Birdsong (12 page)

The ticket hall was busy with families negotiating excursions to the countryside. Trolleys with clanking wheels were pushed up and down the platform by vendors offering wine and loaves of bread filled with cheese or sausage. By the time the Azaires arrived, the windows of the large restaurant were already steamed up with the vapour from the kitchen, where the soup was boiling for lunch. An aroma of cress and sorrel was just discernible when the swing doors pushed open to reveal the waiters in their black waistcoats and long white aprons carrying trays of coffee and cognac to the tables at the front and shouting back orders to the bar. At the end farthest from the kitchen was a tall cash desk at which a grey-haired woman was making careful entries in a ledger with a steel-nibbed pen.

Two locomotives were panting on the polished rails, their tenders piled high behind them. The black of the coal, and smudged faces of the driver and fireman, spoke of engineering toil and industrial work that had driven the tracks out west to Paris and north to the coast; this contrasted with the glossy flanks of the painted carriages and the bright display of local cloth among the women and children who thronged the platforms in pastel dresses with coloured parasols. Grégoire had to be dragged from his ecstatic admiration of the Paris express and over to the platform where the small train was waiting to take the branch line to Albert and Bapaume.

As they sat on the hot plush of the carriage seats, they watched the centre of the city recede slowly behind them. The spire of the cathedral flickered into view as the train heaved itself east to Longueau, where it juddered over the lines of crossing rails before it found its course northward and began to pick up speed, the wheeze of exhausted steam gradually replaced by the repeated sound of the wheels on the track beneath.

Lisette sat with her hands in her lap next to her stepmother in the middle of one bench seat with Grégoire on her other side and Azaire, flanked by Stephen and Marguérite, opposite.

“So are you going to catch the biggest fish?” she said to Stephen, her head on one side.

“I shouldn’t think so. I expect you need special local knowledge. French fish are cleverer than English ones.”

Lisette giggled.

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter how big the fish is. It’s the sport of catching it.”

“I’ll catch the biggest one,” said Grégoire. “You wait.”

“I bet you don’t catch a bigger one than Stephen,” said Lisette.

“Who?” said Azaire.

“You mean Monsieur Wraysford, Lisette,” said Isabelle primly, her voice snagging slightly on her own hypocrisy.

Lisette looked at her stepmother with calm, quizzical eyes. “Do I? Oh, yes, I suppose I do.”

Isabelle felt her heart whisper and beat. She dared not catch Stephen’s eye, though had she looked she would not have found it, since at the first sound of his Christian name he had anticipated embarrassment and fixed his eyes on the landscape of green downland revealed in streaming rectangular frames by the windows of the train.

Neither Azaire nor Grégoire made anything of Lisette’s slip, and Isabelle embarked on an urgent and insistent cross-examination of Marguérite about whether she had brought changes of clothes in case the children wanted to swim in the river.

“Anyway,” Lisette said to Grégoire, “no one would want to eat anything you caught, would they, Ste–Monsieur?”

“What? Why not? I expect you’re a good fisherman, aren’t you, Grégoire? That’s a fine new rod you’ve got there.”

Lisette looked angrily at her brother, who appeared to have stolen Stephen’s attention, and said nothing for the rest of the journey.

A second train took them from Albert out along the small country line beside the Ancre, past the villages of Mesnil and Hamel to the station at Beaumont. The sun appeared from behind clouds banked high above a wooded hill, and lit up the green
valley of the river. There were some meadows between the railway line and the water and some large areas of unkempt grass. They picked their way down a dry path and through a gate in the fence that lay twenty yards or so back from the river. They could see other anglers on the opposite bank, solitary men and a few boys perched on stools or sitting with their feet in the water. The Ancre was sometimes no wider than a strong stone’s throw and in other places broad and forbidding enough for only a confident swimmer to contemplate crossing. In the wide stretches, there seemed barely any agitation of the surface that licked the margins marked by rushes and rotting logs which had caught in the weeds; in the narrower reaches the water occasionally showed white where a small current split the surface.

Azaire installed himself on a canvas stool and lit his pipe. He was disappointed that the Bérards had not been able to accompany them; conversation was never more enjoyable than when Bérard was there to bring out the best in him. These days there was not much to say to Isabelle, and the children bored him. He baited his line and cast it carefully into the water. With or without Bérard, it was not a bad way to pass a summer’s day, beside a river in pleasant countryside, with the sound of rooks in the trees and the peaceful swell of the downs all round him.

Stephen helped Grégoire to bait his new rod and then settled himself at the foot of a tree. Lisette stood and watched him, while Isabelle and Marguérite set out a rug in the shade.

By one o’clock no one had caught anything. The river’s surface had been undisturbed by fish of any kind, though they could just make out the figure of a small boy some way down the opposite bank whose homemade float seemed barely to touch the water before the line was whisked in again with a flashing, heavy creature on the end. They walked back to the station and took a pony and trap up the hill to the village of Auchonvillers, which had been recommended by Bérard as having a passable restaurant. He had not been to it himself but had been told it was well known in the district.

Azaire straightened his tie outside the door. Isabelle ran her eye quickly over the children to make sure they were respectable. Auchonvillers was a dull village, consisting of one principal road
and a few tracks and lesser streets behind it, most of them connected to farms or their outbuildings. The restaurant was more accurately a café, though its dining room was full of local families taking lunch.

They had to wait by the entrance until a young woman showed them to a table. They settled down at last and Isabelle smiled encouragingly at Grégoire, whose hunger had made him sulky.

“At least people seem to be properly dressed,” said Azaire, looking round the room.

Marguérite was nervous about eating with her employers and could not decide what she wanted to eat when the waitress returned. She asked Isabelle to decide for her. Azaire poured wine for himself and, after she had fractiously insisted, for Lisette.

Stephen looked over the table at Isabelle. Six days earlier she had been Madame Azaire, the distant and respected object of his passion. Now she was grafted to him, in flesh and in feeling. There was the high collar of her dress with the dull red stone at the throat, the formal arrangement of her hair, and the eyes turning this way and that in social concern but keeping always that point of light at the centre that seemed to him to speak so clearly of her hidden life that he sometimes felt amazed that other people could not read her infidelity with a single glance. He watched her talking to Grégoire or reassuring Marguérite, and he wanted to be alone with her, not making love, but talking to a truer version of her. When he judged there was a safe moment, he sought out her eyes with his and inclined his head in a gesture of affirmation so small that only Isabelle could have seen it, and he saw by the fractional softening of her expression that she had.

At this moment Stephen knew he would not return to England. There had been the possibility, he now conceded, that his feeling for Isabelle could have been discharged or relieved by what they did in the red room. But it had become clear to him that it was not a contained appetite that could be exhausted or satisfied. It split and spread and changed its shape and entered areas of his thought and feeling far removed from the physical act itself. It had become more important to him than the maintenance of his livelihood or his career or his duty to his employers. He was now mastered by the feeling; he could not rest until he
knew where it would end. Almost as decisive as his tenderness toward Isabelle was an overpowering sense of curiosity.

Although his mind worked clearly and had never had any difficulty in dispatching the tasks set for it by schoolmasters or employers, Stephen had not developed the habit of analysis. His confidence in himself was not checked by judgement; he followed where nothing more than instinct took him, and relied on some reflexive wariness to help. Looking at Isabelle, he knew also that the feeling he had for her was of a kind seldom experienced, and therefore he was obliged to follow it.

A strong, metallic-tasting trout was succeeded by a watery stew that they managed to eat with the help of quantities of bread. Isabelle, engrossed in making Grégoire eat his food, looked serene when she turned periodically to the rest of the table. Stephen guessed that it was the deliberate destruction of the basis of her family role that made her able to resume it with such apparent contentment. No sarcasm of her husband, no suggestive remark of Lisette or pointless tantrum of Grégoire could now disturb her charming equilibrium.

After lunch they returned to the river. Azaire went back to his stool and Grégoire to a small tree trunk he had found at the edge of the water. Stephen walked down the bank in the direction of Beaucourt. The big sky over the rolling farmland had now cleared and was filled with the sound of larks, which made him shudder in distaste. He sat down at the foot of a tree and idly began to bait the hook on the rod Azaire had lent him. He felt a hand lightly touch his shoulder and another cover his eyes. He started, but then relaxed at the gentleness of the touch. He placed his own hand over the fingers on his shoulder and stroked them. They were slender and feminine. He gripped the hand and turned round. It was Lisette. She gave a little cry of triumph.

“You didn’t think it would be me, did you?”

Knowing his eyes had already betrayed his surprise, Stephen merely said, “I didn’t hear you creep up behind me.”

“You expected it to be someone else, didn’t you?” Lisette had a coquettish but determined look.

“I wasn’t expecting anyone at all.”

Lisette walked around him, her hands behind her back. She
was wearing a white dress and her hair was tied back with a pink ribbon.

“You see, Monsieur Stephen, I know everything about you and my stepmother.”

“What do you mean?”

Lisette laughed. Stephen remembered the wine she had drunk at lunchtime. She lowered her voice and said huskily, “ ‘My darling Isabelle,’ ” then sighed and panted as though with longing or desire, before beginning to laugh again.

Stephen shook his head and smiled in feigned incomprehension.

“That day after lunch I went out into the garden and I fell asleep on a bench. When I woke up I walked back to the house. I still felt a little dizzy when I got back, so I sat down on the terrace and I heard sounds from an open window upstairs. They were very quiet, but they were such funny sounds.” Lisette began to laugh again. “And that evening after dinner I heard someone creeping oh-so-quietly along the corridor to her room, then tiptoeing back downstairs.”

She looked at Stephen with her head on one side. “Well?” she said.

“Well what?”

“What do you say?”

“I think you’re a girl with a strong imagination.”

“Yes, I’m certainly that. I’ve been imagining all the things you’ve been doing and I think I would like to try them.”

Stephen laughed in genuine amusement.

“It isn’t funny. You don’t want my father to know what I’ve been hearing.”

“You’re a child,” said Stephen, feeling himself begin to sweat.

“No I’m not. I’m almost seventeen. I’m nearer your age than she is.”

“Do you like Isabelle?”

Lisette looked taken aback. “No. I mean yes, I used to.”

“She’s been kind to you.”

Lisette nodded.

“Think about that,” said Stephen.

“I will. But you shouldn’t have led me on.”

“Shouldn’t have what?”

“When you gave me that carving, I thought … You know, you
are
the right age for me. Why shouldn’t I have wanted you for myself?”

Stephen began to see that she was not a child who was making trouble for its own sake, but someone whose feelings had been hurt. There was some truth in the things she said.

“I’m sorry about the carving,” he said. “You were sitting next to me. If it had been Grégoire I would have given it to him. I meant nothing by it. In fact I did make one for Grégoire later.”

“So it meant nothing at all?”

“I’m afraid not.”

Lisette put her hands on his arm. “Stephen, I’m not a child, even if they treat me as one. I’m a woman—at least almost a woman. My body is a woman’s body, not a child’s.”

He nodded. He thought by keeping calm he might placate her. “I understand. It’s difficult for you, especially without a mother.”

“What do you know about my mother?”

“Don’t be angry, Lisette. I have no mother, either, and no father. I do know, I do understand.”

“All right. Perhaps you do. But I meant what I said. I want you to do those things to me.”

“I can’t do that, Lisette. You must know that. Be fair to me. Be fair to yourself.”

“Is it that I’m not pretty enough? Am I not as pretty as her?”

He looked at her. Flushed with wine and confusion, she was attractive. She had deep-set brown eyes with thick lashes, coarse hair, and a slim waist.

“Yes, you’re pretty.”

“Touch me, then, touch me as you touch her.”

She held on to his arm with both hands. He realised how affected she was by the wine; her eyes did not quite focus as she looked up into his.

She took his hand and rubbed it between her breasts. Despite himself, Stephen felt the reflex of desire.

“Lisette,” he said, “this is very foolish. Your parents are just down at the bend in the river. I am not going to let you tease me or humiliate yourself. What I will do, if you like, is to kiss you, just
very quickly, if you promise that you will go away and never say another word about this.”