The Birdcage

by John Bowen

  He had done his duty. He had been fair. He had warned her. By a deliberate self-control, he had interrupted the love-play of lips and the tips of fingers to warn her that they must keep it casual. She had made some reply. Something quite off the point, as one might expect. Oh, yes—she had said, “Nobody’s ever put his tongue in my belly-button before. It does feel funny.” What a ridiculous innocent she was! The most pleasant way of making love in the end, he thought, is to teach somebody. Bunty had been prepared to do anything. She’d had very little experience, as far as he could tell (the boys she had known at Swiss Cottage had been lovers of the grunting-athletic school), but she had no inhibitions either.

  The Living Arts had needed to cast about a bit for their good talkers. Reference to Senior Common Rooms may be all very well, but, if one wishes to be thought forward-looking, one has to be wary of seeming to be linked with “the Establishment”. Then there had been the question of including women. Port and that sort of thing—the associations are masculine. The very idea of good talk is masculine. To the idea of good talk, add the idea of women, and all you have is a telephone conversation. Yet there were many intelligent and talented women. The Brains Trust on television always included a woman. Usually. (It is nowhere written down that the ratio of women to men in a television discussion programme shall be one to four, but that is how it works out.) Eventually the Unit in conference had decided it would have:

  (1) A woman, to represent women.

  (2) A north-country (and preferably working-class) novelist, to represent the anti-“Establishment” establishment.

  (3) A philosopher, to represent thought.

  (4) A painter, to represent the visual aspect of things.

  (5) A poet who was also an academic—to represent the application of intelligence to artistic creation.

  The woman should be either an actress, a sociologist, or a Life Peeress. One of the five should be Jewish, and one should be either black, brown, or yellow or some shade in between. There should be no politicians. If you have one politician, you have to have two, and then you have to make sure that nobody else on the programme has political opinions of any kind. Nobody should be French.

  They had made a mistake, Peter Ash now saw, in choosing Fred Trent, the best-known, though not the best, of the north-country, working-class novelists. Somehow, before the discussion began, they would have to find a way in which he could be effectively interrupted. None of the others seemed disposed to try; they merely talked sotto voce amongst themselves, and that was not true entertainment: it was not even visual. Conflict was one thing; ignoring each other was quite another.

  “Well, I don’t know, you can’t beat the old writers, can you?” Fred Trent said. “I mean, I’ve read them all, you know, in my time. Dickens … Thackeray … Trollope … George Eliot … Fielding … Priestley … what I call my tradition—you can keep your Prousts; I’ve no time for that—Tolstoy … I read them in the Army, as a matter of fact. I never did anything in the Army, you see; I just loafed about. Doing anything in the military way was against my principles. I said, ‘If you’re going to pay me what I’m worth, that’s different. If not, I’ll do nothing.’ I was a private.” (Challengingly to the philosopher, who had been the youngest full colonel in the Royal Intelligence Corps, a body notorious for young colonels.) “You didn’t know about my Army career, did you? That’s because I haven’t written it yet, but I will. I’ve got it all up here, you know.” (Tapping his forehead with a finger which, if he had had to describe it, he would have called “blunt”.) “Oh, yes, we’ll get to that in time. I’ve confined meself so far; I know that. I’ve confined meself to the Trent country.” (A phrase coined by Fred Trent himself to describe the small village in county Durham where he had been born, brought up, married, and had bought a home.) “I haven’t needed to go outside the Trent country yet, but I can when I want to. I’ll expand, you see. The whole of England’ll be the Trent country before I’ve done. I don’t waste anything, you know. I mean, sitting here, listening to you, there’s a little recording machine inside” (tapping again), “taking it all down, and storing it up for me to use. You’ll be famous some day, when I get to you.” (The philosopher, who knew he was already famous, smiled a cold smile.) “Writing’s a great agony for me, you know. It’s not easy. Sometimes I have to go out and get drunk to break the tension. Because …” (very slowly, with great earnestness, glaring them all into a momentary attention) “the task I have set myself is to write English prose better than any other writer now living. And don’t think I find that easy, because I don’t. Not because there’s any competition. There isn’t. There isn’t anybody writing in England today who can come within a mile of me. There’s just the people who imitate me, and the people who can’t even do as well as that, writing nancy muck about young men called Archibald. But that’s not the trouble. What I find so difficult is to maintain the standard I have set myself. No other man could keep to it, and I don’t mind telling you it plays the devil with me sometimes.”

  “That’s very good, Fred,” said the director. “That’s very good indeed, isn’t it, Peter? But you’ll keep it a bit brisker, won’t you? Relaxed, but brisk. Lots of jolly old attack, eh?”

  “It’s a funny sort of wine, port,” said the painter, who came from Bermondsey, to the philosopher, who came from Oxford. “Sort of sweet. When I was on one of them television discussions, we had whisky.”

  “Barbarous. I haven’t had lunch yet. I thought we’d be lunching here.”

  “They give you sandwiches after.”

  A boy in pointed shoes took the decanter away from the painter, and placed a silver chain round the neck of it. The chain had been rubbed with soap. He replaced the decanter on the table. “How’s that?” he asked one of the cameramen.

  “Still hot.” The painter said, “Even when you think you’re finished, they keep making you do bits again for the close-ups like.”

  “We’ll just run though very roughly then, shall we?” said the director. Peter Ash said to the academic poet, “Would you say you’re on the side of life?” and the academic poet said, “I’m afraid I never know what that means.”

  Peter Ash was flustered. If Dr. Leavis and Mr. Richard Hoggart knew what they meant when they said somebody was on the side of life, then surely the academic poet must know. He decided that it was a joke. “We’ll keep that in,” he said.

  “Now, lots of hush,” said the director. “We’re not going to try to run through the whole thing, because we haven’t got time. Peter’s got the list of topics for discussion, so he’ll just guide you gently from one to another. You don’t need to bother about anything. Just concentrate on that old, relaxed sort of college atmosphere. Keep the old port circulating to the left, and that sort of thing. We don’t mind if you get into a bit of an argument from time to time, but don’t be too … I mean, don’t——” More than half the cinema audience nowadays was in its teens, and the rest was old-age pensioners come in for a bit of a warm. One shouldn’t talk down to such people, of course, but at the same time it did no harm to remember that most of them didn’t understand any word of more than three syllables. But he mustn’t inhibit his talkers, or they might fall silent. “Anyway, just be relaxed,” he said. Like the beam of a lighthouse his smile swept the table. “And brisk.”

  “Quiet now, please,” said the Floor Manager. “All set for a run-through.”

  They waited, sitting there nervously at the table in the heat of the lights. The woman, who couldn’t remember whether they’d been given permission to smoke, lit a cigarette to represent female emancipation. The philosopher wondered whether port would boil. From the air came music. The Floor Manager brought his hand down sharply like a conductor. Peter Ash poured himself a glass of port first for the academic poet on his right, then for himself, then passed the decanter easily to the left, and smiled a whimsical, welcoming, relaxed, intelligent smile. “Hullo there!” he said to the camera. “Nowadays, as I expect you’ve noticed, we’re alway
s being told that the art of conversation is dead.” He paused for a count of four. “But is it? Can we really say it is?”

  Immediately you knew that it wasn’t. The art of conversation, like all the other arts, might take a bit of pasting sometimes, but just as long as Peter Ash was around to see it safely through, you could be sure it would survive.

  *

  The flag-sellers were out in the Brompton Road. Patient in hats they stood, spaced out at intervals of sixty yards or so. They did not ask. One could feel them not asking from twenty feet away. Sometimes a young one would jingle her collecting-can, while the people passed with eyes averted.

  “Sailors’ Day,” said Norah Palmer to Squad Appleby. Do you have sixpence?”

  “Ah, but shall I get a sailor for it? No, my dear,” said Squad to the flag-seller, “If charity is to be disbursed to the fleet, I prefer to give my mite much more directly.”

  It was not certain that the flag-seller heard him, or, if she heard, she did not trouble to understand. People did make remarks when they bought flags. One expected it of people. Kind remarks, they made, or facetious remarks, but only if they should ask for change was an answer required. Norah put two shillings in the collecting-can, took a flag for herself, and gave one to Squad. “Thus we buy immunity,” she said.

  The flag-seller asked, “Would you like me to pin it in place for you, sir?” Since Norah had paid for both flags, this deference to the male annoyed her, and she determined to put herself on an equal plane of sophistication with Squad, and continued, “Anyway you know perfectly well you couldn’t get a sailor for sixpence.”

  “Two pounds, my dear. The market rate.”

  “How useful to know!”

  “Norah, love, if that were ever in your mind, as they say, how swiftly it could be arranged.”

  “No thank you, Squad.”

  Crass! Men—even Squad—were capable of an extraordinary crassness sometimes. One couldn’t, of course, be hurt by such a piece of unthinking idiocy (though she was hurt, just the same). She had flushed and unconsciously she had tightened her lips, just like an offended spinster (which is what she was), and now she must untighten them, and be pleasant to poor Squad. It wasn’t his fault. Perhaps she was already at the age when one took a gigolo—oh dear! all those Michael Arlen associations—orchids and illicit love and long moonlight drives at high speed along the Gran’ Corniche in a Hispano. Did people read Michael Arlen nowadays? She supposed not. Had Squad ever wept for Iris March. “Have you ever wept for Iris March, Squad?” she said, and Squad replied, “Not eally,” which answered the question, she supposed, but not the question behind the question. She herself had passed the years from thirteen to seventeen or so in a prolonged spasm of voracious and indiscriminate reading. Three books a day often—it was like having a tapeworm—Bessie Bunter in The Schoolgirl, all those Forsytes going on and on from one Saga to another bound in green with gold lettering, back copies of The New Yorker, Michael Arlen, Gerhardi, Noel Coward’s autobiography (he didn’t have two little dots then; that dated one, she supposed), Mrs. Dalloway and then right through Virginia Woolf in a great drunken orgy until she was knocked over by The Waves. Rosamund Lehmann, she had read, and Gladys Mitchell, Charles Morgan, The Mortal Storm (how she had wept, and then she had seen the movie, and wept and wept again)—good and bad, pulp and the pretty paper of The Hogarth Press, arty and crafty, The Hobbit and Emily Dickinson and Woman & Beauty and old second-hand copies of volumes from The Left Book Club, all mixed up and only half understood, she had eaten them all. “Gigolo”—she hadn’t known what the word meant, and an older girl had explained, “Well, it’s when you sort of pay men to make love to you.” Norah Palmer was not yet so worldly-wise that she would know how to make the payment. Gold cigarette cases, the books said, and suits from Savile Row, but surely spot cash would be cheaper and more acceptable?

  That wasn’t bothering her. One could do without that—she could anyway, and had for some time now. “I leave you here,” she said. She was bound to the office, Squad to rehearsal rooms in Westminster. No, it was that life felt so empty, when she allowed herself to think of it. Perhaps it had been empty before, but it had not seemed so. A home; she missed a home. The flat at Beaufort Street had been a home. She had helped to make it, had planned for it, bought for it, moved furniture, matched colours, hung pictures. Overton Square was not a home. It was a flatlet, not a home.

  She must entertain. And she must go out more. She had been out, of course, from time to time—to a couple of parties, and she had been asked out to dinner, though a single woman is not as much in demand for dinner parties as a single gentleman. She had felt unprotected, but this would pass. One must work at friends, as everybody knows and she must work at hers, or the days would go by and she would find herself friendless, lost, out of touch.

  For the present, she had put a routine between herself and the need to take things up again. She would work late at the office, and then stop off for a while at a drinking club in Knightsbridge. They were quite a good crowd there really, most of them film or television or advertising people, most of them in their late thirties, forties, or early fifties. They were not perhaps quite her kind of people—they certainly weren’t intellectuals—but she knew them, had met them; they were not strangers; they were the sort of people one could drink with. Norah Palmer would have a gin and water at the bar, and then another one or two. If she were to find herself with a crowd who were drinking, she would stand her round with the rest. Usually she would leave the club at nine or half past, just too late for a movie. Just too late for anything really, except to boil herself an egg, read a book for a while, and go, very slightly blurry, to bed.

  *

  The Lord Chamberlain’s Office was helpful, and then again it wasn’t. They had a copy of The Forgotten Men right enough, down there in the vaults, but Aubrey couldn’t get at it. “I don’t think we could allow you to make a copy of the play without the author’s permission,” the man in the Lord Chamberlain’s Office said. “Unless of course you could secure proof of his death over fifty years ago, in which case it would be out of copyright.”

  “Well, he may be dead. In the Great War or something. In Flanders Fields.”

  “Passchendaele? That was 1917.”

  “The Somme then?”

  “But have you proof of it?”

  “Not actual proof.” There was a pause, and it seemed that the man in the Lord Chamberlain’s Office did not intend to break it. Aubrey said, “There wouldn’t be any objection to my coming along and reading it, I suppose?”

  “I’m afraid this is a very small office.”

  “I wouldn’t take up much room.” No reply. “Or I could go down to the vaults, and read it there.” At once Aubrey had a vivid mental picture of himself in the vaults. The walls would be damp, he supposed—No, for that would destroy the manuscripts—the walls would be dry, but very cold and dark, and he would sit between rows of locked boxes on a tiny wooden stool, and would read by the light of a guttering candle. They would not let him down there, loose among all those plays, without supervision, so one of the sentries would have been detailed to watch him, and would stand, moonfaced and patient, behind the stool squinting under that silly peak their caps have, to make sure that Aubrey was not copying. Well, it would make a change from being photographed by tourists, and fainting on parade; the sentry would not mind; he would expect to be tipped. “Couldn’t I just sit in a corner of your office somewhere? I read terribly quickly,” Aubrey said.

  “We do try to be helpful. I wonder if we might arrange something. Shall I phone you?”

  “When?”

  “Three or four weeks’ time? We might be able to arrange something then.”

  “Three or four weeks!” The man in the Lord Chamberlain’s office seemed to be unaware that Mr. P. was taking a personal interest.

  “I don’t promise that we’ll be able to fix anything definite then. But we could talk, you know, and perhaps arrange to telephone again.�
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  Aubrey thanked the man, and hung up, and reported his lack of progress to Norah Palmer, who said, “There must be some information on the MS. itself. An agent, or a name and address or something. Ask him.”

  “He’ll probably tell me that there is, but I’m not to know it.”

  “Ask anyway.”

  There was information. There was a name and address. “I wondered why you hadn’t asked about that,” said the man in the Lord Chamberlain’s office. “No reason why we shouldn’t tell you that. Might help you to trace the chap, eh?” Edward Laverick’s address was given as 316, Brick Lane, Bethnal Green. Aubrey took a taxi, and was driven to Bethnal Green, where taxis are rare.

  There were furniture factories in Brick Lane, and not much else. “The English Cottage Furniture Company,” “Rustic Tables, Ltd.”, “Regency Teak and Fine Woods”, “Bath and West Country Furnishings”, there they all were in Bethnal Green. “Well, it stands to reason, dunnit, I mean,” said a man at the factory where 316 Brick Lane had once stood. “You couldn’t call it like Bethnal Green Furniture now, could you? Who’d buy it?” Aubrey could buy a table for seven pounds at the factory which would cost him fifteen in the West End. In fact, since Aubrey was to do with the television, he could have one for six pound ten. Aubrey made a note of the name of the factory and its address. “There’s no trickery in it, mate,” the man said. “Them shops, they’ve got their overheads, the same as you or me. Stands to reason. You’re paying for the overheads.”

  No. 316 Brick Lane had been destroyed in the Blitz. At the Town Hall, Aubrey discovered that a family named White had lived there. White was a common name. There were many Whites in the borough, though none were the Edward James and Mary May who had lived at 316. Perhaps Edward James and Mary May White had been killed when their house was bombed. Perhaps they had moved out of the borough. Lavericks, a further digging into the records showed, had lived in the house till 1924, Henry Arthur and Susan Pease, and Susan Pease Laverick had continued to live there until 1927. About sons and daughters it was difficult to say. Perhaps the Whites had been related to the Lavericks; houses usually did change ownership to relatives in Bethnal Green. But perhaps they had only bought it. No, there were no Lavericks on the electoral roll at present. So much for Bethnal Green. Since Aubrey could not find a taxi to bring him back, he caught the Underground.