Read Online The Birdcage by Marcia Willett - Free Book Online Page A

put up a photo of Winston or Monty or Mountbatten. Everyone would recognize him at once. That photo of your brother will simply have to do. Thank God he was called Michael. We both promised . . .’)
    â€˜Tell me about him,’ demands Lizzie, hitching herself into Angel’s lap. ‘Tell me again.’
    Angel settles them both comfortably. ‘His name was Michael Blake,’ she begins.
    She is describing her brother, who was killed in Korea, and Pidge knows that she is feeling, as she always does, guilty at this deception: ashamed that Lizzie can never know who her real father is, distressed at using the brother whom she loved as a kind of replacement.
    â€˜Michael wouldn’t have cared,’ Angel often says defensively, after these uncomfortable times. ‘He was always kicking up a lark, he’d have understood, but it just feels . . . well, you know . . .’
    And Pidge can imagine how difficult it is and tries to do what she can. As she listens to Angel she thinks of Mike, whose driver she was in the last year of the war and the first months of peace.
    â€˜I’ll want the car at three o’clock’ – a tiny pause – ‘but it’ll be a late one, Pidge,’ he’d say; this is their signal.
    She’ll never know how the rumours started but once Mike hears of them he is ruthless.
    â€˜Nothing I can do, darling Pidge,’ he tells her on that last meeting. ‘I’ve told you how it is with my wife. She’s quite helpless physically and I could never leave her. We agreed, didn’t we?’
    But she still clings to him, unwilling to believe that she will never lie with him like this again, warm in his arms.
    Pidge looks about her and then back at the two curled together on the sofa: this is Mike’s house. He owns a great deal of property and when he found that she was taking up a job at the University Library in Bristol, he offered her the house on a very reasonable rent.
    â€˜No strings,’ he said. ‘That’s all over, Pidge, but it might help out while you get settled.’
    It was nearly nine years before she heard from him again: a letter outlining another plan, this time an attempt to assist the mother of his child.
    â€˜See what you can do, Pidge,’ he wrote. ‘No names, no pack-drill. You’ll like Angel and I’d like to think of you all together, looking after each other since I can’t – not directly, anyway.’
    It could so easily have been a disaster – they might have been jealous of each other – but it was a brilliant plan.
    Mike always was a great judge of character, thinks Pidge, listening to Angel describing Michael’s schooldays to Lizzie – and now there is a new man: Felix Hamilton, who will be coming for a drink tomorrow.
    In his nervousness he rings the wrong doorbell.
    â€˜Hello,’ says Pidge, appearing as suddenly as a jack-in-the-box, and he looks at her almost in dismay. She raises an eyebrow, registering his confusion, liking the look of him. ‘Can I help?’
    â€˜I’m so sorry, I must have muddled the address.’ Disconcerted, he bundles the bunch of flowers – yellow roses – into his left arm and feels anxiously in his pocket. ‘I could have sworn it was this number.’ He steps back to check the number on the door whilst Pidge watches with amused interest.
    â€˜Right number, wrong door,’ she says kindly when she feels that he’s suffered enough. ‘I expect it’s Angel you’re looking for.’
    â€˜Yes it is,’ he agrees gratefully. ‘I thought . . . she said that . . .’
    At this point the door at the top of the stairs opens and Angel stares down at them.
    â€˜Darling,’ she cries warmly, addressing both of them. ‘Whatever are you doing down there? I hope you’re not giving Pidge my flowers, Felix.’
    â€˜No,