Birdsong

by Sebastian Faulks

  Stephen did not think Jeanne needed reassurance about his well-being; neither would she enjoy details of trench life. While he compelled himself not to mention Isabelle, he thought it sensible to write about things common to both him and Jeanne. This meant talking about Amiens and how its people and buildings survived.

  What he wanted to say to Jeanne was that she, apart from Michael Weir, was the best friend he had. Since he might be dead within the month, there seemed no reason not to say so. He wrote: “It means a great deal to me to receive your letters, to have some contact with a sane world. I appreciate your kindness to me. Your friendship enables me to survive.”

  He tore up the page and threw it in the wastepaper basket by his feet. Jeanne would not appreciate such things; it was precipitate and vulgar on his part. He needed to be more formal, at least for the time being. He rested his head on his hands and tried to picture Jeanne’s long, wise face in his mind.

  What was this woman like? What would she want him to say? He imagined her dark brown eyes beneath their arched brows. They were intelligent, sardonic eyes, and yet they had a quality of great gentleness and compassion. Her nose was similar to Isabelle’s but her mouth was wider, with a darker shade in the skin of the lips. Her chin was sharper, though quite small. The strength of her features, the darkness of her colouring, and the forbidding quality of her eyes gave her a faintly masculine appearance; yet the beauty of her pale skin, not expressive like Isabelle’s but quite even in its ivory smoothness over her face and neck, spoke of extraordinary delicacy. He did not know how to approach her.

  He wrote some details of his train journey to Boulogne and promised that he would write from England, when at least he would have something interesting to tell her.

  When the boat arrived in Folkestone the next day there was a small crowd assembled on the quay. Many of the boys and women waved flags and cheered as the mass of infantry came up the gangplank. Stephen saw the looks on the faces of the crowd change from gaiety to bewilderment: for those come to greet sons or brothers these were the first returning soldiers they had seen. The lean, expressionless creatures who stepped ashore were not the men with gleaming kit and plump smiles who had been played aboard by the regimental bands. Some wore animal skins they had bought from local farms; many had cut pieces from their coats with knives to increase their comfort or to bind their cold hands. They wore scarves about their heads instead of caps with shining buttons. Their bodies and their kit were encrusted with dirt and in their eyes was a blank intransigence. They moved with grim, automatic strength. They were frightening to the civilians because they had evolved not into killers but into passive beings whose only aim was to endure.

  Stephen felt a hand on his arm. “Hello. Are you Captain Wraysford? My name’s Gilbert. I’m in charge here. Couldn’t make it out with you chaps—bad leg, I’m afraid. Now look, you take these forms and when you get to the station I want you to liaise with the embarkation officer. All the men’s names are here. Got that?”

  Stephen looked at the man in bemusement. His body gave off an acrid, rotting smell when he came close to show him the forms.

  On the station platform were further crowds of well-wishers. There were tables on which voluntary organizations were offering tea and buns. Stephen walked to the head of the platform and, when he was obscured from the throng by the bulk of the redbrick waiting room, dropped the thick bundle of forms over a low wall.

  The train started, men lining the corridors, sitting on their kit, smoking and laughing, waving to the people on the platform. Stephen gave his seat to a woman in a blue bonnet.

  Jammed up against the window of the compartment he could see little of England as it went past in flashing squares visible only occasionally beneath the angle of his armpit. The sight of his homeland had not brought any feeling of affection or deep welcome. He was too tired to appreciate it. All he could feel was the pain in his lower back from trying not to bang his head against the luggage rack above. In time, perhaps, he would appreciate the countryside and the sounds of peace.

  “I’m getting out at the next stop,” said the woman in the bonnet. “Would you like me to telephone your wife or your parents and tell them you’re on your way?”

  “No. No, I … don’t think so. Thank you.”

  “Where is your home?”

  “Lincolnshire.”

  “Oh dear, that’s a long way.”

  “I’m not going there. I’m going to …” He had had no plans. He remembered something Weir had once said to him. “To Norfolk. It’s very nice at this time of year.”

  At Victoria Station, Stephen pushed and fought his way out into the street. He wanted to see no more soldiers but to lose himself in the great blankness of the city. He walked briskly up through the park to Piccadilly, then slowly along the north side. He went into a well-stocked gentlemen’s outfitter near the foot of Albemarle Street. Many of his clothes had been lost in transit a year before and he needed at least a change of shirts and underwear. He stood on the planed floorboards looking into the glasstopped cases with their extensive displays of coloured ties and socks. A man in a morning suit appeared behind the counter.

  “Good morning, sir. Can I help?”

  Stephen saw the man’s eyes run down him and register his uniform and rank. He also saw, beneath his formal politeness, an involuntary recoil. He wondered what it was about him that repelled the man. He did not know if he smelled of chloride of lime or blood or rats. He reflexively put his hand up to his chin but felt only a minimal scratch of beard that had grown back since he had shaved in the Hotel Folkestone.

  “I want some shirts, please.”

  The man went up a ladder and pulled out two wooden shelves which he brought down and laid in front of Stephen. There were white, stiff-fronted shirts for evening wear and collarless cotton striped for day. As Stephen demurred, the assistant brought more shelves down with shirts of every colour and fabric they had in stock. Stephen gazed at the array of pastel colours, the great arc of choice that the man fanned out in front of him, their buttonholes finished by hand, the pleats of the cuffs nipped and pressed, their textures running from the rigid to the luxuriously soft.

  “Excuse me, sir. I must just attend to this other customer while you make your choice.”

  The assistant backed away, leaving Stephen confused by the decision and by the man’s attitude to him. With the other customer, a large man in his sixties in an expensive overcoat and homburg hat, he was much more effusive. After several items had been charged to his account, the man wandered out of the shop, heavily, without acknowledging Stephen. The assistant’s smile froze, then faded, as he returned. He kept a certain distance.

  Eventually he said, “I don’t wish to hurry you, sir, but if you’re not happy with our choice it would perhaps be better if you tried elsewhere.”

  Stephen looked at him incredulously. He was about thirty-five, with sandy hair receding on either side and a neat moustache.

  “I was finding it difficult,” he said. His jaw felt heavy as he spoke. He realized how tired he was. “Excuse me.”

  “I think perhaps it would be better if—”

  “You don’t want me in here, do you?”

  “It’s not that, sir, it’s—”

  “Just give me these two.” He picked out the shirts nearest him. Ten years ago, he thought, he would have struck the man; but he merely offered him the money and left.

  Outside, he breathed deeply in the thick air of Piccadilly. Across the street he saw the arches of the Ritz hotel, its name lit up in bulbs. Women in trimmed fur coats and their escorts in sleek grey suits and black hats went through the doors. They had an air of private urgency, as though they were bent on matters of financial significance or international weight that would not even permit them to glance toward the ingratiating smile of the doorman in his top hat and gold frogging. They disappeared through the glass, their soft coats trailing behind them, oblivious to the street or to any life but theirs.

  St
ephen watched for a moment, then walked along with his service valise toward Piccadilly Circus, where he bought a newspaper. There had been a financial scandal and an accident at a factory in Manchester. There was no news of the war on the front page, though later, next to the readers’ letters, was a report on Fifth Army manoeuvres and warm praise for the tactical expertise of its commander.

  The further he walked, the more isolated he felt. He marvelled at the smoothness of the undamaged paving stones. He was glad that an ordinary life persisted in the capital, but he did not feel part of it. He would have been embarrassed to be treated differently from ordinary civilians by people in a country he in any case had not lived in for some time, but it seemed strange to him that his presence was a matter not just of indifference but of resentment. He stayed the night in a small hotel near Leicester Square, and in the morning took a taxi to Liverpool Street.

  There was a train to King’s Lynn at midday. He had time to go to a barber and have a haircut and shave before he bought a ticket and wandered up the platform. He climbed into a half-empty train and found a seat at leisure. The upholstery of the Great Eastern Railway was plush and clean. He sank into a corner seat and took out a book. The train jerked and clanked its way slowly out of the station, then began to gather speed as it left the low, grimed terraces of northeast London behind.

  Stephen found he could not concentrate on the book. His head seemed too clogged and numb for him to be able to follow the simple narrative. Although there was some stiffness in his limbs he did not feel the ache of fatigue in any physical way; he had slept reasonably well in his small hotel room and breakfasted late. His mind, however, seemed hardly to function at all. He was capable of doing little more than sitting and staring at the landscape that went by. The fields were lit by a spring sun. The occasional narrow stream or river went quietly through them. On the rise of hills he could once or twice make out the grey spires of churches, or a cluster of farm buildings, but for the most part he saw only this flat, agricultural land, apparently uninhabited, whose deep, damp soil was going through the same minute rotations of growth and decay, invisible but relentless, that it had done for centuries beneath the cold, wet sky by day, by night, with no one to see.

  Yet as the train clattered onward it seemed to sound a rhythm in a remote part of his memory. He dozed in the corner seat and awoke with a start, having dreamed he was in the Lincolnshire village of his childhood. Then he found he was still asleep: he had only dreamed that he had awoken. Again he found himself in a barn in a flat, pale field, with a train going by. A second time he awoke, in some fear, and tried to keep himself conscious; but again he found that he had only dreamed his awakening.

  Each time his eyes opened he tried to stand up, to lever himself off the plush seat of the carriage, but his limbs were too heavy and he felt himself slide under again, just as he had once seen a man in his company slip on the duckboards of the trench into an uncovered sumphole, where he had drowned in the clinging yellow mud.

  At last he managed to catch himself in a moment of waking and force his legs up. He stood at the window and gazed at the fields.

  It took some minutes before he could convince himself that he was not dreaming. The sensation felt no different, to begin with, from the half-dozen times he had thought himself awake, only then to find that he was still asleep and had dreamed it.

  Gradually some clarity returned to him. He held tight to the frame of the window and breathed deeply. The sense of disorientation diminished.

  I am tired, he thought, as he pulled a cigarette from its case. I am tired in my body and in my mind, as Gray pointed out. Perhaps Gray, or one of his Austrian doctors, could also explain the curious sequence of hallucinating dreams.

  He straightened out his uniform and pushed his hair into place where he had ruffled it in sleep. Pulling back the door of the compartment, he wove his way down the swaying carriage to the restaurant car. Only two tables were taken and he was able to seat himself by the window. The steward waddled down the aisle with a menu.

  Stephen was surprised by the choice. It had been years since he had been confronted with such variety. He asked for consommé, then sole, and steak-and-kidney pudding. The waiter offered him the wine list. His pocket was filled with English bank notes he had bought with his pay in Folkestone. He ordered the most expensive wine on the list, which was six shillings a bottle.

  The steward hovered with a ladle full of boiling soup, most of which he deposited into the crested plate, though by the time he had finished, the starched white cloth bore a long trail of brown. Stephen found the soup too strong to be pleasant; the taste of fresh beef stock and seasoning confused him. He had not eaten lunch or dinner in Amiens and his palate had grown used to Tickler’s plum-and-apple pudding, bully beef, and biscuits, with only an occasional slice of cake sent out from England to Gray or Weir.

  The little fillets of sole with the delicate film of veins and intricate white layering of flesh were too subtle for him to taste. With some ceremony the steward then poured an inch of wine into the crystal glass. Stephen swallowed quickly and told him to pour. While he waited for the steak-and-kidney pudding, he drank properly. He found the taste overpowering. It was as though his whole head had been filled with small explosions of scent and colour. He had not tasted wine for six months, and then only a rough, unlabelled white. He put the glass down quickly. Water at the front tasted simply of water if it had come up with the rations, or something worse if it had been sieved from shellholes; tea had an equally straightforward flavour—of petrol, from the cans in which it was carried. But when he drank this wine it felt as though he were drinking some complex essence of France itself, not the visceral inferno of Picardy, but a pastoral, older place where there was still hope.

  He was evidently even more tired than he had thought. He ate as much of the steak-and-kidney pudding as he could. He passed over the dessert and smoked a cigarette with coffee. At King’s Lynn he took a branch line along the Norfolk coast toward Sheringham, which he thought was the place Weir had recommended. However, he found as the small train puffed along that he was impatient with travelling. He wanted to be outside in the clear, peaceful air; he longed for an inn with a soft bed. At the next station, a village called Burnham Market, he hauled his valise down from the luggage rack and jumped out onto the platform. He was able to walk into the village itself, which was bisected by a road on either side of which was a plush, well-kept green. Most of the houses that overlooked it had been built in the eighteenth century; they were spacious but modest and were interspersed with half a dozen shops, including a pharmacy, a chandler, and a place that sold equipment for horses.

  Behind a huge chestnut tree was a long, low-built inn called The Blackbird. Stephen went into it and rang a bell on a counter at the foot of the stairs. No one answered, so he went into the stone-flagged bar. It was empty, though there were still uncollected beer glasses from lunchtime on the tables. It had a dark, cool atmosphere, given by the floor and the heavy wooden beams.

  He heard a female voice behind him and turned to see a plump woman in an apron who smiled a little uncertainly as he met her eye. She told him she was only the cleaner and the landlord was out for the afternoon, but she could let him have a room if he would sign the register. She showed him upstairs to a small bedroom with a mahogany chest of drawers and an old wooden bedstead with a fat white eiderdown on it. There was one ladder-back chair by the door and a washstand with a china jug and basin. Just by the door was a small bookshelf with half a dozen well-read volumes on it. Beyond the chest was a window that overlooked the green at the front of the hotel where the chestnut tree’s white blossom blocked out the sky. Stephen thanked the woman and threw his valise on to the bed. It was the kind of room he had wanted.

  When he had unpacked he lay down on the bed and closed his eyes. He wanted to sleep, but his eyelids were flickering too much. Each time sleep seemed near his body jolted him back from it. Eventually he fell into a half-waking state, like the
one he had found himself in on the train, in which brightly illuminated scenes from the last two or three years occurred at random in his mind. Incidents and men he had forgotten recurred with vivid immediacy, and then were gone. He tried to pull himself back from the lurid sequence of memories. He kept seeing Douglas falling off the stretcher on to the slippery floor of the trench as a shell landed; he could hear the lifeless thump of his passive body. A man he had forgotten, called Studd, came back to his mind, his helmet blown back and his scalp raked by machine-gun bullets as he bent to help another man who had fallen.

  Stephen climbed off the bed. His hands were shaking like Michael Weir’s during a bombardment. He breathed in deeply, hearing the air catch in his chest. It seemed to him extraordinary that he should be feeling the shock now, when he was safe in a tranquil English village.

  The thought of his surroundings stirred him. It was a long time since he had been in England. Perhaps it would be good for him to walk outside and look at it.

  His boots echoed on the uncarpeted wooden steps as he went down, hatless, into the hall and out into the air.

  He heaved his shoulders up, then let them drop in a long, broken sigh. He began to walk along the green, then turned down a lane that led away from the village. He tried to relax himself. I have been under fire, he thought; but now, for the time being, it is over. Under fire. The words came back. How thin and inadequate the phrase was.

  The hedgerows were deep and ragged where he walked, covered with the lace of cow parsley. The air had a feeling of purity, as though it had never been breathed; it was just starting to be cool with the first breeze of evening. From the tall elms he could see at the end of the field there was a sound of rooks, and a gentler calling of wood pigeons close at hand. He stopped, and leaned against a gate. The quietness of the world about him seemed to stand outside time; there was no human voice to place it.