The Birdcage Page 23

  ‘And he was friendly?’ asked Felix anxiously. ‘He sounded natural?’

  ‘He was very polite and very charming, and his laugh sounds just like yours.’ Lizzie smiled at him reassuringly. ‘Is there anything you feel I should know before I humiliate myself any further?’

  ‘I am just so pleased,’ said Felix happily. ‘It’s such a good sign that he wants to meet you again. It means that he’s slowly letting go of all his resentment.’

  He shook his head, as if words were beyond him, and she reached out to touch his hand.

  ‘I was rather pleased too,’ she admitted. ‘So come on. Teach me my lines, give me my cues, I want to rehearse this scene before I play it to an audience.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Tilda made her way between the dawdling holidaymakers, enjoying the sensation of belonging; happy in this awareness of her own permanency amongst so many visitors. David had often railed at the indecision of strolling couples blocking the path, at being unable to park his car outside his grandfather’s flat at the height of the season, but Tilda took it in her stride. The warm sunshine washed the pretty village scene in yellow light, carving sharp black strokes of shade across the sunken cobbled pavement and touching the hanging baskets with their bright splashy colours. She’d had to park in West Street this morning and – as she passed beneath the long, three-tiered, slate-hung walls of the old nunnery, holding Jake’s chair carefully away from the traffic – she considered the possibility of starting her own little business here, in Dunster. She hesitated outside the second-hand bookshop, wondering whether she should check with Adrian to see if his holiday let might be free for Lizzie, and decided that she mustn’t interfere; paused to look at the display of antique linen-wear in the window of the Linen Basket, which had once been Parhams grocery shop, and resisted an urge to try on one of the gorgeous straw hats that hung in the doorway.

  ‘Can’t afford it,’ she told Jake, who watched wide-eyed as he was swung along, his own linen hat cocked rakishly to protect him from the sunshine. ‘I’ve got your future to think of, haven’t I?’

  As she put him into the car, her mobile sang out its silly little tune and she snatched it from the pocket of her satchel-bag.

  ‘Saul!’ Her voice was so full of delight that the young man might have been forgiven for imagining that she was more than usually pleased to hear his voice. ‘How are you? You’re still coming on Friday?’

  ‘Of course I’m coming.’ There was nothing to betray the lifting of his heart at that tone in her voice. ‘I want to see my godson, don’t I?’

  ‘Oh, Saul, you’ll never guess who I’ve just met!’

  ‘No, I probably wouldn’t.’ He sounded cautious now, trying to disguise a flash of dismay. ‘Brad Pitt? Pierce Brosnan? Homer Simpson? I give up. Who have you just met?’

  ‘I was having coffee with Felix and who should stroll in but Lizzie Blake, the actress. Remember that sitcom? Family Values? David adored it. And she does that advert with the terrific dog . . .’

  ‘Yes, I know who you mean.’ He sighed with silent relief: no gorgeous new man, then. ‘How come Felix knows her?’

  ‘He didn’t exactly say and I didn’t like to ask but she is just so nice.’

  ‘And am I going to meet her?’

  ‘I don’t know. She’s only booked in for a few days at the Luttrell Arms but we’re trying to persuade her to stay longer. I hoped she might come to Michaelgarth. Wouldn’t it be fab?’

  ‘It would,’ he agreed. ‘Meanwhile, I shall be down about tea-time, if that’s OK?’

  ‘It’ll be so good to see you, Saul.’ She suddenly realized how very true this was. ‘Oh, listen, I nearly forgot. Did you know that Gemma’s down?’

  ‘At Michaelgarth?’ He was clearly surprised.

  ‘No, they’re at the cottage. Guy had some sailing job postponed and we’d had a cancellation so they’re there for the week.’

  ‘That’s nice.’ He sounded non-committal. ‘How are my nephews?’

  ‘Oh, she left the twins with your ma so that they could both have a real break. Guy’s getting some sailing with a man he sold a boat to last year.’

  ‘So Gemma’s spending time with you and Jake, then.’

  ‘A bit. She’s got a few chums over here, you know, but she and Guy will be coming to supper on Friday. Drive carefully, won’t you, Saul? Give me a buzz on the way down.’

  ‘Of course.’ He heard the rising note of anxiety – ever since David’s accident, she’d been abnormally fearful when her friends were making long trips – but kept his voice light. ‘Everyone sends their love and tells me that I must bring you back with me.’

  A little silence. ‘Yes,’ she said, rather bitterly. ‘I’m sure they do.’

  ‘Tilda, they really miss you.’

  ‘I know.’ She controlled that flash of resentment: that a cruel quirk of fate should have suddenly removed her so completely from the company of her friends and the world where she’d been so happy. ‘Give them my love, won’t you? And we’ll see you on Friday.’

  She drove carefully away: driving was something she’d had to make herself do immediately after David’s death, knowing that, if she lost her nerve, her life – and Jake’s – would be impossibly restricted. She was cheered by Saul’s call, part of her mind planning the weekend ahead, part still wondering how she might occupy her time and her talents. She’d reached Alcombe before it quite suddenly occurred to her that Piers’ high spirits might have been caused by the prospect of his lunch with Lizzie Blake and nothing at all to do with Alison.

  ‘Oh, how I do hope so,’ she said aloud. She glanced in the mirror at Jake and then at her watch. If she dashed round the Co-op here in Alcombe, instead of going into Tesco’s, there would be plenty of time to see the new golden Labrador puppies over at Huntscott. She’d reserved one charming little fellow several weeks before and the breeder, an old friend of the Hamiltons, had agreed that if Piers really was not ready to have another dog then she’d take him back.

  ‘Don’t worry, my dear,’ she’d said. ‘I’m sure he’ll want him. Joker’s litter brother is his great-grandfather but I understand how you feel. I shan’t have a problem finding a home for him.’

  ‘You won’t tell him, will you?’ Tilda had asked anxiously. ‘I want it to be a surprise for his birthday.’

  The breeder had given Tilda’s shoulder a friendly squeeze.

  ‘Not a word,’ she’d promised.

  Tilda put Jake’s chair into the trolley, her mind made up. Seeing Bertie had confirmed her conviction that it was time for another puppy at Michaelgarth. Piers should have his present on Saturday at the party whilst Saul was with them to give his support. Saul, like David, was a man of positive action and she could count on him to keep them all going if the moment became too emotional. Tilda made a happy little face at Jake as she pushed him along the aisles, choosing treats for the birthday supper. Her heart gave a tiny jump of excitement: perhaps Lizzie Blake might be one of the party too.

  All that morning, Piers was aware of a barely subdued excitement: he worked with one eye on the clock and his thoughts elsewhere. When he arrived outside the hotel there was no room to park and he could only lean across to open the door for Lizzie before driving on again as quickly as he could so as not to cause a traffic jam.

  He said: ‘Sorry about that, I couldn’t quite think where else to meet you,’ whilst she was telling him that she’d been nearly run over whilst hopping in and out to look for him. They both fell silent, neither looking at the other, both anxious not to behave as if they were inexperienced teenagers on their first date. It was Lizzie – knowing so much more about the past than Piers – who was able to assume control; to drive the conversation carefully away from banality towards the intimacy that they both needed.

  ‘I love this part of the village,’ she observed, as Piers took a short cut up St George’s Street. ‘It’s so incredibly quiet. You can’t believe that all that busyness is happening in the High Stre
et when you’re sitting in that beautiful little garden.’

  He smiled, slowing a little as he passed the school and turned into Priory Green. ‘It’s rather special,’ he agreed.

  ‘It was so odd,’ she continued, almost as if he hadn’t spoken, ‘to see Felix sitting there on that bench. I thought he might be dead, you know, and I needed to see him so much.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Piers after a moment. ‘Why now?’

  ‘It’s one of those trigger points,’ she answered. ‘I’m sure there are all kinds of clever names for it but I think it’s fairly common. Something pretty grim happens, some terrible loss, and you find that you’re reassessing your life, trying to understand why certain things happen, but to do that you need to fill in a few gaps and sometimes you don’t think of asking questions until it’s too late. Well, I didn’t. Angel, my mother, died quite young – she was barely sixty – so she hadn’t got to that age where you begin to look back and start all that “Do you remember?” stuff. And I wasn’t old enough to want to know then.’

  ‘But why should you think that my father would know things about your life?’ It sounded abrupt, even aggressive, and he frowned, frustrated by his lack of tact. ‘I’m not getting this right.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’ She felt strangely at ease with him. ‘I can’t tell you how glad I am that you wanted to do this. For us to have lunch together, I mean. I always felt that I knew you, you see. Felix talked about you and I imagined how you might be, as children do. I expect he didn’t talk about me.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Piers after a moment, moved by the rather wistful note. ‘Not as such.’

  . . . She had a child with her. I suppose she isn’t yours, by any chance?

  Lizzie was looking at him curiously. ‘Not as such,’ she repeated reflectively. ‘Do you remember seeing us in Parhams that day, Piers?’ She saw his hands tighten on the wheel and bit her lips. ‘Sorry,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m getting this all wrong, aren’t I? We come from different standpoints. You saw me as the enemy and I saw you as a friend. We – me and Angel and Pidge – were happy to share Felix but, since we had no choice in the matter, we just accepted the fact that we were lucky to have anything of him at all. You, on the other hand, had all the fear of losing him and we constituted a threat. I can quite understand that, but I just want us to be friends now.’ She shook her head, sighing. ‘I always go bull-headed at things,’ she told him regretfully. ‘Putting my foot in it, making assumptions . . . Where did you say we were having lunch?’

  The sudden change of subject, the light social tone, didn’t deceive him at all.

  ‘I’m having trouble adjusting,’ he admitted, refusing the opportunity she was offering him. ‘Every time I think, that’s all over, it’s in the past, another memory or some old tug of loyalty jumps out of the woodwork.’

  She turned towards him, relieved and grateful for his honesty. ‘Of course it does. Goodness, how else could it be? That’s what I meant when I said we’re coming at it from totally opposite positions. I’d decided to track down the past so I was prepared for it, as far as I could be, hoping to meet Felix . . . and you. Mind you, I was pretty nervous. After all, you can’t just turn up after thirty-odd years without expecting a few surprises. But for you, this is a bolt from the blue. I’m sorry about last evening, Piers. I was unbelievably stupid and tactless. It must have been such a shock for you.’

  He began to laugh. ‘I felt such a prize idiot. I really thought I recognized you – well, I did, of course – and feeling a real hell of a fellow, chatting up a famous actress . . .’

  Lizzie was laughing too. ‘You should worry. I behaved like a total prat . . .’

  He turned his head, still smiling. ‘Shall we take it from the top?’ he suggested. ‘New readers start here?’

  She grinned at him, settled in her seat and stared straight ahead as if at a set. ‘Clear,’ she said in a sharp high voice. ‘OK. Act One. Scene One . . . Take Two. Action . . .’ and waited. This time he must call the shots.

  ‘Start at the beginning,’ he said after a moment, ‘and go on until the end and then stop. Tell me everything you can remember about Angel and Pidge and the Birdcage.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Felix watched them go, his heart beating so unsteadily that he was obliged to reach for the back of the chair to support himself. He longed so much for harmony to exist between these two; hoping that the gentle powers of understanding and friendship might go some way to healing the pain and resentment that still reached forward, long-fingered from the past, to touch and bruise the present. He sensed the current of interest that flowed between them, sparking intermittently into something more than just curiosity roused by times past, and he was seized by anxiety.

  He’d laughed aloud as Lizzie hopped from the porch into the road each time a car had come along, startling the driver before leaping back again and waving up to him, miming fright, expectation, and turning the whole scene into street theatre. He knew that it was a means of keeping up her own spirits, refusing to let her nerves take control: behaving just like Angel before a performance. He remembered how she’d greet him with exaggerated relief, clutching one of her cotton wrappers around her, the after-lunch coffee cup rattling in its saucer as her hand shook.

  ‘I can’t remember a single word, sweetie, not a word of it. My mind is quite, quite blank. Thank goodness you’ve turned up, Felix. I do hate the afternoon before a first night. I have this terror that I’m going to say the wrong lines. Once, when we were doing a Rattigan season, I was standing in the wings just before my entrance and I couldn’t remember whether it was French Without Tears or The Winslow Boy. Everything went black. Oh, the horror . . . Felix, I think I need soothing . . .’

  That wicked upward look, which spoke volumes of love and need, had never failed to move him; but then Angel had been able to show her vulnerability, gratefully accepting assistance whilst continuing to find her own ways of dealing with it – just as Lizzie did now. Marina had hidden her weaknesses, armouring herself with pride and self-righteousness against his attempts to help her, becoming weighted and clumsy with an iron-clad self-protection, so that each time her jealousy and fear unbalanced her it became more and more difficult to right herself.

  Now, watching Lizzie, Felix was pierced with pity and remorse, knowing that, even after he’d finished the affair with Angel, its shadow had lain between him and Marina; an indelible stain that could never be washed away no matter what solvents of affection or penitence he applied to it. He’d betrayed them both: Marina and Angel.

  ‘She began drinking,’ Lizzie had said, ‘well, she always liked a drink, of course, but more serious stuff. It was a bit of a vicious circle, if you see what I mean. She’d drink a bit, become unreliable, lose her confidence and then drink a bit more. I’d begun to get work myself by then so it was poor old Pidge who took the brunt. It was quite a gradual process; an extra shot of whisky before going down to the theatre, a little sip between acts. She was very naughty and cunning, as you can imagine, and Pidge didn’t really have a hope . . .’

  He’d tried to imagine that older Angel, unconfident, slowly losing her professional edge, unwilling to face his own part in her disintegration, his face sombre. Lizzie had carefully stared out of the window.

  ‘It’s difficult to know when it really began,’ she’d offered. ‘I wondered whether she’d been in a play which folded, something like that, or whether she was getting to that age which is so deadly in the theatre: the onset of the big four-o was such a nightmare. These days there’s television to take up the slack but there wasn’t the scope for Angel . . .’

  Even as she’d attempted to ameliorate his guilt he’d been remembering that final meeting with Angel in Bristol. Now those memories came flooding back, driving the thought of Piers and Lizzie from his mind.

  As soon as she sees his expression she puts an arm about him, drawing him into that magic circle of emotional security.

  ‘Sweetie, you look terrible
,’ she says. ‘Whatever is it?’

  The windows are open, the leaves of the plane tree flickering gold and green in the afternoon sunshine, whilst the drone of the city beats quietly beyond the small green deserted square. He looks about the room: Angel’s yellow, silk fringed shawl flung across the broad lap of an armchair, magazines in an untidy pile on the floor beside it; Lizzie’s new ballet shoes – the blocked pink satin toes in the process of being darned – standing together on the table with Pidge’s work-basket, full of brightly coloured reels of cotton and a fat rosy-pink velvet pincushion; the new, clean, sharp-edged sheet of music – a Beethoven sonata – balanced on the rack of the piano whilst a stack of yellowing, crumpled pages threaten to topple from its shiny lid onto the black and ivory keys; and – presiding over all this dear, familiar scene – the birdcage. He stares up at the two pretty birds, with the small chick beside them on the perch, and his throat constricts with misery.

  ‘Come,’ she says, watching his face, ‘come, my darling, you look in need of soothing.’

  He goes with her for the last time to the warm bed, postponing the brutality of parting, snatching this final offering of comfort and love.

  ‘You’ve said this before,’ she tells him later, wrapped in a long cotton garment, her hair falling over her shoulders, her face pale. ‘It’s impossible, Felix. We tried it once and it didn’t work.’

  ‘It has to work.’ He cannot look at her. ‘Marina has said she’ll divorce me . . .’

  She moves swiftly to his side, looking up into his eyes which were turned so resolutely from hers. ‘Would that be so bad?’ she asks softly. ‘Would it, Felix?’

  ‘It’s not simply that,’ he answers wretchedly. ‘She says that I would no longer be able to see Piers.’

  ‘She’s bluffing,’ she says at once, taking a step back, retying her belt more firmly. ‘She couldn’t do that.’