A Summer Bird-Cage Read Online Free PDF Page A

that moment: I looked at myself in fascination, thinking how unfair it was, to be born with so little defence, like a soft snail without a shell. Men are all right, they are defined and enclosed, but we in order to live must be open and raw to all comers. What happens otherwise is worse than what happens normally, the embroidery and the children and the sagging mind. I felt doomed to defeat. I felt all women were doomed. Louise thought she wasn’t but she was. It would get her in the end, some version of it, simply because she was born to defend and depend instead of to attack. I can get very bitter about this subject with very little encouragement: fortunately Michael came along and distracted me.
    ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘You look gorgeous.’
    ‘Do I really?’ I said, perking up at once. After all, to be really logical I could always have shaved off my eyebrows. And since I didn’t—
    ‘Do you like my dress?’ I said.
    ‘It’s lovely. Is it the same as Daphne’s wearing? It can’t be.’
    ‘Oh yes it is.’
    ‘You look knockout, SallyO.’
    ‘Not as knockout as Louise.’
    ‘Don’t be silly, you’re much prettier than Louise.’
    ‘Oh
Michael
—’
    ‘Are those her flowers? Christ, what an armful.’
    ‘Terrible, isn’t it?’
    ‘Don’t you get a bouquet?’
    ‘Oh yes! Yellow roses for me.’ I picked them up.
    ‘They look fabulous. What will you have when you get married?’
    ‘I’m not getting married. Catch me at the kitchen sink.’
    ‘Silly.’ He kissed my hand, gallantly. He’s the only member of our family who ever touches anyone without wincing. I remembered how I had hated buttoning up Louise.
    ‘You look pretty smart yourself,’ I said. ‘Who’s in the drawing-room?’
    ‘Oh, everyone. Except your mother. Your father’s reading the paper, Mum is knitting, Daphne’s looking sick and I’m drinking gin.’
    ‘Before church?’
    ‘Come and have one yourself.’
    ‘No thank you. I’m waiting till the reception.’
    ‘I say, Sally, who drank the whisky?’
    ‘What whisky?’
    ‘I’m sure you know what whisky. Don’t you?’
    ‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’
    ‘There’s half a bottle gone from the corner cupboard in the music-room. Your father seems to think it must be Kristin, but I thought it was probably you two. Wasn’t it?’
    ‘It certainly was not,’ I said, annoyed by his knowing smile. I prefer almost anyone to be familiar with me than my family. ‘If you think it was Louise you should ask her yourself.’
    ‘Oh, I wouldn’t dare. I wouldn’t be so personal. But I do think someone ought to tell Uncle that it wasn’t Kristin.’
    ‘Honestly,’ I said, diverting my annoyance, ‘I can’t imagine where Papa thinks Kristin comes from. He talks about her as though she were a kitchen-maid, but her father’s a wealthy barrister in Stockholm or something. It’s ridiculous. What would she do with whisky? Papa must think she’s a real hard drinker if he thinks she had all that.’
    ‘If she’s the daughter of a wealthy whatnot, what’s stopping her packing up and going?’
    ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ I couldn’t go into the twisted motives of middle-class girls with no sense of vocation, although I felt I was becoming an expert on the subject.
    ‘Your father’s a bit of a reactionary, isn’t he,’ said Michael, largely to prove to me that he knew what the word meant.
    ‘About women and servants. And poor Kristin happens to be both.’
    ‘Oh, she’s all right. She’s just sex-starved. That’s all.’
    ‘Oh don’t be stupid,’ I said, slipping back at once into my annoyed feminist we-are-frail-as-our-complexions-are mood. ‘Honestly, Michael, you are stupid sometimes.’ And I marched off with Louise’s lilies, but I knew quite well that he was probably right, with all his odious masculine unperplexity. I would so like people to be free, and bound together not by need but by love. But it isn’t so, it can’t be so.
    We got