Birdsong (9 page)

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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 Bérard, 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 assumed, 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 fishing that he was going to put to Bérard 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.

Grégoire 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, Grégoire."

"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 fishing 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 passed 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 Bérards. 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, Bérard 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 Grégoire would be so kind... That's it, then Madame Bérard 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." Bérard settled himself in the chair vacated by Lisette, who was given permission by her stepmother to take Grégoire 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 circumstances 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?" Bérard'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."

Bérard 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 unembarrassed 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 Bérard brightly, "we've met them on several occasions."

"I," said Bérard 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 noble lay behind Bérard'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 fashion 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 peacocks!"

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, Bérard." Bérard 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 snob," said Madame Bérard.

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 reassuring; 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 reassurance 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 breasts 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 Bérard put an arm round her shoulders.

"It's a circulation problem, without a doubt," said Bérard. "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 Bérard 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 Bérard, 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 Bérard, 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.