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

know.’
    ‘Oh yes, oh yes,’ said Tony. ‘That wasn’t what I was calling in question. I’m sure your heart is all that it should be. And now, perhaps, you’d like to drift off and talk to your guests while your sister and I have a little chat?’
    ‘Do you think I should?’ she said, very wide-eyed and very annoyed. ‘Yes, perhaps you’re right, perhaps I should. I’ll be seeing you some day, I suppose.’
    ‘I suppose so,’ said Tony. And she disappeared.
    ‘Honestly,’ said Tony, as she receded, ‘she should go on the stage. She really should. She’d bring the house down. Tender-hearted, indeed. She probably is, to insults. All really selfish people think they’re tenderhearted, because they get hurt so often. They mistake the pangs of wounded pride for the real thing.’
    ‘Oh, she’s all right,’ I said, vaguely. I enjoyed hearing Tony treat her with such little respect. It reduced her. He really seemed to think that she was silly: I didn’t know how he had the nerve, but I admired him for it. Well, no, I didn’t exactly admire him for it, but I liked him for it. I liked him so much. I really did think he probably had treated Gill very badly. And yet, in some way, it was impossible to mind. He has that knack of suspending judgement, which is what some people mean by charm. He doesn’t deceive, he simply suspends one’s judgement. He is a great opportunist both with girls and with money, and yet he always gets away with it: I doubt if people ever feel wronged by him, despite the obvious incriminating facts. On the contrary, girls in particular usually seem to feel they have let him down, because what he wanted was clearly something more than mere change, and they feel guilty because he hasn’t found it with them. This made the Gill affair all the more curious, because she and I, before I had seen him, had felt that he was deeply in the wrong. Perhaps there is something in the very name of marriage that had altered the case: I had had different expectations, despite my high protestations of freedom from reverence. Perhaps, in that, my sin of preconception was greater than his. Anyway, whatever the explanation of the moral undertones, the fact is that when Tony turned to me, after his comment on Louise, and said, ‘Look, Sarah darling, I saw you talking to Gill and let’s not us go over all that nonsense, shall we?’ any annoyance that was left ebbed out of me: under the solid heaviness of his presence it seemed unreal, theoretical, a mere head-idea, and I was where I had always been, friendly and overcome with delight that such lovely people exist. Also, I must confess, at the risk of sounding a fool which I am not, that when he said darling to me the word hit me in the stomach: it isn’t a word he uses casually, and he had said it with real intimacy, which is so rare a thing that it brings the tears to my stupid eyes whenever it is proffered. And so, thawed, I smiled and said, ‘Well, then, what shall we talk about? Did you send Lou away so that we could talk about her?’
    ‘Oh no! Not her. I thought we might note all the guests. All their qualities.’
    ‘We might,’ I said, ‘if desperate for other topics.’ I didn’t mean that: I loved noting people, especially with somebody else. Tony and I had spent many a happy hour sitting on bridges and punts taking sociological surveys, and now, as I looked round with him at all the hats and bow-ties and champagne glasses, everything became suddenly full of the subaqueous glamour of existence, no longer gestures, but the things themselves.
    ‘I’d have thought they were rather good material for noting,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen such a fabulous mixture of varieties of money. I must be the only pauper here. Why aren’t there any more people from Oxford?’
    ‘Oh, I don’t know. They’re all abroad, or working, or can’t afford the train fare, I suppose. Or perhaps they can’t be bothered to come. Why did you come, in any case?