A Summer Bird-Cage (3 page)

She sounded very approachable, so I went down and we went into the music-room where the light was. She sat down on the settee, very heavily, and said, ‘Look, Sally, I’m drinking in the dawn.’ And she was too: she had halffinished a bottle of whisky: she handed it to me with a kind of bonhomie that was quite unprecedented, and said, ‘Go on, have a drink.’

I obeyed, though the stuff tasted very sour and odd in my half-asleep mouth, and then I looked around. Everywhere was littered with ash, little grey worms of it all over the carpet, and Louise herself looked quite fantastic, her long hair all wild and tangled up with two odd curlers stuck in the top, and her skin glistening white and deathly with cold cream.

‘What the hell do you think you are?’ I said. ‘Lady Macbeth?’

‘How did you guess,’ she said, ‘how did you guess. And how did you know I was here?’

‘I heard you. You woke me up.’

‘Oh Christ, that must have been when I fell over the piano stool. I’m not really making a noise.’

‘Oh no. And look at that ash.’

She looked at it, comically helpless.

‘Yes, it is rather a mess, isn’t it. What on earth can I do with it? And all that whisky. Could I fill it up with water, do you think?’

‘Don’t be silly, you’ll be in Rome before it’s discovered.’

‘Yes, so I will. So I will. I keep forgetting.’ She paused and belched. ‘I say, Sally, I feel ghastly.’

‘I’m sure you do,’ I said, primly. ‘Would you like me to make you some coffee?’

‘Oh, Sarah, be an angel. I’d love some. I could just do with some. Do make me some, I need looking after for once in my life, I’m too weak to switch the gas on. Do be an angel, I’ll love you for ever if you make me some coffee.’

I could have done with that too.

It was soft of me, I suppose, but I was so honoured by her drunken accessibility that I took her into the kitchen and sat her down at the table, made her some Nescafé, and swept up all the ash quietly with a dustpan and brush. Then she started to moan about her hair so I fetched the rest of her curlers and put it all up for her. She looked only faintly ridiculous even with her hair full of iron rolls and her face shining with grease: somehow she managed to look dramatic rather than at a disadvantage. She looked as though she were in a film or an air raid. She was more communicative than I had ever known her, and kept muttering about Rome and loving, honouring and obeying: she said nothing about Stephen except, ‘Stephen knows such gorgeous people in Rome,’ which came up from time to time as a refrain. I envied her, for her honeymoon if not for her husband, and told her so: ‘I wouldn’t mind larking about in first class hotels for a bit,’ I said. She was pleased that I was impressed. After a while the blodginess and irritation of being up in the middle of the night left me, and I fell in with the isolated moment, the dark kitchen, Louise leaning on her elbows with her face in her hands, the smell of ash and cold cream, and the sudden disruption of twenty-one years of family life, during which I had never been up at that hour except when ill. Louise kept going on so about Rome that I too started to think of it: there is something about Italy that fills me with such desire: even the names are so incantatory that they put me under—Florence, Arno, Ferrara, Siena, Venice, Tintoretto, Cimabue, Orvieto, Lachrimae Christi permesso, limonata—just the sound of them reminds me that I am not all dry grit and deserted hollows. As Kingsley Amis might put it, I am a nut case about abroad. I love E. M. Forster for loving it: I love George Eliot for her monstrous dedicated ardour in
Romola:
I love those two lines of Keats which I first found used to illustrate some long-forgotten figure of speech in a grammar textbook—

‘So the two brothers and their murdered man

Rode past fair Florence.’

Fair Florence, with the sculpture and the water-ices. I gave myself up to the idea of it, I wallowed in nostalgia—stupidly, as I had only got back from abroad the day before and was due in fact for a spell of English Victoriana-worship—I envied Louise for going there the minute that trivial business of getting married was over. A honeymoon and Rome, what an
embarras de richesses
. I would have changed places in a flash, if only I could have chosen a different man. I could have made good use of those nice little stapled booklets of tickets.

I must say, in justice, that there was something so almost gay in the way Louise talked about those gorgeous people, and her trousseau, and the hotels, that I was quite prepared to believe that everything was perfectly normal and happy, and even that she might be in love: certainly that life would be beautiful and exciting and highly-coloured for her, which for other people may well be just as good as love. I did not think that the drabness and despair which threatened to ooze over my life in every unoccupied second would ever swamp Louise: she was way off, wealthy, up in the sky and singing. Louise, Louise, I mutely cried as we went up to bed for the last two hours of the night, Louise teach me how to win, teach me to be undefeated, teach me to trample without wincing. Teach me the art of discarding. Teach me success.

Her wedding morning was bright and promising. She got up earlier than usual, looking wax-coloured and stiff. She came down to breakfast, one of those lapsed middle-class events which she normally used to miss. This had been one of my mother’s grievances, and I thought never again will she have that to complain about. We could never see what difference it made if we came down to breakfast or not, as we were quite prepared to fast if we got up late. But mother didn’t see it that way. Our domestic help at that time consisted of one lonely Swedish girl, not a bit clean and brisk as they look on travel posters, but dim, melancholic, and I suspect suicidal: she used to weep into the washing-up. She said she wept for homesickness, but I thought it was something much more cosmic and tried to talk to her about it, but she disliked me for being indirectly her employer and would simply scowl when I approached her. She couldn’t deal with breakfast for all of us, poor girl, and was always half-asleep and yawning as she swayed in with the eggs and coffee. Once Papa called her a slut—not to her face, of course, but he said it—and Mama immediately launched into tirades of abstract liberal fervour while I burst into tears, totally unexpectedly, and I never knew whether it was because I hated to hear my father be so brutal or my mother so rhetorical, or whether (as I hope it was) I cried because I felt so sorry for her, depressed amongst the alien dishes. I kept telling myself that she could leave if she wanted, but it did not comfort me, for where is a gloomy young foreigner to go? I had been
au pair
myself and knew what it could feel like. She wore long black jerseys with loose sleeves rolled back, and had prominent (not protruding, prominent) white eyes, rather like a large bird—a goose or a seagull—staring and blind. She was not ideal company at the breakfast table: she seemed to echo Louise’s own un-made-up pallor. The toast was hard, there was an egg short so I had to go without, and Daphne’s hair had clearly been in overeffective rollers. I felt too dreary to express until I discovered amongst Louise’s plentiful post a card from Martin.

It said, platitudinously enough: ‘Dearest Sarah, I hope you had a good crossing and enjoy the wedding. I miss you here. Please write soon. Much love, Martin.’

Not much in the way of passion, perhaps, but these uninspired words lifted me out of my gloom and restored my faith in life: I felt a great pang for Martin and
vin ordinaire
which managed to put Louise and hard toast in their place again. It detached me, that unimpressive little postcard, and my detachment lasted until I had actually zipped myself into my bridesmaid’s dress half an hour before we were due to leave for church.

I began to get involved again when I went to see if I could help Louise dress. This was one of the tasks which books on weddings expressly allocate to the chief bridesmaid, which I assumed I was, though nobody had ever said anything about it; and I have always been conscientious. Our school motto was
Qui fidelis est in parvo, in multo quoque est fidelis
. I didn’t knock on her bedroom door when I went in, and surprised her standing quite still and looking at herself in the mirror. Her dress was on, but open all the way down the front.

‘Can I help?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You can do my dress up down the front.’

She seemed to like my doing it for her, but I didn’t like the physical closeness. I wasn’t used to her. She was never a one for touching people, for kissing or fighting or sitting on knees. There were a lot of little buttons, all the way from the demure high neck to the waist, and I fumbled over them. They didn’t have proper buttonholes but horrid little fabric loops. I could feel her hard breasts rising and falling under my clumsy hands in her far from new brassiere. I thought how like her, to wear a bra that is actually dirty on her wedding day. She must have been wearing it for the past week.

‘Is this your something old?’ I asked, indicating it.

‘My bra? Yes, I suppose it is. I hadn’t thought.’

She was millions of miles away again, all the intimacy of the night before forgotten, but perhaps that wasn’t surprising. She looked vacant and worried. She started to mess around with her hair and got me to spray lacquer on the back, which I did so liberally that I could see it shining like dewdrops during the ceremony. She has coarse hair, thick and heavy and easy to manage. I thought she was thinking purely narcissistic thoughts, when she quite suddenly said, ‘I say, Sarah, what do you think it would feel like to be a virgin bride?’

‘Terrifying, I should think,’ I said. It was something I had often considered. ‘All that filthy white.’

‘What do you mean?’ she asked, as she started to dab scent behind her ears.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Surely one would feel like a lamb led to the slaughter and all that? With a bow round one’s neck?’

‘Yes, I suppose so. But it must be rather exciting.’

‘Hardly fair on the bridegroom.’

‘Do you think one would be disappointed?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ I said, as rudely as I could. I didn’t want to talk female intimacies. Not with her.

‘I suppose one would,’ she said. ‘Still, it seems a pity.’

‘Why, do you mean you’re missing an extra
frisson
or something?’

She looked at me sharply, through the mirror, and said, ‘Oh no. I have plenty of
frissons
of my own. Plenty.’

I still remember the way she said that. It was oddly spontaneous, oddly revealing. She must have said more than she meant, or said too much what she did mean, because she immediately snapped shut again, and started to put on her veil, humming horribly through her teeth. ‘Be an angel,’ she said, ‘be an angel and go and look at my bouquet. Bring it up to me so I can see what it looks like.’

I went, glad to get out, and pondering to myself the likely nature of those
frissons
. I wonder if anyone ever married a man they didn’t like just in order to see what it felt like? Louise’s bouquet was made of lilies, huge virginal lilies, very formal, with no Constance Spryery about them: they would have done equally well for an altarpiece. They were lying on the hall table: I thought, what a nerve, really, to choose flowers like that. There was something theatrical about them, as well as something ceremonious, and I wondered who the audience was. I picked up the flowers and looked at myself with them in the hall mirror and thought that I wouldn’t make nearly as good a bride as Louise. I stiffened my neck and tried to look dignified, but I couldn’t make it. I lacked grandeur; I looked too pink and fleshy for the white intactness of those flowers. I looked less intact than Louise, ironically enough. I looked horrifyingly pregnable, somehow, at that moment: I looked at myself in fascination, thinking how unfair it was, to be born with so little defence, like a soft snail without a shell. Men are all right, they are defined and enclosed, but we in order to live must be open and raw to all comers. What happens otherwise is worse than what happens normally, the embroidery and the children and the sagging mind. I felt doomed to defeat. I felt all women were doomed. Louise thought she wasn’t but she was. It would get her in the end, some version of it, simply because she was born to defend and depend instead of to attack. I can get very bitter about this subject with very little encouragement: fortunately Michael came along and distracted me.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘You look gorgeous.’

‘Do I really?’ I said, perking up at once. After all, to be really logical I could always have shaved off my eyebrows. And since I didn’t—

‘Do you like my dress?’ I said.

‘It’s lovely. Is it the same as Daphne’s wearing? It can’t be.’

‘Oh yes it is.’

‘You look knockout, SallyO.’

‘Not as knockout as Louise.’

‘Don’t be silly, you’re much prettier than Louise.’

‘Oh
Michael
—’

‘Are those her flowers? Christ, what an armful.’

‘Terrible, isn’t it?’

‘Don’t you get a bouquet?’

‘Oh yes! Yellow roses for me.’ I picked them up.

‘They look fabulous. What will you have when you get married?’

‘I’m not getting married. Catch me at the kitchen sink.’

‘Silly.’ He kissed my hand, gallantly. He’s the only member of our family who ever touches anyone without wincing. I remembered how I had hated buttoning up Louise.

‘You look pretty smart yourself,’ I said. ‘Who’s in the drawing-room?’

‘Oh, everyone. Except your mother. Your father’s reading the paper, Mum is knitting, Daphne’s looking sick and I’m drinking gin.’

‘Before church?’

‘Come and have one yourself.’

‘No thank you. I’m waiting till the reception.’

‘I say, Sally, who drank the whisky?’

‘What whisky?’

‘I’m sure you know what whisky. Don’t you?’

‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘There’s half a bottle gone from the corner cupboard in the music-room. Your father seems to think it must be Kristin, but I thought it was probably you two. Wasn’t it?’