A Summer Bird-Cage by Margaret Drabble

took out the neatly folded sheet. Her writing looked like some other language, hieroglyphic, neat and unearthly. Not for her the unaesthetic carelessness of dashes, scribbles, and postscripts.
     
    Roma
    Sara cara cara mia,
    How enchantingly your name suits this enchanting language, and how repentant I am for my long silence since I saw you in the summer at that station. I would write, but then what would I say? I have death in my heart.
    To resume. I was reminded of you by meeting your sister Louise, whom I last saw three years ago in Oxford,
blasé
and breathless after three years of conquest: at first sight she reminded me of that piece which begins ‘They that have power to hurt and will do none.’ I met her this time not on a station but in a church, that other refuge of the aimless. In Santa Maria in Cosmedin. Do you remember it? All those layers of all those centuries, Rome, Byzantium, and the dark ages of the world, and I might harden into less than one grain of one pillar. Also those barley sugar things around the altar are very consoling, so frivolous in all the serious stonework. And there I met your sister Louise, half-heartedly inspecting the half-vanished frescoes, and alone on her honeymoon. She was looking more beautiful than in Oxford: in Oxford she had the air of an heiress up for the weekend, coldly distinct in the midst of all those pre-Raphaelite daisy-nibbling barefoot Beatrices who swept the city in our era. But in Rome she looked herself, posed expensively against an artistic background. She was all in black and white and grey, and there was something stoic and stony in her face that suited the masonry. I thought I would avoid her, but she saw me and spoke to me, so we went and sat outside by the yellow fountain, where she told me she had married Stephen Halifax (and I hate
cara mia
his insufferable books) and that he was lunching with a film director. I would like to have that Vestal Virgin’s House at the bottom of my garden.
    As she talked inattentively of this and that I thought of those lines of Joachim du Bellay, which he once wrote of Rome:
     
‘Si le temps peut finir chose si dure
Peut finir la peine que j’endure.’
     
    My pain I know is without end: I am after all nothing more than a neo-Gothic ruin, built in decay for the bats and the ivy: but hers, hers I cannot help comparing with your more curable afflictions, and I wonder if those enchanting eyes will ever gaze at anything other than the imagined glass?
    You will forgive me, Sara de mon coeur, for writing to you of your sister: it is an oblique overture to you, one of the more happy incidents in that succession of journeys and train tickets which is my life.
    Mon âme s’envole vers toi.
    Simone
     
    I finished her letter and then looked down at it with a glow of pleasure: Simone’s letters are always a delight, they always reassure and assert something in me which is usually crying out for satisfaction. I am so relieved and excited that she continues to remember me: I see her as so much greater and grander than myself, that her recognition is like a bow from a queen. And she clearly remembered that meeting on the Gare du Nord as tenderly as I did: she would say to our acquaintances all over Europe, ‘I met Sarah, you know, at five in the morning . . . ’ My life was thereby extended into bars and trains and drawing-rooms that I would never enter. I was distinguished by her attention from people like Daphne, who was never an incident for anyone. I was
cara Sara
, and I am a fool about endearments. I wonder, is there something servile in my admiration for Simone? Because I do admire as well as love her, though I have always believed love preferable to an exclusive of admiration. I consider her a superior being. She is superior, and in contact with her I share her superiority: I lose the cruel and evasive sentimentality that Daphne and my mother arouse in me, and I become created harder and brighter in her eyes.
    Her writing