Birdsong Read online

  “No, I haven’t been past that house since we last saw you.”

  “Ah-ha, you wish to keep the melody as a treasured little memory. I understand. So you have chosen a different walk for your afternoon exercise.”

  “No. I was reading a book this afternoon.”

  Bérard smiled. “A romance, I’ll bet. How charming. I read only history myself. But tell us about the story.”

  “It was about a young man from a modest family in the provinces who goes to Paris to become a writer and falls in with the wrong kind of people.”

  Stephen was taken aback by Isabelle’s unembarrassed fluency. He watched as she spoke and wondered if he could have told that she was lying. Nothing in her manner was different. One day she might lie to him and he would never know. Perhaps all women had this ability to survive. From the subject of Isabelle’s book the conversation moved on to the question of whether the families who lived in the provinces could be as important in their way as those who lived in Paris.

  “Do you know the Laurendeau family?” asked Azaire.

  “Oh yes,” said Madame Bérard brightly, “we’ve met them on several occasions.”

  “I,” said Bérard weightily, “don’t consider them to be friends. I have not invited them to our house and I shall not be calling on them.”

  Something mysterious but noble lay behind Bérard’s rejection of the Laurendeau family, or so his manner implied. No amount of interrogation from his friends would extract from him the delicate reasons for his stance.

  “I don’t think they ever lived in Paris,” said Azaire.

  “Paris!” said Aunt Elise, suddenly looking up. “It’s just a big fashion house, that city. That’s the only difference between Paris and the provinces—the people there buy new clothes every week. What a lot of peacocks!”

  Azaire picked up his own thoughts on the importance of family. “I have never met Monsieur Laurendeau, but I’ve heard that he’s a very distinguished man. I am surprised that you haven’t built up your acquaintance, Bérard.”

  Bérard pursed his lips and wagged his index finger backward and forward in front of them to show how sealed they were.

  “Papa is not a snob,” said Madame Bérard.

  Isabelle had grown increasingly quiet. She wished Stephen would catch her eye or give some indication in his manner toward her that everything was all right. Jeanne had once said that men were not like women, that once they had possessed a woman it was as though nothing had happened and they just wanted to move on to another. Isabelle could not believe this of Stephen, not after what he had said and done with her in the red room. Yet how was she to know, when he gave her no sign, no smile of warmth? At first his self-control had been reassuring; now it worried her.

  Under Azaire’s instruction they left their coffee cups and made to transfer to another room for the advertised game of cards.

  Isabelle searched for reassurance in Stephen’s eyes in the safe melee of movement. He was looking at her, but not at her face. In the act of rising from her chair, in her characteristically modest movement, she felt his eyes on her waist and hips. For a moment she was naked again. She recalled how she had shown herself to him in her hot afternoon abandonment and how perversely right it had then seemed. Suddenly the shame and guilt belatedly overpowered her as she felt his eyes pierce her clothes, and she began to blush all over her body. Her stomach and breasts turned red beneath her dress as the blood beat the skin in protest at her immodesty. It rose up her neck and into her face and ears, as though publicly rebuking her for her most private actions. It cried out in the burning red of her skin; it begged for attention. Isabelle, her eyes watering from the heat of the risen blood, sat down heavily on her chair.

  “Are you all right?” said Azaire, impatiently. “You look very warm.”

  Isabelle leaned forward on to the table and covered her face with her hands. “I don’t feel well. It’s so hot in here.”

  Madame Bérard put an arm round her shoulders.

  “It’s a circulation problem, without a doubt,” said Bérard. “It’s nothing to make a fuss about, it’s quite a common ailment.”

  As the blood retreated beneath her dress, Isabelle felt stronger. The colour remained in her face, though the beating of the pulse was less.

  “I think I shall go to bed, if you don’t mind,” she said.

  “I’ll send Marguérite up,” said Azaire.

  Stephen could see no chance of speaking to her privately so merely wished her a polite good night as Madame Bérard took her by the elbow at the foot of the stairs and helped her up a step or two before rejoining the others.

  “A circulation problem,” said Bérard, as he shuffled the cards in his plump fingers. “A circulation problem. There it is. There it is.” He looked at Azaire, and his left eyelid slid down over the eyeball, remaining in place long enough for the broken blood vessels beneath the skin and the small wart to be visible before it was rotated smoothly back to its home beneath the skull.

  Azaire gave a thin smile in response as he picked up his cards. Madame Bérard, who was searching in her handbag for her spectacles, saw nothing of the confidential male exchange. Aunt Elise had retired to the corner of the room with a book.

  Upstairs Isabelle undressed quickly and slipped beneath the covers of her bed. She pulled up her knees to her stomach as she had done when she was a small girl in her parents’ house and she had heard the whistling of the wind from the surrounding fields of Normandy as it worked the wooden shutters loose and sighed in the space beneath the roof. She prepared herself for sleep by filling her mind with the reassuring picture of peace and certainty she had always relied on; it contained an idealized version of her parents’ home in a slightly fanciful pastoral setting, in which the sensuous effects of sun and flowers helped make analysis or decision seem unnecessary.

  When she was almost in the arms of this vision there came a small knocking that at first seemed like something in the dream, then switched from one world to another to be identifiable as a soft but urgent tapping on the door of her room.

  “Come in,” she said, her voice uncertainly sliding back into wakefulness.

  The door opened slowly and Stephen appeared in the dim light from the landing.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I couldn’t bear it downstairs.” He raised his finger to his lips and whispered, “I had to see how you were.”

  She smiled anxiously. “You must leave.”

  He looked about the room. There were her photographs of her sisters, her hairbrushes, a gilt mirror on the dressing table, her clothes laid across the chair.

  He leant over her bed, and felt his hand sink into the rich pile of covers beneath the quilt. A sweet smell rose up from the bed. He kissed her on the lips and touched her hair before leaving.

  Isabelle shuddered as he went, fearing the noise of his footsteps in the echoing corridor. Stephen moved, soundlessly to his own ears at least, to the main junction of the first-floor landing, then went downstairs to rejoin the game he had left.

  ———

  The following morning Stephen went into town. Azaire told him he should not return to the factory for another day or so, but he found it difficult to stay quietly in the house with Lisette, Marguérite, and various other visitors or members of the household preventing Isabelle from being alone or available to talk.

  He thought of his life as a wood of confusion with two or three clear tracks on which he could orientate himself. From their directions he could remember and look forward with something like clarity. While they were straight enough and discernible to him, they also felt like scars that had been cut into the undergrowth, and he had no desire to reveal them to other people. For Isabelle he felt great gratitude and admiration; in the pressure of his emotion toward her there was an impulse to disclosure, a natural movement toward trust. He did not fear this nakedness but he did not feel pleasure at the prospect of it.

  He was standing at the back of the cold cathedral, loo
king up to the choir stalls and the window in the east. It was quiet enough to think. There was the sound of a brush on the tiled floor as a cleaner worked her way down the side of the nave, and the occasional bang of the small entrance, set into the main doors, through which visitors arrived from time to time. A handful of people were praying in the body of the church. A medieval bishop was commemorated in Latin on a stone beneath his feet, his name still not erased by the traffic of the years. Stephen felt sorry for whatever anguish had caused the urgent prayers of the scattered worshippers, though also mildly envious of their faith. The chilly, hostile building offered little comfort; it was a memento mori on an institutional scale. Its limited success was in giving dignity through stone and lapidary inscription to the trite occurrence of death. The pretence was made that through memorial the blink of light between two eternities of darkness could be saved and held out of time, though in the bowed heads of the people who prayed there was only submission.

  So many dead, he thought, only waiting for another eyelid’s flicker before this generation joins them. The difference between living and dying was not one of quality, only of time.

  He sat down on a chair and held his face in his hands. He saw a picture in his mind of a terrible piling up of the dead. It came from his contemplation of the church, but it had its own clarity: the row on row, the deep rotting earth hollowed out to hold them, while the efforts of the living, with all their works and wars and great buildings, were no more than the beat of a wing against the weight of time.

  He knelt forward on the cushion on the floor and held his head motionless in his hands. He prayed instinctively, without knowing what he did. Save me from that death. Save Isabelle. Save all of us. Save me.

  ———

  He arrived back too late to have lunch with Isabelle and Lisette, both of whom in their different ways were disappointed. He walked through the cool, quiet house, hoping to hear voices. Eventually he heard the sound of feet and he turned to see Marguérite going into the kitchen.

  “Have you seen Madame Azaire?”

  “No, Monsieur. Not since lunch. Perhaps she’s in the garden.”

  “And Lisette?”

  “I think she’s gone into town.”

  Stephen began to look in all the rooms downstairs. Surely she must have known that he would return. She could not have gone out without leaving a message.

  He turned the handle on a door that led to a small study. Isabelle was sitting inside, reading a book. She put it down and stood up as he came in.

  He went over to her, not sure if he should touch her. She put her hand on his.

  “I was in the cathedral. I lost track of time.”

  She looked up at him. “Is it all right? Is everything all right?”

  He kissed her and she pressed herself close to him. He found his hands at once searching beneath her clothes.

  Her eyes looked up into his. They were wide and enquiring, full of urgency and light. Almost at once they closed as she let out a little sigh of excitement.

  They were leaning against the wall of the room and he had slipped his hand through the fastening at the back of her skirt. He could feel the satin under his fingers, then a round soft swell beneath. He felt her fingers on the front of his trousers.

  “We must stop.” He pulled himself back.

  “Yes. Lisette has gone.” Isabelle was breathless. “But Marguérite.”

  “The red room?”

  “Yes. You go first and go up to your room. Give me ten minutes before you come down.”

  “All right,” he said. “Let me kiss you good-bye.”

  He kissed her deeply and she began to sigh again and rubbed herself against him. “Please,” she said, “please.”

  He did not know if she meant him to stop or to continue. He had lifted her skirts as she stood with her back to the wall and now had his fingers between her legs. “Come to me,” she whispered, her breath hot in his ear. “Into me, now.” He removed her fumbling fingers from his trousers and freed himself. His shoulder was next to the polished wood of a glass-fronted bookcase. Behind Isabelle’s head was a framed picture of flowers in a terra-cotta pot. He had to lift her a little, clasping her behind with his hands, until she slithered on to him and wrapped her legs around his waist so that he could not move but had to bear her weight. The flowers moved a quarter turn on their hook as her shoulder nudged them.

  She opened her eyes again and smiled at him. “I love you.” She covered his face with kisses, keeping his body captive by her weight. Then she put her feet on the ground again and gently pulled him out of her. His flesh was rigid and swollen with blood. She ran her hand up and down it until he began to pant and give way at the knees, then spurted on to the floor, then against her dress, before she could take the last three or four spasms in her mouth. She appeared to do this from instinct, almost from a sense of tidiness, not because it was something she had known about or done before.

  “The red room,” she said. “In ten minutes.”

  Her clothes had fallen back into place. She seemed unaware of any mark on the front of her dress. Stephen watched her as she moved from the room, her walk, as always, a modest sway beneath the skirt. He felt awkward, half-undressed; it was as though she had treated him like a boy and taunted him, though he did not dislike the feeling. He rearranged his trousers and shirt and took his handkerchief to the polished parquet.

  He walked briefly in the garden, trying to cool his head, then, as instructed, went up to his room. He watched the minute hand crawl round on his pocket watch. If he added three minutes for the garden, that gave him only seven to endure. When it was time, he removed his shoes and went silently to the first floor. Down the main corridor to a narrow passage, down again and through a little arch … He remembered the way.

  Isabelle was waiting inside. She wore a robe with some oriental pattern in green and red.

  She said, “I was so afraid.”

  He sat down next to her on the stripped bed. “What do you mean?”

  She took his hand between both of hers. “When you wouldn’t look at me last night I was afraid that you’d changed your mind.”

  “About you?”

  “Yes.”

  He felt invigorated by Isabelle’s concern. It still seemed improbable to him that she could really want him so much.

  He took her hair and all its colours in his hands. He felt grateful to her also. “After all we said and all we did. How could you doubt?”

  “You wouldn’t look at me. I was frightened.”

  “What could I have said? I would have given us away.”

  “You must smile or nod. Something. Promise me that.” She had started to kiss his face. “We’ll work out a signal. Promise me, won’t you?”

  “Yes. I promise you.”

  He let her undress him, passively standing by as she took off his clothes and folded them on the chair. He braved the exposure of his gross excitement and she affected not to notice.

  “My turn,” he said, but there was only the silk robe to take off and then the beauty of Isabelle’s skin. He laid his cheek against the whiteness of her chest and kissed her throat where he had seen the flush of exertion when she had been gardening. The skin was young and new and almost white, with its patterning of little marks and freckles that he tried to taste with the tip of his tongue. Then he laid her gently down on the bed and buried his face in the fragrance of her hair, covering his own head with it. Next, he made her stand up again while he worked slowly over her body with his hands and his tongue. He let his fingers trail only briefly between her legs and felt her stiffen. At last, when he had touched every part of her skin, he turned her round and bent her forward on to the bed, then moved her ankles a little further apart with the pressure from his foot.

  ———

  When they had finished making love they slept, Isabelle beneath a blanket with her arm draped over Stephen, he uncovered, on his front, at an angle across the mattress. She had not yet had time to wash and return
the sheets.

  When he awoke he at once rested his head on her splayed hair and breathed in the perfume of her skin where his face was against her neck and the soft underline of her jaw. She smiled as she felt his skin and opened her eyes.

  He said, “I was convinced when I came down the stairs that I wouldn’t be able to find this room again. I thought it wouldn’t be here.”

  “It won’t move. It’s always here.”

  “Isabelle. Tell me. Your husband. One night I heard sounds from your room as though he was … hurting you.”

  Isabelle sat up, pulling a blanket over her. She nodded. “Sometimes he … becomes frustrated.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “We wanted to have children. Nothing seemed to happen. I used to dread each month … you know.”

  He nodded.

  “The blood was like a rebuke. He said it was my fault. I tried for him, but I didn’t know what to do. He was very brusque, he wasn’t cruel to me but he just wanted to do it quickly so I would be pregnant. It was not like with you.”

  Isabelle suddenly looked shy. To mention what they did seemed more shameful than to do it.

  She went on, “Eventually he began to doubt himself, I think. To start with he was so sure it was nothing to do with him because he had two children. Then he was not so sure. He seemed to grow jealous of me because I was young. ‘You’re so healthy, of course,’ he would say. ‘You’re just a child.’ And things like that. There was nothing I could do. I always made love to him, though I didn’t enjoy it. I never criticized him. He seemed to build up this disgust with himself. It made him talk to me sarcastically. Perhaps you’ve noticed. He began to criticize me all the time when other people were here. I think that for some reason he felt guilty about marrying me.”

  “Guilty?”

  “Perhaps toward his first wife, or perhaps because he felt he married me under false pretences.”