The Birdcage

by John Bowen

  The rest of the story had been much as he had told it to Norah Palmer next morning, except that, if one truly considers it, Peter Ash had been more brave than he suggested, since he’d had not only the gondolier, but Mario to contend against. It had been an humiliating and a comic episode, but it had left no scar, since he had come out of it so well. It was an incident now, a story to be told at parties with the details altered; he felt no distress at remembering it. Only for us—for me writing it, for you reading it—for us for whom this novel is, among other things, a finding out, the incident cannot be isolated. It has connections with the past, and points to the future.

  Peter Ash restless, Peter Ash fuddled, Peter Ash on the loose for the evening, Peter Ash determined to end his nine years’ affair with Norah Palmer, had looked for a young man to pass the time away, so you may at least assume that he was following a preference. For nine years this preference had slept; now in this combination of circumstances, in this foreign city, on this warm summer evening, it woke, stretched, opened one eye, looked about and saw, first Bluey and the American as an example, then Mario as an opportunity. The preference reaffirmed its existence, and then went back to sleep.

  As a young man, Peter Ash had been what is called “a practising homosexual”, but Norah Palmer was one of those women who make it a minor vocation to “cure” homosexuals, and, moving as she did among intellectuals and creative artists, found plenty of opportunities to exercise it. It was all a waste, Norah Palmer thought, an appalling waste: so many of those who thought themselves to be homosexual were no more so than she was. Fashion or accident, she thought, might tilt a young man one way before his emotions had settled down, and then a sense of doom, or a reaction against the censure of society or simply the fact that he had undertaken responsibilities to another person, or made friends within a particular circle—all these factors might keep him tilted, when there was no need for it and it was all waste. Norah Palmer disliked waste. If, by offering her own body for use, she could prevent it, she would do so. She had no notion of the body as an altar. If by a little affection, a little patience, a casual and undemanding attitude to sex, she might show a better way to some of those who were not (she felt sure) by nature homosexual, then why not for goodness’ sake? She had brought reassurance, if not actual “cure” to an Economics don, a B.B.C. Talks Producer, a poet (but he, as it turned out, was alcoholic as well, and there was no doing anything with him) and a man from Chatham House, and then she had taken up with Peter Ash, and at last, as it seemed, the cure had worked, and her vocation been justified.

  I have so far presented Peter Ash to you as a person in the main dislikeable, but people are not usually dislikeable for no reason. You must consider that Norah Palmer lived with Peter Ash for nine years, and she was a human being as we are, and could not have done so if he had been entirely a monster. Peter Ash’s homosexuality, when Norah Palmer first met him, was part of the total Peter Ash, and the reasons for it were also the reasons for what you may have found dislikeable in him. I do not suggest that they would account for homosexuality in anyone else, man or woman, for I do not know what causes this state of affairs. Anyone who has read Mr. Gordon Westwood’s excellent little book, A Minority, will know that, in the histories of the people Mr. Westwood interviewed, he could find no significant correspondences that would allow him to form a hypothesis as to cause; there seemed to be as many “reasons” for homosexuality as there were homosexuals. Indeed, even the word “homosexual”, Mr. Westwood tells us, cannot properly be used to describe a person, but only an action, and Norah Palmer’s poet had, as she discovered, been capable of rollicking in bed with her on Sunday night, to spend Monday afternoon with equal enjoyment in the arms of a long-distance lorry-driver with a wife and two-year-old daughter in Devizes. So all the possible reasons you may find in the various studies on the subject were irrelevant to Peter Ash except two, and those two were relevant to more than his sexual deviation. Peter Ash was selfish, and he was, to use the jargon word, “insecure”—that is, he was frightened that at any time he might lose what respect and affection he had from people, because he did not believe that he deserved it.

  These reasons, you may say, are not reasons at all; they explain immediately, but not finally. Why was he selfish? Why was he insecure? The two are linked, of course: a person not self-obsessed does not demand the moment-by-moment reassurance that other people like and respect him. For the self-obsession, I offer no final, all-explaining whys. Some factor in the genes … a childhood of deprivation … a father dead, divorced or defeated … a mother possessive or neglectful … an only childhood … siblings better loved…. You may take your pick of those and others, or a combination from those and others, for I am not God to know everything, even about a character I have imagined, and this is an exploring not an explaining. I tell you only that Peter Ash, after enduring a not particularly distinguished war in the R.A.F. Regiment was demobilized, used his Education Grant for a dramatic school, and led for a while the shifting life of a young actor of only moderate talent, and that by that time he had already fallen into a particular way of sexual life, which was at once easy and unbearably difficult. Afraid at all times of committing himself, afraid of being tied, afraid of being found out yet compelled somehow to undertake what, if he were found out, would bring him the greatest shame, he had passed from periods of abstinence to brief adventures—in trains, in the wooded places of public parks, in the bed-sitting-rooms of strangers, in cinemas, once in a beach-shelter at Scarborough when he had slept afterwards wrapped for warmth in newspapers salvaged from the litter-bin.

  He was not a satyr. He did not usually seek adventures, but was unable to resist accepting them when they occurred. He did not like leading this sort of life, and did not like himself for leading it. But he was frightened of attachment, for in an attachment he would be found to be (he knew) the kind of sub-person that he “really” was. When Norah Palmer undertook him, and he discovered not only that he was capable of heterosexual behaviour and could take pleasure in it, but that it did not at all bind him, that she had her own life and intended to lead it, that she would not be dependent, then the advantages of a continued attachment grew clearer and clearer to him, and he himself came to depend—to depend on Norah Palmer, who was an intelligent women as all the world knew, and took it quite as a matter of course that he should be respected. And since he had no daemon, no itch, and was not driven to acts of sexual deviance as gestures against society or any of that jazz, he did not relapse. The need had gone. Their relationship grew, and changed, but continued. There were frets and chafes, but they were contained within it, and only after nine years, only when Norah Palmer, seated on a chair of plaited plastic in the Piazza San Marco, told Peter Ash that she respected nothing about him, only then did the frets and chafes become so concentrated as to break the relationship altogether, and leave Peter Ash to go it alone.

  *

  To go it alone. But he was not alone; he had friends; he had a great many friends. He could spend at least a part of most evenings in company if he wished, and return to the flat to sleep. He was a lion, and need never languish for lack of invitations.

  As for women, well it was true that most of his friends were married, and one didn’t go about interfering with the marriages of one’s friends. But there were plenty of unattached women in London, who would be glad to go to a theatre with Peter Ash, to bed with Peter Ash. Unattached … glad…. There was the rub. Unattached women are glad of an attachment of some sort. Not necessarily marriage; one must not be so naïf as to suppose that; but there are other attachments than marriage. We have come a long way towards sexual egality in our society, but not so far that the word “spinster” has lost it pejorative associations; unattached, unmarried women most usually need a defence against that word. Peter Ash had already, as we know, made up his mind to drop Bunty, and when Bunty suggested that he might like to spend a week-end at her home in Taunton, his determination was reinforced. It was not at all diffi
cult to end the affair. No tears, or none that he saw. No scenes, or none in which he was involved. It was usual for them at the end of one meeting to arrange a date and time for the next. “See you Thursday? 7.30? In the foyer?” and Thursday it would be, if she were not on duty. If no arrangement were made, there would be no meeting. And so, one morning, Peter Ash found that he could make nothing definite; he was all tangled up with boring things; he would give her a ring at the Section House when he was free. Since he never did give her a ring, it is to be presumed that he was never free.

  Bunty might have telephoned him at the flat, but she did not. He had known that she wouldn’t; she was a sensitive little thing. He did not consider, it did not occur to him to imagine how Bunty would wait for him to ring her at the Section House, how she would not go out for any kind of recreation in case she missed his call, how she would inquire at the desk of the Section House when she came back from duty whether there were any messages for her, and how she would pretend that she had not really expected there to be a message, how, after a while, she would not ask, because her asking so often had been noticed and made a subject of chaff and she already guessed that there would be no message, how she would fight against her own wish to speak to him, how she would write letters in her head but not on paper, how she would keep fourpence in her handbag, but would never use it for a phone call, how she would stay away from the local Odeon. Peter Ash did not think in such terms; it did not concern him to do so. He told himself that she herself had intended to end the affair that time when she came late to dinner, and now he had done so for her. She had been right at the time, and his fault, if there were one, had been in prolonging matters. When, later on at Christmas, among the ninety-seven cards Peter Ash received, there was one from Bunty (who had given in so far, but sent no message with it), he was surprised.

  But he knew that he could not expect to free himself as easily from any fresh attachment. He must be circumspect. If life were only a series of holiday cruises, how easy affairs might be. As one moved from each to the next, a gate would slide shut, the past cease to exist, and the future be only three weeks long. How passionately one might love during each three weeks, how outrageously behave! But Peter Ash was known. His home was settled. He had a continuing responsibility to the public. He could always be found. He could not move on. Philandering was well enough for irresponsible, shifting people; he himself had too much sensibility to philander, even if he were not responsible and rooted. He knew philanderers—men who moved from one affair (and often one address) to another, making conquests and breaking hearts, lying—Peter Ash could not lie; he could not bear to lie. He could not pretend, or persuade himself, as a philanderer must, that each new affair was for real. He could not enjoy the game of courting and parting. He could not hurt people—or at least, he could not endure to see them hurt.

  Casual sex, then? Sex as needed? Sex as medicine, as a laxative to keep one “regular”? There are women whose profession is to supply that need. There are cards on boards outside shops in Soho and districts north—“ATTRACTIVE LADY MASSEUSE SPECIALIZES IN FRENCH AND GERMAN SYSTEMS. DISCIOLINE IF REQUIRED” or “RED-HAIRED MODEL, EARLY TWENTIES, AVAILABLE AMATEUR PHOTORAPHY. FULL STUDIO FACILITIES OR WILL VISIT HOME BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT”. But he didn’t want that. He didn’t mind paying for sex, he supposed, but the notion of making an appointment, as if going to the dentist, and spending half an hour or less with someone whose chief desire must be that he should get it done and pay her—No! Besides he had heard that prostitutes said that most of their clients were kinky, and, making an exception for the married men on an occasional outing, he could quite see that this must be so. “Having sex” was for Peter Ash, as it is for most men, in part an act of reassurance to oneself, an exercise of power over another, and in a professional relationship of that sort, the power is with the prostitute, who gives as much as she will, and exacts a fee. A mistress, then? Old-fashioned notion, but they still existed, the mistresses in mewses, making second homes for rich businessmen with families out of London. But that would be too expensive. Peter Ash was not in that financial class. If he had a mistress, she must be that for love. And would be, in her way, just as much of an attachment.

  Bunty had been a great convenience, and he missed her. If only people would be content to be that! If only they wouldn’t fall in love, and want one to meet their families! If only they would not, simply by existing, make emotional demands one was too cold to meet! Peter Ash began to stay out longer in the evenings, and to find it more and more difficult to get out of bed in the mornings. The preference which had woken already in Venice began to stir. Peter Ash closed his mind. He did not want that; he had done with that. But it was so easy. No attachments. No visits to the dentist either, but all done in the comfort and familiarity of one’s own home, and where there was professionalism, it was at least coupled with enjoyment, if what he had heard about the Navy and the Brigade of Guards were true. Abstinence was his alternative—but there was no need for abstention; he had no conviction that the preference was wrong in itself. The Christian Faith is a great sustainer against temptation of this kind, it is said, but Peter Ash was an agnostic, and in any case one notices that those unhappy clergymen and Youth Leaders who attempt to put the Christian Faith between themselves and their desires are not often sustained much beyond middle-age, when Faith and all cracks, and only the policemen are waiting in the public lavatories.

  He had closed his mind, but the logic remained. It began to seem to Peter Ash that everything was pushing him towards a return to the world he had left, as he had thought for ever, nine years ago.

  *

  “He used to take me everywhere. Good hotels and everywhere like that. He said it didn’t matter about me coming from the orphanage and that, only he liked me to dress proper in case we was to be seen, you know. He said I could have a job in his record shop any time, but I didn’t fancy it. We used to meet in the shop after closing time. He had a sort of couch there and everything, in the little room at the back. He was really educated, you know. I mean, he knew all about classical music and that. Then when people begun to talk, he put some money in the Post Office for me, and bought me a ticket to London. I didn’t mind. It was dead there really.”

  “You’re Peter Ash, aren’t you? My friend and I always go to the pictures on Sunday afternoons, so I often see you. I never knew you were queer, though. I mean, you usually do hear, don’t you? It gets around. It’s awful really, the way people talk. No, well I work in a tobacconist’s really. Oh, I don’t know. It passes the time.”

  “I had them stars put on special for the bike, you see. No, I don’t wear it all the time. I take it off in bed like. I mean, you get some geezers, like some of them as comes up to me like, kinky for leather like; I mean, they never want you to take it off at all, whatever happens. There was this geezer lived in Shooters Hill took me back there one night. Wanted me to belt him. He had one of them Boy Scout belts with a buckle and a motto on it like. Well, you feel a bit stupid, you know what I mean? So I belted him one with the old belt like, and he says,’ Harder!’, and then he says, ‘Harder!’ again, so I loses patience with him, and ‘Bugger this for a lark,’ I says, and I lashes out like, and the bloody buckle cuts his back open, and there’s a dirty great gash with blood an’ all. ‘Christ! I’m sorry, mate,’ I says, and he just lies there panting; he’s done his lot. ‘Oh, you beautiful boy!’ he says; ‘You’re so good to me,’ he says, leering up at the dirty great cross he’s got above the bed. You can’t make’em out, can you, them geezers? You don’t know where you are with them…. Mind you, I could see you wasn’t one of them. You haven’t got that look about you at all. There’s a geezer, I says to meself, more interested in me than me jacket.”

  “Oh, he’s queer. He came round to all the clubs, you know, and asked questions, and then wrote that article there was all that fuss about, and three of the clubs had to close. Well, I was talking to Tony—that’s Tony, the blonde in the dark blue suit—go with
anyone, she would. Well, she says she’s had him, and she knows a lot of other boys who went home with him when he was doing his article.” (Peter Ash did not know the journalist under discussion. It seemed unlikely that Tony had indeed “had” him. There is a curious “In” game played by the sillier and more feminine boys who hang about the clubs and bars, Peter Ash discovered. One cannot mention a public figure of any eminence without receiving the immediate, knowing comment—“Oh, he’s queer” … every theatrical leading man … millionaires … television personalities … all dancers … most dukes … any M.P. whose name gets into the news…. “Oh, didn’t you know? Where have you been? Everybody knows he’s queer.” Peter Ash wondered how long it would be before the clear suburban voice at the bar said, “Peter Ash? Oh, I’ve had him. Didn’t you know? Oh … not bad. I’ll give you an intro, darling, if you’re interested.”)

  “I don’t usually go to these places. It’s funny we should both be there—quite a coincidence really. I thought you looked different from the usual crowd. Well, I don’t usually get out very much. I live with my mother at Richmond—you could say Twickenham, I suppose, but I always think Richmond sounds better, don’t you? She gets lonely if I go out in the evenings.”

  “Where I was living, the whole house was queer. It was nice there. All the rooms done up differently. Well, I mean, like Regency and Contemporary, and there was one boy had all stuffed birds under glass, and there was another did his whole room in different shades of red. It was like a cathedral somehow. You lowered your voice when you went in. Only then he had a sort of craze for black and white, and changed it. I liked living there, only it was a bit expensive, so I moved out. I live with my friend in Baron’s Court now, but he had to go to Liverpool today for a conference, so he won’t be back. He’s in research. No, I don’t exactly do anything. I was going to be a secretary, and I took the shorthand lessons and everything, but then I gave it up.”