Birdsong (35 page)

She pushed back her hair, settled her glasses, and took out the book that Irene’s Bob had given her to read. She found it hard going. It seemed addressed to insiders, people who already knew all the terminology and all about the different regiments; it reminded her of the aircraft magazines her father had bought for her during his final attempt to turn her into the male child he had wanted. Still, in some of the book’s more matter-of-fact moments, the calmly given statistics and geography, there was something that held her attention. Most eloquent of all were the photographs. There was one of a moon-faced boy gazing with shattered patience at the camera. This was his life, his actuality, Elizabeth thought, as real to him as business meetings, love affairs; as real as the banal atmosphere of the cross-channel ferry lounge, known to every modern holiday-maker in Britain: his terror and imminent death were as actual and irreversible to him as were to her the drink from the bar, the night in the hotel ahead, and all the other fripperies of peacetime life that made up her casual, unstressed existence.

Although her grandmother was French, she did not know the country well. She fumbled for words as the expressionless policeman thrust his hand through her car window at the dock and made some rapid, guttural demand. The big lorries shuddered on the quayside; no other cars seemed to have made this winter crossing to a cold, dark continent.

Out of Calais, she found the road south. Her mind turned to Robert. She pictured the evening they would spend in Brussels. He was good at finding restaurants where he would not see anyone he knew and could talk to her without being on his guard. It was not that anyone would have minded; the majority of diplomats and businessmen away from home for long periods made “arrangements” for themselves. Robert was unusual in the double inconvenience of having both his wife and his mistress in England.
The thought of this made Elizabeth laugh. It was typical of a certain impracticality in him. The reason he did not want anyone to see them was because he felt guilty. Unlike his worldly confrères, who entertained their women on one of numerous business accounts, introduced them to their friends and even, sometimes, to their wives, Robert pretended that Elizabeth did not exist. This was something she found less appealing, but she had plans for it.

She chose a hotel in the town of Arras, which Bob had told her was near a number of cemeteries and battlefields. The hotel was down a narrow side street that issued into a quiet square. She went through iron gates and up a gravel path to the front door. She stepped inside. To the right was a dining room with low lights in which half a dozen people scattered singly among the many empty tables were taking dinner with an audible sound of cutlery on china. A stooped waiter eyed them from the entrance to the kitchens.

The reception desk was in a nook below the stairs. A woman with iron-coloured hair wound into a bun put down her pen and looked up at her through thick glasses. There was a room with its own bathroom; someone would bring her case up later. Would she be taking dinner in the hotel? Elizabeth thought not. She carried the small case herself, down a long corridor in which the intermittent ceiling lights seemed to grow dimmer the further she went from the stairhead. At last she found the number on the door. It was a vast room in which a riotous wallpaper had been pasted over the original nineteenth-century distemper. A seraglio effect had been attempted with drapes from a canopy around the four-poster bed, though the oval china door handles and the marble-topped bedside tables remained unorientalized. The room had a smell of damp cardboard, or perhaps brown tobacco from an earlier decade, mixed with something sweeter, a prewar aftershave or the attempted concealment of some half-remembered plumbing failure.

Elizabeth went out into the night. Back on the main street she could see the square and the station to her right and the top of a cathedral or substantial church ahead of her. Keeping the spire in view, she went through the narrow streets, looking for somewhere congenial to eat, where a woman on her own would not attract attention. She found herself eventually in a large square that looked
a little like the Grand’ Place in Brussels. She tried to imagine it full of British troops and their lorries and horses, though she was not sure if they had had lorries in those days, or, come to that, whether they still used horses. She ate in a crowded brasserie full of young men playing table football. Pop music thundered from a speaker perched above the door. Occasionally the noise was augmented by one of the youths revving a two-stroke motorcycle just outside.

She looked up Arras in the index of Bob’s book and found references to staff headquarters, transport, and a number of baffling numbers and names of regiments, battalions, and officers. The waiter brought herring with potato salad, both of which seemed to have come from a tin. He deposited a mock-rustic pitcher of red wine next to her glass.

So what did they do in a town, exactly? She had thought of wars being fought in the countryside, on open ground.

She drank some red wine. What did it matter anyway? It was just a stopover on the way to see Robert.

She read a few pages of the book and drank some wine. The combination of the two things awakened a small determination in her: she would understand this thing, she would get it clear in her mind. Her grandfather had fought in it. If she had no children herself she should at least understand what had gone before her; she ought to know what line she was not continuing.

The waiter brought a steak with a towering portion of frites. She ate as much as she could, plying mustard over the surface of the meat. She watched as the juice from it furred the edges of the potatoes, turning them red. She enjoyed the small physical details she noticed on her own; in company she would just have talked and swallowed.

The food and wine brought relaxation. She sat back against the red plastic-covered bench. She saw two of the thinnest and tallest of the young men eyeing her from the bar and looked down quickly to her book in case they should interpret her idleness as encouragement.

Her small determination hardened into something like resolve. What did it matter? It mattered passionately. It mattered because her own grandfather had been here, in this town, in this square: her own flesh and blood.

T
he next day she drove to Bapaume and followed the signs for Albert, a town, Bob had told her, that was close to a number of historic sites and which, according to the book, had a small museum.

The road from Bapaume was dead straight. Elizabeth sat back in her seat and allowed the car to steer itself, with only her left hand resting on the bottom of the wheel. She had slept well in the seraglio, and the hotel’s strong coffee and icy mineral water had given her a sense of strange well-being.

After ten minutes she began to see small brown signs by the side of the road; then came a cemetery, like any municipal burial ground, behind a wall, belched on by the fumes of the rumbling container lorries. The signs began to come faster, even though Albert was still some ten kilometres away. Through the fields to her right Elizabeth saw a peculiar, ugly arch that sat among the crops and woods. She took it for a beet refinery at first, but then saw it was too big: it was made of brick or stone on a monumental scale. It was as though the Pantheon or the Arc de Triomphe had been dumped in a meadow.

Intrigued, she turned off the road to Albert on to a smaller road that led through the gently rising fields. The curious arch stayed in view, visible from any angle, as its designers had presumably intended. She came to a cluster of buildings, too few and too scattered to be called a village or even a hamlet. She left the car and walked toward the arch.

In front of it was a lawn, lush, cropped, and formal in the English style, with a gravel path between its trimmed edges. From near to, the scale of the arch became apparent: it was supported on four vast columns; it overpowered the open landscape. The size of it was compounded by its brutal modern design; although clearly a memorial, it reminded her of Albert Speer’s buildings for the Third Reich.

Elizabeth walked up the stone steps that led to it. A man in a blue jacket was sweeping in the large space enclosed by the pillars.

As she came up to the arch, Elizabeth saw with a start that it was written on. She went closer. She peered at the stone. There were names on it. Every grain of the surface had been carved with British names; their chiselled capitals rose from the level of her ankles to the height of the great arch itself; on every surface of every column as far as her eyes could see there were names teeming, reeling, over surfaces of yards, of hundreds of yards, over furlongs of stone.

She moved through the space beneath the arch where the man was sweeping. She found the other pillars identically marked, their faces obliterated on all sides by the names that were carved on them.

“Who are these, these …?” She gestured with her hand.

“These?” The man with the brush sounded surprised. “The lost.”

“Men who died in this battle?”

“No. The lost, the ones they did not find. The others are in the cemeteries.”

“These are just the … the unfound?”

She looked at the vault above her head and then around in panic at the endless writing, as though the surface of the sky had been papered in footnotes.

When she could speak again, she said, “From the whole war?”

The man shook his head. “Just these fields.” He gestured with his arm.

Elizabeth went through and sat on the steps on the other side of the monument. Beneath her was a formal garden with some rows of white headstones, each with a tended plant or flower at its base, each cleaned and beautiful in the weak winter sunlight.

“Nobody told me.” She ran her fingers with their red-painted nails back through her thick dark hair. “My God, nobody told me.”

A
fter driving round Brussels for almost an hour Elizabeth despaired of finding Robert’s flat. The only time she had come close to the right street she had found herself obliged to follow a one-way system that took her directly away from it. She left her car on the edge of a building site and hailed a taxi.

She was looking forward to seeing him; she could feel herself becoming excited as the driver pressed through the traffic. She was also a little nervous because every time she saw Robert she was worried that he would not live up to her recollection. It was as though there was this pressure on him to justify the effect he had on her life. She was denied to other men, lived alone, and was party to a continuing deceit; it was up to him to be worth it. Yet he was the most diffident of men, unable to make such claims for himself, offering no promises, and always urging her to act in her own interests. Perhaps that was one reason why she loved him.

She paid off the taxi and rang the bell on the street door. His voice came through the intercom and the door opened with a raucous buzzing sound. She ran upstairs, her feet echoing on the wooden steps. He was at the door of his first-floor flat, a bearlike scruffy man, cigarette in hand, still in his suit, but with the collar loosened and the tie at half-mast. Elizabeth flung herself into his arms.

She felt as she often did for the first few minutes in his presence, disorientated and in need of reassurance. She explained about the car and, when he had finished laughing, he said they had better go and get it and put it in the underground parking.

Half an hour later they were back at the flat and able to begin again. Elizabeth went to have a bath while Robert stuck his feet up on the coffee table and began telephoning restaurants.

She came back into the sitting room in a new black dress, ready to go out. He handed her a drink. “I promise I didn’t put any tonic in. I just showed it the label. You look wonderful.”

“Thank you. You look all right too. Are you going to wear that suit or are you going to change?”

“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Don’t tell me.”

He went and sat next to her on the sofa, clearing a space among the books and papers. He was a heavily built man, tall, with a deep chest and a heavy belly. He began to stroke Elizabeth’s hair and to kiss her glistening lips. He slid his hand up her skirt and murmured in her ear.

“Robert, I’ve just got dressed. Stop it.”

“You’ll spoil my makeup,” he said.

“I mean it. And get your hands off there. You should wait till later.”

He laughed. “This way I can relax and enjoy dinner.”

“Robert!”

He laddered her stocking and smudged her lipstick, but she had time to repair the damage before they went out. He was right in a way, Elizabeth thought; it was easier to talk once this closeness had been reestablished.

At dinner he asked her what she had been doing and she told him about work and her mother and how she had become intrigued by her mother’s parents. As she talked, it seemed to become clearer to her. Her life had reached an age at which she should no longer be the last to die; there ought to be someone younger than she was, a generation of her children who should now be enjoying that luxurious safety of knowing that grandparents and parents still lay like a barrier between them and their mortality. But in the absence of her own children she had started to look backward and wonder at the fate of a different generation. Because their lives were over she felt protective; she felt almost maternal toward them.

She described her visit to Irene’s house, where she had met Bob, someone who, from Irene’s description, sounded as though he was seldom out of the pub or the betting shop, and how she had found a small birdlike man with thick glasses and quick hands who offered her a choice of two or three books from a room full of shelves.

“But nothing had prepared me for what I saw. The scale of it.
The memorial is as big as Marble Arch, bigger, and every inch of it is written on. It all looks so recent. The cleaner showed me a shell they had found in the wood last week.”

Robert refilled her glass several times while she talked, and when they left the restaurant and set off toward the Grand’ Place she felt light-headed and relaxed. Brussels seemed such a solid town, a monument to the efficiency of Flemish labour, to the comfort of large meals produced with French imagination, and above all to the pleasures of peace.