A Summer Bird-Cage

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘Oh no,’ I said, shutting the door after her as we reached the top. ‘It isn’t funny except for the bit about the bath. That was funny. Here, sit down and get warm. Shall I make you a cup of Maxwell House?’

  ‘Have you any cocoa?’

  ‘We might have.’ I went into the kitchen and looked. We hadn’t. I put some coffee in a cup instead. My cup and Jackie’s were still sitting side by side on the hearth: I wondered if she would notice them, but of course she didn’t. It had never crossed her mind that I had any real reason for not wanting her to come. This wasn’t surprising. I don’t think she ever speculated much about my life. Or if she did, I doubt if she guessed right. Just as I so often guessed wrong about her. I had to ask her everything in questions.

  She looked quite normal, very pale and un-made up, and one couldn’t have told from her appearance that anything was wrong, except for a violent uncontrolled shivering that she indulged in from time to time. Part of it was, I suppose, the cold, but part of it must have been neurotic. She looked oddly as though she were taking part in a college cocoa party, sitting there undressed and drinking a mug of coffee. Now for a tête-à-tête, I said to myself, and I asked her, ‘Well, what are you going to do next?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know where to go.’

  ‘Do you really mean that you’re not going back to Stephen?’

  ‘Certainly I mean it. I’m never going near him again. Nor am I ever going home again. I’m truly finished off this time.’

  By home she meant our parents’ home.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you must have got plenty of money. You can go where you like.’

  I find it hard to believe that anyone who has a lot of money can really be in a fix, though I am obviously wrong. ‘Why,’ I said, ‘you could go abroad tomorrow, you could go anywhere you wanted. I quite envy you,’ I said, trying to cheer her up.

  ‘Do you realize that every penny I have belongs to that man?’

  ‘To Stephen?’

  ‘Yes. To Stephen.’

  ‘What’s the matter with Stephen? Why have you gone off him so suddenly?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, I was never on him. You can’t pretend you like him either so don’t bother trying. Nobody likes him.’

  ‘Well, well, well. Then what did you marry him for?’ I asked, thinking with delight that at very long last we had got down to brass tacks, and congratulating myself on asking the question I had been itching to ask for months.

  ‘Oh Lordy,’ said Louise, ‘you must be the only person in the world who doesn’t know the answer to that question. I married him for his money, of course.’

  ‘Did you really?’ I was full of shock and admiration.

  ‘Of course I did. What other attraction do you think he could have for anyone?’

  ‘But Loulou, what a terribly wicked thing to do.’

  ‘Is it really wicked? I suppose it is. It’s beginning to me to seem rather the normal thing to do. Though I must say I surprised myself, once, long ago, when I first made my mind up. Yes, I really took myself by surprise. But that was so long ago.’

  ‘Good Lord,’ I said, ‘how ignorant I must be. I think you’re the only person I know who married for money. I know they’re always doing it in books but I thought it was just a novelist’s convention. Do you think all those other things like wicked stepmothers are true too? All the fairy-story things?’

  ‘I think it’s more than likely,’ said Louise, having another energetic shiver.

  ‘Have a blanket,’ I said.

  ‘No thank you. I’m not cold.’

  ‘Do go on then, this is fascinating, tell me when you decided to take this awful step. When did you decide to marry him? Did he keep asking you?’

  ‘He asked me every day. I don’t know when I decided. I think it was somewhere round about the time when I came to see you in Oxford last term. Do you remember when John and Stephen and I came? It was something about the way Stephen kept paying all the bills. Perhaps you didn’t notice. Wherever I go with Stephen, there are always a thousand bills, and he pays for everything, and I know it doesn’t matter. With John it sometimes mattered, but with Stephen it never did. It was like suddenly realizing that the Americans might wipe out Russia, and then one would have no more worries about war. That would be immoral, and tragic, but it would be safe. Have you ever thought that? That they might one night just wipe the whole lot out, and we would live in our lifetimes. And it was the same with money. I suddenly realized that if I married Stephen I need never think about need or want again. About wanting things I couldn’t buy.’

  ‘Did you always want so many things you couldn’t have?’

  ‘Oh, desperately. Don’t you? Partly it’s looking the way I do. I must have clothes. I’m only young once, as they say, and I’m already twenty-four, and if I don’t have the clothes now I’d feel I wasn’t paying a debt to nature. And other things like food and theatres. I felt I must have them.’

  ‘I feel I must have them, but I tell myself I’m wrong for feeling that way. Didn’t you feel you were being wicked?’

  ‘Wrong. Wicked. I don’t know, I really don’t. All those books I used to read, and I could never work out the simplest thing from them, like whether it was better to be a virgin or not. And then I was so serious at heart. I got so sick of people thinking I was serious. Do you think it was so awful a thing to do, Sal?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘I think it’s rather a thrilling thing to do, to marry for money.’

  ‘You are a baby,’ she said, grandly and wanly: I could see that my enthusiasm was having an excellent and tonic effect on her. ‘It isn’t thrilling at all, it’s rather a cynical thing to do.’

  ‘Well, I think it’s rather grand to be cynical. Rather classy. I’m far too ignorant to be cynical.’

  ‘If you insist on my choosing a non-grand word for myself, then I should say that what I did was just plain feeble. I did it because I didn’t trust people.’

  ‘Didn’t trust who?’

  ‘Men.’

  ‘Oh. I think I trust men as much as I trust women, don’t you?’

  She laughed, and then sneezed. ‘That’s not the point,’ she said.

  ‘Why did you get married in such a hurry?’

  ‘I felt I had to get it over. And Stephen insisted so.’

  ‘Tell me about Stephen. Why was he so keen on marrying you? What kind of man is he to live with?’

  ‘I couldn’t begin to tell you about him. He’s too horrid, you wouldn’t believe how horrid and awful he is. He’s a nut-case, but the most selfish, the most specious, the most mean kind of maniac that was ever let loose . . . I’m not sure that it wasn’t quite straightforwardly all that money that helped to ruin him, you ought to hear him talking about our daily, he talks about her as though she weren’t human. Nothing but a comic creature that says funny things. I know you and I are pretty hopeless with that kind of person, but with me it’s because I’m frightened of them, I’m aware the whole time of how overwhelmingly human they are. She’s a spinster, our daily, and she had a budgie that died. Stephen laughed when she went on about it, and said Poor old Miss McGregor, but I wasn’t so dead to all human feeling not to realize that to her that bird was like a child. And if that’s funny then everything is. Everything.’

  ‘Doesn’t he realize about some people not having money?’

  ‘No, not at all. He knows, but he doesn’t realize. He’s always criticizing the clothes of the people we know—or rather the people I know—it makes me wild. He doesn’t think that certain styles and certain colours cost a lot of money. All the brilliant social satire people manage to detect in his books is nothing more nor less than his own bitchy snobbism. He’s an articulate snob. He doesn’t understand, he sneers.’

  ‘I could have guessed that from his books. They lack compassion.’

  ‘How beautifully, how lit. critically you put it. They do.’

  ‘What on earth did he use to think about my c
lothes then?’

  ‘He hates the way your shoes are always down-at-heel. But on the whole he thinks you’re picturesque.’

  I laughed. ‘Charming,’ I said. ‘And where does he get all his taste and money from?’

  ‘That’s another thing. He pretends he’s making all his money out of his books, but of course he isn’t, he couldn’t keep himself in socks off them. He lives off his father’s tobacco factory or whatever it is. You should hear his double-thinks on lung cancer, they have to be heard to be believed. And he pretends his family are part of the Halifax family, which is just a bloody lie as they have no connexions at all. Not that I would mind about that if it weren’t that he didn’t. I have to tread so carefully, it’s like dealing with a baby. Oh God, he’s such a liar.’

  ‘You haven’t told me why he married you.’

  ‘I really don’t know. I thought he wanted to because he loved me—he used to go on and on about how much he loved me, and how I was the most beautiful woman in the world, which I was only too ready to believe, and how important it was that I should marry him . . . he made me feel it was my duty to marry him, so it wasn’t all money and self-interest, a tiny bit of it was a feeling of pity and obligation on my part. But do you know what all that long love-nonsense was? Nothing but a seduction. Would you credit it? Talk about wicked to marry for money, think of the shock when you find somebody has actually set out to seduce you in a totally hypocritical and methodical way, not meaning a word of it but just wanting to get you into bed or in his case to the altar which for him came to the same thing. It’s like something out of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. And when he gets you there he’s more or less incapable, not that that has anything to do with it. Oh God. Oh God. I knew I was breaking some kind of rule of the heart, but I don’t think I deserve to end up with a husband that made me feel sick.’

  ‘In what way . . . ?’ I began, tentatively, but she stopped me with, ‘Don’t ask me about that, just don’t ask me, that’s all. He hurt me, if you want to know. He hurt me.’

  I didn’t want to know.

  ‘When did you begin to find all this out?’ I asked.

  ‘Far later than I should have done. Far too late. When we married I just thought he was a bit odd. I really believed it when he said he loved me. I thought he was a nut, but quite a kind and sad and interesting one. But later . . . Oh, Sarah, I was so bored. So crashingly, terrifyingly bored. You can’t imagine anything like it. It wasn’t that he suddenly changed, or anything like that, it was just that I saw too much of him and too little of anyone else. It was being abroad that did it, because all the people we ever saw were his friends, or rather his business contacts, and I had to spend hour after hour, meal after meal being civil to people in order to get them to do obscure things for him. I don’t think he wanted to come home because he wanted to hang on to me. And he knew that out there in Rome and Paris I couldn’t really get away.’

  ‘Couldn’t you wander off sometimes?’

  ‘Oh yes. I wasn’t a prisoner. And although he’s jealous he’s not tyrannical. But it was so difficult to meet anyone. All I ever seemed to meet were waiters. I ran across Michael in Paris, and I even envied him.’

  ‘It must be odd, being abroad with a lot of money.’

  ‘It is odd. In some way it kills desire. It pads one from the sharpness of everything.’

  ‘But in Paris you saw John?’

  ‘Yes. John flew over one night after the show, one Saturday night. It was terrible. We wanted to go out together, but I was too worn down by this time to do anything outrageous, so we all three went out to dinner on the Saturday night, very late. We went to a nightclub, which was at least something—you know how Stephen hates drink and places where people drink, unless he’s going to get something out of it. But he and John talked the whole time, about contracts and this bloody film, which is a real non-starter, and in the end I said couldn’t John and I have a dance together. So we did, and he’s so bloody you know what, but for some reason my pride wouldn’t let me say what a bad time I was having, and he was furious with me. He always hated the idea of my marrying Stephen.’

  ‘That’s not surprising.’

  ‘No, it’s not.’ She looked amused at the thought: she was still intrigued and faintly impressed by the absurdity of what she had done.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I’ve recently begun to think that Stephen’s in love with John himself, and won’t admit it, or else has admitted it to John and been told what John the darling would immediately tell him. So when he saw that he had a chance of getting me, when I was what John wanted, it must have seemed to him a chance of evening off a lot of old scores, and of getting a sort of vicarious satisfaction at the same time.’

  ‘I used to think Stephen was queer,’ I said.

  ‘As well as everything else. I don’t know why he’s spent so much of his life and time running after girls. I’ve only found out about all the others quite recently. There was a girl called Sappho that I met at a party. We were very tight, and she told me the whole story, and then she sent me the letters he had written her. And would you credit it, there was a lot of it word for word the same as he wrote to me? Have you ever heard of anything so criminal?’

  ‘Never,’ I said. It was appalling to think of her, such a first-hand beauty, being dished out second- and thirdhand phrases, even by somebody she didn’t love. I tried to imagine what it would have done to my vanity, let alone hers.

  ‘Honestly,’ she went on, ‘you wouldn’t believe what a morass of duplicity that man is. He sins against every kind of human relationship I can think of. You remember how seriously we used to take all these things at Oxford, truth and honesty and being subtle with people and not trampling on feelings? I used to spend days worrying about how to refuse an invitation. And then to meet someone who has all the jargon of it and none of the reality, with no more idea of what it’s about than an elephant . . . oh, when I married him I thought we were going to be sophisticated all right, me marrying him for his money, and he unrequitedly but gratefully worshipping me, and me straightforwardly and nobly and honestly admitting that I didn’t love him—and I never said I did, never—and me straightforwardly and nobly going off with John, and us all sitting and discussing these things cleverly over large drinks—God, what a fool I was, what fools women are, what fools middle-class girls are to expect other people to respect the same gods as themselves and E. M. Forster . . . anyway, I’m through with it all now, through with all that.’

  ‘Through with all what?’ I asked, as I realized that what she was saying was that all these childish idols of truth and honesty were real, and she answered, ‘Oh, through with all that money and duplicity.’

  ‘I don’t understand why you didn’t marry John instead of Stephen. Or didn’t he ask you?’

  ‘He did ask me. In a way. He would have married me. He was mad about me.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you marry him? He’s got plenty of money.’

  ‘He has at the moment, but he spends it like water, and you never can tell with actors. He may be out of work for years.’

  ‘You are a right bitch, aren’t you,’ I said, admiringly.

  ‘And also I don’t really love him very much—oh, love, love, I know one oughtn’t to drag it in, but I really don’t love John enough to marry him. To put up with all that being married means. And I know that he’d be unfaithful if we did marry and I don’t love him little enough to enjoy that, so you see that it wouldn’t have worked . . . ’

  ‘You mean, in fact, that you love him but you don’t trust him,’ I said.

  She was taken aback. She stopped in her outpouring to consider the proposition.

  ‘I never thought about not trusting him. I think it’s unlikely that he loves me more than any of his other women.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why should he?’

  ‘Oh, Louise,’ I said, from the depths of my experience. ‘That’s no way to talk about love.’

  And I meant it. I thought
of Tony and I said, ‘Just because he’s got a lot of other women doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you. Can’t you tell? I thought I could, earlier tonight. How did he react when you decided to marry Stephen?’

  ‘He was furious. But I didn’t pay it much attention, I didn’t see why I should pay him any more respect than he paid me. There’s something about his being an actor that prevents me from taking anything he does seriously. Now Stephen, he’s quite different, writers have always been known for a sensitive lot . . . ’

  ‘It just shows how wrong you can be . . . have you been seeing much of John since you got back from Paris?’

  ‘Nearly every day.’

  ‘But didn’t Stephen notice?’

  ‘I don’t know what he noticed or didn’t notice. He must have realized that it was impracticable to try and keep me away from people here—he was always going out himself, he couldn’t very well ask me for my itinerary. And in a way it was his lack of interest that annoyed me. His lack of superficial interest, I mean. I’m sure he was seething away inside, but he never asked me just sort of casually where I had dinner or what film I’d been to see. Even when I quite wanted to talk about it. I suppose he was afraid to broach the subject. Just in case.,’

  ‘Did he talk to you?’

  ‘Not much. He had this thing about having to be quiet when he worked—not that he was working at anything, except this film script. He kept ringing up his director in Paris. It gives me quite a kick to think of that ’phone bill. I used to ring people up all over the country, everyone I could think of. When I was alone in the evenings. And people were always ringing him up too, business people and publishers and tobacco factory people about shares. They used to think I was his secretary and give me messages. In the end I had to be quite rude, and say I was his wife and not there to write notes for him. All they ever said was that they didn’t know he was married. That did give me a lift, believe me! It made me feel really important.’

  ‘Couldn’t you see all this coming?’

  ‘I told you. I thought I’d be free, to have my cake and eat it. To keep love as a sideline. Don’t you ever marry for love, Sarah. It does terrible things to people.’