A Summer Bird-Cage Read Online Free Page B

books on weddings expressly allocate to the chief bridesmaid, which I assumed I was, though nobody had ever said anything about it; and I have always been conscientious. Our school motto was
Qui fidelis est in parvo, in multo quoque est fidelis
. I didn’t knock on her bedroom door when I went in, and surprised her standing quite still and looking at herself in the mirror. Her dress was on, but open all the way down the front.
    ‘Can I help?’ I asked.
    ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You can do my dress up down the front.’
    She seemed to like my doing it for her, but I didn’t like the physical closeness. I wasn’t used to her. She was never a one for touching people, for kissing or fighting or sitting on knees. There were a lot of little buttons, all the way from the demure high neck to the waist, and I fumbled over them. They didn’t have proper buttonholes but horrid little fabric loops. I could feel her hard breasts rising and falling under my clumsy hands in her far from new brassiere. I thought how like her, to wear a bra that is actually dirty on her wedding day. She must have been wearing it for the past week.
    ‘Is this your something old?’ I asked, indicating it.
    ‘My bra? Yes, I suppose it is. I hadn’t thought.’
    She was millions of miles away again, all the intimacy of the night before forgotten, but perhaps that wasn’t surprising. She looked vacant and worried. She started to mess around with her hair and got me to spray lacquer on the back, which I did so liberally that I could see it shining like dewdrops during the ceremony. She has coarse hair, thick and heavy and easy to manage. I thought she was thinking purely narcissistic thoughts, when she quite suddenly said, ‘I say, Sarah, what do you think it would feel like to be a virgin bride?’
    ‘Terrifying, I should think,’ I said. It was something I had often considered. ‘All that filthy white.’
    ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, as she started to dab scent behind her ears.
    ‘Oh, I don’t know. Surely one would feel like a lamb led to the slaughter and all that? With a bow round one’s neck?’
    ‘Yes, I suppose so. But it must be rather exciting.’
    ‘Hardly fair on the bridegroom.’
    ‘Do you think one would be disappointed?’
    ‘I’ve no idea,’ I said, as rudely as I could. I didn’t want to talk female intimacies. Not with her.
    ‘I suppose one would,’ she said. ‘Still, it seems a pity.’
    ‘Why, do you mean you’re missing an extra
frisson
or something?’
    She looked at me sharply, through the mirror, and said, ‘Oh no. I have plenty of
frissons
of my own. Plenty.’
    I still remember the way she said that. It was oddly spontaneous, oddly revealing. She must have said more than she meant, or said too much what she did mean, because she immediately snapped shut again, and started to put on her veil, humming horribly through her teeth. ‘Be an angel,’ she said, ‘be an angel and go and look at my bouquet. Bring it up to me so I can see what it looks like.’
    I went, glad to get out, and pondering to myself the likely nature of those
frissons
. I wonder if anyone ever married a man they didn’t like just in order to see what it felt like? Louise’s bouquet was made of lilies, huge virginal lilies, very formal, with no Constance Spryery about them: they would have done equally well for an altarpiece. They were lying on the hall table: I thought, what a nerve, really, to choose flowers like that. There was something theatrical about them, as well as something ceremonious, and I wondered who the audience was. I picked up the flowers and looked at myself with them in the hall mirror and thought that I wouldn’t make nearly as good a bride as Louise. I stiffened my neck and tried to look dignified, but I couldn’t make it. I lacked grandeur; I looked too pink and fleshy for the white intactness of those flowers. I looked less intact than Louise, ironically enough. I looked horrifyingly pregnable, somehow, at