Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Sebastian Faulks
Praise
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction
Epigraph
Part One: France 1910
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part Two: France 1916
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Part Three: England 1978
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Part Four: France 1917
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Part Five: England 1978–79
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Part Six: France 1918
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Part Seven: England 1979
Chapter 51
Where My Heart Used to Beat
Copyright
ALSO BY SEBASTIAN FAULKS
Fiction
The Girl at the Lion d’Or
A Fool’s Alphabet
Charlotte Gray
On Green Dolphin Street
Human Traces
Engleby
A Week in December
A Possible Life
Jeeves and the Wedding Bells
Devil May Care (as Ian Fleming)
Non-fiction
The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives
Pistache
Faulks on Fiction
As editor
A Broken World: Letters, Diaries and Memories of the Great War (with Dr. Hope Wolf)
War Stories (with Jörg Hensgen)
About the Book
A novel of overwhelming emotional power, Birdsong is a story of love, death, sex and survival. Stephen Wraysford, a young Englishman, arrives in Amiens in northern France in 1910 to stay with the Azaire family, and falls in love with unhappily married Isabelle. But, with the world on the brink of war, the relationship falters, and Stephen volunteers to fight on the Western Front. His love for Isabelle forever engraved on his heart, he experiences the unprecedented horrors of that conflict – from which neither he nor any reader of this book can emerge unchanged.
About the Author
Sebastian Faulks’s books include the number one bestseller A Week in December, A Possible Life, Human Traces, On Green Dolphin Street and Charlotte Gray. Birdsong was first published in 1993 and has gone on to sell over three million copies. It is taught at school and university on both English and History syllabuses and is regularly voted one of the nation’s all-time favourite books. Faulks is a member of the government’s First World War Centenary Advisory Board. He lives in London with his wife and their three children.
www.sebastianfaulks.com
‘Magnificent – deeply moving’
Sunday Times
‘With Birdsong Faulks has produced a mesmerizing story of love and war … Faulks’s writing is so terrifyingly real that the reader can be forgiven for breaking out in a sweat at the horror of the bombardment above ground and the cloying and claustrophobic atmosphere below … This book is so powerful that as I finished it I turned to the front to start again’
Sunday Express
‘Amazing ... I have read it and re-read it and can think of no other novel for many, many years that has so moved me or stimulated in me so much reflection on the human spirit’
Daily Mail
‘An overpowering and beautiful novel ... Ambitious, outrageous, poignant, sleep-disturbing, Birdsong is not a perfect novel, just a great one’
Simon Schama, New Yorker
‘Engrossing, moving, and unforgettable’
The Times
Birdsong
FOR EDWARD
Introduction
A good deal has changed in the twenty or more years since I wrote this novel. Outside academia, the First World War was at that time an almost closed book. There were occasional lectures at the Imperial War Museum; there were battlefield tours in which a handful of surviving veterans took part; small military publishers brought out biographies of generals and reassessments of battles. But the audience for these things was what we now call ‘niche’; the level of interest and knowledge in the general population was low. When I told people I was writing a novel set in this period, with many scenes in the trenches, the response was discouraging. It was as though people felt those four years had been dealt with, assimilated and filed away.
I passionately disagreed. My feeling, which was based at that time on little more than haphazard reading and some conversations with veterans of the Western Front, was that an important aspect of the conflict had not been understood. It was difficult to be precise about what I thought was missing, but in rough terms I think it was this: a full appreciation of the soldiers’ physical experience; and, perhaps more importantly, a philosophical understanding of what it meant to be part of the first genocidal event of the century – the one that made the others imaginable. The novelistic themes that seemed to spin out of these historical questions were: What did those four years tell us about our species? Was our sense of what we are for ever changed?
But, fiction apart, there are interesting questions of memory and forgetting that the last twenty years have brought into focus. The drive to forget had clearly been irresistible, and began in November 1918. In the first eighteen months, men joined up in a whirl of enthusiasm. Patriotic feeling ran high; the uniform was something to show off to the girls; and all your friends were joining up. You didn’t want to be given a white feather or be left out of a great adventure. It was time the Germans were taught a lesson they would never forget, and history and propaganda both suggested that the war would be short.
The training was outdated and based on a belief that mounted cavalry would be decisive. Few strategists on either side foresaw what actually awaited: a static killing field, in which ten million men would be annihilated by shell blast or torn apart by machine guns. It was not only the efficient means of dispatch that was new, but the scale of the war. After the volunteers of Kitchener’s army had been dealt with, there came the conscripts: men not physically suited to war, but old, rickety or timid. The mud did not discriminate; it swallowed the reluctant with the brave.
It was difficult for ordinary men who survived this holocaust to find words to describe what no living creature had seen before. Families and friends at home were sometimes reluctant to ask too much; sometimes they were disbelieving or uninterested. To many survivors, silence seemed the best way forward: however much our view of human nature had been changed, life had to go on.
In the 1920s there were many attempts at novels, though most were really memoirs with the name of the regiment changed to ‘the Loamshires’ or similar. Most showed a struggle between the literary reticence of the period and the awful subject matter, with the former generally coming out on top. Exceptions included books by Frederic Manning and R.H. Mottram. A decade after the armistice, the enduring memoirs of the war, by such gifted writers as Graves, Sassoon and Blunden, began to emerge. These were highly polished works, but with a degree of self-protective, officer-class irony. The watershed year of 1928 also saw the first production of R.C. Sheriff’s moving play Journey’s End. Through the 1930s there was a steady flow of personal histories – from the officer perspective, such as Guy Chapman’s fine A Passionate Prodigality (1933) or from more oblique views, such as I Saw Them Die by the spirited American nurse, Shirley Millard (1936).
But in 1939, just when a new generation of writers might have been expected to shake off the numbness of trauma and produce something definitive, a new disaster occurred. And the way in which the Second World War was remembered was immediately different, principally in the way that the worldwide Jewish community set about naming and honouring those who had died in Nazi concentration camps.
Within a few years of 1945, a considerable new war literature had sprung up, much of it concerned with flying and escaping from prisoner-of-war camps. Most of it was heroic in tone, as befitted a war in which the moral cause had been so much clearer. Film-makers in particular relished the emerging stories of commandos and fighter pilots; these offered movement and glamour, unlike the bog of slaughter on the Western Front.
In the 1950s and 1960s, while cinema screens hummed with Spitfires, artistic interest in the First World War continued to dwindle. John Harris’s honourable 1961 novel, Covenant With Death, gave a lively account of the raising of a Yorkshire Pals battalion and its fate on the Somme, but read more like a documentary than a fully realised fiction. Dramatically, interest in the conflict seemed confined to a single play: Oh! What a Lovely War, staged by Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in London in 1963. This was based on a radio piece that used comic songs set against battlefield statistics. For the stage version, Littlewood insisted that the performers wear Pierrot costumes, not uniform; she said she wanted audiences to leave the theatre ‘laughing at the vulgarity of war’.
When historic events are being portrayed within this number of ironic layers the idea of real memory would appear to be dead in the water. The experience seemed beyond recall or imagination, relegated to another world – of big moustaches and funny hats.
So when I began to research the background for this novel, my instinct was to by-pass the published books and either speak to veterans or go to original documents. In November 1988 I went on a trip to Flanders with half a dozen old soldiers in their nineties, organised by the indefatigable historian of the period, Lyn Macdonald, whose work did a great deal to preserve the men’s stories before it was too late. The veterans were lucid, but, perhaps not surprisingly, found it difficult to give a sustained account of the experience; their way of remembering seemed principally anecdotal, especially after lunch. However, standing with these men in the mud at Aubers Ridge – the same mud from which they had collected the body parts of their friends in 1915 – and holding their hands as they spoke about it, gave me a sense of connection and helped bring the war out of the ‘Oh! What a lovely…’ world and back to reality.
And if the published work all seemed to leave things unexpressed, there were still documents. In the gloomy reading room of the Imperial War Museum you could order collections from a card index; and the diaries, letters, tickets, postcards, telegrams and so forth that tumbled onto the desk gave an instant connection to the past. This was raw material, authentic, mud-stained and unshaped by any extraneous demand. It was intensely thrilling to handle it.
As the centenary of August 1914 is now upon us, the newspapers, television and radio are full of debate and documentary. Who was to blame for the outbreak of war? The Germans? The Russians? The Serbs? Or did we all ‘sleepwalk’ to disaster (an interpretation enthusiastically received in Germany)? Could Britain have stayed out of it – with benefits to all? Or was it in its subtler way as righteous as the more clearly justified fight against the Nazis in 1939?
I think there were signs a few years ago that the obstacles to the memory of 1914–18 were starting to clear, like smoke from the battlefield. In 2000, the turn of the century seemed more significant than that of the millennium, since the former (unlike the latter) was small enough to have a character. The imperial world of 1905, with its archdukes, kings and kaisers had by 1995 become one of social democracy. The principal question, it seemed to me, was this: could the century-long transition have been achieved by means other than the extermination of millions in Europe and Russia? Whatever your answer, it must take into account the personal shortcomings of the crowned heads and their chiefs of staff in 1914; it must also acknowledge the failure of organized labour and international socialism to prevent war. The apportionment of responsibility is famously complex, but I don’t see how one can deny that the catastrophe of 1914–18 in some way legitimised – or at least made imaginable – the killing of millions as a political solution. And this in a continent that from the Renaissance, through the Enlightenment (terms scalded since 1914 with unintended irony) had believed itself to be, with whatever setbacks, the apex of gradually improving human civilisation.
As the enormity of that recognition sank in at the end of the twentieth century, I think there were signs of guilt and panic at a personal level as well. How else to explain the extravagant ceremony made of the death of Harry Patch, the last survivor of the war, in 2009? Patch served for three months only, in 1917, before being invalided out. He hated the war and everything it stood for. Yet when he died, two poet laureates wrote poems for him. Bristol University had awarded him an honorary degree and he had been given the freedom of the city of Wells. Radiohead composed a song for him; Bloomsbury published a biography of him; he was honoured by French and Belgian governments; he had a racehorse named after him. The Prince of Wales paid tribute at his funeral in Wells cathedral. All this not for a V.C. or a general but for someone who believed that war is the ‘slaughter of human beings’, which ‘isn’t worth one life’.
The excessive attention paid to Harry Patch’s death seemed to be motivated by a sense of guilt about our collective failure to inquire into the nature of that holocaust. Could making a fuss of one reluctant Lewis-gunner make up for the fact that for decades we had failed to extend to those who fought in the war the compassion and curiosity that was their due?
Any generalization about the ‘real’ nature of the Great War experience is likely to run into trouble. There were almost as many different stories as there were men. However terrible its consequences for Europe and for our understanding of ourselves as a species, we need to remember that most did get through it. Only a minority were ordered ‘over the top’. The majority of the troops did not die. To those from the poorest back - grounds, the idea of two meals a day, however rough and ready, was a novelty. But on 1 July 1916 on the Somme, seeing their friends and compatriots mown down before them, many lost their religious faith; some German machine gunners choked on their work and refused to kill further.
It is impossible even for historians who have read all the papers in all the archives to agree on who was ‘responsible’ for the Great War, though the recent books and television programmes have stirred a debate of high quality. At a conference at the British Library in February this year, Neil Faulkner, a Marxist historian, argued that the greatest feature of the war was the ‘mass desertions’ and ‘revolutionary movements’ that ‘shut down the war’ on the Eastern and Western Fronts; and that the war’s great legacy was the size of the anti-war movement in Britain today. This was an uplifting thesis, sadly unsupported by fact.
The biggest historical question in my mind when I began to write this novel was in fact the opposite: Why did the men carry on; why were the mutinies so contained? Or, more novelistically: How far can you go and still call yourself human? Friendship was a powerful unifying force; the fellowship of men seemed to grow in proportion to the horror of their circumstances. Then came the metaphysical sense of obligation to the dead: only by carrying on could you make their ends seem other than pointless. The men in the British Expeditionary Force were also, at company level, well led. After the public-school junior officers had been largely wiped out, the army looked to the ranks; so that by 1918 roughly half the officers came from what was crudely termed ‘working class’ backgrounds. They had seen the war from the ground up and knew how to look after their men; they were paternal and protective, with limited aggressive ambition; they knew how much they could ask. The main character of this novel, Stephen Wraysford, is one such.
The passing of a century has separated us from the events of 1914–18. Is it too much to hope that is has also given us perspective – that we can at last comprehend the essence of that conflict? Probably. There is an argument that merely to reimagine such things is in some way to legitimise them. Happily for me, this was not a point of view I was aware of when I wrote this book, which, whatever its literary and thematic aims, was also at some level and with whatever clumsiness, an attempt to offer a belated gesture of love and understanding to the men who were hurled into that catastrophic war.
© Sebastian Faulks, 2014
‘When I go from hence, let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is unsurpassable.’
Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali
PART ONE
FRANCE 1910
THE BOULEVARD DU CANGE was a broad, quiet street that marked the eastern flank of the city of Amiens. The wagons that rolled in from Lille and Arras to the north made directly into the tanneries and mills of the Saint-Leu quarter without needing to use this rutted, leafy road. The town side of the boulevard backed on to substantial gardens which were squared off and apportioned with civic precision to the houses they adjoined. On the damp grass were chestnut trees, lilac and willows, cultivated to give shade and quietness to their owners. The gardens had a wild, overgrown look and their deep lawns and bursting hedges could conceal small clearings, quiet pools, and areas unvisited even by the inhabitants, where patches of grass and wild flowers lay beneath the branches of overhanging trees.
Behind the gardens the river Somme broke up into small canals that were the picturesque feature of Saint-Leu; on the other side of the boulevard these had been made into a series of water-gardens, little islands of damp fertility divided by the channels of the split river. Long, flat-bottomed boats propelled by poles took the town-dwellers through the waterways on Sunday afternoons. All along the river and its streams sat fishermen, slumped on their rods; in hats and coats beneath the cathedral and in shirtsleeves by the banks of the water-gardens, they dipped their lines in search of trout or carp.
The Azaires’ house showed a strong, formal front towards the road from behind iron railings. The traffic looping down towards the river would have been in no doubt that this was the property of a substantial man. The slate roof plunged in conflicting angles to cover the irregular shape of the house. Beneath one of them a dormer window looked out on to the boulevard. The first floor was dominated by a stone balcony over whose balustrades the red creeper had made its way up to the roof. There was a formidable front door with iron facings on the timber.
Inside, the house was both smaller and larger than it looked. It had no rooms of intimidating grandeur, no gilt ballrooms with dripping chandeliers, yet it had unexpected spaces and corridors that disclosed new corners with steps down into the gardens; there were small salons equipped with writing desks and tapestry-covered chairs that opened inwards from unregarded passageways. Even from the end of the lawn it was difficult to see how the rooms and corridors were fitted into the placid rectangles of stone. Throughout the building the floors made distinctive sounds beneath the press of feet, so that with its closed angles and echoing air the house was always a place of unseen footsteps.
Stephen Wraysford’s metal trunk had been sent ahead and was waiting at the foot of the bed. He unpacked his clothes and hung his spare suit in the giant carved wardrobe. There was an enamel wash bowl and wooden towel rail beneath the window. He had to stand on tiptoe to look out over the boulevard where a cab was waiting on the other side of the street, the horse shaking its harness and reaching up its neck to nibble at the branches of a lime tree. He tested the resilience of the bed, then lay down on it, resting his head on the concealed bolster. The room was simple but had been decorated with some care. There was a vase of wild flowers on the table and prints of street scenes in Honfleur on either side of the door.
It was a spring evening with a late sun in the sky beyond the cathedral and the sounds of blackbirds from either side of the house. Stephen washed perfunctorily and tried to flatten his black hair in the small looking glass. He placed half a dozen cigarettes in a metal case which he tucked inside his jacket. He emptied his pockets of items he no longer needed: railway tickets, a blue leather notebook and a knife with a single, scrupulously sharpened, blade.
He went downstairs to dinner, startled by the sound of his steps on the two staircases that took him to the landing of the first floor and the family bedrooms, and thence down to the hall. He felt hot beneath his waistcoat and jacket. He stood for a moment disorientated, unsure which of the four glass-panelled doors that opened off the hall was the one through which he was supposed to go. He half-opened one and found himself looking into a steam-filled kitchen in the middle of which a maid was loading plates on to a tray on a large deal table.
‘This way, Monsieur. Dinner is served,’ said the maid, squeezing past him in the doorway.
In the dining room the family were already seated. Madame Azaire stood up.
‘Ah, Monsieur, your seat is here.’
Azaire muttered an introduction of which Stephen heard only the words ‘my wife’. He took her hand and bowed his head briefly. Two children were staring at him from the other side of the table.
‘Lisette,’ Madame Azaire said, gesturing to a girl of perhaps sixteen with dark hair in a ribbon, who smirked and held out her hand, ‘and Grégoire.’ This was a boy of about ten, whose small head was barely visible above the table, beneath which he was swinging his legs vigorously backwards and forwards.
The maid hovered at Stephen’s shoulder with a tureen of soup. Stephen lowered a ladleful of it into his plate and smelt the scent of some unfamiliar herb. Beneath the concentric rings of swirling green the soup was thickened with potato.
Azaire had already finished his and sat rapping his knife in a persistent rhythm against its silver rest. Stephen lifted searching eyes above the soup spoon as he sucked the liquid over his teeth.
‘How old are you?’ said the boy.
‘Grégoire!’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Stephen to Madame Azaire. ‘Twenty.’
‘Do you drink wine?’ said Azaire, holding a bottle over Stephen’s glass.
‘Thank you.’
Azaire poured out an inch or two for Stephen and for his wife before returning the bottle to its place.
‘So what do you know about textiles?’ said Azaire. He was only forty years old but could have been ten years more. His body was of a kind that would neither harden nor sag with age. His eyes had an alert, humourless glare.
‘A little,’ said Stephen. ‘I have worked in the business for nearly four years, though mostly dealing with financial matters. My employer wanted me to understand more of the manufacturing process.’
The maid took away the soup plates and Azaire began to talk about the local industries and the difficulties he had had with his work force. He owned a factory in town and another a few miles outside.
‘The organization of the men into their syndicates leaves me very little room for manoeuvre. They complain they are losing their jobs because we have introduced machinery, but if we cannot compete with our competitors in Spain and England, then we have no hope.’
The maid brought in a dish of sliced meat in thin gravy which she placed in front of Madame Azaire. Lisette began to tell a story of her day at school. She tossed her head and giggled as she spoke. The story concerned a prank played by one girl on another, but Lisette’s telling of it contained a second level. It was as though she recognized the childish nature of what she said and wanted to intimate to Stephen and her parents that she herself was too grown-up for such things. But where her own interests and tastes now lay she seemed unsure; she stammered a little before tailing off and turning to rebuke her brother for his laughter.
Stephen watched her as she spoke, his dark eyes scrutinizing her face. Azaire ignored his daughter as he helped himself to salad and passed the bowl to his wife. He ran a piece of bread round the rim of the plate where traces of the gravy remained.
Madame Azaire had not fully engaged Stephen’s eye. In return he avoided hers, as though waiting to be addressed, but within his peripheral view fell the sweep of her strawberry-chestnut hair, caught and held up off her face. She wore a white lace blouse with a dark red stone at the throat.
As they finished dinner there was a ring at the front door and they heard a hearty male voice in the hall.
Azaire smiled for the first time. ‘Good old Bérard. On the dot as usual!’
‘Monsieur and Madame Bérard,’ said the maid as she opened the door.
‘Good evening to you, Azaire. Madame, delighted.’ Bérard, a heavily set grey-haired man in his fifties, lowered his lips to Madame Azaire’s hand. His wife, almost equally well built, though with thick hair wound up on top of her head, shook hands and kissed the children on the cheek.
‘I am sorry, I didn’t hear your name when René introduced us,’ said Bérard to Stephen.
While Stephen repeated it and spelled it out for him, the children were dismissed and the Bérards installed in their place.
Azaire seemed rejuvenated by their arrival. ‘Brandy for you, Bérard? And for you, Madame, a little tisane, I think? Isabelle, ring for coffee also, please. Now then –’
‘Before you go any further,’ said Bérard, holding up his fleshy hand, ‘I have some bad news. The dyers have called for a strike to begin tomorrow. The syndicate chiefs met the employers’ representatives at five this evening and that is their decision.’
Azaire snorted. ‘I thought the meeting was tomorrow.’
‘It was brought forward to today. I don’t like to bring you bad tidings, my dear René, but you would not have thanked me if you had learned it from your foreman tomorrow. At least I suppose it won’t affect your factory immediately.’
Bérard in fact appeared to have enjoyed delivering the news. His face expressed a quiet satisfaction at the importance it had conferred on him. Madame Bérard looked admiringly at her husband.
Azaire continued to curse the work force and to ask how they expected him to keep his factories going. Stephen and the women were reluctant to give an opinion and Bérard, having delivered the news, seemed to have no further contribution to make on the subject.
‘So,’ he said, when Azaire had run on long enough, ‘a strike of dyers. There it is, there it is.’
This conclusion was taken by all, including Azaire, as the termination of the subject.
‘How did you travel?’ said Bérard.
‘By train,’ said Stephen, assuming he was being addressed. ‘It was a long journey.’
‘Ah, the trains,’ said Bérard. ‘What a system! We are a great junction here. Trains to Paris, to Lille, to Boulogne … Tell me, do you have trains in England?’
‘Yes.’
‘Since when?’
‘Let me see … For about seventy years.’
‘But you have problems in England, I think.’
‘I’m not sure. I wasn’t aware of any.’
Bérard smiled happily as he drank his brandy. ‘So there it is. They have trains now in England.’
The course of the conversation depended on Bérard; he took it as his burden to act as a conductor, to bring in the different voices, and then summarize what they had contributed.
‘And in England you eat meat for breakfast every day,’ he said.
‘I think most people do,’ said Stephen.
‘Imagine, dear Madame Azaire, roast meat for breakfast every day!’ Bérard invited his hostess to speak.
She declined, but murmured something about the need to open a window.
‘Perhaps one day we shall do the same, eh, René?’
‘Oh, I doubt it, I doubt it,’ said Azaire. ‘Unless one day we have the London fog as well.’
‘Oh, and the rain,’ laughed Bérard. ‘It rains five days out of six in London, I believe.’ He looked towards Stephen again.
‘I read in a newspaper that last year it rained a little less in London than in Paris, though –’
‘Five days out of six,’ beamed Bérard. ‘Can you imagine?’
‘Papa can’t stand the rain,’ Madame Bérard told Stephen.
‘And how have you passed this beautiful spring day, dear Madame?’ said Bérard, again inviting a contribution from his hostess. This time he was successful, and Madame Azaire, out of politeness or enthusiasm, addressed him directly.
‘This morning I was out doing some errands in the town. There was a window open in a house near the cathedral and someone was playing the piano.’ Madame Azaire’s voice was cool and low. She spent some time describing what she had heard. ‘It was a beautiful thing,’ she concluded, ‘though just a few notes. I wanted to stop and knock on the door of the house and ask whoever was playing it what it was called.’
Monsieur and Madame Bérard looked startled. It was evidently not the kind of thing they had expected. Azaire spoke with the soothing voice of one used to such fancies. ‘And what was the tune, my dear?’
‘I don’t know. I had never heard it before. It was just a tune like … Beethoven or Chopin.’
‘I doubt it was Beethoven if you failed to recognize it, Madame,’ said Bérard gallantly. ‘It was one of those folk songs, I’ll bet you anything.’
‘It didn’t sound like that,’ said Madame Azaire.
‘I can’t bear these folk tunes you hear so much of these days,’ Bérard continued. ‘When I was a young man it was different. Of course, everything was different then.’ He laughed with wry self-recognition. ‘But give me a proper melody that’s been written by one of our great composers any day. A song by Schubert or a nocturne by Chopin, something that will make the hairs of your head stand on end! The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings which normally we keep locked up in the heart. The great composers of the past were able to do this, but the musicians of today are satisfied with four notes in a line you can sell on a song-sheet at the street corner. Genius does not find its recognition quite as easily as that, my dear Madame Azaire!’
Stephen watched as Madame Azaire turned her head slowly so that her eyes met those of Bérard. He saw them open wider as they focused on his smiling face on which small drops of perspiration stood out in the still air of the dining room. How on earth, he wondered, could she be the mother of the girl and boy who had been with them at dinner?
‘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 towards 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, look 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 Madam 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 which 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 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 towards 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 goodbye 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 leaned 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 with 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 which 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 with 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 cultivate 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 of 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 banister 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 towards 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 leftwards 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 word ‘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 by 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 cover 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 towards 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 towards 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 boulevard and walked to 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 back yards of the bursting houses. There was the noise of poverty that comes from children on the streets and their mothers screaming threats or admonishments or calling out important news to neighbours. There was the racket of cohabitation 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.