Birdsong

by Sebastian Faulks

  Azaire returned with Meyraux, a small, fleshy man with thick dark hair swept across his forehead. Meyraux had the look of someone honest who had been driven to suspicion and a profound stubbornness. He shook hands with Stephen, though the reserved look in his eye seemed to indicate that Stephen should read nothing into the formality. When Azaire offered him a seat, Meyraux hovered for a moment before apparently deciding that this did not necessarily amount to a capitulation. He sat square and unbudgeable in the chair, though his fingers fluttered in his lap as though weaving invisible strands of cotton.

  “As you know, Meyraux, Monsieur Wraysford has come to visit us from England. He is a young man and wants to learn a little more about our business.”

  Meyraux nodded. Stephen smiled at him. He enjoyed the feeling of being unlicensed, disqualified by his age from responsibility or commitment. He could see the entrenched weariness of the older men.

  “However,” Azaire went on, “as you also know, Monsieur Wraysford’s compatriots in Manchester are able to produce the same cloth as we do for two-thirds of the price. Since the company he works for is one of our major customers in England, it is only fair that we should try to impress him. I understand from his employer, who is a most farsighted man, that he would like to see more cooperation between the two countries. He has talked about taking shares in the company.”

  Meyraux’s fingers were jabbing faster. “Another Cosserat,” he said dismissively.

  Azaire smiled. “My dear Meyraux, you mustn’t be so suspicious.” He turned to Stephen. “He is referring to one of the great producers, Eugène Cosserat, who many years ago imported English workers and techniques—”

  “At the cost of several jobs among local people.”

  Azaire continued to address Stephen. “The government wants us to rationalize our operations, to try to bring more of them under one roof. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do, but it inevitably means greater use of machinery and a consequent loss of jobs.”

  “What the industry needs,” said Meyraux, “as the government has been saying since my father’s day, is more investment and a less mean and timid attitude on the part of the owners.”

  Azaire’s face became suddenly rigid, whether from anger or simple distaste was impossible to say. He sat down, put on a pair of spectacles and pulled a piece of paper toward him from the pile on the table.

  “We are in difficult times. We have no money to invest and we can therefore only retrench. These are my specific proposals. Employees on salaries will take a cut of one per cent. Those on piecework will be paid at the same rate but will have to raise output by an average of five per cent. Their output will no longer be measured by the metre but by the piece. Those not qualified to use the new machinery, about half the work force, will be reclassified as untrained workers and their rate of pay will be adjusted accordingly.”

  He took off his glasses and pushed the piece of paper toward Meyraux. Stephen was surprised by the simplicity of Azaire’s assault. He had made no pretence that the work force had anything to gain from the new arrangements or that they would make up in some other way for what they were clearly being asked to forgo. Perhaps it was just a first bargaining position.

  Meyraux, confronted with the details, was impressively calm. “It’s about what I expected,” he said. “You appear to be asking us to settle for even less than the dyers, Monsieur. I need hardly remind you what situation they are in.”

  Azaire began to fill his pipe. “Who is behind that nonsense?” he said.

  “What is behind it,” said Meyraux, “are the attempts of the owners to use slave labour at diminishing levels of pay.”

  “You know what I mean,” said Azaire.

  “The name of Lucien Lebrun is being mentioned.”

  “Little Lucien! I didn’t think he had the courage.”

  It was bright in the glass office, the sunlight streaming in across the books and papers on the table beneath the window and illuminating the faces of the two antagonists. Stephen watched their fierce exchange but felt dissociated from it, as though they spoke only in slogans. From the subject of Azaire’s wealth, his mind moved naturally to possessions, to the house on the boulevard, the garden, the plump children, Grégoire with his bored eyes, Lisette with her suggestive smile, and above all to Madame Azaire, a figure he viewed with an incompatible mixture of feelings.

  “… the natural consequence of a production with so many separate processes,” said Azaire.

  “Well, I too would like to see the dyeing done here,” said Meyraux, “but as you know …”

  He could not be sure of her age, and there was something in the vulnerability of her skin where he had seen the goosepimples rise on her arm in a draught from the garden. There was something above all in the impatience he had seen in the turn of her head that concealed the expression of her eyes.

  “… would you not agree, Monsieur Wraysford?”

  “I certainly would.”

  “Not if we were to invest in larger premises,” said Meyraux.

  I am mad, thought Stephen, quelling a desire to laugh; I must be insane to be sitting in this hot glass office watching the face of this man discussing the employment of hundreds and I am thinking things I can’t admit even to myself while smiling my complicity to …

  “I will not discuss it further in the presence of this young man,” said Meyraux. “Forgive me, Monsieur.” He stood up and inclined his head formally toward Stephen. “It’s nothing personal.”

  “Of course,” said Stephen, also standing up. “Nothing personal.”

  ———

  In his notebook the code word Stephen used when describing a certain aspect of Madame Azaire and of his confused feeling towards her was “pulse.” It seemed to him to be sufficiently cryptic, yet also to suggest something of his suspicion that she was animated by a different kind of rhythm from that which beat in her husband’s blood. It also referred to an unusual aspect of her physical presence. No one could have been more proper in her dress and her toilet than Madame Azaire. She spent long parts of the day bathing or changing her clothes; she carried a light scent of rose soap or perfume when she brushed past him in the passageways. Her clothes were more fashionable than those of other women in the town yet revealed less. She carried herself modestly when she sat or stood; she slid into chairs with her feet close together, so that beneath the folds of her skirts her knees too must have been almost touching. When she rose again it was without any leverage from her hands or arms but with a spontaneous upward movement of grace and propriety. Her white hands seemed barely to touch the cutlery when they ate at the family dinner table and her lips left no trace of their presence on the wine glass. On one occasion, Stephen had noticed, some tiny adhesion caused the membrane of her lower lip to linger for a fraction of a second as she pulled the glass away to return it to its place, but still the surface of it had remained clear and shining. She caught him staring at it.

  Yet despite her formality toward him and her punctilious ease of manner, Stephen sensed some other element in what he had termed the pulse of her. It was impossible to say through which sense he had the impression, but somehow, perhaps only in the tiny white hairs on the skin of her bare arm or the blood he had seen rise beneath the light freckles of her cheekbones, he felt certain there was some keener physical life than she was actually living in the calm, restrictive rooms of her husband’s house with its oval door handles of polished china and its neatly inlaid parquet floors.

  A week later Azaire suggested to Meyraux that he should bring Stephen to eat with the men in a room at the back of the factory where they had lunch. There were two or three long refectory tables at which they could either eat the food they had brought or buy whatever dish had been cooked by a woman with a white head scarf and missing teeth.

  On the third day, in the middle of a general conversation, Stephen stood up abruptly, said, “Excuse me,” and rushed from the room.

  An elderly man called Jacques Bonnet follo
wed him outside and found him leaning against the wall of the factory. He put a friendly hand on Stephen’s shoulder and asked if he was all right.

  Stephen’s face was pale and two lines of sweat ran from his forehead. “Yes, I’m fine,” he said.

  “What was the matter? Don’t you feel well?”

  “It was probably just too hot. I’ll be fine.” He took out a handkerchief and wiped his face.

  Bonnet said, “Why don’t you come back inside and finish your lunch? It looked a nice bit of rabbit the old woman had cooked up.”

  “No!” Stephen was trembling. “I won’t go back. I’m sorry.”

  He pulled himself away from Bonnet’s paternal hand and moved off briskly into the town. “Tell Azaire I’ll be back later,” he called over his shoulder.

  At dinner the following day Azaire asked him if he had recovered.

  “Yes, thank you,” said Stephen. “There was nothing the matter with me. I just felt a little faint.”

  “Faint? It sounds like a problem of the circulation.”

  “I don’t know. There’s something in the air, it may be one of the chemicals used by the dyers, I’m not sure. It makes it hard for me to breathe.”

  “Perhaps you should see a doctor, then. I can easily arrange an appointment.”

  “No, thank you. It’s nothing.”

  Azaire’s gaze had filled with something like amusement. “I don’t like to think of you having some kind of fit. I could easily—”

  “For goodness’ sake, René,” said Madame Azaire. “He’s told you that there’s nothing to worry about. Why don’t you leave him alone?”

  Azaire’s fork made a loud clatter as he laid it down on his plate. For a moment his face had an expression of panic, like that of the schoolboy who suffers a sudden reverse and can’t understand the rules of behaviour by which his rival has won approval. Then he began to smile sardonically, as though to indicate that really he knew best and that his decision not to argue further was a temporary indulgence he was granting his juniors. He turned to his wife with a teasing lightness of manner.

  “And have you heard your minstrel again in your wanderings in the town, my dear?”

  She looked down at her plate. “I was not wandering, René. I was doing errands.”

  “Of course, my dear. My wife is a mysterious creature, Monsieur,” he said to Stephen. “No one knows—like the little stream in the song—whither she flows or where her end will be.”

  Stephen held his teeth together in order to prevent himself protesting on Madame Azaire’s behalf.

  “I don’t suppose Monsieur Wraysford is familiar with the song,” said Madame Azaire.

  “Perhaps Monsieur Bérard would sing it to me.” Stephen found that the words had escaped.

  Madame Azaire let out a sudden laugh before she could catch herself. She coughed and Stephen saw the skin of her cheeks stain lightly as her husband glared at her.

  Although he was annoyed with himself for what his host might take as rudeness, Stephen’s face remained expressionless. Azaire had no spontaneous reaction, like his wife, nor, like Stephen, a contrived one. Fortunately for him Lisette began to giggle and he was able to rebuke her.

  “Is Monsieur Bérard a good singer, then?” asked Grégoire, looking up from his plate, his napkin tucked into his collar.

  “A very distinguished one,” said Azaire challengingly.

  “Indeed,” said Stephen, meeting his gaze with level eyes. Then he looked directly at Madame Azaire. She had recovered her composure and returned his look for a moment, a dying light of humour still in her face.

  “So you didn’t pass the house again?” he said to her.

  “I believe I walked past it on my way to the chemist, but the window was shut and I didn’t hear any music.”

  The Bérards came again after dinner and brought with them Madame Bérard’s mother, a woman with a wrinkled face who wore a black lace shawl and was said to have great religious sensitivity. Bérard referred to her, for reasons that were not explained, as Aunt Elise, and she asked the others to do likewise. Stephen wondered whether her married name carried painful reminders of her dead husband or whether it was some social secret of his wife’s family that Bérard thought it better to conceal.

  On that and later occasions Stephen watched the Bérards and the role they played in the lives of the Azaires. On the terrace, when the evenings grew warm enough, the five of them sat in wickerwork chairs breathing in the scent of honeysuckle and jasmine that lay on the lintels and window frames at the back of the house. Bérard in his stout black boots and formal waistcoat conducted his small orchestra with dogged skill, though he always kept the best parts for himself. He was an authority on the important families of the town and could speak at length on the role played by names such as Sellier, Laurendeau, or de Morville in the making of its wealth and social fabric. He hinted in a long and indirect way that his own family had had connections with the de Morvilles that, through the negligence of some Bonapartist Bérard, they had failed to ratify. His manner of criticizing this errant ancestor was to belittle the ingratiating habits of Paris society, particularly in its hunger for titles, in such a way that the failure of his forebear, who had remained stubbornly provincial, was portrayed as being virtuous in a timeless manner yet possessing in addition a greater finesse than that displayed by the more artful Parisians. This early Bérard therefore seemed both sturdy and refined, while his descendants themselves were consequently presented both as the inheritors of commendable virtue and as the guileless beneficiaries of superior breeding.

  It passed the time. It was a way of getting to the end of peaceful evenings, Stephen supposed, but it made him burn with frustration. He could not understand how Madame Azaire could bear it.

  She was the only one who did not respond to Bérard’s promptings. She barely contributed when he invited her to do so, but would speak, unbidden, on a subject of her own choice. This appeared to leave Bérard no choice but to cut her off. He would apologize with a small bow of his head, though not for some minutes, and not until he had taken the conversation safely down the path he wanted. Madame Azaire would shrug lightly or smile at his belated apology as though to suggest that what she had been about to say was unimportant.

  Aunt Elise’s presence was a particular benefit to Bérard, since she could be relied on to raise the tone of any conversation with her religious conviction. Her reputation as a person of patience and sanctity was based on her long widowhood and the large collection of missals, crucifixes, and mementos of pilgrimage she had collected in her bedroom at the Bérards’ house. With her blackened mouth and harsh voice she seemed to embody a minatory spiritual truth, that real faith is not to be found in the pale face of the anchorite but in the ravaged lives of those who have had to struggle to survive. Sometimes her laugh seemed more ribald or full-blooded than holy, but in her frequent appeals to the saints she was able to dumbfound her listeners by invoking names and martyrdoms of the early church and its formative years in Asia Minor.

  “I’m proposing an afternoon in the water gardens next Sunday,” said Bérard. “I wonder if I might interest you in joining us?”

  Azaire agreed enthusiastically. Aunt Elise said she was too old for boating and managed to imply that such self-indulgence was not appropriate for a Sunday.

  “I should think you’re pretty handy with a boat, René?” said Bérard.

  “I’ve got a feel for the water, it’s true,” said Azaire.

  “Listen to him, the modest old devil,” Bérard laughed. “If it wasn’t for all the evidence to contradict him, he wouldn’t even admit to being any good at business.”

  Azaire enjoyed being cast in the role of self-effacing joker that Bérard had created for him. He had devised a way of inhaling sceptically when some talent of his was mentioned and following the hissing intake of breath with a sip from his glass. He said nothing, so his reputation for wit remained intact, though not to Stephen, who, each time Azaire modestly rolled his ey
es, remembered the sounds of pain he had heard from the bedroom.

  Sometimes from the safety of the sitting room he would fix his eyes on the group and on the vital, unspeaking figure of Madame Azaire. He didn’t ask himself if she was beautiful, because the physical effect of her presence made the question insignificant. Perhaps in the harshest judgement of the term she was not. While everything was feminine about her face, her nose was slightly larger than fashion prescribed; her hair had more different shades of brown and gold and red than most women would have wanted. For all the lightness of her face, its obvious strength of character overpowered conventional prettiness. But Stephen made no judgements; he was motivated by compulsion.

  Returning one afternoon from work, he found her in the garden, pruning an unchecked group of rose bushes, some of which had grown higher than her head.

  “Monsieur.” She greeted him with formality, though not coldly.

  Stephen, with no plan of action, merely took the little pruning shears from her hand and said, “Allow me.”

  She smiled in a surprised way that forgave his abrupt movement.

  He snipped at a few dead flowers before he realized he had no proper sense of what he was trying to do.

  “Let me,” she said. Her arm brushed across the front of his suit and her hand touched his as she took the little shears from him. “You do it like this. Beneath each bloom that’s died you cut at a slight angle to the stem, like this. Look.”