A Summer Bird-Cage by Margaret Drabble Page B

Shakespearean sonnet, which had come into my head the first time I heard that Louise had chosen lilies for her bouquet. I went over it again, as best I could.
     
They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the things they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold and to temptation slow They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces . . . 
Something something something . . . 
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
     
    But Louise, of course, had the power to hurt and did it. Why, then, this aura of virginity? Was it simply a trick of profile?
    The fact that Louise had been alone in that church disturbed me profoundly. Why wasn’t she with her husband? I wasn’t surprised, but I was disturbed. Indeed, I was so little surprised that the news seemed like a confirmation of something. Poor
elegantissima
Loulou, wandering sadly around Rome by herself looking at ancient monuments. Whatever Louise was now realizing, she must surely have foreseen: she wasn’t stupid, nor was she carried away by idealistic fervours in marrying Stephen Halifax. Perhaps she was stoically realizing that she had miscalculated.
    Re-reading Simone’s letter again today, after an interval of months, I realize that there is nothing in it to suggest the betrayal and disillusion that I sensed.
    I put the letter away, that evening, and tried to forget it, except of course for the charming sentiments about myself. After all, I said to myself, what had Louise and her marriage got to do with me? She was merely and accidentally my sister whereas Simone was a personal person of my own.
    This is a lie, but a lie that I am often near to believing.

5
The Invitation
    I NOW FIND myself compelled to relate a piece of information which I decided to withhold, on the grounds that it was irrelevant, but I realize increasingly that nothing is irrelevant. I meant to keep myself out of this story, which is a laugh, really, I agree: I see however that in failing to disclose certain facts I make myself out to be some sort of
voyeuse
, and I am too vain to leave anyone with the impression that the lives of others interest me more than my own. So I hasten, belatedly, to say that all this time that I have been writing about I was in love with somebody quite outside this story, so far outside it that thousands of miles separate him and it. His name is Francis. We were in love for our last year at Oxford, most inseparably in love. I felt as though he carried me around in his pocket. At the end of the year, our final year, he, being a great scholar, was awarded a Commonwealth scholarship to go and study political theory in Harvard. He said he wouldn’t go. I said he should. I suppose we quarrelled.
    I couldn’t understand myself. Nothing could have appalled me more than the idea of his leaving me for a year, and yet I have never pursued any end with greater intensity. I think I suspected that half of him really wanted to go, and that he was determined not to merely through consideration of my feelings. I was equally determined not to be stayed with through anything but clear, unalloyed desire on his part. So, despite his fervent protests, I forced him to accept the scholarship and go to America. Perhaps he seriously didn’t want to go. I long since gave up any hope of knowing the truth about it. The fact is, he went. Oh, I have been over it a thousand times: the fact that he went meant that he didn’t love me, the fact that I drove him to it meant that I didn’t love him, and so on forever. The fact remains, and now it is all that remains.
    It is only now, at the time of writing (or rather, indeed, rewriting) that it occurs to me that I may have been simply delaying the problem of marriage. In a way I’m surprised that I didn’t marry him straight away, on leaving college, as Gill had married Tony. I was dimly beginning to formulate the idea that of all the many kinds of marriages, Gill’s and Louise’s represented