A Summer Bird-Cage

by Margaret Drabble

  She seemed to like my doing it for her, but I didn’t like the physical closeness. I wasn’t used to her. She was never a one for touching people, for kissing or fighting or sitting on knees. There were a lot of little buttons, all the way from the demure high neck to the waist, and I fumbled over them. They didn’t have proper buttonholes but horrid little fabric loops. I could feel her hard breasts rising and falling under my clumsy hands in her far from new brassiere. I thought how like her, to wear a bra that is actually dirty on her wedding day. She must have been wearing it for the past week.

  ‘Is this your something old?’ I asked, indicating it.

  ‘My bra? Yes, I suppose it is. I hadn’t thought.’

  She was millions of miles away again, all the intimacy of the night before forgotten, but perhaps that wasn’t surprising. She looked vacant and worried. She started to mess around with her hair and got me to spray lacquer on the back, which I did so liberally that I could see it shining like dewdrops during the ceremony. She has coarse hair, thick and heavy and easy to manage. I thought she was thinking purely narcissistic thoughts, when she quite suddenly said, ‘I say, Sarah, what do you think it would feel like to be a virgin bride?’

  ‘Terrifying, I should think,’ I said. It was something I had often considered. ‘All that filthy white.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, as she started to dab scent behind her ears.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Surely one would feel like a lamb led to the slaughter and all that? With a bow round one’s neck?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. But it must be rather exciting.’

  ‘Hardly fair on the bridegroom.’

  ‘Do you think one would be disappointed?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ I said, as rudely as I could. I didn’t want to talk female intimacies. Not with her.

  ‘I suppose one would,’ she said. ‘Still, it seems a pity.’

  ‘Why, do you mean you’re missing an extra frisson or something?’

  She looked at me sharply, through the mirror, and said, ‘Oh no. I have plenty of frissons of my own. Plenty.’

  I still remember the way she said that. It was oddly spontaneous, oddly revealing. She must have said more than she meant, or said too much what she did mean, because she immediately snapped shut again, and started to put on her veil, humming horribly through her teeth. ‘Be an angel,’ she said, ‘be an angel and go and look at my bouquet. Bring it up to me so I can see what it looks like.’

  I went, glad to get out, and pondering to myself the likely nature of those frissons. I wonder if anyone ever married a man they didn’t like just in order to see what it felt like? Louise’s bouquet was made of lilies, huge virginal lilies, very formal, with no Constance Spryery about them: they would have done equally well for an altarpiece. They were lying on the hall table: I thought, what a nerve, really, to choose flowers like that. There was something theatrical about them, as well as something ceremonious, and I wondered who the audience was. I picked up the flowers and looked at myself with them in the hall mirror and thought that I wouldn’t make nearly as good a bride as Louise. I stiffened my neck and tried to look dignified, but I couldn’t make it. I lacked grandeur; I looked too pink and fleshy for the white intactness of those flowers. I looked less intact than Louise, ironically enough. I looked horrifyingly pregnable, somehow, at that moment: I looked at myself in fascination, thinking how unfair it was, to be born with so little defence, like a soft snail without a shell. Men are all right, they are defined and enclosed, but we in order to live must be open and raw to all comers. What happens otherwise is worse than what happens normally, the embroidery and the children and the sagging mind. I felt doomed to defeat. I felt all women were doomed. Louise thought she wasn’t but she was. It would get her in the end, some version of it, simply because she was born to defend and depend instead of to attack. I can get very bitter about this subject with very little encouragement: fortunately Michael came along and distracted me.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘You look gorgeous.’

  ‘Do I really?’ I said, perking up at once. After all, to be really logical I could always have shaved off my eyebrows. And since I didn’t—

  ‘Do you like my dress?’ I said.

  ‘It’s lovely. Is it the same as Daphne’s wearing? It can’t be.’

  ‘Oh yes it is.’

  ‘You look knockout, SallyO.’

  ‘Not as knockout as Louise.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, you’re much prettier than Louise.’

  ‘Oh Michael—’

  ‘Are those her flowers? Christ, what an armful.’

  ‘Terrible, isn’t it?’

  ‘Don’t you get a bouquet?’

  ‘Oh yes! Yellow roses for me.’ I picked them up.

  ‘They look fabulous. What will you have when you get married?’

  ‘I’m not getting married. Catch me at the kitchen sink.’

  ‘Silly.’ He kissed my hand, gallantly. He’s the only member of our family who ever touches anyone without wincing. I remembered how I had hated buttoning up Louise.

  ‘You look pretty smart yourself,’ I said. ‘Who’s in the drawing-room?’

  ‘Oh, everyone. Except your mother. Your father’s reading the paper, Mum is knitting, Daphne’s looking sick and I’m drinking gin.’

  ‘Before church?’

  ‘Come and have one yourself.’

  ‘No thank you. I’m waiting till the reception.’

  ‘I say, Sally, who drank the whisky?’

  ‘What whisky?’

  ‘I’m sure you know what whisky. Don’t you?’

  ‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘There’s half a bottle gone from the corner cupboard in the music-room. Your father seems to think it must be Kristin, but I thought it was probably you two. Wasn’t it?’

  ‘It certainly was not,’ I said, annoyed by his knowing smile. I prefer almost anyone to be familiar with me than my family. ‘If you think it was Louise you should ask her yourself.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t dare. I wouldn’t be so personal. But I do think someone ought to tell Uncle that it wasn’t Kristin.’

  ‘Honestly,’ I said, diverting my annoyance, ‘I can’t imagine where Papa thinks Kristin comes from. He talks about her as though she were a kitchen-maid, but her father’s a wealthy barrister in Stockholm or something. It’s ridiculous. What would she do with whisky? Papa must think she’s a real hard drinker if he thinks she had all that.’

  ‘If she’s the daughter of a wealthy whatnot, what’s stopping her packing up and going?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ I couldn’t go into the twisted motives of middle-class girls with no sense of vocation, although I felt I was becoming an expert on the subject.

  ‘Your father’s a bit of a reactionary, isn’t he,’ said Michael, largely to prove to me that he knew what the word meant.

  ‘About women and servants. And poor Kristin happens to be both.’

  ‘Oh, she’s all right. She’s just sex-starved. That’s all.’

  ‘Oh don’t be stupid,’ I said, slipping back at once into my annoyed feminist we-are-frail-as-our-complexions-are mood. ‘Honestly, Michael, you are stupid sometimes.’ And I marched off with Louise’s lilies, but I knew quite well that he was probably right, with all his odious masculine unperplexity. I would so like people to be free, and bound together not by need but by love. But it isn’t so, it can’t be so.

  We got off to church in the end. I was highly embarrassed by having to sit next to Daphne, who looked such a total fright in her ultra-smart dress. It was a tarty dress, but at the same time it did suit me: it had a very short skirt, and I have nice legs, whereas Daphne’s are muscular and shapeless round the ankles and covered in hairs and bluish pimples. Oh, the agony. If I had had any courage I would have told her to put on suntan stockings, but somehow I couldn’t interfere with the awfulness of nature. It must be so frightful to have to put things on in order to look better, instead of t
o strip things off. She sat there, solid and yet scraggy, and she looked blind and sentimental because she had taken her glasses off. She probably was feeling sentimental, which was a waste, about Louise. I wondered what she would think if she knew how sinister, in her terms, this marriage really was. It would have taken only that little chat about virgin brides to make her start declaring just causes and impediments. I could see her, standing nobly up and interrupting the ceremony to say that to her certain knowledge her cousin Louise Bennett had, on the twenty-second of July, nineteen-fifty-eight, with Sebastian William Howell, etc, etc. And yet here she was, happening to be ignorant, going along with her yellow roses. How can people be so totally unaware of facts? It seems to me to be almost a vice, such ignorance.

  When we arrived at the church there was a crowd of villagers standing round the nineteen-thirty lych-gate staring, and I wondered if she realized that they were probably saying things like: ‘A pity she isn’t as good-looking as the rest of the family’ or ‘You always get one plain bridesmaid, don’t you?’ I don’t know if Daphne cares about her looks at all: I fear she probably does, because her clothes, though hideous, are always elaborate, not careless, and she overcurls her hair and wears a very bright red lipstick which makes her skin look pale and dead. She wears it in an effort to appear gay. How unjust life is, to make physical charm so immediately apparent or absent, when one can get away with vices untold for ever. I know one girl who, like Daphne, is a plain girl from a handsome family, featureless and thickly-made, but she is such a girl that one forgets what she looks like in the charm of her conversation. I’m glad I know someone like that or I wouldn’t believe it possible. Appearances can make one such a snob. But this girl was above appearances, whilst Daphne scrabbles after them. Daphne inflicts such pain on me. She makes me confess how much I am a bitch. And Daphne, who was chased by a god and was turned into a tree to preserve her virginity. Perhaps there is some truth in that fable. Something our Daphne had preserved. Who would rape a tree?

  As we waited for Louise I remembered how she once told a whole railway compartment as we went through Chesterfield station that the tower leaned over because it saw a virgin bride. I was only eleven at the time and I was deeply shocked.

  When the car drew up with Louise and my father in it, one could not help but be moved. She looked so perfect. She was a photographer’s dream: they could scarcely let her go in to be married, they were so entranced, and kept taking her through her dim and heavy veil. She leaned her head this way and that, obliging, serene, betraying no impatience. The spectators were thrilled; they kept gasping in admiration. For them she was the real thing: and for me too she almost was, for that halfhour, as meaningless and pure as the flowers she carried. By virtue of form, not content. Symbol, not moral. As I finally followed her up the aisle my hands were trembling with some appropriate emotion: I could not keep the foliage round the roses still.

  I calmed down after a while, after that strange primitive shock of beauty and innocence had worn off, and had a good look round, trying to spot guests I knew. I thought I saw one of my very favourite people, a would-be and probably will-be artist called Tony, but he was half-behind a pillar. The soles of Stephen’s shoes looked very clean and new, side by side, as he knelt down at the altar. I had difficulty in turning over the pages of my hymnbook with gloves on, yet felt too conspicuous to start ripping them off. I got landed with all the lilies at the ring bit: they kept me very busy till the end of the service, when Loulou reclaimed them to walk down the aisle, a married woman, to a rather obscure piece of music which I fancy wasn’t the Wedding March, though I’m not certain. I heaved a sigh of relief as I tripped after, thinking ‘Now for the champagne.’

  When we emerged into the open air the best man, who had accompanied me, said, ‘Well, Christ, that’s that, what a farce.’

  I didn’t ask him to elucidate, and I didn’t find out what he had meant for months. I assumed it was just a general comment on the church and the top-hattery. The best man, in fact, terrified me even more than Stephen himself did, as he had in addition to a certain degree of fame a rather rude and handsome face and manner. He was an actor, an almost well-known one, in fact to anyone who is slightly more of a theatregoer than me he would probably qualify as being very well-known. I at first assumed that Stephen had chosen him as best man for prestige value, but afterwards discovered that they really had been close friends Apart from other reasons. They had been up at Cambridge together, and John had been in some ghastly-sounding play of Stephen’s all about a truck driver, which had had a very short run at the Lyric, Hammersmith, thereby bringing both to their first public notice. He is called John Connell. I suppose success held them both together: they are just about as unlike as two people can be. Stephen is thin, prematurely ageing, and I think I have made myself clear about my opinion of his sexual qualifications, whereas John is a heavy and rather fancies himself in jeans, open-necked shirts, and coal-heaver’s jackets with leather patches on the back. It’s all a big game because he went to Winchester: his histrionic tendencies only bloomed at Cambridge after long repression, where I gather he was the King of the ADC. He is a megalomaniac, like most actors, but I now think that he is so through real excess of energy and not through sheer blinkered ambition. Once he said to a director who told him not to overact: ‘How can you overact life?’ I like that. It’s much coarser than Stephen: a much thicker ideal.

  I suppose all they did share was vanity: John thought himself a superman, and Stephen thought himself a super-intellect, and they ministered to each other in mutual admiration. It was odd to see them there side by side in church, so entirely different: I wish now that I had known the whole story then, I feel Louise cheated me out of an interesting frisson or two.

  As we embarked for the reception I heard Louise say to John, ‘And for God’s sake have a few drinks, remember you’ve got to take enough for two.’

  3

  The Reception

  I HAD A hard time at the reception to begin with, trying to remember the names of business friends of my father, and being gay with the local gentry. I felt it my duty to deal with them before I had more than two glasses of champagne, so I concentrated on eating stuffed prunes, prawns, smoked salmon and suchlike. I met the Halifax parents, who confirmed Louise’s assertion that it wasn’t a pseudonym: they were very upper, but not a bit like an ancient family. I didn’t think they could be an ancient family. I had to keep finding plausible reasons to explain why there wasn’t a display of wedding presents. The real reason was that Louise had refused on grounds of ostentatious vulgarity—with reason, I think—but I couldn’t say that to the kindly and charming inquiries of beneficent ladies anxious to see once more the silver cream jugs they so painfully chose. I felt sorry for the ladies. They weren’t interested in Louise, and why should they be? They just wanted to have a look at everything. I decided that when I got married they could.

  After what seemed hours of such fraternizing I decided to launch out on my own and see if I could find Tony. Before I did I inadvertently got mixed up in a conversation with Stephen, who approached me with a vacant, spindly walk and said:

  ‘Well, how do you like being my sister-in-law?’

  I gave this meaningless question as little attention as it deserved, and countered it with, ‘Surely you’re not drinking orange juice on your wedding day?’

  ‘You know quite well,’ he said, ‘that I never drink. I’ve told you before that I don’t like it, but you don’t seem to believe me. You even accused me of affectation last time.’

  ‘Did I really?’

  ‘Yes, you did. And I must say that I am strongly inclined to believe that it is as much through affectation that you indulge.’

  ‘Oh, you’re quite wrong,’ I said. ‘I love it.’

  ‘I think a lot of nonsense is talked about drink,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t nice. And I mean to say, whoever heard of a novelist who didn’t drink?’

 
; ‘You must have a very romantic conception of the artist. Penniless and bearded in his garret, you see him?’

  ‘More or less, I suppose I do. Anyway I believe in extremes, don’t you?’

  ‘No no, the well-observed norm, that is what art is about. The delicacy of the perception will compensate for any lack of violence.’

  I think he was quoting from one of his reviews.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘Well, I just don’t believe that, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Well, you may find you are wrong,’ he said, with a superior kind of look. I hate anyone to be didactic except me. I was just looking for some retort when I caught sight of Tony’s wife Gill, and immediately disengaged myself from that totally profitless encounter. Stephen can’t be such a fool as he seems. But he certainly has a lot of seeming to account for.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said, ‘I see an old Oxford friend I haven’t seen for years, excuse me.’

  Not very elegant, but I got away. It wasn’t in fact literally years since I had seen Gill: it was more like nine months. She had been up the year before me, and so had been down for over a year now. She and Tony had got married the minute she left the Porter’s Lodge, more or less, at the end of her last term, and had since then been living in a flat on the King’s Road. I liked them both more than almost anyone; Gill and I had been almost intimate. Not quite—the gap of one year does make some difference even at university level. Also she is basically very unlike me, much more generous and obvious and unselfconscious. With no twists, or so I thought at Louise’s wedding. Tony had plenty of twists, but of the sort that to me seemed like the straight and narrow.

  She was talking to some Chelsea-type lady of Louise’s own past, and when she saw me she broke off what she was saying at once and said, ‘Sarah, how super to see you.’

  ‘How super to see you,’ I said, inanely and happily: we stood gaping and grinning at each other, trying to think of some way to get going together again. Not painfully trying, but trying. She looked much tidier than she ever used to, I noticed: she used to be a great one for home-made dresses made of hessian and painted by herself in large bold flowers, but now she was wearing a neat grey outfit that I guessed was a Young Jaeger number. Her hair was up, too, very carefully up, in a nice yellow dome.