Free A Summer Bird-Cage by Margaret Drabble Page B

was preoccupied with flats and jobs and being serious it utterly repelled me. I kept remembering my mother’s comments about dirt. It wasn’t just that they kept the bread loose on the windowsill among the ashtrays, without a suggestion of a breadboard, and cooked in unwashed pans, and left stale Martini in the only teapot: I could have thought these habits endearing, if it hadn’t been for the phoneyness of the whole setup. And these were such phoneys that I couldn’t even pride myself on detecting them. I felt as though I were watching them all through the civil pages of one of Stephen’s short stories about Bohemia. I hated the way they all felt it their duty to be rude, frank and blunt. I felt in relation to them as my probation officer friend doubtless felt in relation to me. Squalor has its degrees, like crime.
    Gill and I didn’t have too bad a time flat-hunting. We kept drawing little circles on the map, indicating areas that we couldn’t bear to live outside, and in the end found somewhere in our third and largest circle, through an ad in a window, moreover, not through an agency. It was in Highbury, at the top of Highbury Hill, in a large decayed Victorian house. It was on the second floor, and the rooms were vast and gracious, with ceilings covered in moulded fruit and flowers. Gill borrowed a ladder from a neighbourly carpenter and painted all the moulding red and green and gold. It looked quite homely. The best thing was that we had enough room: I couldn’t have shared a bedroom, I don’t think. We settled down together there in a kind of suspended, interim tranquillity: Gill was working, quite pointlessly, at Swan & Edgar’s, and I was busy filing things at the BBC. The days passed, which seemed the most I could expect of them, and the weather gathered its cold strength for the attack of winter.
    After a while I began to wonder what had happened to Louise. Nobody had heard anything of her: she hadn’t even sent my parents a postcard to say she’d arrived in Rome. But I knew that she couldn’t have come home, as the news would surely have filtered through to me had she been in London. One October evening as I was walking home from the bus stop I passed a film poster of some epic with a large picture of the Coliseum, and I suddenly and insistently remembered her. I wondered why she was such a mystery, why she didn’t fit together, why she was so unpredictable. I simply could not imaginer what she and Stephen were doing together in Rome, if indeed they were still there: I could never picture one of their conversations together when nobody else was there. They just didn’t exist in relation to each other. And yet I suppose that I knew more facts about Louise than anyone else in the world, except perhaps our mother: but despite this I had a much better sense of what Gill, for example, would do under any given circumstances. I felt my powers of deduction were at fault: I ought to have been able to deduce from observed particulars, whereas I always trust to messy things like intuition, or to sheer voluntary information and confessions. I was just telling myself that it was time I had a little more data about Louise’s case when I arrived at our front door. I put my hand in the letter-box, and there, like a polite reply to my half-formulated thinkings, lay a letter from Simone, with a Rome postmark.
    I went upstairs with it in a glow of contentment, feeling it solid and thick in my hand, a large white and expensive envelope covered in Simone’s black, twig-like script. A whole letter, and it felt quite a long one. It was so long since she had written to me: her letters used to arrive during vacations like manna in the wilderness. And I realized by my gratitude how near to a wilderness was the place I was now inhabiting. I made myself wait to open it until I had taken off my coat, hung it on the peg, lit the gas fire and sat down on the hearthrug: then I ran my finger through the thick, stiff paper and