The Birdcage (10 page)

Marina has begun to suspect that Felix is entailed with the rather disreputable wife of one of his colleagues and gradually the icy silences, the tension, reappear. As autumn draws on and half-term approaches, Piers begins to suffer from his mother's uncertain temper.

‘We saw a cormorant on the beach,' he tells her, noting the event laboriously in his nature book. He sits at his grandfather's desk, a cushion on the chair to lift him high enough, his legs twisting together in his efforts. ‘He'd eaten so much fish he could hardly fly and we were able to get a really good look at him.'

‘It would be much more useful,' answers his mother sharply, ‘if instead of wandering about watching birds all day you were practising your tables. You know how weak you are at your sums.'

He stares at her, stricken, his happy mood shattered, his pleasure in the cormorant with his grey eye and snake-like neck completely spoiled.

‘I
do
practise them sometimes,' he protests. ‘When I'm out with Grandfather I say them as we go along. Daddy says he was bad at sums too, when he was my age.'

‘Then he should encourage you to practise more,' says Marina angrily. She resents the way Piers shows such affection to his father when he, Felix, is so indifferent to her own happiness: it is hurtful and shows insensitivity on Piers' part. ‘The trouble is that Daddy doesn't care. If he really cared about you he'd make you work instead of reading you silly stories. You'll find as you grow older, Piers, that the people who are easy-going are not the ones who have your true welfare at heart.'

She goes away, taking the Hoover and her dusters, and Piers is left sitting at the desk, his heart cold with terror.
The trouble is that Daddy doesn't care. If he really cared about you . . .

His innocence is tarnished; his confidence shaken. Nothing will ever be quite the same again.

After a great deal of anxious thought he decides to take his own soundings: Grandfather first. He waits until his parents have gone off to a dinner party and then climbs out of bed, pulls on his plaid dressing-gown and slips downstairs. In the hall he hesitates: here, as usual, he is aware of a presence, an invisible comfort that soothes his troubled heart. Sometimes he lies on the flagged floor, watching the light that streams through the tall, high windows, or he might climb into one of the pair of heavily carved chairs that stand against the staircases, one at each end of the hall. Occasionally he takes a toy into the hall, running a small car or a fire engine over the slates, muttering to himself, but before too long the stillness here in the heart of the house takes hold of him so that he finds that he is lying quite still, listening to the silence.

This evening he waits only for a moment – the prospect of this first test interferes with his ability to hear that all-embracing sound of silence – and presently he crosses the hall and moves quietly down the passage towards the study. Outside the door he stops, his ear pressed against the panel. Several voices are speaking in loud, urgent tones and suddenly there is a burst of music; Grandfather is listening to the wireless. Piers recognizes that music, which sounds like a great train pulling out of the station, gathering speed, thundering rhythmically along the track with sparks flying and smoke pouring from its chimney: it's the theme tune from the weekly serial
Paul Temple.

Piers turns the handle and goes into the warm, firelit study. Monty's tail beats a welcome from the rug and David Frayn, seated at his desk, screws round in his chair to peer at the small figure standing just inside the door.

‘Hello there,' he says. ‘What's up? Where's the fire? Had a bad dream?'

He gets up, switching off the wireless, and Piers closes the door behind him and goes to sit on the fender beside his grandfather's armchair.

‘I haven't been to sleep yet,' he admits. He stretches out his slippered foot so that Monty can lick his bare ankle: he finds the warm, wet caress oddly comforting. ‘I've been thinking, Grandfather.' He's thought very carefully about what he should say, basing it on what his mother has said to him, and now he tries it out. ‘If I don't get better at my tables I might not pass my entrance exam in the spring and I've been wondering if I should give up the nature book, Grandfather? It takes up quite a lot of time, these days, when I could be practising my tables.'

David Frayn looks down upon the boy's dark head, watching him stroking Monty with the fringed edge of his dressing-gown's corded belt. He doesn't question the fact that the boy has to go away to preparatory school but he guesses that Marina has been putting pressure on him to work harder and he knows that his daughter, like her mother before her, always uses a hammer to crack a walnut. He feels his way towards a compromise between discipline and kindness.

‘I think you've come on very well,' he says, so as to make an encouraging start. ‘You rattle them off like a good ‘un when we're out on our sorties.'

‘It's not just saying them that I mind,' says Piers earnestly, turning to look up at him. ‘It's dotting about. Like nine sixes or seven eights. I get muddled then, you see. Mummy nearly always catches me out.'

Hunched on the fender, dressing-gown trailing over his drawn-up knees, he wears an anxious expression that makes him look almost careworn and David thinks of Piers' uncle Peter, killed at Arnhem before he was able to have a child of his own. How often he looks back, regretting hasty words, wrong decisions: now, with Piers, he attempts to put his experience to good use.

‘Tell you what,' he says thoughtfully. ‘How would it be if I took over the nature book for a bit? You could advise, of course, on what we decide to put in; read it over, keep me up to scratch and so on. But it would save you some time, wouldn't it, without breaking the flow?'

Piers' face is alight with joy and his grandfather smiles back at him, touched that the nature book is so important to his grandson, unaware that he has passed a crucial test. The book
is
important but not so important as discovering that his grandfather, by putting work before pleasure, has shown that he really cares about him. The sensation of relief cannot be suppressed, it must be allowed a physical expression, and Piers crawls along his grandfather's outstretched legs and cuddles into his arms just as he does with his own father.

Holding the child, watching the firelight leap on the dark-panelled walls, David reflects sadly on how rarely he held Peter in his arms once he'd grown out of babyhood. It simply wasn't done – even if Eleanor had allowed it – and he'd been afraid of showing his emotional side to the boy. This might have been more acceptable with his daughter but Marina had never encouraged physical displays of affection. Peter had been a true male Frayn, cheerful, good-humoured, warm – and he'd been loved by everyone who knew him – but it had taken Felix, who had come amongst them and broken the taboos of the past, to show that the comfort of a cuddle, the warmth of a hug, releases tension and dissipates anger or fear.

‘How about a bite of supper?' suggests David, feeling that the boy deserves a little reward.

‘What is it?' asks Piers, sitting upright, distracted by the thought of food. ‘Has Mummy left you something nice?'

‘Baked potato.' David edges himself off the chair. ‘Bit of chicken. Might be some of that trifle left.'

Piers is filled with pleasurable anticipation as the three of them leave the study and cross the hall to the kitchen.

‘I like lots of butter on the potato,' he mentions hopefully. ‘But I don't like the outside skin. He chuckles aloud, thinking of another of Grandfather's odd sayings: ‘Only potatoes wear jackets; gentlemen wear coats', and his grandfather winks at him.

‘That's Monty's treat,' he says. ‘Plenty for all. Foraging party to the fore. Quick march.'

CHAPTER TEN

Watching Felix across the polished surface of the dining-table, Marina is aware that she is changed: different from the girl who fell in love nearly ten years before. She does not analyse this difference, she merely acknowledges it; almost relieved that the uncontrollable flutterings and wild desperations are rarely felt nowadays. In truth those tenderer, gentler powers have hardened into a sense of possession, a need to control, and the passion between them, once given an edge by her need to assuage her guilt, has become dulled. Without this edge physical love is an unnecessary embarrassment, building to a loss of that necessary control so that, afterwards, she feels humiliated.

She looks with faint resentment at Felix who is talking to Helen Cartwright, smiling at some story she is telling him. Marina notices the intimate way Helen sits half turned, so that she leans a little against him, whilst Felix, head bent on one side, turns and turns his glass, his other hand jammed into the pocket of his black jacket. He looks relaxed, comfortable with himself, and yet not totally absorbed. Marina dislikes Helen Cartwright, still fearing that she has the power to make Felix behave foolishly, wishing that she could annihilate whatever it is within him that attracts women. Her physical need for him might be growing less but she still has all the rights of ownership. Anyway, there is something degrading in this silly flirtation between people of their ages.

Marina glances at the other women around the table. Her sixth sense insists that Felix is playing a double game yet she still can't quite decide with whom he might be involved. Her suspicion alights first on one acquaintance and, when no proof is forthcoming, on another; yet, despite his apparent innocence, some instinct warns her that he is betraying her. She looks at him again and, at that same moment, he raises his eyes and stares at her. His eyes narrow into a smile, tentative, almost questioning, and she realizes with a tiny shock that she almost dislikes him; that she wants to punish him for being attractive, generous, warm-hearted. She turns her head away without responding, addressing some random remark to her neighbour, James Cartwright, who hastens to make himself agreeable.

Felix, wondering if sharp-eyed Helen has seen the exchange, straightens in his seat and counts the days that must pass before he can be in the Birdcage again. Those few days each month are so precious that he wonders how he ever managed without them. It is another world, there in the narrow house in Bristol; a world in which he can be himself. He arrives as early as he can on Sunday evening, feeling the tension drop away from him as he enters that big room where the three of them are waiting for him: Angel stretched out along the sofa; Pidge pottering in the kitchen area behind the piano; Lizzie kneeling at the table, colouring a picture.

‘Hello, my birds,' he says. ‘How's life in the cage?' and it is as if this is how they always are and always will be: waiting for him. In summer the warm breeze trembles through the branches of the plane tree beyond the window; in winter the curtains are drawn and the lamps lit. On the following Monday he very occasionally manages to get away so as to take Angel out to lunch but, even if he can't, those few hours in the afternoon are kept sacrosanct. ‘Soothing time,' Angel calls it – and he needs soothing just as much as she does. Oh, the comfort of Angel! – releasing the pent-up tensions and humiliations, restoring him to confidence. He hurries away before Lizzie comes in from school, back to the office, but much later he returns to the Birdcage so as to spend the evening with Pidge and Lizzie before going down to King Street to meet Angel from the theatre so that they can have supper together.

As he looks at Marina across the table, he is continually amazed that she hasn't suspected that there is someone in Bristol; especially after Angel's appearance at Molly's cocktail party.

‘I'm sorry, sweetie,' she said at once, when she saw him again. ‘It was just such a long time not to see you that I simply couldn't bear it. I know it was crazy. Pidge is furious with me.'

It
had
been a shock to see her there, with Marina standing so watchfully beside him, but even in his horror he'd been aware of undercurrents of shame. Angel had every right to be at the party and he'd felt hypocritical as he'd stood with his wife whilst his mistress pretended that they hardly knew each other.

‘I hoped that Marina wouldn't want to come to the party,' he began to explain but Angel simply shook her head.

‘Forget it, sweetie. All over now.'

Watching Marina across the table Felix realizes that Angel never demands excuses, she simply requires his love. He takes a deep breath of gratitude and smiles at Helen Cartwright.

‘A penny for your thoughts?' she asks archly – but he shakes his head.

‘They're far too expensive,' he answers lightly, ‘even for you.'

‘She never gives up, does she?' asks Marina on the way home in the car.

A light mizzle of rain mists the windscreen and the narrow road, winding ahead between coppery beech hedges, gleams black and shiny in the headlights' beam. Felix tenses himself.

‘She?' He answers her question with a question, although he knows the answer.

‘Helen Cartwright.' Marina's voice is contemptuous. ‘Still flirting and wriggling about as if she were sixteen instead of nearly forty. It's so undignified.'

Felix knows that if he is to have a comfortable journey back to Michaelgarth and a peaceful night then he must agree with her: he must condemn Helen. But Felix dislikes belittling his friends; he refuses to heap contumely upon people simply because they are fun-loving, friendly or kind. He doesn't care to compromise his own standards for the doubtful benefits of a quiet life.

‘Old Helen's all right,' he says lightly. ‘No harm in her really, you know. I didn't get chance of a word with James. How is he?'

‘I hardly spoke to him,' she answers coolly. ‘He was too busy talking to Mary Yates. His manners are nearly as bad as Helen's.'