‘Is that you, Sal?’ her voice came, thin and clear, and I knew that she wanted something. She always does when she calls me Sal.
‘Yes, it’s me. How are you?’
‘Oh fine, fine. How are you?’
‘Surviving . . . ’
‘Has Mama been to see you?’
‘Mama? No, why, should she have been?’
‘Oh, I just thought she might have been . . . She was in town, she gave me a ring last night. I thought she might have been to see you.’
‘No, I didn’t even know she was here. How is she?’
‘How do you expect?’
‘I’m surprised she didn’t give me a ring . . . perhaps I was out.’
‘Perhaps she just wanted to tell me off.’
‘What about?’
‘Oh, first of all about that silly picture of John and me in the paper . . . did you see it?’
I took a gasp at angels rushing in where I feared etcetera and answered, rather proud of the penurious note in my reply, ‘As a matter of fact, I was just eating fish and chips out of the copy with it in. It’s not a bad photo, is it? What did Mama say?’
‘Oh, she said various things about it not being dignified, and this and that, you know . . . she doesn’t really mind, she was tickled pink by that one in the Tatler. She was rather annoyed, though, about Daphne.’
‘What about her, for goodness’ sake?’
‘Oh, it’s nothing really . . . just that Daphne happened to call when she was in London doing some Christmas shopping, or something, and paying her duty visit to My Fair Lady, or whatever, and like an idiot I asked her round for a drink and then went and forgot all about it. I wasn’t in when she called . . . talk about psychological slips of memory . . . anyway, she actually went and told Mama, which I thought pretty low, even by her own old school standards, so I got a little moral thingummy from Mumsy about relations, and all the rest of it . . . apparently you had gone and blackened my case by having her to tea or something with a young man, as mother put it . . . who on earth did you sacrifice?’
‘Oh, it was only Lovell,’ I said, remembering, ‘and we all met quite by accident in the Tate. There’s no lofty moral tone about that, is there?’
‘Well, Mama got it all wrong, as usual, and I got it in the neck. And do you know what Mama suggested, as compensation, I suppose?’
‘No?’
‘She said why didn’t I invite Daphne to stay for a few days next time she was in London for one of these conferences or whatever. Well, I ask you? Did you ever hear of anything so inconceivable? A visit from Daphne. I suppose that’s Mummy’s idea of social life, married daughters having the family to stay . . . she’ll be inviting herself next, just when I thought I’d got out of all that. But honestly, Sal, did you ever hear the like. Daphne in our house. I just couldn’t reply I was so dumbfounded . . . And she didn’t even seem to realize the enormity of what she was saying. How can people be so obtuse?’
‘Obtuse to what?’
‘To the impossibility, of course.’
‘To the clash, do you mean, of types?’
‘Yes. that’s what I mean. Daphne and Stephen under one roof. It was bad enough having her as bridesmaid, which they insisted on . . . if Stephen had been the kind of man who is capable of arguing we’d never have put up with it.’
‘I must say I wondered . . . ’
‘You missed all that fuss, didn’t you? I had to give in, I said to myself, this is the last, the very last thing, that I’m ever going to do in the name of duty . . . and then they start getting at me to have people to stay . . . it’s so stupid. I mean could you do it?’
‘Of course I couldn’t. Not even to martyr myself . . . she depresses me so unbearably, every time I speak to her I end up feeling kind of debased and wicked and guilty . . . ’
‘Do you really? She doesn’t make me feel wicked, she makes me feel predatory . . . after all, one can scarcely think of people like that as human beings. She’s like a different species, don’t you think.’
‘Loulou, how horribly apt.’
‘It’s good, isn’t it. A different species. There’s really no point in pretending that she’s a human being like me because she so obviously isn’t. She reminds me of those tame shabby animals in zoos, odd gnus and cows and things, so docile and herbivorous that they don’t even bother to put them behind bars, but let them wander around loose . . . all the boring animals. Herbivores. Sadly smelling, depressed animals. You know what I mean?’
‘And you feel you’re a carnivore?’
‘Well, if that is the opposite of a Daphne, yes, I do. And you too. We’re the predatory type, don’t you think? The flesh eaters? I’d rather eat than be eaten. If Daphne weren’t another species I would have to feel sorry for her, but as it is . . . ’ She paused, at loss for a fanciful conclusion.
‘As it is,’ I said, ‘you devour her unashamed.’
‘Oh, I don’t deliberately devour . . . ’
‘But one does feed off them . . . ’
‘If you mean that my way of life—our way of life—exists through the existence of theirs . . . well, yes, I suppose one does. It is a minority way, isn’t it, Sal? Money, theatres, books . . . ’
‘Speak for yourself about money,’ I said, and then wished I hadn’t, as I feared it would close her up, but it didn’t. ‘No,’ she went on, ‘not money, but you can’t pretend you’re not one of the most exclusive of all . . . the most predatory . . . for all your fish and chips, SallyO, and your down-at-heel shoes . . . you know what I mean, we’re in it together, you and I.’
You cannot accuse Louise of slowness.
‘And we can’t live without the herbivores?’
‘How could we? We live by our reflection in their eyes.’
‘I hope not,’ I said. And I meant it, but I knew that she was terribly, intimately right. I had never, literally never, heard such words of intimacy from her before. It made a pause in the conversation as I couldn’t take her up, and then she went on, ‘But what I really rang you about, Sarah, was something that I wanted you to help me out with. A problem of entertaining.’
‘Not entertaining Daphne. You can do your own slaughtering.’
‘Oh no, not Daphne. Not as bad as that. But stiff enough, in its own way. Stephen won’t be in, and I tried to get Jessica to come and leaven the lump, but she’s engaged . . . ’
‘Come on,’ I said, ‘out with it.’
‘It’s not too bad, really. It’s some Italian friends of Stephen’s that we met in Rome, something to do with Alfa Romeos, but classy, you know—they had to be asked, Stephen said, but he’s gone and got himself tied up in Paris while they’re here—and I thought that as you speak Italian better than me, and as we need another girl . . . what do you think?’
‘When’s it for?’
‘The eighteenth.’
‘And what for?’
‘Oh, just for drinks, I offered dinner but thank God they’ve got to go to the theatre. Could you make it?’
‘It’s a very odd request,’ I said.
‘Yes. I suppose it is. I just didn’t want to deal with them, and then . . . ’
Her voice trailed away. I was so convinced of ulterior motives that I didn’t press the point—especially as she appeared to have conceded it—so I simply agreed to go.
‘Oh thank you,’ she said, ‘You are a love . . . Has Francis come home yet?’
‘Of course he hasn’t. He’s not coming till next summer.’
‘Lordy Lordy, poor old you. Shall I invite some nice men round for you?’
‘What do you think you are, a bawd or a hostess?’
‘What an extraordinary remark. If Mama does ring you, you will stand up for me, won’t you?’
‘I’ll do my best. Loulou, why do you think God made people like Daphne? Was it really so that I can be what I am? It hardly seems fair, to say the least.’
‘The question’s pointless,’ she said, lightly. ‘London wouldn’t be London if i
t weren’t for the provinces. Oxford wouldn’t have been Ox if it hadn’t been for Redbrick. School wouldn’t have been school if it hadn’t been for secondary moderns. What can you do about it, except make sure that you come out on top every time?’
‘You’re right, of course.’
‘Of course I am. Truly, Sarah, the Daphnes of this world aren’t worth a moment’s worry. By worrying about them you get like them and that makes two disasters instead of one. Just sit down and thank God you’re you.’
‘Oh, I do.’
‘Does she still talk about men as boy-friends?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Oh,’ she said, dismissive, ‘it isn’t even amusing. Ignore it. Give me the flesh eaters, let them all eat each other up, if they can catch each other, and let the others go on chewing the cud . . . I must go, Sarah, see you next week. Cheerio.’
‘Cheerio.’
She rang off. I had an extraordinary conviction that my emancipation from her was drawing near: I felt that shortly it would all be over, that I would no longer feel strange and angry at the sound of her voice, or plain and dull in her presence. It was nearly over. This sudden tightness and closeness was the beginning of the end. I felt nearer to understanding her than I had ever been: even her meaningless marriage threatened to float within my vision. I sat down again and looked at the photo of her and John and thought about all that Wilfred had hinted, and I put my money on Louise. She would win. What, I didn’t know. But she would win.
I went back to Daphne. I had asked flippantly enough about God’s purpose in creating such incomplete creatures, and her answer had been unexpectedly near the bone. I do feel perpetually the double-edged guilt and glory of having so much, so much abundance: at school they tried to argue it out of me by the ‘Greater gifts—greater duties to society’ line, and I had swallowed it, at least as far as the intellect went—but what on earth was one to do about all this lovely body that one was obliged to walk around with? Skin and limbs and muscle, all glowing and hot with life and energy and hope? Some people haven’t got flesh like that, demanding flesh: Daphne is slack and dull, muscles in her legs instead of in her belly, no curves, no shine, no shape, and one can’t shut one’s eyes and pretend it isn’t so, or that, being so, it doesn’t matter. It does matter. And yet there is no moral in it. I don’t deserve to be as I am: she doesn’t deserve to be as she is. And there isn’t any way that one can get rid of the guilt of having a nice body by saying that one can serve society with it, because that would end up with oneself as what? There simply doesn’t seem to be any moral place for flesh. I didn’t worry about all this when Francis was there. Flesh is a straight gift, I concluded: those who have got it had better make the most of this world, because they evidently were created for it and not for the next. I sat there a moment longer, then stood up and looked at myself in the mirror. Myself stared back at myself, caught in a paroxysm of vanity. I hugged my own body in my own arms. My own flesh. Indisputable. Mine.
At lunch-time on the day I went to drinks with Louise I had a very strange experience. It so happened that it was another very cold day, and I put my black stockings on, which I very rarely do as I resent having ‘Beatnik’ and other insults shouted at me in the street. I got to work without mishap, but in the lunch-hour I went into the nearest W. H. Smith’s to buy a packet of envelopes. I was just looking at the paperbacks when a small child aged about three started to stare at me. Her mother tried to distract her, but after a bit the child got loose and wandered over to me, still staring at me entranced. Then—and this is the odd bit—she reached out her little hands and started to pat my legs, and to feel up inside my skirt, along my thighs. I can feel it now, those tiny warm hands on my legs, and the mother in horror saying, ‘Pat, come here, Pat.’ The child was dragged away, and I smiled, all forgiveness and politeness as ever. I suppose she was puzzled because my legs were black and the rest of me white. I cannot say how strange and primitive those hands felt. My legs seemed to stir to life under them: they began to heave out of their usual careful torpor and to burn under me with an awful warning. Perhaps one perpetually expects larger hands to reach under one’s skirt. It was simply the smallness of those that disturbed me.
11
The Collision
AT LOUISE’S I drank gin and tonic and talked a little bad Italian and soaked myself in the air of worldly well-being that emanated from that flat. Unobtrusive warmth, a choice of drinks, well-deployed lights, cigarettes in all the cigarette-boxes, books on all the bookshelves, and choice duck-egg blue towels on the towel-rails in the bathroom. This really feels like life, I said to myself. It was a pity the people were dull, but then one can’t have everything. Anyway, they very shortly left, and left Louise and me confronting each other among the ashtrays. We were talking fairly easily, having been broken in by the presence of others, about films and people and Oxford. She was wearing a lilac-coloured silky jersey. After an idle hour or so, in which we played Frank Sinatra and drank another drink—odd how the very thought of such idle boredom can later cause such pangs of nostalgia and desire—we decided to go and look for something to eat. The kitchen was indeed impressive, as Wilfred had told me at the party—it wasn’t in any way modern or streamlined, but very oldy-worldy, with pestles and mortars and jars of herbs and copper pans. It gave the impression of French country cooking. I was pleasantly surprised when Louise opened a cupboard and displayed such normal fare as tins of sardines and beans and ravioli. However, Louise said she felt like cooking, so we had spaghetti: I stood aghast as she tipped wine and garlic recklessly into the sauce, and splashed tomato puree on to her smart shirt affair. Life must be totally different if one doesn’t have to think about cleaner’s bills. And grocer’s bills.
‘The funny thing is,’ she said, ‘that I really love cooking. I’m just greedy, I suppose, but I really love it. The smells and the mixtures. But I won’t do it, you know, because it’s beneath my dignity. So I have to let Françoise do it most of the time.’
‘That’s ridiculous. I hate it, and I have to. Let’s swap.’
‘Why don’t you eat out?’
‘I don’t like eating out alone.’
‘Why not?’
‘People stare.’
‘You little timid. Why don’t you just let them?’
‘I don’t like being stared at. I would like to be ignored.’
‘I don’t mind being stared at.’
‘I know. That’s because you’re always bloody sure of the reason why.’
‘Well, what’s wrong with that?’
She started to strain the spaghetti through an enormous sieve. I always have to use a small red plastic colander, and everything eels into the sink as often as not. We sat down to eat at the kitchen table, which was covered with a choice orange tablecloth.
‘It doesn’t go with your blouse,’ I said.
‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ she said furiously. ‘You can’t have everything matching all the time.’
The spaghetti was most delicious, and when we had finished it we went back into the sitting-room and played Frank Sinatra again. I was struck as we sat there by the charming convention of the scene—sisters idling away an odd evening in happy companionship. It was like something out of Middlemarch or even Jane Austen. I was just flicking through the pages of Harper’s (which was concealed, along with all other papers, in a drawer in a strange off-white cabinet) when she suddenly switched off the gramophone and said, ‘Come on, Sarah, let’s go out.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Where?’
‘Let’s go and meet John after the theatre.’ She looked at her watch. ‘He’s off in about half an hour. If we get a taxi we’ll catch him before he leaves.’
I covered my astonishment and said, ‘Won’t he mind if I’m there?’
‘Why should he mind? Of course he won’t. Come on, I can’t spend a whole evening in.’
She went and put on her coat, and then said, ‘I’d better just make sure I catch him,’ and sta
rted to make a ’phone call. When she got through she said, ‘Hello, is that Bert? . . . This is Mrs Halifax. I wonder if you’d be an angel and tell Mr Connell not to leave unless I’m there . . . yes, I’m coming in to meet him . . . Thank you so much . . . No, that’s lovely. So long as you don’t let him go.’
I assumed it was the stage door-keeper. There was something naïve in the pleasure which she obviously took in his being called Bert.
‘I didn’t want to go all the way there and then miss him,’ she said to me as she put the receiver down.
We went down the stairs and into the street: it was bitterly cold and I turned my coat collar up round my ears. We had to walk to the main road to pick up a taxi. Louise was remotely exhilarated, as though she were setting out on an adventure. I wondered, as I watched her sideways standing on the street corner waving at the taxi-man with her inimitable, ostentatious grace, whether perhaps she weren’t really in love with this man. I had swallowed without a gulp the fact that she didn’t, couldn’t love Stephen, and the next stage should clearly have been my acceptance of her love for John. But the idea of it didn’t convince me. It didn’t seem the right explanation. This dim exaltation, this curious breathlessness, came from some other source. And I seemed nearer to it, as we sat there side by side and watched the big white houses, and then the porticoes of Harrods and all those smart little boutiques off Knightsbridge. Prompted by this sense of impending clarity, I said, ‘When you pass clothes in shop windows, could you literally buy everything you see?’
‘Everything I want, you mean?’
‘Of course.’
‘Good Lord no! I mean, there are limits . . . model dresses, and so forth, you know. But most things, I suppose . . . ’
‘It must be very odd,’ I said, trying to prod her into telling me what it really felt like.
‘I suppose it is odd, compared with the old days,’ she said. ‘But it has a curious effect on one, you know . . . I used to like everything I saw, just about, because I couldn’t have it . . . and now I scarcely like anything that I see in the shops. They all look sort of imitation . . . you know what I mean. I only want the things I can’t have, model dresses and coats and things . . . and one can’t really have those. Or not all those. And so it goes on. If one had unlimited money, one would find that there simply wasn’t a designer good enough in the world. There isn’t any top. One thinks there’s a top, but there isn’t.’
A Summer Bird-Cage Page 16
