The Birdcage

by John Bowen

  And father. Daphne had looked after her father entirely, ever since their return to London from Chesterfield. She had clothed him, kept him, refused to deduct a penny from his old age pension when he became eligible for it. That had been her pride. It was right that children should look after their parents in old age; it was the natural thing; she was glad to do it. If now her father were to become a person of means, if he were to go around the place giving them television sets and that kind of thing, that would threaten their relationship, and unsettle the children. One wouldn’t, of course, put it in such words, but there could be only one head to a family. Daphne preferred matters as they were.

  It was no good. She could not sleep.

  She heard Rosemary clump up the stairs to bed, and then Gerald to his room at the attic, and she anticipated and then heard the running water, the flushed water closet, the opening and shutting of doors that attended their retirement. It was not late. Rosemary’s light would be off by now, but she would not be asleep. Daphne felt that to talk to somebody might help to settle her, and decided that she might as well talk to Rosemary.

  Yet, even as she put a woollen dressing-gown over her nightdress, she hesitated, for cosy chats between mother and daughter were not usual in that family. When you are a Headmistress, even of so small an educational unit as a Primary school, and your working life is spent among children, every one of whom is an individual battling for intimacy and deplorably ready to take advantage of it, you do not usually develop in your own family that mother-and-daughter relationship which is one of the glories of British family life; you do not giggle together, and gossip, and wear each other’s clothes. Nor, when your husband is dead and your father dependent on you, do you need to make a kind of feminine international against “the men”; your daughter is neither your ally nor your confidante. So Rosemary might be a little surprised at her mother’s appearance, late at night, for a good old heart-to-heart.

  On the landing, Daphne hesitated. How should she explain it? Rosemary had gone to bed. But there was, she noticed, a light none the less, shining beneath a door, only it came from her father’s room, not Rosemary’s.

  He never kept his light on. He did not read in bed. He had gone up at ten, and should by now be asleep. Something was wrong, if father’s light were still on.

  Had he fallen? Was he helpless? A stroke? She knocked lightly on the door, and went quickly into the room. Her father had not undressed. He was sitting beside the bed on a straight chair, reading a manuscript. Reading?—No, he was not reading. The pages were disordered, and her father sat there, resting one elbow on the bed, and his head on his hand, staring down at them. Daphne said, “Is that the play, Father? Have you been reading your play?”, and Edward Laverick replied in a small voice, “It’s no good. It’s no good at all. I can’t take it in.”

  In life, responses are not often immediate, but are more like what happens in Greater London, when a subscriber on the Knightsbridge telephone exchange dials a Gladstone or a Holborn or a Fleet Street number, and waits for as much as seven seconds after dialling while somewhere in all that great web of hidden mechanism, stimulus searches for response, until at last one hears the ringing tone, and knows that the hunt is done. So the words came on waves of sound from Edward Laverick, and set up a resonance in Daphne’s ears, and this resonance was decoded into meaning by the cells of her brain, and then Daphne stood for seconds where she was, suspended in feeling while time went on, until at last idea became emotion, and Daphne knew first that she was certainly feeling something, and then that this something was relief.

  Edward Laverick said, “I’ve been sitting here reading it. I don’t know what to say to them. I don’t truly.” The play was written on lined foolscap in careful copy-book longhand, and corrections had been made in the margin. This was the original from which the prompt copy (since eaten by mice) had been typed by a genteel lady from the Pitman School in 1904. Daphne said, “It’s a mystery to me where you’ve been hiding it all this time.” She put one arm around Edward Laverick’s shoulders, and said, “Now come along, Father. You must get some sleep, you know.”

  He allowed Daphne to help him undress, turning his back as he pulled on his pyjama trousers under his shirt. Once in bed he sat up straight against the pillow, looking, in his striped pyjama top and his spectacles and his earnest vulnerability, like a school boy who has irresponsibly drunk the magic potion and aged sixty years without growing up. Daphne took his spectacles off him, and laid them on the dressing-table, while Edward Laverick put his teeth in a tumbler. “That’s enough reading for tonight,” she said. “We’ll have a glass of hot milk, both of us,” and went downstairs to prepare it.

  When she returned, he was as she had left him, the manuscript sheets still scattered on the coverlet. Daphne arranged a dressing-gown over her father’s shoulders, and helped him to drink the milk. He said, “Gerald said there’d be three hundred pounds.”

  “We don’t need it.”

  “I’d have liked to have had it. I’ve been thinking about it since….”

  Daphne said, “The children didn’t mean anything. It’s your money. They know that really. It’s like a game they play—If I Had A Million Pounds.”

  Edward Laverick supped his hot milk. He said, “Everything coming at once. I can’t explain it. It’s like a feeling in your stomach; like something physical, something that’s wrong with you. It’s like a sort of dizziness.” He said, “I’ve always saved to give them something at Christmas and on their birthday. I like to find out what they want, and get it for them. I’ve no use for money. Not for myself. You don’t need money at my age.”

  “I know.”

  He said, “I’m not greedy for money, Daffy. You know I’m not greedy for it. I gave up my pension, and didn’t care that.”

  He had said, “Daffy” to her. “Daffy Down Dilly” had been her name when she was very small, “Daffy Down Dilly” up to her mid-teens before she had grown into responsibility, their special name when they would play swinging games together and jumping games, and shared the weekly treat of listening to ‘Monday Night at Seven’ on the radio. It was thirty years ago, all that. Daffodil hair had grown dull in thirty years, and a daffodil stem grown thicker. Daphne sat on the bed beside her father. She said, “I couldn’t sleep. I was too upset.”

  Edward Laverick said, “Then I found I wanted the money. Just to have it. Not to do anybody any good, but just to feel I had it. When that young man came, I wanted to know how much…. I’ve never asked for money. Never asked anyone. I’ve been above that all my life…. I knew quite well where the play was, but I told him I’d have to look for it. I wanted to see for myself what it was worth. I’ve always kept it; I don’t know why. I’ve got all my old examination papers from night school, but I never look at them.”

  Daphne said, “It can’t be bad, Father, if they put it on in the theatre.”

  “I don’t know about what’s good and bad in plays; I never did. Mr. Lambert used to say,’ You just write what you know. Write truthfully, and it’s sure to be right.’ I deceived him then,” Edward Laverick said bitterly. “It’s not the truth. Not what I wrote. I deceived myself too, I suppose.” He picked up one of the foolscap sheets, and crumpled it. “It’s not true; it’s all made-up,” he said. “It’s all pushed about.”

  Daphne said, “We’ve never wanted for anything. We’ve never gone short.”

  “Oh, I’ve wanted. You always want what you can’t have. You want to give something…. Or you think you do; you think that’s what you want—to give. Then, when you can do it, you find out all you wanted was gratitude.”

  Daphne shivered. She said, “Was it because I didn’t take your pension? Did you want me to take some of it?” He did not reply, and she said, “I’m sorry, Father.”

  This time it was Edward Laverick who put an arm round his daughter’s shoulders, and she snuggled a little closer to him, a middle-aged, bossy woman, prematurely grey, resting her cheek against her father’s white st
ubble, and as unconscious of the unsuitability of it as middle-aged lovers in Hyde Park. Edward Laverick said, “I’ll tell them I’ve lost it, Daffy. All that’s forgotten, that play. Maybe I thought it was all right when I wrote it; maybe I thought it was true then, and maybe I was right. But it’s not like Shakespeare. Time passes, and the life goes out of things. You couldn’t act it now, and make it true, not for any money. I’ll tell them I couldn’t find it, and they must leave us alone. I didn’t ask them to go looking for my play. We’re all right here as we are, my Daffy. We do very well as we are.”

  *

  As for Norah Palmer, she did not understand the decision at all.

  At first the old man said that he had lost his play. Well, that was inconvenient, but it did not matter. If the company were able to produce an authorization by Edward Laverick himself, the Lord Chamberlain’s Office would certainly allow them to copy the play.

  But the old man would not give an authorization. It seemed that he had been lying. He had not lost the play. He had a manuscript of the play at home, but had not brought it with him to the company’s office. He had kept the play all this while with other papers (of no importance, as far as Norah Palmer could tell) from his student days, but he did not want them to read it.

  Friendliness and common sense were part of Norah Palmer’s professional equipment. Besides, one had to admire what she took to be integrity, and in any enterprise that involved the arts, one had to be prepared for integrity to hold matters up for a while. It was right that it should. Norah Palmer herself was prepared to go a long way in allowing for integrity; she had not been to Dr. Leavis’s lectures for nothing. She said, “I do understand, Mr. Laverick. I don’t mind telling you that there are poems I wrote myself when I was an undergraduate that make me blush today.”

  “Yes?”

  “And yet they probably have a quality that I’d be the only one who couldn’t recognize; do you know what I mean? A sort of freshness that one’s bound to lose.”

  “Yes?”

  “And, you know,” Norah Palmer said. “A play isn’t really what’s said; it’s what happens.”

  “It’s people talking,” said Edward Laverick, who knew at least that his own play was people talking.

  “Yes indeed, but more people than talk, wouldn’t you say?” He didn’t understand. “I mean, the people and the relationships between them are the what. The talk is only the how. Naturally, the how is important, but it can be changed, whereas, if you took away the what, you wouldn’t have a play.”

  This was Norah Palmer’s manner with her own contemporaries, and it was not working with Edward Laverick. He could tell that she wished him well, but could understand little of what she was saying. It seemed as if she might be wanting him to rewrite his play, but he was too old for that, and all that business of evening classes was long ago.

  Norah Palmer said, “We really aren’t doing anything more at this stage than asking to read the play. After we’d read it, you and I could talk again.” Edward Laverick was glad he hadn’t brought the manuscript with him.

  He said, “I looked it out last night. I stayed up to read it. It wasn’t any good. You wouldn’t like it at all. It wouldn’t go these days. It’s not the thing.”

  “Oh, you’ve no idea what goes these days, especially on the box.” What box? “Besides, if we liked it, we’d plan to use it in a special series of plays of social protest, probably picking one play from every five-year period since 1900, excluding the two wars.” She wished she didn’t have to remember to keep using the phrases of the order of “if we liked it”, but she knew that she must promise nothing. The old man’s play might turn out to be truly awful.

  “There were some good plays in those days.”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “You’d find a lot of good plays in those days, I should think,” Edward Laverick said, being too polite to add, “without badgering me for mine.”

  She wished that she could make him understand that whether his play were any good or not was not for him to decide. That was her decision. She was the Script Editor. He seemed to have no notion at all of their relative responsibilities to this matter of his play. “Why don’t you let me read your play anyway?” she said. “I promise to tell you quite frankly if I don’t like it.”

  “I’d rather not, if you don’t mind. I’d rather not give you the trouble.”

  “But surely you’d want us to do it—if we liked it?” She decided to give him more definite encouragement than was usual at this stage. “You know,” she said winningly, “if Bernard Shaw liked it when he saw it, I think you might reasonably assume there’d be something in it to interest us.”

  Edward Laverick did not understand how anyone could be so foolish as not to realize that, in that article in the magazine, the writer had not been praising The Forgotten Men for its own sake, but using it to beat other plays. But he only said again, “I wouldn’t put you to the trouble.”

  Irritated amusement. “It’s no trouble at all. Really it isn’t. It’s what I’m paid for.” They had been talking for twenty minutes, and were no further forward. Clarissa had looked in once, so somebody must be waiting to see her. What next to try? Aubrey had reported that the old man had tried to ask about money, and had been very properly snubbed. It was dangerous to talk of money at this early stage, and arouse hopes that might be disappointed. Norah Palmer wished that the old man had an agent, since agents talked the language of money, and were hardened against disappointment, turning it back outwards as a weapon instead of allowing it to pierce them. This old man, as Norah Palmer clearly saw, was a white-collar C2. His clothes confirmed it. What Aubrey had seen of his home confirmed it. What they knew of his past at the Ministry and the early days at night school, confirmed it. Money made a difference to such people, and to their families. A sudden windfall—£500 to buy a television set, a fridge, a new washing machine, furniture; by the expenditure of less than £500, C2’s might become CI’s almost overnight. She said, “You know, for a ninety-minute play, I think we’d expect to pay …” tasting figures in her mind, moving up from a two hundred and fifty guinea minimum, holding this imaginary money up to the light, weighing, feeling … “in your case … if we really felt we could use the play … perhaps £400?”

  “Yes?” It was more than he had expected, more than Gerald had guessed, but if it had been twice as much it would have been only a fist beating on a door already locked.

  Norah Palmer said gently, “If you’re really worried about the quality of the writing, you don’t need to be. We do a great deal of rewriting ourselves, and it makes no difference to the fee. I mean, we don’t expect you to know how television works. Why should you? That’s our job. If we liked the play, we’d take it over, and work on it until we got it right. We wouldn’t put it out at all if we weren’t satisfied with it, so don’t be embarrassed on that score.”

  Edward Laverick stood up, and said. “I’m sorry, miss. You’ve been very kind. I’ve taken up a great deal of your time, I dare say. They’ll be expecting me back at home. My daughter said she’d wait in.” He could see that Norah Palmer was upset, and searched for an explanation that would make her feel better, for she was beginning to wear the expression of a person who has failed through no fault of his own, and feels the unfairness of it. He said, “The way I look at it, it’s private, you see.” She still did not understand. “Even when they did it before, they did it badly,” he said, and Clarissa took him to the lift.

  Left alone in her box of light wood and glass, Norah Palmer concluded that he must be even dottier than most old men, who were dotty enough, as God he knew. The bore of it was that, with so much else to worry her, she would have to find some acceptable way of explaining his dottiness to Mr. P.

  *

  That Saturday, as on every Saturday, Daphne made up her list of the tins and packets she must buy to carry the household through the week, leaving only perishables for weekday shopping. When the list was made, she said to Edward Laverick,
“Drat it, Father! There’s not enough in my bag. Can you lend me a pound to carry me through?” To herself this request sounded a little insincere, which was strange because she was a woman who had the habit of truth, and she had been careful to make sure that there was indeed not enough money in her bag that Saturday.

  Edward Laverick looked round for his jacket, but as he picked it up to put his hand in the pocket, Rosemary said, “That’s O.K., Mummy. Here you are. But I want it back, mind,” and gave her mother a pound note.

  Edward Laverick looked at Daphne, and she looked back at him, her mouth a little open, vexation and surprise in her eyes. Slowly he began to smile, and the smile passed from father to daughter. Rosemary said, “I don’t know what you two are grinning about. Have I got a smut on my nose?” Daphne began to laugh, and so did Edward. The more Rosemary could not see what was so funny, the more they laughed. Eventually, she just went out and left them, laughing together at the kitchen table.

  7

  “Only Connect”

  In the end it was Squad Appleby who made matters up between them. “This has gone on long enough,” he said. “From all that I hear, your ex-gentleman is just about to go spectacularly to the bad, and as for you, my love——”

  “Oh, Squad, don’t! I feel far too frail for moral admonition.”

  “—you are certainly going to end up in a maisonette in St. John’s Wood with your emotionally rapacious mama if I don’t do something about it quickly.”