A Summer Bird-Cage (8 page)

ME
: A girl called Gill Slater. She was at Oxford. She was here at the wedding, she knows Louise.

MAMA
: Oh yes, the girl in grey with all the long hair . . . I thought she was married?

ME
: Married? Oh no.

MAMA
: I’m sure I addressed the invitation to a Mr and Mrs Antony Slater.

ME
: Oh
Antony
. That’s her brother. Perhaps Louise put them on the list as Antony and Gill Slater, did she?

MAMA
: Yes, that must have been it. How silly of me. They must have been surprised. And they did reply separately, I remember now—oh well, it’s too late to worry. And what does she do?

ME
: Oh, she’s a—she’s a sort of research student.

MAMA
: Oh yes? Well, it sounds like a very nice idea. After all, you won’t want to stay here all your life cooped up with your poor old mother, will you? I shall lose all my little ones at one fell swoop, shall I?

ME
: Oh don’t be silly.

MAMA
: What do you mean, don’t be silly? It seems to me you’re very eager to be off.

ME
: You know that’s not it at all.

MAMA
: Well, what is it then?

ME
: Well, it’s just that I can’t stay here all my life, can I?

MAMA
: No, of course you can’t, nobody ever suggested anything of the sort. When have I ever tried to keep you at home? Haven’t I just said that you must lead your own life? After all, that’s why we sent you off to Oxford, it was always me who said you two must go—I don’t know what I wouldn’t have given for the opportunities you’ve been given. And your father wasn’t any too keen, believe me. In my day education was kept for the boys, you know.

ME
: Well, you hadn’t any boys to educate, had you? You had to make do with us.

MAMA
: And what thanks do I get? And you can’t say that staying at home for a week just after you’ve got back from abroad is staying at home
all your life
, can you? I’ve hardly had a chance to see you yet, and you’re off. I sometimes wonder what you and Louise bother to come home for . . . Oh, it’s all very well when you want something, like a bed or a reception, but as for staying here for me, it never crosses your minds, does it?

ME
: Honestly, Mama, you know you always used to get furious when Louise came home . . . and I have to start earning my living sometime, don’t I?

MAMA
: I don’t see what all the hurry is about. No sooner do I get rid of one daughter than the other starts leaving home. You just use home as if it were a hotel, you two, you don’t seem to remember I’m your mother and have always been on your side whenever your—and then all you want to do is to get away to your horrible dirty friends and horrible poky little flats.

ME
: Oh, Mum, you know Loulou’s flat isn’t a bit horrible, it’s a very smart little place in South Ken, all pastel painted and hand-woven curtains . . . 

MAMA
: All I am is a servant, that’s all I am, just a household drudge, and when I think how I respected my mother and carried things for her, and the years I’ve sat in for you two, all those nights when your father was away . . . 

ME
: Don’t say that, don’t say that, of course I’ll stay, it doesn’t matter to me at all . . . 

MAMA
[in floods of tears]: Oh, I know there’s nothing to keep you here, I know there’s no reason why you should stay here, there’s nothing to amuse you, you’ve outgrown it all, you always were too clever for me . . . 

ME
[weeping too, feeling myself saying her words, wounded by my own sharp, indifferent self]: Oh don’t, please don’t, Mummy, please don’t, I’ll stay with you as long as you like, you know I will . . . 

MAMA
[sniffing and reasserting her hairpins]: No, don’t be silly. Of course you can’t stay here, what on earth would you do with yourself here? You go off to London, you’ll be better off there, it’s your duty to get yourself a good job . . . 

ME
: No, I don’t want to go any more.

MAMA
: Oh yes, you really ought to go. It would be much better for you to go. So let’s have no more nonsense, shall we?

And so I went to London at the end of the week. Once a point has been made openly my mother never retracts: she has a high sense of honour, at least theoretically, and occasionally I feel obliged to hold her to the letter of what she has said and not the spirit of it. This was one of those cases. I stayed at first in a flat at Earl’s Court with an old school-friend, a strange relic from my subdued past: at school we used to get out of bed at midnight and go down to sit in the moonlit classroom amongst the empty desks, where we would talk about John Donne, Camus and Comus. Now she was training to be a probation officer: the moral streak had come out on top, and although she still regarded it with a certain detached suspicion, I could see that she had settled down to live with it in close communion. I admired her perseverance: I envied her her acquaintance with Teds and shop girls: but I felt little impulse to go and do likewise. And I didn’t feel it was wholly my own love of luxury that was preventing me, either: I felt it was something slightly more positive. My moral streak was more ravenous and more demanding: I couldn’t satisfy it with a sacrifice.

In the end I got a job with the BBC. It seemed better than nothing, and it was work, with all the added charms of coffee-breaks, desks, lifts and catching the Tube home. Though I hadn’t as yet got a home. For some reason I didn’t get in touch with Tony, in his loathsome flat in the King’s Road, but I did ring Gill. She asked me out to visit her in the place in Highgate where she was living, and when I got there I saw at once why she was keen to get out. It was unspeakably sordid, and like Tony’s place it stank of paint: all the people in it were trying to be artists, though they completely lacked talent, and made Tony look like a young Picasso. They were all very young, younger even than Gill and me, and they all wore large men’s jerseys of shattering expense, and smoked all the time. I suppose such a place could have had charm if I had met it at the right moment: it could even have had glamour if I had gone there straight from leaving school: but as I was preoccupied with flats and jobs and being serious it utterly repelled me. I kept remembering my mother’s comments about dirt. It wasn’t just that they kept the bread loose on the windowsill among the ashtrays, without a suggestion of a breadboard, and cooked in unwashed pans, and left stale Martini in the only teapot: I could have thought these habits endearing, if it hadn’t been for the phoneyness of the whole setup. And these were such phoneys that I couldn’t even pride myself on detecting them. I felt as though I were watching them all through the civil pages of one of Stephen’s short stories about Bohemia. I hated the way they all felt it their duty to be rude, frank and blunt. I felt in relation to them as my probation officer friend doubtless felt in relation to me. Squalor has its degrees, like crime.

Gill and I didn’t have too bad a time flat-hunting. We kept drawing little circles on the map, indicating areas that we couldn’t bear to live outside, and in the end found somewhere in our third and largest circle, through an ad in a window, moreover, not through an agency. It was in Highbury, at the top of Highbury Hill, in a large decayed Victorian house. It was on the second floor, and the rooms were vast and gracious, with ceilings covered in moulded fruit and flowers. Gill borrowed a ladder from a neighbourly carpenter and painted all the moulding red and green and gold. It looked quite homely. The best thing was that we had enough room: I couldn’t have shared a bedroom, I don’t think. We settled down together there in a kind of suspended, interim tranquillity: Gill was working, quite pointlessly, at Swan & Edgar’s, and I was busy filing things at the BBC. The days passed, which seemed the most I could expect of them, and the weather gathered its cold strength for the attack of winter.

After a while I began to wonder what had happened to Louise. Nobody had heard anything of her: she hadn’t even sent my parents a postcard to say she’d arrived in Rome. But I knew that she couldn’t have come home, as the news would surely have filtered through to me had she been in London. One October evening as I was walking home from the bus stop I passed a film poster of some epic with a large picture of the Coliseum, and I suddenly and insistently remembered her. I wondered why she was such a mystery, why she didn’t fit together, why she was so unpredictable. I simply could not imaginer what she and Stephen were doing together in Rome, if indeed they were still there: I could never picture one of their conversations together when nobody else was there. They just didn’t exist in relation to each other. And yet I suppose that I knew more facts about Louise than anyone else in the world, except perhaps our mother: but despite this I had a much better sense of what Gill, for example, would do under any given circumstances. I felt my powers of deduction were at fault: I ought to have been able to deduce from observed particulars, whereas I always trust to messy things like intuition, or to sheer voluntary information and confessions. I was just telling myself that it was time I had a little more data about Louise’s case when I arrived at our front door. I put my hand in the letter-box, and there, like a polite reply to my half-formulated thinkings, lay a letter from Simone, with a Rome postmark.

I went upstairs with it in a glow of contentment, feeling it solid and thick in my hand, a large white and expensive envelope covered in Simone’s black, twig-like script. A whole letter, and it felt quite a long one. It was so long since she had written to me: her letters used to arrive during vacations like manna in the wilderness. And I realized by my gratitude how near to a wilderness was the place I was now inhabiting. I made myself wait to open it until I had taken off my coat, hung it on the peg, lit the gas fire and sat down on the hearthrug: then I ran my finger through the thick, stiff paper and took out the neatly folded sheet. Her writing looked like some other language, hieroglyphic, neat and unearthly. Not for her the unaesthetic carelessness of dashes, scribbles, and postscripts.

Roma

Sara cara cara mia,

How enchantingly your name suits this enchanting language, and how repentant I am for my long silence since I saw you in the summer at that station. I would write, but then what would I say? I have death in my heart.

To resume. I was reminded of you by meeting your sister Louise, whom I last saw three years ago in Oxford,
blasé
and breathless after three years of conquest: at first sight she reminded me of that piece which begins ‘They that have power to hurt and will do none.’ I met her this time not on a station but in a church, that other refuge of the aimless. In Santa Maria in Cosmedin. Do you remember it? All those layers of all those centuries, Rome, Byzantium, and the dark ages of the world, and I might harden into less than one grain of one pillar. Also those barley sugar things around the altar are very consoling, so frivolous in all the serious stonework. And there I met your sister Louise, half-heartedly inspecting the half-vanished frescoes, and alone on her honeymoon. She was looking more beautiful than in Oxford: in Oxford she had the air of an heiress up for the weekend, coldly distinct in the midst of all those pre-Raphaelite daisy-nibbling barefoot Beatrices who swept the city in our era. But in Rome she looked herself, posed expensively against an artistic background. She was all in black and white and grey, and there was something stoic and stony in her face that suited the masonry. I thought I would avoid her, but she saw me and spoke to me, so we went and sat outside by the yellow fountain, where she told me she had married Stephen Halifax (and I hate
cara mia
his insufferable books) and that he was lunching with a film director. I would like to have that Vestal Virgin’s House at the bottom of my garden.

As she talked inattentively of this and that I thought of those lines of Joachim du Bellay, which he once wrote of Rome:

‘Si le temps peut finir chose si dure

Peut finir la peine que j’endure.’

My pain I know is without end: I am after all nothing more than a neo-Gothic ruin, built in decay for the bats and the ivy: but hers, hers I cannot help comparing with your more curable afflictions, and I wonder if those enchanting eyes will ever gaze at anything other than the imagined glass?

You will forgive me, Sara de mon coeur, for writing to you of your sister: it is an oblique overture to you, one of the more happy incidents in that succession of journeys and train tickets which is my life.

Mon âme s’envole vers toi.

Simone

I finished her letter and then looked down at it with a glow of pleasure: Simone’s letters are always a delight, they always reassure and assert something in me which is usually crying out for satisfaction. I am so relieved and excited that she continues to remember me: I see her as so much greater and grander than myself, that her recognition is like a bow from a queen. And she clearly remembered that meeting on the Gare du Nord as tenderly as I did: she would say to our acquaintances all over Europe, ‘I met Sarah, you know, at five in the morning . . . ’ My life was thereby extended into bars and trains and drawing-rooms that I would never enter. I was distinguished by her attention from people like Daphne, who was never an incident for anyone. I was
cara Sara
, and I am a fool about endearments. I wonder, is there something servile in my admiration for Simone? Because I do admire as well as love her, though I have always believed love preferable to an exclusive of admiration. I consider her a superior being. She is superior, and in contact with her I share her superiority: I lose the cruel and evasive sentimentality that Daphne and my mother arouse in me, and I become created harder and brighter in her eyes.