The Birdcage (10 page)

He had done his duty. He had been fair. He had warned her. By a deliberate self-control, he had interrupted the love-play of lips and the tips of fingers to warn her that they must keep it casual. She had made some reply.
Something
quite off the point, as one might expect. Oh, yes—she had said, “Nobody’s ever put his tongue in my
belly-button
before. It does feel funny.” What a ridiculous innocent she was! The most pleasant way of making love in the end, he thought, is to
teach
somebody. Bunty had been prepared to do anything. She’d had very little
experience
, as far as he could tell (the boys she had known at Swiss Cottage had been lovers of the grunting-athletic school), but she had no inhibitions either.

The Living Arts
had needed to cast about a bit for their good talkers. Reference to Senior Common Rooms may be all very well, but, if one wishes to be thought
forward-looking
, one has to be wary of seeming to be linked with “the Establishment”. Then there had been the question of including women. Port and that sort of thing—the
associations
are masculine. The very idea of good talk is masculine. To the idea of
good talk
, add the idea of
women
, and all you have is a telephone conversation. Yet there were many intelligent and talented women.
The Brains Trust
on television always included a woman. Usually. (It is nowhere written down that the ratio of women to men in a television discussion programme shall be one to four, but that is how it works out.) Eventually the Unit in
conference
had decided it would have:

The woman should be either an actress, a sociologist, or a Life Peeress. One of the five should be Jewish, and one should be either black, brown, or yellow or some shade in between. There should be no politicians. If you have one politician, you have to have two, and then you have to make sure that nobody else on the programme has political opinions of any kind. Nobody should be French.

They had made a mistake, Peter Ash now saw, in
choosing
Fred Trent, the best-known, though not the best, of the north-country, working-class novelists. Somehow, before the discussion began, they would have to find a way in which he could be effectively interrupted. None of the others seemed disposed to try; they merely talked
sotto voce
amongst themselves, and that was not true
entertainment
: it was not even visual. Conflict was one thing;
ignoring
each other was quite another.

“Well, I don’t know, you can’t beat the old writers, can you?” Fred Trent said. “I mean, I’ve read them all, you know, in my time. Dickens … Thackeray … Trollope … George Eliot … Fielding … Priestley … what I call
my
tradition—you can keep your Prousts; I’ve no time for that—Tolstoy … I read them in the Army, as a matter of fact. I never
did
anything in the Army, you see; I just loafed about. Doing anything in the military way was against my principles. I said, ‘If you’re going to pay me what I’m worth, that’s different. If not, I’ll do nothing.’ I was a private.” (Challengingly to the philosopher, who had been
the youngest full colonel in the Royal Intelligence Corps, a body notorious for young colonels.) “You didn’t know about my Army career, did you? That’s because I haven’t written it yet, but I will. I’ve got it all up here, you know.” (Tapping his forehead with a finger which, if he had had to describe it, he would have called “blunt”.) “Oh, yes, we’ll get to that in time. I’ve confined meself so far; I know that. I’ve confined meself to the Trent country.” (A phrase coined by Fred Trent himself to describe the small village in county Durham where he had been born, brought up, married, and had bought a home.) “I haven’t needed to go outside the Trent country yet, but I can when I want to. I’ll expand, you see. The whole of England’ll be the Trent country before I’ve done. I don’t waste anything, you know. I mean, sitting here, listening to you, there’s a little recording machine inside” (tapping again), “taking it all down, and storing it up for me to use. You’ll be famous some day, when I get to you.” (The philosopher, who knew he was already famous, smiled a cold smile.) “Writing’s a great agony for me, you know. It’s not easy. Sometimes I have to go out and get drunk to break the tension.
Because
…” (very slowly, with great earnestness, glaring them all into a momentary attention) “the task
I
have set
my
self is to write English prose better than any other writer now living. And don’t think I find that easy, because I don’t. Not because there’s any competition. There isn’t. There isn’t anybody writing in England today who can come within a mile of me. There’s just the people who imitate me, and the people who can’t even do as well as that, writing nancy muck about young men called
Archibald
. But that’s not the trouble. What
I
find so difficult is to maintain the standard
I
have set
my
self. No other man could keep to it, and I don’t mind telling you it plays the devil with me sometimes.”

“That’s very good, Fred,” said the director. “That’s very good indeed, isn’t it, Peter? But you’ll keep it a bit brisker, won’t you? Relaxed, but brisk. Lots of jolly old attack, eh?”

“It’s a funny sort of wine, port,” said the painter, who came from Bermondsey, to the philosopher, who came from Oxford. “Sort of sweet. When I was on one of them television discussions, we had whisky.”

“Barbarous. I haven’t had lunch yet. I thought we’d be lunching here.”

“They give you sandwiches after.”

A boy in pointed shoes took the decanter away from the painter, and placed a silver chain round the neck of it. The chain had been rubbed with soap. He replaced the decanter on the table. “How’s that?” he asked one of the
cameramen
.

“Still hot.” The painter said, “Even when you think you’re finished, they keep making you do bits again for the close-ups like.”

“We’ll just run though very roughly then, shall we?” said the director. Peter Ash said to the academic poet, “Would you say you’re on the side of life?” and the academic poet said, “I’m afraid I never know what that means.”

Peter Ash was flustered. If Dr. Leavis and Mr. Richard Hoggart knew what they meant when they said somebody was on the side of life, then surely the academic poet must know. He decided that it was a joke. “We’ll keep that in,” he said.

“Now, lots of hush,” said the director. “We’re not going to try to run through the whole thing, because we haven’t got time. Peter’s got the list of topics for discussion, so he’ll just guide you gently from one to another. You don’t need to bother about anything. Just concentrate on
that old, relaxed sort of
college
atmosphere. Keep the old port circulating to the left, and that sort of thing. We don’t mind if you get into a bit of an argument from time to time, but don’t be too … I mean, don’t——” More than half the cinema audience nowadays was in its teens, and the rest was old-age pensioners come in for a bit of a warm. One shouldn’t talk
down
to such people, of course, but at the same time it did no harm to remember that most of them didn’t understand any word of more than three syllables. But he mustn’t inhibit his talkers, or they might fall silent. “Anyway, just be relaxed,” he said. Like the beam of a lighthouse his smile swept the table. “And brisk.”

“Quiet now, please,” said the Floor Manager. “All set for a run-through.”

They waited, sitting there nervously at the table in the heat of the lights. The woman, who couldn’t remember whether they’d been given permission to smoke, lit a cigarette to represent female emancipation. The philosopher wondered whether port would boil. From the air came music. The Floor Manager brought his hand down sharply like a conductor. Peter Ash poured himself a glass of port first for the academic poet on his right, then for himself, then passed the decanter easily to the left, and smiled a whimsical, welcoming, relaxed,
intelligent
smile. “Hullo there!” he said to the camera. “Nowadays, as I expect
you’ve
noticed, we’re always being told that the art of
conversation
is dead.” He paused for a count of four. “But is it? Can we really say it is?”

Immediately you knew that it wasn’t. The art of
conversation
, like all the other arts, might take a bit of pasting sometimes, but just as long as Peter Ash was around to see it safely through, you could be sure it would survive.

*

The flag-sellers were out in the Brompton Road. Patient
in hats they stood, spaced out at intervals of sixty yards or so. They did not ask. One could feel them not asking from twenty feet away. Sometimes a young one would jingle her collecting-can, while the people passed with eyes averted.

“Sailors’ Day,” said Norah Palmer to Squad Appleby. Do you have sixpence?”

“Ah, but shall I get a sailor for it? No, my dear,” said Squad to the flag-seller, “If charity is to be disbursed to the fleet, I prefer to give
my
mite much more directly.”

It was not certain that the flag-seller heard him, or, if she heard, she did not trouble to understand. People did make remarks when they bought flags. One expected it of people. Kind remarks, they made, or facetious remarks, but only if they should ask for change was an answer required. Norah put two shillings in the collecting-can, took a flag for
herself
, and gave one to Squad. “Thus we buy immunity,” she said.

The flag-seller asked, “Would you like me to pin it in place for you, sir?” Since Norah had paid for both flags, this deference to the male annoyed her, and she determined to put herself on an equal plane of sophistication with Squad, and continued, “Anyway you know perfectly well you couldn’t get a sailor for sixpence.”

“Two pounds, my dear. The market rate.”

“How useful to know!”

“Norah, love, if
that
were ever in your mind, as they say, how swiftly it could be arranged.”

“No thank you, Squad.”

Crass! Men—even Squad—were capable of an
extraordinary
crassness sometimes. One couldn’t, of course, be hurt by such a piece of unthinking idiocy (though she was hurt, just the same). She had flushed and unconsciously she had tightened her lips, just like an offended spinster
(which is what she was), and now she must untighten them, and be pleasant to poor Squad. It wasn’t his fault. Perhaps she was already at the age when one took a gigolo—oh dear! all those Michael Arlen associations—orchids and illicit love and long moonlight drives at high speed along the Gran’ Corniche in a Hispano. Did people read Michael Arlen nowadays? She supposed not. Had Squad ever wept for Iris March. “Have you ever wept for Iris March, Squad?” she said, and Squad replied, “Not eally,” which answered the question, she supposed, but not the question behind the question. She herself had passed the years from thirteen to seventeen or so in a prolonged spasm of voracious and indiscriminate reading. Three books a day often—it was like having a tapeworm—Bessie Bunter in
The Schoolgirl
, all those Forsytes going on and on from one Saga to another bound in green with gold
lettering
, back copies of
The New Yorker
, Michael Arlen, Gerhardi, Noel Coward’s autobiography (he didn’t have two little dots then; that dated one, she supposed),
Mrs. Dalloway
and then right through Virginia Woolf in a great drunken orgy until she was knocked over by
The Waves
. Rosamund Lehmann, she had read, and Gladys Mitchell, Charles Morgan,
The Mortal Storm
(how she had wept, and then she had seen the movie, and wept and wept again)—good and bad, pulp and the pretty paper of The Hogarth Press, arty and crafty,
The Hobbit
and Emily Dickinson and
Woman & Beauty
and old second-hand copies of volumes from The Left Book Club, all mixed up and only half understood, she had eaten them all. “Gigolo”—she hadn’t known what the word meant, and an older girl had explained, “Well, it’s when you sort of pay men to make love to you.” Norah Palmer was not yet so worldly-wise that she would know how to make the payment. Gold cigarette cases, the books said, and suits from Savile Row,
but surely spot cash would be cheaper and more
acceptable
?

That wasn’t bothering her. One could do without that—she could anyway, and had for some time now. “I leave you here,” she said. She was bound to the office, Squad to rehearsal rooms in Westminster. No, it was that life felt so empty, when she allowed herself to think of it. Perhaps it had been empty before, but it had not seemed so. A home; she missed a home. The flat at Beaufort Street had been a home. She had helped to make it, had planned for it, bought for it, moved furniture, matched colours, hung pictures. Overton Square was not a home. It was a flatlet, not a home.

She must entertain. And she must go out more. She had been out, of course, from time to time—to a couple of parties, and she had been asked out to dinner, though a single woman is not as much in demand for dinner parties as a single gentleman. She had felt unprotected, but this would pass. One must work at friends, as everybody knows and she must work at hers, or the days would go by and she would find herself friendless, lost, out of touch.

For the present, she had put a routine between herself and the need to take things up again. She would work late at the office, and then stop off for a while at a drinking club in Knightsbridge. They were quite a good crowd there really, most of them film or television or advertising people, most of them in their late thirties, forties, or early fifties. They were not perhaps quite
her
kind of people—they certainly weren’t intellectuals—but she knew them, had met them; they were not strangers; they were the sort of people one could drink with. Norah Palmer would have a gin and water at the bar, and then another one or two. If she were to find herself with a crowd who were drinking, she would stand her round with the rest. Usually she would
leave the club at nine or half past, just too late for a movie. Just too late for anything really, except to boil herself an egg, read a book for a while, and go, very slightly blurry, to bed.