Burnice
Rubens once said that she was a very slow writer. She congratulated herself if
she wrote three good sentences in a day, and celebrated the momentous event by
playing a cello (many members of Rubens’s family were talented musicians). It
is therefore a testament as much to her tenacity as prolificacy that, by the
time she died in 2004 at the age of 76 (or 81, depending on which year you
believe she was born in—Rubens always said that she was born in 1928, but,
according to one obituary, she was actually born in 1923—) Rubens had published
twenty five novels and a memoir. Her first novel was published in 1960, and the
last in the year she died, which means Rubens published a novel on average
every two years. Rubens dealt with many genres in her novels. Her personal
favourite novel was Brothers, an epic saga of three generations of a Jewish family,
beginning in the tsarist Russia in the eighteenth century and continuing beyond
the Second World War She wrote a few more novels on this theme, including her last
one, The
Sergeant’s Story. However, Rubens’s lasting reputation rests on a
number of black comedies she wrote, characterised by her deadpan humour—pans
did not come deader than Rubens’s.
Birds
of Passage,
first published in 1981 (and later filmed for a television drama) tells the
story of two neighbours—Ellen and Alice—who, after they have been finally and
respectably widowed, go on a cruise together. They have been abiding patiently
for their respective husbands to do the decent
thing and die without creating too much fuss. Neither of the husbands is
even once referred to with his first name—Alice’s husband is ‘Pickering’, while
Ellen’s is ‘Walsh’—, probably to emphasize their peripheralness in the lives of
the two protagonists, despite having been married to them for decades. Walsh
obliges and drops dead of a coronary one day. But Pickering, to the annoyance
of Ellen and embarrassment of Alice, carries on living. The two families also
share a hedge and it is the husbands’ responsibility to cut and trim it. One
hedge-cutter is dead, but the other continues with his duties. Pickering,
however, does not have the courage to trim the hedge on the Walshs’ side,
because he does not want to usurp his dead neighbour’s place in any way,
oblivious to the fact that this act of omission is making his dead neighbour’s
widow more and more resentful. Ellen has no choice really, then, to marry
again; and marry she does. Her second husband, Thomas—he, like the other two,
is only referred to by his surname—begins trimming the hedge, till, one day,
he, too, drops dead. This, even Alice silently agrees, is very unfair, and
begins wishing fervently for Pickering to pop his clogs. Which, he finally
does. After a decent period of mourning, the two widows, who, between them have
126 years, although none would confirm the individual contribution to this sum,
are ready to embark on a cruise. On the cruise they become part of a group,
which includes Mr. Barlow—recently widowed and going on the cruise to celebrate
the memory of his dead wife who, so he tells others, if she were alive, would
have accompanied him— and Mrs Dove—a widow, who has spent her recent years
entering various draws of crossword competitions, and, having been finally
rewarded with two tickets to go on a cruise, she has, much against her better
judgement, invited her daughter—another Alice—who is going through a midlife
crisis. The younger Alice’s husband has left her for another woman and she has
found succour in an aggressive lesbian. Alice (Dove) is an angry woman, and
although she has decided that she is angry towards men, she is also coming
round to accept that she not a lesbian. To this group attaches Wally Peters, a
bachelor in his mid-sixties with an impressive paunch and socially awkward
manners. Wally has never been in a serious relationship; indeed he may have
been a virgin. Amongst the crew is lurking a waiter, who has, during his
fifteen years of waiting on the cruise, successfully raped a number of single
women—age is no bar for our rapist; he is equally content to rape grannies as
well as younger women—without, incredible as It may seem, getting caught even
once. He has hypothesized, it would appear, successfully, that the bourgeois
pride of the women would stop them from reporting him to the purser; and he has
also surmised, again accurately, that some or more of them have probably not
been involved in bedroom gymnastics for a while and would actually welcome his
attention. The rapist zeroes in on the two widows—Pickering Alice and
Ellen—and, over the next ten days, that is the half of their cruise, rapes them
every night, having cleverly persuaded them to move into different cabins when
one couple—comprising a bossy woman and her henpecked husband—leaves the cruise
after the wife is publicly humiliated when, feeling sea-sick, she is caught
short. The sexual assaults have the diametrically opposite effects on the two
neighbours. While Ellen is consumed with rage she can barely contain—the waiter
has guessed that this would be the case, and has taken the precaution of taking
her nude photograph, hiding in the cupboard of her cabin when she was changing
clothes, which he uses to blackmail her—in Pickering Alice it leads to sexual
awakening. Neither of the women guesses that the other is also the object of the
waiter’s lust. Neither thinks, for different reasons, that the other would
believe, if told. The after-effects of the nightly (for Ellen) and pre-dawn
(for Pickering Alice) encounters are there for all to see. The once confident
Ellen becomes increasingly haggard and concocts various improbable schemes to
wreak her mighty revenge on the waiter (which culminates in her buying, while
spending a day in one of the ports, having gone to great lengths to dissociate
herself from her inquisitive group, a Swiss army knife!), Alice is aglow with
effulgence and is filled with hitherto unknown self-assurance which surprises
Ellen, though she still does not suspect the reason behind it. When Ellen can
bear it no longer, she tells the story of her nightly ordeals to the widower
Barlow—who, for all appearances is wooing Ellen in a manner that probably went
out of fashion before the First Great War—during a fancy dress competition (in
which Barlow appears as Mahatma Gandhi). Barlow, in turn opens his heart to
Ellen and confesses that his marriage was far from happy, at least not towards
the end, as his now-dead wife was having it off with another man; indeed the
two cruise tickets were bought by Barlow, as a perversely gentlemanly gesture,
for the two love-birds to go on a cruise in order to find out whether the two
really wanted to spend the rest of their lives together. As it turns out the
rest of Barlow’s wife was not long when she meets with a road traffic accident
while driving to give her lover the good news of the unexpected manna from
heaven—the cuckold is actually sponsoring their cruise—, and leaves for
presumably not heaven. Barlow is appropriately and suitably outraged when he
hears of the sexual assault, and promises to accompany Ellen to the purser
after the fancy dress competition is over. Just when Ellen is heaving a sigh of
relief that her aged loins would finally get respite from the nighttime
invasion, Barlow drops dead of a heart attack in the midst of the fancy dress
competition. At this stage the rapist makes
his first mistake. He decides to turn his attention to the other Alice, who, he
correctly guesses, would provide a spirited and vigorous resistance to his
amatory attentions—indeed the more resistant his victims are, the more they
fight, the more he is turned on; that is why the thought of raping the hostile
Ellen excites him more than having a sexual congress with the Pickering Alice,
who has willingly opened to him her inviting second lips as it were, and has
taken to putting on her best chiffon dress for what she has come to expect as
the nocturnal adventure—but, he incorrectly assumes, would yield herself to his
power eventually. As it happens, it is the waiter—he, too, like the rest of the
male characters save Wally—and even here we know only the diminutive—remains
nameless—who bites the dust, and Alice Dove drags him to the purser. The purser
does not believe her, but for the sake of propriety offers to investigate the
matter further if she lodged a complaint. Alice Dove decides not to lodge a complaint,
and the waiter, thanking his stars for the unexpected reprieve, decides to lie
low for the rest of the cruise. This has the opposite effect on the two
protagonists: Ellen regains her self-confidence, while Alice, feeling rejected,
goes back to being her mousy, dithering self. Just when it appears as though
the cruise would end without any further kerfuffle, Rubens has one last, and
not very pleasant, twist to offer.
Birds
of Passage
is a dark comedy. Dark subjects such as death and sexual assaults occur
repeatedly, and unexpectedly, in the novel; and are treated with terrifyingly
comic nonchalance. Yet, it is a testimony to Rubens’s greatness that at no
stage does she trivialise or downplay the sinisterness of what is going on. The
full horror of the rapaciousness of the waiter’s assaults is laid bare for the
reader. As the novel progresses, the increasing helplessness and futile
agitation of Ellen, while depicted in an impassive manner, is full of pathos.
It is for this reason you feel distinctly queasy while smiling at Ellen’s
comically inept attempts to put an end to her nightmare. Alice Pickering, the
other protagonist, reacts very differently to the waiter’s ravishment, which,
in her, engenders wholly different feelings. Here, too, is pathos at work: that
a woman, who has avowedly enjoyed conjugal pleasures for decades, is actually
unfulfilled, and has to wait till she is sixty something and go through what
most would regard as acts of utter degradation in order to experience sexual
enjoyment, is somehow more sad than funny.
Birds
of Passage,
however, is not just a dark comedy. It is also an exquisite comedy of
manners. It is a story of bourgeois airs
and pretensions, the morbid secrets that lay hidden under an outwardly happy,
contented, middle-class, appearances. Nothing is, as it seems in the novel.
Ellen and Pickering Alice are united in their grandiose belief that they are
somehow special compared to the other women on the cruise because the waiter,
they think, has chosen only them for his attention, unwarranted in Ellen’s
case, and gratefully received in Alice’s case. It does not occur to them that
they are just cannon fodder to the waiter’s lust, and there is nothing remotely
special about them. Mr. Barlow, the devoted widower, has not enjoyed the happy
connubial bliss he leads everyone to believe. Supporting the main plot of the
narrative is the subplot involving the bachelor Wally and Mrs Dove, the mother
of the younger Alice. Rubens is at her toe-curling best, here. Both Mrs. Dove
and Wally are desperate to find a life-partner, and in a moment of rashness
which he soon comes to regret, the pompous, gauche and awkward Wally proposes
to Mrs Dove; and she, in a response that is as impulsive as his proposal (and
which she, too, would bemoan when sanity prevails) accepts him. Both realise in
no time that they have no intention of tying themselves into matrimony, but
continue with the charade for the rest of the cruise in order to save the
embarrassment to the other. The other members of the group cotton on to what is
going on between Wally and Mrs. Dove at different times and in different
circumstances.
Rubens
does not let the pace of the plot slacken at any time, and, when the reader is
least expecting it, gives a hundred watt jolt of surprise. Reading this novel
is like driving down a picturesque winding route, whereby, after a while, you
come to expect another surprise, but do not know whether it would actually
materialise or in what shape or form.
Birds
of Passage
finds Burnice Rubens, one of the best writers of her generation, in splendid
form. Buy it from a second hand book-shop, and read it.
