Birdsong

  She pressed him once more with her grandfather’s name; if he did not respond she would leave him alone and not meddle any more with things that did not concern her.

  “My brother. I brought him back all right. Always looked after him, I did.”

  “Your brother? Was that in the war? Did he fight with you? And my grandfather? Captain Wraysford?”

  Brennan’s voice piped up. “We all thought he was mad, that one. And the sapper with him. My mate Douglas, he was my mucker, he said, ‘That man’s strange.’ But he held him when he died. They was all mad. Even Price. The CSM. The day it ended he ran out with no clothes. They put him in a loony bin. They bring me this tea, I say I don’t want that. My brother’s good to me, though. Caught some good fish too. I like a nice bit of fish. You should have seen the fireworks. The whole street was dancing.”

  His grip of time gave way again, but Elizabeth was moved by what she had heard. She had to look away from Brennan, down to the orange-and-brown carpet.

  It was not what he said that was important. He had told her that her grandfather had been strange, whatever that might mean in such a context; he told her they thought he and some friend of his were mad, and—though this bit was unclear—that he had comforted a dying man. She didn’t feel inclined to press him for clarification, however. Even if he had been lucid enough to give it, she felt it would have made no difference. It was not what Brennan said; it was the fact that some incoherent part of him remembered. By hearing his high voice in the tiny mutilated body, she had somehow kept the chain of experience intact.

  She sat, feeling great tenderness toward him, holding his hand, as the limited range of what he could recall began to play itself again. After another ten minutes she stood up to leave.

  She kissed him on the cheek and walked quickly across the cavernous room. She said she would visit him again, if he liked, but she could not bear to look back at the small body in the chair where it had perched for sixty years.

  Outside the high Victorian walls, she ran toward the sea. She stood on the road that overlooked the water, breathing gulps of salty air in the rain, digging her fingernails into the palms of her hands. She had rescued some vital connection, she had been successful in her small errand; what she could not do, which made her curse and wring her hands, was restore poor Brennan’s life or take away the pity of the past.

  “It’s for you,” said Erich, wearily proffering the telephone receiver with its tangled flex to Elizabeth. “It’s a man.”

  “A man,” said Elizabeth. “Erich, you’re so precise.” It was Robert. He was going to find himself unexpectedly in London that evening and wondered if she would like to come to see him in his flat.

  “I’m sorry it’s such short notice,” he said. “I’ve only just found out. I don’t suppose you’re free.”

  Elizabeth was going to the cinema and then to a party somewhere in south London. “Of course I’m free,” she said. “Shall I come round at about eight?”

  “I’ll see you then. We’ll stay in, shall we? I’ll buy some food.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll get it,” she said with a swiftness based on experience of Robert’s shopping.

  When she had disentangled her earlier arrangements, she went through into Erich’s room to see if she could help him.

  “So,” he said, the sound causing half an inch of ash to tumble down the front of his cardigan, “the errant knight is paying a call.”

  “I do wish you wouldn’t listen to my conversations.”

  “If you use the office as a centre for your social life how can I help it?”

  “It’s not such a very busy life, is it? One man once a month. There must be worse. Cheer up, Erich. I’ll buy you lunch.”

  Erich sighed. “All right. But we won’t go to Lucca’s. I’m fed up with that man. You see the same trays of sandwich filling day after day. I think he just smears a new layer of mashed sardine over what’s already in there. The bottom inch must have been there since Lucca came to London in nineteen fifty-five.”

  “How do you know that’s when he came?”

  “We immigrants, you know, we stick together. We’re frightened of your bloody police and your Home Office regulations. The year you arrive is important.”

  “Does the Home Office give you a course in how to run a sandwich bar? I mean, all these Italians from different parts of their country, all of them grew up with wonderful food and they come here and they all produce the same egg mayonnaise, the same mashed sardines in stale rolls, the same coffee that tastes of acorns, when in Italy it’s like nectar. Do the immigration people give them a complete kit or what?”

  “You have no respect for us wretched refugees, do you? Be careful or I’ll insist you take me to the best restaurant in London.”

  “Anywhere you like, Erich. It’s my pleasure.”

  “My God, that man puts you in a good mood, doesn’t he? It’s like ringing a bell. It’s like Skinner’s rats.”

  “Don’t you mean Pavlov’s dogs?”

  “No, I’m an Anglo-Saxon these days. Skinner will do for me. Get back to work, will you? I’ll come through at one, not a minute before.”

  Erich was quite right, Elizabeth thought, as she went back to her desk. Robert rang; she jumped. His voice made her happy. It was better to have some source of happiness than none, though, wasn’t it? She had pushed and pulled him and tried to change his mind; she had analysed her own feelings and guessed at his; she had done everything she could to make him leave his wife, but nothing had changed. She had resigned herself to not thinking about the future. The grim conversations and the tearful partings would come back soon enough.

  ———

  Robert had a small top-floor flat in a block off the Fulham Road. While he waited for Elizabeth he tried to remove traces of his family, though it was difficult to obliterate them completely. The flat had an open kitchen attached to the sitting room with a bamboo curtain dividing them. On the wooden unit between the rooms there were two Chianti bottles with red candles stuck in them, which gave it the air of a Chelsea bistro from the sixties, as Elizabeth frequently pointed out. They could not be thrown away because Robert’s daughter liked them.

  Half a dozen of his wife’s dresses hung in the wardrobe, and there was some of her makeup in the bathroom cabinet.

  He could at least remove her photograph from the sideboard and bury it beneath the tablecloths in the drawer. Each time he did this he felt a pang of superstitious guilt, as though he had stabbed her effigy. He wished her no harm; he recognized in her the qualities of dedication and generosity he feared that he himself lacked, but with Elizabeth he could not help himself.

  Many of his male colleagues assumed it was an arrangement of convenience, a lighthearted sideshow of the kind the majority of them enjoyed. Robert knew that Elizabeth also thought so, however hard he tried to convince her to the contrary. When he protested that he was not that kind of man, she laughed at him. He had been unfaithful to his wife for one ill-advised night before he met Elizabeth, but with her, as he tried to explain, it was different. He believed he had married the wrong woman. He didn’t want to reclaim some notional freedom, he just wanted to be with Elizabeth. He had been addicted to her initially in a physical way: a week without her body made him vague and irritable. Then the mocking confidence of her character had intrigued him. If, as she sometimes claimed, he used her just as an amusing diversion, why was it not more enjoyable? Why was there so much anguish in what his colleagues nudgingly hinted must be such fun?

  He heard her ring at the intercom as he was straightening the cushions on the sofa.

  “What on earth is this?” said Elizabeth, fingering his sweater.

  “I had time to change out of my suit, so I—”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “I bought it this afternoon. I thought it was time I smartened myself up.”

  “Well you can get rid of that for a start. And are those flared trousers? Robert, really.”

  “T
here’s not a single man in Europe who doesn’t have slightly flared trousers. You can’t buy any other sort in the shops.”

  She went into the bedroom and found some old corduroy trousers and an inoffensive sweater. Robert pretended to protest when she took control of small aspects of his life, but privately he was pleased. He admired her for knowing about such things and he was flattered that she cared enough about him for it to matter.

  Properly dressed, he made drinks and stood with his arm round Elizabeth as she set about cooking the food she had brought. This was the time he liked best, when everything was anticipation and the evening had not really begun.

  While they ate he talked about his work and the people he had met in the course of it. Elizabeth urged him on with questions. He feared boring her, but she clearly liked the sardonic way he described the various meetings and dinners he had attended.

  They managed to spend an evening and a night of enclosed harmony without discussing the difficult decisions that awaited them. Robert was glad, and Elizabeth too, when she left with a light step in the morning, seemed elated.

  On Saturday afternoon Françoise telephoned to say she had found twenty more notebooks in the attic, and Elizabeth went down at once to fetch them. She had nothing to do that evening, so she would have a long bath, not bother with dinner, but study the notebooks and see if she could make any headway where Bob had failed.

  She lit the fire in the sitting room to warm it up while she was in the bath. She wondered whether some law would prevent the gas board from going on strike. Almost everyone else had at one stage during the winter, lining up to take their turn. If they stopped the gas, would the army take over the supply? She could always go and stay with her mother, who had oil-fired heating, though she would have to take Mrs. Kyriades with her, otherwise she wouldn’t last a day in the cold …

  Elizabeth brought her mind back to the notebooks. She curled up in her dressing gown on the sofa and opened the first one. It had a date, 1915, inside the front cover. They were all dated, she discovered, from 1915 to 1917. The one she had given Bob had been from 1918, she thought. In some of them were lines of English. “Arrived back at Coy HQ at ten. Still no word from Gray abt attack.” Elizabeth felt a leap of excitement at the sight of the word “Gray.” Again she had touched the past. It had stopped being history and had turned into experience.

  She flicked through the books at random. There seemed to be an almost complete and sequential record, though she noticed that after a long entry on 30 June 1916 there was nothing for two months. Had something happened?

  She settled her reading glasses and picked up another notebook. There was a ring at the doorbell.

  She went crossly into the hall to answer the intercom. “Hello?” she said abruptly.

  It cracked and fuzzed. “It’s me.”

  “Who?”

  “Stuart, of course. It’s freezing.”

  Elizabeth was dumb. Stuart. God. She had asked him over.

  “Come up. I was just … in the bath. Come on up.” She pushed the button on the intercom and left the door of the flat open as she dashed into the bedroom. She ripped off her glasses, tore the combs from her hair, and wrapped the dressing gown more modestly about her. She could hear him knocking at the open door. He must have run up the stairs.

  She proffered her cheek. “I’m sorry. I’m running a bit late.”

  “Hmmm,” he said. “I thought I couldn’t smell any enticing aromas on the stairs.”

  “Come in, come in. I’m sorry it’s such a mess.” The notebooks were open all over the floor; her breakfast coffee cup was still on the table. Short of actually having her clothes hanging in front of the fire to dry she could hardly have made it clearer that she was not expecting anyone.

  Stuart appeared not to notice. “I brought you this,” he said, handing her a bottle of wine. She peeled off the paper.

  “Lovely,” she said. “Muscadet. Is that very special? I don’t know anything about wine.”

  “I think you’ll find it’s pretty good.”

  “You’ll have to excuse me while I get dressed. I’m sorry to be so chaotic. Help yourself to a drink from the side there.”

  Elizabeth cursed steadily under her breath as she dressed. She pulled on a knee-length navy wool skirt she had just bought, woollen tights, and boots. She thought about the top. She didn’t want to look too dowdy, but on the other hand she was going to have to go out into the freezing night to buy some food. She took a turtleneck from the drawer and an old leather jacket from the closet. There was no time for makeup. Stuart would have to take her au naturel. Terrifying thought, she murmured, as she quickly brushed her hair. This was not the kind of thing that Lindsay, who thought her so poised, would ever have imagined happening to her. She quickly fastened a pair of red earrings as she went through to the sitting room.

  “Ah, what a transformation. Magnificent. You—”

  “Look, I’ve just realized I forgot to buy any pasta. We’re having pasta and I forgot the pasta. Would you believe it? So I’m just going to slip out. Is there anything you’d like while I’m there? Cigarettes? Turn on the television. Have another drink. I won’t be a minute.”

  She managed to get out of the front door before Stuart had a chance to protest. She ran to the supermarket on Praed Street and hastily collected all she would need to make a quick dinner. She had more wine at home if Stuart’s bottle was not enough for both of them. It was some red wine Robert had brought; she wasn’t sure if Stuart would approve, but her shopping bag already looked suspiciously full.

  “Just thought I’d buy a few other things while I was there,” she explained to Stuart as she puffed through into the kitchen. She poured herself some gin and started cooking.

  “What’s this?” said Stuart, standing in the doorway, holding out his hand to her. “It looks like a buckle from a belt.”

  Elizabeth took it. “Gott mit uns,” she read from the lettering on it.

  “God with us,” Stuart translated. “I found it on the carpet.”

  “Just something I got in a junk shop,” said Elizabeth. It must have fallen out of one of the notebooks, but she didn’t want to discuss it.

  Once dinner was on the table Elizabeth began to relax. Stuart hadn’t seemed to mind the chaos of her arrangements; in fact he had hardly seemed to notice. He was complimentary about the food and took charge of the wine himself, making sure their glasses stayed full.

  “So, tell me all about yourself, Elizabeth Benson,” he said, sitting back in his chair.

  “I think I already have. This time and last time. Between the two I think I’ve covered the ground. You tell me some more about your work. You’re a marketing consultant, didn’t you say?”

  “That’s right, yes.”

  “What does it entail?”

  “How long is a piece of string?”

  “You know what I mean. Do people come to see you and ask how to sell their products? Is that what it is?”

  “That’s part of it. It’s rather more complicated than that.”

  “Well, go on. Tell me. I’m sure I can follow.”

  “We are in the skills business. We like to see ourselves as beneficent jailers. We have a set of keys for all occasions. The keys unlock the potential of a business. We have to teach people how to use them, which key fits which lock. But above all we have to teach them how to ask the right questions.”

  “I see,” said Elizabeth, with a slight hesitation. “So you give advice and sales go up and you take a percentage. Is that it?”

  “It’s more a question of seeing how each part of a business can relate to the other parts. So suppose you’re in product development and Bloggs is in sales, then unless you’re asking the right questions you may be pulling in different directions. I always say our main aim is to teach people not to need us.”

  “And how do I know when I don’t need you?”

  “That’s a very good question.”

  “Is it one of the questions you would hav
e taught me to ask?” Elizabeth felt a twitch at the corner of her mouth, which she tried to quell.

  “It’s not quite that simple.”

  “I thought it might not be. Anyway. I thought you were a musician.”

  Stuart ran his hand back through his hair and resettled his glasses. “I am a musician,” he said. “It’s just that I don’t make a living from it. You don’t make a living from being a cook, but you’re still a cook, aren’t you? Do you follow?”

  “I think so. You play the piano very well anyway.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’m afraid it’s only ice cream. I meant to make something, but I didn’t have time. Is that all right?”

  As she made coffee in the kitchen and tried to spoon the frozen ice cream from its carton without snapping the shaft off the spoon, Elizabeth was struck, not for the first time, by the thought that her life was entirely frivolous.

  It was a rush and slither of trivial crises; of uncertain cash flow, small triumphs, occasional sex, and too many cigarettes; of missed deadlines that turned out not to matter; of arguments, new clothes, bursts of altruism, and sincere resolutions to address the important things. Of all these and the other experiences that made up her life, the most significant aspect was the one suggested by the words “turned out not to matter.” Although she was happy enough with what she had become, it was this continued sense of the easy, the inessential nature of what she did, that most irritated her. She thought of Tom Brennan, who had known only life or death, then death in life. In her generation there was no intensity.

  She took the coffee and the ice cream back into the sitting room. Stuart had put a record on, a Beethoven piano concerto, and was listening to it with closed eyes.

  Elizabeth smiled as she put his ice cream down in front of him. She couldn’t quite make up her mind about Stuart. She was impressed by his piano playing and flattered by his attention, but some part of her remained unconvinced.