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

couldn’t I jump for the unreliable with both eyes shut, as Gill had done? Why did I want to have my cake and eat it, as far as security was concerned? How could one expect people to be reliable about some things and not about others?
Qui fidelis est in parvo
, I expect, though the idea nauseates me.
    Depressed by this sad story, I asked Gill what she was going to do next: she seemed neither to know nor to care. I was impressed by her nonchalance. Her hair had begun to escape from its pins, shaken out of its elaborate backcombed beehive by the vehemence of her denunciation of her husband: she looked more like herself. She said, loudly, ‘I expeat everyone’s been listening in to this little chat, don’t you think? It ought to warn people off. Talk about blighting the marriage hearse with a few odd tears.’
    The phrase had crossed my mind too, but I try to resist the temptation to talk in quotations. Sometimes it seems the only accomplishment my education ever bestowed on me, the ability to think in quotations.
    I wanted to get away from Gill in order to find Tony, so I deftly introduced her to Michael, who was lurking around, and slipped off with some phrase about looking for Louise. I did in fact find Louise, on the same errand: she and Tony were talking to each other in a corner. They were so engrossed that I had to tap Tony on the shoulder to interrupt: when he saw it was me his response couldn’t have been more gratifying. He opened his arms and enfolded me, and I felt champagne from his glass trickling down the nape of my neck.
    ‘
Tony
,’ I said, ‘you’re spilling things on me.’
    ‘Am I?’ he said, as he released me and looked at me and kissed me on the cheek, making the most of everything as he always does.
    ‘I should be careful,’ said Louise, sourly. ‘He’s very tight by now.’
    ‘Of course I am,’ said Tony, ‘of course I am, with all this lovely free champagne, and drinking healths to Louise, my beautiful first love. She really was, too, you know,’ he said, turning to me. ‘She was my first love. When I first went up, I saw Louise walking along the street in some tight cream trousers and a tight white jersey, and I said Aha, what a girl. I tracked her for days, to and fro along the road to that dismal place of yours I grew to know so well, with my heart in my mouth, wondering what she’d say if I accosted her. I didn’t dare to draw near, I was quite ill with undeclared passion.’
    ‘You great liar,’ said Louise. ‘I met you at Sebastian’s.’
    ‘Yes, I know I did. But that doesn’t mean I hadn’t followed you for weeks, does it?’
    ‘You’re a great liar. As well as everything else.’
    ‘Oh, those were the days,’ said Tony. ‘Those were the days, you in those trousers, and lectures, and gowns, and bicycles, and you the most beautiful girl in Oxford. And to think you’ve gone and got married. It’s a tragedy, that’s what it is.’
    ‘Well you did it yourself.’
    ‘So I did. How foolish of me.’
    ‘What should I have done otherwise?’
    ‘Oh, don’t ask me. Something grand and wicked.’
    Louise smiled. She smiled and looked down at her hands, and twisted the shiny unscratched wedding ring, sitting so neatly by the great lump of diamonds. Then she said:
    ‘I don’t know, it’s all rather vulgar, isn’t it, getting married? I don’t know what faint memory of good taste stopped me painting my nails. I was going to do them orange. Oh, but then, of course, that wouldn’t have gone with my other dress . . . oh, there’s always a reason for things, isn’t there?’
    ‘You couldn’t look vulgar if you tried,’ said Tony. ‘You look like the picture of the Snow Queen in my first fairy story book. Ice within and ice without, the aristocrat of the nursery world, none of that Cinderella or Hansel and Gretel plebeian stuff, you know.’
    ‘Oh, pack it up,’ said Louise. ‘I’m sick of being called heartless. I’m very tender-hearted, you