A Summer Bird-Cage by Margaret Drabble Read Free Book Online

his arms round me and plead with me to stay, but he didn’t, he just patted me on the shoulder and said, “Well, if that’s what you want.” He sent me to bed, and he brought me some Ovaltine. That was nice of him, I suppose.’ Her voice trailed off, unintentionally pathetic. She meant that it was nice of him. She really did expect so little.
    ‘But, Gill,’ I said, ‘how could he throw his arms round you when he must have thought you hated him so? He wouldn’t have known you wanted him to.’
    ‘Perhaps he didn’t. I never can realize that he doesn’t know how much I love him. I always feel so at a disadvantage, loving him so much. But I suppose that time I’d shaken him. Perhaps he thought I didn’t love him any more.’
    ‘Where did you go after that?’
    ‘Oh, I went and stayed with Peter and Jessica for a bit, and then I was rather ill so I went home, and when I was better I moved back to London. I’m living there in Highgate now at the Studio with James and Rose and Jeremy and all that crowd.’
    ‘Are they all still painting?’
    ‘Oh yes.’ She smiled. ‘God, they’re terrible. So’m I, but at least I know it. They really think they’re serious artists. It’s so funny. I keep dabbling, but I know it’s only for me. Still, it’s nice to try. Tony made me feel so useless. Once I said to him, “I feel like a still life, I want to
do
something”, and he gave me a bit of canvas and a few paints and said, “You paint me then.” It was awful, I was so offended, it was just the same as when my mother used to give me a handkerchief to iron with my toy iron on washday, so I could be grown-up like her. And the truth is that my stuff
is
like child’s painting when you compare it with his. You know what I mean? It used not to matter but it does now. Everything matters so much.’
    ‘How did your mother take it?’
    ‘Oh, with Christian forgiveness. You know.’
    I did know. I knew Gill’s family life almost as well as I knew my own, by a mixture of association and intuition: her parents, like mine, were middle-class, respectable, apparently cultured—her mother in fact
was
cultured, she was a very nice woman, a prison-visiting Quaker, one of those who actually do what they talk about doing. Gill had done her a grave injustice in her suggestion that she had objected to the marriage on the grounds that Tony had once been in an orphanage, since this was the one feature in Tony’s history and personality that had really appealed to her. She had said to me once, in a curious
tête-à-tête
at a college sherry party—Mrs Webster was an Old Girl of our college—that she didn’t object to Tony’s being Nobody, in such a startlingly literal way, nor to his being a painter, but that she did object to his total lack of responsibility and social conscience, and his habitual promiscuity. How she got to hear of the latter I can’t imagine, nor can I imagine how we ever got round to talking about it, as I am sure no definite words came up during our conversation: but we both knew that that was what we were discussing. I had defended Tony as much as I dared, though really there wasn’t much defence to make, and I would have been slightly perturbed by the last allegation myself if I had been either Gill or her mother. All I could say was, helplessly, defending our generation, ‘Yes, I’m sure you’re right, I’m sure that from every practical point of view you’re right, but I’m equally sure that he
is
reliable, on some deeper level. I’m sure he is. And it isn’t security that Gill wants, not security of that sort, I know it isn’t.’ And now, it seemed, I had been wrong. He hadn’t been reliable on any level. He was as unsound with people as he was with things and sex and money. It seemed a nasty victory to common sense, and I asked myself if it justified Louise, and then realized that Mrs Webster was as alien to Louise as she was to Tony. Why did I want to reconcile everything? Why