Birdsong

  “Not with Lucien,” said Isabelle.

  Azaire’s face seemed to collapse. His voice had so pitifully requested a complete dismissal of the rumour that Isabelle’s partial denial appeared worse than a confirmation of what he feared.

  She saw this and moved to end his uncertainty even if she could not stop his anguish. “Not with Lucien. With Stephen.”

  Azaire looked up from his seat. “With … him?”

  “Yes.” Stephen looked evenly back at him. “With me. I pursued your wife. I seduced her. You must hate me, not her.”

  He wanted to protect Isabelle as far as he could, though he was astounded to find himself in this position: Isabelle could easily have prevaricated. His slow heart was beating hard. He looked at Azaire, whose jaw had gone loose, causing his mouth to open. There was a dribble of wine on his chin. Stephen pictured the misery from the way it affected the muscles of his face. He felt pity for him. Then, in the interests of preserving something for Isabelle and himself, he hardened his heart. It was an act of almost physical willpower, as he compelled the compassion to go out of him.

  Isabelle was no longer able to be cold toward Azaire. The brief sentences with which she had informed him of her unfaithfulness seemed to have drained her resolve and she began to weep and to apologize to him for what she had done. Stephen listened carefully to what she said. He did not begrudge Azaire his wife’s apologies but he did not want her to retreat too far.

  Azaire was incapable of saying more than “With him? Here?”

  Isabelle said, “I’m sorry … so sorry, René. I meant you no harm. It is a passion for Stephen. It was not done to hurt you.”

  “This … boy, this English boy? In my house? Where? In your bed?”

  “It doesn’t matter, René. It doesn’t matter where.”

  “It does to me. I want to know. Did you … in which room?”

  “For God’s sake,” said Stephen.

  Azaire sat silently at the table, his hand still clutching the base of his glass. His mouth dropped open again and he screwed up his eyes in puzzlement, as though looking into a bright sun.

  “And your father, Monsieur Fourmentier, what can he do …? What will they say? My God, my God.”

  Isabelle looked at Stephen and there was fear in her eyes. Stephen could see that she had not calculated what effect her sudden honesty would have on her husband. The fear was no doubt partly for Azaire’s well-being, but also seemed to be for herself: there was a chance that in the crisis she might lose her resolution and follow some older code of conduct which would compel her to put herself once more at Azaire’s mercy. It made Stephen feel uneasy as he looked at the wreckage of this suddenly precipitated storm. He felt he needed to keep Isabelle’s determination in place, but this could not be done if Azaire collapsed completely.

  He was muttering to himself: “Bitch … Your father told me and I never listened. In my own house. And now my children. What will become of them? Bitch.”

  “Listen.” Stephen moved swiftly round the table and took him by the shoulders. “What can you expect from a woman you have treated as you have treated Isabelle? Did you expect her to humiliate herself for your pleasure, to sit meekly at your table in the knowledge that you would beat her later?”

  Azaire was rejuvenated. “What did you tell him?”

  “It doesn’t matter what she told me. This is a house where everything can be heard. How can you sit there and call her names after what you’ve done to her? This is a woman with her own life and feelings and look what you have done to her. What have you done?” He pushed Azaire violently back into his chair.

  Azaire seemed inspired by Stephen’s anger. He stood up and said, “You will leave my house within the hour. If you have any sense you will never let me see you again.”

  “Certainly I will leave your house,” said Stephen. “And I am taking your wife with me. Isabelle?”

  “I don’t want this.” Isabelle shook her head. The words came from her mouth without thought or calculation in their purity of feeling. “I don’t know what to do or how to behave now. I could be happy in the simplest way, like any other woman with a family of her own, without this terrible pain I’ve caused. I won’t listen to either of you. Why should I? How do I know that you love me, Stephen? How can I tell?” Her voice fell to the low, soft note Stephen had heard when she spoke on his first evening in the house. It was a beautiful sound to his ears: pleading and vulnerable, but with a sense of strength in its own rightness. “And you, René, why should I trust you when you have given me so little reason even to like you?”

  Both men watched her in silence. Stephen believed in the strength of feeling between them, and believed it would persuade her.

  Isabelle said, “This is not a situation anyone can be prepared for. Nothing I have learned in religion, or from my family or my own thoughts is any help to me. I won’t be painted as some sort of whore by you, René. I’m a frightened woman, no more than that—not an adulterer, or a harlot or anything else. I’m just the same person I ever was, but you never took the trouble to find out what that was.”

  “Forgive me, I—”

  “Yes, I do forgive you. I forgive you any wrong you’ve done me and I ask you to forgive me the wrong I’ve certainly done to you. I am going upstairs to pack.”

  She left the room with a rustle of her skirt and a barely discernible trace of roses.

  “You go with him,” Azaire shouted after her, “and you are going to hell!”

  Stephen turned and left the room, trying to still the exultation of his heart.

  ———

  Isabelle placed the framed photograph of Jeanne on top of the clothes she had piled in her case. She paused for a moment, then added the family group with her parents in their Sunday best, Mathilde, dark-haired and womanly on her father’s right hand, herself, a little fair-haired child on her mother’s left, with Delphine, Jeanne, and Béatrice standing behind. The photograph had been taken in a park in Rouen; among the plane trees in the background an oblivious couple were strolling over the gravel. In the foreground at her father’s feet was the Fourmentiers’ small white dog.

  She looked into the staring face of her father, the eyes dark and remote above the thick moustache. How hard he would find it to understand what she was doing, she thought. How little he had ever tried.

  She packed two dresses and the blouse with the dogtoothed edging. She would need more practical clothes for travelling: a coat, and shoes she could walk in. Presumably she could send for others when they arrived wherever they were going.

  Isabelle did not pause for thought. She wanted to be out of the house, alone with Stephen, before the certainty deserted her and she began to consider the practical details.

  She heard footsteps in the corridor leading to her room and turned to see Stephen in the doorway. She ran to him and he held her close against his chest.

  “You are a wonderful woman,” he said.

  “What shall I say to the children?”

  “Say good-bye to them. Tell them you’ll write.”

  “No.” Isabelle stepped back from him and shook her head. Tears flowed from her eyes. “I have done wrong to them. I can’t pretend otherwise. I must just leave them.”

  “No good-byes?”

  “No. Quickly, Stephen. We must go. I’m ready to leave.”

  “Wait here. I must get my papers.”

  As Stephen ran up the stairs to his room he heard the sound of a woman’s voice shouting and sobbing on the floor below. There came the noise of a door slamming and he heard Grégoire’s voice asking what was going on. He threw his passport, his notebooks, work reports, razor, and a change of clothes into a small leather bag. As he descended to the first landing, he saw Lisette standing in her nightgown outside her bedroom. She looked pale and shocked.

  “What’s happening?” she said. “Why is everyone shouting?”

  Stephen felt a rush of pity for the girl. He turned speechlessly from her and ran to Isabelle’s room.
She had put on a coat and a green hat with a feather. She looked touchingly young.

  “All right?” said Stephen. “Shall we go?”

  She took his hand between hers and looked up into his grave face. She smiled and nodded as she picked up her case.

  Each space and unexpected corridor beneath the plunging roof with its conflicting angles was alive with voices and the sound of feet, heavy, hesitant, running or turning back. The door to the kitchen banged and rolled repeatedly on its hinges as Marguérite and the cook shuttled back and forth to the dining room under the pretext of clearing dinner, then lingered, listening, in the hallway. At the top of the stairs Stephen appeared with his arm round Isabelle, guiding her past the stricken looks and questions.

  “To hell,” Azaire repeated from the doorway of the sitting room.

  Isabelle felt the pressure of Stephen’s hand on the small of her back as they passed. She turned on the threshold of the house and saw the pale figure of Lisette at the bend of the stairs. She shuddered, and led Stephen out into the night.

  Back inside the house, Azaire ordered the children to wait on the landing while he went to Isabelle’s room. He pulled back the cover on the bed and looked at the sheets. He ran his hands over them. They were clean, starched, barely touched by the weight of his wife’s body. He went upstairs to his lodger’s room and ripped back the blanket. The narrow bed was more disarrayed than Isabelle’s, as though Stephen had slept less soundly or the maid had spent less time making it, but it bore no signs of the adultery: the sheets were clean, with the ridge of the crease running neatly up the centre.

  Azaire went back to the first floor and began to go through each room in turn. He raged with a desire to see the filth and shame of what they had done to him. He wanted to see the marks of his wife’s betrayal, the stains of her degradation. In the midst of his anger and his humiliation, he noted the return of a low urge he had not felt for many months.

  Grégoire stood terrified on the landing as his father scrutinized his bed. Lisette clutched her brother’s hand as they watched the wretched emotions of adulthood. Azaire held the sheets from Marguérite’s bed up to the light, believing he had seen a mark, but it was no more than beeswax or polish from her hand where she had not washed properly. He ran his fingers over the linen in the guest rooms and laid his head on it, inhaling deeply. There was only the smell of camphor.

  Eventually he stood defeated and flushed beneath the light at the top of the stairs. The doors to all the rooms stood open, their beds uselessly wrecked. Azaire was breathing heavily. In his haste and rage he had not thought of the red room. He had forgotten the narrow corridor with its plain wooden boards that doubled back from the garden side of the house toward the back stairs. Since he had first bought the house he had had no cause to visit it, had never in fact seen its finished shape, such as it was, after it had been cleared of the previous owners’ unwanted belongings and modestly redecorated by Isabelle. It was a place he had not refound, but which had stayed, as Stephen had feared it might for him, beyond the reach of memory.

  ———

  Stephen sat opposite Isabelle in the train going south towards Soissons and Reims. He felt the simple elation of his victory, the fact that it was he who had won, who had persuaded Isabelle against the weight of convention and sound argument to do the difficult and dangerous thing. And there was the deeper happiness of being with this woman, whom he loved, and the undeniable evidence, for the first time, that she was his. Isabelle smiled, then shook her head incredulously from side to side with closed eyes. When she opened them again they had a look of resignation.

  “What will they say? What will he say to Bérard and to his friends?” Her voice was intrigued but not anxious.

  “It’s not the first time a wife has left her husband.” Stephen had no idea what Azaire would say, but he did not feel inclined to imagine. He felt it was important that he and Isabelle concentrate on themselves.

  The train was the last of the evening, so they had had little choice of destination. At the station Isabelle had wrapped a shawl over her face, fearing recognition as she clambered on to the train. As it made its way south over the flat landscape, she relaxed; there might be years of regret, but the prospect of immediate drama and reverse had gone.

  The train stopped at a dimly lit station and they looked out of the window at a porter unloading mail and pushing a trolley full of boxes to a wooden building that gave on to the empty stockyard. The man’s face showed pale in the darkness. Behind him was the ordered black swell of a street, leading uphill into a town where the occasional yellow light showed hazily from behind curtains and shutters.

  The train shrugged and clanked out of the station and made its way south through the tranquil night. The summer was almost at an end and there was an edge of cold to the air. To the east was the forest of Ardennes, and beyond it the Rhine. After a stop at Reims they followed the line of the Marne through Joinville. Occasionally the gloomy river would be caught by moonlight when the railway traveled alongside before retaking its own course through cuttings and embankments whose high sides enclosed it in darkness.

  As they moved south, Isabelle came and sat next to Stephen, resting her head against his body. The rolling motion of the train made her eyes heavy; she slept as it picked out its set course, nosing its way to where the Marne joined the river Meuse, whose course linked Sedan to Verdun—a flat, unargued path through the lowlands of her native country.

  She dreamed of pale faces beneath rose-coloured lights; Lisette at the corner of the stairs, the bloodless features in the red glow, a lost girl, and others like her caught in some repeated loop of time, its pattern enforced by the rhythmic motion of the train; many white-skinned faces with dark eyes, staring in disbelief.

  ———

  They stayed in a hotel in the spa town of Plombières. It was a grey building with wrought-iron balconies and thick ivy. Their room was on the first floor; it overlooked a damp garden with a broken summerhouse and a number of outsized cedar trees. Behind the wall at the far end were the baths themselves, whose waters were held to have curative properties for people with rheumatism, chest complaints, and certain diseases of the blood. There were a dozen or so other residents in the hotel, mostly old couples, who ate in the ornate dining room. For the first three days Stephen and Isabelle barely left their room. Isabelle was tired by the journey and the strain of what she had done. She slept in the large wooden bed with its boat-shaped ends, and Stephen would sit beside her for hours, reading a book, smoking a cigarette, or standing on the balcony, looking over the peaceful little spa.

  A shy maid left trays outside their door at dinnertime and hurried back along the passageway. On the third day Stephen went down to the dining room on his own, and sat by the window that overlooked the square. The owner of the hotel brought him a menu.

  “Is Madame your wife quite well?” he asked.

  “Quite well, thank you. Just a little tired. I expect she’ll come down tomorrow.”

  Various residents nodded their greetings to Stephen as they took their places at table. He smiled back and drank from the bottle of wine he had ordered. A waiter brought fish in a heavy cream sauce. Stephen drank again and let himself slip into the tranquil atmosphere of this foreign world: nothing, he imagined, had changed for years in the ordered routine of the hotel, in the thin air or the rich food that was based on recipes from the eighteenth century, or in the probably imaginary qualities of the waters and the genteel, restrictive lives their presumed properties had supported in the town.

  On the fourth day Isabelle ventured out with him for a walk. She took his arm like a long-married wife as they explored the streets, sat for a time in an almost grassless park, and drank coffee in a square opposite the boys’ school.

  Stephen was endlessly curious. He asked Isabelle to describe her early life in the smallest detail; he never seemed to tire of stories of her days in Rouen.

  “Tell me more about Jeanne.”

  “I’ve
told you everything I can think of. Now you tell me how you came to be in this place, this institution.”

  Stephen exhaled slowly. “There’s not much to tell. My father worked for the post office in a flat part of England called Lincolnshire. My mother worked in a factory. They were not married, and when she became pregnant he disappeared. I never met him. From what I heard of him later he seemed an ordinary man, someone who took what he could find and preferred not to pay for it.”

  “Is that what you think is ordinary?”

  “It’s how people live. My father probably had some charm, though he was not a handsome man, not what you would think of as a seducer. He was just a man who liked women and I should think I have half brothers and sisters in England, though I’ve never met them. My mother left the factory and went back to live with her parents, who worked in a village. Her father was a farm labourer. My mother eventually got a job in service, as a maid in a big house. Like Marguérite.”

  Isabelle watched Stephen’s expression as he spoke. There seemed to be no emotion in his voice, though the line of his jaw had tightened a little.

  “But my mother was not a strong character either. When I was a small child I wanted her to prove herself independent of my father, so that he could be dismissed from our minds. In fact she got pregnant again, by someone who worked at the house. She was fond of me but never looked after me much. I was brought up by my grandfather, who taught me to fish and catch rabbits. I was a real farm boy. He also taught me how to steal and how to fight. He was quite young, still in his fifties, and very fit. He regarded it as proper that any labouring man should augment his income in whatever way he could. He would have bare-knuckle fights for money, if enough was offered, and he stole from the larger houses in the district. Mostly food or animals he’d trapped.

  “My mother went off with the man she’d met at the house. I heard that they went away to Scotland. Soon after this my grandfather was arrested on some small charge and was sent to prison. Part of his defence was that he needed to stay at home to look after me. The court ordered that I should be taken into a home in the local town, since he was not fit to be my guardian. I’d been quite happy running wild, living with my grandmother, and the next thing I was dressed in a sort of tunic and set to work scrubbing floors and tables in this huge brick building. We had to do lessons as well, something I hadn’t done before.