The Birdcage

by John Bowen

  Norah Palmer’s mother, after four weeks in a cheap hotel, had bustled back to Chard, leaving Norah Palmer to think matters over, and perhaps begin to look about her for the tiny Georgian house. Impossible to say flatly, “No.” Norah Palmer was alone now—a woman defenceless against family affection and family convenience and family duty. She had not been a person subject to headaches and lassitudes; in all these years, even her periods had been placid. But by the end of the second week of her mother’s visit, Norah Palmer had begun to expect a headache at about five o’clock of every working afternoon, half an hour before she left the office, an hour before meeting her mother.

  Somehow, if she could, she would find a way of refusing the arrangement. Then she would live alone, she supposed. But if one lived alone, one was likely to fall into habits of eccentricity. She went to the self-service delicatessen to buy cheese and brown sugar, and found Monica Badgebury there. “Good gracious, Monica!” she said. “It must be years.”

  “Norah Palmer! I didn’t know you lived near here.”

  “Well, now you know I do.”

  Monica Badgebury had been the one certain First of Norah Palmer’s year at Newnham. Time which erodes the neck and thickens the hips, Time which sharpens the nose and dulls the sight and sags the breasts, Time which enlarges the pores and steals away the teeth, Time which deadens hair and reddens hands, Time, the bachelor uncle who makes free with us all, personally and persistently and in intimate ways, had been at work on Monica Badgebury. She was no older, could not be more than a year older than Norah Palmer. Now biscuit had turned to brown; black hair worn longer than was fashionable had coarsened and streaked and been crammed into a chignon; the mouth had taken a discontented turn downwards. Determination in Monica Badgebury had become doggedness; intelligence, erudition. She wore a two-piece from the Home-Weare Shop in Rathbone Place with a scarf of cerise chiffon, and her lips were magenta. “How pleasant to meet you again!” she said. “Now let me see, what was your field, my dear? The Augustans?”

  “Not for some time, I’m afraid. I work for a television company now.”

  “Oh yes? People do go in for that sort of thing, I know. Do you appear? I must watch.”

  “No, I don’t appear.”

  “My dear, I’m sure you’re wise. It’s a great mistake for people like us to appear, I feel. An unfortunate mistake.” Monica Badgebury named The Living Arts philosopher and, with considerably more disapproval, a popularizing historian, who had found it easier to maintain a reputation for scholarship with the many people who did not know his subject than with the few who did. As she spoke, her hands went out to the shelves of the self-service delicatessen, picking as it seemed at random to fill a wire basket with Shredded Wheat. “I have wondered sometimes whether the roots of my disinclination towards television might not lie in emotional prejudice,” she said, and one thin hand fluttered like a brown bird over cans of tomato soup, indistinguishable in every way from each other except by their labels, “but I have decided that they do not. Of course I have never been asked. If I had been asked, I might feel differently, but I hope I should not. In speaking to unintelligent, or at least to under-intelligent people, or to people …” three tins of beans, the smallest size … “who quite simply lack the basic knowledge that would allow them to approach one’s subject, one might be driven first to simplify, then to distort, and finally perhaps to deliberate falsification for effect.” Tinned peaches. But something about the weight of the tin in her hand drew her attention to it. “No,” she said. “South African,” and put it back on the shelf. “Then of course, what one says is never printed, and cannot, therefore, be critically considered by one’s colleagues, and that, I think, may very easily lead one into an irresponsibility of judgment, would you agree?”

  “Shall I get you another basket? That one seems to be full.”

  “Oh no, my dear. I only came in for instant coffee.” She regarded the contents of her basket with an expression too mild for surprise. “Things mount up,” she said. “I so seldom shop that, when I do, I take the opportunity to stock up. Usually, the woman who cleans the flat looks after this kind of thing, but she has been away for three weeks for some reason, so there may be deficiencies. Perhaps she may be ill or dead. In the United States, I gather from a colleague of mine, Frewin—You remember Frewin?”

  Norah Palmer did not remember.

  “Perhaps you don’t remember Frewin himself. He was before our day at Cambridge. But you will remember his little book on the Wool Trade in the Later Thirteenth Century. Now Frewin spent a year, you know, in … I think it was Idaho, and he tells me that in the United States nobody of intelligence either watches or takes any part in the popular television there, but that the universities have their own stations, quite like the Third Programme except that the daytime programmes, as it happens, are of an educational rather than an academic nature. But there are periods—usually very early in the morning—when scholars are given carte blanche, and Frewin himself delivered a very interesting series of lectures on the Medieval Staple in what was called the Dawn Seminar. Most of his students, he tells me, set their alarm clocks early so as to be able to watch, and he had a number of letters from quite ordinary people; he still corresponds, I believe, with the proprietor of an all-night snack-bar in Moscow, Idaho. I sometimes think it’s a pity that we don’t do more of that kind of thing in this country.”

  “You’re teaching at London?”

  It had not occurred to Monica Badgebury that anyone might not know this. She added a fourth can of beans to the three she had already. At some stage of the canning process, a little curry powder had been mixed with the beans so as to justify the label, “Chili Con Carne”. Monica Badgebury said, “I lunch in hall on my teaching days, of course, but if I’m going to spend the day at the Museum, I like to get in a cooked breakfast. So often it has to last all day.”

  “And in the evenings?”

  “Evenings?” The distinction between daytime and evening in terms of work was not meaningful to Monica Badgebury. The Library of the British Museum would close, to be sure, and so would the Public Record Office, but there were secondary sources from the London Library waiting at home. There were notes to be made and arranged. Perhaps Norah Palmer referred to the meetings of learned societies, which took place in the evenings? Monica Badgebury was a member of the English Historical Association, and there was also a small group from London University, which met on two evenings a month during term. They were mostly medievalists, and called themselves the Tout Society; Norah Palmer might not have heard of it. There was a restricted membership of course—one had to restrict membership of a Society of that kind—of twenty senior members and twenty in statu pupillari. A group of this sort was to be found among the members of most faculties of the two senior universities—the Stubbs Society at Oxford, to which Monica Badgebury had once read a paper, was the model for their own—but there wasn’t the same corporate feeling in London, and the Tout Society would never have existed if Monica Badgebury and her colleague, Frewin, had not founded it. Yet, curiously enough, the keenest to be elected were the provincials, and it was not always possible to keep them out, not that Monica Badgebury herself had any snobbery of that sort; one must be careful always to keep in mind that Tout himself, and Tait after him, had taught at Manchester.

  Norah Palmer could imagine, could she not, the jealousies involved in running such a Society? They were not exclusive, because even non-members might attend as guests, and nobody might become a member without having been a guest first, yet those who had not been elected frequently accused those who had, of forming a coterie. And although the student membership was fluid, as students came and went (Monica Badgebury used the word “student” disdainfully in inverted commas, since it was not, and could never be, the word “undergraduate”), competition was almost more bitter over the election of students than of senior members. One wanted—it was natural enough—the most able of one’s own pupils to be elected, but Monica Badgebur
y was afraid that a particularly nasty form of sexual discrimination was beginning to appear among the membership. Monica Badgebury had brought a pupil of her own to every meeting of last term, and had encouraged her to ask intelligent questions after the paper. Usually they had prepared the questions together over a glass of sherry at a public house in Bloomsbury before the meeting began. The girl was extremely able; there was no doubt of that; she would benefit from the Society, and the Society from her membership of it. Yet she had not been elected, although Monica Badgebury had proposed her, and Hilda Bates——”

  “Hilda Bates?”

  “A colleague. She’s working on the Cistercian Orders in South-West England under John.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Hilda Bates had acted as seconder. Since the ballot was secret, Monica Badgebury could not know who had voted against her pupil, but it could not be an accident that the girl had received only nine votes, and that the Tout Society had only nine women members; there was a significant correlation there. “Why,” she said, “even Frewin must have voted against her, and he always votes with me.”

  Norah Palmer said desperately and at random, “Badge, where do you go for the summer vacation? Where did you go this year?”

  Monica Badgebury said, “Yes, the vacations are a problem for us, aren’t they? Luckily I have a married brother at Hastings. He and his wife let off part of their house in summer, so I am able to pay my way without embarrassment, and both sides—” sides with a small, deprecatory smile—“are able to keep what privacy they need. I think I may say that I get on nobody’s nerves. I take work with me, of course.”

  Defenceless! They were all defenceless.

  *

  Edward Laverick looked at Aubrey, and saw a young man in a suit of light grey flannel, with a white shirt and a straight striped tie. He did not know that the shirt was of sea-island cotton and the tie Italian, but he knew that both were different in kind from his own cheap poplin shirt and Tootal tie, bought for him by Daphne. Aubrey wore under his jacket a dark-blue sleeveless pullover of soft wool (it was cashmere), and so did Edward Laverick wear a pullover for warmth, but it was thicker than Aubrey’s and home-knitted in a cable-stitch. Aubrey wore pointed Swiss shoes, bought at Simpson’s of Piccadilly: some day, if ever he could afford it, Aubrey would have his shoes and suits made for him. Edward Laverick wore Barrett’s shoes in a broad fitting, bought at Herne Hill. Edward Laverick had dressed up to receive Aubrey. Aubrey was wearing his office clothes.

  It was a morning in November. Daphne was at school, and would be teaching poetry to the top class of eleven-year-olds at this moment—No, she would not be teaching; they would be “doing” poetry; one taught sums, but poetry was only done. At this moment, some serious Rachel or Tony would be reciting with expression:

  “TIME, you old GYPSY man,

  Will you not STAY?

  PUT UP your caravan,

  JUST for ONE day.”

  At this moment, Rosemary at the Library would be coaxing some indignant woman to put four and twopence into the Fines Box, and the indignant woman would be saying, “I can’t have had it since August, because we went away in August. I only brought it back because I found I’d read it already. You must have made a mistake with the date. Four and twopence! I could buy a book for less.” At this moment, Gerald would be at a lecture. Not one of Monica Badgebury’s lectures; Gerald didn’t see the point of history, as a matter of fact, because what this country wants is fewer historians and more engineers. Gerald was a good, hard worker, and he’d done well enough in History at “O” Level, but when it came to advanced studies, he preferred to put himself to something which would be of use, and not end up as a teacher like most of these Arts people. Only Edward Laverick was in the house to meet Aubrey, but a tray with cups, biscuits and a tin of Nescafé had been left out for him in the kitchen; he had only to boil a kettle.

  They knew, all the family knew of Aubrey’s coming—not that he would be Aubrey, of course, but that some man would be coming today from a television company to see Grandy. They did not know why. The letter had not been explicit. It had said only that the company had obtained Edward Laverick’s address from his nephew, Mr. White, in Chesterfield, that it believed him to be the author of a play called The Forgotten Men which was performed at the Avenue Theatre in 1904, and that, if he were indeed that Mr. Laverick, it would like to send somebody to see him. Unless the company heard from Mr. Laverick, Aubrey would call on him next morning. For Norah Palmer had said to Aubrey, “You go, would you? Just make sure he’s the right man, and get a copy of the play to read. I’d go myself, but you’ve been so clever about finding him, I might just as well stay out of the act for as long as I can. Anyway, I expect he’d rather talk to a man.” Of course Aubrey knew well enough that any serious discussion of The Forgotten Men with Edward Laverick would be conducted by Norah herself. He probably wouldn’t even get the play to read first. Plays in which Norah Palmer was interested did not have to go through the usual routine of readers’ reports.

  Edward Laverick hadn’t known what to make of the letter. Nor had Daphne. She had never been told about The Forgotten Men. “Did you write this play, Father?” she said accusingly.

  Please, miss; it wasn’t me, miss. “A long time ago, my dear,” Edward Laverick said. “It was before I was married.”

  “Grandy!” Rosemary was surprised, but also disappointed. If her grandfather wrote plays, or had written plays, and there was a television company which knew of these plays, then he had a new dimension—must have, because she would never have thought him capable of plays. She was the librarian, the booky one of the family. Yet in fact she knew quite well that Grandy had no new dimension, and thinking could not make it so.

  Daphne said, “You never told me.”

  “No, I——”

  “You’ve never been in the least interested in that sort of thing.”

  “It was when I was doing evening classes.”

  “Oh!”

  Gerald said, “If they put it on in London, it must have been some good.”

  “It was some friends of my English teacher. They acted it; they were actors. They only did it once.”

  Silence. Toast and Golden Shred consumed. Tea drunk. Daphne said, “Let me see that letter again, Father,” and read it quickly through. “Well, I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t. How they could know all about it, and none of us——”

  “I’d forgotten. I haven’t thought about it for——”

  The letter went round the table again. They had all read it before, but a letter of any sort was an occasion, a letter for Grandy (who never had letters, for who would write to him?) particularly an occasion, and this letter of all letters a most special and not to be understood occasion. Daphne said, “I can’t take it in, Father. It’s a mystery to me,” and Gerald said, “Sounds to me as if they want to do Grandy’s play on the telly. It can’t be anything else.”

  Of course! Of course! It couldn’t be anything else. They were going to act Grandy’s play. “And we haven’t got a set. We can’t watch,” Rosemary cried.

  Gerald said, “We can go over to Beryl’s”—and it was true that Rosemary had been over to her friend Beryl’s to watch the Royal Ballet in Swan Lake, and then again when the Bolshoi had done excerpts from something in half an hour’s dancing.

  Daphne said, “We can’t all go.”

  “But, Mummy, Beryl wouldn’t mind. She’d love to have us over, especially if—I mean, everybody at the Library will be talking about it, if they do Grandy’s play on——”

  “I wonder how much you get for a television play,” Gerald said. “How much did you get when they did it in the theatre, Grandy?”

  But he hadn’t, of course, been paid anything. Mr. Lambert had told him that the people who did it had lost money. He had felt worried at that, and resentful (since, after all, he hadn’t asked them to put on his play) until Mr. Lambert had said that the people could well afford it, and had expected to lose.<
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  Rosemary said, “They’re always talking about what was on the night before, all the girls, and even Mr. Sidcup has a set that gets the B.B.C. I feel stupid, missing it all.”

  “If you have books in the house, you don’t need television. You should know that, Rosemary.”

  “Books won’t help us to watch Grandy’s play.”

  Daphne said, “It’s time we were going our ways,” and began to stack the dishes. She had nothing against television as such, and would enjoy watching a good play on it, or a travel programme, if she had the time. But there were other things they needed before a television set. They would buy one when they could afford it. Of course, if father wanted to—but that was ridiculous; she would leave daydreaming of that sort to the children, who always thought the older ones had nothing to do but pamper them. It was exciting that a television company should have written to father about some play that had been done years ago, but there was nothing in the letter to say that they wanted to buy it. It was strange that all this time he’d written a play, and had never told her, never even thought to mention it. Old people grew sly in their ways; she’d often heard that said. But it was unlike her father to keep secrets. They’d always been very close, she and he, though without unhealthiness. “You’re a dark horse, Father; a dark horse,” she said, kissing him before she left the house, and Edward Laverick set about washing up the breakfast crocks.