A Summer Bird-Cage (10 page)

‘There’s a couple of letters for you, Gill,’ I said, as she came back again, rubbing her hair with a towel.

‘Oh, are there? Where?’

‘On the mantelpiece.’

She read the first one very quickly, and then opened the invitation; as she took it in her expression clouded. She stood there scowling at it, then she looked down at me, read my face, and said, ‘I suppose you’ve got one too?’

‘Yes, I have,’ I said. ‘I haven’t seen David for ages, have you?’

‘No, I haven’t, and I can’t say I particularly want to.’

‘Why, what’s wrong with David?’

‘Oh, nothing.’

‘I thought I’d probably go.’

‘What on earth for? It’s bound to be an utterly sick-making drunken orgy, with foreign girls and models with their hair done up over bird-cages. And actors.’

She paused for my response, which didn’t arrive.

‘Well, isn’t it?’ she repeated aggressively.

‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘I suppose so. But I rather like that kind of person.’

‘Well I don’t. I think they’re silly and tiresome and I should be bored to tears.’

As she said that, I suddenly glimpsed in her the traditional university woman, badly dressed, censorious, and chaotic. I didn’t like what I saw, so I quickly said, ‘I like David.’

‘I do too, in a way, but he likes such silly girls.’

‘Some men just do. One can’t do anything about it, can one?’

‘It annoys me, that’s all, to see him getting intense about nitwits with their hair six inches high.’

‘He doesn’t get intense,’ I said plaintively. ‘He just likes girls. He can’t help it.’

‘When’s his novel coming out, anyway?’

‘I’ve no idea. Is there one on the way?’

‘Well, isn’t there?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘He’ll never publish anything if he goes on being a journalist. All he cares about is money.’

‘Oh shut
up
,’ I said, ‘and stop getting at him for such stupid contradictory reasons. Why don’t you want to go to this party, anyway? I thought it might make a change. We could go together.’

‘A change from what?’

‘Oh, you know. People in ties. Everyone will drink horrid wine like the good old days in Ox. Do come, I’d be scared to go by myself.’

She didn’t respond to this moving appeal, but looked down again at the invitation with a puzzled look.

‘I don’t get it,’ she said, after a pause, shaking her tidy damp head. ‘I just don’t get it. Look.’

She handed the piece of card over to me: it was exactly the same except that David had only crossed out the Partners Welcome message, and Tony had added underneath: ‘I shall be there.’ I looked from it to her to see what she didn’t get, and she said, ‘What does he mean? I don’t know what he means.’

I thought hard and quick.

‘Perhaps he’s just telling you he’ll be there so you can go too.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘Look, Gill, how should I know?’

‘Perhaps he’s warning me not to go? Which do you think, is he warning me not to go or expecting me to go and meet him there?’

‘I really don’t know,’ I repeated, touched but a little embarrassed by her questioning: I didn’t see how she could expect me to understand Tony if she didn’t. I would never never ask anyone else about Francis. But Gill seemed genuinely to have resigned the right to know what Tony was doing. Obviously her surface neatness covered unpleasant depths of doubt. Still, despite my reluctance even to express an opinion about Tony, I was relieved that she had stopped pretending that the causes of her distress were the mess on the floor or the hair-styles of model girls.

‘I should think that perhaps it means that he would like you to go,’ I said, finally. I didn’t really think so but I hadn’t the nerve to suggest the other thing. ‘When did you last see him?’

‘It was at Beata’s.’

‘Was he pleased to see you?’

‘Not really. He was with another girl.’

‘What a lout,’ I said. That seemed to clinch everything to me, though I still couldn’t say so: after all, Tony is very odd and may well have wanted to meet his lost wife at David Vesey’s party. But as she seemed inclined not to go, I couldn’t in fairness disco arage her from this inclination. She did persuade me, however, to go myself and to report on the state of affairs: who Tony was with, what he looked like,
etcetera
.

6

N
OVEMBER THE TENTH
was a strange and promising day. I woke feeling higher than I had done for the past week, which had been distinguished chiefly by an involved airmail confusion with Francis. I had been making difficulties to him, and I always hate myself for that, and at the same time feel an ominous horror because it is always a sign that I am about to have a crisis of malice, weeping and exhaustion. I had felt it coming for days: I had been crouching inside the walls of my consciousness terrified to move too far or too violently in case they collapsed and left me looking at the wild beasts. In the pre-crisis days I feel like someone living in a paper house surrounded by predatory creatures. They believe the house is solid so they don’t attack, but if I were to move they would see the walls flutter and collapse and they would be on to me in no time.

But somehow, on the morning of that day, the crisis seemed averted. Perhaps it was quite simply that when I woke the sun was shining through the flimsy curtains on to my bed. And by the first post there came a letter from Francis that seemed to confirm the change in the weather: it said the only things that can comfort: it said, foolishly but beautifully, ‘Beloved angel, I believe you whatever you say, even if it isn’t true, because I believe you are true,’ and so forth: it forgave me,
carte blanche
, absolutely, in that extraordinarily generous way that Francis has. And at the end of the letter he said, ‘I know you must be extravagant, my lovely angel, I wouldn’t have you clip your wings and put up with the common good of life, so burn the time away till nightfall.’ I could have eaten the words on the page. He seemed more present than he had seemed at any moment since he had left, and as I walked out into the bright sunlight to catch the bus I could feel the wild beasts slinking away with their tails between their legs, balked of their rightful prey.

It was a wonderful blue cold day, with the last yellow leaves reprieved on the terrace of plane trees by the bus stop: almost one of those aqueous and lunar days when everything is charged with its own clarity. The colours of the houses and the brick were glowing and profound, and the small children playing in the streets looked as though they were on the way to an entrancing future. I had a good day at work, with a few odd compliments from above, and my good mood was still with me when I returned home in the evening to change for David’s party. Deciding what to wear was a pleasure instead of the usual burden: I took down my dresses and skirts with an affectionate proprietary familiarity, and tried on this and that without once thinking that I looked a fright. In the end I put on an enchanting linen dress with pleats and a yoke, rather like a gym tunic, which I had bought two years ago, long before such things became fashionable. It was a wonderful and exhilarating dress to wear because it left me complete freedom of movement: it had no belt to sever my legs from the movement of my shoulder, it didn’t mould or make me any way, it just met me where I went out to meet it, with a casual friendliness. It was a perfect garment to feel happy in. I hung a lump of amethyst on a silver chain which Simone had once given me round my neck, then looked for my lilac eyeshadow: I couldn’t find it, so decided that eyeshadow was anyway vulgar. I spent five minutes putting my hair up, and then took it all down again. I thought I looked fine either way. Then I spent another ten minutes looking for the invitation with the address on it, which had slipped behind the clock on the mantelpiece. Then I decided it was getting very late, so I grabbed my coat and the first book I could see, and ran for the bus. I always take a book with me to parties, I find it is a girl’s best chaperone, but I did wish I’d picked up something more likely than
Paradise Lost
.

To get to NW6 from N5 one has to go into Piccadilly and change. It took time, but I enjoyed myself looking out of the bus at the shop windows, which were all lit up in garish Christmas colours, red and green and tinsel and electric blue. Christmas Offers had begun to replace the cut prices. I loved it all, all the candles and the posters and the cold bonfire air.

When I got to David’s the party was in full swing. I could tell that from the bottom of the stairs. They were rather cold, grey, office-like stairs. In fact they were office stairs: he and Simon live on top of an accountant’s. There was a raucous noise descending—not the even, beelike murmur of cocktail conversation, but a much more extrovert, high-pitched roar, with a background of music and feet shuffling, from which an individual voice rose from time to time in a wail or shriek of gaiety. I took all this in, quietly, before I drew a deep breath, remembered that I was my love’s lovely angel, and pushed open the door. I found myself in their crowded hall, full of smoke and heaps of coats and people. After the preliminary dazzle, I distinguished David with his back to me, so I made my way over to him and attracted his attention by shouting ‘David’ in his ear: he lurched round, scattering white wine all over the girl whose glass he had been filling, and said, ‘
Sarah
, I’m so glad you came. Wasn’t it nice of you to come? There’s a terrible scrum in here, isn’t there?’

‘Terrible,’ I agreed, ‘but it’s just what I feel like.’

‘Is it really? I’ve had enough. I wish they’d all go home. Except that would mean they hated my party and that would be too depressing, wouldn’t it? So they’ll all have to stay till morning.’

‘They will, you needn’t worry,’ I said, looking round. Everyone looked very much settled down for the night. David himself appeared to be a little distraught and very hot: he kept trying to push the hair off his forehead with the back of the hand that was holding the bottle.

‘What do you want to drink?’ he said. ‘There seems to be white wine, red wine or beer, and I believe there is some Scotch hidden in the kitchen cupboard. Or there was, once. Would you like some Scotch?’

‘No thank you, really, I’d rather have some white wine, I hate Scotch.’

‘Do you really?’ he said, as he started off through the crowd to a table in the corner of the next room. ‘I thought you used to be a hard drinker? Don’t I remember you and Francis and me getting through a bottle or two?’

‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘but times have changed.’

‘Not for me they haven’t.’

‘Haven’t they?’

‘There, will that do?’

He handed me a half-pint beer-mug full of wine: ‘Oh God,’ I said, ‘that’s far too much, it looks so bad.’

‘Well, you’ll get through it, won’t you? Are you drinking to talk or to get drunk, as Aristophanes once said to Socrates?’

‘Did he really? You old pedant. To get drunk, I suppose. Not much chance of a conversation round here.’

‘What do you mean? There’s lots of intelligent people here. Lots of old friends. And how is Francis? He’s a real pedant, old Francis.’

‘Oh, he’s all right. Who’s here then that I like?’

‘Don’t you like everyone? What about Stephanie and Michael? There they are, talking about H-bombs. Go and tell them not to be so worried.’

‘All right, I will. Will they make me sign anything? I saw Stephanie on a newsreel the other day, handing out pamphlets at that to-do outside Brize-Norton.’

‘Darling Stephanie, I wonder why she isn’t a bore. She must see how absurd it all is. You go and talk to her, I must fly off and deal with the new arrivals. If I know any of them. Honestly, there are so many people here that I’ve never seen in my life before. Do you think they would gatecrash my parties if I wore glasses like Francis?’

‘Of course they wouldn’t,’ I said, loudly, over the heads of people who started to surge between us: then I turned and made my way over to Stephanie and Michael. On the way I caught sight of Tony. He was dancing, in a very confined space, with a beautiful foreign-looking girl who was wearing an extraordinary bright yellow dress with a silk fringe round the bottom.

Stephanie and Michael were both very much from the old administration. They had been one of the steady couples in Oxford, with a predictable career mapped before them of three years’ idyll followed by a July wedding immediately after Finals: all of which had, of course, charmingly happened. Stephanie had been my great stand-by just before exams: she had kept drifting into my room late at night, as I sat up with cups of coffee over volumes of
Beowulf
and the dead relics of past essays, bringing with her patterns for wedding dresses, scraps of material, and ideas for bouquets from
Vogue
. I discussed these things with her with much greater enthusiasm than I could summon up for eleventh-hour revision, and was sorry I missed her wedding through being in Paris. She wasn’t at all a frivolous person, as that description of her might suggest: but then neither was she a real academic bore like me.

Both she and Michael are, separately and as a couple, the sort of people one might very much like to be, if one didn’t suspect that through thus gaining nearly everything one might lose that tiny, exhilarating possibility of one day miraculously gaining the whole lot. Both their families were connected with professional politics, and they followed politics with the kind of committed, critical enthusiasm that others reserve for theatre reviews or literary fashions. They made political earnestness respectable in our circle, because of their evident soundness and intelligence, but somehow I could never go the whole way with them. ‘It’s no good,’ Francis had said to me late one night after a long session on immigration from the West Indies. ‘They believe people can be changed and I don’t. That’s basically what it is.’ And I was with Francis on this point, not in a despairing Tory way, but because I do believe that people can’t be changed: they can only be saved or enlightened or renewed, one by one, which is a different thing and not one that can be affected by legislation.