A Summer Bird-Cage by Margaret Drabble Page A

is so beautiful. So spiked and classy on the page. The first time I saw it was when she called on me in college after meeting me at a party: I was out, and she left me a note on white, thick-grained paper with a flower stuck through the sheet, a black twig with one yellow flower like a Japanese painting, and never since then have I seen her writing without the image of that twig and that leafless, austere yellow flower. It was so like her, so deliberately chosen: or perhaps people choose their own symbols naturally, for Gill always has in her room vast masses of green leaves, any leaves, chopped off trees or hedges, whilst Stephen and Louise have dried grasses in long Swedish vases. Simone, the flower without the foliage, and Gill, the foliage without the flower. I should like to bear leaves and flowers and fruit, I should like the whole world, I should like, I should like, oh I should indeed.
    Sad, eclectic, gaunt Simone with her dark face and her muddled heritage, her sexless passions and her ancient clothes, gathered from all the attics of Europe. She is the window through which I first glimpsed the past. Her mother was a French opera singer and her father an Italian general: their houses, she once told me, were full of dead laurel wreaths and medals and pictures of the dead. She herself moves through a strange impermanent world where objects are invested with as much power as people, and places possibly with more: these things have for her a pure aesthetic value, totally divorced from the world of sensations and rhythms where I live. Tragic Simone, cut after an unlivable pattern. She is the most singular character in the subversive feminine realm which men are so ready to resent and to misunderstand: even Tony, who is sympathetic to most of the loose vagaries of the passions, would have called my feelings towards her nothing but decadent emotionalism. I can just hear him saying those very words—words which he would never have used about any man, no matter how decayed. Friendships between women are invariably described pejoratively as intimacies, sublimations or perversions, but I don’t believe that Simone offered or experienced any of these things. Men and women were the same to her, unsmeared by any image of profit or loss or by the overhanging future: she had no future. She was most purely personal in her life. In most people, and in myself, I am vaguely aware of a hinterland of non-personal action, where the pulls of sex and blood and society seem to drag me into unwilled motion, where the race takes over and the individual either loses himself in joy or is left helplessly self-regarding and appalled. With her I sensed a wholly willed, a wholly undetermined life. And how could such a person live? The French believe they can, but one has only to read their books to mark some heroic dislocation from the pulse of continuous life. She lacked an instinct for kitchens and gas-meters and draughts under the door and tiresome quarrels: and, lacking instinct, she had to live on will. Willing to get up, willing to go to bed, willing to eat or sleep or love.
    And where does one get the energy for this sort of existence? The only way to be recharged is to be put in touch with external rhythms. Otherwise one will run down from exhaustion. Simone will run down, in a train or a gutter or a hotel bedroom, like those
fin-de-siecle
poets she so much admires and resembles. I know it, I know the signs of a short term, though she is the only living person in whom I have ever witnessed them. Meanwhile, I am gratified that she puts me on a level with the Vestal Virgin’s house and the candy pillars: if I have as much charm for her, I cannot lack beauty.
    And then, what about Louise? I looked down at that white precious letter and turned my thoughts, a little reluctantly, to the other problems it posed. Simone almost seemed to imply in it that Louise was no more dislocated than I was. It was odd that she had mentioned that sinister