The Birdcage (2 page)

‘So am I,' she answered brightly, speaking clearly. ‘Terribly, terribly sorry.'

The woman's expression grew anxious; she seized some brochures, and pushed them across the counter, muttering unintelligibly, her eyes averted.

Remembering, Lizzie burst into a fit of laughter, nearly choking on her tea; tears streamed from her eyes and she dabbed at them. Could it be that she was crying? Resolutely she took her mug and the booklets and went to sit at the dining-table.

In this big first-floor room, the kitchen had been divided from the living area by the simple means of placing an upright piano in the middle of the floor. Its back, which had a square deal table placed against it, was turned to the sink and cupboards and shelves, hiding the smaller working area very cleverly. On its other side, a long refectory table was set about with assorted battered wooden chairs, one wall was lined with bookshelves, another hung with paintings, and a long sofa, which fitted comfortably into the wide bay window, kept company with three unmatched armchairs and a low carved chest used as a table.

Sitting in the wide-armed carver, pushing an old silk cushion into the small of her back, Lizzie set down her tea, took the brochures from under her arm and opened the biscuit tin. She began to turn the pages. Beyond the window, the plane tree trembled in the light, soft breeze; the June evening was warm and the voices of the children, playing in the square, echoed through the open casement. The room faced west and the pattern of the leaves shifted and changed in the sunlight, flickering over faded linen chair covers. A crimson petal fell soundlessly from one of the roses in a vase on the piano, their scent drifting in the high, airy spaces. Lizzie turned another page.

‘Dunster Castle towers above the little village huddled at its gates . . .'

She stared at the picture, frowning, her mind balancing on the edge of a memory: the sandstone castle, glowing rich and warm at sunset, the mosaic of red and grey slate roofs silvered by gentle rain, a peaceful, sheltered garden; the sea breaking on grey stones and shingle, the ache of weary legs on the long walk home from the beach . . . And Angel, restless, brittle, never still.

Lizzie put the brochure aside. She saw a tiny cameo, a sliver of the past: a meeting, charged with tension and excitement, and Angel staring at a woman of her own age whilst she, Lizzie, gazed at the small boy who held the woman's hand.

The telephone bell shivered the memory to pieces and made her jump.

‘Hello, dear heart.'

Lizzie smiled with relief to hear her agent's voice and sank into a deep-lapped armchair.

‘Hello, Jim. How are things?'

‘Things are good. Very good. That holiday you were talking about. You're not going too far away?'

‘No, no.' Her eyes strayed to the table, the open brochure, the glossy photographs. ‘I thought, maybe, the West Country. On the coast somewhere. Why?'

‘Just as long as you're in Manchester on Monday week.'

They talked for a few moments longer, Lizzie replaced the receiver and returned to the table. She stood for a long while, staring down at the picture.

She slept late the next morning. Half a sleeping tablet had finally released her from an exhausting mental circling, resurrecting memories and sharpening grief, which dogged her into the early hours. Her dreams were curiously vivid.

Pidge and Angel are sitting together at the table, a bottle of wine between them whilst she sits on the floor beneath the long board with her toys. Angel's feet are bare and fidget constantly, rubbing one upon the other or tucking themselves into the long, cotton wrapper that ripples round her legs. Pidge's feet are placed upon the long bar and her shoes, with pointed toes and little heels, are soft dark blue leather.

‘I loved him so much, d'you see?' she is saying. Her voice is full of pain and, more than that, there is a kind of desperate need to be understood, forgiven even. Her narrow feet remain quite still, planted firmly there on the wooden rail, whilst Angel's white, rounded toes, with their brightly painted nails, push at each other restlessly. She murmurs at intervals, in soothing counterpoint to Pidge's recital, comforting her.

‘After all, sweetie, he didn't belong to me either. I mean, did he?' Her chair creaks a little as she leans forward. There is a tiny chink of glass, a liquid gurgle. ‘To be honest, it's
quite
extraordinary. Rather fun,
I
think . . .'

Pidge's feet come down from the rail, her shoes are eased off and she hitches her chair forward an inch or two: Angel's toes cease to rub together, she crosses her legs, drawing the wrapper about her knees, and sits back comfortably. With the voices murmuring above her head, listening to bursts of smothered laughter and the occasional exclamation, the child continues her game; setting the scene that her toys enact on the soft silky rug, with the refectory table like a roof, the broad end-leg as a wall, sheltering and enclosing them.

Lizzie pushed back the quilt and sat on the edge of the bed. The dream, like yesterday's, left her feeling edgy. Had she sat so, beneath the table, whilst Angel and Pidge talked? Had she wakened in the dressing-room one evening, alone and frightened, and run to find her mother? She was not a stranger to dreams but these had been touched by an almost hallucinatory quality. Her behaviour of late might have given rise to a slight anxiety if she could only bring herself to care. She'd posted a nice little cut of steak in the letter-box outside the butcher's shop, gone off with someone else's trolley in the supermarket, forgotten the car and, leaving it behind in the car-park, walked home from the library. Small things of no great moment, taken separately, yet the dreams seemed part of the same pattern.

‘Perhaps I'm having a nervous breakdown.'

Lizzie spoke the words aloud, tilted her head as if waiting for a response, and pattered away to the bathroom for a shower. Talking to herself made her feel less alone and, more importantly, kept anxieties in proportion. It was much more difficult to take herself seriously when she spoke out – rather loudly and very clearly – as if to an audience. She grinned brightly at herself in the glass above the basin as she cleaned her face, slapped on moisturizer and plunged the horseshoe-shaped pins into her hair.

She began to hum: ‘I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair.'

Still with
South Pacific
, then. Well, that was fine, lots of good numbers to carry her through the day. She remembered the little tap routine that had accompanied that particular song and tried it out, her leather-soled slippers clapping softly on the lino, thinking back to her first lessons in the basement room with the painted concrete floor at the dance studio.

Shuffle
hop
step tap ball change. Shuffle
hop
step tap ball change. Shuffle
hop
step, shuffle step, shuffle
step
, shuffle ball
change
.

She could hear, inside her head, the dancing mistress shouting the steps above the clatter of tap shoes, accentuating the beat; her body could remember the rhythm, arms swinging loosely, head up. She couldn't have been more than seven or eight. How she'd loved the music, the movement, the disciplining of the body; the
barre
that had been fixed to the wall in the attic room forty years ago was still there where Lizzie had once performed her daily exercises, her little routine:
pliés, battements, port de bras,
watching herself in the glass on the opposite wall. She still did a regular workout.

‘But not this morning,' she muttered as she dressed quickly, pulling on jeans and a black T-shirt.

An appointment with the hairdresser hurried her down the stairs for coffee and some toast. The brochure was lying where she'd left it but she glanced away from it, humming to herself again, concentrating on what Jim had told her about the possibility of work with a touring company in the autumn. Could she cope with the arduous routine, the travelling, the same performance night after night?

‘Just what you need, heart,' he'd said reassuringly. He was very kind, very professional and insisted that his extravagant speech and flamboyant behaviour were simply by-products of a lifetime working with actors. Lizzie adored him.

‘I feel a bit wobbly,' she'd told him before she'd left London. ‘I need a break. I'm going to Bristol.'

‘Back to the Birdcage?' That's what the tall, narrow house had been dubbed back in the early sixties once the agency had learned that three women lived in it, one of them called Pidgeon.

Standing in the kitchen, drinking black coffee, waiting for the toaster to fling its contents on to the floor, Lizzie thinks of Angel's delight at the joke and how she pleads for them to change the address officially.

‘It's all very well for you,' retorts Pidge, ‘but how would you like your letters to be addressed to “Miss Pidgeon, The Birdcage”? Have a heart.'

Instead, Angel finds a pretty, gilt birdcage – from some prop room? – complete with two brightly painted, little wooden birds perched on a trapeze. Shortly afterwards an even smaller chick, made of soft yellow material, is added.

‘That's you,' says Angel to Lizzie. ‘See? You're a swinging chick. How do you like that?'

The birdcage hangs above the piano in the sitting-room for years. It becomes a symbol, an in-joke.

‘That's us,' Angel tells visitors. ‘Three little birds in a gilded cage. Well, one chick and two old boilers . . .' she adds – and waits for the inevitable denial, the compliments.

The birdcage is such a part of their lives together that it is impossible to imagine either Pidge or Angel getting rid of it. When Angel dies of complications following the onset of pneumonia, Pidge lives on alone until she, too, dies after a series of strokes. She leaves the house with all its contents to Lizzie.

‘I can't sell it,' Lizzie tells Sam. ‘I just can't. Not yet, anyway.'

‘No need,' he answers easily. ‘It will be useful as a little bolt-hole.'

‘That's about right,' she agrees. ‘I always bolted back to it. Between productions, after your disastrous love affairs. I always finished up in the Birdcage with Angel and Pidge.'

‘That's not quite what I had in mind,' he says, putting an arm round her, knowing how hard she is taking Pidge's death. He makes a face, rolling his eyes, guying a saucy leer, hoping to make her smile, holding her closer. ‘More of a love nest, perhaps, than a birdcage?' and she laughs at his feeble joke, winding her arms about him.

Ten years ago since Pidge died, thought Lizzie, swallowing her toast with difficulty. And less than two years ago Sam and I were here together. And now?

She began to clear her breakfast things, the action distracting her from such thoughts, concentrating instead on the missing birdcage. It would be good to see it again; to hang it up as a gesture to the past. She decided that as soon as she was home again she would have a thorough search for it.

All the while, as she collected her keys, hunted for her bag, the photograph seemed to cry continually for her attention. Reluctantly, almost fearfully, she paused to look at it again. ‘The Yarn Market is octagonal and dates from the fifteenth century . . .'

Lizzie bent closer to look at the smaller, inset picture. Another fragment, just like the scene in the shop, slid clearly into her mind.

The Yarn Market. She remembers running in through the doorless entrance, calling to Angel, who stands on the cobbles outside in the sunshine, and leaning through the big window spaces.

‘Look at me? Can you see me?'

‘I can see you, sweetie, I can see you.' But Angel is looking up the High Street, her eyes darting from shop doorways to peer at the occupants of a car; distracted, preoccupied, always on the watch.

Lizzie feels the slubby crispness of her yellow and white gingham frock, bare feet in sandshoes, and her long plait, thick as Angel's wrist, knocking against her back as she jumps along beside her mother down the sunken, narrow, cobbled pavement. They pause beside the hotel, with its big medieval porch, before crossing the road to the Yarn Market. It is cool and dark beneath the slated roof and she dances, singing breathlessly to herself, a small, bright flame of colour amongst the shadows, whilst Angel waits, watching and watching. But for whom?

This question occupied Lizzie as she walked into the town: as she chatted to the friendly girl who blow-dried her hair; as she did her shopping; all the while she was trying to pin the memory down, to capture it. If she could remember which year it had been, then other things might fall into place; but why should Angel, of all people, decide to take a holiday in a tiny town on Exmoor? Angel liked bustle, unexpected outings to restaurants or pubs, friends dropping by for impromptu drinks: she became restive and bored after ten minutes up on Brandon Hill. Nor did she consider it necessary for Lizzie to be taken on holiday except during the summer of that one year. That Dunster year.

Back at home, Lizzie kicked off her shoes, put away the shopping and collected the ingredients for her lunch. Mostly she couldn't be bothered to eat formally – it seemed such an effort for just one person – but today she felt a need to prepare something almost as a rite to the shades of Pidge and Angel rather than for herself. Just now, here in the Birdcage, she felt that they were very close to her: Angel, eyes closed, stretched along the sofa in the window, with Pidge sewing nearby, arguing across the table or perhaps pottering in the kitchen. Pidge was responsible for most of the cooking, although Angel liked to experiment – either disastrously or brilliantly. ‘I am never commonplace,' she'd say grandly, shovelling her mistakes into a newspaper whilst Pidge, resigned, began to make an omelette. ‘I don't do things by halves.' Because of going down to the theatre each evening, mealtimes were movable feasts and Pidge remained flexible at all times.