Illywhacker

He was not the only one of her uninvited visitors who gave her that sweet calm smile of recognition, merely the first. He had sat and smiled at her, she knew, because he knew she was like him and he like her. This kindred feeling was so soothing that her whole soul became as cool and limpid as tank water.

But to listen to most of the people who saw her, those all-but-burglars, you would think that her presence in a cage had affected some vital thing in their innards. She could not, ever, predict what it was they were going to do when they saw her, but the reactions were nearly always violent or loud or crude or angry – and she knew it was sinful to sit safely inside her cage and enjoy it, but she did anyway.

She preened herself. She had become vain and was not even ashamed of it. Once she had been a young girl and worn short socks and sensible skirts, but now she arranged her powder and her lipsticks and her rouges, mascaras, eye-liners, her emollients, astringents, foundation creams, moisturizing creams, her egg creams, her enamels, her nail-polish removers, emery boards, nail files and other aids to femininity.

And although her cage was directly opposite you as you walked on to the fourth level – so that you had only to come to the rail in front of you and look across – there was such a tangle of objects, such a confusion of lines or rope, netting, electrical cable, string, so many shapes you could not immediately understand, so many fascinating perspectives of the emporium below and the sky above, that you did not immediately notice the woman in the cage, or the child that was so often with her. In fact you were more likely to notice the lattice structure – it was very pretty and was often lit from within – that was next door to her. This was a cube measuring about ten feet in every way and you would not immediately describe it as a cage at all. It was far too pretty. It was a place for ferns and creepers and there were, indeed, some terracotta pots whose dried dead vegetation suggested that it was intended to have plants growing over it. Charles had given this to Emma in 1944, for Christmas. She had thanked him of course, and given him warm kisses, but she had not been so simple as to be tricked into living in it. And this, as it turned out, was just as well, because when Leah Goldstein arrived to live, one tear-stained afternoon, there was immediately a suitable place to put her.

There was another cage on the left as you entered from the stairway, and this one was often noticed first, and it was certainly a far more splendid structure than that rusty tin-floored affair that Emma had crawled into to remind her husband of his obligations. This latest cage was also a present from Charles. It was strong enough to hold a polar bear, but its ironwork was beautiful. There were pink Venetian blinds, a little day bed, and a fluffy rug on the floor. Originally, too, there had been bottles of Coty and Max Factor on a glass shelf, but Emma could not be induced to move.

Neither, of course, would she live in the flat itself – and this is more easily understandable because it was a small and dark and poorly ventilated area on the Pitt Street end of the fourth gallery. Charles slept there. Emma often cooked there. But the family's real home was in and around the cage where its most determined member lived, out on the gallery floor itself. This fourth gallery was more like a storehouse, a warehouse, a garden shed with spiders and old yellowing newspapers, which were dry and unpleasant to touch. It provided a marked contrast to the hygienic emporium below where the shining white-enamelled cages were so regularly wiped clean that, first thing in the morning when the staff arrived, there was a distinct change of air, as if the wind had changed its quarter and was now blowing off the sea, and then the emporium was all awash with bleaches and antiseptics, and although that might be all very comforting for some, Emma preferred the chaos of that big rectangular doughnut of private territory, the fourth gallery, where she lived amidst old mist nets, broken-down refrigerators, children's toys, mouldering laundry, lost sandwiches and those abandoned tricycles which had once raced round and round, but could no longer – Charles had stacked other cages, plainer, smaller, rusty birdcages, in such a manner that they blocked the children's favourite racetrack.

It was a madhouse, so he said.

When he was angry he said that they were all demented, himself included, and that their children would grow up to be insane, capable of theft and suicide. He called her a slattern and a slut and madwoman and then she would go cold as ice and she could do that trick with her eyes so they went blind and hard as steel ball-bearings and it frightened him and he thought she would never love him again. Then he would come to her in the night, begging as if she were a queen in satin and silk, a queen in a cage, and then she would spurn him.