The Birdcage Page 24

  ‘She might be able to. After all, we haven’t exactly been over-discreet, have we? If it should come to court . . .’

  ‘No-one would keep a parent from his child.’ Rising fear makes her voice tremble. ‘It’s nonsense.’

  ‘I can’t take that chance.’ In his attempt to make her understand how serious he is he merely sounds harsh. ‘I have to think about Piers.’

  ‘And what about me?’

  ‘Do you imagine that this is easy?’

  ‘I see you for a few days each month, if I’m lucky . . .’

  ‘How often we see each other isn’t the point . . .’

  They argue in self-defeating circles until finally, hating himself, he raises the weapon of his marriage and prepares to crush her with it. ‘You always knew the score, Angel. I’ve never pretended that I would ever leave Marina. We knew that this might happen sooner or later . . .’

  She loses her temper then, battering him with bitter words, accusing him of faithlessness, of cowardice . . . until, suddenly, Pidge appears and Angel turns towards her.

  ‘He’s leaving us,’ she tells her, almost conversationally. ‘He’s really going this time, Pidge. What shall we do?’

  The sudden outburst of weeping shocks him and he steps forward instinctively, his arms outstretched, but Pidge shakes her head, holding Angel, watching whilst he takes one last look around him before passing through the open doorway and down the stairs.

  He’d never seen her again. Even now he couldn’t tell if he’d made the right decision. At least he and Marina had come to love each other again at the end, even if it had been a result of her suffering. He had the small comfort of knowing that she’d needed him and he’d been able to give her comfort and affection. Felix took a deep breath: he needed a drink. No point in sitting wondering how Piers and Lizzie were getting on together or brooding over the past; he’d be better off having a jar in the pub with one or two of his old chums, followed by some lunch. He pottered about collecting his keys and his hat and, treading carefully down the stairs, made his way out into the busy street.

  Leaving Piers to pay the bill, Lizzie wandered out of the long, low-ceilinged bar, blinking into the bright sunshine. Crossing to the sea-wall she stood for a while, her arms folded on the warm stone, looking down at the small boats which rested, beached and motionless, waiting for the tide to lift them back to life. The long mole reached out into the Channel and, on the spit of land beyond it, three cottages huddled comfortably together, their backs turned against the sea.

  Piers appeared beside her, pushing his wallet into his back pocket, looking across to the harbour wall.

  ‘Would you like to walk out to the beach?’ he asked.

  ‘I should love to if you’ve got the time.’

  They fell into step together, side-stepping visitors, coming together again, each aware of the other. Lizzie paused on the little bridge to look down into the inner harbour where other boats lay, some rotting into wrecks.

  ‘I wish the tide were in,’ she said dreamily. ‘It seems impossible to imagine how much water would be needed to fill it up. It must be very beautiful at high tide with a full moon.’

  ‘It is.’ He wandered ahead, his hands in his pockets, glancing back at her. ‘Perhaps tomorrow evening . . . or Friday? We could have dinner at the Anchor. I can’t promise a full moon but I’ll check the tides . . .’

  He hesitated and she smiled at him, nodded her agreement.

  ‘That sounds nice. But not Friday. I shall be back in Bristol by then.’

  He couldn’t disguise his disappointment. ‘In Bristol? But when are you going?’

  ‘On Friday morning.’ She made a regretful face. ‘The room was only free for four nights. I suppose I was lucky to get in at all at such short notice but I’m beginning to wish I could stay longer.’

  Piers tripped over the extended lead belonging to a small waddling spaniel, apologized to its owner, and reached out to draw Lizzie on to the grassy space in front of the cottages.

  ‘You can’t go just yet.’ He tried for a light note, which didn’t deceive her at all. ‘You haven’t seen Michaelgarth yet.’ He was rather surprised to realize how very much he wanted this. ‘Does my father know that you’re going on Friday?’

  She nodded. ‘I mentioned it this morning. I told you about meeting Tilda?’ She gave a small chuckle. ‘She pressed me to stay, bless her, but it’s not quite that simple. I should think that the place is bursting at the seams, although she mentioned a self-contained flat in Dunster. At a bookshop . . . ?’

  Piers nodded abstractedly, realized that he was still holding her arm and let it go abruptly. They moved forward again, pacing slowly together, each in a pensive mood.

  Lizzie thought: I think he really does want me to stay. Goodness, I’ve talked myself hoarse but he really seemed to need to know all about Angel and Pidge. He wasn’t being polite. Oh, crikey! Should I go or should I stay? How I’d like to stay . . . if he really means it. Felix would like it, I know, and that darling girl. How terrible that her husband, that Piers’ son, was killed . . . and the baby . . . Oh God, the baby! Could I deal with that . . . ?

  Piers glanced at her from time to time, trying to gauge her reaction. He was astonished at how flat he felt, thinking that she would be gone in less than forty-eight hours. Her story, which she’d told with all the flair of her profession, had given him a great deal to think about, rather as if a missing member of his family had unexpectedly arrived on the scene; someone who could fill in the gaps, who shed new light on old memories: a gentle light that was kind to human failing and softened the hard, black and white edges of preconceived truths. It was impossible that she should disappear almost as suddenly as she’d arrived.

  ‘And anyway,’ he said aloud, as if clinching an argument. ‘I’m on holiday next week. I can show you round properly.’

  Even as he spoke the words he thought of Alison again; since Tilda had mentioned her at breakfast, she’d been there at the back of his mind, a shadow across the expanding light of this strange, new happiness. They’d reached the end of the mole and stood together, staring out across the Bristol Channel to the distant hills of Wales, faint and insubstantial in the hazy heat. Lizzie watched him thoughtfully.

  ‘Perhaps I could check out the bookshop . . . ?’ She pursed her lips, looking casual, open to possibilities but not too keen – ‘If Tilda thinks it’s OK . . .’

  ‘Well, it’s an idea.’ He shifted his weight, thrust his hands into his pockets, made his decision. ‘But you might think of staying with us – Tilda and me and Jake – at Michaelgarth . . . just for a few days.’ He looked down at her and away again. ‘Perhaps it’s a bit sudden. After all you don’t really know any of us, but it could be rather fun.’

  A gull screamed above their heads, wings stretched white against the sky, drifting in the light airs. Lizzie turned, looking back at the high wooded hills above the harbour, shutting her eyes for a moment against the sun’s heat and then opening them again to smile at him.

  ‘Thank you, Piers,’ she said. ‘I should like that very much.’

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Lizzie stirred, drifting between sleep and waking, her eyelids fluttering. Her hands opened and closed, stretched out on the sheet as if reaching for something . . . or someone.

  ‘It couldn’t matter less, darling,’ Sam is saying. ‘You know me. It’s part of the job as far as I’m concerned. You know how really good photographers always say that they have to be a little bit in love with their subject to get the best out of them? Well, that’s all it is. But you always knew that, didn’t you? It wasn’t as if it was ever a secret and it’s got nothing to do with you and me.’

  She struggles to speak, to tell him something important, but she cannot make a sound.

  Roused by her efforts into wakefulness, Lizzie dragged the pillows into a soft, supporting pile behind her head and stared out of the window towards the great hill, all green and gold in the ear
ly morning sunshine. Loss enveloped her, panic plucking at her diaphragm, and she lay still, looking about her as if by examining and learning the room she might beat down her fears. She’d always found it difficult to remember places accurately although she responded immediately to atmosphere: she knew at once whether she felt comfortable and happy or, instead, uneasy and wanting to be away. Describing a town, a room, was agony for her.

  ‘Tell us all!’ Angel commands, as soon as she returns from a visit with a school-friend or, in later years, after a tour abroad, and poor Lizzie screws up her eyes, willing her recalcitrant memory to perform, halting and stumbling through a dull and pedestrian account, whilst Angel rolls her eyes in despair and Pidge grins sympathetically. It is exactly the same with people: she is quickly drawn towards them, or totally indifferent, and very rarely has cause to review that first opinion. So it is with Sam: an instant fascination; an absolute requirement for his company.

  ‘I love you, little Lizzie,’ he tells her. ‘You’ve got under my skin. D’you know that?’

  She feels herself beaming at him; trying to be cool and sophisticated, failing miserably.

  ‘He’s terrifically dishy,’ her friends warn her, solo and chorus, ‘and he’s quite a lot older than you. He’s got a bit of a reputation . . .’

  Lizzie listens obediently, nodding sensibly, her eyes wide and dreamy with love; she knows these things – and is touched that her friends should care enough about her to wish to protect her – but his age and physical attractions, his predilections for younger actresses, are all part of Sam. He is determined, wily, forceful: even his black hair curls and crisps with vitality: his bright brown eyes either focusing with uncomfortable intensity or flicking to and fro, restless, observant, watchful.

  ‘I love you too,’ she answers, not shyly or hesitantly but longingly, needfully. And, later, when the rumours begin – which he never bothers to deny – she takes no notice of them.

  ‘There will always be rumours with a man like Sam.’ Angel is comfortingly pragmatic. ‘Ignore them if you can and don’t play the detective; don’t interrogate unless you really can’t put up with it. It’s part of his job as far as he’s concerned and it’s got nothing to do with how he feels about you.’

  Perhaps it is because she knows that Angel has experienced a similar situation in her own love affair with Felix, and because, like Angel, jealousy and the need to possess have been left out of her character, that she is able to deal with those occasional lapses; and Sam makes it easier simply because he never lies. He treats his infidelities, most no more than drawn-out flirtations, as a kind of necessary occupational hazard: if an actress turns in a better performance because she thinks he is in love with her, well, so be it. He expects Lizzie to be intelligent about it and, because he is never furtive, never shuts her out, but is always careful to make Lizzie feel that she and their marriage are completely separate from these tiresome outbreaks, she is able to accept them. He is discreet and, whenever possible, he makes certain that, in public, Lizzie is always at his side. There are difficult moments, when the current actress believes that he is serious about her, but he is always careful to leave an escape route for the injured party so that she might withdraw with a certain amount of dignity. If, however, any of them refuse to go gracefully, he has no hesitation in being brutal: he never deceives them about his true feelings and he refuses to be blackmailed.

  Once or twice the injured party comes to see Lizzie, imploring her to give Sam up, convinced that it is only she, Sam’s wife, who stands between their love.

  ‘Sorry, darling, sorry,’ he mutters absently, already planning his next production, next seduction, ‘the woman has the intelligence of an amoeba. Good grief! She must be raving . . .’

  ‘You’re hopeless.’ But she stretches out her arms to him.

  ‘Why do I put up with it . . . ?’

  The thin, high wailing of a baby roused her and she drew the sheet up to her chin, almost as if it were a kind of protection. The insistent, weak yet demanding cry penetrated her defence and sadness and grief welled inside her: had she been so ready to forgive Sam’s lapses because she’d been unable to give him a child? This guilt, growing alongside her own desperate longing for a baby, had made her more vulnerable, fearful of losing him.

  A door opened and she heard a light footfall along the corridor. Abruptly the crying ceased, there was movement, the sound of a low murmuring, and then silence. Lizzie got out of bed, humming a little – Blossom Dearie’s ‘Peel Me a Grape’ – peering from the window, concentrating on the room. She bent to inhale the scent of the roses arranged in a pretty silver vase set on the oak chest of drawers, which was placed across one corner of the room. A photograph caught her attention: straddling a bicycle, the small boy frowned in the bright sunlight, staring at the camera almost censoriously.

  David, thought Lizzie – and was aware of a tightening of her stomach muscles as panic seized her. Impossible though it might seem, she was here, at Michaelgarth, with Tilda just down the passage and Piers asleep across the garth.

  ‘I can’t quite believe it,’ she’d said to Felix, after Piers had dropped her back in Dunster after lunch on Wednesday afternoon. She’d gone to the flat early in the evening to find him outside on his big platform, watering some of his pots and tubs. He was in shirt-sleeves, his arms brown; she found that she was looking at his hands. ‘It was such a shock – well, you can imagine, can’t you? – and I just accepted, “Thank you very much, I’d love to”,’ she mimicked herself, ‘and that was that. And now I’m having a good old panic, Felix, and I’m counting on you to reassure me.’ Leaning against the kitchen door-jamb, watching him working amongst the tiny blooms in his miniature garden, she’d grinned suddenly, wickedly. ‘Not,’ she added with mock-severity, ‘that I’m talking soothing here, you understand.’

  He’d stared at her, his movements arrested, an odd look of mingled surprise and guilt on his face, and then he’d begun to chuckle, the years falling away, so that his face looked almost young again, his eyes gleaming with amusement at old memories.

  ‘Darling Lizzie,’ he’d said, with such warmth and love, that she’d instinctively held out her arms to him and they’d met in the middle of the kitchen and hugged each other.

  ‘Am I crazy?’ She’d held him away at arm’s length, peering fearfully into his face. ‘Accepting just like that? After all, I hardly know Piers . . . or Tilda.’

  ‘But you do know him, don’t you?’ he’d asked gently. ‘In some inexplicable way you know him because you know me. You’ve known him since you were a child.’

  ‘Yes,’ she’d agreed at last. ‘It seems that way. When I saw him in the bar I felt a kind of recognition – and not just because you’re both physically alike. And I think he felt the same way.’

  ‘I think so too.’ Felix had let her go, turning back to the miniature garden outside the kitchen door, putting his secateurs and a small fork into a painted wooden tool-box. ‘I admit that I am amazed that he’s invited you so soon, although, to be fair, Piers has never been a procrastinator. He clearly wants to get to know you much better, and, personally, I can’t think of a better way of going about it. I’m all for it but then I’m probably as crazy as you are,’ a little pause ‘. . . and we mustn’t forget that I have a hidden agenda.’

  ‘And what is that?’ She’d watched him, frowning in anxiety as she’d sensed his mood swing towards self-doubt. ‘What agenda?’

  He’d straightened up, dusting his hands together and then digging them deep into the pockets of his old khaki-drill trousers. Head bent for a moment in thought, he’d stood in the early evening sunshine, brooding, whilst she’d stared at him, almost afraid of what she might hear.

  ‘I’d like to feel that Piers has forgiven me,’ he’d said at last. ‘Or, at the very least, I wish he could understand and accept my behaviour in the past. It’s been between us all these years, that shadow of resentment on his part and guilt on mine, and we’ve never quite been able to con
front it. Now, you’ve suddenly come among us and we can’t ignore it any longer. Once that first huge step was taken it seemed to me that the worst was over and we had a good chance, Piers and I, of restoring our relationship before it was too late. Now you tell me that he’s invited you to Michaelgarth – and that place is very special to Piers, remember – so I can’t help feeling that he’s taken the next three or four steps in one great leap. Good grief! Naturally, I’m delighted. By accepting you, surely he must have forgiven me. You embody all the things that threatened him and yet he’s invited you into his home and family, and in time for his birthday, so that you’ll meet some of his closest friends. Oh, I’m sure that he retains certain reservations but I feel . . . oh, as if I’ve received some kind of absolution. Of course I want you to go to Michaelgarth, but my reasons are not necessarily disinterested ones.’

  ‘But there couldn’t be any hidden motive on his part?’ She’d sounded troubled and he’d hastened to reassure her.

  ‘Of course not. That’s not at all what I was implying.’ He’d smiled at her. ‘It means so much to me, that’s all. To see you and Piers as friends would heal so many old wounds and to imagine you at Michaelgarth with him and Tilda is almost too much to take in all at once. It’s beyond everything I ever hoped.’

  ‘Well, then,’ she’d grinned back at him, though still nervous, ‘let’s hope I can put up a good performance. Wish me luck for a truly bizarre first night.’

  ‘You’ll be just fine,’ he’d said encouragingly. ‘It’s perfect timing, what with Piers’ birthday and Saul down for a few days, and I shall be at Michaelgarth on Saturday. Tilda being there will take all the strain out of it. There’s nothing to fear.’

  Now, as she prowled about the room, examining the water-colour of an ancient stone bridge spanning a white tumble of water, peering into the built-in cupboards that took up one whole wall, she gave a disbelieving snort.