The Birdcage

David Frayn sees their return with relief. Nothing, it seems, has altered between them and Marina is looking forward to having Felix under her eye for most of August. David feels guilty, rather as if he has accused Felix unfairly, yet deep in his bones he continues to feel that something is wrong. As the summer progresses he notices that whatever source has been supplying Felix with the strength to cope with Marina’s whims and fancies is failing him. He becomes less able to deal with her accusations and sometimes David overhears a desperate note in his voice.

‘I promise you, darling, that it was nothing more than dinner-party fun. I wasn’t flirting with her. Oh, I know it might have looked like it but we were simply laughing about something – no, I’ve no idea what it was. It was completely unimportant. Please, Marina, it is not a sin for a married man to laugh with another woman . . .’

Marina has begun to suspect that Felix is entailed with the rather disreputable wife of one of his colleagues and gradually the icy silences, the tension, reappear. As autumn draws on and half-term approaches, Piers begins to suffer from his mother’s uncertain temper.

‘We saw a cormorant on the beach,’ he tells her, noting the event laboriously in his nature book. He sits at his grandfather’s desk, a cushion on the chair to lift him high enough, his legs twisting together in his efforts. ‘He’d eaten so much fish he could hardly fly and we were able to get a really good look at him.’

‘It would be much more useful,’ answers his mother sharply, ‘if instead of wandering about watching birds all day you were practising your tables. You know how weak you are at your sums.’

‘Then he should encourage you to practise more,’ says Marina angrily. She resents the way Piers shows such affection to his father when he, Felix, is so indifferent to her own happiness: it is hurtful and shows insensitivity on Piers’ part. ‘The trouble is that Daddy doesn’t care. If he really cared about you he’d make you work instead of reading you silly stories. You’ll find as you grow older, Piers, that the people who are easy-going are not the ones who have your true welfare at heart.’

She goes away, taking the Hoover and her dusters, and Piers is left sitting at the desk, his heart cold with terror. The trouble is that Daddy doesn’t care. If he really cared about you . . .

After a great deal of anxious thought he decides to take his own soundings: Grandfather first. He waits until his parents have gone off to a dinner party and then climbs out of bed, pulls on his plaid dressing-gown and slips downstairs. In the hall he hesitates: here, as usual, he is aware of a presence, an invisible comfort that soothes his troubled heart. Sometimes he lies on the flagged floor, watching the light that streams through the tall, high windows, or he might climb into one of the pair of heavily carved chairs that stand against the staircases, one at each end of the hall. Occasionally he takes a toy into the hall, running a small car or a fire engine over the slates, muttering to himself, but before too long the stillness here in the heart of the house takes hold of him so that he finds that he is lying quite still, listening to the silence.

This evening he waits only for a moment – the prospect of this first test interferes with his ability to hear that all-embracing sound of silence – and presently he crosses the hall and moves quietly down the passage towards the study. Outside the door he stops, his ear pressed against the panel. Several voices are speaking in loud, urgent tones and suddenly there is a burst of music; Grandfather is listening to the wireless. Piers recognizes that music, which sounds like a great train pulling out of the station, gathering speed, thundering rhythmically along the track with sparks flying and smoke pouring from its chimney: it’s the theme tune from the weekly serial Paul Temple.

Piers turns the handle and goes into the warm, firelit study. Monty’s tail beats a welcome from the rug and David Frayn, seated at his desk, screws round in his chair to peer at the small figure standing just inside the door.

‘I haven’t been to sleep yet,’ he admits. He stretches out his slippered foot so that Monty can lick his bare ankle: he finds the warm, wet caress oddly comforting. ‘I’ve been thinking, Grandfather.’ He’s thought very carefully about what he should say, basing it on what his mother has said to him, and now he tries it out. ‘If I don’t get better at my tables I might not pass my entrance exam in the spring and I’ve been wondering if I should give up the nature book, Grandfather? It takes up quite a lot of time, these days, when I could be practising my tables.’

David Frayn looks down upon the boy’s dark head, watching him stroking Monty with the fringed edge of his dressing-gown’s corded belt. He doesn’t question the fact that the boy has to go away to preparatory school but he guesses that Marina has been putting pressure on him to work harder and he knows that his daughter, like her mother before her, always uses a hammer to crack a walnut. He feels his way towards a compromise between discipline and kindness.

‘It’s not just saying them that I mind,’ says Piers earnestly, turning to look up at him. ‘It’s dotting about. Like nine sixes or seven eights. I get muddled then, you see. Mummy nearly always catches me out.’

Hunched on the fender, dressing-gown trailing over his drawn-up knees, he wears an anxious expression that makes him look almost careworn and David thinks of Piers’ uncle Peter, killed at Arnhem before he was able to have a child of his own. How often he looks back, regretting hasty words, wrong decisions: now, with Piers, he attempts to put his experience to good use.

‘Tell you what,’ he says thoughtfully. ‘How would it be if I took over the nature book for a bit? You could advise, of course, on what we decide to put in; read it over, keep me up to scratch and so on. But it would save you some time, wouldn’t it, without breaking the flow?’

Piers’ face is alight with joy and his grandfather smiles back at him, touched that the nature book is so important to his grandson, unaware that he has passed a crucial test. The book is important but not so important as discovering that his grandfather, by putting work before pleasure, has shown that he really cares about him. The sensation of relief cannot be suppressed, it must be allowed a physical expression, and Piers crawls along his grandfather’s outstretched legs and cuddles into his arms just as he does with his own father.

Holding the child, watching the firelight leap on the dark-panelled walls, David reflects sadly on how rarely he held Peter in his arms once he’d grown out of babyhood. It simply wasn’t done – even if Eleanor had allowed it – and he’d been afraid of showing his emotional side to the boy. This might have been more acceptable with his daughter but Marina had never encouraged physical displays of affection. Peter had been a true male Frayn, cheerful, good-humoured, warm – and he’d been loved by everyone who knew him – but it had taken Felix, who had come amongst them and broken the taboos of the past, to show that the comfort of a cuddle, the warmth of a hug, releases tension and dissipates anger or fear.

‘I like lots of butter on the potato,’ he mentions hopefully. ‘But I don’t like the outside skin. He chuckles aloud, thinking of another of Grandfather’s odd sayings: ‘Only potatoes wear jackets; gentlemen wear coats’, and his grandfather winks at him.