The Birdcage

by John Bowen

  “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.

  More than this (so complex are the considerations which govern the professional lives of businessmen!), each of the companies is not merely a business for selling an audience to advertisers, but is also a public service under the control of Parliament, and therefore ultimately of the audience it is selling. It wants to be liked by the people. It wants the people, as well as the manufacturers, to have an idea of it, and, since one can’t entirely disassociate people from manufacturers, it would save a great deal of confusion if this idea, this image, the manufacturers had were also the image the people had.

  Commercial television in Britain came by stages. There were so few companies to begin with that, to the mass of those who watched, commercial telly was simply commercial telly; it was what you watched on Channel Nine, if you’d had your set adapted; it was the telly with the adverts. Time passed. More and more parts of Britain were reached by a network of more and more companies. Since the best (or at least the most expensive) of every company’s programes is transmitted over the whole network, and for most of the time, most of the people who are watching commercial television continue to see the same picture, hear the same sounds, with T.W.W. viewers watching Granada on the network, A.T.V. watching Associated-Rediffusion, most people still do find it difficult to remember—far less to care—which company is which. But the companies care. By its choice of what programmes it originates, by advertising, by public relations, each company works at “projecting an image”. That image is something far more special than merely the picture of a company which is not the B.B.C. Simple enough, it would be, to project that image. The B.B.C. already has an image—an image of “They”, complex enough in its way, but permeated with the flavour of Old Folk’s Homes and the teaching profession. All the commercial companies are “we”, not “They”; they began with that advantage. But that is not enough for them. They would like the public to know which “we” is which.

  The policy of Norah Palmer’s company was ingenious. It was to be the “we” of “They”—or perhaps the “They” of “we”; no one had formulated it in quite those terms. The B.B.C. Charter lays a duty on that great corporation to “inform, instruct and entertain”. But this is from the top; this is what is called an “Establishment” activity. Those who planned the programmes for Norah Palmer’s company thought highly of instruction and information, but they saw themselves as the heirs, not of Lord Shaftesbury, not of Disraeli, but of Place and Lovett, of William Cobbett, the heirs of that great movement of self-education in the nineteenth century that found its final flower in Tit-Bits. Hence the search for genuine originals. Hence those great pieces of television polemic, the Time-Exposure series of documentaries on the Public Schools, the Church of England, Oxford and Cambridge, Cricket and the Foreign Office. Hence (and here we return to Norah Palmer and Mr. Laverick’s play) The Fore-Runners, a series of television revivals of plays of social protest, some of which had had a success of sorts on the stage, some of which had failed, but all of which had passed and perished in the ruck of “Establishment” theatre until the great dawn of what the company’s prestige advertising in the literary weeklies and quality Sundays called “the theatre of conscience” in the nineteen fifties. It seemed to Norah Palmer that Edward Laverick’s The Forgotten Men, played on the stage for a single Tuesday afternoon in 1904, noticed by Shaw, but remembered by nobody, might be a real fore-runner, a real find, and a scoop for her Department.

  First they must find the play, and read it. Well … plays did not disappear; it must be somewhere. “The Avenue Theatre,” Norah Palmer said. “There isn’t an Avenue Theatre any more. What happens to theatres nowadays. You can’t turn your back on one without somebody’s pulling it down.”

  “Ask Richard Findlater. He’s bound to know.”

  Norah Palmer said, “Even then we’ll have to find the author. That’ll be a rare piece of detection after fifty-seven years.” She wrote, “Ask R. Findl abt Avenue Th” on her memo pad. Squad said, “Dear Richard Findlater! Thank God for him. But wasn’t I clever to find that notice?”

  “Yes, you are clever, Squad. I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

  “Keep paying me enough, and you’ll never have to find out. Now let�
�s go and have lunch. I’ve decided I’d rather eat something Spanish than boring old lettuce, so you can take me on expenses, and we can look at the flat afterwards.”

  “All right. Let me go and wash.”

  “And I’ll tell you what, my dear,” Squad said wickedly as they waited for the lift. “If you are going to have a crise with that gentleman of yours, you need a bit of detective work to take your mind off thing.”

  *

  Mrs. Halliday knew a man with a van. Well, he didn’t have the van; a friend of his had the van, but the man Mrs. Halliday knew had the use of the van, and would drive it. As for the man with the van himself, he would come along with the driver, and would bring a couple of West Indians for the heavy work. It wasn’t worth getting the movers in, Mrs. Halliday said, not with the few sticks Miss Palmer had to move. Movers—the only advantage of movers was that you was insured in the matter of breakables, she said, but being as Miss Palmer wasn’t taking the breakables, being as the breakables was to be left with Mr. Ash, Miss Palmer would do better, in a manner of speaking, to save the expense of movers, leaving the actual what you might call moving to be done by the man with the van.

  So Norah Palmer agreed to employ the man with the van, and the man Mrs. Halliday knew who knew the man with the van, and the two West Indians, both on vacation from Nottingham University, where one was studying medicine, the other agriculture.

  “This sofa going, is it?” said the man with the van. “You’re taking the sofa, then?” asked Mrs. Halliday. “Or was you intending to leave it?” Norah Palmer was taking the sofa. Agriculture grasped one end of it, Medicine the other. They lifted. They moved forward, bearing the sofa. They stopped. The sofa was too wide for the door. “I suppose it come in,” the man with the van said. “I suppose it done that, eh? Come in, like? You didn’t need a block and tackle, I suppose?”

  “Not to get it in,” Mrs. Halliday said. “There was some men delivered it, as I remember. You remember, miss? The men? They didn’t have no trouble, did they, not with getting it in?”

  Norah Palmer said, “I think the legs are removable.” Medicine and Agriculture put the sofa down gently. The man with the van removed one of the legs of the sofa. “This one is,” he said.

  The man Mrs. Halliday knew appeared at the door. He said, “There’s a copper outside says I can’t park this side of Beaufort Street on Wednesdays.” “I could have told him that,” Mrs. Halliday said.

  Norah Palmer was taking the sofa. It had been designed for her and for Peter Ash by an architect. They used to say jokingly to their guests that it was the only architect-designed sofa in the country, but this was no longer true, because many of their friends had been so taken by the notion of an architect-designed sofa that they had borrowed the plans, and had sofas made up for themselves. The architect who had designed it was, Norah Palmer and Peter Ash decided, probably more a friend of hers than of his, which was why she was taking the sofa, in spite of the fact that the friend who had designed the fabric with which the sofa was covered was more of a friend of his than of hers. However, the same fabric had been used to re-cover the two armchairs from Heal’s, so Peter Ash was keeping those. Norah Palmer was taking the basket chair they had bought from Danasco.

  “You don’t want to lose these legs, miss,” the man with the van said. “I’ll put them in a bag, shall I? I expect there is a bag for them somewhere.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve no idea where.”

  “Then I’ll put them with the sofa in the van. Wouldn’t look right, would it, a sofa with no legs?”

  Now that they had made a division, there was not so much to go. What there was probably would not fill the van. The sofa. The basket chair. A coffee table. A table lamp. A lithograph by Miro (number 86 of 200) bought in Paris and framed in the Edgware Road. An original modern painting bought on the instalment plan from a gallery in Lisle Street. Cushions. Clothes. Books. The record-player and a cabinet of long-players (Peter Ash had kept the television set). A portable transistor radio. A chest-of-drawers. A writing-desk. A dressing-table (Peter Ash had the built-in cupboards). She had left the crockery, cutlery, pots and pans. She had left the little chandelier in the hall. She had left the Gio Ponti chairs in the dining-alcove and the rosewood dining-table. She had left the curtains, the carpets and the rugs. She had left the Scrabble set, and the wine rack, and the fridge and the filing-cabinets. She had left much more than she was taking, and Peter Ash had given her a cheque for the difference. She had resigned to Peter Ash so much of what they had bought together, of what they had discussed for days before buying, of what they had had second thoughts about after buying, of what they had used until it had become habitual to them. She was taking with her only, as it seemed to Norah Palmer, a token of her household possessions, of those own things among which it is so important to live. Yet, as those things were borne away by Medicine and Agriculture, and she saw how the flat looked without them, she did not envy Peter Ash. There were four indentations in the carpet where the sofa had stood. The lithograph by Miro and the original modern painting bought by monthly instalments had left light patches on the wall. The chest-of-drawers, the dressing-table, the writing-table, each had left its own marks. Everything she was taking from the flat had said I have been here. Remember me. Peter Ash might buy another sofa; new pictures; he might have the wall repainted. But the new pieces would look wrong in that room. Behind the new pictures, beneath the new sofa, the message would still be there, Remember me. In her new flat, what Norah Palmer was taking of the old would give a continuity to her life. New pieces in the old flat would only remind Peter Ash of the discontinuity of his. No, if anyone had to go (and she had not wanted to go), she would rather it were herself, and he must stay behind.

  “All done in here, then?” said the man with the van.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “You be careful of that mirror. Seven years bad luck if you break it,” Mrs. Halliday said to the back end of Agriculture, who was carrying the dressing-table downstairs. Norah Palmer wondered how much she should tip them. Would students be insulted by a tip? Not nowadays; not when so many of them worked in coffee-bars. Perhaps ten shillings to the man with the van would cover everything. Or a pound? But if she were going to tip as much as a pound, she might as well have had the movers in the first place. “Mr…. er … I’m awfully sorry! I’ve forgotten your name,” she said.

  “Stan,” said the man with the van.

  “Yes…. Well, I think I’ll go on ahead now, so as to be ready for you in Ovington Square.”

  “They’ll want their teas.”

  “I’ll expect you in about half an hour, then. Or an hour?”

  “Say forty-five minutes.”

  “You have the address?”

  “Oh, yes,” said the man with the van, and Mrs. Halliday said, “They’ve got the address all right.”

  “I’ll say good-bye, then, Mrs. Halliday.”

  She would say good-bye, but she was not sure how. Mrs. Halliday had been coming in to clean for them for so long; she was as near as one came in 1961 to an old retainer. What did Mrs. Halliday feel about all this? She had never referred to the unmarried state of Peter Ash and Norah Palmer, had seemed to take it for granted, double bed and all. People of Mrs. Halliday’s class, Norah Palmer supposed, were far readier to accept unconventional behaviour than the suburban lower-middles would ever be.

  Norah Palmer hated saying good-byes. She had everything, she supposed—her hand-bag, her hat, the light coat she had decided to wear instead of packing it. The door to the stairs was already open; she had only to go through it for the last time. She said, “Thank you very much, Mrs. Halliday, for all you’ve done,” and almost added, “Look after Mr. Ash,” which would have been too silly and insincere, for Peter Ash was no concern of Norah Palmer’s now, and she had better get used to that.

  Mrs. Halliday said, “I’ll look after him, miss. Don’t you worry.”

  “What? … Oh…. Thank you.”

  “Men
! They don’t know what’s good for them. I’ve got your address. And the telephone. I’ll let you know if anything happens.”

  “Well….” But one couldn’t explain. “I’m sure we’ll meet again,” Norah Palmer said. She must get away before phrases like “We must keep in touch” came popping out of her mouth like toads, to encourage Mrs. Halliday to Lord knew what confidences and what connivance. “I’ll get a taxi in the Fulham Road,” she said, and went quickly down the stairs.

  “You wait here,” said Mrs. Halliday to the man with the van.

  Mrs. Halliday went down to her own basement. There was a birdcage on the kitchen table. The cage was empty; Mrs. Halliday had bought it at Woolworth’s the day before. She took it off the table, and went back upstairs where the man with the van was waiting. “Haven’t got all day, you know,” he said, but Mrs. Halliday only replied, “Five minutes won’t kill you,” and went past him into the kitchen of the flat. She filled the drinking-tray of the new cage with water from the tap, and the food-tray with birdseed from a packet in the cupboard. The new cage had cost ten shillings and ninepence. It stood in the same relation to the cage in which Fred and Lucy lived as Mrs. Halliday’s three-piece suite did to the Heal’s chairs and the architect-designed sofa. But it was a cage; it would contain a bird.

  Mrs. Halliday opened the door of the Liberty’s cage, and put her hand in, the forefinger extended. The lovebirds looked at it seriously, heads to one side. “Here Fred, then! Here, then!” Mrs. Halliday said. “Ooops-a-lockle! Ooops-a-lockle! Took! took! took!” Mrs. Halliday did not really know which was Fred and which Lucy, and, since they had never produced an egg, could not even be sure that both were not Fred. But she knew that, if she held her finger out for long enough, one of the birds would perch on it, for Fred and Lucy were accustomed to Mrs. Halliday; they had seen more of her, and at closer quarters, than they had seen of Peter Ash and Norah Palmer. So very soon Fred (or it may have been Lucy) came to perch on Mrs. Halliday’s finger, and stroked the side of her thumb with his beak. Mrs. Halliday withdrew her hand from the cage, and shut the door, leaving Lucy (or it may have been Fred) alone in there. She put the other lovebird in the Woolworth’s cage. “There’s this to go,” she said to the man with the van.