A Summer Bird-Cage (18 page)

‘You really surprise me. I thought only intense people had collapses.’

‘Intense people collapse, but they also survive. They feed on disaster. So did Sappho and all the other girls. But for Stephen it isn’t a game. With him it isn’t a question of pushing to see how far he can go. With him it might mean permanent disablement.’

‘What
do
you mean?’

I was horrified by this glimpse of abysses so beyond anything I had ever imagined.

‘When I said that Stephen was a sick man,’ Wilfred went on, ‘I didn’t mean that he found life faintly tragic or mildly meaningless, or anything like that—I mean that he really is a psychological case. People use the word neurotic to describe anything they like, and forget that some people really are neurotic, and have real illnesses of the mind. And a real case isn’t glamorous or intense or anything like that—he’s just ill and cut off and unapproachable. That’s what Stephen is like. I know him well, and I know. It isn’t interesting, it’s sad and boring. He’s been getting worse. There used to be days when he would emerge and face what was happening to him—now he never does, never, and there’s nothing his friends can do except stand around and try to stop him getting hurt. It’s like looking after a chronic invalid or a baby. I’m not even interested any more, except for the sake of the past, and because someone has to be. I feel responsible. I know it’s presumptuous of me to assume that I know more about it than his wife, but I feel sure that she’s precisely the kind of person who would be incapable of appreciating how bad he is, that he really can’t feel things normally at all . . . do you understand me?’

‘Not really. Only very vaguely. If Stephen is as bad as you suggest he is, how on earth can he write books?’

‘Well, his art isn’t exactly of the most human kind, is it? And then, a lot sicker men than him have written a lot better books. Look at John Stuart Mill. And then again, he’s not writing at the moment, which worries me more than anything—I’m convinced he used to find some kind of release in writing, a sort of substitute existence, full of emotions and humanity and so forth, and above all full of people—’

‘I’m out of my depth,’ I said.

‘You aren’t with me at all?’

‘It’s so completely out of my world of reference—I’ve never been faced with anything like this before. Do you mean he’s mad?’

‘You do put things bluntly, don’t you, my dear. No, I don’t mean precisely that . . . I do, however, mean that he’s a case for a specialist, not for all our amateur guesswork. Don’t you feel that there are whole areas of his personality that never come to light?’

‘I always felt he was meaningless. Sort of nothing and meaningless.’

‘That’s one way of describing it.’

‘But what is it that’s wrong with him? Is it curable?’

‘I don’t know. I doubt it. I’m afraid he’s one of those unfortunate people who are always one up on their doctors, and so beyond help—’

‘But as to what it is . . . ’

‘My dear child, you’re a silly girl. You think you’re brave and can take everything, don’t you? You don’t like to be spared, do you? Well, I am old-fashioned enough to be able to decide that it would be better for you if I didn’t go into it.’

‘Perhaps I’m grateful to you. Perhaps I don’t want to know.’

‘I’ll tell you this much. You know that all these words one uses so gaily at parties, like masochism and sadism, have real meanings, don’t you? Real, factual meanings, like mumps and measles?’

‘Yes, I knew that.’

‘Then you see what I mean.’

‘Yes, I see what you mean.’

‘Then you see that I am justified in feeling concern on his behalf?’

‘I suppose so. You think that Louise is going to precipitate some ghastly crisis and everything will snap.’

‘In a way.’

‘Will it matter?’

‘Of course it will matter. Things are bad, but not as bad as they might be, by a long way.’

‘Just tell me, what do you get out of it?’

‘Out of what?’

‘Out of all your concern?’

‘Nothing. Nothing but the satisfaction of having tried. Nobody else is interested, so somebody has to be. It’s not very exciting, I agree.’

‘It’s like being God,’ I said.

He smiled. ‘Yes, I sometimes feel tempted to feel that. But unlike Stephen I don’t believe in God, so either I take an interest myself or consign him to the human rubbish-dump.’

‘How terrible.’

‘It is.’

‘Is there nobody that cares but you? I thought John Connell was a friend of his too?’

‘Ah yes, but their relationship is only one of mutual aid . . . this film they talk about, but will never make, rather aptly symbolizes it . . . and anyway, under the circumstances, it would take a remarkable degree of detachment, I think . . . ’

‘So nobody cares but you?’

He paused. ‘Doesn’t it strike you as odd that you, the sister of his wife, should be asking me that?’

I had to think for a moment before I realized what he meant. ‘Yes. Yes, of course,’ I admitted. ‘Husband and wife, husband and wife. Not that I have any faith in the idea at all with those two. I suppose that it’s just conceivable that on some deeper level she cares about him, but I think it’s terribly unlikely. He would need someone self-sacrificing and devoted, wouldn’t he? Somebody more interested in him than in herself.’

‘And for that Louise wouldn’t qualify?’

‘Well, would she?’

‘Oh, I agree. I never had any hopes of her.’

‘She’s a taker, not a giver.’

‘Perhaps you can tell me what, in marrying him, she expected to take?’

‘Now
there’s
a question. I’ve thought about this several times, believe me. Do you know what I decided in the end? That she didn’t know what else to do so she got married. It sounds too bourgeois to be true, doesn’t it, just the kind of thing that all that higher education ought to have knocked out of us—but the fact is that when she came down a couple of years ago she had no idea of what to do with herself. There wasn’t any career she was passionately interested in, so she just messed around for a year, in and out of people’s beds I don’t doubt, and then started a job in advertising. I ask you, Louise sitting in an office trying to sell things—the idea was ludicrous. And yet, what could she do? I didn’t quite get this at the time because I was still up myself and overflowing with love and optimism—but since I came down I see what she was getting at. She was far too intelligent to do nothing, and yet too beautiful and sexy to do all the first-class things like politics or law or social sciences—and she was naturally afraid of subsiding into nothingness, I suppose. Or that’s what I guess she felt, from what I myself am feeling. Our situations are very similar.’

‘But not your ways of solving them?’

‘Oh, I don’t solve things. I just drift and struggle as the weeks float on.’

‘But Louise thought that marrying Stephen was her way out of doing nothing?’

‘I think so. After all, he is very different from all the boys in Birmingham that we might have been marrying, and he has a lot of money, and he is famous . . . or does all that mean that she just succumbed to social pressures? I suppose it does. But on her own terms, that’s the point. I think she’s getting her pound of flesh from society for not letting her live as what she is.’

‘
Via
Stephen?’

‘Yes, admittedly,
via
Stephen.’

‘It’s hardly very generous of her.’

‘I don’t think she has the objectivity to be generous. She thinks her own life is so much more interesting than anyone else’s that she has a right to sacrifice others—she has a point, too I think, but I agree that she ought not to be endangering her husband’s sanity, if you really think she is doing something as melodramatic as that . . . it’s a pity she didn’t pick someone better able to look after themselves. But it all seems so unlikely to me. I would have thought that of the two she was much more unstable.’

‘Would you really? I had concluded, from I admit a much briefer acquaintance, that she was hard as nails.’

I pondered this description, and decided, ‘Yes, in a way I think you’re right.’

I was at this point remembering discussing normality and extremes with Stephen at his wedding: it seemed peculiarly ironic that I had then thought of myself as being more eccentric than he was.

‘Does he know himself that he’s in such a bad way?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes, I think he knows all right. Sometimes he seems to be perfectly lucid about his own state of mind, but much more often he seems to think that everyone else is like him—he must do a lot of double thinking.’

‘What did he hope to get out of marrying Louise?’

‘How should I know? Perhaps he hoped to catch a little of her intensity. To live off her energy. Perhaps he hoped she would understand him. Perhaps he simply wanted to get hold of her, to appear as her owner, when she’d turned down so many others. Including John. It must have looked to him at one point as though he’d beaten John.’

‘What on earth do you think will happen?’

‘I’ve no idea. Couldn’t you try asking Louise what she’s up to?’

‘Oh God no, don’t ask me to interfere, you can’t imagine what bad terms Lou and I are always on, I couldn’t talk straight to her to save my life.’

‘No. Somehow I didn’t think you would.’

‘Why don’t you try finding out from John?’

He laughed. ‘That wouldn’t be quite the same thing. Do you think she’s in love with him?’

‘I’ve really no idea.’

‘I think John is quite seriously taken with her. But it won’t last. He’s a great one for passing passions. Being so attractive himself, he can afford to be.’

‘He is attractive, isn’t he?’

‘Do you find him so?’

‘Oh, fabulously.’ The more I thought about this, the truer it seemed. ‘He’s one of those people,’ I said, ‘that I resent because they’re so obviously wonderful. You know, he just gives you a look and you start twitching.’

‘Dangerous, isn’t it?’

‘Perhaps Louise is in love with him. Is he a serious kind of person?’

‘Oh very, I suppose.’

‘Because she couldn’t be in love with anyone less serious than her.’

And as I said that, I realized what it was that Louise and I really had in common. We were both serious people.

There our conversation more or less ended. We both sobered up considerably over the coffee, and I at least began to wonder if I had said anything that would be likely to get reported back to its subject-matter. If I had, it was too late. And I had said worse things about Louise before. Also, Wilfred had said much more compromising things to me than I had to him.

I went home on the Tube. On the way back I kept thinking of a programme I once saw on television about schizophrenic children: strange, bright little children who lived in a severed world and did not recognize other people as people at all, and climbed over their mothers as though they were part of the furniture. They talked a private language, arranged things in neat lines, made odd little gestures with their hands, and broke their mothers’ hearts, I do not doubt. I remember there was one enchanting small child called Henry, aged three, who acknowledged the existence of nobody except, for one fleeting second, when his mother violently kissed his arm: then he leaned back and shut his eyes in pleasure, like a child, like a normal living child. The psychiatrist kept insisting that the condition was rare and biochemical, but it seemed oddly metaphysical to me. Which just shows how willing one is to attach glamorous reasons to sickness, provided there is nothing to repel. In fact I suppose a Mongol would bring more joy. He also said that an apparently similar condition could be found in small children who had been ignored by their parents, but that the neglect had to be almost total. That upset me more than anything—the thought of those sad, borderline children who clung on to sanity and childhood through the few scraps of affection and interest that accidentally fell their way. The human mind is not a delicate plant, I thought: on the contrary, it will survive almost anything, and what could have happened to Stephen to have pushed him out beyond the borderline? Do not expect an answer to that question, because there is none.

10

I
THOUGHT OVER
what Wilfred had said continually, without seeming to get anywhere. There seemed to be a lot of clues around, which would one day, but not yet, fit into a pattern. I didn’t do anything about getting to see her myself: I didn’t feel it would be appropriate to invite her round for coffee. So I waited, and as chance would have it the next news I heard of her was from a quite unexpected source—my cousin Michael, between me and whom there existed, as I have explained, a certain
rapport
. Michael is a medical student in his fourth or so year at a hospital in Oxford, and on the whole I see him only at family gatherings, though occasionally he used to look me up at college. Anyway, about a week after the party at Louise’s, he rang me up and asked if he could come round to supper. I said Yes, and we had quite a pleasant meal of packet soup
etcetera
, and talked about Daphne and his latest girl-friend and when I was going to get married. He had come up, if you please, to watch a football match. Just as we were talking about a woman he had seen in the hospital who had been horribly squashed by a bus, he broke off to say, ‘And, by the way, I saw your friend Martin in Paris.’

‘Did you really? By what way?’

‘What way?’

‘I mean, why did you think of him?’

‘Oh, I was thinking of those plastic bombs. I saw someone in Paris when I was with him, almost blown up. I had to go and help.’

‘How awful, what happened?’

‘Oh, he got taken off to hospital.’

‘And how was Martin?’

‘Great. He’s a nice chap, isn’t he? He took me out to a nice spot or two. He sends you his love.’

‘He’s not thinking of coming back again?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘He was nice to me, Martin. Did you meet any nice girls while you were with him?’

‘They all talked French. Except for one American and she was too fast for me.’

‘Oh, Michael.’

‘Guess who else I met there?’