Read Online A Summer Bird-Cage by Margaret Drabble - Free Book Online

have known that I had approximately three times my quota of books in my room. I was afraid Louise, never very assiduous in her pursuit of me, would have gone by the time I got there. It was a good quarter-mile of corridor to my room, and on the way I began to grow conscious of my early-morning-in-college, un-made-up, bedroom-slipper, academic look. I was even more conscious of it when I arrived, pushed open the door, and saw Louise and her two men. It was a sunny day and my room looked delightful, full of dust, flowers, books and unmade bed. Louise was sitting on the window-seat, in white trousers and a white shirt, and the two men were standing around in the fireplace region. They all started as I came in: they had obviously been talking about something. I recognized Stephen, but I had never met John before, though I knew who he was.
    ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’
    ‘Just visiting,’ said Louise. She didn’t move a muscle. The sun was shining through the window into the room: she looked dazzling, as though the light were shining through her too.
    ‘Just visiting. We thought we’d call on you.’
    ‘Thanks a lot,’ I said, and put my pile of books down on the top of my desk.
    ‘I trust that we haven’t interrupted your studies?’ said Stephen.
    ‘Not half,’ I said. ‘I was just settling down for a quiet day in the library.’
    ‘On a day like this?’
    ‘It’s always like this at exam time,’ I said.
    ‘You haven’t met John, have you, Sarah?’ said Louise, still from her distant point of sunny vantage. ‘This is John Connell. John, this is my little sister Sarah.’
    ‘How do you do,’ I said.
    ‘How do you do,’ he said.
    You couldn’t deny that he was stunning. He seemed to fill the room, and Stephen looked more nebulous than ever by his side.
    ‘Well,’ I said, ‘shall we all have a cup of coffee?’
    ‘I thought we’d go out,’ said Louise.
    ‘Come to that,’ I said, ‘how did you get in?’
    ‘Through the back door.’
    ‘Well, I hope nobody saw you. My name will be mud.’ Men weren’t allowed in college during the mornings.
    ‘Oh, nobody saw us,’ said Louise, ‘I know my way around here.’
    They all looked so odd in my room, so much older than anyone I ever remembered having been in it before, so much older and so much smarter.
    ‘Where are we going out to?’ I asked.
    ‘I don’t know. In Stephen’s car. To the country.’
    ‘Where on earth have you all come from?’
    ‘Oh, from London. It seemed a nice day to go out.’
    ‘Do you really want me to come?’
    ‘Yes, of course we do. That’s why we came to pick you up.’
    ‘Oh.’ I said. ‘Well, if we’re going out I’ll have to change my skirt.’
    ‘All right,’ said Louise, ‘carry on.’
    And they really seemed to be expecting me to carry on, and as I hadn’t the nerve to throw them out in the corridor, apart from the risk of their being discovered there, I did so. I didn’t at all mind taking off my tatty old skirt in front of John, for some reason, possibly because he was an actor and with actors such things hardly register, but I very much minded in front of Stephen. Even though I was wearing a totally opaque black petticoat. They all looked the other way as I got a reasonable skirt out of the wardrobe and put it on: there was something in Stephen’s personality that made any attempt at informality a mockery, even though he himself was ostensibly a Bohemian type, at least in dress and opinion. I simply didn’t know what kind of behaviour he expected from me.
    As I brushed my hair and dabbed on a little lipstick, Louise got up and wandered over to my desk, and started reading my essay, the one I had been making notes for in the library. She read the title out aloud: ‘In the
Leviathan
, Hobbes demonstrates nothing adequately except the limitations of his own study-bound conception of human nature.’
    ‘Well, well, well,’ she said. ‘That’s quite a thing to write about,