The Birdcage

‘A week!’ she exclaimed, reverting to the habit of talking aloud: her old trick of feeling less alone and holding anxieties at bay. ‘Can you believe it? A week ago you hadn’t met any of them. Well, except for Felix, of course. It’s crazy to have become so involved with them in so short a time. But then you are crazy. Potty. Nuts. Doolally. I mean, why did you have to behave like that?’

She groaned in dismay at the memories: practically picking Piers up in the bar; confusing him with Felix on the telephone; doing an ‘Angel’ when she’d met Alison. It seemed that she was never able to act normally. As soon as another person came within her orbit it was as if the curtain swished up, the spotlight flashed on and she was thrust out into its glare and straight into her routine.

She hummed the rhythm aloud, hearing the tap mistress’s voice shouting the steps above the clatter of tap shoes on the painted cement floor. From that tender age she’d been taught that once the curtain went up you had to smile; even in the backest of back rows with no-one looking at you, still you must continue to dance and mime. Animation was essential and you learned to continue to sing for your supper even after the show was over.

‘The trouble was,’ she told herself, ‘that you’d begun to practise the part of the brave but abandoned woman and then, suddenly, everything spiralled out of control and you were stuck with it. Not that you ever actually said that Sam had died; not in so many words.’

‘I lost my husband three months ago,’ she’d said to the travel agent and now she could remember the shock of the words; how they’d seemed to jump from her mouth, to lie there on the counter in front of her. The woman had accepted them at face value and behaved accordingly, with deference and pity for the newly bereaved, and she, Lizzie, had made no attempt to explain but instead had been seized with a fit of hysterical laughter: teetering on that fine line between bitter tears and mad laughter, which she’d walked so precariously since the telephone call from the States.

Lizzie shook her head, replaying the scene, hearing the words clearly in her head: ‘No, no,’ she should have said to the woman. ‘Not lost him as in “dead”. No, I’ve lost him to another woman; to an actress who is much younger than I am and who is expecting his child. I couldn’t do that, you see,’ she might have said to the woman across the counter. ‘I couldn’t give him a child and, now that someone else has, he’s in this terrible state. He wants her and the child but he doesn’t quite want to let me go. Oh, he feels very badly about it,’ she would have been almost shouting at the travel agent now, ‘because I’ve tried not to make a fuss about his little flings, and after all I wanted a child just as much as he did and I’ve felt so terribly guilty, but this was one bloody fling too far.’

Lizzie pulled the car abruptly over to the side of the road into a lay-by, switched off the engine and rummaged for a tissue. Tears streamed from her eyes as she seemed to hear Sam’s voice in her head, explaining it all during the phone call.

‘She’s pregnant,’ he says, and his voice is an unbearable mixture of embarrassment and pride; shame and excitement. ‘She’s says it’s mine.’ A long pause: she is too clenched with shock and fear to speak. ‘I think it probably is,’ he mumbles. ‘Look, it’s terrible to bounce this on you but I wanted you to hear it from me. You know how these rumours get about . . .’

Her voice, cool and almost impersonal – rather as though they are discussing someone else’s problem – cuts through these unbearable apologies and explanations. He is silenced for a moment.

‘Love her?’ he repeats slowly, at last. ‘How the hell do I know if I love her? Love’s such an overused word, I’m not certain what it means any more. Look, I’ll grab a flight out—’

‘No,’ she says desperately. ‘No, Sam, I’m not prepared to be a kind of ageing head wife, relegated to the background like some old dowager so that you can spend nearly all your time with your new family whilst I get the occasional weekend thrown to me like a bone to a dog,’ but when he talks about the expected baby and she hears the longing in his voice, she begins to lose hope. He will choose the younger woman who can give him a child: the one thing he has never had.

‘And you can’t blame me for wanting to have my husband around,’ shouts Lizzie. ‘But I suppose that doesn’t matter. I don’t get any say in this, do I? Because she can make a baby I can be chucked away as if our marriage means nothing. And don’t tell me that you love me. Like you said last time we spoke, you just don’t know what it means any more. You probably never did.’

He doesn’t ring back and after a few days she writes to him saying that, as far as she is concerned, it’s over between them. It is a shock to find how quickly the rumours get around and it is a relief to be able to leave London, closing up the flat for a month, and returning to the Birdcage. Still no word comes from him and she imagines him with this new woman, pictures him holding the new-born child.

The message from him on her mobile comes as a shock: ‘I shall be in the UK at the weekend. Looking forward to seeing you.’ Then the two messages from Jim: ‘Don’t forget that you’re supposed to be in Manchester on Monday.’ And the second: ‘Sam is trying to find you. He’s on his way to the Birdcage but I haven’t told him where you are. Give me a buzz.’

Sitting by the roadside, drying her eyes, Lizzie took a very deep breath and pulled herself together. It was only to be expected that Sam would come back from the States to discuss their separation. Despite the forward leaps of her vivid imagination, picturing him as a proud father, it was only a few months since he’d broken the news of the pregnancy to her. The legalities regarding divorce must now be set in motion. She sat on for a few moments, thinking about Piers and Felix. She’d allowed them to believe that she was a widow; she’d accepted Tilda’s compassion and friendship under false pretences. How precious their welcome to Michaelgarth had been; how right it had seemed to be part of their family just as, years ago, Felix had been a necessary part of the little group at the Birdcage. How could she have explained to them that she’d been misleading them; trading on their sympathy and goodwill?

Last night, sitting in the garth, watching them with their friends, she’d known that it would be impossible to explain. Being bereaved was such an excellent reason for the journey back to the past: it lent a glow of respectability – even necessity – to what might otherwise be regarded as a tasteless adventure. To appear amongst them, the daughter of the woman who had threatened that very family she now so much admired and envied, might be seen in a very different light without the dignity of bereavement to support it. She had put Felix at risk, threatened his relationship with Piers and, effectively, lied to Tilda.

At least, she told herself, she’d done no harm. In fact, according to Felix, she’d actually restored their relationship, helping them to break down the barriers of guilt and resentment at last. So let it rest at that.

Lizzie blew her nose, straightened her shoulders and started the engine. The roads were quite quiet and she drove the remainder of the journey uneventfully. The little square near the university was empty and she was lucky to find a parking space not far from the front door. She took her bag and one case, the rest could wait, let herself in and climbed the stairs. Once inside she dropped the case outside her bedroom door and stood listening: someone slammed a cupboard door and opened a drawer. She crossed the hall and went into the big room just as he came round the end of the piano, tall, wide-shouldered, dressed as always in black, carrying his coffee.