Read A Summer Bird-Cage for Free Online Page B

thing . . . It was ghastly. It got worse and worse. Once he said to me, “Put the kettle on,” and I said, “Put it on yourself, I’m reading”; and he said, “Put it on, what the hell do you think you’re here for?” Isn’t it unbelievable? That Tony should be like that? Tony of all people? I thought he hadn’t a preconception in the world. Isn’t it unbelievable?’
    I nodded. It was. He was the last man I could picture saying a thing like that to anyone. Stephen Halifax, yes, my father yes, even cousin Michael in a bad temper, but not Tony.
    ‘You don’t know,’ she said, ‘what a difference it makes not to have meals provided. To know that if you don’t start peeling potatoes there won’t be any potatoes. You haven’t been out long enough to know.’
    ‘No, I haven’t.’
    ‘It’s too dismal. I kept saying things like that I’d be quite happy to cook if we could afford nice things, wine and pheasants and herbs and so forth, but that nobody could be happy with bread and potatoes and spaghetti—that was a lie too, though again it was true in principle—but five shillings a day, it was a bit much. I began to feel so humiliated and degraded, I can’t tell you. He simply didn’t see that painting and being painted aren’t equally amusing . . . Anyway one day I said my parents were right, and that I’d got what I deserved, marrying a bloody foundling.’
    ‘You didn’t.’
    ‘Oh yes I did. I knew you wouldn’t believe it, we both behaved so incredibly. It was such a bloody thing to say to anyone. And the stupid thing is that I’ve never had the slightest feeling about his not knowing who his parents are, I mean to say it never even crossed my mind from one month to the next. It didn’t seem to matter about him at all, not nearly so much as him being a painter, or having a hairy chest, or that sort of thing—but of course as soon as I said it he immediately thought I’d been harbouring a deep-seated grievance about it, some repulsion in the blood or something—and I couldn’t convince him that I didn’t care at all. I said to him, “I didn’t say it because I meant it but because I knew it was the only thing that would really hurt you and I had to hurt you somehow.” But he didn’t believe me.’
    ‘Poor Gill. Was that the end of it then?’
    ‘Not quite. We mouldered on till the end of March, when I discovered the crowning insult, which was that I was pregnant. Think of that. I’d never thought it would happen to me, though why I thought it was so unlikely and impossible I can’t imagine. I felt ruined. I cried for days and days, and in the end I told him and said I’d have to get rid of it.’
    ‘Oh
no
,’ I said. I wasn’t really shocked, but I was shocked by her saying it there, when wedding guests might have overheard. But she seemed oblivious. She wouldn’t have cared if they had listened.
    ‘Well, what could I do? He was terribly upset and rather nice about it really, and lent me the money, and asked if I was sure that that was what I wanted. I said yes. I really thought it was. It seems so stupid because I’m one of the only people I know who really wanted children. But I didn’t want them like that. Sort of accidentally and without my consent. Poor kid, I hated it so violently, it almost stopped me hating Tony—I felt it was a leech sucking my blood. Is that abnormal? I suppose it’s not, really. I did want a baby so, but I wanted it to be all proper and intentional with pink nurseries and flowers in hospital, you know. Not tied up in bits of old nightgown and smelling of turpentine.’
    ‘It wouldn’t have minded,’ I said, with questionable tact and questionable truth.
    ‘Oh yes it would. It’s all very well living one’s own sordid way, you can’t expect babies to understand. So I got rid of it, and when I came home that afternoon I said to Tony, “Well, that’s that, and now I’m moving out.” To tell you the truth I’d hoped he’d throw