A Summer Bird-Cage Read Online Free

halffinished a bottle of whisky: she handed it to me with a kind of bonhomie that was quite unprecedented, and said, ‘Go on, have a drink.’
    I obeyed, though the stuff tasted very sour and odd in my half-asleep mouth, and then I looked around. Everywhere was littered with ash, little grey worms of it all over the carpet, and Louise herself looked quite fantastic, her long hair all wild and tangled up with two odd curlers stuck in the top, and her skin glistening white and deathly with cold cream.
    ‘What the hell do you think you are?’ I said. ‘Lady Macbeth?’
    ‘How did you guess,’ she said, ‘how did you guess. And how did you know I was here?’
    ‘I heard you. You woke me up.’
    ‘Oh Christ, that must have been when I fell over the piano stool. I’m not really making a noise.’
    ‘Oh no. And look at that ash.’
    She looked at it, comically helpless.
    ‘Yes, it is rather a mess, isn’t it. What on earth can I do with it? And all that whisky. Could I fill it up with water, do you think?’
    ‘Don’t be silly, you’ll be in Rome before it’s discovered.’
    ‘Yes, so I will. So I will. I keep forgetting.’ She paused and belched. ‘I say, Sally, I feel ghastly.’
    ‘I’m sure you do,’ I said, primly. ‘Would you like me to make you some coffee?’
    ‘Oh, Sarah, be an angel. I’d love some. I could just do with some. Do make me some, I need looking after for once in my life, I’m too weak to switch the gas on. Do be an angel, I’ll love you for ever if you make me some coffee.’
    I could have done with that too.
    It was soft of me, I suppose, but I was so honoured by her drunken accessibility that I took her into the kitchen and sat her down at the table, made her some Nescafé, and swept up all the ash quietly with a dustpan and brush. Then she started to moan about her hair so I fetched the rest of her curlers and put it all up for her. She looked only faintly ridiculous even with her hair full of iron rolls and her face shining with grease: somehow she managed to look dramatic rather than at a disadvantage. She looked as though she were in a film or an air raid. She was more communicative than I had ever known her, and kept muttering about Rome and loving, honouring and obeying: she said nothing about Stephen except, ‘Stephen knows such gorgeous people in Rome,’ which came up from time to time as a refrain. I envied her, for her honeymoon if not for her husband, and told her so: ‘I wouldn’t mind larking about in first class hotels for a bit,’ I said. She was pleased that I was impressed. After a while the blodginess and irritation of being up in the middle of the night left me, and I fell in with the isolated moment, the dark kitchen, Louise leaning on her elbows with her face in her hands, the smell of ash and cold cream, and the sudden disruption of twenty-one years of family life, during which I had never been up at that hour except when ill. Louise kept going on so about Rome that I too started to think of it: there is something about Italy that fills me with such desire: even the names are so incantatory that they put me under—Florence, Arno, Ferrara, Siena, Venice, Tintoretto, Cimabue, Orvieto, Lachrimae Christi permesso, limonata—just the sound of them reminds me that I am not all dry grit and deserted hollows. As Kingsley Amis might put it, I am a nut case about abroad. I love E. M. Forster for loving it: I love George Eliot for her monstrous dedicated ardour in
Romola:
I love those two lines of Keats which I first found used to illustrate some long-forgotten figure of speech in a grammar textbook—
     
‘So the two brothers and their murdered man
Rode past fair Florence.’
     
    Fair Florence, with the sculpture and the water-ices. I gave myself up to the idea of it, I wallowed in nostalgia—stupidly, as I had only got back from abroad the day before and was due in fact for a spell of English Victoriana-worship—I envied Louise for going there the minute