Birdsong

by Sebastian Faulks

“You were going to say ‘I hardly know you.’ ”

  “No. Just that it’s not right.”

  “It is right. You know it’s right. It’s as right as anything can ever be. Isabelle, I understand you. Believe me. I understand you. I love you.”

  He kissed her again and her mouth once more responded to his. He tasted the sweetness of her saliva then buried his face against her shoulder where the flesh was visible.

  She pulled away from him and ran from the room. Stephen went to the window and held on to the frame as he looked out. The force that drove through him could not be stopped. The part of his mind that remained calm accepted this; if the necessity could not be denied, then the question was only whether it could be achieved with her consent.

  In her room Madame Azaire wept as she paced from one side to the other. She was choking with passion for him, but he frightened her. She wanted to comfort him but also to be taken by him, to be used by him. Currents of desire and excitement that she had not known or thought about for years now flooded in her. She wanted him to bring alive what she had buried and to demean, destroy, her fabricated self. He was very young. She was unsure. She wanted the touch of his skin.

  She went downstairs and her step was so light that it made no sound. She found him clenched in combat with himself, leaning against the window. She said, “Come to the red room.”

  By the time Stephen turned round she had gone. The red room. He panicked. He was sure it would be one of those he had once seen but could never refind; it would be like a place in a dream that remains out of reach; it would always be behind him. He ran up the stairs and saw her turn a corner. She went down the main corridor to a narrow passage, down again through a little archway. At the end of the corridor was a locked door that led into the servants’ part of the house. Just before it, the last door on the left, was an oval china handle that rattled in the ill-fitting lock. He caught her as she opened the door of a small room with a brass bedstead and a red cover.

  “Isabelle.” He too was in tears. He took her hair in his hands and saw it flow between his fingers.

  She said, “My poor boy.”

  He kissed her, and this time her tongue did not flee from his.

  He said, “Where is Lisette?”

  “The garden. I don’t know. Oh God. Oh please, please.” She was starting to shake and tremble. Her eyes had closed. When she opened them again she could barely breathe. He began to tear at her clothes and she helped him with urgent, clumsy actions. The waistcoat was caught on her elbow. He pushed back her blouse and buried his face in the satin slip between her breasts. There was so much delight in what he saw and touched that he thought he would need years to stop and appreciate it, yet he was driven by a frantic haste.

  Isabelle felt his hands on her, felt his lips on her skin and knew what he must be seeing, what shame and impropriety, but the more she imagined the degradation of her false modesty the more she felt excited. She felt his hair between her fingers, ran her hands over the bulge of his shoulders, over the smooth chest inside his shirt.

  “Come on, please, please,” she heard herself say, though her breathing was so ragged that the words were barely comprehensible. She ran her hand over the front of his trousers, brazenly, as she imagined a whore might do, and felt the stiffness inside. No one upbraided her. No one was appalled. She could do whatever she wanted. His intake of breath caused him to stop undressing her and she had to help him pull down her silk drawers to reveal what she suddenly knew he had long been imagining. She squeezed her eyes tight shut as she showed herself to him, but still no guilt came. She felt him push her backward on to the bed, and she began to arch herself up from it rhythmically as though her body, independent of her, implored his attention. She felt at last some contact, though she realised with a gasp that it was not what she expected; it was his tongue, lambent, hot, flickering over and inside her, turning like a key in the split lock of her flesh. This shocking new sensation made her start to sigh and shudder in long rhythmic movements, borne completely away on her passion, feeling a knot of pressure rising in her chest, a sensation that was impossible to sustain, to bear, though all its momentum seemed to be onward. In this conflict she thrashed her head from side to side on the bed. She heard her voice crying out in denial as from some distant room, but then the sensation broke and flooded her again and again, down through her belly and all her limbs, and her small voice, close to her head this time, said, “Yes.”

  When she opened her eyes she saw Stephen standing naked in front of her. Her eyes fixed on the flesh that stuck out from him. He had still not made love to her; the joy was yet to come. He climbed on top of her and kissed her face, her breasts, pulling the nipples upward with his lips. Then he rolled her over, ran his hands up the inside of her legs, above the silk stockings that her speedy undressing had not had time to remove, and between the cleft where her legs were joined. He kissed her from the small of her back over the pink swell of divided flesh, down to the back of her thighs where he rested his cheek for a moment. Then he began again at her ankles, on the little bones he had seen on the boat in the water gardens, and up the inside of her calves.

  Isabelle was beginning to breathe fast again. She said, “Please, my love, please now, please.” She could no longer bear his teasing. In her left hand she grasped the part of him she wanted to feel inside her and the shock of her action stopped him in his caressing. She opened her legs a little further for him, to make him welcome, because she wanted him to be there. She felt the sheet beneath her as her legs spread out and she guided him into her.

  She heard him sigh and saw him take the rumpled sheet between his teeth and begin to bite on it. He barely moved inside her, as though he were afraid of the sensation or of what it might produce.

  Isabelle settled herself, luxuriously, on the feeling of impalement. It rolled around the rim, the edges of her; it filled her with desire and happiness. I am at last what I am, she thought; I was born for this. Fragments of childish longings, of afternoon urges suppressed in the routine of her parents’ house, flashed across her mind; she felt at last connections forged between the rage of her desire and a particular attentive recognition of herself, the little Fourmentier girl.

  She heard him cry out and felt a surge inside her; he seemed suddenly to swell in her so that their flesh almost fused. The shock and intimacy of what he had done, leaving this deposit of himself, precipitated a shuddering response in her, like the first time, only shorter, fiercer, in a way that made her lose contact for a moment with the world.

  When she had recovered enough to open her eyes, she found that Stephen had rolled off her and was lying face down across the bed, his head tilted awkwardly to one side, almost as though he were dead. Neither of them spoke. Both lay quite still. Outside was the sound of birds.

  Tentatively, almost shyly, Isabelle ran her fingers down over the vertebrae that protruded from his back, then over the narrow haunches and the top of his thighs with their soft black hair. She took his damaged hand and kissed the bruised and swollen knuckles.

  He rolled over and looked at her. The hair was disarrayed, its different shades milling over her bare shoulders and down to the stiff, round breasts that rose and fell with her still-accelerated breathing. Her face and neck were suffused with a pink glow where the blood was diluted by the colour of the milky young skin with its tracery of brown and golden freckles. He held her gaze for a moment, then laid his head on her shoulder, where she stroked his face and hair.

  They lay, amazed and unsure, for a long time in silence. Then Isabelle began also to think of what had happened. She had given way, but not in some passive sense. She had wanted to make this gift; in fact she wanted to go further. This thought for a moment frightened her. She saw them at the start of some descent whose end she could not imagine.

  “What have we done?” she said.

  Stephen sat up and took her by the arms. “We have done what was right.” He looked at her fiercely. “My darling Isabelle, you must understa
nd that.”

  She nodded without speaking. He was a boy, he was the dearest boy, and now she would have him always.

  “Stephen,” she said.

  It was the first time she had used his name. It sounded beautiful to him on her foreign tongue.

  “Isabelle.” He smiled at her and her face lit up in reply. She held him to her, smiling broadly, though with tears beginning again in the corners of her eyes.

  “You are so beautiful,” said Stephen. “I won’t know how to look at you in the house. I shall give myself away. When I see you at dinner I shall be thinking of what we did, I shall be thinking of you as you are now.” He stroked the skin of her shoulders and laid the back of his hand against her cheek.

  Isabelle said, “You won’t. And nor shall I. You will be strong because you love me.”

  Stephen’s level gaze, she thought, was not afraid. As his hands stroked her breasts she began to lose her concentration. They had talked only for a minute but what they had said, and what it meant, had made her tired of thought. A feeling, more compelling, began to rise through her body as his hand worked over these soft and privately guarded parts of her. Her breath began to come unevenly again; the low exhalations were broken and she felt herself begin to slide again once more, willingly, but downward where there was no end in sight.

  Azaire was in a sprightly mood that evening. Meyraux had come close to accepting his new pay offer to the workers, and although the strike had spread among the dyers, there seemed little chance of its infecting other parts of the industry. His friend Bérard, who had not called for more than a week, had promised to look in with his wife and mother-in-law for a game of cards after dinner. Azaire ordered Marguérite to fetch up two bottles of burgundy from the cellar. He congratulated Isabelle on her appearance and asked Lisette what she had been doing.

  “I went for a walk in the garden,” she said. “I went down to the end where it joins the others, where it grows all wild. I sat down under a tree and I think I fell asleep. I had a very strange dream.”

  “What was that?” Azaire began to pack some tobacco into his pipe.

  Lisette giggled. “I’m not going to tell you.”

  She seemed disappointed when he did not press her but turned instead to his wife. “And how have you whiled away the day? Some more pressing errands in town?”

  “No, just the usual things,” said Isabelle. “I had to speak to the butcher’s boy. They sent the wrong kind of steak again. Madame Bonnet was complaining about all the work she has to do. Then in the afternoon I read a book.”

  “Something educational, or one of your novels?”

  “Just a silly thing I found in a bookshop in town.”

  Azaire smiled indulgently and shook his head at his wife’s frivolous tastes. He himself, it was assumed, read only the great philosophers, often in their original languages, though this arduous study must have taken place in private. When he settled in beneath the glow of the lamp after dinner, his hand invariably reached out for the evening paper.

  Isabelle’s eyes flickered upward from the sofa, where she sat with her predinner sewing, at the sound of a man’s footsteps descending the stairs. Stephen stood in the doorway.

  He briefly took Azaire’s offered hand and turned to wish Isabelle good evening. She breathed a little less uneasily as she saw the sternness of his dark and steady face. His self-control appeared unshakeable.

  She noticed at dinner that he did not address her, nor even look at her if he could avoid it. When he did, his eyes were so blank she feared that she could see indifference, even hostility in them.

  Marguérite came backward and forward with the food, and Azaire, in a lighter mood than usual, talked about a plan for a day’s fishing that he was going to put to Bérard later. They could take the train to Albert and then it might be enjoyable to rent a little pony and trap and take a picnic up to one of the villages beside the Ancre.

  Grégoire became animated at the thought of it. “Will I be allowed my own rod?” he asked. “Hugues and Edouard both have their own. Why can’t I?”

  Isabelle said, “I’m sure we can find you one, Grégoire.”

  “Do you fish, Monsieur?” said Azaire.

  “I did when I was a child. Just with worms and bits of bread. I would sit for hours by a pool in the gardens of a big house near where we lived. I went there with a few other boys from the village and we would sit there and tell stories while we waited. It was rumoured that there was an enormous carp. One of the boys’ father had seen it, in fact he had almost caught it, or so he claimed. There were certainly some large fish in the pool because we caught some of them. The trouble was that we were always being ordered off the land because it was private property.”

  Isabelle listened with some astonishment to this speech, which was easily the longest Stephen had addressed to her husband since he had been in the house. Apart from his brief disclosure to herself and Lisette at lunchtime, it was the first time he had admitted to anything so personal as a childhood. The more he spoke, the more he seemed to warm to the subject. He fixed Azaire with his eye so that he had to wait for Stephen to finish before he could resume eating the piece of veal that was speared on the end of his fork.

  Stephen continued: “When I went to school there was no time for fishing any more. In any event I’m not sure I would have had the patience. It’s probably something that appeals to groups of boys who are bored most of the time anyway but prefer to be together so that they can at least share the new things they are discovering about the world.”

  Azaire said, “Well, you’re welcome to join us,” and put the piece of veal into his mouth.

  “That’s very kind, but I think I have imposed enough on your family outings.”

  “You must come,” said Lisette. “They have famous ‘English teas’ at Thiepval.”

  “We don’t have to decide now,” said Isabelle. “Would you like some more veal, Monsieur?”

  She felt proud of him. He spoke the language beautifully, he was elegantly polite, and now he had even told them something of himself. She wanted to take the credit for him, to show him off and sun herself in the approval he would win. She felt a pang of loss when she reflected how very far she was from being able to do this. It was Azaire who was her choice, her pride, the man in whose glory she was bound to live. She wondered how long she could maintain the falsity of her position. Perhaps what she and Stephen were attempting, the denial of truth on such a scale, was not possible. Although she was frightened by the drama of pretence, she was also excited by the exhilaration of it, and by the knowledge that it was a shared venture.

  They had left the red room at five in the afternoon and she had not spoken to him since. She had no way of telling what had passed through his mind. Perhaps he was already regretting what had happened; perhaps he had done what he wanted to do and now the matter was finished for him.

  For her, in the delirium of joy and fear, there were still practical matters to attend to. She had to dress and conceal the torn front of her blouse when she left the red room. She had to take the sheets and the cover from the bed and deliver them unseen to the laundry room. She had to check and recheck the room for signs of adultery.

  In her own bathroom, she took off her clothes. She was known to have baths twice a day and often at this time, but the blouse was beyond repair and would have to be thrown away secretly. Her thighs were sticky where the seed she had felt so deeply planted in her had later leaked. It had stained the ivory silk drawers that had been bought for her by her mother from the rue de Rivoli in Paris as part of her wedding trousseau. When she washed in the bath there were more traces of him between her legs and she scoured the enamel afterward. The major problem was still the bed covers. Marguérite was particular about the linen and knew which rooms needed to be changed and when, even if it was Madame Bonnet who usually did the work. Perhaps she would have to take one of them into her confidence. She decided to give Marguérite the next afternoon off and to wash and iron the sheets
herself, replacing them before anyone had been into the red room. She would throw the red cover away and say she had suddenly grown tired of it. This was the sort of impulsive behavior that annoyed her husband, but which he thought characteristic. She felt no revulsion for the stains and physical reminders of their afternoon, not even for the flecks of her own blood that she had seen. She had learned from Jeanne not to be ashamed, and in this shared mark she saw the witness of an intimacy that pressed her heart.

  Marguérite went to answer the front door to the Bérards. Azaire thought it proper to continue the evening in the sitting room, or even in one of the small rooms on the ground floor, where he sometimes instructed Marguérite to lay out coffee and ices and little cakes. However, Bérard was ponderously considerate.

  “No need for us to disturb this delightful family scene, Azaire. Let me rest my bulk on this chair here. If little Grégoire would be so kind … That’s it, then Madame Bérard can sit on my left.”

  “Surely you would be more comfortable if—”

  “And then we shall not feel that we have inconvenienced you. Aunt Elise would only accompany us on the condition that we were just neighbours dropping in on you, not guests who were to be specially treated in any way at all.”

  Bérard settled himself in the chair vacated by Lisette, who was given permission by her stepmother to take Grégoire up to bed. Lisette kissed her father briefly on the cheek and skipped out of the room. Although she had been pleased with her grownup role that morning, there were times when it still paid to be a child.

  Stephen envied her. It would have been easy enough for him to leave the families together; in fact they might have preferred it. While he could look at Isabelle, however, he wanted to stay. He felt no particular impatience with the falsity of their position; he was confident that what had occurred between them had changed things irrevocably and that the social circumstances would adjust in their own time to reflect this new reality.

  “And you, Madame, have you heard any more of your phantom pianist with his unforgettable tune?” Bérard’s heavy head, with its thick grey hair and red face, was supported by his right hand as he rested his elbow on the table and looked toward Isabelle. It was not a serious enquiry; he was merely tuning up the orchestra.