The Birdcage

by John Bowen

  And by the time she had finished telling Peter Ash all this, the party was over, and Bunty was far too tiddly to go back to the dormy. So she went home with Peter Ash instead.

  *

  Edward Laverick was seventy-five years old. Everyone was very kind, and he had his pension. Daphne had insisted that he must keep his pension, and spend it on himself. She said that old people ought to have independence. At first, Edward Laverick had often been able to buy something for the twins out of his pension, but now the twins were nineteen. Gerald had his scholarship, and Rosemay was working in the Public Library, so they needed nothing from Edward Laverick that he could afford to give them.

  Daphne had looked after Edward Laverick for the whole of her adult life, so she knew what was best for him. When her mother died, Daphne was seventeen years old. That was in 1936. Edward Laverick, who knew well enough the dangers of such a relationship, had been determined that she should not “sacrifice herself” for him, and had even considered marrying again to avoid that, except that, at fifty years old, to marry again is not so easily done. Besides, Daphne showed no signs of an intention to make any such sacrifice. She had her friends, and did not lose them because her mother was dead. Into a general programme of cleaning house, washing, shopping and getting meals for two, one can fit a dance at the Town Hall or an evening at the cinema easily enough, and Daphne did so. Edward was not helpless. Though Daphne took her mother’s place in charge of domestic matters, Edward was ready enough to help, and did. She finished school, and went on to a teachers’ training college, continuing to live at home, and look after her father. When the war came, she did not, it is true, join any of the Women’s Auxiliary Services, for there was no point in making her father homeless for that, but she took up the job she had been trained for, and became a certificated teacher at the local Elementary School. She had been friendly for some time with a young man named Alan, who was in her year at Coll. Friendly?—well, she had let him go farther than anyone else had ever gone, though not, of course, as far as he had wanted to go. When he was called up, they became engaged to be married. Alan, and their engagement, survived Dunkirk. Then it had seemed likely that he would be posted to the Middle East, so they were wed. Six months later, Alan was killed in the desert. A little over three months later still, Daphne took time off from work to bear twins. It was providential that her father was still at home to help her care for them.

  But London early in 1942 was no place for new-born children. As soon as they could, they had moved to Edward’s married sister, whose husband had a small farm on moorland just outside Chesterfield. Two more children were no great matter to her. She had borne and reared seven, and had the habit of it. Daphne found a teaching post again easily enough. Edward went to work in a factory.

  That sounds a simple decision. It had not been simple—or, if easy to make, not easy to execute. At the Ministry, they had said he was mad. They had been worried about him, really worried, even with so much else to worry them; they had been worried at the Ministry. An Executive Officer of fifty-six, with so little time before he was due a pension, to renounce it, and go off to the provinces, to do God knows what! Let Laverick take time to think about it; let him take a week off if necessary; let him have a little talk with his doctor. But Edward did not think he was mad. He was getting his own back, he thought. Long ago the Civil Service had trapped him, or at least it had allowed him to trap himself. His need, his parents’ strong wish, that he should better himself; it might sound snobbish and small, but it had led to an education, scraped on their part and slaved on his; it had led to evening classes at the Poly in York Place, to a growth of the mind, a joyous certainty that all the time he was pushing farther and farther back the blinkers that class and poverty had fastened on him. It had led (perhaps because his own imagination was too small) to the sort of job that had seemed made for him, the sort of job in which, by hard work and the passing of periodical examinations, one was bound to move, could not help but move, steadily up the ladder of promotion. So he had become a clerical officer in the Civil Service. Oh, he’d had security later on in the difficult days of the early nineteen-thirties, and he’d moved up that ladder. There was no cheat there. Time and the passing of the requisite examinations guaranteed promotion to Edward Laverick. He had moved from the Clerical Grade into the Executive Grade, and at the end he would have his pension. What he would never have was any real responsibility, since that, in the Civil Service, is only given to the Administrative Officers, who are most often recruited in a different way. It has to be so. Responsibility and judgment go together. There had been no opportunity in the Clerical and Executive Grades for Edward Laverick to exercise judgment, so it would not have been in the public interest to have given him responsibility.

  You and I, reader, looking back from the nineteen-sixties, you and I, who have read a little history, a little psychology, a little sociology and get a whole lot more every week, in the book reviews of the Fridays and the Sundays, we may see very well that, in the context of his time and his education, Edward Laverick had done about as well for himself as he could, and that the Civil Service had been for him, not a trap, but a most appropriate pigeon-hole. He had written a play (we shall come again to that), but if he had had a writer’s vocation, a writer’s obsessions, he would not have stopped at one. He was not a scientist, not even a backyard inventor, and he had no money-itch, that might have brought him from barrow to shop to chain of shops.

  Today Edward Laverick would pass his Eleven-Pius, go on to a Grammar School, stay there until the age of eighteen, and then win a place at a University; today he might indeed become an Administrative Officer of the Civil Service, or a producer of B.B.C. programmes, or a schoolmaster, solicitor or dentist. He might do very well for himself today, but yesterday he did about as well as might have been expected.

  Edward Laverick, who lacked our hindsight and our detachment, did not see matters like that in 1942. He resented the Ministry, and the renouncing of his pension seemed to him the kind of gesture that proved him alive again; it was as if he had torn the badge of life-in-death from off his arm. And did they think he cared, in 1942, with the war in its most critical stage, and two new-born grandchildren in the house—did they think that, when men were dying, and great events were all about him, Edward Laverick cared about his job or his pension, cared about “security” at that time of all others, cared about the piddling documentation of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries? No, he would take Daphne and the twins to the moorland farm where his sister lived, and he (even he, at fifty-six) would bicycle in all weathers and every working day to the factory where, however badly to begin with, he could do a real job with his hands, packing the components that men needed to fight with, and earning (as it turned out) as much money a week as he had done after forty years with the Civil Service. Edward Laverick was going to work with “real” people, and the Ministry knew what it could do with its pension, because the time had come for Edward Laverick, like Bartleby the Scrivener, to say “I would prefer not”. Heroic sentimentality!

  And then the war ended, first in Germany, and then in Japan, with both a bang and a whimper from those who had the time, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to make so undignified an expression of suffering. Edward Laverick’s grandchildren grew, and were old enough to go to school. The urgency dribbled out of life. There was no longer any reason to stay on a small farm outside Chesterfield, especially since it was more crowded now with cousins returned from the war. Edward Laverick had grown too old to bicycle in all weathers to work in a factory, even if the factory itself had continued to need him, now that there were younger men available. He had a house of his own in Herne Hill, if he could recover it from its present tenants. Daphne wrote, first to the tenants, then to a solicitor, and finally to the London County Council Department of Education. The return was arranged. And about time too, Daphne said in private to her father. She didn’t want her children growing up with north-country accents like one of those comedians on
the wireless.

  The children had seen more of Edward Laverick’s married sister than of their own mother, who had been teaching five days a week. They knew that Edward Laverick’s married sister was not their mother, but they loved her as a friend. They wept when they had to leave, and so did she. But tears are soon dried. Children, like puppies, adapt themselves soon enough to a new home if it has familiar things—a blanket, a toy, people who are not strangers. They were not separated, and Mum and Grandy had moved with them. Old men, like old dogs, find change less easy. The year was 1947. Edward Laverick was sixty-one, not yet eligible for his old age pension (he had renounced the other), but not eligible for a new job either. He had no money, and nothing to do.

  It did not matter, Daphne said. They could manage without money from her father. And she would give him pocket-money from her own salary until the old age pension came along.

  She gave him a pound a week. He gave up smoking. He did odd jobs about the house. He looked after the fires, and emptied house refuse into the dustbin, and took the washing to the launderette, and was entrusted with shopping under instruction, since most items of food were still rationed at that time, and, for what was not, Daphne was at school, and could not queue. There was a small garden at the back of the house, and he planted vegetables in it, and tended them. He saved three shillings a week out of his pound towards Christmas and birthday presents for the twins. In the evenings, he would read books from the Public Library, which cost nothing.

  Then, when he did get his old age pension, Daphne would take none of it. She said that he more than earned his keep, and that it was good for a man to have money of his own.

  This was Edward Laverick, author of The Forgotten Men.

  But all that business of writing a play was over and done a long time ago. It belonged to the past, to the days of “self-improvement” and of evening classes, when he was sustained by something too vague to be called ambition, a sort of undirected hope that if he worked hard and learned enough, he would become in time—what? He didn’t know; never asked; it was enough to feel himself growing, and know that he pleased his parents. That was before he had been “caught” (as one used to put it), before he had found himself—he supposed he had asked Janet; he must have done so; but “found himself” better describes what happened—found himself married. He had never gone on with that sort of thing, that writing; it had not been his idea in the first place. It was Mr. Lambert, who gave the English classes at night school, who had encouraged him, and had made him rewrite it over and over again, and had sent the play when it was finished to a group of people he knew who had founded their own company because they couldn’t stand the sort of thing that was put on nowadays. That had been in 1904, which was a very long time ago. Edward Laverick himself in those days had had a great taste for the sort of thing that was put on, and would go in the pit or the gallery whenever he could afford it. If he could have written the sort of thing that was put on, he would have done so, but every time he tried, Mr. Lambert had told him to be “true to himself”, and had made him rewrite it. They had told him he was a “primitive”, which sounded almost as if he hadn’t taken trouble with his play, when, truth to tell, he had slaved on it. They had said that the renaissance of the English theatre must come from below, that art was not artificial, but was about real life, and that the whole silly crew of West End dramatists were not worth a tenth of one real person like Edward Laverick. (They had said, in fact, about Edward Laverick in 1904 very much what people were saying about Norah Palmer’s genuine original dustman in 1961, but the tide was not with them.) Then they had put Edward Laverick’s play on a stage one Tuesday afternoon, and they hadn’t got it right. They weren’t the people Edward Laverick had in his mind when he wrote the play. What they said didn’t sound right, and they didn’t remember it all. And very few people came to watch it. Edward Laverick, sitting with Mr. Lambert in the stalls, had felt like part of a death.

  He hadn’t gone on with that sort of thing. You couldn’t, after all, do nothing but English at night school.

  *

  The Librarian of the British Drama League was sure they would have a script of The Forgotten Men, because they did have scripts of nearly everything.

  “Even if it was only done once?” Aubrey asked. “I mean, it wasn’t a success or anything. It just had one matinée performance, and nobody’s heard of it since. I shouldn’t think it’s been published.”

  The Librarian of the B.D.L. said that a surprisingly large number of plays were published that had never been performed at all.

  But The Forgotten Men was not among them.

  “Never mind,” the Librarian said. The B.D.L. also had a great many scripts which had not been published. Battered and tattered by use, interlined with comments, they might be; whole pages might have come loose and be lost in rehearsal, but they were still scripts. There was the Horniman Collection. Might it be in that? Did Aubrey remember what management had presented the play? The Independent Theatre? Well, there had been a good many with names like that at the turn of the century, and the people who ran them were usually of a sort to leave their scripts to the B.D.L. when they died.

  Aubrey and the Librarian consulted the B.D.L. Catalogue. The Forgotten Men was not to be found on it. Nor was Edward Laverick. He seemed not to have written another play, not even a one-acter for amateur performance.

  “Oh well,” Aubrey said. “If you haven’t got one, you haven’t. I’ll tell them.”

  But he must not give up hope so soon. The B.D.L. Library also contains books of reference. There is Professor Allardyce Nicholl’s comprehensive list of productions, but the fifth and last volume stops at 1900. There are general works about the theatre of that time. Might the Independent Theatre have presented any other plays, better known than The Forgotten Men? Shaw’s review did not name the actors of Mr. Laverick’s play, but if Aubrey could trace any other reference to the Independent Theatre, he might discover who ran it. And he, if he were still alive (and so many of them were; it was sad sometimes), might have a script, or at least know where one was to be found.

  The morning passed in research, and the afternoon passed, and the Independent Theatre could not be traced in the indices of any of the works of reference held by the B. D. L. It did not seem to have enjoyed a long life as a production company. “So many of them didn’t,” the Librarian said. The late eighteen-nineties and early nineteen hundreds had been a time of squandered idealism in the theatre, of single productions of Maeterlinck by semi-professional groups, of little legacies wasting slowly in the Steinway Hall.

  There was always the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, said the Librarian with the air of a shop-keeper forced to recommend the establishment round the corner. From what she could gather, this had been a public performance of The Forgotten Men. It would have needed the Lord Chamberlain’s licence, and his office would have kept a script.

  “Still?”

  “Oh yes. Scripts are stored in the Wine Vaults of St. James’s Palace, so of course they survived the bombing.”

  “Will they lend it to us?”

  “Certainly not,” the Librarian said. “I doubt if they’ll even let you copy it. From what I’ve heard, they’re always extremely helpful in the matter of information, but inclined to be a tiny bit obsessive about the scripts themselves. Officials are like that, you know. They hoard things. Still, you can always try.”

  *

  She was charming. She worked so hard at everything. She so much wanted to please. And she admired him.

  There is a phrase, “a bit of crumpet”. Bunty was a bit of crumpet. She was warm and toasted and made to be eaten. You could have her when you wanted her, and, for the rest of the time, keep her in the bread-bin out of the way. She demanded nothing of you. (The idea that a crumpet should demand anything!) Your mouth watered when you thought of her. You bit into her, and the butter ran down your chin. Bit. A bit of crumpet.

  “We’ll just have a warm-up, shall we?” the director said
. “O.K. for a bit of a run-through, Peter?”

  They were in a deconsecrated chapel in Finsbury Park, which The Living Arts unit often used as a studio. This was a special edition, and it was to be given over entirely to what they had billed as Good Talk—or, as it was sometimes called, “the art of conversation”, which was something that the English were known, by themselves and Anglophile Americans, to do enormously well, but which was in danger of being killed by television.

  It was to be urbane, and it was to be spontaneous. “Listen, everybody, I want you to be relaxed,” the director said. There was port in a decanter, and it would be passed to the left. “I just want you to be yourselves,” the director said. “Absolutely cosy and relaxed.” They were using the Czinner technique of filming so as to keep the whole thing spontaneous—three cameras covered the table, and would be in operation for the whole of the discussion: from the enormous footage produced, the film would be cut. Expensive? Sure, sure, sure, the director admitted, but The Living Arts would go to expense cheerfully enough to get the effect it wanted, and Good Talk was spontaneous as everyone knew, or it was nothing. “Smoke if you want to, and remember that the cameras just aren’t there,” the director said. “Just be as jolly and cosy as you would at home. Now I want this whole thing to be absolutely spontaneous and genuine, so we won’t rehearse at all. We’ll just run it through,” the director said.

  Peter Ash wanted to be fair. Above all things, fair. He had made it quite clear to Bunty from the beginning that the whole thing must be casual. “I’d rather not go to bed with you at all,” he had said (though they were already in bed when he had said it), “than run the risk of your taking me seriously.” He had said, “I have to be fair to you, Bunty. I’m much older than you are. If you’re ever tempted to take me seriously you just remember that.” And he had begun the speech from Candida that goes, When I am thirty, she will be forty-five, but couldn’t remember how it ended, and anyway, since he was not a woman, the speech in his mouth became confusing. What it all amounted to, he had told her, was that he was too old for this to be more than just a passing thing.