A Summer Bird-Cage (25 page)

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I remember Stella.’

‘You know she married Bill?’

‘Bill?’

‘The physics man she knew. They got married the year they came down, a week after the end of term or something dotty. And now they’ve got two babies.’

‘How super,’ I said, automatically, but Louise cried almost with frenzy, ‘No, it isn’t, it isn’t super at all, it’s the worst catastrophe I’ve ever seen.’

She stopped for a moment, and then she said, more calmly, ‘What’s happened to me is bliss compared with that. You ought to go and visit them. They live in a slum in Streatham, and Bill lectures at the Polytechnic, and Stella goes mad with that baby—there was only one when I saw them. They didn’t mean to have them, either of them, and poor Stella hasn’t even the comfort of hating them because she’s incapable of hate. She wouldn’t know how to hate them.’

‘When did you see all this?’

‘I went to see them last spring, when she was expecting her second—it was too terrible, the baby was sitting on its pot and screaming, and the loo was littered with wet nappies, and everywhere smelt of babies. There were plastic toys all over the place, and you could hardly get through the front door for the pram, and there was a bottle of clinic orange-juice leaking on the window-sill, oh it was disgusting. The house was quite horrid, and they were buying it on a mortgage, I can’t think why—a horrid little terrace house, and you could even hear babies crying in the houses on either side. She said there were babies in every house. And at tea we had marge on the bread instead of butter, it was like the war. Bill was out at work. She tried so hard not to show me what she was feeling but poor thing, one could tell at a glance—she hadn’t brushed her hair, or worn make-up for days, I shouldn’t think, and she hadn’t any stockings on although it was cold and she hadn’t bothered to shave her legs, they were all blue and cold—she never took her apron off the whole time I was there. And in the end it all came out, I asked her something about Bill and she started to complain about him, she said that that kind of life was all right for him because at least he spent the day with intelligent people, and I said what intelligent people, and she said the other teachers at the Polytechnic, and when I said that I didn’t think they could be much fun either she said anyway they were better than babies and the milkman. Oh God, I’ve never heard such abuse from anyone, she sounded like a fishwife or something off the music-halls, and all the time she was shovelling Farex down that poor little kid. And I said to myself as I left, never never never will I let that happen to me. Never will I marry without money.

‘I suppose that what I really said to myself was, I will never have children. I want my life, I want it now, I don’t want to give it to the next generation. So I took bloody good care that it shouldn’t happen to me.’

‘Would you and Stephen never have had children?’ I asked. I felt subdued with horror.

‘Never,’ she said. ‘Never.’

I was silent. I was silenced. Louise stared into the fire. She had stopped shivering and had started to cry. The tears rolled down her nose and she didn’t make any effort to stop them. She frightened me: I hadn’t seen her cry since she was ten.

‘I never went to see her again,’ she said, after a while. She said it in such a way that I knew she had been worrying about it, for a long time. And then, after another long pause, she said, ‘Stella wrote to me, while I was in Paris. She was in hospital after the second baby, and this time it was a boy. She said it weighed seven pounds, and had black hair, and that the hospital let it stay with her at night, but that she missed the little girl who wasn’t allowed in even at visiting-time, they don’t allow children in maternity wards. I didn’t know that, it seems ironic, really. She’d written to the
Spectator
about it. She said she was sorry she’d been cross the day I’d been to see her, but the baby had kept her up all night teething, and she and Bill had had a quarrel about whose turn it was to get up for the early feed. She said she felt better now the other one was born.’

‘I’m glad,’ I said.

‘Yes. But I couldn’t go to see her again, could I? So I stayed away. And which was true, in any case, the letter or what I saw?’

Looking at her crying, so pitiably and unapproachably there, I saw for her what I could never see for myself—that this impulse to seize on one moment as the whole, one aspect as the total view, one attitude as a revelation, is the impulse that confounds both her and me, that confounds and impels us. To force a unity from a quarrel, a high continuum from a sequence of defeats and petty disasters, to live on the level of the heart rather than the level of the slipping petticoat, this is what we spend our life on, and this is what wears us out. My attitude to the petticoat is firmer than hers, but I am exhausted nevertheless.

‘How could I go and see her again?’ she repeated. ‘I stayed away. And look at me now. What shall I do now? Whatever shall I do?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. I didn’t like her to ask me. It seemed a kind of incest, just to watch her cry, so unfamiliar was any true proximity.

‘If I were you,’ she said, ‘I would marry Francis. I think you should marry Francis.’

‘I think I probably will,’ I said.

‘But I don’t know what on earth I shall do,’ she said again.

As I sit here, typing this last page, Francis is on his way home. He is somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic on his way home to me, and I am waiting to see whether or not I have kept faith. I am waiting to take my life up again, not indeed where I left off, for I shall only find where it is when I try. But somewhere, and somewhere further on, moreover.

Gill is still at home, I think, but Tony rang me the other day to ask where she was, so I suppose he will be making overtures to her himself soon.

And as for Louise, well, what was there that could have happened? She’s living with John at the moment but she refuses to marry him, despite his entreaties, and despite Stephen’s determination to divorce her as soon as possible. She says she has learned her lesson, but I don’t know what she means by that. Wilfred tells me that Stephen is writing another novel with Louise as villainess: I foresee a book about a woman who is destroyed by a fatal streak of vulgarity, manifested by an inability to resist shades of mauve, purple and lilac. The odd thing is that John has turned out to be deeply and devotedly in love with her: he loves her as much as Francis and I used to love each other before the boat sailed, which is my high-watermark of passion. He loved her before the wedding, just as seriously, and was outraged when she treated it all as a dramatic joke. He wasn’t enjoying it at all. I shan’t suspect actors as much in the future: John seems to have behaved better than most people I know. She may even marry him in the end, if she can ever face the fact that he really is fond of her.

The oddest thing of all is that she seems to have forgiven me for existing. She’s so nice to me now, so genuinely nice: she tells me all sorts of things. She even said once that in marrying Stephen she was trying to stop me overtaking her.

She also said that when Stephen went and caught them together in the bath, what upset her most was that she was wearing her bath-cap. To keep her hair dry. She said she would have started a scene if she had had her hair loose, but with a plastic hat on like that she felt so ridiculous that she couldn’t.

She must at heart be quite fond of both John and me: of John, to have worn it, and of me, to have told it.

M
ARGARET
D
RABBLE
is the author of
The Sea Lady, The Seven Sisters, The Peppered Moth,
and
The Needle’s Eye,
among other novels. For her contributions to contemporary English literature, she was made a Dame of the British Empire in 2008.