A Summer Bird-Cage (16 page)

I don’t seem to be able to describe how that party was at all. It ought to be easy, because everything is very distinct in my mind: I can visualize most of the clothes that the women wore, and how they had their hair, and that kind of thing. I can remember how people talked, in a way, and I could tell who was successful and who wasn’t and who was intelligent and who wasn’t. But there was something in the air that eluded me. It was almost like being in a foreign country, where distinctions are in one sense much clearer and brighter, and yet in another sense strange and very hard to assess. I think that the something in the air was a certain sort of worldliness to which I was unaccustomed and uninitiated, even though I had known for some time of its existence. Put more simply, I was socially out of my depth. I have just re-read, while thinking about this problem, one of Stephen’s descriptions of a function of this kind, and I find it very hard to know precisely why I would be incapable of writing one like it. I feel it ought to be easy to sit down and write a Stephenesque account of his ménage and friends, but it isn’t. It isn’t really a question of observation. In the passage of Stephen that I have just been looking at there is a description of a left-wing, Bohemian, sexy-type girl, familiar enough in style and intention—the girl is made to seem very immature, very self-deluding, and so on. Yet he doesn’t actually say anything about her thought processes: the whole thing is implied from various observations about her badly cut hair, the fit of her skirt over her hips, the nicotine on her fingers, and the somewhat crass, provocative things that he makes her say. The point is that I could observe these things but I could never achieve the tone or the conclusions. I could write up the actress with the purple velvet rose in these terms, but I could never feel I’d got her down on paper when I’d done it. There are hundreds of things I could say about Stephen himself—the way he holds a bottle when he is pouring out of it, very gently and yet at the same time clumsily, with no sense of shape, the way he sways slightly when he talks, the way his eyes select a spot just to the side of one’s eyes when he talks to one, so that he gives the impression of contact without risking it—but they don’t seem to add up to anything. They don’t imply the truth.

Satire won’t do. Worldliness won’t do. But until you can do them both you can’t do anything. Immaturity is no good, and they made me feel immature, all those people, even those I could see through: they caught undertones I couldn’t, though they didn’t even know they were doing it. The thing is that I couldn’t start to feel them in my terms because I couldn’t really feel them in theirs, and one needs the double background. Perhaps it can be learned by long apprenticeship and dedicated exploration: I hope so. Perhaps nobody is born with it. Perhaps it is only me that takes refuge in things like chance, unchartered encounters, cars in the night, roads going anywhere so long as it’s not somewhere that other people know better. You can’t judge or despise or even really get at something that you don’t know and haven’t thoroughly got, because of the fear of despising it because it’s not yours. The sour grapes principle, in fact. It applies to everything. Only when one has got everything in this life, when one is eaten up with physical joy and the extreme, extending marvel of existing, can one trust oneself on the subject of the soul.

I didn’t stay very long. I had a brief interchange with Louise before I left: I sought her out to thank her for the lovely party,
etcetera
, and instead of letting me make a quick exit as I had expected she would, she seemed suddenly inclined to launch into family matters. She asked me when I had last seen our mother, and I said not since late September, when she had come up to London for some meeting or other, and to buy a new coat.

‘What sort of coat?’ said Louise, at once, with surprisingly normal curiosity. It was exactly the question that I would have asked.

‘Oh, a kind of black curly one. Persian lamb, I think it’s called. Really rather nice, as furs go.’

‘Sounds rather a good idea. I hope she won’t fill it too full of mothballs. Do you remember how that other one she had used to smell on speech days and things. I used to be terrified to go near her.’

‘I used to think she looked marvellous in it, I don’t know why—I must have been very susceptible to her opinions because I don’t remember noticing that I didn’t like things till I was about thirteen.’

‘But she used to get such horrid things for us. Or they seemed horrid. Do you remember that olive-green pinafore dress we had? I think it got handed on to you—rather the same colour as that dress you’re wearing now—I used to hate it so violently that once when she made me go out to tea in it I took another dress in a paper bag and changed in the loo. Looking back, it must have been one of the nicest things we had. It’s a lovely colour.’

‘I used to hate it too. Wasn’t it a hand-on from Daphne?’

‘That would explain it. Perhaps it was.’

‘I met Daphne a week or two ago in the Tate.’

‘What on earth was she doing there?’

‘She’d come up for a conference.’

‘Her as well. What a socially committed family we are. I believe you’ve even got a job?’

‘Sort of. We can’t all marry millionaires.’

‘We can have a damn good try. Shall I introduce you to one?’

‘Do you know any?’

‘I don’t think I do. But I know quite a lot of people who would do.’

‘No thank you. Really. I’d rather wait for Francis.’

‘Isn’t it very awful, waiting for Francis? Or do you get around?’

‘Oh, I get around. It isn’t quite a question of
un seul être me manque et tout est dépeuplé
.’

‘It never is, is it? The world seems quite heavily populated whatever happens. It cheers me up sometimes, to think of that.’

‘Yes. It cheers me too. I say, Loulou, have you got a fur coat?’

‘For goodness’ sake, I’m not fifty yet, you know. Also we’re not millionaires ourselves, all this décor cost a pretty penny, and then making films and so forth, it seems to spend itself somehow . . . I
have
got rather a miraculous leather coat, though. Would you like to come and have a look at it? I’ve been dying to show it to someone. I haven’t dared to wear it yet, I can’t think where to go in it first—I got it in Paris. Could you bear to come and have a look?’

‘I’d love to, if you don’t mind leaving all your guests . . . ’

‘Oh, they’re all right, he can deal with them. Come on, you can put your things on while we’re there.’

So we left the drawing-room and went off to the bedroom, which was empty, brightly lit, and piled with other people’s clothes. ‘It looks rather nice like this,’ said Louise, ‘sort of encamped and temporary.’

Strangely, I didn’t feel it was her house at all, I felt as though odd circumstances had drawn us together in a hotel bedroom. There was no air of permanence in the room. She flung open one of the wardrobe doors, and I realized that what it really looked like was a film set. It was tidy and new inside the wardrobe as well as out. She searched through the row of beautiful-looking garments and eventually lit on what she was looking for: ‘Look,’ she said, drawing it out with a kind of comic reverence, ‘Look at that, isn’t it heaven, isn’t it worth waiting for, isn’t it the most perfect garment you ever saw in your whole life PI went in to buy a pair of shoes and I came out with this, this in a paper carrier just like a pair of pants from Marks, isn’t it a joke? The shop-ladies said when I tried it on, “
Formidable, Madame
.” I’ve never been so utterly enraptured, so vain in my life, I walked around for the rest of the day in a coma thinking about it . . . ’

‘Put it on for me,’ I said, ‘please put it on.’

She unbuttoned it to try it on for me with a real glittering elation; I wondered if she had been drinking, or whether it really was the coat, or whether she was simply in a mood. When she had got it on she did look superb; it was a lovely thing, in very dark brown, and the leather looked soft and alive like skin. But the most extraordinary thing was her glitter, which was almost feverish; it was years since I had seen her behave so spontaneously and vividly before me, with no trace of distance or wariness. Anyone watching us would have seen a normal sisterly scene of clothes gossip and giggles in the bedroom, with no more than a trace of deliberate I’m-older-and-smarter-than-you provocation on her part. I couldn’t understand why she had chosen me to show it to, unless she thought I would die of envy, and that wasn’t implied in her manner at all. ‘It’s perfect,’ I said. ‘You look absolutely perfect.’ She gave a little shake as I spoke and stopped looking at herself raptly in the mirror; she turned round to me quickly and said, ‘It is, isn’t it?’ Then she gave a curious hop and a skip as though she was about to start dancing, broke off abruptly, stood absolutely still for a minute while her face composed itself into its usual classic composition, and started to undo the buttons down the front. She put it back on the hanger in silence, and I, sensing that the little game was over, turned away to unearth my own coat from the pile on the bed. When I turned back to her she was staring at herself again in the mirror, unsmiling, gravely, as though she were some object foreign to herself. I didn’t interrupt, but put my things on in the prolonged silence; when I was ready to go she said, ‘Well, I’d better go back to all the rest in there. Will you be able to get back all right?’

‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘It isn’t far to the Tube, is it?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘It isn’t far. Second on the right, first on the left.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’d better go. Will you thank Stephen for me?’

‘Yes, I’ll thank Stephen for you.’ She held open the bedroom door and we went out and walked slowly along the hall. At the front door she said, ‘Why don’t you come and see me sometime?’

‘I’d love to,’ I said.

‘I’ll give you a ring some day,’ she said.

‘All right,’ I said.

‘I’ll be seeing you then.’

‘Yes. Thank you for the party.’

‘I’m glad you came.’

‘I’m glad I came too.’

‘It’s frightfully hot in here, isn’t it? I envy you, going out. Perhaps I’ll go and switch the central heating off.’

‘That sounds a good idea,’ I said.

‘Good-bye. Remember me to Francis.’

‘Good-bye.’

She shut the door behind me and I stood out there on the landing and breathed in a deep breath of relief. It had been stifling in the flat, smoky and airless, though I hadn’t noticed it until she had said so. I went slowly down the stairs and through the front door where the coldness met me like another element, like the unexpected touch of cool water. I undid the top button of my coat and let the air in on my neck. Then I took off my shoes and my sore feet drank in the smooth-grained surface of the step. I took a step or two forward, a shoe in either hand, and when I was down to the pavement I began to run through all the grand spaciousness and calm of the street, as though chains had been loosed from my ankles, as though a burden had been lifted from my back.

9

I
PUT MY
shoes on again to go down the Tube, and was just buying my ticket when I heard someone approaching me from behind, somewhat out of breath. I looked round and it was Wilfred Smee: he too had been running.

‘I only just caught you,’ he said. ‘You run frightfully fast.’

‘I do, don’t I?’ I said, faintly embarrassed that he had overlooked my barefoot exhibition.

‘I wanted to talk to you,’ he said. ‘Have you eaten yet this evening? Perhaps we could go and have a meal somewhere?’

‘All right,’ I said. I thought I didn’t like him, but I wasn’t sure, and I was hungry and wanted to hear what he had to say about Louise.

‘We’ll eat round here, shall we?’ he said, and started to direct me out of the Tube station. He walked very quickly: I had to do a kind of jog-trot to keep up with him.

‘I saw you leaving,’ he said, ‘so I decided to come after you. Did you enjoy the party?’

‘In a way,’ I said. ‘It was interesting.’

He laughed. ‘But not amusing?’

‘Oh well, it wasn’t my kind of party, that’s all.’

‘What is your kind of party?’

‘Oh, the David Vesey kind that I met you at last, I suppose.’

‘The drink wasn’t as nice. One thing that one can say for Stephen, he always provides enough of the right kind of thing. Whatever criticisms one might make of the company.’

I was strongly reminded of something Louise had once said, but couldn’t at the time remember it.

‘What criticisms would you make of the company?’ I asked, suspecting that he had probably had a lot more of the drink than I had, to be talking to me so gaily.

‘Oh, they were a lot of bores, didn’t you think? Not really what you might call a brilliantly intelligent gathering.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘They were most of them so much older than me that I couldn’t tell.’

He laughed again. ‘You mean you can only tell when people are dim if they’re your own age?’

‘Oh, not exactly that. Anyway, it isn’t intelligence that matters at parties, is it?’

‘What is it then? It is to me.’

‘I like people to be amusing.’

‘You like a good laugh?’

‘That’s right.’

‘How odd. I’d have thought you were just the type for intense chats about films or books or so forth.’

‘Would you? I suppose I am, but nobody ever gets quite intense enough for me. Sometimes I suspect that I must be so bloody brilliant that everybody else inevitably seems to be at half pressure. Isn’t that a terrible thing to say? But you know what I mean, and that’s why I gave up looking for Dostoyevskys in corners. Now I prefer a good laugh.’

‘Perhaps you’re not as unlike your sister as you look,’ he said, but I couldn’t take him up on that as we had just arrived at our goal, which was a reasonable-looking restaurant called La Calabria. When we were settled in and waiting for the
minestrone
, he said, ‘I suppose you really are the clever one. Stephen’s always going on about how clever you are. He admires that kind of thing.’

‘Oh, Louise is clever too,’ I said. ‘But she did the wrong subject.’