A Summer Bird-Cage (12 page)

‘You do look like her,’ he repeated. He let go of my hand and took hold of my chin with his fingers, pinching it hard and painfully, and tilting my face towards the light: but I had had enough of being bullied, and I pulled away and said, ‘Just let go of me, do you mind, just let me alone.’

He released me, as he had to, as I was standing stock still and quite unmanoeuvrable. ‘Thank you for the dance,’ I said, and started off back towards Jackie Almond and Wilfred Smee. He followed, and I tried very carefully to walk straight: I felt red in the fac; from drink and I remembered Louise’s lily-like bloom. Jackie looked like an old friend when I rejoined him. I was introduced to Wilfred Smee, but could hardly bring myself to be civil, not that I had anything in particular against him: he seemed more sensitive to my state than John, and shortly they both removed themselves, at his instigation.

I sat down on Jackie’s knee, weak with relief. He kissed my arm for a few minutes, intermittently and absent-mindedly, and then said, ‘Come on, I’ll take you home.’

‘I’m all right,’ I said. ‘I don’t need taking.’

‘I always take girls home after parties.’

‘Do you?’

‘Always.’

‘Do you like doing it?’

‘I suppose I must.’

He helped me to stand up, and led me into the hall. I was very glad he hadn’t taken what I had said about going home alone seriously, as I didn’t feel like being submerged in depression alone in the small hours. Also I wasn’t at all sure how to get back to the flat, and was happy to shelve the problem. As it happened, there was no problem, as this man called Jackie Almond, whose virtues and uses had increased with my exhaustion, actually possessed a car.

‘I don’t believe it,’ I said, as he opened the door and put me in. ‘I simply don’t believe it.’

‘This is why I always take girls home from parties,’ he said, pulling out the starter thing.

‘Why? Because it’s easy for you?’

‘No. Because it’s easy for them.’

This charming answer quite disarmed me: the old-fashioned, well-brought-up chivalry of him, together with the comfort of sitting in a warm car instead of walking the cold streets looking for non-existent taxis, effected a sag in the moral nerve that I had subconsciously braced to meet the cold and the walking: I had been ready to go home alone, on foot if need be, and the unexpected blessing of a car upset me. I started to cry. I felt terribly stupid, sitting there and crying: crying after parties is a habit I gave up at least a year ago.

‘God, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘How stupid of me. How stupid. It’s just that I’m so glad I haven’t got to walk.’

I was sniffing, as I always do when I cry, and I couldn’t find my handkerchief, so he lent me his. It was almost like having Francis there.

‘I get so terribly fed up,’ I said, as I blew my nose, ‘of being alone. I am sorry, please don’t notice, I am sorry.’

I really meant it, too: there was a time when I would have cried really, I suppose, for attention, but this time I simply couldn’t help it. More honourable, in one way, but more degrading.

‘Most girls cry after parties,’ he said, suddenly, as the car started forward in the dark.

‘Do they?’

‘Most of the sort of girls that I take home.’

‘What sort are they?’

‘You would be offended, wouldn’t you, if I said your sort?’

I sniffed and hesitated, and then said, ‘Yes, I suppose I would. One likes to be distinct, at least.’

‘Even if it were the nicest sort of girl?’

‘What sort is it then? Apart from being my sort?’

‘Which you wouldn’t recognize as a sort?’

‘Not except as an insult.’

‘Isn’t there any sort I could say you belonged to that would please you?’

‘I don’t want you to please me. I want you to tell me what you mean.’

‘Oh, of course. I understand that. But discounting what I mean, isn’t there anything that would please you if I did say it?’

‘If you said it and meant it, do you mean?’

‘Of course.’

‘No, I don’t think there is. I don’t want to be the sort of girl that you take home. Now tell me what you were thinking of.’

‘Oh, nothing very much. You make the whole business sound rather terrifying, but then that’s one of your qualities. You and your sort. The high-powered girls, I would call you. I like high-powered girls, particularly at parties. I like them all the time, but they never seem to like me.’ He pulled a mock-pathetic face, which I think was rather serious, but I wasn’t really thinking of him. I was thinking of me as a high-powered girl. For some reason the phrase didn’t offend or threaten me, but seemed to say something true, something that connected up with me and how I had been, and moreover connected me with how other people were. It was this last connexion that really mattered: it expressed one quality of living that I would really like to have. I would like to be high-powered, in a way that I wouldn’t like to be or to be called Bohemian, or bourgeois, or intellectual, or promiscuous, or any of the other charges that I had laid myself open to. I was, in a way, all these things, I suppose, but I didn’t belong to them. I only belonged to them relatively, depending on who was watching: Daphne, Francis, Louise, David Vesey . . . But to being high-powered I hoped I did belong, and he had caught me in a pattern of behaviour that I would like to hold to, he expressed my community with people that I would like to belong to, people like Simone and Gill and one or two others that I have met. His words seemed to dispel a little of the isolation of behaving as I do, a little of the classlessness and social dislocation that girls of my age and lack of commitments feel. I sat silent, amazed by the recognition of how much I missed community, and how deeply I felt my social loneliness. I had no colleagues, no neighbours, no family.

After a while he said, ‘Well? Why do you think they don’t like me?’ and I realized that he had of course been thinking of himself.

‘I’m sure they do,’ I said. ‘If I am one, they do.’

‘Do you really?’

‘Of course I do. Why did I spend the evening with you?’

‘Convenience?’

‘Did you spend it with me for convenience?’

‘No, I did it because I like girls like you. I like you.’

‘And I did because I like men like you. Chivalrous men.’ He winced at that, but what could I say? ‘Anyway,’ I went on, ‘I’m sure all high-powered girls must like you, out of self-defence, because so few people will put up with them. There aren’t many people I could meet at a party who would put up with the whole lot from me, drink and bad dancing and weeping on the way home and all. One must be grateful.’

‘Oh, one must. I suppose I must be grateful that girls need this kind of attention.’

‘Yes. And there we are.’

‘Mutual gratitude.’

‘That’s right.’

‘You don’t think that’s rather sordid?’

‘Not really. Why should it be?’

He didn’t reply to this and I drifted off again on a private tack: I was thinking that despite all, despite the dislocations that made this sort of contact so necessary in its ephemeral way, the contact itself was worth it. Driving along a street I’d never seen with a man I’d never met in the dark of considerable understanding was worth a lot of the rest of life. I am never really happy unless lost in this way, and connected in this way. It’s not that I don’t like playing social games: I enjoy playing at cashmere cardigans or First Nights, or superior restaurants, or literary teas, or jazzy nightclubs, but while playing these things I never have any sense of connexion with the other people doing them, and am always more aware of the event making me than of me making the event. Whereas now, alone in the dark with this man, who assuredly didn’t mean anything permanent to me, nor I to him, I felt liberated, as though I were drawing a little on his energy and he on mine. I don’t know what I am missing in my life of permanent and valuable contact, though I feel its absence, but at least from time to time I get something that I would never get were I not so displaced—the sudden confidence, the momentary illumination of feeling, ships passing and moreover signalling in the dark.

It’s all compensation, I suppose. But then I wouldn’t have most of the things that it’s compensation for. Excepting Francis. And who knows, respecting Francis I sometimes think I may be able to have my cake and eat it.

He took me home, and I remember that we shook hands on parting. I wanted to ask him in for a drink, but I knew what would happen if I did so I didn’t, after a little thought. I felt bad, shaking hands like that.

In bed I remembered that John had said Louise and I were alike. I wondered how right he was. It needed considerable discernment to see that we resembled each other at all.

7

I
HAD A
bad time explaining about Tony to Gill the next evening. It didn’t seem helpful to say that he was well and happy, as though I had visited him in hospital. What I did say was that I had scarcely spoken to him, and that he had been dancing with a friend of David’s called Beatrice.

‘What was she like?’ said Gill, sitting on the floor and biting the quick of her nails.

‘She had a horrid yellow dress on,’ I said.

‘Really horrid?’

‘Yes, really horrid.’

‘He likes such awful people,’ she said.

We spent a horrible evening, somehow typical of the temporary pointlessness of our lives: we listened to the wireless, and I tried to write to Francis. I then made us both a curry, which I thought was rather kind and unselfish of me, but Gill was furious when I put an iron casserole with rice in it on the coffee-table: she said it would burn a hole: I said so what, it wasn’t our table: she said she didn’t like looking at tables with holes burned in them: I said since when: she called me an undergraduate: I called her an undergraduate: and so on. I ended up feeling utterly childish and worn out, as though I weren’t old or disciplined enough to live without support, and so I went to bed. Girls shouldn’t share flats, but who else can they share them with?

The whole of the next month went on in the same way, cluttered up with intractable material objects like dirty saucepans and shoes that needed new heels, and although I didn’t get any tidier I began to share Gill’s irritation with everything in the flat. I was relieved to get out to work in the mornings.

The next thing that happened was an invitation from Louise. It arrived at breakfast-time on a Saturday morning in late November. I hadn’t heard anything of her since John Connell’s elliptic comments at David Vesey’s party: nobody seemed to have seen her, so I had assumed she was still in Paris. The invitation was for an ‘At Home’ at six-thirty on December the seventh. I was rather shocked by the unfamiliar, printed self-assurance of the words ‘Mr and Mrs Stephen Halifax’. She really had done it. There was a note in with the invitation: it said—

24 Honeyman Gardens, SW3

My dear Sarah,

O to be in April now that England’s here. We seem to have returned to the rain of the whole year: we would have stayed, but for Stephen’s film, which I expect you know of. Do come to this party and look at our pretty flat.

Amitiés sincères
, as they say in France,

Loulou

I read and re-read this communication several times as I chewed over my cornflakes: it seemed surprisingly amiable, but I was so well-trained in suspicion that I searched for
doubles entendres
, the iron hand beneath the velvet glove, and so on. The sad thing was that, as always upon renewed contact with her after a gap of time, ninety-five per cent of me leaped forward, earnest and happy to greet any sign of friendliness: I did still
want
to like her: but the other five per cent had been so often proved right that it was getting increasingly hard to confuse. On the face of it her letter seemed to be friendly enough: in fact it seemed too friendly to be normal. We never corresponded unless we wanted something from each other, and we never invited each other to anything. Doubtless there
are
sisters who immediately rush to see each other after returning from abroad, and doubtless there are even more sisters who, if having a party, would invite each other to it as a matter of course, but we didn’t belong to either of these groups. It never occurred to us to approach each other. I had assumed that when she returned to London the sum of our contact would be odd meetings in shops, art galleries and coffee-bars, sometimes civil and sometimes not, occasionally prolonged into cups of coffee or drinks together, but more often not. This had been the pattern of things in our frightful year together at Oxford, and I hadn’t seen any reason why it should be changed. I wouldn’t have dared to change it myself: I had thought to avoid her even more insistently now she was married.

It hadn’t always been like this, of course: there had been a time when, happily oblivious of my own undesirability, I had pursued her and waited on her and yearned for the crumb of her company that never fell my way. This had lasted from the age of eight until I was thirteen or so: before I was eight she used to play with me quite often, and after the age of thirteen I learned at least superficially to ignore her and to get on with my own life. But the humiliating period after she had cast me off and before I learned to appear to have cast her off I remember very clearly. Particularly I remember the ends of term, when she would come home from boarding school, while I was still going to the local girls’ school: I would cross the days off on my calendar for the last fortnight of term with growing excitement, and when the day came I would beg my parents to take me to Birmingham station with them to meet the train. They always did, touched by my enthusiasm, and I would stand on the platform counting the minutes till the train came in. When it was late I nearly died of suspense.

I always had a lot of fascinating things to tell her and fascinating questions to ask her about school and her friends there. And every time she came there would be the same cold disillusion, the same sharp lesson in withdrawal. I remember her walking down the platform with her brown suitcase and her green school coat and hat, oddly detached from her school-friends, who were jabbering and giggling under the strain of meeting their families in full view of each other. No doubt she was even more selfconscious than they were, but by the age of thirteen she had learned not to show it. She would walk slowly and carefully, deliberately avoiding any appearance of haste: when she was within speaking distance a cool embarrassed little smile would cross her face. She would kiss my parents calmly, without fuss, rather as though they were strangers, and she would not look at me at all. Not once, ever. She ignored my existence completely.