PROLOGUE
The child, waking suddenly and finding herself alone, sat up anxiously amongst the makeshift bed of cushions and rugs. She could hear her mother’s voice, echoing oddly – now loud, now quiet – a murmuring duet with a deeper voice, flaring and dying so queerly that she scrambled to her feet and went out into the passage. Small, tousled, without her shoes, she hurried along until she emerged into a Looking-Glass world where painted gardens ascended into cavernous shadowy places, a flight of stairs revolved gently away, and walls drifted silently apart. A cluster of lights, perched aloft, lit up an interior as neat and bright as a dolls’-house room, with cardboard books on painted shelves and shiny plaster food set upon the small table; almost she expected Hunca Munca to appear.
Standing quite still, just beyond the circle of light, a draught shivering round her legs, she watched her mother, who talked and smiled and stretched her hands to someone whose arm and shoulder, clad in severe dark cloth, could just be glimpsed; but, before she was able run to her, a sudden surging roar pinned her in the dark corner. As it beat up, swelling then receding dizzily about her head, she squared her mouth to cry out in fear, and then there were people all about her, lifting her, soothing her, carrying the small struggling figure away from the woman who remained on stage as the curtain rose and fell, again and again. She yelled aloud in panic as she was borne off – ‘Angel!’ she shouted – but her voice was lost in the backstage bustle and she cried out again.
No sound came and she wakened – properly now – to the present, her head at an uncomfortable angle against the arm of the chair, her mouth dry. The fear was still with her, a sense of terrible loss clinging with the fragments of the dream, so that she passed her hands over her face as if to wipe away both the dream and the panic together.
‘Sleeping in the afternoon,’ she told herself disparagingly. ‘What do you expect?’ and glanced hopefully at her watch. Twenty-eight minutes past five. Once, not so long ago, this would have been a time of preparation, of nervous tension; swallowing black coffee, forcing down some bread and butter, before going to the theatre. There, the world beyond the stage door brought its own particular brand of comfort. Snuffing up the familiar theatre smell – dust, greasepaint, sweat – hearing the chatter in the dressing-rooms, a kind of comradeship and relief that sprang from the security of being where you belonged, concentrated the mind on the work ahead. Still nervous, oh, yes! But excited now and part of the family: listening to the gossip as you sat at the mirror and applied the colour to your face.
Lizzie Blake straightened in her chair, shrugging her shoulders to ease the crick in her neck, stretching her long, still-glamorous legs. She rose from the armchair, humming. She’d discovered that humming held thought – and fear – at bay and she knew plenty of tunes. Today it was South Pacific: ‘This Nearly was Mine’. She waltzed into the kitchen, exaggerating the beat, hamming it up, humming and singing alternately, slipping back nearly twenty-five years. Lizzie filled the kettle and switched it on; not that she wanted a cup of tea but that dread, empty, early evening desert between five and seven had to be filled somehow – especially now that Sam was gone.
She hurried herself away from this thought at once, humming again – ‘A Cockeyed Optimist’ this time – and began to make the tea, tapping out the rhythm on the caddy with a teaspoon, wondering whether she might allow herself a ginger biscuit: just one. After all, her weight never increased. She remained as tall and slender as she’d been at twenty – her work and self-discipline had kept her fit and supple – and the masses of dark reddish-gold hair were barely touched with grey. It was pinned, as usual, into a mysterious bundle from which screwy tendrils escaped and tortoiseshell hairpins occasionally slipped; her ivory skin was dusted with freckles and her amber-brown eyes were rather shy beneath the feathery brows. As she’d grown older – too old for the roles of Nellie or Ado Annie or Bianca – she’d been cast in small comedy parts and had also had a great success in a television sitcom that had run for several years. Meanwhile, her singing voice had carried her into voice-over jingles for television commercials and now, if she’d wanted to, she could have listened to herself at least three or four times each evening, extolling a particular brand of face-cream, or watched herself at the wheel of a popular family car complete with two small children and a delightful mutt-like dog. This last was a very amusing and popular commercial and she’d become a household face – something she’d never quite achieved through those long years on the stage nor, even, with the sitcom – and she was getting used to passers-by doing double-takes and crying, ‘Oh, you’re that lady in the advert . . .’ She longed to be blasé about it, to shrug and smile distantly, but, truth to tell, she rather liked the recognition and was quite ready for a little chat, a bit of a chuckle with these friendly admirers. Deep down she felt rather ashamed at the pleasure this gave her but there was no harm and it cheered her up, boosting her ego and warming the heart: reactions not to be sniffed at, especially since Sam . . .
Lizzie seized the biscuit tin: two biscuits and a good look at the latest holiday brochure would be an excellent distraction from the long empty hours ahead. Perhaps her friends and her agent had been right when they’d advised that she shouldn’t leave London to return to the house in Bristol where she’d grown up with Pidge and Angel. It was simply that London had been so awful without Sam; so lonely and . . . just wrong. She lifted the mug and tasted the hot tea, glancing at the highly coloured brochure advertising the beauty of the West Country.
‘Will you be travelling with a party?’ the young woman in the travel agent’s office had asked earlier that morning.
‘No, no. Quite alone.’ She tried to make it sound adventurous and gay but the words had a rather pathetic ring and the woman glanced curiously at her.
‘I lost my husband three months ago.’ The words leaped from her mouth and seemed to lie on the counter where they could both look at them: Lizzie with dismayed surprise and the woman with shocked pity.
‘I am so sorry.’
The hushed tone and special sympathetic expression had an odd effect on Lizzie; she could feel wild laughter creeping below her diaphragm. Instinctively she breathed in, tightening her stomach muscles, beaming so madly that the woman almost flinched away from her.
‘So am I,’ she answered brightly, speaking clearly. ‘Terribly, terribly sorry.’
The woman’s expression grew anxious; she seized some brochures, and pushed them across the counter, muttering unintelligibly, her eyes averted.
Remembering, Lizzie burst into a fit of laughter, nearly choking on her tea; tears streamed from her eyes and she dabbed at them. Could it be that she was crying? Resolutely she took her mug and the booklets and went to sit at the dining-table.
In this big first-floor room, the kitchen had been divided from the living area by the simple means of placing an upright piano in the middle of the floor. Its back, which had a square deal table placed against it, was turned to the sink and cupboards and shelves, hiding the smaller working area very cleverly. On its other side, a long refectory table was set about with assorted battered wooden chairs, one wall was lined with bookshelves, another hung with paintings, and a long sofa, which fitted comfortably into the wide bay window, kept company with three unmatched armchairs and a low carved chest used as a table.
Sitting in the wide-armed carver, pushing an old silk cushion into the small of her back, Lizzie set down her tea, took the brochures from under her arm and opened the biscuit tin. She began to turn the pages. Beyond the window, the plane tree trembled in the light, soft breeze; the June evening was warm and the voices of the children, playing in the square, echoed through the open casement. The room faced west and the pattern of the leaves shifted and changed in the sunlight, flickering over faded linen chair covers. A crimson petal fell soundlessly from one of the roses in a vase on the piano, their scent drifting in the high, airy spaces. Lizzie turned another page.
‘Dunster Castle towers above the little village huddled at its gates . . .’
She stared at the picture, frowning, her mind balancing on the edge of a memory: the sandstone castle, glowing rich and warm at sunset, the mosaic of red and grey slate roofs silvered by gentle rain, a peaceful, sheltered garden; the sea breaking on grey stones and shingle, the ache of weary legs on the long walk home from the beach . . . And Angel, restless, brittle, never still.
Lizzie put the brochure aside. She saw a tiny cameo, a sliver of the past: a meeting, charged with tension and excitement, and Angel staring at a woman of her own age whilst she, Lizzie, gazed at the small boy who held the woman’s hand.
The telephone bell shivered the memory to pieces and made her jump.
‘Hello, dear heart.’
Lizzie smiled with relief to hear her agent’s voice and sank into a deep-lapped armchair.
‘Hello, Jim. How are things?’
‘Things are good. Very good. That holiday you were talking about. You’re not going too far away?’
‘No, no.’ Her eyes strayed to the table, the open brochure, the glossy photographs. ‘I thought, maybe, the West Country. On the coast somewhere. Why?’
‘Just as long as you’re in Manchester on Monday week.’
They talked for a few moments longer, Lizzie replaced the receiver and returned to the table. She stood for a long while, staring down at the picture.
Dunster Castle towers above the little village huddled at its gates.
She slept late the next morning. Half a sleeping tablet had finally released her from an exhausting mental circling, resurrecting memories and sharpening grief, which dogged her into the early hours. Her dreams were curiously vivid.
Pidge and Angel are sitting together at the table, a bottle of wine between them whilst she sits on the floor beneath the long board with her toys. Angel’s feet are bare and fidget constantly, rubbing one upon the other or tucking themselves into the long, cotton wrapper that ripples round her legs. Pidge’s feet are placed upon the long bar and her shoes, with pointed toes and little heels, are soft dark blue leather.
‘I loved him so much, d’you see?’ she is saying. Her voice is full of pain and, more than that, there is a kind of desperate need to be understood, forgiven even. Her narrow feet remain quite still, planted firmly there on the wooden rail, whilst Angel’s white, rounded toes, with their brightly painted nails, push at each other restlessly. She murmurs at intervals, in soothing counterpoint to Pidge’s recital, comforting her.
‘After all, sweetie, he didn’t belong to me either. I mean, did he?’ Her chair creaks a little as she leans forward. There is a tiny chink of glass, a liquid gurgle. ‘To be honest, it’s quite extraordinary. Rather fun, I think . . .’
Pidge’s feet come down from the rail, her shoes are eased off and she hitches her chair forward an inch or two: Angel’s toes cease to rub together, she crosses her legs, drawing the wrapper about her knees, and sits back comfortably. With the voices murmuring above her head, listening to bursts of smothered laughter and the occasional exclamation, the child continues her game; setting the scene that her toys enact on the soft silky rug, with the refectory table like a roof, the broad end-leg as a wall, sheltering and enclosing them.
Lizzie pushed back the quilt and sat on the edge of the bed. The dream, like yesterday’s, left her feeling edgy. Had she sat so, beneath the table, whilst Angel and Pidge talked? Had she wakened in the dressing-room one evening, alone and frightened, and run to find her mother? She was not a stranger to dreams but these had been touched by an almost hallucinatory quality. Her behaviour of late might have given rise to a slight anxiety if she could only bring herself to care. She’d posted a nice little cut of steak in the letter-box outside the butcher’s shop, gone off with someone else’s trolley in the supermarket, forgotten the car and, leaving it behind in the car-park, walked home from the library. Small things of no great moment, taken separately, yet the dreams seemed part of the same pattern.
‘Perhaps I’m having a nervous breakdown.’
Lizzie spoke the words aloud, tilted her head as if waiting for a response, and pattered away to the bathroom for a shower. Talking to herself made her feel less alone and, more importantly, kept anxieties in proportion. It was much more difficult to take herself seriously when she spoke out – rather loudly and very clearly – as if to an audience. She grinned brightly at herself in the glass above the basin as she cleaned her face, slapped on moisturizer and plunged the horseshoe-shaped pins into her hair.
She began to hum: ‘I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair.’
Still with South Pacific, then. Well, that was fine, lots of good numbers to carry her through the day. She remembered the little tap routine that had accompanied that particular song and tried it out, her leather-soled slippers clapping softly on the lino, thinking back to her first lessons in the basement room with the painted concrete floor at the dance studio.
Shuffle hop step tap ball change. Shuffle hop step tap ball change. Shuffle hop step, shuffle step, shuffle step, shuffle ball change.
She could hear, inside her head, the dancing mistress shouting the steps above the clatter of tap shoes, accentuating the beat; her body could remember the rhythm, arms swinging loosely, head up. She couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. How she’d loved the music, the movement, the disciplining of the body; the barre that had been fixed to the wall in the attic room forty years ago was still there where Lizzie had once performed her daily exercises, her little routine: pliés, battements, port de bras, watching herself in the glass on the opposite wall. She still did a regular workout.
‘But not this morning,’ she muttered as she dressed quickly, pulling on jeans and a black T-shirt.
An appointment with the hairdresser hurried her down the stairs for coffee and some toast. The brochure was lying where she’d left it but she glanced away from it, humming to herself again, concentrating on what Jim had told her about the possibility of work with a touring company in the autumn. Could she cope with the arduous routine, the travelling, the same performance night after night?
‘Just what you need, heart,’ he’d said reassuringly. He was very kind, very professional and insisted that his extravagant speech and flamboyant behaviour were simply by-products of a lifetime working with actors. Lizzie adored him.
‘I feel a bit wobbly,’ she’d told him before she’d left London. ‘I need a break. I’m going to Bristol.’
‘Back to the Birdcage?’ That’s what the tall, narrow house had been dubbed back in the early sixties once the agency had learned that three women lived in it, one of them called Pidgeon.
Standing in the kitchen, drinking black coffee, waiting for the toaster to fling its contents on to the floor, Lizzie thinks of Angel’s delight at the joke and how she pleads for them to change the address officially.
‘It’s all very well for you,’ retorts Pidge, ‘but how would you like your letters to be addressed to “Miss Pidgeon, The Birdcage”? Have a heart.’
Instead, Angel finds a pretty, gilt birdcage – from some prop room? – complete with two brightly painted, little wooden birds perched on a trapeze. Shortly afterwards an even smaller chick, made of soft yellow material, is added.
‘That’s you,’ says Angel to Lizzie. ‘See? You’re a swinging chick. How do you like that?’
The birdcage hangs above the piano in the sitting-room for years. It becomes a symbol, an in-joke.
‘That’s us,’ Angel tells visitors. ‘Three little birds in a gilded cage. Well, one chick and two old boilers . . .’ she adds – and waits for the inevitable denial, the compliments.
The birdcage is such a part of their lives together that it is impossible to imagine either Pidge or Angel getting rid of it. When Angel dies of complications following the onset of pneumonia, Pidge lives on alone until she, too, dies after a series of strokes. She leaves the house with all its contents to Lizzie.
‘I can’t sell it,’ Lizzie tells Sam. ‘I just can’t. Not yet, anyway.’
‘No need,’ he answers easily. ‘It will be useful as a little bolt-hole.’
‘That’s about right,’ she agrees. ‘I always bolted back to it. Between productions, after your disastrous love affairs. I always finished up in the Birdcage with Angel and Pidge.’
‘That’s not quite what I had in mind,’ he says, putting an arm round her, knowing how hard she is taking Pidge’s death. He makes a face, rolling his eyes, guying a saucy leer, hoping to make her smile, holding her closer. ‘More of a love nest, perhaps, than a birdcage?’ and she laughs at his feeble joke, winding her arms about him.
Ten years ago since Pidge died, thought Lizzie, swallowing her toast with difficulty. And less than two years ago Sam and I were here together. And now?
She began to clear her breakfast things, the action distracting her from such thoughts, concentrating instead on the missing birdcage. It would be good to see it again; to hang it up as a gesture to the past. She decided that as soon as she was home again she would have a thorough search for it.
All the while, as she collected her keys, hunted for her bag, the photograph seemed to cry continually for her attention. Reluctantly, almost fearfully, she paused to look at it again. ‘The Yarn Market is octagonal and dates from the fifteenth century . . .’
Lizzie bent closer to look at the smaller, inset picture. Another fragment, just like the scene in the shop, slid clearly into her mind.
The Yarn Market. She remembers running in through the doorless entrance, calling to Angel, who stands on the cobbles outside in the sunshine, and leaning through the big window spaces.
‘Look at me? Can you see me?’
‘I can see you, sweetie, I can see you.’ But Angel is looking up the High Street, her eyes darting from shop doorways to peer at the occupants of a car; distracted, preoccupied, always on the watch.
Lizzie feels the slubby crispness of her yellow and white gingham frock, bare feet in sandshoes, and her long plait, thick as Angel’s wrist, knocking against her back as she jumps along beside her mother down the sunken, narrow, cobbled pavement. They pause beside the hotel, with its big medieval porch, before crossing the road to the Yarn Market. It is cool and dark beneath the slated roof and she dances, singing breathlessly to herself, a small, bright flame of colour amongst the shadows, whilst Angel waits, watching and watching. But for whom?
This question occupied Lizzie as she walked into the town: as she chatted to the friendly girl who blow-dried her hair; as she did her shopping; all the while she was trying to pin the memory down, to capture it. If she could remember which year it had been, then other things might fall into place; but why should Angel, of all people, decide to take a holiday in a tiny town on Exmoor? Angel liked bustle, unexpected outings to restaurants or pubs, friends dropping by for impromptu drinks: she became restive and bored after ten minutes up on Brandon Hill. Nor did she consider it necessary for Lizzie to be taken on holiday except during the summer of that one year. That Dunster year.
Back at home, Lizzie kicked off her shoes, put away the shopping and collected the ingredients for her lunch. Mostly she couldn’t be bothered to eat formally – it seemed such an effort for just one person – but today she felt a need to prepare something almost as a rite to the shades of Pidge and Angel rather than for herself. Just now, here in the Birdcage, she felt that they were very close to her: Angel, eyes closed, stretched along the sofa in the window, with Pidge sewing nearby, arguing across the table or perhaps pottering in the kitchen. Pidge was responsible for most of the cooking, although Angel liked to experiment – either disastrously or brilliantly. ‘I am never commonplace,’ she’d say grandly, shovelling her mistakes into a newspaper whilst Pidge, resigned, began to make an omelette. ‘I don’t do things by halves.’ Because of going down to the theatre each evening, mealtimes were movable feasts and Pidge remained flexible at all times.
Now, as Lizzie set the table, she felt as if she were making them an offering, a simple little puja: smoked salmon with chunks of lemon, rings of tomato in a vinaigrette with herbs, thin slices of cucumber in mayonnaise, and new brown bread. She chose the dishes with care: round, white bone-china for the salmon; oval, blue earthenware for the tomatoes; a yellow bowl for the cucumber. Oddly, the palette of colour and texture worked. Lizzie felt that Pidge and Angel would have approved. Unable to afford the best, each of them had made a point of buying and using things that caught her attention and appealed to her own particular taste.
Pleased with her puja, Lizzie poured herself a glass of chilled Sancerre and sat down.
‘I know I shouldn’t be eating this because it’s for you,’ she said aloud so as to placate the shades of Pidge and Angel. ‘It’s not a real puja but it’s the best I can do.’
The little meal was delicious. Afterwards, she cut herself some cheese and made coffee, strong and black. Sitting quietly, she stared out across the room, through the branches of the plane tree outside the window, to the rooftops and the sky beyond, listening to other things beside the city’s sounds.
Later, she climbed the steep stairs to the attic room. Once her own special eyrie, now it was full of those things that had been put aside for later use – ‘It might come in,’ Pidge had been fond of saying – as well as the items which, out of sentimental attachment, they’d simply been unable to throw away. It was years since Lizzie had used this room and it was here she hoped to find the birdcage. Which one of them would have decided that the joke was too stale to want to keep it hanging above the piano? Perhaps, after Angel died, Pidge had found it too painful a reminder.
Lizzie moved slowly between cardboard boxes, bulging bin-liners and small pieces of furniture. Old books, with broken spines and ragged leaves, were stacked on the small bookcase she’d used as a child, whilst a chair with a broken leg held a faded tapestry stool in its lap. There was no sign of the birdcage. It was too big to be stored in the boxes which were marked clearly with felt-tip pen; too bulky for the bin-liners, weighty with their burden of old curtains and blankets, which she moved carefully aside in case they’d been piled on top of it. She peered into a tea-chest, which was packed with sheet music and theatre programmes, and stared for a moment at the cardboard box bearing the legend ‘LIZZIE’S TOYS’. To distract herself from the mixed emotions that this evoked, she turned aside and glanced along the shelf at the books. Amongst these battered copies were several Reprint Society editions. Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day, two Rumer Goddens, Maugham’s Theatre and an Iris Murdoch.
Lizzie leafed through the Bowen and then picked up Theatre. She remembered that Angel had given it to Pidge as a birthday present and, still feeling their shades close at hand, she decided to take the book down to read later. She looked about her, frowning: the birdcage was nowhere to be seen and she was acutely disappointed. It was foolish and irrational but she’d cherished the hope that she would discover it here amongst these artefacts of the past, but suspected now that it must have been thrown away. Angel’s rooms, which Lizzie now used, had no cupboard large enough to conceal it and Pidge’s quarters, cleared out and redecorated, were let to a young woman taking a post-graduate course at the university.
Lizzie went into the sitting-room and lay full-length on the sofa. She felt deeply hurt that the birdcage had been disposed of without her consent.
‘After all,’ she said aloud, crossly, as if to admonish the accompanying shades, ‘I was part of it too.’
She can imagine it quite clearly. The two little wooden birds have been so delicately painted that it seems that the feathers, blue and green and yellow, must stir; that at any moment the wings might be stretched for flight. Angel, professional as always in the setting of a scene, places a tiny bowl of seed on the floor of the cage and hangs a round mirror beside the trapeze. Pidge refuses to let her put a second bowl of water beside the seed.
‘It’ll get stale and smell,’ she says firmly, ‘or get knocked over when people peer in.’
Angel grumbles, her artistic sensibilities affronted, but Pidge won’t budge. There is only just room on the swing for the yellow chick, probably an Easter toy from a cardboard egg. She leans rakishly, her bright orange feet wound about with wire so as to attach her to the wooden bar, her fluffy wings poised as if she fears that she might tumble from her precarious perch.
How Lizzie loves them: to begin with, tall though she is, she has to stand on the piano stool so as to see them properly. Angel is the bird whose head is thrown back, beak parted in joyous song: Pidge has her head on one side, as if listening. Lizzie is thrilled to be a part of this little tableau: the chick, safe within the confines of the cage, not quite ready for flight.
Lizzie stirred. Now that she was back in Bristol, her earlier instinct – to block the past, to hum and dance away from those dreams and memories – was beginning to change very gradually into an acceptance; even into curiosity. The mad conception that, somehow, Pidge and Angel were here in the Birdcage with her was beginning to be a comfort rather than a threat.
‘Crazy!’ she announced to anyone who might be listening.
‘Potty. Nuts. Doolally.’
She hitched herself a little higher on the sofa, found that she was still clutching Theatre, and, holding it by its spine, shook the book gently so as to dislodge the dust. The pages clapped lightly together and a card slipped from between its sheets and fell to the floor. Lizzie picked it up and looked at it. Even in black and white the Yarn Market was instantly recognizable. The castle’s towers and battlements rose from behind the trees on Castle Hill and across the street from the Yarn Market stood the Luttrell Arms with its high medieval porch.
Shocked and disbelieving, Lizzie stared at the postcard. Its appearance at this moment, hedged about with mystery and coincidence as if it were some sign or portent, knocked her off balance and it was some time before she could bring herself to turn it over, so hopeful was she that it should contain some kind of message for her. The ink was faded but Angel’s writing was clear enough.
Darling Pidge,
So here we are and the cottage is sweet.
Lovely weather but it’s rather a trek to the beach for poor little Lizzie’s legs. Dunster is the most gorgeous village but – you’ll be relieved to know! – not a sign of F. I haven’t given up hope, though!
Love from us both. Angel xx
There was no date, only the word ‘Tuesday’ scrawled across the top of the card and the postmark was blurred. Lizzie reread the message anxiously, as though by further study the words might give up some secret; the answer to her question: why the holiday in Dunster? The first lines were innocent enough; it was only the words ‘not a sign of F’ that held the clue to the mystery.
Lizzie lay down again, holding the card, closing her eyes, remembering. Gently, as in that Looking-Glass world of backstage, with its silently collapsing walls and revolving staircases, her memory began to open, layer upon layer, before her inward eye. It was a long while before she stirred, rousing slowly to the sounds of evening outside the window, aware of the coolness of the shadowy room. She shivered a little, reaching a long arm for Angel’s yellow silk shawl, her eyes still dreamy and unfocused.
It was strange that a part of her life once so vital could be so completely written over, hidden beneath the palimpsest of subsequent experiences. F was for Felix: oh, how could she have forgotten someone she loved so much? The smell of him was in her nostrils, the feel of him beneath her fingertips, which clutched the postcard. For years he was a part of their lives here in the Birdcage; joking with Pidge, bringing presents for the small Lizzie, going down to the theatre with Angel. He’d arrive at the Birdcage on Sunday evenings; Pidge would be thinking about supper whilst listening to the Palm Court Hotel orchestra on the radio. Nothing could have persuaded Lizzie to go to bed until after she’d seen him and very often she was allowed to stay up late as a special treat.
‘Hello, my birds,’ he’d say, holding out a bottle to Pidge, fielding Lizzie with his other arm, looking across at Angel with that tiny heart-stopping wink. ‘How’s life in the cage?’
Perhaps, after all, it was Felix and not Angel’s agent who had named it so? For years – or so it seemed – that one Sunday in the month was the high spot of her small existence. Lizzie frowned, drawing the shawl about her, still holding the postcard. There could be no doubt that F stood for Felix – but what had Felix Hamilton, her mother’s lover, to do with Dunster? She sat up, feeling about with her toes for her shoes. Placing the card on the table beside the brochure, she went into the kitchen to pour herself a drink and, sitting down with it at the table, she stared at the postcard as if by sheer willpower she could wrench an answer from its picture of Dunster and the faded inky message.
Closing her eyes, Lizzie groped towards the words that defined Felix: the smell of his tweed coat; the feel of his long brown fingers holding her hand; the queer sensation of an emotional stability. Crazy! For years she hadn’t given him a thought whilst now, for some reason, the memories had come crowding back, green and fresh, and filling her with an unsettled longing; a need to see him again. It wasn’t so odd that, back in Bristol, she should feel the presence of Pidge and Angel – even her sudden passion to find the birdcage was not unreasonable – but this desire to seek Felix out, talk to him and tie up loose ends, was extraordinary. But why Dunster?
Lizzie opened her eyes; the question continued to puzzle her. The postcard lay face upwards and, as she looked at it, suddenly the tiny cameo, that sliver of the past, slid back into her mind: Angel staring at the woman in the grocer’s shop whilst she and the little boy gazed at one another. She recalled the atmosphere of tension, communicated by the sudden tightening of Angel’s hand on hers and the expression of resentment on the woman’s face. Her memory made another connection: Felix explaining why he couldn’t be her daddy, telling her about his son with the odd name who lived in the country.
Gasping with a kind of triumphant relief Lizzie leaned back in her chair, the pieces of the puzzle clicking neatly into place. It seemed clear, now, that Angel had gone to Dunster hoping to see Felix and almost certainly against Pidge’s advice: . . You’ll be relieved to know! – not a sign of F. I haven’t given up hope, though! It was the kind of mad plan that would have appealed to Angel. Perhaps Felix had been on holiday from the office for a while with no excuse to visit Bristol: perhaps his passion had been cooling off a little. Had Angel hoped that, by appearing on his home ground, she might force his hand? Lizzie longed to know what had happened between Felix and Angel; why had he stopped coming to the Birdcage? Frustration seized her. Why, when it was too late, did she feel this passion to unearth the past? She picked up the postcard with its faded message. Were they still there, in Dunster somewhere, Felix and his son – and that woman with the bitter, resentful face?
It suddenly occurred to her that Felix, like Angel and Pidge, might be dead. In remembering the young Felix she’d forgotten that he would have grown old too. Only then did she realize how much she’d been counting on finding him again; of talking to him once more. An unexpected and inexplicable sense of despair galvanized her into action. She reached for her mobile and, peering at the page in the brochure, dialled a number.
‘Hello,’ she said, swallowing in a suddenly dry throat. ‘I expect it’s hopeless but I suppose you don’t have any rooms empty at the moment? I’d like to come down to Dunster for a few days next week . . . Oh, really? Four nights? . . . No, no, not too soon at all. Monday night to Thursday night. Fine . . .’
She gave the details required by the receptionist, replaced the receiver and sat quite still; the room was full of early evening sunshine, dappled with the pattern of plane leaves, peaceful and full of memories. She half expected to see Angel come yawning from her afternoon sleep, waving to Lizzie with her crayons at the table, calling to Pidge clattering about in the kitchen.
‘I need you, sweetie. Could you just hear me in that bit in Act Three? It’s the scene with Orlando . . .’ And Pidge, quickly drying her hands, taking the script, read the part in a quiet, colourless voice, whilst Angel lay full-length on the sofa with her eyes closed, responding to the cues.
‘I’m sure you realize,’ Lizzie said aloud to them, ‘that this is a wild-goose chase. Utterly crazy . . .’ but her voice trembled with anticipation and she was filled with a new sense of purpose. She must decide what clothes she’d need, find the map, telephone Jim to let him know where she’d be; if she managed an early start on Monday morning she could be in Dunster in plenty of time for lunch.
In Dunster: at these words a thrill passed through her frame. With her head full of plans and hopes Lizzie rose from the table and, pausing only to pick up the postcard, hurried away to her bedroom.