Birdsong

by Sebastian Faulks

  ———

  In the hallway of Mark and Lindsay’s terraced house there were a pram and a pushchair, round which greetings were exchanged. Elizabeth, in a gesture that had persisted since college days, handed Mark a bottle of wine.

  As she stepped into the double sitting room, in which the dividing wall had been knocked through, Elizabeth entered a routine so familiar that she found herself talking, smiling, and behaving as though by predetermined programme. Sometimes when she went to see Mark and Lindsay they had invited other people. Tonight there was a couple from the next street and a man suspiciously on his own. Elizabeth found a cigarette alight in her fingers and red wine sliding down her throat.

  They were her oldest friends, bound to her by shared experience. Although she often thought the three of them would not now become so close if they were meeting for the first time, the link was surprisingly emotional. Lindsay was an impulsive woman with a domineering tendency; Mark was a homely man of no clear ambition. In their twenties there had often been some other guest who tried to impress with self-important stories or who was anxious to claim positions of political integrity unavailable to the rest; but by now such evenings took a friendly, uninspiring course. For Elizabeth, at the age of thirty-eight, they were reminders of how little their lives had changed. Only the children had altered things. At some stage there would be an exchange between the others about behaviour and schools, and she would have to close her ears, partly through boredom, partly through an unacknowledged anguish.

  Lindsay had also been through a phase of inviting unattached men when Elizabeth went to visit. For two or three years the previously settled threesome would be augmented by a variety of single men, desperate, divorced, drunk, but more often merely content to be as they were.

  “Your trouble,” Lindsay once said, “is that you frighten men off.”

  “Trouble?” said Elizabeth. “I wasn’t aware that I was in trouble.”

  “You know what I mean. Look at you. You’re so poised, with your smart dresses and your Anouk Aimée good looks.”

  “You make me sound middle-aged.”

  “But you know what I mean. Men are such timid creatures, really. You have to be gentle with them. Make them feel safe. To begin with, anyway.”

  “Then you can do what you like?”

  “Of course not. But look at you, Elizabeth. You have to compromise a little. Remember that man David I introduced you to? He’s very kind, just your type. You didn’t give him a chance.”

  “You seem to be forgetting that I’ve got a boyfriend already. I don’t need to go pop-eyed and flirtatious with Dennis or David or whatever he’s called. I’m spoken for.”

  “By the Eurocrat, you mean?”

  “Robert is his name.”

  “He’s never going to leave his wife. You know that, don’t you? They all say they will, but they never, ever do.”

  Elizabeth smiled serenely. “I don’t mind whether he does or not.”

  “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t rather be married.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve got a job to do, people to see. I can’t suddenly devote my time to searching for a husband.”

  “And what about children?” said Lindsay. “I suppose you’re going to say you don’t want children either.”

  “Of course I’d like children. But I think I need to know why.”

  Lindsay laughed. “You don’t need to know anything at all. It’s called biology. You’re thirty-nine.”

  “Thirty-eight in fact.”

  “Your body tells you time is running short. You’re no different from the millions of other women in the world. You don’t need a reason, for God’s sake.”

  “I think I do. I think one should have some sort of reason for doing something that, on the face of it, is quite unnecessary.”

  Lindsay smiled and shook her head. “Spinster talk.”

  Elizabeth laughed. “All right. I will try, I promise. I’ll try my hardest to fall spontaneously and exotically in love with Dennis—”

  “David.”

  “With whoever you produce.”

  After having apparently given up, Lindsay had that night made a final attempt: a man called Stuart. He had tangled fair hair and glasses. He revolved a large wine glass thoughtfully in long fingers.

  “What do you do?” he said to Elizabeth.

  “I run a clothing company.” She disliked being asked this question, thinking people ought to ask new acquaintances who they were rather than what they did, as though their job defined them.

  “You say you run it. You’re the boss, are you?”

  “That’s right. I started as a designer about fifteen years ago but I transferred to the business side. We formed a new company and I became the managing director.”

  “I see. And what’s this company called?” said Stuart.

  Elizabeth told him and he said, “Should I have heard of you?”

  “We supply a couple of chain stores, but they put their own labels on. We do a small amount of what we like to call couture under our own name. Perhaps you’ve seen the name in that context.”

  “And what exactly is ‘couture’?”

  Elizabeth smiled. “It’s mostly what you’d call dresses.”

  As the evening went and Stuart relaxed the defensive tone of his opening cross-examination, Elizabeth found that she quite liked him. She had grown accustomed to people’s responses to her. Many of them assumed that there was a polar choice between marriage and work and that the more enthusiastically she had embraced her job, the more vigourously she must have rejected the idea of children or male partnership. Elizabeth had given up trying to explain. She had taken a job because she needed to live; she had found an interesting one in preference to a dull one; she had tried to do well rather than badly. She could not see how any of these three logical steps implied a violent rejection of men or children.

  Stuart told her that he played the piano. They talked about places they had visited. He didn’t give her a long exposition of capital markets or join in competitive argument with Mark; nor did he too obviously flirt or fawn. He laughed at some of the things she said to him, though she noticed that there was an edge of surprise in his amusement, as though something about her had not predisposed him to expect her to be lighthearted. When he did not ask her for her telephone number she was relieved, though also fractionally disappointed.

  As she drove the familiar route home, over the river, she let her mind play with the idea of what it would be like to be married. Just by the Fulham Road ABC they had built the pavement out into the road to make it impassable to heavy traffic. It always made her inhale, in an effort to make her narrow car even smaller as it squeezed between the bollards already crimson with the scraped paint of fatter vehicles. Perhaps if she was married her husband would do the driving. Some chance, to judge from the couples she knew.

  It was one o’clock when she let herself into the flat. As she turned on the light in the sitting room she saw her still-packed suitcase. She went into the kitchen to make some tea but found she had forgotten to buy any milk on her way back from the Underground. By the sink were her breakfast cup and plate from two days ago, when she had left in a hurry to get to the airport.

  She sighed. It didn’t matter. Tomorrow was Saturday and she would sleep in as long as she liked. She could read the paper in bed with the radio playing softly in the background and with no one to interrupt her tranquil routine.

  ———

  It never went quite as smoothly as she planned. To begin with, she had to dress and go out to buy some milk. Then, when she had settled back in bed with the paper and a pot of tea, the telephone rang twice.

  There was then at last an hour of perfect solitude. The main article in the paper was prompted, as many others had been, by the sixtieth anniversary of the 1918 armistice. There were interviews with veterans and comments from various historians. Elizabeth read it with a feeling of despair: the topic seemed too large, too fraught, and too remote for her to
take on at that moment. Yet something in it troubled her.

  In the afternoon she drove down to Twickenham. The firm’s accountant had advised that she should run a large car on the company. He said this would impress clients and be what he called tax-efficient. Elizabeth had bought a glistening Swedish sedan with boorish acceleration and a tendency not to start.

  “You work too hard, that’s your problem,” said her mother, pouring tea from a pot with small pink roses set, improbably, on trails of honeysuckle.

  Françoise was in her middle sixties, a handsome woman with a lined, gentle face on which the shortsightedly applied powder was sometimes visible in little patches on the cheekbones. She retained a certain dignity, given by her posture and the grave light of her blue eyes. Although her grey hair made her look like a grandmother, it was possible to see in her skin and the texture of her face the earlier ages she had lived through; a fairness lingered in the front of her hair; episodes of middle age, even childhood, could be read in the open, only superficially marked, planes of her face.

  Elizabeth smiled and stretched out her legs toward the fire. Her conversations with her mother ran on predictable lines, but only up to a point. Naturally Françoise wanted her daughter to be happy and not to look tired when she came to visit, but she did not assume, like Lindsay, that marriage was the way to achieve this end. She had herself married a heavy-drinking man called Alec Benson who was disappointed that Elizabeth was not a boy and had disappeared to Africa shortly after her birth in pursuit of a woman he had met in London. He had returned at intervals and Françoise patiently took him back when he needed a home. She had remained fond of him, but she hoped for something better for her daughter.

  On the sideboard there was a photograph of Elizabeth at the age of three being held by her grandmother. It was a family axiom that she had “adored” Elizabeth, who found it disconcerting that she had no recollection of her: she had died the year after the picture was taken. There she was in the photograph, unquestionably doting, though this unreturned love had a ghostly, unnerving quality for Elizabeth.

  “I was reading an article about the anniversary of the Armistice,” she said to Françoise, who had been following her gaze.

  “Yes, the papers are full of it, aren’t they?”

  Elizabeth nodded. If she knew little about her grandmother, she knew even less about her grandfather. Her mother had occasionally mentioned “that awful war,” but Elizabeth had paid little attention. It had reached a stage when it would be embarrassing to ask her mother about him because it would have revealed the state of her ignorance. But something about the war article had unsettled her: it seemed to touch an area of disquiet and curiosity that was connected to her own life and its choices.

  “Do you still have any of your father’s old papers?” she said.

  “I think I threw most of them out when I moved. But there may be some things in the attic. Why do you ask?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I was just thinking. I feel mildly curious. It must be something to do with my age.”

  Françoise raised an eyebrow, which was as close as she came to enquiring about Elizabeth’s personal life.

  Elizabeth ran her hand through her hair. “I feel there’s a danger of losing touch with the past. I’ve never felt it before. I’m sure it is something to do with my age.”

  What she described as a mild curiosity crystallized inside her to a set determination. Beginning with the contents of her mother’s attic, she would track this man down: she would make up for the lateness of her interest in him by bringing all her energy to the task. It would be one way, at least, of understanding more about herself.

  Elizabeth straightened her hair in the mirror. She was wearing a suede skirt, leather boots, and a black cashmere sweater. She pushed the thick dark hair back a little from her ears and turned her head sideways to insert two costume earrings the color of oxblood. There was light mascara on her lashes; the paleness of her skin made her look less Gallic than Lindsay had been suggesting, but there was nevertheless something dramatic in her face that further makeup would have overstated. In any case, it was only Monday morning, time for the late walk to the Lancaster Gate Underground, her mouth still burning from the too-hasty coffee she had bolted as the radio told her it had turned half-past eight.

  The train of the Central Line fitted its tube like a bullet in the barrel of a rifle. When it came to its customary sudden, dark, and unexplained halt between Marble Arch and Bond Street, Elizabeth could see the pipes and cables of the tunnel only inches from the shell of the carriage. It was the deepest, hottest line in London, dug by sweating tunnellers on a navvy’s day rate. They started again with mysterious smoothness and glided into Bond Street, where a delayed crowd was waiting. Elizabeth got off at Oxford Circus and hurried north through the pedestrians ambling three abreast, none of them looking ahead, then turned left into the area behind the shops.

  Once a week regularly and sometimes more often she went to visit Erich and Irene, the principal designers for the company. Both had refused to move from their old office or even to change the name on the door when the new company had been formed five years earlier.

  Since she was already late, it would make no difference if she stopped at the local Italian café. She ordered three coffees to take away and Lucca, the plump, grizzled attendant, tore up a Mars bar box for her to balance them on as she made her precarious way to a door a few yards down with a brass nameplate in the brick: BLOOM THOMPSON CARMAN. WHOLESALE, FABRIC AND DESIGN.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she called as she stepped out of the lift on the second floor and made her way to the open door.

  She put the improvised tray down on the desk in the area laughingly known as Reception and went back to close the concertina doors on the lift.

  “I brought you some coffee, Erich.”

  “Thank you.” Erich came out of an inner room. He was a man in his early seventies with wild grey hair and gold glasses. His cardigan had holes in the elbows so large that there were in fact no elbows. His chain-smoked Embassy and baggy eyes gave him an air of compressed weariness held at bay only by his nervous, ticking fingers that worked the round dial on the telephone, impatient at its slow returning grind, or skittered his gold scissors through bolts of unshaped cloth.

  “Train got stuck in the tunnel as usual,” said Elizabeth.

  She sat on the edge of a desk, moving magazines, pattern books, invoices, and catalogues with her hip. Her skirt lifted over the black woollen tights on her knees. She sipped dangerously from the scalding plastic cup. The coffee tasted of acorns, earth, and steam.

  Erich looked at her sadly, his gaze travelling the length of her body, from the thick dark hair, over the line of her thigh and the revealed knee, to the toe of the chestnut leather boot.

  “Look at you. What a wife you would have made my son.”

  “Drink your coffee, Erich. Is Irene here yet?”

  “Of course, of course. Since eight-thirty. We’ve a big buyer coming at twelve, I told you.”

  “Hence the Savile Row suit?”

  “Don’t bother me, woman.”

  “At least brush your hair and take off that cardigan.”

  She smiled at him as she went through into the workroom to see Irene.

  “Don’t say it,” said Elizabeth.

  “What?” said Irene, looking up from a sewing machine.

  “ ‘Look what the cat’s dragged in.’ ”

  “I wasn’t going to,” said Irene. “I’m far too busy for chitchat.”

  “Here’s some coffee. Did you have a nice weekend?”

  “Not bad,” said Irene. “My Bob was taken poorly Saturday night. Only indigestion as it turned out. He thought it was appendicitis. What a fuss he made, though. How’s your Bob?”

  “My Bob? He didn’t ring. I don’t know. I had a letter, but it’s not the same, is it?”

  “You tell me. My Bob’s never put pen to paper except on the Littlewoods football-pool coupon.”

&nbs
p; “I thought he was an expert on archaeology.”

  Irene raised an eyebrow. “You shouldn’t be so literal, Elizabeth.”

  Elizabeth cleared a space at her desk and began to make telephone calls. There were meetings to arrange, a cloth warehouse to visit, buyers to placate. When Erich had arrived from Austria in 1935 he had left disappointed customers in Vienna who had been prepared to pay well for his exuberant designs. He had first employed Irene as a seamstress but had later become dependent on her as his own energy began to fail. Elizabeth had joined them fifteen years ago, when their order books were growing empty. It had taken time to stop the slide, but then the company had grown rapidly; its headquarters in Epsom employed fifteen people and had flourished at a time of economic difficulty. Inflation ate some of the profits before they were even banked: like Weimar, Erich said. He took a dim view even of success, but his own inspiration was almost exhausted, and most of the company’s successful designs came from younger people commissioned by Elizabeth.

  At lunchtime they closed the office and went to Lucca’s café.

  “The lasagne is very good today,” said Lucca, poised with a stubby bookmaker’s ballpoint over his small curling pad.

  “Fine,” said Elizabeth. “I’ll have that.”

  “Very good choice, Signora,” said Lucca. He liked to stand close to Elizabeth so that his vast belly pressed through his spattered white apron and the black cashmere on her shoulder. “I bring you a little salad.”

  There was always the implication in his manner that this was a particular gift to Elizabeth, made from tiny slices of fresh fennel and pieces of Italian wild mushrooms flown in that morning from Pisa, secretively prepared by himself for fear of arousing the envy of other diners, anointed with the extra-virgin olive oil, and gallantly omitted from the bill.

  “Not too much onion, please,” said Elizabeth.

  “I’ll just have wine,” said Erich, lighting a cigarette.

  “Lasagne for me too,” said Irene.