The Birdcage

by John Bowen

  “Is Peter really going to the bad?”

  “Well, you know what a gossipy young spark I am. I hear everything sooner or later, because people will talk. And from the word that’s going round, your ex is not discreet in his amours; far from it. There are very strange tales on the grapevine, my love, I’m here to tell you. Unless,” Squad said carefully, “you just don’t care any more. Because I don’t, my love, as well you know. He’s nothing to me, your ex-gentleman. He’s the sort of man who would cut a lettuce.”

  Norah Palmer said, “I suppose I do care a bit. Not in the usual way. I mean, if somebody came along and said he’d been run over by a bus, I don’t believe I’d mind much. Like the way you don’t mind so much about something’s being broken, but hate it to get dirty.”

  “And your mama? You know, my love, that you’re welcome to stay here as long as you like. I’ve never had a lodger so prompt with the rent. Only….”

  “Yes, it would solve that, I suppose. If it comes to a choice between mother and Peter, I’d rather Peter. And I don’t really like living alone.”

  “Then would you like me to meddle a little?”

  “What makes you think he’ll respond?”

  “Oh, my dear,” Squad said, “I have an instinct about these things. I’d have made a marvellous marriage broker in the seventeenth century. Can’t you just see me in something by Wycherley? Supple, a mender of hearts. I’d do it with a stammer and just a hint of syph and get a rave notice in The Sunday Times for my restraint.”

  “You won’t make him think I … I’m in love with him or anything like that?” Norah Palmer said.

  “I shan’t mention the word.”

  “I’m past all that.”

  “My love, we all are. One goes through that kind of thing, but one couldn’t put up with it all one’s life.”

  *

  Mrs. Halliday, when she knew, went out to her brother’s pet-shop, and brought back two more lovebirds for the cage in the kitchen. “Quite like old times,” Norah Palmer said.

  Peter Ash said, “I’ve missed you.”

  “We’ll have to move the sofa to hide that stain on the carpet.”

  Norah Palmer moved about the flat like a dog brought home from an extended stay in Kennels, sniffing, wandering, noting what was changed, and welcoming what was still the same. Peter Ash, feeling himself superfluous to this performance, went into the kitchen to make tea.

  As they were waiting for it to steep (ten minutes for a good Darjeeling; it was always difficult for Peter Ash to wait the last three), he said, “I think you’ll be interested in the next edition.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve managed to get Massie Barnard. He’ll only be in London thirty-six hours, so we’ve caught him on the wing. We’re going to do him on the stage of the Haymarket, and use hand cameras.” Massie Barnard was an American playwright, who wrote compassionate and violent plays about sexual frustration in Iowa City. Peter Ash said, “I had rather a good idea. I thought I’d try to explore the emotional identity between his work and Forster’s. I don’t think anybody’s done that before. The emotional identity.”

  Norah Palmer remembered that, when she and Peter Ash had attended the London production of Mr. Barnard’s last play together, she had made some bon mot to the effect that Mr. Barnard’s characters, being people of limited sensibility, had taken E.M. Forster’s “Only connect!” as a literal injunction which could best be obeyed in bed. “Has the tea steeped?” she said.

  “I thought if I could manage it in the time, I’d like to get him to make the discovery for himself, and I’d just lead up to it. I thought——”

  Norah Palmer interrupted. “Really, my dear, I’ve hardly had time to sit down,” she said. “Naturally I’m interested in the technicalities of your work, but it’s very boring for me if you go on about it all the time. Just let’s enjoy our tea for now, shall we?” So Peter Ash shut up, and Norah Palmer sipped her tea in silence.

  But all their friends were delighted when they heard that Peter Ash and Norah Palmer were together again. It was, after all, by far the most sensible arrangement.

  *

  Mr. Massie Barnard was just a little high. “I find”, he had told them, “that the more I work, the more I drink, and I have done a lot of work today.” They had all laughed at that, and Props had been sent round the corner for ham sandwiches, which Mr. Barnard had refused.

  “Nobody will get it,” the producer had said, “but it’ll be fun to do,” so Mr. Massie Barnard, whose raw material was violence and pain, sat in an elegant chair on the elegant set of what would once have been called a problem play and is now called “a typical Haymarket success”. Top lighting beat down on Mr. Barnard, and the camera had been sent in close to hold him like a lover, savouring every line on his lined face, every enlarged pore, every wisp of hair at his nostrils and ears. The achievement of which the production team of The Living Arts was most proud was its visual interest—“Cinema is images,” the director would often say, “That’s what it all comes down to in the end. We’re all bloody photographers really.” Now, those of you who have ever visited Photographic Exhibitions, or bought the books recording such Exhibitions, will know that the first prizes are always won by Japanese with photographs of Tress Reflected In Snow, and the second prizes by Old Peasant. It is possible with top lighting to make almost anyone look like Old Peasant, and Mr. Barnard had put on thirty years as he sweated euphorically under the lights and made sleepy answers to incisive Peter Ash.

  “Mr. Forster?” he said. “Well now, his work is very much admired by people I admire. I think Arthur Miller admires his work a great deal.” A pause. “But for myself….” Cigarette smoke expelled, so that it drifted up slowly, putting a thin gauze between Mr. Barnard’s eyes and the camera before disappearing altogether through the top of the frame. “Hold it a moment!” said the director. “I want you closer, Jim. I want to get that sort of hooded quality in the eyes.” Mr. Barnard sighed, and paused, and waited for the next take. “For myself, I just don’t dig Mr. Forster,” he said, italicizing the word delicately, “I have genuinely tried to dig him, but I guess his writing is too old world for me.”

  “You mean you think it’s artificial?”

  “That’s what I said, so I suppose I must mean it.” The director wished that celebrities wouldn’t do this to Peter Ash. They didn’t realize that things often had to be said twice or the public didn’t understand. Luckily Peter Ash himself didn’t always catch on when people were taking the old Michael.

  “What would you say is the message of your plays, Mr. Barnard? Fundamentally, I mean.”

  “I would say to that, that if I could tell you what the message was, I wouldn’t need to write the plays.”

  “Of course that’s true. But what I mean is … if you were really to boil down….’

  “Man, oh man,” Mr. Barnard said sleepily. “You’ve got a great future with the Reader’s Digest.”

  A tolerant smile, showing that one could take a joke, even against oneself. It was a mistake to give these people anything to drink: it was unprofessional to drink while working. Perhaps Mr. Barnard didn’t consider this to be work. Celebrities! Peter Ash preferred it when The Living Arts was not concerned with people at all, but with things. There’d been none of this nonsense when they’d done the exhibition of sculpture at Holland Park. “I think that what you’re really saying in your plays, if I’m any judge,” he said, “is that we must all love each other or die. Isn’t that it?—Really?”

  “We’ve got to die anyway.”

  Triumphantly. “But we’ve got to love too?” Mr. Barnard took time off to expel a little more smoke, and so gave Peter Ash the chance to make the link he wanted, by saying quickly, “And what would you say Forster’s message is in Howard’s End?”

  Mr. Barnard said, “Oh, I know that. Everybody knows that. Every graduate student in every School of Letters knows that. Not that I was ever a graduate student at college, partly because my mother
ran out of money, ‘Only Connect,’ isn’t that it? I was never sure exactly what it meant, but none of my college teachers ever asked me what it meant, only if I remembered what it was.”

  “Now really, Mr. Barnard,” Peter Ash said primly, “I don’t think you’re being serious. ‘Only connect’—why, it’s one of the…. It’s something everybody can understand…. It expresses what all of us … what all of us….” said Peter Ash, and the words, “Only Connect” ballooned in his head, and filled it, and pressed it out from the inside, expanding rhythmically faster and faster, over and over, “Only Connect. Only Connect, ONLY CONNECT.” “Christ!” the Floor Manager whispered, “Peter’s ill. He’s going to pass out,” and the director said, “Keep them running. It may be interesting.” Peter Ash tried as hard as he could to smile his twinkling, whimsical smile. “All of us …” he said. “We all believe …” and “OnLY ConnECT” went in and out, faster and faster like machinery gone mad in his head. “It’s a universal truth,” he said. “Good God,” he said. “We can’t live without it. We can’t live alone,” and a little spittle ran down one corner of his mouth, and smoke drifted up from Mr. Barnard’s cigarette, and the film wound out foot by foot in the cameras, and the director decided that, spectacular as this might be, he couldn’t possibly use it.

  “Cut!” he said. “We’ll go on in a moment when Peter’s feeling better.”

  Because you have to go on eventually. You can’t just stop.

  About the Author

  John Bowen was born in India, sent ‘home’ to England at the age of four and a half, and was reared by aunts. He served in the Indian Army from 1943–47, then went to Oxford to read Modern History. After graduating he spent a year in the USA as a Fulbright Scholar, much of it hitch-hiking. He worked for a while in glossy journalism, then in advertising, before turning freelance when the BBC commissioned a six-part adventure-serial for children’s television. Between 1956 and 1965 he published six novels to excellent reviews and modest sales, then forsook the novel for nineteen years to concentrate on writing television drama (Heil Caesar, Robin Redbreast) and plays for the stage (After the Rain, Little Boxes, The Disorderly Women). He returned to writing novels in 1984 with The McGuffin; there were four more thereafter. Reviewers have likened his prose to that of Proust and P. G. Wodehouse, of E. M. Forster and the young John Buchan: it may be fair to say that he resists compartmentalisation. He has worked as a television producer for both the BBC and ITV, directed plays at Hampstead and Pitlochry and taught at the London Academy of Dramatic Art. He lives in a house on a hill among fields between Banbury and Stratford-on-Avon.

  Copyright

  Faber Finds edition first published in 2008

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2013

  All rights reserved

  © John Bowen, 1962

  The right of John Bowen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–30513–1