A Summer Bird-Cage (14 page)

So the friends I did continue to see were of that odd, persistent variety that one sees largely through habit, and because they always have an address and telephone number. I can see that in a few years they will turn into the
genre
of ‘friends of the family’, and recur, sending the children Christmas presents and remembering my birthday, while those one passionately loved and wanted are swept into oblivion. Also, I saw a few people I had once cared about, but who were now too involved in their work or their wives or husbands to care about me. It was one of these who took me to the Tate—a chirpy historian by the name of Lovell, who had invited me to lunch with various academic cronies of Francis’s, for old times’ sake. It was a nice thought, and a nice lunch, but it made me feel curiously passé, and I felt the impulse to tell everyone that I had got a degree too, as good as any of theirs, which is always a danger signal. I resisted it, but it was sad to feel that way at all. Lovell was so nice and so friendly and so full of himself, and kept asking healthy unguarded questions about Francis, and telling me about his thesis, so I should have felt happy. But I didn’t, I felt as though everyone else was leading a marvellous, progressive life except me, and that I had been subtly left behind. He didn’t seem to notice, and it wasn’t that I was exactly bored by the exhibition we had gone to look at; it was just that I simply didn’t care, although I wanted to. I was bullying my brain and eyes to wake up and take a little interest as we stood in front of a charming sculpt of a little girl, when I suddenly noticed Daphne, my cousin Daphne, whom I hadn’t seen since Louise’s wedding. She was walking round the gallery alone, looking so like herself and what she was that she seemed a cross between a symbol and a cartoon. She was wearing a maroon coat with a fitted waist, and brown middle-height high-heeled shoes with thick heels; her hat was dark green and felt, and her handbag was rather expensive crocodile skin. Under the coat I could see she was wearing her Sunday suit and a pale blue blouse. She was carrying a string bag with a newspaper in: I was surprised they hadn’t made her leave it at the desk. They must have recognized her transparent honesty. Once I was even made to leave my handbag—admittedly rather a vast one—solely because I had gone out in the morning without doing my hair or trying to put it up. If one could learn to put one’s hair into the curious roll that Daphne wears, they would never ask to look at one’s ticket again.

I wondered for a moment or two whether to notice her before she noticed me: I wasn’t any too happy about the idea of introducing her to Lovell, who tended towards the satiric rather than the charitable. It was so obvious that I couldn’t avoid her altogether, however, that I decided I had better salve my conscience and take the first plunge, though I went and ruined my moral vantage by whispering in his ear, before I hailed her, ‘Just look at this too extraordinary cousin of mine, Charles.’ ‘Where?’ he said, and I said, ‘There,’ and shouted ‘Daphne’ at her intent back. She turned round, recognized me, and came over looking chatty and not half as embarrassed as I was. I introduced her to Lovell, saying he was a friend of Francis’s, and doing research at one of the London colleges: ‘Oh,’ she said brightly, ‘you must be a historian, that’s my line of country as well,’ and I remembered that she was, in effect, a history teacher. She didn’t look unlike a certain type of clever research student herself. But emphatically not Lovell’s type: he liked clever women, but he only liked the smart and breezy sort in clever clothes who sit in libraries over a pile of learned books radiating successful control of mind and body and expensive feminine perfume. Anyway, Daphne wasn’t even clever. It turned out that she had come up to London for the weekend to attend some conference about marking School Certificate papers. I felt we ought to ask her to have a cup of tea with us, and was very grateful to Lovell when he suggested it himself: so we all trouped off to the restaurant and drank tea and talked about the paintings and history and other innocuous subjects. I was surprised by Daphne’s
savoir-faire
in keeping off family gossip, and relieved by the small amount of work I was expected to do to keep the conversation going: she and Lovell seemed to have a lot to say about education, jokes in exam papers,
etcetera
. They got on to his thesis, and it wasn’t until I heard Daphne say brightly and somehow desperately, ‘It sounds absolutely wonderful, I’d love to hear some more about it sometime’ that I realized she was actually, as they say, making a pass at him. He replied, ‘Oh, I’ll send you a copy when it’s finished,’ and I thought the time had come for interference.

‘How’s Michael?’ I said, a little abruptly, as though I had just remembered his existence.

‘Oh, he’s all right,’ she said and we turned the conversation to his holiday in Paris. After a while she politely and reciprocally asked after Louise. I was wondering how on earth I could convey to Lovell the fact that I wanted to break up our little tea-party, when she suddenly said she had to catch a train that evening up to the Midlands, and ought to be on her way to the station: she seemed determined to go by taxi, despite our advice about buses and Tubes, so we took her down the steps while Lovell performed the indelicate operation of waving at a taxidriver. We shut her into the taxi, and she said as she left, pink with unexpected pleasure, ‘I’m so glad I met you both, I really didn’t know what to do with myself alone in London for a day.’

‘You should have rung me up last night,’ I said, but it wasn’t me that had pleased her. She drove off, holding her string bag and her little suitcase as she sat there on the taxi seat, as though she were afraid the taxi-driver might turn round and grab them if she put them down for a second. In trains, she would never leave anything on the luggage rack. She had to take everything along with her to the restaurant car or the lavatory. And I’m sure she went in taxis because she was frightened of getting lost.

I don’t know quite what I expected Lovell to say when she had gone. I didn’t really think he would turn on me and say, ‘What ghastly relations you have, I really can’t associate with you any more if I’m liable to meet people like that in your company.’ What he did say was, ‘Poor girl, what a ghastly life it must be, teaching history from the sabre-toothed tiger to the Entente Cordiale.’

‘She needn’t do it if she didn’t want,’ I said tartly, spurred on to attack since he defended.

‘What else could she do?’

‘I don’t know. Anything. Anyone can do anything.’

‘In theory, perhaps. I must say it was a curious colour-scheme.’

‘Very curious.’ I looked at his delicately narrowed trousers, his expensive suede jacket, and his pretty green tie. ‘Don’t you think she could do better if she tried?’ I said.

‘Why should she try? It wouldn’t help,’ he said, and because it was cold standing on the steps there we started to walk off down the Embankment towards Lambeth Bridge. It was a very grey day and the river looked hopeless and beautiful, having given up autumn for dead and with as yet no thought of spring. It feels open down by the Thames in that reach, with the smell of traffic and estuary and barges. As we walked, a little speedboat passed us: in it I could see a man in a sheepskin coat, and a girl in a head-square hanging on to his arm as the wind blew in her face, and laughing. You can do that, even on the greyest, dirtiest stretch of river. It made me feel stagnant and covered in oil and dead feathers, to see them there.

Daphne is somehow a threat to my existence. Whenever I see her, I feel weighted down to earth. I feel the future narrowing before me like a tunnel, and everyone else is high up and laughing.

8

A
S THE DAY
for Louise’s party drew near, I realized I hadn’t got anything suitable to wear. There was no question of gaily and obliviously wearing something old and becoming like the linen dress I had worn to David’s: I would have to make the effort of assessing the situation and finding something socially correct. I couldn’t possibly afford anything new, being nominally at least selfsupporting, and beyond writing to my father for a cheque, and yet I couldn’t face going to see Louise in all her newly-married splendour without making some attempt to look appropriate. There wasn’t a single six-thirty dress in my wardrobe, apart from a dreary black number that I had bought at the age of eighteen, when I first went up to college, under the impression that black was sophisticated. I suppose it is, but not on me. It makes me look drained and sallow. I think that if the dress problem had been straight in my mind I would have rung Louise up for a little mild chatter about Rome, but I never got round to it. In the end I asked Gill if she could lend me anything, and we spent a happy hour trying on each other’s clothes: it was no use, because she was just slightly bigger in all directions than I was, and such garments as didn’t mind being too big were far too arty for the occasion. Also, they were all very dirty. Cleaning is so expensive. I was about to resign myself to wearing the dreary black, which Louise had hinted to be a mistake almost on its first appearance, when Gill said, ‘Why not try Stephanie? She’s about your size—anyway, her things used to be too tight for me when I used to try to borrow them. She’s pregnant now, she won’t want them any more.’

It seemed a brilliant suggestion, so we rang up Stephanie. She sounded delighted to hear us and asked us both round for a drink. We went, and there she was, sitting on a late Georgian settee knitting a blue pram rug and reading copies of
Vogue
and
Mother-to-be
. Her flat was beautifully furnished yet managed not to look opulent: she and Michael tended to believe that
objets d’art
ought to be kept in art galleries for the use of the public, so those that they had collected were discreet, almost austere. She was very helpful about the dress problem, and produced armfuls of suitable-looking things. She was obviously exactly the sort of person I should try to imitate for the occasion. I decided on a charming little dress in a sort of olive green, which made me look very unlike myself, but not altogether unconvincing. As we left, I was rather saddened and impressed by her ménage, but on the step outside Gill said, ‘It’s rather cosy, don’t you think,’ and, truly, I agreed. Gill is always tougher than me about other people. Sometimes I think I admire too much whatever I have not got. It’s better than sour grapes, but Gill’s reaction wasn’t sour grapes either. She simply didn’t want to live like that. Under the circumstances, she was lucky to know it.

The dress gave me a certain superficial confidence about the party, and I dressed for it not totally without pleasure: I had promised myself that I would go in a taxi, I suppose in order to feel more like the other guests and more like the dress I was wearing. Anyway, one gets so ruffled, walking in the cold and the wind. I worked it out so that I should arrive fairly late, and I was trying to pretend that I wasn’t frightened as the thing drew up outside the white wedding-cake façade of their house, but when I overtipped the driver and hadn’t the nerve to ask for my money back, I knew that I was really in a bad way. I knew I would have felt a lot better if I had asked for the change, but I didn’t, even though there was time. After he had driven off with his undeserved two shillings, I took a deep breath, straightened my back, and started to walk up the few steps to the front door. At that point I would have given anything for my self-discipline to have allowed me to retreat and go home. But it didn’t: retreat is about the last thing it ever allows me. When I reached the front door I faced another dilemma—I didn’t know whether or not to ring the doorbell. There was a row of four bells, and Louise’s was the next to the bottom: she lived on the first floor, obviously. In the end, after much deliberation, and spurred on by the awful thought of being caught hesitant on the doorstep by the next guest, I decided against ringing and walked straight in. I was reassured as soon as I was inside the door by party noises coming down the stairs: at least I hadn’t fulfilled the worst of my nightmares and come on the wrong day. The noises, however, were ominous; there was no sound of any particular gaiety, only a subdued, indistinct, conversational hum. Clearly I was going to have to talk. Pulling the torn shreds of my arrogance more tightly around me, and hoping I didn’t look as naked as I felt, I walked up the stairs and found another doorbell with Halifax by it, which I rang. This must have been the right thing to do, because Louise herself opened the door, and had obviously been standing in the hall waiting to do so. It was such a shock to see her that I had nothing to say.

She too looked taken aback, though not in any obvious way: ‘Why, Sarah,’ she said, very loudly, ‘how enchanting to see you, how very kind of you to come.’

‘How very kind of you to ask me,’ I said.

‘It must be months since I last saw you.’

‘It is. It was September.’

‘Oh yes, September. It was at my wedding, wasn’t it?’

‘That’s right. At your wedding.’

‘It seems a long time ago.’

‘Yes, it does, doesn’t it?’

We then paused a little to take breath in this scintillating exchange. She was looking very marvellous by any standards, wearing a kind of creamy-coloured wool dress in a curious towelling texture, neither knobbly nor hairy but a mixture of both. Perhaps it was more off-white than cream. It was obviously Italian, and my first thought was that she had obviously bought it in one of those fearfully worldly shops that I and my friends used to pass, dusty and more or less barefoot, clutching our bottles of wine, maps, postcards of irresistible objects like the bust of Augustus, and encumbered with all the weariness and useless cockleshells of pilgrimage. It gave me a strange feeling, to realize that a sister of mine had crashed into that other Rome, the Rome of the Romans. I decided some minutes later that perhaps, horror of horrors and sublimity of sublimities, she had even had it made. Anyway, she looked very remarkable in it, and I suddenly remembered Simone’s letter about her in Santa Maria, looking stoic and stony. She didn’t look stoic and stony now, particularly, but she did have rather an architectural look, as she had made herself up to look very pale, paler even than she is by nature, with thick grey eyebrows, rather like a sculpture, in fact. Except for one disastrous error: she had made her lips up in bright, clear scarlet. I could see the temptation, of course: after achieving the neutral, colourless harmony of skin and pale dress and dark hair the temptation to do something violent with one’s mouth must have been overwhelming. But Louise’s mouth isn’t her best feature: it’s very good, but it hasn’t quite got the mobile sort of generosity to look good in that colour: it is, if anything, just a little inflexible and even censorious. Her eyes are what make her impressively, classically beautiful: she should have let them win and brood over the whole effect, by wearing no lipstick at all. In fact she looked unexpected and slightly disappointing in exactly the same way that that bust of Nefertiti did the first time I saw a picture of it reproduced in colour. And they say the Greek statues were all painted too.