Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
After driving round Brussels for almost an hour Elizabeth despaired of finding Robert’s flat. The only time she had come close to the right street she had found herself obliged to follow a one-way system that took her directly away from it. She left her car on the edge of a building site and hailed a taxi.
She was looking forward to seeing him; she could feel herself becoming excited as the driver pressed through the traffic. She was also a little nervous because every time she saw Robert she was worried that he would not live up to her recollection. It was as though there was this pressure on him to justify the effect he had on her life. She was denied to other men, lived alone, and was party to a continuing deceit; it was up to him to be worth it. Yet he was the most diffident of men, unable to make such claims for himself, offering no promises, and always urging her to act in her own interests. Perhaps that was one reason why she loved him.
She paid off the taxi and rang the bell on the street door. His voice came through the intercom and the door opened with a raucous buzzing sound. She ran upstairs, her feet echoing on the wooden steps. He was at the door of his first-floor flat, a bearlike scruffy man, cigarette in hand, still in his suit, but with the collar loosened and the tie at half-mast. Elizabeth flung herself into his arms.
She felt as she often did for the first few minutes in his presence, disorientated and in need of reassurance. She explained about the car and, when he had finished laughing, he said they had better go and get it and put it in the underground parking.
Half an hour later they were back at the flat and able to begin again. Elizabeth went to have a bath while Robert stuck his feet up on the coffee table and began telephoning restaurants.
She came back into the sitting room in a new black dress, ready to go out. He handed her a drink. “I promise I didn’t put any tonic in. I just showed it the label. You look wonderful.”
“Thank you. You look all right too. Are you going to wear that suit or are you going to change?”
“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it.”
“Don’t tell me.”
He went and sat next to her on the sofa, clearing a space among the books and papers. He was a heavily built man, tall, with a deep chest and a heavy belly. He began to stroke Elizabeth’s hair and to kiss her glistening lips. He slid his hand up her skirt and murmured in her ear.
“Robert, I’ve just got dressed. Stop it.”
“You’ll spoil my makeup,” he said.
“I mean it. And get your hands off there. You should wait till later.”
He laughed. “This way I can relax and enjoy dinner.”
“Robert!”
He laddered her stocking and smudged her lipstick, but she had time to repair the damage before they went out. He was right in a way, Elizabeth thought; it was easier to talk once this closeness had been reestablished.
At dinner he asked her what she had been doing and she told him about work and her mother and how she had become intrigued by her mother’s parents. As she talked, it seemed to become clearer to her. Her life had reached an age at which she should no longer be the last to die; there ought to be someone younger than she was, a generation of her children who should now be enjoying that luxurious safety of knowing that grandparents and parents still lay like a barrier between them and their mortality. But in the absence of her own children she had started to look backward and wonder at the fate of a different generation. Because their lives were over she felt protective; she felt almost maternal toward them.
She described her visit to Irene’s house, where she had met Bob, someone who, from Irene’s description, sounded as though he was seldom out of the pub or the betting shop, and how she had found a small birdlike man with thick glasses and quick hands who offered her a choice of two or three books from a room full of shelves.
“But nothing had prepared me for what I saw. The scale of it. The memorial is as big as Marble Arch, bigger, and every inch of it is written on. It all looks so recent. The cleaner showed me a shell they had found in the wood last week.”
Robert refilled her glass several times while she talked, and when they left the restaurant and set off toward the Grand’ Place she felt light-headed and relaxed. Brussels seemed such a solid town, a monument to the efficiency of Flemish labour, to the comfort of large meals produced with French imagination, and above all to the pleasures of peace.
She was tempted to feel that an uneventful life was not necessarily a frivolous one; that the worthy crafts of citizenship had to be seriously worked at before they could be passed on. They went down a narrow alley as it began to rain. She felt Robert’s arm urging her on toward the shelter of a café he had chosen for a digestif. As they rounded the corner they found themselves suddenly in the Grand’ Place. Elizabeth looked up and saw the gilt façades of the merchant buildings, glittering gold beneath the filmy drizzle, lit by the soft lights of the square.
———
On Sunday afternoon she began to feel the low pressure of imminent separation. Sometimes it seemed to her that she began to dread her return almost as soon as she arrived.
Robert had put a record on and was lying back on the sofa balancing the ash on the end of his cigarette as he listened to music.
“When are we going to get married?” said Elizabeth.
“Is there an ashtray under that paper?”
“Yes.” She passed it to him. “Well?”
“Oh Elizabeth.” Robert sat up. “The trouble with you is that you’re so impatient.”
“Ah, that’s the trouble with me, is it? There are so many theories. And I don’t think two years is that impatient.”
“We will divorce, but I can’t do it now.”
“Why?”
“I’ve told you. Anne’s just started a new school. And Jane needs to make friends where we’ve moved and—”
“It’s not fair to Anne.”
“Exactly. She’s only ten.”
“And soon she’ll have exams and then Jane will need cheering up, then you’ll have a new job.”
Robert shook his head.
“And the year after that,” said Elizabeth, “it will be too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“Too late for you and me.”
Robert sighed. “It isn’t easy, Elizabeth. I do promise you that we will divorce. I’ll even give you a deadline if you like. Say within three years.”
“I can’t depend on that,” said Elizabeth. “I can’t plan my life on such a slender promise.”
“Are you feeling broody?”
“I wish you wouldn’t use that word. I’m not a chicken. When I see a small child my guts turn over inside me. I have to stop walking and take several deep breaths because my whole body is yearning so strongly. Is that what the word means?”
“I’m sorry, Elizabeth. I’m really sorry. I’m no good for you. You must give me up for good. You must find someone else. I promise I won’t make it difficult for you.”
“You don’t see the point at all, do you?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s you that I want. You’re the man I love. I don’t want anyone else.”
Robert shook his head. He seemed moved by her conviction, but helpless. “In that case I don’t know what to suggest.”
“Marry me, you fool, that’s what you should suggest. Follow the instincts of your heart.”
“But my heart is so torn. It’s torn by Anne. I couldn’t bear to hurt her.”
Elizabeth felt she should have foreseen his response. She became more conciliatory. “I would look after her,” she said softly. “I’d care for her when she came to stay.”
Robert stood up and went to the window. “You’ve just got to give me up,” he said. “You know that, don’t you? It’s the only answer.”
Despite her furious endeavour to the contrary, she cried when she said good-bye to him in the underground parking. She began to feel dependent and helpless and despised herself for it. His arms seemed big when th
“I’ll ring,” he said, shutting her in behind the driver’s door.
She nodded and moved the car off to do blurred battle with the teatime traffic.
———
On Thursday evening Elizabeth went down to Twickenham to see her mother, and while Françoise was busy in the kitchen she went up to the attic, where there were several trunks full of documents, photographs, and books. She didn’t tell her mother the reason for her search; she said she was looking for an old diary of her own.
The attic was not tall enough to stand up in, and Elizabeth had to crouch beneath the roof, though the builder had installed electric light by which she could make out the size of the task ahead of her.
There were five leather trunks and six black tin ones, in addition to several cardboard boxes, only a few of which seemed labelled. Most seemed to have been filled at random: there were Christmas decorations and old games with important bits missing packed in with bundles of letters and receipts.
She began with the leather trunks. She had no idea that her mother had been such a keen theatre-goer. There were bundles of programmes from the West End and magazines in which actors she had seen recently on television in grizzled character roles were shown on the stage thirty years before, their bright eyes rimmed with black, their wrists trailing lacy cuffs, and their neatly trimmed hair glistening with matinée appeal.
In another trunk was a box, labelled THE ESTATE OF ALEC BENSON, which contained various probate papers. There had been no money, though there had been some interesting debts. Unknown to his wife he had bought a share in a horse-transporting business in Newmarket, and the sale of this had covered some of what he owed. The rest of his trunk was a jumble of prospectuses and letters from various companies he had bought, sold, or invested in; most were based in Kenya and what had then been Tanganyika. They had in common a lack of capital and a certain El Dorado optimism. Later the documents came from Rhodesia and South Africa. There were sheaves of carefully preserved golf cards. Score 79, handicap 6, net 73. “Let down by putting,” read a scribbled note at the bottom of one from Johannesburg dated 19 August 1950.
In the first of the metal trunks Elizabeth came across a khaki battledress top. She pulled it out and held it up to the light. It told her nothing. It seemed in good condition, the rough serge unmarked and the stripes on the sleeves neatly sewn. There was also a tin helmet, in equally good condition, the webbing inside still in place and the exterior only slightly chipped. In the bottom of the trunk was a small leather writing case, and in this were an unused pad and a monochrome snap of a group of soldiers sitting in shirtsleeves on an armoured vehicle. A scribbled note on the back said: “Tunisia, 1943—The Fearless Five (Jarvis absent).”
Wrong war, wrong man. After all she had seen, after all the names on that great arch, they had come back for more barely twenty years later. If she herself were to have a boy, what guarantee was there that he too would not spend years of his adult life in this hellish perversion?
She moved, crouching, down the attic, to the row of metal trunks. Inside the first there was more rubbish: some of her old toys, and more bills and business letters relating to the purchase of the house.
Elizabeth dwelt on some of these because although they were trivial in themselves they touched her. The lines of debt and interest, drawn up on thick blue bond with red margins and figures entered with a manual typewriter and countersigned in firm black ink, spoke of nugatory sums at kindly rates of interest, yet how fearsome they must have seemed in their time, how constant an obstacle to peace of mind. Above all to Elizabeth they did represent a family, however fissile and unsure, a house, and a child with the presumed determination of the parents, of her mother at least, to make one more effort to improve upon the past. And with that slim debt to some mutual society had gone concomitant sacrifices of her personal ambition, of travel and a better life. Yet still somehow it was difficult to see her own life as the pinnacle of previous generations’ sacrifices.
In the third metal trunk, toward the bottom, was a parcel, looped and tied in a bow with string. The dust from it dried the skin on her fingers and set her teeth on edge. She pulled open the knot and the parcel fell apart limply, dropping its guts into her hands. They were more papers and letters and a notebook. There were also some coloured ribbons, three medals, and a hip flask. It all seemed to date from an earlier time than the contents of the other trunks.
Among the papers were some handwritten in French. One had an address in Rouen. Elizabeth found herself reading it guiltily. It was hard to follow what it meant. The handwriting was of a dense, ornate kind, the ink was faded, and Elizabeth’s French was not good enough for the idiomatic language. There was a second letter in the same hand with an address in Munich.
At the bottom of the pile were two books. The first was a military handbook for officers. On the flyleaf was written “Captain Stephen Wraysford, April 1917.” Elizabeth opened it. Among instructions to officers was one that told him he should be “blood thirsty and forever thinking how to kill the enemy and help his men to do so.” Something about the way the word “bloodthirsty” was split in two made Elizabeth shudder.
The other was a notebook with pages ruled in thick blue lines. It was full of inky writing that spread in clusters over the printed lines from a red margin on the left.
It posed even more of a problem for Elizabeth than the letters. It appeared to be written in Greek script. She looked through it, puzzled. If it had belonged to a foreigner, someone unconnected with her family, what was it doing with this small parcel of her grandfather’s belongings? She slipped it into the pocket of her skirt and tied the rest of the papers back into their bundle.
Her mother was reading a book in the sitting room.
Elizabeth introduced the subject with a small subterfuge. “I couldn’t find the diary I was looking for. It had an old address in it from years ago. When I moved flats you let me leave a lot of stuff up there, do you remember?”
“Yes I do. I wish you’d get rid of some of it.”
“I will. While I was looking for the diary I came across a little packet of what must have been your father’s papers.”
“I thought they’d all been thrown away. There used to be a whole lot of them, but they got lost when I moved house.”
“What sort of things were they?”
“There were boxes full of notebooks that he’d kept from the time he first went to France. I think there were twenty or thirty of them. But I couldn’t understand them because they were in some sort of code.”
“There’s one up there in the attic. It looks as though it’s written in Greek.”
“That’s it,” said Françoise, putting down her sewing. “There were lots more. I always thought that if he’d wanted anyone to understand them he would have written them in plain English.”
“What was he like, your father?”
Françoise sat up in her armchair, a slight flush colouring her cheeks. “I wish you could have known him. He would have loved you. I wish he could just once have seen you and stroked your face.”
———
The following Saturday Elizabeth went down into the Underground station and sat on a train as it hurtled, clanked, and rolled its electric way along the bed of the pipe inserted through the glutinous clay beneath the city. At Stratford she emerged into the winter daylight and took a bus onward. She cursed the glistening Swedish sedan, which had refused to start.
Bob and Irene’s house was in a square with half a dozen naked plane trees on a plot of grass behind iron railings. At one end was a sandpit with a red-and-orange construction for children’s climbing games, its gaudy surfaces sprayed with words formed from scripts known only to the sprayer. To Elizabeth they looked like angry warnings from a fundamentalist scripture. It was too cold for children to be playing in the garden, but a woman with a woollen scarf round her head was being dragged over the sparse and muddy green by a thin alsatian, which stopped and crou
Elizabeth hurried to the house and pressed the bell. She saw the top of Irene’s head as she bent to restrain her barking terrier in the half-open door. With threats and cajolings to the dog, and reassurances to Elizabeth, Irene managed to clear enough room for them both to get into the hallway and for her to close the door after them.
They went into the sitting room at the front of the house and Elizabeth sat down while Irene went to make tea. The room had dark brown wallpaper, though most of it was concealed by pictures and shelves that contained glass cases with stuffed birds and collections of china cups and saucers. There were two tailor’s dummies, one dressed in a nineteenth-century purple velvet dress, the other draped and trailed over its otherwise naked torso with antique lace. There were a number of small tables about the room with brass curios and figures on them.
“I hope Bob doesn’t mind me using him like a reference library,” said Elizabeth as Irene returned with the tea.
“I shouldn’t think so,” said Irene. “He’s probably pleased to be asked. Were those books helpful?”
“Yes, they were. I told you about the memorial I saw, didn’t I? The thing is I’ve become obsessed by the subject now and I want to know more. I’ve found this notebook of my grandfather’s—at least I think it’s my grandfather’s, it was in with some of his things. It’s written in a language I don’t understand and I wondered if Bob might know, what with his archaeology and everything.”
“Egyptian hieroglyphics and all that?”
“Well, it’s not Egyptian, but—”
“I know what you mean. He certainly used to know a lot about languages. He’s done courses on them. I don’t think he speaks any, but he’d probably recognize what it was, especially if it’s an old one. Not very interested in the modern world, Bob. I gave him one of them record sets so he could learn French for our holidays one year and he never opened it.”
When Bob was persuaded at Irene’s third attempt to come in from the garden, he shook hands with Elizabeth and poured himself a cup of tea. She told him about her visit to France and he nodded his head, sipping noisily, as he listened. He was shorter than his wife, with a bald skull and round tortoiseshell glasses. While she talked he rested his head on one side and occasionally scraped his chin on his upraised shoulder. Once she had explained the reason for her second visit his movements became wakeful and eager.