Birdsong (48 page)

At last he managed to catch himself in a moment of waking
and force his legs up. He stood at the window and gazed at the fields.

It took some minutes before he could convince himself that he was not dreaming. The sensation felt no different, to begin with, from the half-dozen times he had thought himself awake, only then to find that he was still asleep and had dreamed it.

Gradually some clarity returned to him. He held tight to the frame of the window and breathed deeply. The sense of disorientation diminished.

I am tired, he thought, as he pulled a cigarette from its case. I am tired in my body and in my mind, as Gray pointed out. Perhaps Gray, or one of his Austrian doctors, could also explain the curious sequence of hallucinating dreams.

He straightened out his uniform and pushed his hair into place where he had ruffled it in sleep. Pulling back the door of the compartment, he wove his way down the swaying carriage to the restaurant car. Only two tables were taken and he was able to seat himself by the window. The steward waddled down the aisle with a menu.

Stephen was surprised by the choice. It had been years since he had been confronted with such variety. He asked for consommé, then sole, and steak-and-kidney pudding. The waiter offered him the wine list. His pocket was filled with English bank notes he had bought with his pay in Folkestone. He ordered the most expensive wine on the list, which was six shillings a bottle.

The steward hovered with a ladle full of boiling soup, most of which he deposited into the crested plate, though by the time he had finished, the starched white cloth bore a long trail of brown. Stephen found the soup too strong to be pleasant; the taste of fresh beef stock and seasoning confused him. He had not eaten lunch or dinner in Amiens and his palate had grown used to Tickler’s plum-and-apple pudding, bully beef, and biscuits, with only an occasional slice of cake sent out from England to Gray or Weir.

The little fillets of sole with the delicate film of veins and intricate white layering of flesh were too subtle for him to taste. With some ceremony the steward then poured an inch of wine into the crystal glass. Stephen swallowed quickly and told him to
pour. While he waited for the steak-and-kidney pudding, he drank properly. He found the taste overpowering. It was as though his whole head had been filled with small explosions of scent and colour. He had not tasted wine for six months, and then only a rough, unlabelled white. He put the glass down quickly. Water at the front tasted simply of water if it had come up with the rations, or something worse if it had been sieved from shellholes; tea had an equally straightforward flavour—of petrol, from the cans in which it was carried. But when he drank this wine it felt as though he were drinking some complex essence of France itself, not the visceral inferno of Picardy, but a pastoral, older place where there was still hope.

He was evidently even more tired than he had thought. He ate as much of the steak-and-kidney pudding as he could. He passed over the dessert and smoked a cigarette with coffee. At King’s Lynn he took a branch line along the Norfolk coast toward Sheringham, which he thought was the place Weir had recommended. However, he found as the small train puffed along that he was impatient with travelling. He wanted to be outside in the clear, peaceful air; he longed for an inn with a soft bed. At the next station, a village called Burnham Market, he hauled his valise down from the luggage rack and jumped out onto the platform. He was able to walk into the village itself, which was bisected by a road on either side of which was a plush, well-kept green. Most of the houses that overlooked it had been built in the eighteenth century; they were spacious but modest and were interspersed with half a dozen shops, including a pharmacy, a chandler, and a place that sold equipment for horses.

Behind a huge chestnut tree was a long, low-built inn called The Blackbird. Stephen went into it and rang a bell on a counter at the foot of the stairs. No one answered, so he went into the stone-flagged bar. It was empty, though there were still uncollected beer glasses from lunchtime on the tables. It had a dark, cool atmosphere, given by the floor and the heavy wooden beams.

He heard a female voice behind him and turned to see a plump woman in an apron who smiled a little uncertainly as he met her eye. She told him she was only the cleaner and the landlord was out for the afternoon, but she could let him have a room if he
would sign the register. She showed him upstairs to a small bedroom with a mahogany chest of drawers and an old wooden bedstead with a fat white eiderdown on it. There was one ladder-back chair by the door and a washstand with a china jug and basin. Just by the door was a small bookshelf with half a dozen well-read volumes on it. Beyond the chest was a window that overlooked the green at the front of the hotel where the chestnut tree’s white blossom blocked out the sky. Stephen thanked the woman and threw his valise on to the bed. It was the kind of room he had wanted.

When he had unpacked he lay down on the bed and closed his eyes. He wanted to sleep, but his eyelids were flickering too much. Each time sleep seemed near his body jolted him back from it. Eventually he fell into a half-waking state, like the one he had found himself in on the train, in which brightly illuminated scenes from the last two or three years occurred at random in his mind. Incidents and men he had forgotten recurred with vivid immediacy, and then were gone. He tried to pull himself back from the lurid sequence of memories. He kept seeing Douglas falling off the stretcher on to the slippery floor of the trench as a shell landed; he could hear the lifeless thump of his passive body. A man he had forgotten, called Studd, came back to his mind, his helmet blown back and his scalp raked by machine-gun bullets as he bent to help another man who had fallen.

Stephen climbed off the bed. His hands were shaking like Michael Weir’s during a bombardment. He breathed in deeply, hearing the air catch in his chest. It seemed to him extraordinary that he should be feeling the shock now, when he was safe in a tranquil English village.

The thought of his surroundings stirred him. It was a long time since he had been in England. Perhaps it would be good for him to walk outside and look at it.

His boots echoed on the uncarpeted wooden steps as he went down, hatless, into the hall and out into the air.

He heaved his shoulders up, then let them drop in a long, broken sigh. He began to walk along the green, then turned down a lane that led away from the village. He tried to relax himself. I have been under fire, he thought; but now, for the time being, it
is over. Under fire. The words came back. How thin and inadequate the phrase was.

The hedgerows were deep and ragged where he walked, covered with the lace of cow parsley. The air had a feeling of purity, as though it had never been breathed; it was just starting to be cool with the first breeze of evening. From the tall elms he could see at the end of the field there was a sound of rooks, and a gentler calling of wood pigeons close at hand. He stopped, and leaned against a gate. The quietness of the world about him seemed to stand outside time; there was no human voice to place it.

Above him he saw the white moon, early and low above the elms. Over and behind it were long jagged wisps of cloud that ran in ribbed lines back into the pale blue of the sky, then trailed away in gestures of vapourous white.

Stephen felt himself overtaken by a climactic surge of feeling. It frightened him because he thought it would have some physical issue, in spasm or bleeding or death. Then he saw that what he felt was not an assault but a passionate affinity. It was for the rough field running down to the trees and for the path going back into the village, where he could see the tower of the church: these and the forgiving distance of the sky were not separate, but part of one creation, and he too, still by any sane judgement a young man, by the repeated tiny pulsing of his blood, was one with them. He looked up and saw the sky as it would be trailed with stars under darkness, the crawling nebulae and smudged lights of infinite distance: these were not different worlds, it seemed now clear to him, but bound through the mind of creation to the shredded white clouds, the unbreathed air of May, to the soil that lay beneath the damp grass at his feet. He held tightly on to the stile and laid his head on his arms, in some residual fear that the force of binding love he felt would sweep him from the earth. He wanted to stretch out his arms and enfold in them the fields, the sky, the elms with their sounding birds; he wanted to hold them with the unending forgiveness of a father to his prodigal, errant, but beloved son. Isabelle and the cruel dead of the war; his lost mother, his friend Weir: nothing was immoral or beyond redemption, all could be brought together, understood in the long perspective of forgiveness. As he clung to the wood, he wanted
also to be forgiven for all he had done; he longed for the unity of the world’s creation to melt his sins and anger, because his soul was joined to it. His body shook with the passion of the love that had found him, from which he had been exiled in the blood and the flesh of long killing.

He lifted his head, and found that he was smiling. He walked in peace along the road for perhaps an hour, though he had no track of time. The evening stayed light as far as he went, the fields in their different shades and the trees in lines or clumps or alone where a chance seed had dropped.

As the road fell and turned a corner he found himself coming into a small village. There were two boys playing on a big green space beyond a ditch that separated it from the road. Stephen went into a pub opposite and found himself in what looked like a private parlour. An irritable old man asked him what he wanted. He fetched beer from an unseen barrel in a back room; with the pint mug he brought a smaller glass containing some cinnamon drink. Stephen took both glasses outside and sat on a bench by the green, watching the boys at play until the sun at last went down and the white moon glowed.

S
tephen went back a day early to France so that he could visit Jeanne in Amiens. His transfer to brigade staff had been delayed by a fortnight, and he was to rejoin his company at the Front in the meantime. He thought the return to the war might be made easier if he had spent a night in France before going on to whatever billet Gray had meanwhile allocated him.

Amiens station had the look of an old landmark to him, though he found to his surprise when he counted that this was only the third time he had actually arrived at it. The first time had led to extraordinary and unseen consequences and so, in a way, had the second. On this occasion there would certainly be no Isabelle; perhaps there would be no drama or reverse at all. He hoped so.

Jeanne had decided to trust him, and he felt grateful to her. There was no need for it, but it showed generosity and imagination on her part, he thought, unless it was only pity. He found it difficult to know what kind of feelings he awakened in people now, but even if Jeanne’s impulse was merely one of charity to an uncouth soldier, he would not turn it away. She was a kind woman. He wondered why she had not been married: she must be thirty-eight or -nine, almost too old to have children.

He had sent a telegram from Boulogne, and had awaited her reply. She would be happy to see him that evening, she said, at any time.

He walked up through the town, still with his awkward service valise. He was wearing one of the new shirts he had bought in London, with new underwear. As far as he could tell, the lice that had plagued him had perished in the bonfire he had made with his old clothes in Norfolk. As he passed through Liverpool Street on his return, he asked the barber to remove his moustache. He had begun to feel almost like the young man who had arrived at the boulevard du Cange.

He crossed the square with the café in which he had met Jeanne and came to the small house in which she had been lodging with Isabelle. He rang the bell. As he waited he tried to remember
what Jeanne looked like, but no picture came to his mind.

“Come in, Monsieur.” Jeanne held out her hand.

Stephen found himself once more in the modest hallway, though it seemed more brightly lit this time. Jeanne opened a door on the right into a sitting room. It had a shiny wooden floor and a circular table with freesias in a glass bowl. There were armchairs on either side of the marble mantelpiece.

“Are you tired after your journey?”

“No, not at all. I feel very well.”

Stephen sat in the chair that Jeanne indicated for him, and looked up at her. He did remember the strong features of her face and her pale skin; when he looked at them they made him calm. In the set of her eyes and the turn of her head there were occasional flickers of Isabelle, something impetuous that was transformed and stilled in the gravity of Jeanne’s demeanour.

Jeanne said, “She told me you stared a lot.”

Stephen apologized. “These years in the mud—I’ve lost my manners.” He was glad that the subject of Isabelle had come up so soon. At least they could then dispose of it.

“Have you heard from Isabelle?”

“Yes,” said Jeanne. “She’s very happy. Max is badly hurt, but he’s going to survive. She asked me to thank you for coming to see her. I think it meant a good deal to her. She has been very unlucky—or very foolish, as my father would say. All her decisions have been difficult ones. To see you again and to know that you at least wished her well, I think that sustained her.”

“I’m pleased,” said Stephen, though he did not feel pleasure. It confused him to think the role he now played in Isabelle’s life was to offer minor reassurance. “I’m pleased,” he repeated, and in that moment of small insincerity he thought he felt the last presence of Isabelle leave him, not by going into false oblivion, as she had the first time, but into simple absence.

He turned to Jeanne. “How long will you stay in Amiens? Isn’t your home in Rouen?”

Jeanne looked down at her hands. “My father’s old and would like me to stay and look after him. Although my mother’s still alive, she’s not well and is less attentive than he would like.”