Birdsong

by Sebastian Faulks

  That evening she rang Bob to see if he had made any progress with the notebook. She said, “I’ve got a few names of people I think must have been in it with him, but I’ve no idea how to get in touch with them. There’s someone called Gray, who seems to have been important, but he must be incredibly old if he’s still alive.”

  She heard Bob whistling pensively at the other end. “Have you thought of Who’s Who?” he said. “If this Gray got some sort of medal or went on to do something in civilian life he might be in there.”

  Elizabeth found a three-year-old copy of Who’s Who in the public library in Porchester Road and worked her way through the details of the fifty-two Grays included. They had distinguished themselves in a range of business activities and public service but few of them had even been born before 1918. Over the page was one last Gray.

  ———

  “GRAY, William Allan McKenzie,” she read. “Senior consultant Queen Alexandra’s Hospital, Edinburgh, 1932–48. b Calcutta 18 Sept 1887, s of Thomas McKenzie Gray and Maisie Maclennan; m 1920 Joyce Amelia Williams d of Dr A R Williams; one s one d. Educ: Thomas Campbell College, St. Andrew’s University, BSC 1909.”

  ———

  Her eye ran on down the small print until it came to the words “Served War of 1914–18”. The details tallied.

  At the foot of the entry was an address and telephone number in Lanarkshire. The only problem was that the book was three years old, and even then he had been, Elizabeth calculated … eighty-eight.

  As she had remarked to the corporal, there was no time to waste. She hurried back to her flat and made for the telephone. It rang before she could get to it.

  “Hello.”

  “It’s me.”

  “What?”

  “Stuart.”

  “Oh, Stuart. How are you?”

  “I’m fine. How are you?”

  “Oh, you know. Fine, thanks. Quite busy.” Elizabeth paused so that Stuart could tell her why he had rung. He said nothing, so she chattered a bit more. Still he said nothing when it was his turn to speak. Eventually she said, “Well. Was there something, you know … in particular?”

  “I didn’t know I needed a reason to ring.” He sounded affronted. “I just rang for a chat.”

  It was not the first time he had rung for a chat and then said nothing. Perhaps he was shy, Elizabeth thought, as she talked on about what she had been doing. She found it difficult to say goodbye to people without at least pretending that they would soon be meeting, and she found by the time she put the receiver down that she had invited Stuart to dinner.

  “You must come round some time,” she said.

  “Must I?” he said. “When?”

  “Well … God. What about Saturday?”

  It didn’t matter. She liked him. She would have time to cook something. Meanwhile she pulled the envelope from her bag and started to dial the Scottish number.

  As her finger returned to zero she pictured a cold, grey farmhouse in Lanarkshire where an ancient telephone would ring thunderously on the hall table and a very old man would have to lever himself from an armchair several rooms away and make painful progress down the corridor, only to be confronted with a complete stranger asking him questions about a war he had fought in sixty years ago.

  It was ridiculous. Her nerve failed her and she cut the connection.

  She went into the kitchen and poured some gin over three ice cubes and a slice of lemon. She added a dribble of tonic, lit a cigarette, and went back into the sitting room.

  What was it all for? She wanted to find out what had happened to her grandfather so that she could … what? Understand more about herself? Be able to tell her notional children about their heritage? Perhaps it was just a whim, but she was determined. The worst that could result from the telephone call was embarrassment. It didn’t seem a very fearful price.

  She dialled again, and heard the number ring. Eight, nine, ten times it rang. Fourteen, fifteen. Surely even the lamest old man would by now have—

  “Hello?” It was a woman’s voice. For some reason Elizabeth was surprised.

  “Oh, is that … is that Mrs. Gray?”

  “Speaking.” The voice had a slight Edinburgh accent. It sounded distant and very old. Joyce Amelia.

  “I’m very sorry to bother you. My name is Elizabeth Benson. I have a rather peculiar request. My grandfather fought in the same company as your husband in the First World War and I’m trying to find out something about him.”

  Mrs. Gray said nothing. Elizabeth wondered if she had heard.

  “I know it’s a very odd thing to ask,” she said. “And I really am sorry to trouble you. I just didn’t know who else to ring. Hello? Are you there?”

  “Yes. I’ll go and fetch my husband. You’ll have to be patient. And do speak up. He’s a wee bit deaf.”

  Elizabeth felt her palms prickle with nervous excitement as Mrs. Gray set down the receiver with a heavy Bakelite thud. She pictured it lying on the hall table, beneath the draughty wooden staircase. She waited for a minute, then another minute. Eventually a quavery but loud voice came on the line.

  Elizabeth explained again. Gray could not hear her, so she went through it for a third time, shouting out her grandfather’s name.

  “What do you want to know about all that for? Good heavens, it was years ago.” He sounded annoyed.

  “I’m sorry, I really don’t mean to be a nuisance, it’s just that I’m anxious to get in touch with someone who knew him and to find out what he was like.”

  Gray made a snorting sound at the other end.

  “Do you remember him? Did you fight with him?”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Like? Like? What was he like? God knows. You don’t want to go into all that now.”

  “But I do. Please. I really need to know.”

  There were more noises from Gray’s end of the line. Eventually he said, “Dark-haired. Tall. He was an orphan or something. He was superstitious. Is that the chap?”

  “I don’t know!” Elizabeth found herself bellowing. She wondered if Mrs. Kyriades was enjoying the conversation through the wall. “I want you to tell me!”

  “Wraysford. God …” There was some more snorting. Then Gray said, “He was a strange man. I do remember him. He was a tremendous fighter. Quite unbelievable nerve. He never seemed very happy about it. Something worried him.”

  Elizabeth said, “Was he a kind man, was he a good friend to the other men?” She did not think she had the army terminology right, but it was the best she could do.

  “Kind? Dear me.” Gray seemed to be laughing. “Self-contained I would say.”

  “Was he … funny?”

  “Funny? It was a war! What an extraordinary question.”

  “But did he have a sense of humour, do you think?”

  “I suppose so. Pretty dry, even to a Scot like me.”

  Elizabeth could sense Gray beginning to recall; she pressed him. “What else do you remember? Tell me everything.”

  “Never wanted to go on leave. Said he had no home to go to. He liked France. I remember visiting him in hospital when he’d been wounded. Must have been nineteen fifteen. No, nineteen sixteen.”

  Gray spent some minutes trying to date the visit while Elizabeth fruitlessly interrupted.

  “So is there anything else? Did he have any friends? Anyone I could speak to now who would remember him?”

  “Friends? I don’t think so. No, there was some sapper. I can’t remember his name. He was a loner.”

  “But a good soldier.”

  The line crackled as Gray considered.

  “He was a terrific fighter, but that’s not quite the same thing.”

  Mrs. Gray’s voice came back on the line. “I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to take my husband away now. He isn’t used to this kind of thing and I don’t want him to get tired out. Do you understand?”

  “I do,” said Elizabeth. “I’m very grateful
to you both. I do hope I haven’t been a nuisance.”

  “Not at all,” said Mrs. Gray. “There’s a man my husband used to write to. His name was Brennan. He was in a Star and Garter veterans’ home in Southend. It’s not far from London.”

  “Thank you very much. You’ve been very kind.”

  “Good-bye.”

  There was the sound of a receiver rattling in its cradle.

  In the silence Elizabeth could hear the thump of music from the flat upstairs.

  ———

  The Swedish sedan had again failed to start, and Elizabeth was compelled to take the train from Fenchurch Street, one of British Rail’s recent corridorless variety, with new orange plush on the seats. She brought a cup of coffee down the rocking carriage, wincing as the boiling fluid seeped out from under the lid and onto her hand. When it was cool enough to drink, she found its taste merge into the atmosphere of diesel fumes and cigarette ends, so it was hard to tell where one ended and the next began. The heating was turned up full and most of the people in the carriage seemed on the point of unconsciousness as they looked out of the window at the flatlands of Essex sliding past.

  Elizabeth had telephoned the matron of the home, who told her that Brennan was barely worth visiting, but that he would see her if she came. She felt excited by the prospect of actually meeting someone from that era. She would be like a historian who, after working from other histories, finally lays hands on original source material. She had an unclear picture of Brennan in her mind. Although she knew he would be old and, to judge from what the matron had said, decrepit, she still envisaged him in uniform, with a gun.

  It was raining when she emerged from the station in Southend. She opened the door of a blue Vauxhall taxi in the forecourt. The car moved off over the glistening streets, along the front with its long, dejected pier and crumbling Regency hotels. As they went up the hill, the driver pointed out toward the sands, where a cockle boat was fishing with an attachment that looked like a giant vacuum hose trailing over the edge.

  The home was a large Victorian building of red brick just visible beneath the pattern of fire escapes. Elizabeth paid the driver and went inside. There were stone steps leading up to a reception desk. Huge, high-ceilinged corridors led off in either direction. The receptionist was a plump woman with a mauve cardigan and tortoiseshell glasses.

  “Is he expecting you?”

  “Yes, I think so. I spoke to the matron, Mrs. Simpson.”

  The receptionist dialled two digits on the telephone. “Yes. Visitor for Brennan. All right. Yes.” She put the phone down. “Someone’ll come for you,” she said to Elizabeth. She picked up the magazine she had been reading.

  Elizabeth looked down and brushed a crumb from her skirt.

  A woman in a nurse’s uniform came up and introduced herself as Mrs. Simpson.

  “You’re for Brennan, aren’t you? If you’d like to step into my office a moment.”

  They went a few yards down the corridor and into a small overheated room with filing cabinets. There was a calendar on the wall with a picture of a kitten in a basket. On top of a table was a spider plant whose green and white shoots trailed down almost to the floor.

  “You haven’t been here before, have you?” said Mrs. Simpson. She was a surprisingly young woman with peroxided hair and red lipstick. The uniform sat oddly on her.

  “What you have to understand is that some of the men have been here almost all their lives. This is all they know, all they remember.” She stood up and took out a file from the cabinet. “Yes. Here we are. He was admitted in nineteen nineteen, your Mr. Brennan. Discharged nineteen twenty-one. Returned nineteen twenty-three. He’s been here ever since, paid for by the government. No surviving family. Sister died in nineteen fifty.”

  Elizabeth calculated. He had been there almost sixty years.

  “They’re very ignorant, most of the old-timers. They haven’t kept up at all with what’s been happening in the world. We do encourage radio and newspapers but they can’t follow them.”

  “And what exactly is wrong with Mr. Brennan?”

  “Amputation,” said Mrs. Simpson. “Let me see. Yes. Injury sustained during final offensive, October nineteen eighteen. Shell blast. Left leg amputated in field hospital. Returned to England. Hospital Southampton. Moved to North Middlesex, then Roehampton. Admitted September nineteen nineteen. Also shell shock. Do you know what that means?”

  “Psychological damage?”

  “Yes, it’s a catchall expression. Soft in the head. Some of them got over it, some of them didn’t.”

  “I see. And will he know who I am? I mean, if I explain why I’ve come?”

  “I’m not sure I’ve quite made myself clear.” Mrs. Simpson’s genteel voice took on an exasperated edge. “This man lives in a world of his own. They all do. They have no interest in the outside world at all. Some of them can’t help it, of course. But everything’s done for them. Meals, toilet, everything.”

  “Does he have many visitors?”

  Mrs. Simpson laughed. “Many visitors? Oh dear. His last visitor was …” She consulted the file on her desk. “His sister. In nineteen forty-nine.”

  Elizabeth looked down at her hands.

  “Well, I’ll take you along to see him, if you’re ready. Don’t expect too much, will you?”

  They walked down the green linoleum of the corridor. The brickwork was tiled to waist height on either side, then met high overhead in a semicylindrical shape from which hung yellow lights on long plaited flexes.

  They turned one corner, then another, past piled laundry baskets, past a pair of swing doors from behind which came a sudden burst of cabbage and gravy before the more general smell of disinfectant reasserted itself. They arrived at a blue-painted door.

  “This is the dayroom,” said Mrs. Simpson. She pushed open the door. There were a number of old men sitting round the edge of the room, some in wheelchairs, some in armchairs covered with pale brown plastic.

  “He’s over by the window.”

  Elizabeth went across the room, trying not to breathe too deeply of the hot stagnant air, which smelt of urine. She approached a small man in a wheelchair with a rug over his thighs.

  She held out her hand to him. He looked up and took it.

  “Not that one,” said Mrs. Simpson from the doorway. “Next window.”

  Elizabeth let go of the man’s hand with a smile and moved down the room a few paces. There was an orange-and-brown-patterned carpet over the centre of the floor. She wished she hadn’t come.

  The little man in the wheelchair was like a bird on its perch. He had thick glasses bound on one side with adhesive tape. Elizabeth could see his blue eyes watering behind them.

  She held out her hand. He made no movement, so she took his hand from his lap and squeezed it.

  She felt self-conscious and intrusive. Why on earth had she come? Some vanity about her imagined past, some foolish self-indulgence. She pulled up a chair and took Brennan’s hand again.

  “My name is Elizabeth Benson. I’ve come to visit you. Are you Mr. Brennan?”

  Brennan’s blue eyes rolled in watery surprise. She felt him hold on to her hand. He had a tiny head. The hair was not so much grey as colourless. It lay flat and unwashed against his skull.

  She made to take her hand away, but she felt him try to hang on to it, so she left it in his, and moved her chair up closer.

  “I’ve come to see you. I’ve come to see you because I think you knew my grandfather. Stephen Wraysford. It was in the war. Do you remember him?”

  Brennan said nothing. Elizabeth looked at him. He was wearing a striped woollen shirt with the top button done up but no tie, and a hand-knitted brown cardigan. He was so small, with one leg missing; she wondered how much he weighed.

  “Do you remember the war? Do you remember those days at all?”

  Brennan’s eyes were still awash with surprise. He could clearly not grasp what was happening.

  “Shall I just talk for a m
inute or so? Or shall we sit quietly for a bit?”

  He still did not answer, so Elizabeth smiled at him and laid her other hand on top of his. She shook her head so that the hair that had fallen on to her cheek was held back over her ear.

  Brennan started to speak. He had a little high voice like a girl’s. It came up through a weight of phlegm Elizabeth could hear moving on his chest; after every few words he took thin sips of air.

  “Such fireworks. We was all there, the whole street. There was dancing. We was out all night. Barbara and me. My sister. She fell down. In the blackout it was. Had to put it up every night. Fell off a ladder.”

  “Your sister fell off a ladder?”

  “There was that song we all sung then.” He took an extra gulp of air and tried to sing it for Elizabeth.

  “And do you remember anything about the war? Can you tell me anything about my grandfather?”

  “The relief of Mafeking that was. They give us such a bad tea. I can’t eat it. It’s muck. It was that bloody Hitler.” His hand was warm between hers.

  A tea-trolley was brought into the room and made its clanking, metal way toward them.

  “All right, Tom. You got a visitor then?” boomed the woman who pushed it. “What are you doing with a pretty girl like this? You up to your old tricks I expect. I know you, you old scoundrel. Leave it there, shall I?” She put a cup on the small table near Brennan’s elbow. “He never drinks it,” she said to Elizabeth. “You like a cup, love?”

  “Thank you.”

  The trolley rattled off. Elizabeth sipped the tea. She felt her gorge rebel against the extraordinary taste and quickly put the cup back on the saucer.

  She looked round the room. There were perhaps twenty men in the stifling atmosphere. None of them was talking, though one was listening to a small radio. They all stared ahead of them. Elizabeth tried to imagine what it must have been like to spend sixty years in such a place, with nothing to differentiate one day from the next.

  Brennan began to talk again, looping from one random recollection to another. As Elizabeth listened she could see he believed he was living in whatever era he was recalling: that time became the present for him. Most of his memories seemed to come either from the turn of the century or from the early forties and the Blitz.