Birdsong

by Sebastian Faulks

  “Because he took you away from someone of your own age?”

  Isabelle nodded, but did not speak.

  “And then?”

  “Eventually it became so bad that he could no longer make love to me. He said I castrated him. Naturally this made him feel worse and worse. So he would try to make himself excited by doing … strange things.”

  “What?”

  “Not, not like the things you and I …” Isabelle stopped in confusion.

  “Did he hit you?”

  “Yes. To begin with it was to try to make himself excited. I don’t know why this was supposed to help. Then I think it was out of frustration and shame. But when I protested he said it was part of making love and I must submit to it if I wanted to be a good wife and to have children.”

  “Does he hit you very hard?”

  “No, not very hard. He slaps me on the face and on the back. He takes a slipper sometimes and pretends I am a child. Once he wanted to hit me with a stick, but I stopped him.”

  “And he has hurt you badly?”

  “No. I have occasionally had a bruise, or a red mark. It isn’t the damage I mind. It’s the humiliation. He makes me feel like an animal. And I feel sorry for him because he humiliates himself. He is so angry and so ashamed.”

  “How long has it been since you made love?” Stephen felt the first twinge of jealous self-interest cloud his sympathy.

  “Almost a year. It is absurd that he still pretends that’s why he comes to my room. We both know he comes only to hit me now, or to hurt me. But we pretend.”

  Stephen was not surprised by what Isabelle had told him, though he was incensed at the thought of Azaire hurting her.

  “You must stop him. You must end this. You must tell him not to come to your room.”

  “But I am frightened of what he would do, or what he would say. He would tell everyone that I was a bad wife, that I wouldn’t sleep with him. I think he already tells stories to his friends about me.”

  Stephen thought of Bérard’s secret glances. He took Isabelle’s hand and kissed it, then held it against his face. “I will look after you,” he said.

  “Dear boy,” she said. “You are so strange.”

  “Strange?”

  “So serious, so … removed. And the things you make me do.”

  “Do I make you do things?”

  “No, not like that. I mean, I do things of my own accord but it is only because of you. I don’t know if these things are right, if they are … allowed.”

  “Like downstairs?”

  “Yes. I know, of course I know, I am unfaithful, but the actual things. I’ve never done them before. I don’t know if they are normal, if other people do them. Tell me.”

  “I don’t know,” said Stephen.

  “You must know. You’re a man, you’ve known other women. My sister Jeanne told me about the act of love but that’s all I knew. You must understand more.”

  Stephen was uneasy. “I’ve known only two or three other women. It was quite different with them. I think what we do is its own explanation.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Nor do I. But I know you mustn’t feel ashamed.”

  Isabelle nodded, though her face showed dissatisfaction with Stephen’s answer.

  “And do you?” he said. “Do you feel guilty?”

  Isabelle shook her head. “I think perhaps I should feel guilty. But I don’t.”

  “And do you worry about that? Do you worry that you have lost something, lost the power to feel ashamed, lost touch with the values or the upbringing that you would have expected to make you feel a sense of guilt?”

  Isabelle said, “No. I feel that what I have done, that what we are doing, is right in some way, though it is surely not the way of the Catholic church.”

  “You believe there are other ways of being right or wrong?”

  Isabelle looked puzzled, but she was clear in her mind. “I think there must be. I don’t know what they are. I don’t know if they can ever be explained. Certainly they are not written down in books. But I have already gone too far now. I can’t turn back.”

  Stephen folded his arms around her and squeezed her. He lay back on the bed with her head resting on his chest. He felt her body go limp as the muscles decontracted into sleep. There was the sound of doves in the garden. He felt his heart beat against her shoulder. The smell of roses came faintly from her scented neck. He settled his hand in the curve of her ribs. His nerves were stilled in the sensuous repletion of the moment that precluded thought. He closed his eyes. He slept, at peace.

  René Azaire had no suspicions of what was happening in his house. He had allowed his feelings toward Isabelle to become dominated by anger and frustration at his physical impotence and by what he subsequently experienced as a kind of emotional powerlessness toward her. He did not love her, but he wanted her to be more responsive toward him. He sensed that she felt sorry for him and this infuriated him further; if she could not love him then at least she should be frightened of him. At the root of his feeling, as Isabelle had guessed, was a sense of guilt. He remembered the pleasure he had taken in being the first man to invade that body, much younger than his, and the thrill he could not deny himself when she had cried out in pain. He remembered the puzzled look in her eyes when she gazed up at him. He could feel that she, more than his first wife, had the capacity to respond to the physical act, but when he saw the bewildered expression in her face he was determined to subdue it rather than to win her to him by patience. At that time Isabelle, though too wilful for her father’s taste, was still docile and innocent enough to have been won over by a man who showed consideration and love, but with Azaire these things were not forthcoming. Her emotional and physical appetites were awakened but then left suspended as her husband turned his energy toward a long, unnecessary battle with his own shortcomings.

  He meanwhile had no reason to mistrust Stephen. The Englishman clearly knew a good deal about the business for a man of his age, and he handled himself well with Meyraux and the men. He did not exactly like Stephen; if he had asked himself why, he would have said there was something cold or withdrawn in him. Although in Stephen they expressed themselves in different ways, these were in fact the qualities Azaire disliked in himself. Stephen seemed too private and too self-contained to be the sort of man who would chase women, in any event. In Azaire’s imagination such men would always declare themselves with flirtatious talk; they would be handsome and much wittier than he was and would charm women in an obvious and seductive manner. Bérard, for instance, would no doubt have been a ladies’ man when younger, he thought. Stephen’s quiet politeness was not threatening, and although he did seem old for his age he was, nevertheless, still a boy. His English suit sat well on him and he had a full head of hair, but he was not what Azaire would have called handsome. He was a lodger, a paying guest who was a notch above Marguérite in his claims on Azaire’s attention, but not quite a full member of his household.

  Azaire was in any case preoccupied by his factory. In the clatter of machinery and the irritation of paperwork and decisions, he seldom thought of home or of his children, or of Isabelle.

  A week after the disturbance he told Stephen it would be all right for him to return to work, though he should not attend any meetings Meyraux might call. The danger of a strike seemed to have lessened; little Lucien, Azaire was pleased to see, was unable to arouse the passions of his workers. Azaire was surprised when Stephen said he would wait another day or so; he thought he must be bored staying in the house with only Isabelle and Lisette for company, but he agreed to postpone the return until the beginning of the following week.

  Stephen’s telegram to London had been answered in detail by a letter from his employer. He was to stay until the end of the month, but would then be expected to deliver written reports to Leadenhall Street. Stephen felt he had done well to be granted even three extra weeks and sent a reassuring telegram back. He didn’t mention the date of his departur
e to Isabelle; it seemed sufficiently distant for him not to have to worry, and the days were so full that his life seemed to change from one to the next.

  At the weekend came the fishing expedition to the Ancre. The Bérards were unable to accompany them because Aunt Elise had been taken ill, so it was only the Azaires, with Marguérite and Stephen in attendance, who set out to take the train to Albert.

  The station had a vast cobbled forecourt and central glass arch crowned by a pointed clock tower. It was said to have prefigured the work of Haussmann in Paris. While the rest of Amiens consciously imitated the capital, the people were proud that their station had shown the way. Horse-drawn cabs waited in a line to the right of the huge glass-topped entrance and a row of small horseless carts were parked beneath two gas lamps set into the cobbles. To the left of the entrance was a formal garden with three oval patches of grass at various angles which unhinged the balanced vista that should have greeted passengers approaching from the street.

  The ticket hall was busy with families negotiating excursions to the countryside. Trolleys with clanking wheels were pushed up and down the platform by vendors offering wine and loaves of bread filled with cheese or sausage. By the time the Azaires arrived, the windows of the large restaurant were already steamed up with the vapour from the kitchen, where the soup was boiling for lunch. An aroma of cress and sorrel was just discernible when the swing doors pushed open to reveal the waiters in their black waistcoats and long white aprons carrying trays of coffee and cognac to the tables at the front and shouting back orders to the bar. At the end farthest from the kitchen was a tall cash desk at which a grey-haired woman was making careful entries in a ledger with a steel-nibbed pen.

  Two locomotives were panting on the polished rails, their tenders piled high behind them. The black of the coal, and smudged faces of the driver and fireman, spoke of engineering toil and industrial work that had driven the tracks out west to Paris and north to the coast; this contrasted with the glossy flanks of the painted carriages and the bright display of local cloth among the women and children who thronged the platforms in pastel dresses with coloured parasols. Grégoire had to be dragged from his ecstatic admiration of the Paris express and over to the platform where the small train was waiting to take the branch line to Albert and Bapaume.

  As they sat on the hot plush of the carriage seats, they watched the centre of the city recede slowly behind them. The spire of the cathedral flickered into view as the train heaved itself east to Longueau, where it juddered over the lines of crossing rails before it found its course northward and began to pick up speed, the wheeze of exhausted steam gradually replaced by the repeated sound of the wheels on the track beneath.

  Lisette sat with her hands in her lap next to her stepmother in the middle of one bench seat with Grégoire on her other side and Azaire, flanked by Stephen and Marguérite, opposite.

  “So are you going to catch the biggest fish?” she said to Stephen, her head on one side.

  “I shouldn’t think so. I expect you need special local knowledge. French fish are cleverer than English ones.”

  Lisette giggled.

  “Anyway, it doesn’t matter how big the fish is. It’s the sport of catching it.”

  “I’ll catch the biggest one,” said Grégoire. “You wait.”

  “I bet you don’t catch a bigger one than Stephen,” said Lisette.

  “Who?” said Azaire.

  “You mean Monsieur Wraysford, Lisette,” said Isabelle primly, her voice snagging slightly on her own hypocrisy.

  Lisette looked at her stepmother with calm, quizzical eyes. “Do I? Oh, yes, I suppose I do.”

  Isabelle felt her heart whisper and beat. She dared not catch Stephen’s eye, though had she looked she would not have found it, since at the first sound of his Christian name he had anticipated embarrassment and fixed his eyes on the landscape of green downland revealed in streaming rectangular frames by the windows of the train.

  Neither Azaire nor Grégoire made anything of Lisette’s slip, and Isabelle embarked on an urgent and insistent cross-examination of Marguérite about whether she had brought changes of clothes in case the children wanted to swim in the river.

  “Anyway,” Lisette said to Grégoire, “no one would want to eat anything you caught, would they, Ste–Monsieur?”

  “What? Why not? I expect you’re a good fisherman, aren’t you, Grégoire? That’s a fine new rod you’ve got there.”

  Lisette looked angrily at her brother, who appeared to have stolen Stephen’s attention, and said nothing for the rest of the journey.

  A second train took them from Albert out along the small country line beside the Ancre, past the villages of Mesnil and Hamel to the station at Beaumont. The sun appeared from behind clouds banked high above a wooded hill, and lit up the green valley of the river. There were some meadows between the railway line and the water and some large areas of unkempt grass. They picked their way down a dry path and through a gate in the fence that lay twenty yards or so back from the river. They could see other anglers on the opposite bank, solitary men and a few boys perched on stools or sitting with their feet in the water. The Ancre was sometimes no wider than a strong stone’s throw and in other places broad and forbidding enough for only a confident swimmer to contemplate crossing. In the wide stretches, there seemed barely any agitation of the surface that licked the margins marked by rushes and rotting logs which had caught in the weeds; in the narrower reaches the water occasionally showed white where a small current split the surface.

  Azaire installed himself on a canvas stool and lit his pipe. He was disappointed that the Bérards had not been able to accompany them; conversation was never more enjoyable than when Bérard was there to bring out the best in him. These days there was not much to say to Isabelle, and the children bored him. He baited his line and cast it carefully into the water. With or without Bérard, it was not a bad way to pass a summer’s day, beside a river in pleasant countryside, with the sound of rooks in the trees and the peaceful swell of the downs all round him.

  Stephen helped Grégoire to bait his new rod and then settled himself at the foot of a tree. Lisette stood and watched him, while Isabelle and Marguérite set out a rug in the shade.

  By one o’clock no one had caught anything. The river’s surface had been undisturbed by fish of any kind, though they could just make out the figure of a small boy some way down the opposite bank whose homemade float seemed barely to touch the water before the line was whisked in again with a flashing, heavy creature on the end. They walked back to the station and took a pony and trap up the hill to the village of Auchonvillers, which had been recommended by Bérard as having a passable restaurant. He had not been to it himself but had been told it was well known in the district.

  Azaire straightened his tie outside the door. Isabelle ran her eye quickly over the children to make sure they were respectable. Auchonvillers was a dull village, consisting of one principal road and a few tracks and lesser streets behind it, most of them connected to farms or their outbuildings. The restaurant was more accurately a café, though its dining room was full of local families taking lunch.

  They had to wait by the entrance until a young woman showed them to a table. They settled down at last and Isabelle smiled encouragingly at Grégoire, whose hunger had made him sulky.

  “At least people seem to be properly dressed,” said Azaire, looking round the room.

  Marguérite was nervous about eating with her employers and could not decide what she wanted to eat when the waitress returned. She asked Isabelle to decide for her. Azaire poured wine for himself and, after she had fractiously insisted, for Lisette.

  Stephen looked over the table at Isabelle. Six days earlier she had been Madame Azaire, the distant and respected object of his passion. Now she was grafted to him, in flesh and in feeling. There was the high collar of her dress with the dull red stone at the throat, the formal arrangement of her hair, and the eyes turning this way and that in social c
oncern but keeping always that point of light at the centre that seemed to him to speak so clearly of her hidden life that he sometimes felt amazed that other people could not read her infidelity with a single glance. He watched her talking to Grégoire or reassuring Marguérite, and he wanted to be alone with her, not making love, but talking to a truer version of her. When he judged there was a safe moment, he sought out her eyes with his and inclined his head in a gesture of affirmation so small that only Isabelle could have seen it, and he saw by the fractional softening of her expression that she had.

  At this moment Stephen knew he would not return to England. There had been the possibility, he now conceded, that his feeling for Isabelle could have been discharged or relieved by what they did in the red room. But it had become clear to him that it was not a contained appetite that could be exhausted or satisfied. It split and spread and changed its shape and entered areas of his thought and feeling far removed from the physical act itself. It had become more important to him than the maintenance of his livelihood or his career or his duty to his employers. He was now mastered by the feeling; he could not rest until he knew where it would end. Almost as decisive as his tenderness toward Isabelle was an overpowering sense of curiosity.

  Although his mind worked clearly and had never had any difficulty in dispatching the tasks set for it by schoolmasters or employers, Stephen had not developed the habit of analysis. His confidence in himself was not checked by judgement; he followed where nothing more than instinct took him, and relied on some reflexive wariness to help. Looking at Isabelle, he knew also that the feeling he had for her was of a kind seldom experienced, and therefore he was obliged to follow it.

  A strong, metallic-tasting trout was succeeded by a watery stew that they managed to eat with the help of quantities of bread. Isabelle, engrossed in making Grégoire eat his food, looked serene when she turned periodically to the rest of the table. Stephen guessed that it was the deliberate destruction of the basis of her family role that made her able to resume it with such apparent contentment. No sarcasm of her husband, no suggestive remark of Lisette or pointless tantrum of Grégoire could now disturb her charming equilibrium.