The Birdcage (5 page)

“Nobody ever finds a flat through the
Standard
. You have to go and queue outside the office at about eight in the morning, or else all the flats have gone by the time you’ve phoned.”

“James and Matthew found one.”

Norah took the
Evening Standard
from him, and examined the three advertisements he had marked. She said, “You don’t imagine I can afford
£
850 for a five-year lease?”

“Renewable.”

“It doesn’t say so.”

“You could ask.”

“Oh, I
could
do anything. Anyway I don’t need two
bedrooms
. There’s no point in going to see places one knows one isn’t going to take. That wastes everybody’s time.”

“What about the one in Royal Crescent?”

She looked again at the advertisement for the one in Royal Crescent. “It’s an agent. You don’t suggest I should ring a house-agent at seven-thirty in the evening?”

“What?” He took the paper from her. “How do you know it’s an agent? It doesn’t say.”

“You’ll find the same telephone number at the end of at least seven other advertisements. Some kind of bait, I suppose. They want you to ring so that they can get you on their books. Personally I prefer agents who tell you what they are.” Norah Palmer began to stack the plates. “Really, dear.” (Dear!) “You might give me credit for a little intelligence.”

But her pride was hurt. The next thing she knew, he would be giving her notice to quit. She had half a mind to leave anyway, stay at the club, search from there. It wasn’t easy to find a flat. They had searched for six months before finding their present flat, and Peter Ash had had to pay
£
3,000 for the lease. She had no money to pay for leases.

She sat at her desk next day in a small glass stall on the third floor of the television company’s building, and
recognized
in herself both sloth and fear. She was thirty-five years old. That was not an age to go looking for flats. It was not an age to set up house all over again, not by
herself
. She shivered, and shut her eyes, but she would have to open them again. Something furnished? If she were to move into something furnished, it would be easy enough to move back again if Peter Ash should—but she must not think along that track. She must be honest; she must be sensible; she must face reality. When something had happened, it had happened; one couldn’t make it not have happened by wishing or pretending. A furnished flat was trivial and transitory. It would have nasty furniture, all the colours clashing, and a reconditioned gas-stove in the kitchen. She wanted her own things around her. She wanted a flat to which she could invite her friends without their pitying her. Pity destroyed friendship, and she would need friends if she were to live alone.

She pressed the buzzer on her telephone, and spoke to her secretary. “Clarissa, get me an evening paper, would you please?” she said. “And you might ask around the office whether anybody knows of a flat. I’m thinking of moving.”

*

“But, my dear, you must move in with me” said Squad Appleby.

“Oh, Squad!”

“No, my dear. I am as serious as a drain. You must move in at once. I need the money. I want to buy a boat on the H.P.”

“Squad——”

“Not a word; not a word. I ask no questions, my dear,
and spread no rumours. You’re breaking up with your gentleman, I take it? No, my dear, don’t answer. If you are, then all I can say is that it’s about time. He has a very dreary line of patter, I’m here to tell you, and worse than that I can’t say of him.”

“I didn’t want to be … I hadn’t thought of being a lodger exactly, Squad.”

“Don’t worry. It’s only
minimally
furnished. And you shall have a kitchen all to yourself, and your own little loo with a bath and basin, and your own telephone, and your own key to your own front door. It’s on my top floor, you see, and there’s only one room upstairs I ever use, so
really
it’s like having a floor to yourself. Rachel lived in sin up there with a cartographer, my dear, and now the silly bitch has decided to marry him, and moved out on Saturday. I shall never have a model as a tenant again. They get moods of religious hysteria. I suppose it’s all that standing about with one hip out of joint, just like yoga.”

“May I come and see it?”

“What are you doing for lunch? Come back with me. There’s some lettuce in what they call the hydrator, and baked beans in the cupboard. Perhaps we could buy some salami or something. Clarissa’s bound to know a salami shop, if we ask. And you needn’t hesitate to tell me if you hate the flat, because I don’t imagine it’s going to be
difficult
to let. The
real
danger, my dear, is actors. They’re always behind with the rent, and the only way you can get them to pay is to offer them
employment
, as if casting weren’t difficult enough already without having to find parts for one’s debtors.”

“How much is it?”

“Three pounds ten a week, payable quarterly in advance. It may hurt at the time, but it’s like teeth; you’re buying security. And it saves my having to hang around in a
meaning
way on Friday evenings. You’ll probably never see me, as a matter of fact. I’m never in. Oh—and you pay in cash, of course, because of the tax.”

“You make it sound as if everything were already settled.”

“Let’s face it. It is. You’d be mad not to take it, my love, as well you know.
Mais voyons nous
, and not another word about it until we do. Because that isn’t at all what I came to see you about.”

“It’s poor Mr. Biston, I suppose. I hope you’re being gentle with him.”

“Oh no, my dear. Not
him
. He’s anaesthetized. All those great fights we’ve been having are things of the past, as they say.

“He’s given up?” Herbert Biston was the author of the television play Squad was next to direct. He was the author in a literal sense; long ago he had originated the play. But Squad was the company’s most “creative” director. Once Mr. Biston’s play had been accepted, once it had been given a provisional place in the schedule, Squad had been asked to work with Mr. Biston to get the play into shape before rehearsals began. After three weeks of this working
with
, there was very little of Mr. Biston’s play left. This was not important. Mr. Biston was a
dustman
—an “original”. It was company policy to find “originals”, and encourage them. The first piece of
encouragement
offered by the company to Mr. Biston was that it gave him the privilege of having his play rewritten by Squad. When that had been done, the company could safely announce a new play,
The Tosher Boy
, by Herbert Biston, a genuine original dustman, and, intrigued by this announcement, the television reviewers would ignore “Focus on Capillaries” or “Great Rear-Admirals of the Blue” or “European Sportsview” or whatever the
competition
from the B.B.C. was that evening, and they would watch the dustman’s play instead. After they had watched it, they would write little pieces pointing out how cleverly Mr. Biston had captured the dustmen’s
argot
, and how this was “the real stuff of television drama”, and how clever the company had been to find such a genuine original as Mr. Biston, and how they must put him on a long-term
contract
at once. Mr. Biston’s next play would not be as successful as the first. Those reviewers who watched it (because the B.B.C., by this time, would be fighting back with the “Black and White Minstrel Show” or a rather
passé
series of Westerns, bought at great expense with public money from the U.S.A.) would suggest that Mr. Biston was in danger of repeating himself. So Mr. Biston’s third play would be a family comedy about life on a
housing
estate, and it would fail utterly. Squad would have lost interest by then, another director would have inherited Mr. Biston, and Mr. Biston himself, conscious that he was now a fully paid-up member of the Screen Writers’ Guild, would have become grand and have insisted on doing his own rewriting. Probably the company would reject Mr. Biston’s fourth and fifth plays. By that time, Mr. Biston would have given up his job as a dustman, so as to “live by his pen”. The company’s last “original”, Norah Palmer remembered, had been a 24-year-old salesman in the Gadget Department of a Department Store in Oxford Street. He had committed suicide three weeks after his twenty-fifth birthday.

All this was still ahead of Mr. Biston, however. For the time being things were going well with him. Squad said that Mr. Biston had even begun to believe that some of the new dialogue was his own. “No, my dear,” Squad said. “Nothing to do with Mr. Biston. Something much more interesting. I’ve brought you
this
.”

This
was a garnering of so far uncollected trivia by George Bernard Shaw; it had been published in a book of ninety-two pages by an American University Press. There was an annotated laundry list. There was a postcard to Messrs. Jaeger about ankle-length underwear, and another to the Herbal Food Stores asking for marigate paste. There was a formal letter, signed by Shaw but probably written by a secretary, about the rating assessment at Ayot St. Lawrence. There was a witty letter to the G.P.O.,
protesting
at having been charged for a trunk call to Bagshot, which, Shaw claimed, he had never made. But the heart of this scholarly little book, the academic triumph of it, the genuine contribution to the
corpus
of Shaw’s work, had been the discovery and re-publication of an isolated piece of dramatic criticism written by Shaw in 1904 for
The Saturday Review
, six years after he had “opened the door” for “the incomparable Max” (the quotation marks are from
Professor
Benstead’s introduction). Max Beerbohm, a sudden prisoner to influenza, had persuaded Shaw to review for him a new play of social protest,
The Forgotten Men
by Edward Laverick, performed by the Independent Theatre for one Tuesday matinée in the set of a drawing-room comedy at the Avenue Theatre.

“
For reasons which do more discredit to the public than to itself, the company was under-rehearsed. The play was
underwritten
. The auditorium most dismally under-peopled….
”

“Squad, what is this?”

“Read on, my dear. Read on.”

“
The whole occasion might have been arranged to reassure me of the wisdom of my own decision to forswear theatrical first nights. If it had been only another
Black-Eyed Susan,
if it had been Sir Henry Irving’s disembowelled version of
Much Ado About Nothing,
why then I should have gritted my teeth and sat through it cheerfully enough, for I am man enough, I hope, to put up with a
little discomfort in the service of a sick friend. But this was torture of another sort. This was the torture of being forced to watch a murder I was unable to prevent. With the possible exceptions of myself and Mr. Granville Barker, the progressive movement in England has never produced a dramatist. The reactionaries, I may boldly say, have produced a great many, and as a pillar to the established order, the London theatre deserves a Government subsidy, but for all the disciples he has raised to follow him, Ibsen might just as well never have lived. Yet here, faltering in his own tongue as well as in those employed to speak for him, but with the promise of a voice that should be heard, was an Ibsen of the
night-schools
, a Polytechnic Ibsen, in Mr. Laverick. And on Tuesday afternoon, we murdered him by neglect
.”

“A Polytechnic Ibsen…. Yes, I do see. But, Squad, how exciting!”

“I thought you’d be pleased.”

“Edward Laverick. I suppose you’ve never heard of him?”

“Never. Must be dead by now. If not, he’s older than God.”

Norah Palmer did sums on her fingers. “1904.
Fifty-seven
years. But unless he died immediately afterwards of disappointment, it won’t be out of copyright. Blast!” She took 1904 away from 1961 all over again in pencil on her blotting pad, and it still came to 57. Under that 57 she wrote “20?” “You know, it sounds as if he might have been quite a young man. I wonder if he’s still alive,” she said. “He needn’t be more than seventy. Though, of course, there was the 1914 war.” She drew a circle round her calculations, and then scribbled over them. “
The Forgotten Men
…. We certainly ought to have it read….
The
Forgotten
Men
by Edward Laverick.”

“
Sounds made
for you.”

“Yes, it does.”

One of the consequences of competition among the commercial television companies in Britain is that each company has become much concerned with its “image”. Manufacturers buy advertising time on television at rates calculated on the basis of how long a commercial runs and how many people may be expected to be watching it; it is the television equivalent of a newspaper’s “cost per thousand”. For example, the cost of showing a television commercial lasting a minute in the Anglia Region at six p.m. will be less than that of showing one lasting only half a minute in the London Area at eight p.m. Time is sold as a commodity. Time-merchants (the commercial television companies) sell it to advertisers, just as the advertisers sell commodities to the public. And since, when selling anything at all to anyone, the seller must consider not only the immediate bargain, but the
idea
of what he is selling, its personality which will bring the buyer back again, and keep him buying more of the same, each of the television companies is selling itself as well as its time. It is selling a minute at seven-thirty on Thursday, 27th April 1961, and it is selling its new special Summer Discount, but it is
also
selling Granada, A.T.V., A.B.C., Tyne-Tees, and suggesting that in some way
its
sort of time is a better sort of time, that
its
sort of people (which means simply the people who watch in the areas for which each company is responsible for transmitting programmes) are not only more willing customers with more money to spend, but actually confer a moral
cachet
on those who provide them with goods and services.