A Summer Bird-Cage (19 page)

‘I can’t.’

‘Louise and Stephen.’

‘Go on, you didn’t.’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘On purpose?’

‘Good Lord no! I was just wandering across by the Louvre, on my way to see Martin actually, when I saw them sitting outside a cafe. They asked me to go and have coffee with them.’

‘Did you?’

‘Well, I kind of had to.’

‘What were they doing?’

‘Just sitting.’

‘Sitting and doing what?’

‘I don’t know. Talking, I suppose.’

‘Was it a posh cafe?’

‘I think it was probably a hotel.’

‘What did you talk about?’

‘I can’t really remember. I think I asked them how long their honeymoon was going on, and Louise said it wasn’t a honeymoon, it was business. So I said what business, and she said something about a film or something. Some French director wants to make a film of one of his books.’

‘Oh, a
French
director. That would explain it.’

‘Explain what?’

‘How anyone could ever be so idiotic as to want to film a book by Stephen. Have you ever read any of his things, Michael?’

‘I can’t say I have, no. What are they like?’

‘Oh, ghastly. Good but ghastly.’ I had been increasingly realizing that Stephen’s books really were good, of their arid kind. And there is a place for aridity. So let it be said here, finally, that his books are good.

‘I don’t think they’re my kind of thing,’ said Michael. ‘I had a look at one once, it was all about civil servants and politicians and love affairs.’

‘Aren’t you interested in that kind of thing?’

‘Lord no. Are you?’

‘I suppose I am.’

‘You always were a funny one.’

‘Tell me, did you think Louise looked happy?’

‘Funny you asked me that. I thought she looked pretty bored. She looked very smart, you know how she does, but she looked really fed up. I asked her if she liked Paris, and she said not very much, she thought it was too full of intellectuals and beatniks. I said I’d have thought she’d have liked that kind of thing, and she was furious with me.’

‘How do you mean, furious?’

‘Well, she said, “Oh shut up, Michael, don’t be so silly.” I remember quite clearly her saying that. She never had much sense of humour, your sister. Always taking offence.’

‘Did she really say “Shut up”?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Was Stephen listening?’

‘Sort of. He never pays me the slightest attention, that man. He gives me the creeps. I suppose he thinks I’m not worth sucking up to.’

‘Did Louise say anything else interesting?’

‘Well, she asked after you.’

‘Did she?’

‘Yes, she asked what were you doing now. I told her you were working for the BBC, and she said she wondered how long that would last. She really is stupid whenever your name comes up, you know. Then I told her I’d been seeing this friend of yours, Martin, and about a place he’d taken me to the night before with singers and all that, you know—well, I had to say something—and she said it all sounded very undergraduate. So I asked her where they spent their time, and she was furious again, she said they weren’t on holiday and they didn’t go out to amuse themselves. I can’t stick your sister, I’m afraid.’

‘She can be terrible. She sounds as though she was very gloomy.’

‘That’s what I thought. I thought he probably didn’t take her out enough. I bet she’d have been glad to come out with Martin and me. He’s a real pain in the neck, that man.’

‘Did he say anything at all?’

‘Not to me. Apart from the fact that it was jolly fine weather, wasn’t it?’

‘Was it?’

‘Not bad.’

‘Did you gather what they’d just been doing or were just about to do?’

‘No. They didn’t seem to be doing anything.’

‘Poor Louise. Not my idea of a honeymoon.’

‘Well, she asked for it. If she will go mixing with characters like that, what does she expect? She gets worse and worse, she really does. She’s the most affected person I’ve ever met.’

‘Affected?’

‘Well, isn’t she? Always carrying on as though she’s so sophisticated and knows so much more than anyone else. And as though she’s so important. She acts as though her bloody husband were Charles Dickens.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘She’s always trying to give the impression of how important he is. He’s not all that important, is he? I’d never heard of him before she got engaged.’

‘I suppose he is quite important, really. He’s very well-known, you know, though not among illiterate medical students. Most people who read have heard of him.’

‘Daphne thinks his books are shocking.’

‘Did she tell you so?’

‘Well, unpleasant was the word she used, but I know what she meant.’

‘Poor Daphne. Do you think she’ll ever get married?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I’d rather be like my sister than yours.’

‘You are more like.’

‘Do you think I’m affected, Michael?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘What do you think will happen to Louise?’

‘I don’t know. It’s her funeral, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Yes, it is.’

‘She could always get divorced and marry somebody else, couldn’t she?’

‘You make it sound very easy.’

‘Oh, I don’t know anything about all that kind of thing.’

‘I think she spends her time giving boring dinner parties for Stephen’s boring literary friends. Literary people are death, I should think. They’re always much nastier about each other than any other people I know are about their colleagues. I suppose she could go on giving dinner parties all her life.’

‘Perhaps she’ll have a baby.’

‘Do you mind.’ The idea outraged me. ‘Honestly, can you picture her pregnant?’

He laughed. ‘It happens to the most surprising people,’ he said. ‘You should see some of the cases I’ve seen.’

‘Michael, did you hear all about it when Louise got engaged? Was there a terrible to-do? Why did they get married so soon after it was all fixed up? When I went away in July nobody had breathed a word, and the first I heard of it was a letter from Mama telling me about it and asking me to go home to be a bridesmaid. Loulou didn’t write to me at all about it.’

‘I didn’t hear much about it either. I was rowing at Henley. But Daphne told me there was a great row, because your father couldn’t stand Stephen. Your mother liked him, apparently, because he kept sending her flowers, but your father couldn’t stand him.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘I don’t know why they had such a short engagement.’

‘Perhaps she was afraid of changing her mind.’

‘Perhaps she wishes she had.’

‘Yes, perhaps she does.’

And there we left it.

The very next day I myself had a desultory and accidental encounter with them. It was a bitterly cold day: I had just been to Bush House and was waiting at a bus stop in the Aldwych to catch a bus home. It was just after half past six, and there didn’t seem to be any buses at all. My feet were getting colder and colder, and I kept wondering if I ought to go up to Holborn and catch a Tube, but hadn’t the willpower to move. I had bought a copy of the
Evening Standard
, but my hands were so cold that I didn’t want to take them out of my pockets to turn over the pages. I was just standing and being miserable when I heard somebody shouting at me, and when I looked around I saw that it was Louise shouting from a car window. She was in the far stream of traffic, and things were piled up and hooting behind.

‘Hi, Sarah,’ she shouted. ‘Hi.’

‘Hallo,’ I yelled back.

‘Come over here,’ she shouted, imperiously. Everyone was staring at her, the whole bus queue and the other pedestrians and the other motorists. It took me a minute or two to get across, as the traffic on my side of the road was still moving: when I got there she leant right out of the car window and said, ‘Where are you going? Come and have a drink with us.’

‘I was going home,’ I said. ‘Where are you going?’

‘We’re going to the theatre,’ she said, ‘with these two friends here in the back.’

I peered into the back, as I could hardly help but do, and saw a somewhat oldish-looking man and his wife. They did not look an amusing couple.

‘Come on,’ said Louise. ‘Get in the back quick. The traffic’s all waiting behind.’

I got in as I was told. It was delightfully warm in the car. Stephen introduced me to the other people: they were American, and the woman was wearing a fur coat. I gathered later that they were potential backers for the potential film, which would explain Louise’s odd mixture of charm and rudeness. Half the time she tried to be her very nicest, flashing dazzling smiles at them, but occasionally a streak of offhand contempt would show itself, as it had in her curious phrase ‘these two friends here in the back’. Stephen, on the other hand, was purely and simply out to please. As soon as I grasped the situation, I immediately decided that Louise had picked me up in order to aggravate already existing tensions, but long afterwards she told me that although this had been her intention, it hadn’t in fact worked out like that, as Stephen was rather keen on me as an image of the young bright set, and considered me a picturesque illustration of London culture. Even pink with cold and wearing an old wool hat. We went to one of those theatrical pubs behind Drury Lane. They were going to see
The Cherry Orchard
at the Aldwych: I said how lovely, and Louise in one of her most deliberately off-moments said, ‘I’ve seen it twice already.’

She seemed to know quite a lot of people in the pub, many more than Stephen did: they kept greeting her with, ‘Hallo, darling’ from time to time. This didn’t go down at all well with Stephen, until he noticed how well it went down with his two back-seat backers, and from then on he decided to treat the matter as an endearing joke.

‘Who on earth was
that
, my sweet?’ he asked, as a peculiarly queer young man patted her shoulder and said, ‘Bye-bye, darling’ on his exit.

‘Oh, an actor,’ said Louise. ‘He’s at the Duchess, I think.’

Stephen glanced at his couple and offered them another drink. They said No. Then he offered me one, and I thought I had better leave. I had been interested in the type of the two people, but having got as much of it as I was capable of—American, sub-intelligent, rich, would-be internationally cultured, ugly—I had become bored. I felt sorry for Louise, who had to spend the evening in their company, and was glad that I had myself no boring social obligations. The thought of having to win money or approval from others, when both themselves and me would be quite aware of what I was attempting to do, made me feel full of disgust. I have not the slightest yearning for any kind of power. I knew Louise must be as bored as I would have been. And I felt sorry for her. It seemed to be becoming almost a habit with me.

As I took my leave and thanked them for the drink, I wondered at the social meaninglessness of all our meetings. I never saw Louise except by accident or at parties. And all we ever did when we saw each other was drink the odd drink, exchange a platitude or two, and wait till the next time. And that seemed to be all there was to it. Perhaps she was neither more nor less than all the other people I was on drinking terms only with. We never met each other with any purpose or any bond. Except the wedding, of course: that had been full of some kind of purpose. But since then—and, indeed, before then—all I had ever seen or heard of her had been on the most flippant, let’s have a gin and tonic level. Let’s go for a drive in the car, let’s have a party, let’s look at my leather coat, let’s go and have a drink before the show. What was so wrong with it all? What was wrong was that she, no more than me, was flippant. It would have to break down some day.

After this episode, a week or so of dreary doldrums elapsed. All the ‘I love yous’ with which I filled my letters to Francis,
faute de mieux
, seemed more of a gesture of faith than usual. Nothing continued to happen, except for one stirring postcard from Simone, who was apparently still in Rome: on the front there was a picture of the jewelled Bambino from Santa Maria in Ara Coeli, and on the back she had written in her spiky distinguished script, ‘How do you like this baby in its jewelled sleeping-bag?’ and a quotation from Byron, about O Rome, the Niobe of nations, the orphans of the heart shall turn to thee. The orphans of the heart, what a phrase: sometimes I wish I had the constancy entirely to pursue the image of my desolation. But I lack constancy to any image: I am constant only to effort.

Then, one evening, about three weeks after my chat with Wilfred, I was flicking through a copy of that notorious gossip-paper in which I had literally bought my fish and chips, when I discovered a grease-stained picture of Louise and John. I leapt to attention and read the accompanying bit of oblique slander: they had been to a charity matinée together, and the caption said, ‘Mrs Stephen Halifax, wife of the novelist, with her friend John Connell. “My husband is so busy writing a film script,” she said, “that he hadn’t time to come.” Mrs Halifax was married last September.’

I must confess that a shiver went through me at the sight of my sister in such a prominent and pilloried position: I wondered what our parents would think of it, and all the old acquaintance of our innocence. I couldn’t at all work out whether I was shocked or concerned or disinterested or what: it was one of those cases where one’s superficial lack of response seems almost to indicate deeper layers of impression. I didn’t feel horrified, as I had no doubt that Daphne, if told what I now assumed to be the facts of the case, would be: but I felt dimly unquiet, as though some profound but obscure personal wound had been inflicted. I was sitting thinking about this and eating the last few damp chips when the telephone rang. I had a premonition that it was going to be somebody tiresome, but when I did answer, it was Louise.

‘Is that you, Sal?’ her voice came, thin and clear, and I knew that she wanted something. She always does when she calls me Sal.

‘Yes, it’s me. How are you?’

‘Oh fine, fine. How are you?’

‘Surviving . . . ’

‘Has Mama been to see you?’

‘Mama? No, why, should she have been?’