Birdsong (32 page)

Elizabeth looked round the restaurant, which was filling with shoppers, workers, even tourists who had strayed north of the shops on Oxford Street. These were the lines of her life, these were the things that concerned her. Order books and Lucca's salad; Robert's awaited calls and the criticism of Lindsay and her mother. Strikes and economic crisis. Trying not to smoke yet keeping the endless check on her weight. A planned holiday with three or four others in a rented house in Spain; a snatched weekend with Robert in Alsace, or even in Brussels itself. Her clothes, her work, her flat: its small orderly ways maintained by just one weekly visit from a cleaner while she was at work. No elaborate system of crèche, day care, and mother's help as exhaustively discussed by her married friends. London in approaching winter, the wail of traffic through the park, and cold Sunday morning walks that issued into jovial meetings in the pubs of Bayswater that seemed to last an hour too long. And the sense of a larger life inside her, excited and confirmed by pictures she saw in galleries, books she read, but particularly by pictures; something unfulfilled, something needing to be understood.

Sometimes she went away on her own to wilder parts of northern England, where she read or walked. She didn't feel self-pity because she could see nothing to feel sorry for; the mundane concerns and preoccupations of her life were interesting to her. She found bed-and-breakfast cottages and small pubs in guidebooks where she sometimes fell into conversation with the owners or with other guests, and sometimes just read by the fire.

Once in a village in the Dales a boy of no more than nineteen began talking to her at the bar of the pub. She was wearing her reading glasses and a thick greyand-white-speckled sweater. He had fair hair and an unconvincing beard. He was at university and had gone off walking in order to do some reading for his studies. He was awkward with her and used set phrases with signalled irony, as though referring to books or films they both knew. He seemed unable to say things without suggesting that they were quotations from someone else. After he had drunk two or three pints of beer he became calmer and told her about his studies in zoology and about his girlfriends at home. He implied a riotous love life. Elizabeth liked his enthusiasm and the pitch of excitement at which he appeared to be living, even in this primitive pub on a Yorkshire hillside with only the landlord's steak-and-kidney pie to come.

It was not until after dinner, when she made her way up the narrow stairs to her room and heard him following, that it occurred to her that his interest was more than conversational. She almost burst out laughing as he took her arm with clumsy caution outside her door. She kissed him on the cheek and told him to get on with his books. When he knocked on the door an hour later, however, she let him in. She was feeling very cold.

He was overwhelmed with gratitude and excitement; he was not able to contain himself even for a minute. In the small and icy hours of the morning he tried again. Elizabeth, reluctant to be awoken from deep sleep after a long day's walk, submitted wearily. He did not want to talk to her in the morning; he wanted to leave as quickly as possible. She felt a little tenderness toward him. She wondered what function the episode had served in his life and in his mythology of himself. She liked living alone, she liked being alone. She ate what she wanted, not proper meals but plates of mushrooms and baked potatoes, grapes, peaches, or soups she made herself. She filled glasses with ice cubes and lemon slices, then poured gin over them, hearing the explosion of the ice, leaving hardly any room for tonic water. She had plastic tops that kept the wine drinkable from one day to the next.

In the cinema, she could drown in the sensuous load of picture and sound without the distraction of company or conversation. In the worst films she wandered off from the story and inhabited the scenery in a plot of her own. She felt selfconscious about going unaccompanied in case she should meet a couple she knew hand-in-hand in the foyer on their evening out; so she generally went on Saturday afternoon, entering in the after-lunch daylight, emerging in the darkness with the full evening still ahead.

By the end of a weekend she did want to talk to someone. She had read articles in the papers or seen something on the television that had set her mind moving; she needed to test her response.

"What do you know about the war, Irene?" she said. "You know, the First World War."

" 'Pack up your troubles' and all that stuff?" said Irene. "Terrible business, wasn't it?"

"Did your father fight in it?" said Elizabeth, cutting the hairy, internal stalk from the centre of a quartered tomato.

"I don't think so. I never asked him. But he fought in something because I've seen his medals."

"When was he born?"

"Well, he wasn't thirty when I was born, so he must have been born about eighteen ninety-five I should think."

"So he was the right age?"

"Search me. I don't know when the wretched thing was. You ask Erich. Men know all about these things."

Erich poured what remained of the litre carafe into his glass. "Even I am not old enough to have fought. I do remember it a little. I was a school-boy."

"But what was it _like?" _said Elizabeth.

"I have no idea. I don't think about war. In any case your English schools should have taught you all about it."

"Perhaps they did. I don't seem to have been paying attention. It all seemed so boring and depressing, all those battles and guns and things."

"Exactly," said Erich. "It's morbid to dwell on it. I've seen enough of that kind of thing in my own lifetime without raking up the past."

What are you suddenly so interested in ancient history for?" said Irene.

"I'm not sure it _is _ancient history," said Elizabeth. "It isn't very long ago. There must be old men alive now who fought in it."

"You ought to ask my Bob. He knows everything."

"I bring you coffee now?" said Lucca.

*

The road swept down into Dover on a wide, banking curve that overlooked the locked, grey sea to her left. Some childish sense of joy came up in Elizabeth at the sight of the water; it was the start of holidays, it was the end of England. On a Thursday evening in winter, it was like breaking bounds.

She drove, as instructed, beneath towering gantries, up a ramp, and down through narrow marked lanes, peering round the piece of paper that a man in a kiosk had slapped on to the middle of her windscreen. She was waved to the head of an empty file. She got out of the car and felt the sea wind whip her hair. There were two container lorries to her left and a dozen or so smaller goods vehicles between marked lines round the dock; it was not a popular crossing. In the shop she bought a map of northeast France, and another of the motorways of Europe that would help her on to Brussels.

In the trembling hold of the ship she gathered up her book, her spectacles, and a spare sweater, in case she should decide to go on deck. She gratefully escaped the diesel fumes of the huge articulated trucks and climbed the steep stairs to the passenger decks.

She felt a little presumptuous. Having lived to the age of thirty-eight without giving more than a glance to the occasional war memorial or dull newsreel, she was not sure what she now expected to find. What did a "battlefield" look like? Was it a prepared area of conflict with each side's positions marked down? Wouldn't buildings and trees get in the way? Perhaps the people who now lived in these places would be sensitive about them; they might resent the arrival of some morbid sightseer, come like a tourist who hovers with his camera at the edge of an air crash. More probably, she thought, they would know nothing about it. It was all a very long time ago. "Battle of What?" they would say. The only person she could remember evincing an interest in these things was a boy she had known at school: a funny, gentle creature with a wheezy voice who was good with algebra. Would history be there for her to see, or would it all have been tidied away? Was it fair to expect that sixty years after an event--on the whim of someone who had shown no previous interest--a country would dutifully reveal its past to her amateur inspection? Most of France was now like England in any case: tower blocks and industry, fast food and television.

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 crosschannel 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 ironcoloured 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 plasticcovered 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.