The Birdcage (7 page)

Angel purses her lips, pretending to consider, gives Pidge a sideways glance. ‘Well, perhaps not
that
married.'

‘Another Mike?'

They both glance instinctively towards the table where Lizzie, humming to herself, is filling in a picture in her colouring book. She works busily, unaware of their conversation, and Angel kicks off her flat leather slippers and tucks her feet up on the seat.

‘He's a bit like Mike to look at – dark hair and that very direct look – but he's not as tough and forceful as Mike. He's nice, Pidge.'

There's a wistful note in her voice and Pidge watches her sympathetically, tapping ash from her cigarette, remembering Mike: General Sir Hilary Carmichael whom the troops nicknamed ‘Mike' just as he nicknamed her ‘Pidge'.

‘Then I'll certainly be here.' She grins. ‘Let's hope we don't repeat our performance.'

‘At least this time I shall get in first.' Angel wriggles along the sofa so that she is leaning a little closer to Pidge. ‘His name's Felix Hamilton . . .'

Kneeling on the chair, working carefully with her crayons, Lizzie is aware of their voices murmuring together but she is too busy telling herself a story that goes with the picture to take any of it in. The woman holding the baby is Angel and she is the baby: ‘There, there, sweetie,' she mutters, ‘don't cry. Look, here's Daddy coming home; he's bringing a rabbit skin to wrap poor Baby Bunting in.' She sings the nursery rhyme just under her breath whilst she colours the tall sunflowers that frame the cottage door a satisfyingly brilliant orange. She sits back on her heels to study her efforts, flexing her fingers, which ache a little from clutching the crayon, listening to the voices. There is a quality in the conversation between Angel and Pidge that hints at something private – some secret knowledge that they share – which is how it has been from the beginning: from that first moment when she and Angel arrived on the doorstep. Lizzie remembers Angel's excitement when she returned from that first meeting with Pidge after an evening performance; excitement and something else.

As soon as Pidge opened the door and welcomed them in, Lizzie was aware of an undercurrent running beneath the polite introductions. The house had been carefully arranged and divided to accommodate lodgers: the ground floor kept as Pidge's private quarters, the first floor and the attic room for the tenant. This little room beneath the eaves was to be Lizzie's and, as they climbed the short steep flight of stairs, her heart thumped with hope. Angel and Pidge stood aside and allowed her to enter.

As Lizzie looked about her in the high attic room, her first impression was that she was standing inside a tent. Rafters criss-crossed high above her head and the ceiling sloped sharply, nearly to the floor. There was a bed with a patchwork quilt, a white painted chest for her clothes and a wickerwork chair with a cushion that matched the quilt. She ran to the dormer window, kneeling so as to look down into the leafy square.

‘Will she be able to cope with the stairs?' Pidge asked anxiously, still standing at the door. ‘They're a bit steep.'

‘Oh,
yes
,' Lizzie cried at once, lest Angel should take fright and deny her this magic place. ‘I can be very careful. Please, Angel. Anyway, it's too small for
you
.'

Angel chuckled; that warm, easy laugh that makes her so many friends.

‘It's simply perfect,' she answered – and Lizzie, washed through with relief and joy, perched on the edge of the bed, looking about her with delight, longing to bring her small suitcase containing all the treasures that would make the room truly hers. Later she went very carefully down the short steep flight of stairs to find Angel, who was being shown her own bedroom across the landing from the big room which was divided into a sitting-room and kitchen. A lavatory with a separate bathroom complete the first-floor accommodation.

‘It's just right for us, isn't it, Angel?' Lizzie, always alert to mood and atmosphere, was anxious to make up for her mother's unusual silence, sensing Pidge's nervousness, puzzled by those undercurrents she could not understand.

‘It's simply perfect,' Angel repeated slowly. ‘But the rent seems very . . . modest for all this space . . .'

It was almost as if she were testing Pidge – or even teasing her slightly – and Lizzie instinctively tensed as if for some kind of physical action.

‘It's more important that I have the right people in my home, you see.' Pidge broke in quickly. ‘It's not just the money . . .'

Her distress communicated itself to Angel who, apparently regretting her former feigned reluctance, slipped an arm about Pidge's slim shoulders in a spontaneous gesture of comfort. ‘My dear, don't think I'm complaining! I couldn't be more thrilled. I'm just knocked sideways at our luck.'

‘That's good, then. So it's “yes”?'

Angel looked from Pidge's anxious face into Lizzie's pleading one. ‘Oh, I think so,' she said, chuckling again. ‘I'd say it's definitely “yes”.'

Whilst Angel and Pidge disappeared into the sitting-room to deal with the business side of the arrangement, Lizzie climbed back up to her eyrie, looking about her with joyful amazement, wondering how soon they could move in so that she might arrange her few belongings to her own satisfaction. After a few weeks it seemed as if they had lived here with Pidge for ever.

Now, slipping from the chair, carrying the book, she goes across to the two women, who stop talking to look at her.

‘See what I've done,' she says, and Angel takes the book, holding it at an angle so that Pidge can see it too.

‘That's pretty good, Lizzie,' says Pidge, blinking a little at the brightness of the sunflowers. ‘Very imaginative use of colour.'

Lizzie too peers at the picture. ‘That's Mummy and me,' she explains, ‘when I was a baby. And that's my daddy coming in at the gate. See? I wish Daddy could come home.'

She imagines him at the front door with Angel standing at the top of the stairs looking down at him holding her, Lizzie's, hand. She knows exactly how it would be: he would drop his case on the floor and hold out his arms to them and they would run down the stairs together. His coat would be rough to touch but he would swing her up in his arms and say: ‘I can't believe that this is little Lizzie. How she's grown . . .'

‘Oh, sweetie.' Angel puts an arm about her. ‘I wish it too. But so many people were killed in the war.'

Lizzie knows this, her very best friend at her new school is also fatherless, and she leans against Angel's leg, pulling her heavy red-gold plait over her shoulder to rub it against her cheek for comfort.

‘He was very brave,' says Pidge, attempting to console. ‘He was a King's Messenger.'

In the odd little silence that follows Angel glances warningly at Pidge but Lizzie is never surprised by those unexpected remarks that indicate that Pidge knew her father almost as intimately as Angel did. Instead, she frowns, remembering
Through the Looking-Glass
and the picture of the King's Messenger in the chapter headed ‘The Lion and the Unicorn'. In her mind's eye she sees an odd-looking rabbit with huge ears, one foot pointed, delving in a bag for a letter for the White King. The creased photograph of her father that Angel has shown her is rather blurred but it is at least that of a man in uniform. Nevertheless, she is confused.

(‘Wouldn't it be heaven,' Angel says in the early days to Pidge, ‘if we could have a proper photograph of Mike framed for her? We could stand it on the piano.'

‘Completely crazy,' answers Pidge forcefully. ‘We might as well put up a photo of Winston or Monty or Mountbatten. Everyone would recognize him at once. That photo of your brother will simply have to do. Thank God he was called Michael. We both promised . . .')

‘Tell me about him,' demands Lizzie, hitching herself into Angel's lap. ‘Tell me again.'

Angel settles them both comfortably. ‘His name was Michael Blake,' she begins.

She is describing her brother, who was killed in Korea, and Pidge knows that she is feeling, as she always does, guilty at this deception: ashamed that Lizzie can never know who her real father is, distressed at using the brother whom she loved as a kind of replacement.

‘Michael wouldn't have cared,' Angel often says defensively, after these uncomfortable times. ‘He was always kicking up a lark, he'd have understood, but it just feels . . . well, you know . . .'

And Pidge can imagine how difficult it is and tries to do what she can. As she listens to Angel she thinks of Mike, whose driver she was in the last year of the war and the first months of peace.

‘I'll want the car at three o'clock' – a tiny pause – ‘but it'll be a late one, Pidge,' he'd say; this is their signal.

She'll never know how the rumours started but once Mike hears of them he is ruthless.

‘Nothing I can do, darling Pidge,' he tells her on that last meeting. ‘I've told you how it is with my wife. She's quite helpless physically and I could never leave her. We agreed, didn't we?'

But she still clings to him, unwilling to believe that she will never lie with him like this again, warm in his arms.

Pidge looks about her and then back at the two curled together on the sofa: this is Mike's house. He owns a great deal of property and when he found that she was taking up a job at the University Library in Bristol, he offered her the house on a very reasonable rent.

‘No strings,' he said. ‘That's all over, Pidge, but it might help out while you get settled.'

It was nearly nine years before she heard from him again: a letter outlining another plan, this time an attempt to assist the mother of his child.

‘See what you can do, Pidge,' he wrote. ‘No names, no pack-drill. You'll like Angel and I'd like to think of you all together, looking after each other since I can't – not directly, anyway.'

It could so easily have been a disaster – they might have been jealous of each other – but it was a brilliant plan.

Mike always was a great judge of character, thinks Pidge, listening to Angel describing Michael's schooldays to Lizzie – and now there is a new man: Felix Hamilton, who will be coming for a drink tomorrow.

In his nervousness he rings the wrong doorbell.

‘Hello,' says Pidge, appearing as suddenly as a jack-in-the-box, and he looks at her almost in dismay. She raises an eyebrow, registering his confusion, liking the look of him. ‘Can I help?'

‘I'm so sorry, I must have muddled the address.' Disconcerted, he bundles the bunch of flowers – yellow roses – into his left arm and feels anxiously in his pocket. ‘I could have sworn it was this number.' He steps back to check the number on the door whilst Pidge watches with amused interest.

‘Right number, wrong door,' she says kindly when she feels that he's suffered enough. ‘I expect it's Angel you're looking for.'

‘Yes it is,' he agrees gratefully. ‘I thought . . . she said that . . .'

At this point the door at the top of the stairs opens and Angel stares down at them.

‘Darling,' she cries warmly, addressing both of them. ‘Whatever are you doing down there? I hope you're not giving Pidge my flowers, Felix.'

‘No, no,' he says hastily and, instantly embarrassed at this ungallant denial, adds, ‘not that I wouldn't have bought some more if I'd realized . . .'

‘So I should hope,' says Pidge indignantly. ‘I'm not some old concierge, you know, sitting about here waiting for the doorbell to ring.'

He begins to laugh and Pidge sees exactly why Angel has been behaving like a woman who is head over heels in love. ‘I give in,' he said. ‘Would half each settle the point?'

‘Certainly not,' cries Angel. ‘They're all for me. Come on up and we'll have a drink. And you, Pidge! Don't go all tactful on me. I want you to meet this man properly. He's coming down to the theatre with me later.'

They climb the stairs and, once inside the big first-floor room, Felix and Pidge shake hands solemnly.

Pidge's level brown-eyed gaze continues to unnerve him a little. ‘And will this be the first time that you've seen the play?' she asks.

He reddens slightly, suspecting that she already knows the answer, guessing that he is being teased, and Angel, pouring drinks, chuckles triumphantly.

‘This'll be the third time, sweetie. How's that for devotion?'

‘Very commendable.' Pidge continues to watch him, assessing him, and Felix has the uncomfortable suspicion that these two women have no secrets from each other.

‘It's a good play,' he answers lightly.

When Lizzie comes downstairs from her high attic room he shakes hands with her just as if she is grown up.

‘Did you bring me a present too?' she asks when she is shown the roses and Pidge chuckles at the expression on Felix's face.

‘He forgot me too,' she says to Lizzie. ‘Shocking, isn't it?'

‘I had no idea,' he pleads, addressing Lizzie, ‘that there were
three
ladies living here. May I come again and make up for it?'

‘I like chocolate,' says Lizzie warningly, lest he should bring the wrong kind of presents. She likes flowers too, but chocolate is best. ‘And Pidge says diamonds are a girl's best friend.'

‘Does she indeed?' Felix laughs as Pidge covers her face with her hands and shakes her head in despair. ‘Well, the truth will out. I'll have to see what I can do.'

‘I like him,' says Pidge much later to Angel. ‘I like him a lot. So does Lizzie. I'm just warning you that you've got competition.'