Birdsong

by Sebastian Faulks

  “Can I have a look at the offending article?” he said, holding out his hand.

  Elizabeth passed over the notebook, guiltily, not sure of the propriety of allowing something her grandfather had written so many years ago to come under the scrutiny of this strange little man.

  “I see,” he said, rasping through the pages like a bank clerk telling notes. Elizabeth feared that the dry old paper would crack. “Wrote a lot, didn’t he? Have you got any more of these?”

  “No, this is the only one left.”

  “I think we’ll have to go through to my study. We’ll be back in a jiff, Irene.” He stood up quickly and beckoned Elizabeth to follow him along the dark hallway to a room at the back of the house overlooking the garden where the last of the afternoon sun had drained away to leave only the black shapes of a wheelbarrow and a damp bonfire down by the wooden fence.

  “I brought back those books you lent me,” said Elizabeth.

  “Thank you. Just leave them on the side there. I’ll shelve them directly I’ve finished this.”

  Bob made a number of sucking and humming noises as he snapped the dry pages back and forth. “I’ve got an idea what this is about,” he murmured. “I’ve got an idea …” He went and pulled a book from one of the shelves that filled the room from floor to ceiling. They were arranged alphabetically, with punched marker tape stuck on at intervals to announce the change of subject. Bob sat down again in a deep leather armchair; Elizabeth, at his invitation, was in the wooden chair at the desk.

  “… but on the other hand, it doesn’t quite add up.” Bob put the notebook down on his lap. He pushed his glasses up on to his forehead and rubbed his eyes. “Why do you really need to know what all this means?”

  Elizabeth smiled sadly and shook her head. “I don’t know, I really don’t. It’s just a whim, really, a vague idea I had that it might explain something. But I don’t suppose there’s anything interesting in it. It’s probably just domestic lists, or records of things he’s supposed to be doing.”

  “Probably,” said Bob. “You know you could have it looked at by an expert if you want. If you took it to a museum or a university department with someone who specializes in this kind of thing.”

  “I wouldn’t want to trouble them with it if it’s so trivial. Couldn’t you do it for me?”

  “I might be able to. It depends how much is private code. For instance, suppose you kept a diary and you referred to Irene in it as Queen Bess, shall we say. Someone might get as far as decoding the words Queen Bess, but they’d still be none the wiser, would they?”

  “I suppose not. I don’t want you to spend too much time on it, Bob. Why not just—”

  “No, no, it would interest me. I’d like to work it out. The script is not of the language it’s written in, I can tell you that. This is Greek script, but the words are not Greek. I think the words themselves are of a mixed language, perhaps with some private terms thrown in.”

  “You mean the original language may not even be English?”

  “Exactly. When they decoded Linear B they spent years thinking they were trying to decode Greek, but they weren’t. Not Attic Greek at any rate. Once they’d got that sorted out, it fell into place. Not that this is as difficult as Linear B, I can assure you.”

  Elizabeth smiled. “How do you know so much about these things?”

  “I had to do something to keep up with Irene. She was making all the money in the days when business was good. I just had my job at the works here. I did some studying in my spare time. It’s surprising what you can learn if you just spend some time reading. I’ll tell you what. If I can’t sort it out within two weeks, you take it to someone else.”

  “Are you sure you don’t mind?”

  “No. I’ll enjoy it. I like a challenge.”

  There was a call from Stuart, the man she had met at Lindsay’s house. Elizabeth was surprised but not displeased to hear from him. He asked her to go out to dinner and she agreed. There was always a small feeling of guilt on her part when she went out with other men. No amount of rationalization about how “unfaithful” Robert was to her could take it away, though it never stopped her going.

  They went to a Chinese restaurant which Stuart insisted was of a more authentic kind than could usually be found in England. He had worked for a year in Hong Kong and had learned some Chinese there. He ordered half a dozen dishes and said a few words in Mandarin, which the waiter made a show of understanding. Elizabeth listened with interest as he explained each dish. They had the same gluelike consistency she was familiar with from Paddington takeaways, but Stuart was adamant that they were the real thing. She wished they could have wine instead of tea.

  He asked if she would like to go back to his flat afterward. It was in a mansion block in St. John’s Wood, not far from the restaurant. Elizabeth was intrigued by him and curious to see what sort of place he lived in. Her eyes moved quickly over the woodblock flooring, the tasteful rugs, the loaded bookshelves. There were only three pictures on the pale gray walls, but all of them were elegant and suitable—somewhere between art and decoration.

  As she drank coffee, he went over to a grand piano and switched on a red-shaded light beside it.

  “Will you play something?” she said.

  “I’m very out of practice.”

  He took some persuading, but eventually rubbed his hands together and sat down.

  He played a piece that was vaguely familiar to Elizabeth; it had a fragile tune whose effectiveness depended on no more than two or three notes. The way he played it, however, very gently but with subtle timing, was touchingly good. Even as she heard it, Elizabeth felt that the little phrase would stay with her.

  “Ravel,” he said when he had finished. “Lovely, isn’t it?”

  He talked to her about Ravel and Satie and compared them to Gershwin. Elizabeth, who had thought of them as quite different kinds of composers, was impressed.

  It was midnight when she finally rang for a taxi. She went downstairs happily humming the tune he had played. On the way home she had treacherous thoughts about Robert. She always told him that he made her unhappy by not leaving Jane; she promised him he would be happier with her. As far as she knew she was passionately sincere in all her protestations. However, she conceded, as the taxi crossed the Edgware Road, it was just possible that she had chosen someone unobtainable for that very reason: that he did not threaten her independence.

  FRANCE

  1917

  Part Four

  Under the cover of a fading twilight, Stephen Wraysford narrowed his eyes against the drizzle. The men in front were invisible beneath the bulk of their clothes and the quantities of kit they were carrying. They looked as though they were bound for an expedition to the Pole, explorers to the furthest regions. Stephen wondered what force impelled him, as his legs moved forward once more.

  It had been raining for three weeks, drizzling, then surging into a steady downpour, then lifting for an hour or so until the clouds came in again over the low horizon of Flanders in its winter light. The men’s coats were saturated, each fibre of wool gorged on water, and their weight added twenty pounds to what they carried. They had marched up from their billets into the rear area and already the skin on their backs was rubbed raw by the movement of the webbing beneath the load. Repetitive marching songs and chants had brought them to the support lines, but then as darkness fell they saw it was another three miles to the Front. Slowly the songs and conversations died as each one concentrated on lifting his feet from the mud that began to suck at them.

  Their worlds narrowed to the soaked back of the man in front.

  The communication trench was filled with orange slime that covered their boots and puttees. The closer they went to the front line the more it began to smell. Within half a mile it had become no more than a zigzagged cesspool, thigh-deep in sucking mud that was diluted by the excreta of the overrun latrines and thickened by the decomposing bodies that each new collapse of trench wall revealed in
the earth beneath.

  An irritated shout passed up and down the line: the front men went too fast, someone had fallen down. The danger was that they would end up in the wrong part of the line and have to start all over again. They had been here before, however; there was something automatic now in the way they could find their way in the darkness and take the right fork when the choice came; there was something of routine in their swearing and their violent protests. At its best it was like pride. They had seen things no human eyes had looked on before, and they had not turned their gaze away.

  They were in their own view a formidable group of men. No inferno would now melt them, no storm destroy, because they had seen the worst and they had survived.

  Stephen felt, at the better moments, the love for them that Gray had demanded. Their desperate courage, born from necessity, was nevertheless endearing. The grimmer, harder, more sardonic they became, the more he cared for them. Still he could not quite believe them; he could not comprehend the lengths to which they allowed themselves to be driven. He had been curious to see how far they could be taken, but his interest had slackened when he saw the answer: that there were no boundaries they would not cross, no limits to what they would endure.

  He saw their faces wrapped in woollen comforters, their caps sticking out beneath their helmets, and they looked like creatures from some other life. Some wore cardigans and waistcoats sent from home, some had strips of cloth or bandage wound around their hands in place of gloves mislaid or stolen from their packs by the less scrupulous. Any cloth or wool they could find in the villages had been pressed into service as auxiliary socks or as extra layers about the head; some had Flemish newspapers stuffed inside their trousers.

  They were built to endure and to resist; they looked like passive creatures adapting to the hell of circumstances that oppressed them. Yet, Stephen knew, they had locked up in their hearts the horror of what they had seen, and their jovial pride in their resilience was not convincing. They boasted in a mocking way of what they had seen and done; but in their sad faces wrapped in rags he saw the burden of their unwanted knowledge.

  Stephen knew what they felt because he had been with them and he himself did not feel hardened or strengthened by what he had seen; he felt impoverished and demeaned. He shared their conspiracy of fortitude, but sometimes he felt for them what he felt for himself, not love but pitiful contempt.

  They said that at the very least they had survived, but even this was not true. Of their original platoon only he, Brennan, and Petrossian were still at the front. The names and faces of the others were already indistinct in his memory. He had an impression of a weary group of greatcoats and grimed puttees, of cigarette smoke rising beneath helmets. He remembered a voice, a smile, an habitual trick of speech. He recalled individual limbs, severed from their bodies, and the shape of particular wounds; he could picture the sudden intimacy of revealed internal organs, but he could not always say to whom the flesh belonged. Two or three had returned permanently to England; the rest were missing, buried in mass graves or, like Reeves’s brother, reduced to particles so small that only the wind carried them.

  If they could claim survival it was by closing ranks and by the amalgamation of different units with conscripted reinforcements. Gray became battalion commander, replacing Barclay and Thursby, who had been killed, and Stephen took over his company. Harrington made the long journey home to Lancashire, leaving part of his left leg on the north bank of the Ancre.

  It was night when they arrived at the front line. The men they were relieving passed out thigh-high rubber boots that had been in continuous service for eight months. The decayed pulp of the interior was a mash of whale oil and putrid rags that could accommodate feet of almost any size. None of them stayed quite calm in the hours of darkness. The bursts of light as shells exploded could be viewed as comforting in their remoteness, but there were always noises and shapes close to the trench itself that excited the old reflex. Stephen sometimes thought it was the only way they could be sure they were still alive.

  The dugout, which acted as company headquarters, was a roofed hole in the second trench. Though small, it had an improvised bunk and a table. Stephen unloaded some of the kit he had brought up the line: a sketchbook, bars of chocolate and cigarettes, a periscope, and a knitted waistcoat he had bought from an old woman. He was sharing with a young redheaded subaltern called Ellis, who liked to read in bed. He was no more than nineteen or twenty, but he seemed composed and cooperative. He smoked incessantly but refused all offers of drink.

  “When we have our next leave, I want to go to Amiens,” he said.

  “It’s miles away,” said Stephen. “You won’t get that far.”

  “The adjutant said we could. He said it was all part of the new efficiency. Officers should have a decent time off in the place of their choice.”

  “I wish you luck,” said Stephen, sitting down at the table and pulling a whisky bottle toward him.

  “Won’t you come too?”

  “Me? I shouldn’t think so. It’s just a railway junction.”

  “Have you been there?”

  “Yes. I was there before the war.”

  “What’s it like?”

  Stephen poured a drink. “It’s got a fine cathedral, if you like architecture. I didn’t care for it myself. It’s a cold building.”

  “Well I’m going anyway. Let me know if you change your mind. The CO said you spoke very good French.”

  “Did he? I’m going to see if everyone’s settled in.” Stephen drained the glass. “Do you know where the tunnel head is?”

  “It’s about fifty yards that way.”

  There was a hole in the ground roughly where Ellis had said. Stephen asked the sentry when the shift was due to come up.

  “About half an hour, sir.”

  “Is Captain Weir with them?”

  “Yes.”

  “If he comes up before I get back, tell him to wait for me.”

  “All right, sir.”

  Stephen went along the trench, twice tripping on the outstretched legs of men who had scraped sleeping holes for themselves in the front wall. He wondered if it would really be possible to get to Amiens. It was almost seven years since he and Isabelle had left on the night train. Surely now it would be safe to return. After occupation and bombardment by the Germans, after the passage of almost seven years, surely the place could hold no disquieting reminders.

  Michael Weir was emerging from the tunnel as Stephen arrived. There passed a moment of physical awkwardness between them when neither offered to shake hands. Weir’s company had been sent back to its original position soon after the initial attack on the hot July morning. He was delighted when, some months later, Stephen’s battalion also returned.

  “Good rest?” said Weir.

  “Yes. Fine. What’s happening underground?”

  “We’ve had a new consignment of canaries. The men are delighted. They were worried about gas.”

  “Good. Come and have a drink if you like. It looks pretty quiet. We’ve got a patrol going out later but it should be all right.”

  “Have you got whisky?”

  “Yes. Riley always seems to get it from somewhere.”

  “Good. I’ve run out.”

  “I didn’t think that was possible. Can’t you just order some more?”

  “Apparently I’ve been through my ration.”

  Weir’s hands were shaking as he took the bottle and filled his glass in the dugout. Ellis watched silently from the bunk: he was frightened by Weir’s dishevelled appearance and his inability to talk sensibly until the liquor had put some strength and reason into him. He looked too old to be crawling underground with explosive charges, especially in those trembling fingers.

  Weir gulped at the drink and shuddered as it ran down inside him. He found it more and more difficult to last out the long underground shift, even with the help of what he took with him in his hip flask. Increasingly he found reasons for instructing someone else
to take the men down.

  ———

  Weir had been on leave to England. He arrived at dusk at his parents’ Victorian villa in Leamington Spa and rang the front-door bell. The maid opened it and asked him who he was. His telegram had gone astray; they were not expecting him. His mother was out, but the maid told him she thought his father would be in the garden. It was an October evening, three months after they had attacked on the Ancre.

  Weir took off his greatcoat and left it on a chair in the hall. He dropped his kitbag on the floor and made his way through to the back of the house. There was a large flat lawn with laurel bushes and a giant cedar in one corner. He saw the gnats in the damp air ahead of him and felt his boots sink into the short-cropped lawn. The packed grass gave luxurious support to his steps. The air was thick with garden scents at evening. The denseness of the silence pressed his ears. Then he heard a door bang in the house, he heard a thrush; then a motor lorry backfiring in the quiet suburban street.

  On the left of the lawn was a large greenhouse. Weir could make out a trickle of smoke coming from the door. As he approached it he caught the familiar smell of his father’s pipe tobacco. He stood in the doorway and looked inside. His father was kneeling beneath a shelf on which small boxes of seeds were neatly laid out. He appeared to be talking to someone.

  “What are you doing?” said Weir.

  “Feeding the toad,” said his father, without looking up. “Quiet now.”

  From an old tobacco tin on the ground beside him, he took a small dead insect, pinched it between finger and thumb, and pushed his hand slowly forward under the shelf. Weir could see the polished seat of his trousers and the back of his bald head, but little else.