Bowen The Birdcage

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30513-1
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

In John Bowen's The Birdcage Peter Ash and Norah Palmer have been living together for nine years. Having never seen the point in getting married they are the epitome of a modern successful career-oriented couple; Peter is the compere for a series of 'art' films and Norah is the Script Editor for the Drama Department of a commercial television company. Why then when holidaying in Venice does Peter decide to break up their long-lasting relationship? What happens to their order and sense of self when he succeeds? By turns wildly funny and frightening The Birdcage is a novel about the end of a love affair, the repercussions and the emotional fallout. A host of brilliantly created characters people the book, including Bunty Bates the policewoman, and Edward Laverick, a playwright who finds himself the object of a hunt. Bowen creates a world that his readers can relate to and analyses the social and psychological end of a relationship. At times comical and tragic The Birdcage remains an original and exciting novel 44 years after its first publication in 1964.

John Bowen was born in India, sent 'home' to England at the age of four and a half, and was reared by aunts. He served in the Indian Army from 1943-47, then went to Oxford to read Modern History. After graduating he spent a year in the USA as a Fulbright Scholar, much of it hitch-hiking. He worked for a while in glossy journalism, then in advertising, before turning freelance when the BBC commissioned a six-part adventure-serial for Children`s Television. Between 1956 and 1965 he published six novels to excellent reviews and modest sales, then forsook the novel for nineteen years to concentrate on writing television drama (Heil Caesar: Robin Redbreast) and plays for the stage (After the Rain: Little Boxes: The Disorderly Women). He returned to writing novels in 1984 with The McGuffin: there were four more thereafter. Reviewers have likened his prose to that of Proust and P. G. Wodehouse, of E. M. Forster and the young John Buchan: it may be fair to say that he resists compartmentalisation. He has worked as a television producer for both the BBC and ITV, directed plays at Hampstead and Pitlochry and taught at the London Academy of Dramatic Art. He lives in a house on a hill among fields between Banbury and Stratford-on-Avon.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bowen, John

Leseproben

1

Semi-attached

Peter Ash and Norah Palmer sat together at a table at Quadri’s in the Piazza San Marco, drinking black coffee with ice-cream in it. Peter Ash wore a shirt of pale blue, open at the neck, and fawn-coloured terylene trousers held up by a belt which was fastened almost uncomfortably tightly to hold in check the plumpness against which he tried so frequently, and so ineffectively to diet. Norah Palmer wore saxe-blue shorts, cut like a skirt, and an olive-green blouse of poplin. Her nose was just beginning to peel, and the strong sun had brought more freckles to her face than were usual for her in London. Sun glasses lay on the table in front of Peter Ash and Norah Palmer. Peter Ash had blond hair of the kind which is always called “fine” because it will fall out in middle life. There was a beach-bag by his side; it contained swimming costumes, two towels, and two damp and sandy paperbacks. The time was half-past six of an evening in July. Peter Ash and Norah Palmer were on holiday together; they had taken their holidays together for nine years. They were (if you insist on the word) tourists, but of a superior sort. They had spent the afternoon, as they had spent every afternoon of their holiday so far, swimming and taking the sun at the Lido, and, because they were sensible as well as sensitive people, they had chosen neither the free beach, which was always crowded, nor any of the beaches of the big hotels, which were expensive, but a modest beach with cabins at modest prices, down by the hospital.

Peter Ash and Norah Palmer had spent the at the Lido. They did not spend their mornings there. They were not mad for the sun. It is easy to overdo the sun. Besides, how foolish to be in Venice, and see nothing! Almost as foolish as to be in Venice, and do nothing else but see the sights, in and wearily out of a thousand interesting little churches, through the interminable galleries of Galleries, finishing the Basilica only to start the Doges’ Palace. Oh, they had noticed, had Peter Ash and Norah Palmer, the parties of inferior and unsophisticated tourists, German and American and (not to be chauvinistic) often English, with hot feet and aching eyes, dragging through the cultural round—the Frari, the Scuola san Rocco, the Accademia, the Ca d’Oro—checking each off against the guide book until at last they could say they had done the lot, and it was time to go on to Florence and start all over again. None of that for Peter Ash and Norah Palmer! They had not come to Venice for that. In the mornings they would rise at a sensible time, and take breakfast in the garden of the Locanda, where each table was shaded by an umbrella, and cages of yellow birds were set against a wall. They would breakfast together in the shade on milky coffee with rolls and jam, and they would offer, as conversational counters to the maid who served them, the simple phrases of Italian learned during the winter at evening classes. Over breakfast they would decide which sight to see that morning, and after breakfast, off they would go to see it, allowing the sight a sensible time to be seen, allowing (as one might expect) the larger sights a longer time, but never too long because, as Peter Ash would tell you, after a while the eye tires so that all pictures, all pieces of architecture or statuary, begin to seem the same, and that’s the time to stop. After all, he would say, there’s nothing to prevent one’s going back and looking again, and Norah Palmer would agree, although somehow they never did go back and look again.

So Peter Ash and Norah Palmer would spend the morning in Venice itself, seeing some sight or other, and they would take coffee or a glass of something at Florian’s, which is on the shady side of the Piazza San Marco in the mornings. There Peter Ash might glance at —one of the many conveniences of Venice is that English newspapers (and German, and French, and American) are on sale in the Piazza from eleven in the morning. And then perhaps they might see another smaller sight, as it might be the Carpaccios at the tiny Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, or they would stroll the streets of the shopping area, where Norah Palmer would examine the goods in the windows while Peter Ash stood indulgently by, and they would discuss what they might buy to take back at the end of the holiday to their flat in Beaufort Street—since the sensible course would be to wait until then to buy it, when they would know how much money they had left.

In some such easy mingling of culture and shopping, the morning would pass until it was time for Peter Ash and Norah Palmer to happen across a little Rosticciera for the lightest of light lunches before taking the boat to the Lido. And after the Lido, sleepy from the sun and sticky with dried salt, they would stop off at Quadri’s, which is on the shady site of the Piazza San Marco in the afternoons, to spin out an ice, and listen to the bands (two on their own side of the square, and one opposite at an almost deserted Florian’s), which took it in turn to play, so that the music was like stereophonic sound at an epic film, continually changing its direction and distance. James Morris, in his excellent book on Venice, which both Peter Ash and Norah Palmer had read, suggests that the drummer at Quadri’s sometimes indulges “in something precariously approaching jazz”. Perhaps he does, but not at six thirty of an evening in July. This evening the musicians of Quadri’s were playing “I’m Getting Married in the Morning”. They transformed it. They took it, and squeezed it, and made it Italian. The rumpty-tumpty tune was stretched and sugared until it would carry the easy agony of a heart which is broken once a day and twice on Sundays (when God may be expected to join in). “I’m Getting Married in the Morning”, the strings lamented, “Ding! Dong! the Bells Begin to Chime”. The violinist’s face twitched in renunciation, and the prolonged throbbing call of the tenor sax summoned the strollers in the Piazza to this sad communion, but the strollers, who were used to it, merely continued to pass and re-pass before Peter Ash and Norah Palmer, and to feed the pigeons.

The bands played, and the people passed, the mechanical Moors on the clock tower beat at the bell that marked the half hour, and Peter Ash and Norah Palmer sat in chairs of plastic plaited to look like wicker, and drank black coffee with ice-cream in it, and watched the people and the pigeons and an old woman who sold maize for the pigeons, and who stood, with her head bent in the hot sun, in an attitude of patient crucifixion. Most of the people were in the shade; most of the pigeons were in the sun, and they had dispersed themselves intelligently between groups of those who fed them, so that there should be maize for all. From time to time, Peter Ash and Norah Palmer noticed, something would startle a group of pigeons (or perhaps they were simply bored), and then they would rise together in a great grey whirr of wings, and circle the square before settling somewhere else. Pigeons are not bats. They have no radar, and, since both pigeons and people were so thick in the Piazza, sometimes a pigeon would collide with a person. And this may explain why, although plump and well-fed in the tourist season, the pigeons of Saint Mark look much more ratty and battered than those of Trafalgar Square. Said Norah Palmer to Peter Ash. Who did not reply.

For Peter Ash and Norah Palmer were quarrelling; they were snapping and sniping at each other in a desultory way. It was not important. It had begun as the merest conversation. Perhaps Norah Palmer had lain in the sun a little too long. She had the ghost of a headache. It would disappear while they changed for dinner into clothes a little less casual, a little longer of sleeve. It would have gone altogether by the time they had decided where they would eat that evening. Meanwhile it was there—a ghost between her eyes—to fret her. And besides, her nose was peeling.

It was nothing at all; they were quarrelling about nothing, were Peter Ash and Norah Palmer. It had begun as chat, and had gone on to intelligent disagreement, and perhaps that ghost of a headache in Norah Palmer had fretted away the tolerance that allows argument to continue amiable, or perhaps Peter Ash had too meticulously reckoned that it was Norah Palmer’s turn to pay for the ices since he himself had paid both for their cabins at the Lido and for the tickets back, and somehow disagreement had curdled into acidity. But it was nothing. Silence would cure it. Time would cure it. One cannot live together for nine years without going through a great many quarrels, most of them more serious than this one. Their quarrel was aimless. It stopped and started; it reached out a finger to tap at this, to probe at that. Disagreement became acidity; acidity became criticism; criticism became mockery. “The trouble is; you don’t respect me,” said Peter Ash to Norah Palmer.

“No. Of course I don’t respect you. Why should I? I know you far too well, my dear.”

“I don’t mean as a person. As an artist.”

“An artist? Really! The conceit!”

“As an interpretative artist.”

“I don’t respect you in anything you do.”

And that was it. They did not speak again. The argument was over. They sat in silence until, after some while, Peter Ash summoned the waiter, and, glancing coldly at Norah Palmer, paid the bill. They...