Birdsong Read online

  “I do think I should open that window,” she said coldly, and stood up with a rustle of silk skirt.

  “And you too are a musical man, Azaire?” said Bérard. “It’s a good thing to have music in a household where there are children. Madame Bérard and I always encouraged our children in their singing.”

  Stephen’s mind was racing as Bérard’s voice went on and on. There was something magnificent about the way Madame Azaire turned this absurd man aside. He was only a small-town bully, it was true, but he was clearly used to having his own way.

  “I have enjoyed evenings at the concert hall,” said Azaire modestly, “though I should hesitate to describe myself as a ‘musical man’ on account of that. I merely—”

  “Nonsense. Music is a democratic form of art. You don’t need money to buy it or education to study it. All you need is a pair of these.” Bérard took hold of his large pink ears and shook them. “Ears. The gift of God at birth. You must not be shy about your preference, Azaire. That can only lead to the triumph of inferior taste through the failing of false modesty.” Bérard sat back in his chair and glanced toward the now open window. The draught seemed to spoil his enjoyment of the epigram he had pretended to invent. “But forgive me, René,” he said. “I cut you off.”

  Azaire was working at his black briar pipe, tamping down the tobacco with his fingers and testing its draw by sucking noisily on it. When it was done to his satisfaction he struck a match and for a moment a blue spiral of smoke encircled his bald head. In the silence before he could reply to his friend, they heard the birds in the garden outside.

  “Patriotic songs,” said Azaire. “I have a particular fondness for them. The sound of bands playing and a thousand voices lifted together to sing the ‘Marseillaise’ as the army went off to fight the Prussians. What a day that must have been!”

  “But if you’ll forgive me,” said Bérard, “that is an example of music being used for a purpose—to instil a fighting valour in the hearts of our soldiers. When any art is put to practical ends it loses its essential purity. Am I not right, Madame Azaire?”

  “I daresay you are, Monsieur. What does Monsieur Wraysford think?”

  Stephen, momentarily startled, looked at Madame Azaire and found her eyes on his for the first time. “I have no view on that, Madame,” he said, recovering his composure. “But I think if any song can touch the heart, then one should value it.”

  Bérard suddenly held out his hand. “A little brandy, if you please, Azaire. Thank you. Now then. I am going to do something in which I risk playing the fool and making you think ill of me.”

  Madame Bérard laughed incredulously.

  “I am going to sing. Yes, there’s no point in trying to dissuade me. I am going to sing a little song that was popular when I was a boy, and that, I can assure you, was very many years ago.”

  It was the speed with which, having made his declaration, Bérard launched into his song that surprised his listeners. One moment they had been making formal after-dinner conversation, the next they had been turned into a trapped audience as Bérard leant forward in his chair, elbows on the table, and sang in a warbling baritone.

  He fixed his eyes on Madame Azaire, who was sitting opposite. She was unable to hold his gaze, but looked down at her plate. Her discomfort did not deflect Bérard. Azaire was fiddling with his pipe and Stephen studied the wall above Bérard’s head. Madame Bérard watched with a proud smile as her husband made the gift of his song to his hostess. Madame Azaire blushed and squirmed in her chair under the unblinking stare of the singer.

  The dewlaps on his neck wobbled as he turned his head for emphasis at a touching part of the song. It was a sentimental ballad about the different times of a man’s life. Its chorus ran, “But then I was young and the leaves were green/Now the corn is cut and the little boat sailed away.”

  At the end of each refrain Bérard would pause dramatically and Stephen would allow his eyes a quick glance to see if he had finished. For a moment there was utter silence in the hot dining room, but then would come another deep inhalation and a further verse.

  “ ‘One day the young men came back from the war,

  The corn was high and our sweethearts were waiting …’ ”

  Bérard’s head revolved a little as he sang, and his voice grew louder as he warmed to the song, but his bloodshot eyes remained fixed on Madame Azaire, as though his head could turn only on the axis of his stare. By an effort of will she appeared to compose herself and stiffen her body against the intimacy of his attention.

  “ ‘And the little boat sailed away-y-y.’ There,” said Bérard, coming abruptly to an end, “I told you I should make a fool of myself!”

  The others all protested that, on the contrary, the song had been magnificent.

  “Papa has a beautiful voice,” said Madame Bérard, flushed with pride.

  Madame Azaire’s face was also pink, though not from the same emotion. Azaire became falsely jovial and Stephen felt a drop of sweat run down inside the back of his collar. Only Bérard himself was completely unembarrassed.

  “Now, Azaire, what about a game of cards. What shall it be?”

  “Excuse me, René,” said Madame Azaire, “I have a slight headache. I think I shall go to bed. Perhaps Monsieur Wraysford would like to take my place.”

  Stephen stood up as Madame Azaire rose from her chair. There were protests and anxious enquiries from the Bérards that Madame Azaire waved away with a smile, assuring them she was perfectly all right. Bérard lowered his face to her hand and Madame Bérard kissed the still-pink skin of Madame Azaire’s cheek. There were a few freckles on her bare forearm, Stephen noticed as she turned to the door, a tall, suddenly commanding figure in a blood-red skirt that swept over the floor of the hall.

  “Let’s go into the sitting room,” said Azaire. “Monsieur, I trust you will join us to make up our card game.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Stephen, forcing a smile of acquiescence.

  “Poor Madame Azaire,” said Madame Bérard, as they settled at the card table. “I hope she hasn’t caught a chill.”

  Azaire laughed. “No, no. It’s just her nerves. Think nothing of it.”

  “Such a delicate creature,” murmured Bérard. “Your deal, I think, Azaire.”

  “Nevertheless, a headache can mean the beginning of a fever,” said Madame Bérard.

  “Madame,” said Azaire, “I assure you that Isabelle has no fever. She is a woman of a nervous temperament. She suffers from headaches and various minor maladies. It signifies nothing. Believe me, I know her very well and I have learned how to live with her little ways.” He gave a glance of complicity toward Bérard, who chuckled. “You yourself are fortunate in having a robust constitution.”

  “Has she always suffered from headaches?” Madame Bérard was persistent.

  Azaire’s lips stretched into a narrow smile. “It is a small price one pays. It is you to play, Monsieur.”

  “What?” Stephen looked down at his cards. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t concentrating.” He had been watching Azaire’s smile and wondering what it meant.

  Bérard talked to Azaire about the strike as they laid down their cards on the table with swift assurance.

  Stephen tried to concentrate on the game and to engage Madame Bérard in some sort of conversation. She seemed indifferent to his attention, though her face lit up whenever her husband addressed her.

  “What these strikers need,” said Azaire, “is for someone to call their bluff. I’m not prepared to see my business stagnate because of the gross demands of a few idle men. Some owner has to have the strength to stand up to them and sack the whole lot.”

  “I fear there would be violence. The mobs would rampage,” said Bérard.

  “Not without food in their stomachs.”

  “I’m not sure it would be wise for a town councillor like yourself, René, to be involved in such a dispute.”

  Bérard took up the pack to shuffle it; his thick fingers moved dextrously
over the rippling cards. When he had dealt, he lit a cigar and sat back in his chair, pulling his waistcoat smartly down over his belly.

  The maid came in to ask if there was anything further. Stephen stifled a yawn. He had been travelling since the previous day and was drawn to the idea of his modest room with the starched sheets and the view across the boulevard.

  “No, thank you,” said Azaire. “Please go to Madame Azaire’s room on your way to bed and tell her I shall look in to see if she’s all right later.”

  For a moment Stephen thought he had seen another half-glance of complicity between the two men, but when he looked at Bérard his face was absorbed in the cards that were fanned out in his hand.

  Stephen said good-bye to the visitors when they finally got up to leave. He stood at the window of the sitting room, watching them in the light of the porch. Bérard put on a top hat as though he were some baron on his way home from the opera; Madame Bérard, her face glowing, wrapped her cape round her and took his arm. Azaire leant forward from the waist and talked in what looked like an urgent whisper.

  A soft rain had begun to fall outside, loosening the earth at the sides of the rutted tracks on the road and sounding the leaves on the plane trees. It gave a greasy film to the window of the sitting room and then formed larger drops, which began to run down the glass. Behind it Stephen’s pale face was visible as he watched the departing guests—a tall figure, his hands thrust into his pockets, his eyes patient and intent, the angle of his body that of a youthful indifference cultivated by willpower and necessity. It was a face that in turn most people treated cautiously, unsure whether its ambivalent expressions would resolve themselves into passion or acquiescence.

  Up in his room, Stephen listened to the noises of the night. A loose shutter turned slowly on its hinges and banged against the wall at the back of the house. There was an owl somewhere deep in the gardens, where the cultivation gave way to wildness. There was also the irregular wheeze and rush of the plumbing in its narrow pipes.

  Stephen sat down at the writing table by the window and opened a notebook with pages ruled in thick blue lines. It was half-full of inky writing that spread over the lines in clusters that erupted from the red margin on the left. There were dates at intervals in the text, though there were gaps of days and sometimes weeks between them.

  He had kept a notebook for five years, since a master at the grammar school had suggested it. The hours of Greek and Latin study had given him an unwanted but ingrained knowledge of the languages that he used as the basis of a code. When the subject matter was sensitive, he would change the sex of the characters and note their actions or his responses with phrases that could not mean anything to a chance reader.

  He laughed softly to himself as he wrote. This sense of secrecy was something he had had to develop in order to overcome a natural openness and a quick temper. At the age of ten or eleven his artless enthusiasm and outraged sense of right and wrong had made him the despair of his teachers, but he had slowly learned to breathe and keep calm, not to trust his responses, but to wait and be watchful.

  His cuffs loosened, he held his face in his hands and looked at the blank wall ahead of him. There came a noise that this time was not the shutter or the sound of water but something shriller and more human. It came again, and Stephen crossed the room to listen for it. He opened the door on to the landing and stepped out gently, remembering the sound his feet had made before. The noise was a woman’s voice, he was almost sure, and it was coming from the floor below.

  He took off his shoes, slid them quietly over the threshold of his room, and began to creep down the stairs. It was completely dark in the house; Azaire must have turned off all the lights on his way to bed. Stephen felt the spring of the wooden treads beneath his socks and the line of the bannister under his exploring hand. He had no fear.

  On the first-floor landing he hesitated. The size of the house and the number of possible directions from which the noise could have come became dauntingly clear. Three passageways opened from the landing, one of them up a small step leading toward the front of the house and two going sideways along the length of it before breaking up into further corridors. A whole family and its servants, to say nothing of bathrooms, laundries, or stores, was on this floor. He could wander by chance into a cook’s bedroom or an upstairs salon with Chinese ornaments and Louis XVI silks.

  He listened intently, stifling his own breath for a moment. There was a different sound now, not identifiably a woman’s voice, but a lower note, almost like sobbing, interrupted by a more material sound of brief impact. Stephen wondered if he should continue. He had left his room impulsively in the belief that something was wrong; now it seemed to him he might merely be trespassing on the privacy of some member of the household. But he did not falter long because he knew that the noise was not a normal one.

  He took a passageway to the right, walking with exaggerated care, one arm in front of him to protect his eyes from harm, and one feeling along the wall. The passageway came to a junction, and looking to the left Stephen saw a narrow bar of light coming from beneath a closed door. He calculated how close to the door he should go. He wanted to remain sufficiently near to the turn in the corridor that he would have time to double back into it and out of sight of anyone emerging from the room.

  He went to within half a dozen paces, which was as close as he dared. He stopped and listened, again quelling his own breathing so he would not miss a sound. He could feel the swell of his heart against his chest and a light pulse in the flesh of his neck.

  He heard a woman’s voice, cool and low, though made intense by desperation. She was pleading, and the words, though indistinct because of the way she kept her voice down, were made audible in places by the urgency of the feeling behind them. Stephen could distinguish the words “René,” and later “I implore you,” and then “children.” The voice, which he recognized even on this slight evidence as Madame Azaire’s, was cut short by the thudding sound he had heard before. It turned to a gasp which, because of its sudden move into a higher register, was clearly one of pain.

  Stephen moved forward along the corridor, his hands no longer raised cautiously in front of him but tensed into fists against his ribs. A step or two short of the door he managed to control his sense of confused anger. For the first time he heard a man’s voice. It was repeating a single word in a broken, unconvinced tone that gave way to a sob. Then there were footsteps.

  Stephen turned and ran for the corner of the passageway, knowing he had advanced beyond the limit he had set himself. As he turned the corner he heard Azaire’s quizzical voice. “Is there anyone there?” He tried to remember whether there had been any hazards on his way as he ran back toward the landing without time to check that his path was clear. From the foot of the stairs going up to the second floor he could see that some light was coming from his room. He took the steps two at a time and plunged toward the switch on the table lamp, causing it to rock and bang as he reached it.

  He stood still in the middle of the room, listening. He could hear footsteps reach the bottom of the stairs below. If Azaire came up he would wonder why he was standing fully dressed in the middle of a dark room. He moved to the bed and slid under the covers.

  After ten minutes he thought it safe to undress for bed. He closed the door and the shutter on the small window and sat down in his nightclothes at the writing table. He read over the entry he had written earlier, which described his journey from London, the train in France, and the arrival in the boulevard du Cange. It made brief comments on the character of Bérard and his wife, under heavy disguise, and gave his impressions of Azaire and the two children. He saw, with some surprise, that what had struck him most he had not written about at all.

  Rising in the morning with a clear head, rested, and full of interest in his new surroundings, Stephen put the happenings of the night from his mind and submitted to a full tour of Azaire’s business operations.

  They left the prosperity of the boul
evard and walked to the Saint Leu quarter, which looked to Stephen like a medieval engraving, with gabled houses leaning over cobbled streets above the canals. There were washing lines attached to crooked walls and drainpipes; small children in ragged clothes played hide-and-seek on the bridges and ran sticks along the iron railings at the water’s edge. Women carried buckets of drinking water collected from the fountains in the better areas of town to their numerous offspring, some of whom waited in the family’s single room, while others, mostly immigrants from the countryside of Picardy who had come in search of work, lodged in makeshift shelters in the backyards of the bursting houses. There was the noise of poverty that comes from children on the streets, whose mothers are screaming threats or admonitions or calling out important news to neighbours. There was the racket of cohabitation that exists when no household is closed to another; there were voices from the crowded bakeries and shops, while the men with barrows and horse-drawn carts cried up their goods a dozen times on each street.

  Azaire moved nimbly through the crowd, took Stephen’s arm as they crossed a wooden bridge, turned from the shouted abuse of a surly adolescent boy, led the way up a wrought-iron staircase on the side of a building and delivered them both into a first-floor office that looked down on to a factory floor.

  “Sit down. I have a meeting now with Meyraux, who is my senior man and also, as a punishment for whatever sins I have committed, the head of the syndicate.” Azaire pointed to a leather-covered seat on the far side of a desk piled with papers. He went down the internal steps to the factory floor, leaving Stephen to look out through the glass walls of the office on to the scene below.

  The workers were mostly women, sitting at spinning machines at the far end of the room, though there were also men and boys in flat leather caps at work on the machines or transporting yarn or bolts of material on little wooden-wheeled wagons. There was a rhythmical clatter from the antiquated jennies that almost drowned the shouts of the foreman, a red-faced man with a moustache who strode up and down in a coat that reached almost to his ankles. At the near end of the factory were rows of workers at Singer sewing machines, their knees rising and falling as they pumped the mechanism, their hands working in flat opposition to one another, going rapidly this way then that, as though adjusting the pressure on a huge tap. To Stephen, who had spent many hours on such premises in England, the process looked old-fashioned, in the same way that the streets of Saint Leu seemed to belong to a different century from the terraces of the mill towns of Lancashire.