A Summer Bird-Cage Read Online Free PDF

off to church in the end. I was highly embarrassed by having to sit next to Daphne, who looked such a total fright in her ultra-smart dress. It was a tarty dress, but at the same time it did suit me: it had a very short skirt, and I have nice legs, whereas Daphne’s are muscular and shapeless round the ankles and covered in hairs and bluish pimples. Oh, the agony. If I had had any courage I would have told her to put on suntan stockings, but somehow I couldn’t interfere with the awfulness of nature. It must be so frightful to have to put things on in order to look better, instead of to strip things off. She sat there, solid and yet scraggy, and she looked blind and sentimental because she had taken her glasses off. She probably was feeling sentimental, which was a waste, about Louise. I wondered what she would think if she knew how sinister, in her terms, this marriage really was. It would have taken only that little chat about virgin brides to make her start declaring just causes and impediments. I could see her, standing nobly up and interrupting the ceremony to say that to her certain knowledge her cousin Louise Bennett had, on the twenty-second of July, nineteen-fifty-eight, with Sebastian William Howell, etc, etc. And yet here she was, happening to be ignorant, going along with her yellow roses. How can people be so totally unaware of facts? It seems to me to be almost a vice, such ignorance.
    When we arrived at the church there was a crowd of villagers standing round the nineteen-thirty lych-gate staring, and I wondered if she realized that they were probably saying things like: ‘A pity she isn’t as good-looking as the rest of the family’ or ‘You always get one plain bridesmaid, don’t you?’ I don’t know if Daphne cares about her looks at all: I fear she probably does, because her clothes, though hideous, are always elaborate, not careless, and she overcurls her hair and wears a very bright red lipstick which makes her skin look pale and dead. She wears it in an effort to appear gay. How unjust life is, to make physical charm so immediately apparent or absent, when one can get away with vices untold for ever. I know one girl who, like Daphne, is a plain girl from a handsome family, featureless and thickly-made, but she is such a girl that one forgets what she looks like in the charm of her conversation. I’m glad I know someone like that or I wouldn’t believe it possible. Appearances can make one such a snob. But this girl was above appearances, whilst Daphne scrabbles after them. Daphne inflicts such pain on me. She makes me confess how much I am a bitch. And Daphne, who was chased by a god and was turned into a tree to preserve her virginity. Perhaps there is some truth in that fable. Something our Daphne had preserved. Who would rape a tree?
    As we waited for Louise I remembered how she once told a whole railway compartment as we went through Chesterfield station that the tower leaned over because it saw a virgin bride. I was only eleven at the time and I was deeply shocked.
    When the car drew up with Louise and my father in it, one could not help but be moved. She looked so perfect. She was a photographer’s dream: they could scarcely let her go in to be married, they were so entranced, and kept taking her through her dim and heavy veil. She leaned her head this way and that, obliging, serene, betraying no impatience. The spectators were thrilled;
they kept gasping in admiration. For them she was the real thing: and for me too she almost was, for that halfhour, as meaningless and pure as the flowers she carried. By virtue of form, not content. Symbol, not moral. As I finally followed her up the aisle my hands were trembling with some appropriate emotion: I could not keep the foliage round the roses still.
    I calmed down after a while, after that strange primitive shock of beauty and innocence had worn off, and had a good look round, trying to spot guests I knew. I thought I saw one of my very