell Mr Connell not to leave unless I’m there . . . yes, I’m coming in to meet him . . . Thank you so much . . . No, that’s lovely. So long as you don’t let him go.’

I assumed it was the stage door-keeper. There was something naïve in the pleasure which she obviously took in his being called Bert.

‘I didn’t want to go all the way there and then miss him,’ she said to me as she put the receiver down.

We went down the stairs and into the street: it was bitterly cold and I turned my coat collar up round my ears. We had to walk to the main road to pick up a taxi. Louise was remotely exhilarated, as though she were setting out on an adventure. I wondered, as I watched her sideways standing on the street corner waving at the taxi-man with her inimitable, ostentatious grace, whether perhaps she weren’t really in love with this man. I had swallowed without a gulp the fact that she didn’t, couldn’t love Stephen, and the next stage should clearly have been my acceptance of her love for John. But the idea of it didn’t convince me. It didn’t seem the right explanation. This dim exaltation, this curious breathlessness, came from some other source. And I seemed nearer to it, as we sat there side by side and watched the big white houses, and then the porticoes of Harrods and all those smart little boutiques off Knightsbridge. Prompted by this sense of impending clarity, I said, ‘When you pass clothes in shop windows, could you literally buy everything you see?’

‘Everything I want, you mean?’

‘Of course.’

‘Good Lord no! I mean, there are limits . . . model dresses, and so forth, you know. But most things, I suppose . . . ’

‘It must be very odd,’ I said, trying to prod her into telling me what it really felt like.

‘I suppose it is odd, compared with the old days,’ she said. ‘But it has a curious effect on one, you know . . . I used to like everything I saw, just about, because I couldn’t have it . . . and now I scarcely like anything that I see in the shops. They all look sort of imitation . . . you know what I mean. I only want the things I can’t have, model dresses and coats and things . . . and one can’t really have those. Or not all those. And so it goes on. If one had unlimited money, one would find that there simply wasn’t a designer good enough in the world. There isn’t any top. One thinks there’s a top, but there isn’t.’

‘Doesn’t one ever have enough?’

‘Never.’

‘You can’t beat the material world by excess?’

‘Ah well,’ she said. ‘That’s an idea, isn’t it. I can’t say it isn’t an idea.’

She paused, smiling at her own reflection in the taxi mirror, as we approached Grosvenor Square. ‘Whatever happens,’ she went on, ‘you can’t buy the past. You can’t buy an ancestry and a history. You have your own past, and the free will to deal with it, and that’s all. It can’t be bought with money.’ She paused. ‘In fact,’ she said, irrelevantly, ‘Stephen doesn’t like some of the clothes I buy. He can’t stand this lilac effect. He was furious when my going-away clothes were lilac. Just right for Birmingham, he said, the old snob. So I wear it when he’s away. He says it makes me look like a deb. He prefers the classic mode.’

‘Why doesn’t he like debs?’

‘Oh, they’re too easy to make fun of—you must have noticed, in his books—no, he doesn’t like any social manifestation. He only likes the timeless in his own life.’

‘Doesn’t he . . . ’ I stuck, looking for the right inoffensive word.

‘Doesn’t he what?’

‘Oh, nothing.’

The taxi had reached the streets behind Charing Cross Road, where John’s present theatre was. It was very glittering and Christmassy. Louise asked him to drive round to the stage door, and when we got out I didn’t offer to pay. There didn’t seem to be any point. We had obviously got there before the curtain, as there was no crowd of disgorged spectators thronging the pavement. We went in through the stage door, and Bert, sitting behind a sort of hatch, said, ‘Good evening, Mrs H.’ It seemed very familiar.

‘Evening, Bert,’ she said. ‘It’s very cold out.’

‘It’s cold enough in,’ he said.

‘I see we’ve beaten him to it.’

‘Oh yes. He won’t be off for another four minutes. It’s running a bit late tonight.’

‘Good house?’

‘Not bad for a Tuesday.’

‘Have you had another win yet?’

‘No such luck.’

‘Bert won seven and sixpence or something stupid on the pools last week,’ she said, turning to me. ‘Everyone else had filled it in right too.’

‘What a shame,’ I murmured, dutifully.

‘This is my sister, Miss Bennett,’ said Louise, and the man stood up affably and we shook hands. It was all too matey for words, and had a real charm, I am loath to admit. Stage door worlds aren’t exactly familiar to me, and I am always rather reluctantly touched by the sentimentality and goodwill and cheek-kissing that goes on. Louise seemed to have taken it in her stride all right. Perhaps the theatrical element in her nature had gravitated naturally to its own level. She certainly would be more at home amongst actresses than amongst female novelists and poets.

After looking at the notice-boards she said, ‘Come on, let’s go up and give him a surprise.’ Again I said that perhaps he wouldn’t like my being there, but she brushed this aside as peremptorily as before, and started off up the stairs. They were cold and shabby and bleak, and we seemed to go up for ever.

‘I thought he was a star,’ I said, crossly. ‘Surely they’ve got a dressing-room further down than this?’

‘It’s an old theatre,’ she said, ‘and Hesther’s in the one on the floor below.’

When we got there, it said John Connell, Dressing Room 2, on a typewritten slip in the door. Louise pushed it open and a warm fleshy odour of greasepaint and clothes and whisky and sweat met us. It was a small room, but big enough for a chaise longue along one wall, which Louise promptly sat on, and lit herself a cigarette. There was a pile of letters at one end of the thing, and she picked them up and started to go through them, just as if I hadn’t been there. I sat down on the chair in front of the mirror, and looked at myself, my cheeks and nose inelegantly pink with cold. I dabbed at them with some powder, but to little effect. Then I studied the telegrams and notes stuck all round the mirror. They said things like ‘Darling John, all the best for a fabulous success’ or ‘Darling John, it’s going to be a Wow’. There were, as well as the telegrams, a lot of cards portraying bunches of flowers, little ducks, or jokey pictures. There was almost something retarded about the whole thing, to my ignorant eyes. Under the mirror was a litter of Kleenex, cotton wool, powder, sticks of Leichner, and dirty glasses. Also a bottle of whisky, a pretentious-looking book called Morality and the Middle Classes, and a lot of old Biros. It was very messy and very human. Quite different from Stephen’s meaningless Greek womb. I began to see why Louise fled there so often for refuge. Whatever it lacked, it had life in excess, dirty, exaggerated life. I could hear the play coming over that loudspeaker arrangement: John was blustering on about something or other while Hesther Innes wept or sniffled in the background. It was obviously very near the curtain; indeed, as I listened, John delivered a dying fall, there was a long pause, and muffled clapping broke out. Even before it faded away we heard the noise of feet rushing up the stone stairs, and John broke violently in. He wasn’t expecting to see us there, and he stopped on the threshold, panting and dishevelled: but he wasn’t an actor for nothing.

‘Darling, darling,’ he said, and opened his arms to Louise. She got up from the chaise longue and walked into them, and they embraced rather lengthily, kissing each other on the lips I noticed. ‘Darling, what a marvellous surprise,’ he said, as he let her go. ‘What are you doing here? And what have you brought Sarah for?’ He kissed me too, less effusively, on the cheek.

‘I don’t know the answer myself,’ I said, as it seemed to be me that he was asking. I felt de trop in any case, and would willingly have disappeared, if I could have thought of an excuse for doing so. Unfortunately Louise knew I had nothing else to do: I had told her so before the project of theatre visiting had been raised.

‘We just came along,’ said Louise. ‘We were having supper and then we got bored so we just came along. You’re pleased to see us, aren’t you?’

‘Of course, of course. Sit down, I’ll be changed in a moment.’

We sat. He really did look pleased to see us—or at least to see Louise. He was obviously excited by her presence: he kept whistling to himself as he washed his hands and started to rub the greasepaint off his face. Their eyes met from time to time in the mirror. I watched him too: in that small space I couldn’t pretend to watch anything else. He ripped off his shirt—a white one, but now streaked with brown round the neck and sleeves—and stood there in a string vest as he dabbed at his eyes with cotton wool. His shoulders were huge and covered in black hair. Then he went over to the wash-basin and ran the cold tap: he put his face under it and came up wet and spluttering. Everything he did seemed to make a noise: all his actions were larger and more physical than other men’s. I wondered if that was because he was an actor, or whether he was an actor because of that. When he dried himself on a towel, one got the impression that he had just been for a long swim. When he ripped off his trousers I did try to look the other way, but as he seemed quite happy to wander round in his underpants my delicacy seemed out of place, if not positively tactless. He got dressed in his own clothes, which weren’t indeed very different from the things he had worn on the stage—the play was about a docker, and John now studiously dressed himself in a check flannel shirt, threadbare round the collar, a pair of dirty jeans, and one of those dark blue dustmen’s jackets with leather patches on the shoulders. When he had finished he did look very striking: not quite a docker but far too hefty for a motor-cycling youth. While changing he scarcely said a word: he simply grunted from time to time as he did up a button or reached down to put on his socks. When he was dressed he went over to Louise and stroked her hair and said, ‘Well, where shall we go for the evening?’

‘You must want something to eat,’ she said.

‘Oh, I can do without.’

‘But we would come with you.’

‘Will you? All right then, let’s go. After you.’

We filed out again, but on the way down John suddenly said, ‘Just a moment, let’s go and look at Hesther’s baby.’

‘Hesther’s what?’ said Louise, as we paused outside Dressing Room 1.

‘Hesther’s baby. She brought it with her.’ He knocked on the door, and the girl inside shouted, ‘Come in.’ We went in and there was the girl who played opposite John, sitting in a dressing-gown and smoking. She was terribly pretty in a sad, shadowy way, the kind of girl I would have loved to be. She looked a little like a very feminine Simone. John introduced me, and Louise kissed her: ‘We’ve come to look at the baby,’ said John.

‘Have you really? There he is, in his basket. The girl couldn’t get back from her day off today so I brought him with me. Isn’t he an angel?’

The baby was lying in a blue basket with pink palm trees on. He was lying on his side, asleep, with his little hands clenched by his mouth. His eyelashes lay on his cheek, enormously long. We were all silent and we could hear him breathing, very lightly and quickly.

‘God, he’s adorable,’ said Louise.

‘Has he been asleep all evening?’ I asked.

‘The whole evening,’ she said. ‘He went to sleep after I fed him at six, then he slept all the way here in the taxi, and he’ll probably sleep all the way back. They’re amazing.’

‘How old is he?’ I asked, entranced.

‘Four months.’

‘He’s so beautiful,’ I said.

‘He is, isn’t he?’ she said. I liked her a lot.

When we went out, I said to John, ‘What a nice person she is.’

‘Isn’t she a sweetie?’ he said, which wasn’t quite what I m...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• The Crossing
• The Wedding
• The Reception
• The Move
• The Invitation
• The Party
• The Next Invitation
• The Next Party
• The Information
• The Convergence
• The Collision
• About the Author