Birdsong. Part 4

In her room Madame Azaire wept as she paced from one side to the other. She was choking with pa.s.sion for him, but he frightened her. She wanted to comfort him but also to be taken by him, to be used by him. Currents of desire and excitement that she had not known or thought about for years now flooded in her. She wanted him to bring alive what she had buried and to demean, destroy, her fabricated self. He was very young. She was unsure. She wanted the touch of his skin.

She went downstairs and her step was so light that it made no sound. She found him clenched in combat with himself, leaning against the window. She said, "Come to the red room."

By the time Stephen turned round she had gone. The red room. He panicked. He was sure it would be one of those he had once seen but could never refind; it would be like a place in a dream that remains out of reach; it would always be behind him. He ran up the stairs and saw her turn a corner. She went down the main corridor to a narrow pa.s.sage, down again through a little archway. At the end of the corridor was a locked door that led into the servants' part of the house. Just before it, the last door on the left, was an oval china handle that rattled in the ill-fitting lock. He caught her as she opened the door of a small room with a bra.s.s bedstead and a red cover.

"Isabelle." He too was in tears. He took her hair in his hands and saw it flow between his fingers.

She said, "My poor boy."

He kissed her, and this time her tongue did not flee from his.

He said, "Where is Lisette?"

"The garden. I don't know. Oh G.o.d. Oh please, please." She was starting to shake and tremble. Her eyes had closed. When she opened them again she could barely breathe. He began to tear at her clothes and she helped him with urgent, clumsy actions. The waistcoat was caught on her elbow. He pushed back her blouse and buried his face in the satin slip between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. There was so much delight in what he saw and touched that he thought he would need years to stop and appreciate it, yet he was driven by a frantic haste.

Isabelle felt his hands on her, felt his lips on her skin and knew what he must be seeing, what shame and impropriety, but the more she imagined the degradation of her false modesty the more she felt excited. She felt his hair between her fingers, ran her hands over the bulge of his shoulders, over the smooth chest inside his s.h.i.+rt.

"Corne on, please, please," she heard herself say, though her breathing was so ragged that the words were barely comprehensible. She ran her hand over the front of his trousers, brazenly, as she imagined a wh.o.r.e might do, and felt the stiffness inside. No one upbraided her. No one was appalled. She could do whatever she wanted. His intake of breath caused him to stop undressing her and she had to help him pull down her silk drawers to reveal what she suddenly knew he had long been imagining. She squeezed her eyes tight shut as she showed herself to him, but still no guilt came. She felt him push her backward on to the bed, and she began to arch herself up from it rhythmically as though her body, independent of her, implored his attention. She felt at last some contact, though she realised with a gasp that it was not what she expected; it was his tongue, lambent, hot, flickering over and inside her, turning like a key in the split lock of her flesh. This shocking new sensation made her start to sigh and shudder in long rhythmic movements, borne completely away on her pa.s.sion, feeling a knot of pressure rising in her chest, a sensation that was impossible to sustain, to bear, though all its momentum seemed to be onward. In this conflict she thrashed her head from side to side on the bed. She heard her voice crying out in denial as from some distant room, but then the sensation broke and flooded her again and again, down through her belly and all her limbs, and her small voice, close to her head this time, said, "Yes." When she opened her eyes she saw Stephen standing naked in front of her. Her eyes fixed on the flesh that stuck out from him. He had still not made love to her; the joy was yet to come. He climbed on top of her and kissed her face, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, pulling the nipples upward with his lips. Then he rolled her over, ran his hands up the inside of her legs, above the silk stockings that her speedy undressing had not had time to remove, and between the cleft where her legs were joined. He kissed her from the small of her back over the pink swell of divided flesh, down to the back of her thighs where he rested his cheek for a moment. Then he began again at her ankles, on the little bones he had seen on the boat in the water gardens, and up the inside of her calves.

Isabelle was beginning to breathe fast again. She said, "Please, my love, please now, please." She could no longer bear his teasing. In her left hand she grasped the part of him she wanted to feel inside her and the shock of her action stopped him in his caressing. She opened her legs a little further for him, to make him welcome, because she wanted him to be there. She felt the sheet beneath her as her legs spread out and she guided him into her.

She heard him sigh and saw him take the rumpled sheet between his teeth and begin to bite on it. He barely moved inside her, as though he were afraid of the situation or of what it might produce.

Isabelle settled herself, luxuriously, on the feeling of impalement. It rolled around the rim, the edges of her; it filled her with desire and happiness. I am at last what I am, she thought; I was born for this. Fragments of childish longings, of afternoon urges suppressed in the routine of her parents' house, flashed across her mind; she felt at last connections forged between the rage of her desire and a particular attentive recognition of herself, the little Fourmentier girl. She heard him cry out and felt a surge inside her; he seemed suddenly to swell in her so that their flesh almost fused. The shock and intimacy of what he had done, leaving this deposit of himself, precipitated a shuddering response in her, like the first time, only shorter, fiercer, in a way that made her lose contact for a moment with the world.

When she had recovered enough to open her eyes, she found that Stephen had rolled off her and was lying face down across the bed, his head tilted awkwardly to one side, almost as though he were dead. Neither of them spoke. Both lay quite still. Outside was the sound of birds.

Tentatively, almost shyly, Isabelle ran her fingers down over the vertebrae that protruded from his back, then over the narrow haunches and the top of his thighs with their soft black hair. She took his damaged hand and kissed the bruised and swollen knuckles.

He rolled over and looked at her. The hair was disarrayed, its different shades milling over her bare shoulders and down to the stiff, round b.r.e.a.s.t.s that rose and fell with her still-accelerated breathing. Her face and neck were suffused with a pink glow where the blood was diluted by the colour of the milky young skin with its tracery of brown and golden freckles. He held her gaze for a moment, then laid his head on her shoulder, where she stroked his face and hair.

They lay, amazed and unsure, for a long time in silence. Then Isabelle began also to think of what had happened. She had given way, but not in some pa.s.sive sense. She had wanted to make this gift; in fact she wanted to go further. This thought for a moment frightened her. She saw them at the start of some descent whose end she could not imagine.

"What have we done?" she said.

Stephen sat up and took her by the arms. "We have done what was right." He looked at her fiercely. "My darling Isabelle, you must understand that." She nodded without speaking. He was a boy, he was the dearest boy, and now she would have him always.

"Stephen," she said.

It was the first time she had used his name. It sounded beautiful to him on her foreign tongue.

"Isabelle." He smiled at her and her face lit up in reply. She held him to her, smiling broadly, though with tears beginning again in the corners of her eyes.

"You are so beautiful," said Stephen. "I won't know how to look at you in the house. I shall give myself away. When I see you at dinner I shall be thinking of what we did, I shall be thinking of you as you are now." He stroked the skin of her shoulders and laid the back of his hand against her cheek.

Isabelle said, "You won't. And nor shall I. You will be strong because you love me."

Stephen's level gaze, she thought, was not afraid. As his hands stroked her b.r.e.a.s.t.s she began to lose her concentration. They had talked only for a minute but what they had said, and what it meant, had made her tired of thought. A feeling, more compelling, began to rise through her body as I his hand worked over these soft and privately guarded parts of her. Her breath began to come unevenly again; the low exhalations were broken and she felt herself begin to slide again once more, willingly, but downward where there was no end in sight.

Azaire was in a sprightly mood that evening. Meyraux had come close to accepting his new pay offer to the workers, and although the strike had spread among the dyers, there seemed little chance of its infecting other parts of the industry. His friend Berard, who had not called for more than a week, had promised to look in with his wife and mother-in-law for a game of cards after dinner. Azaire ordered Marguerite to fetch up two bottles of burgundy from the cellar. He congratulated Isabelle on her appearance and asked Lisette what she had been doing.

"I went for a walk in the garden," she said. "I went down to the end where it joins the others, where it grows all wild. I sat down under a tree and I think I fell asleep. I had a very strange dream."

"What was that?" Azaire began to pack some tobacco into his pipe. Lisette giggled. "I'm not going to tell you."

She seemed disappointed when he did not press her but turned instead to his wife. "And how have you whiled away the day? Some more pressing errands in town?"

"No, just the usual things," said Isabelle. "I had to speak to the butcher's boy. They sent the wrong kind of steak again. Madame Bonnet was complaining about all the work she has to do. Then in the afternoon I read a book."

"Something educational, or one of your novels?"

"Just a silly thing I found in a bookshop in town."

Azaire smiled indulgently and shook his head at his wife's frivolous tastes. He himself, it was a.s.sumed, read only the great philosophers, often in their original languages, though this arduous study must have taken place in private. When he settled in beneath the glow of the lamp after dinner, his hand invariably reached out for the evening paper.

Isabelle's eyes flickered upward from the sofa, where she sat with her predinner sewing, at the sound of a man's footsteps descending the stairs. Stephen stood in the doorway.

He briefly took Azaire's offered hand and turned to wish Isabelle good evening. She breathed a little less uneasily as she saw the sternness of his dark and steady face. His self-control appeared unshakeable.

She noticed at dinner that he did not address her, nor even look at her if he could avoid it. When he did, his eyes were so blank she feared that she could see indifference, even hostility in them.

Marguerite came backward and forward with the food, and Azaire, in a lighter mood than usual, talked about a plan for a day's fis.h.i.+ng that he was going to put to Berard later. They could take the train to Albert and then it might be enjoyable to rent a little pony and trap and take a picnic up to one of the villages beside the Ancre.

Gregoire became animated at the thought of it. "Will I be allowed my own rod?" he asked. "Hugues and Edouard both have their own. Why can't I?" Isabelle said, "I'm sure we can find you one, Gregoire."

"Do you fish, Monsieur?" said Azaire.

"I did when I was a child. Just with worms and bits of bread. I would sit for hours by a pool in the gardens of a big house near where we lived. I went there with a few other boys from the village and we would sit there and tell stories while we waited. It was rumoured that there was an enormous carp. One of the boys' father had seen it, in fact he had almost caught it, or so he claimed. There were certainly some large fish in the pool because we caught some of them. The trouble was that we were always being ordered off the land because it was private property." Isabelle listened with some astonishment to this speech, which was easily the longest Stephen had addressed to her husband since he had been in the house. Apart from his brief disclosure to herself and Lisette at lunchtime, it was the first time he had admitted to anything so personal as a childhood. The more he spoke, the more he seemed to warm to the subject. He fixed Azaire with his eye so that he had to wait for Stephen to finish before he could resume eating the piece of veal that was speared on the end of his fork.

Stephen continued: "When I went to school there was no time for fis.h.i.+ng any more. In any event I'm not sure I would have had the patience. It's probably something that appeals to groups of boys who are bored most of the time anyway but prefer to be together so that they can at least share the new things they are discovering about the world."

Azaire said, "Well, you're welcome to join us," and put the piece of veal into his mouth.

That's very kind, but I think I have imposed enough on your family outings." You _must _come," said Lisette. "They have famous 'English teas' at Thiepval."

"We don't have to decide now," said Isabelle. "Would you like some more veal, Monsieur?"

She felt proud of him. He spoke the language beautifully, he was elegantly polite, and now he had even told them something of himself. She wanted to take the credit for him, to show him off and sun herself in the approval he would win. She felt a pang of loss when she reflected how very far she was from being able to do this. It was Azaire who was her choice, her pride, the man in whose glory she was bound to live. She wondered how long she could maintain the falsity of her position. Perhaps what she and Stephen were attempting, the denial of truth on such a scale, was not possible. Although she was frightened by the drama of pretence, she was also excited by the exhilaration of it, and by the knowledge that it was a shared venture. They had left the red room at five in the afternoon and she had not spoken to him since. She had no way of telling what had pa.s.sed through his mind. Perhaps he was already regretting what had happened; perhaps he had done what he wanted to do and now the matter was finished for him.

For her, in the delirium of joy and fear, there were still practical matters to attend to. She had to dress and conceal the torn front of her blouse when she left the red room. She had to take the sheets and the cover from the bed and deliver them unseen to the laundry room. She had to check and recheck the room for signs of adultery.

In her own bathroom, she took off her clothes. She was known to have baths twice a day and often at this time, but the blouse was beyond repair and would have to be thrown away secretly. Her thighs were sticky where the seed she had felt so deeply planted in her had later leaked. It had stained the ivory silk drawers that had been bought for her by her mother from the rue de Rivoli in Paris as part of her wedding trousseau. When she washed in the bath there were more traces of him between her legs and she scoured the enamel afterward. The major problem was still the bed covers. Marguerite was particular about the linen and knew which rooms needed to be changed and when, even if it was Madame Bonnet who usually did the work. Perhaps she would have to take one of them into her confidence. She decided to give Marguerite the next afternoon off and to wash and iron the sheets herself, replacing them before anyone had been into the red room. She would throw the red cover away and say she had suddenly grown tired of it. This was the sort of impulsive behavior that annoyed her husband, but which he thought characteristic. She felt no revulsion for the stains and physical reminders of their afternoon, not even for the flecks of her own blood that she had seen. She had learned from Jeanne not to be ashamed, and in this shared mark she saw the witness of an intimacy that pressed her heart.

Marguerite went to answer the front door to the Berards. Azaire thought it proper to continue the evening in the sitting room, or even in one of the small rooms on the ground floor, where he sometimes instructed Marguerite to lay out coffee and ices and little cakes. However, Berard was ponderously considerate.

"No need for us to disturb this delightful family scene, Azaire. Let me rest my bulk on this chair here. If little Gregoire would be so kind... That's it, then Madame Berard can sit on my left."

"Surely you would be more comfortable if--"

"And then we shall not feel that we have inconvenienced you. Aunt Elise would only accompany us on the condition that we were just neighbours dropping in on you, not guests who were to be specially treated in any way at all." Berard settled himself in the chair vacated by Lisette, who was given permission by her stepmother to take Gregoire up to bed. Lisette kissed her father briefly on the cheek and skipped out of the room. Although she had been pleased with her grown-up role that morning, there were times when it still paid to be a child.

Stephen envied her. It would have been easy enough for him to leave the families together; in fact they might have preferred it. While he could look at Isabelle, however, he wanted to stay. He felt no particular impatience with the falsity of their position; he was confident that what had occurred between them had changed things irrevocably and that the social circ.u.mstances would adjust in their own time to reflect this new reality.

"And you, Madame, have you heard any more of your phantom pianist with his unforgettable tune?" Berard's heavy head, with its thick grey hair and red face, was supported by his right hand as he rested his elbow on the table and looked toward Isabelle. It was not a serious enquiry; he was merely tuning up the orchestra.

"No, I haven't been past that house since we last saw you."

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

"No. I was reading a book this afternoon."

Berard smiled. "A romance, I'll bet. How charming. I read only history myself. But tell us about the story."

"It was about a young man from a modest family in the provinces who goes to Paris to become a writer and falls in with the wrong kind of people." Stephen was taken aback by Isabelle's unembarra.s.sed fluency. He watched as she spoke and wondered if he could have told that she was lying. Nothing in her manner was different. One day she might lie to him and he would never know. Perhaps all women had this ability to survive, from the subject of Isabelle's book the conversation moved on to the question of whether the families who lived in the provinces could be as important in their way as those who lived in Paris.

"Do you know the Laurendeau family?" asked Azaire.

"Oh yes," said Madame Berard brightly, "we've met them on several occasions."

"I," said Berard weightily, "don't consider them to be friends. I have not invited them to our house and I shall not be calling on them." Something mysterious but n.o.ble lay behind Berard's rejection of the Laurendeau family, or so his manner implied. No amount of interrogation from his friends would extract from him the delicate reasons for his stance.

"I don't think they ever lived in Paris," said Azaire.

"Paris!" said Aunt Elise, suddenly looking up. "It's just a big fas.h.i.+on house, that city. That's the only difference between Paris and the provinces--the people there buy new clothes every week. What a lot of peac.o.c.ks!"

Azaire picked up his own thoughts on the importance of family. "I have never met Monsieur Laurendeau, but I've heard that he's a very distinguished man. I am surprised that you haven't built up your acquaintance, Berard." Berard pursed his lips and wagged his index finger backward and forward in front of them to show how sealed they were.

"Papa is not a sn.o.b," said Madame Berard.

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

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

"Are you all right?" said Azaire, impatiently. "You look very warm." Isabelle leaned forward on to the table and covered her face with her hands.

"I don't feel well. It's so hot in here."

Madame Berard put an arm round her shoulders.

"It's a circulation problem, without a doubt," said Berard. "It's nothing to make a fuss about, it's quite a common ailment."

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

"I think I shall go to bed, if you don't mind," she said.

"I'll send Marguerite up," said Azaire.

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

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

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

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

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

"Come in," she said, her voice uncertainly sliding back into wakeful-ness. The door opened slowly and Stephen appeared in the dim light from the landing.

"What are you doing?"

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

She smiled anxiously. "You must leave."

He looked about the room. There were her photographs of her sisters, her hairbrushes, a gilt mirror on the dressing table, her clothes laid across the chair. He leant over her bed, and felt his hand sink into the rich pile of covers beneath the quilt. A sweet smell rose up from the bed. He kissed her on the lips and touched her hair before leaving.

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

The following morning Stephen went into town. Azaire told him he should not return to the factory for another day or so, but he found it difficult to stay quietly in the house with Lisette, Marguerite, and various other visitors or members of the household preventing Isabelle from being alone or available to talk. He thought of his life as a wood of confusion with two or three clear tracks on which he could orientate himself. From their directions he could remember and look forward with something like clarity. While they were straight enough and discernible to him, they also felt like scars that had been cut into the undergrowth, and he had no desire to reveal them to other people. For Isabelle he felt great grat.i.tude and admiration; in the pressure of his emotion toward her there was an impulse to disclosure, a natural movement toward trust. He did not fear this nakedness but he did not feel pleasure at the prospect of it.

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

He sat down on a chair and held his face in his hands. He saw a picture in his mind of a terrible piling up of the dead. It came from his contemplation of the church, but it had its own clarity: the row on row, the deep rotting earth hollowed out to hold them, while the efforts of the living, with all their works and wars and great buildings, were no more than the beat of a wing against the weight of time. He knelt forward on the cus.h.i.+on on the floor and held his head motionless in his hands. He prayed instinctively, without knowing what he did. Save me from that death. Save Isabelle. Save all of us. Save me.

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

"Have you seen Madame Azaire?"

"No, Monsieur. Not since lunch. Perhaps she's in the garden."

"And Lisette?"

"I think she's gone into town."

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

He turned the handle on a door that led to a small study. Isabelle was sitting inside, reading a book. She put it down and stood up as he came in. He went over to her, not sure if he should touch her. She put her hand on his.

"I was in the cathedral. I lost track of time."

She looked up at him. "Is it all right? Is everything all right?" He kissed her and she pressed herself close to him. He found his hands at once searching beneath her clothes.

Her eyes looked up into his. They were wide and enquiring, full of urgency and light. Almost at once they closed as she let out a little sigh of excitement. They were leaning against the wall of the room and he had slipped his hand through the fastening at the back of her skirt. He could feel the satin under his fingers, then a round soft swell beneath. He felt her fingers on the front of his trousers.