Birdsong. Part 20

"I can't depend on that," said Elizabeth. "I can't plan my life on such a slender promise."

"Are you feeling broody?"

"I wish you wouldn't use that word. I'm not a chicken. When I see a small child my guts turn over inside me. I have to stop walking and take several deep breaths because my whole body is yearning so strongly. Is that what the word means?"

"I'm sorry, Elizabeth. I'm really sorry. I'm no good for you. You must give me up for good. You must find someone else. I promise I won't make it difficult for you."

"You don't see the point at all, do you?"

"What do you mean?"

"It's you that I want. You're the man I love. I don't want anyone else." Robert shook his head. He seemed moved by her conviction, but helpless. "In that case I don't know what to suggest."

"Marry me, you fool, that's what you should suggest. Follow the instincts of your heart."

"But my heart is so torn. It's torn by Anne. I couldn't bear to hurt her." Elizabeth felt she should have foreseen his response. She became more conciliatory. "I would look after her," she said softly. "I'd care for her when she came to stay."

Robert stood up and went to the window. "You've just got to give me up," he said. "You know that, don't you? It's the only answer."

Despite her furious endeavour to the contrary, she cried when she said goodbye to him in the underground parking. She began to feel dependent and helpless and despised herself for it. His arms seemed big when they folded her to his chest.

"I'll ring," he said, shutting her in behind the driver's door. She nodded and moved the car off to do blurred battle with the teatime traffic.

On Thursday evening Elizabeth went down to Twickenham to see her mother, and while Francoise was busy in the kitchen she went up to the attic, where there were several trunks full of doc.u.ments, photographs, and books. She didn't tell her mother the reason for her search; she said she was looking for an old diary of her own. The attic was not tall enough to stand up in, and Elizabeth had to crouch beneath the roof, though the builder had installed electric light by which she could make out the size of the task ahead of her.

There were five leather trunks and six black tin ones, in addition to several cardboard boxes, only a few of which seemed labelled. Most seemed to have been filled at random; there were Christmas decorations and old games with important bits missing packed in with bundles of letters and receipts.

She began with the leather trunks. She had no idea that her mother had been such a keen theatre goer. There were bundles of programmes from the West End and magazines in which actors she had seen recently on television in grizzled character roles were shown on the stage thirty years before, their bright eyes rimmed with black, their wrists trailing lacy cuffs, and their neatly trimmed hair glistening with matinee appeal.

In another trunk was a box, labelled THE ESTATE OF ALEC BENSON, though there had been some interesting debts. Unknown to his wife he had bought a share in a horse-transporting business in Newmarket, and the sale of this had covered some of what he owed. The rest of his trunk was a jumble of prospectuses and letters from various companies he had bought, sold, or invested in; most were based in Kenya and what had then been Tanganyika. They had in common a lack of capital and a certain El Dorado optimism. Later the doc.u.ments came from Rhodesia and South Africa. There were sheaves of carefully preserved golf cards. Score 79, handicap 6, net 73. "Let down by putting," read a_ _scribbled note at the bottom of one from Johannesburg dated 19 August 1950.

In the first of the metal trunks Elizabeth came across a khaki battle-dress top. She pulled it out and held it up to the light. It told her nothing. It seemed in good condition, the rough serge unmarked and the stripes on the sleeves neatly sewn. There was also a tin helmet, in equally good condition, the webbing inside still in place and the exterior only slightly chipped. In the bottom of the trunk was a small leather writing case, and in this were an unused pad and a monochrome snap of a group of soldiers sitting in s.h.i.+rtsleeves on an armoured vehicle. A scribbled note on the back-said: "Tunisia, 1943--The Fearless Five (Jarvis absent)." Wrong war, wrong man. After all she had seen, after all the names on that great arch, they had come back for more barely twenty years later. If she herself were to have a boy, what guarantee was there that he too would not spend years of his adult life in this h.e.l.lish perversion?

She moved, crouching, down the attic, to the row of metal trunks. Inside the first there was more rubbish: some of her old toys, and more bills and business letters relating to the purchase of the house.

Elizabeth dwelt on some of these because although they were trivial in themselves they touched her. The lines of debt and interest, drawn up on thick blue bond with red margins and figures entered with a manual typewriter and countersigned in firm black ink, spoke of nugatory sums at kindly rates of interest, yet how fearsome they must have seemed in their time, how constant an obstacle to peace of mind. Above all to Elizabeth they did represent a family, however fissile and unsure, a house, and a child with the presumed determination of the parents, of her mother at least, to make one more effort to improve upon the past. And with that slim debt to some mutual society had gone concomitant sacrifices of her personal ambition, of travel and a better life. Yet still somehow it was difficult to see her own life as the pinnacle of previous generations' sacrifices.

In the third metal trunk, toward the bottom, was a parcel, looped and tied in a bow with string. The dust from it dried the skin on her fingers and set her teeth on edge. She pulled open the knot and the parcel fell apart limply, dropping its guts into her hands. They were more papers and letters and a notebook. There were also some coloured ribbons, three medals, and a hip flask. It all seemed to date from an earlier time than the contents of the other trunks.

Among the papers were some handwritten in French. One had an address in Rouen. Elizabeth found herself reading it guiltily. It was hard to follow what it meant. The handwriting was of a dense, ornate kind, the ink was faded, and Elizabeth's French was not good enough for the idiomatic language. There was a second letter in the same hand with an address in Munich.

At the bottom of the pile were two books. The first was a military handbook for officers. On the flyleaf was written "Captain Stephen Wraysford, April 1917." Elizabeth opened it. Among instructions to officers was one that told him he should be "blood thirsty and forever thinking how to kill the enemy and help his men to do so." Something about the way the word "bloodthirsty" was split in two made Elizabeth shudder.

The other was a notebook with pages ruled in thick blue lines. It was full of inky writing that spread in cl.u.s.ters over the printed lines from a red margin on the left.

It posed even more of a problem for Elizabeth than the letters. It appeared to be written in Greek script. She looked through it, puzzled. If it had belonged to a foreigner, someone unconnected with her family, what was it doing with this small parcel of her grandfather's belongings? She slipped it into the pocket of her skirt and tied the rest of the papers back into their bundle.

Her mother was reading a book in the sitting room.

Elizabeth introduced the subject with a small subterfuge. "I couldn't find the diary I was looking for. It had an old address in it from years ago. When I moved flats you let me leave a lot of stuff up there, do you remember?"

"Yes I do. I wish you'd get rid of some of it."

"I will. While I was looking for the diary I came across a little packet of what must have been your father's papers."

"I thought they'd all been thrown away. There used to be a whole lot of them, but they got lost when I moved house."

"What sort of things were they?"

"There were boxes full of notebooks that he'd kept from the time he first went to France. I think there were twenty or thirty of them. But I couldn't understand them because they were in some sort of code."

"There's one up there in the attic. It looks as though it's written in Greek."

"That's it," said Francoise, putting down her sewing. "There were lots more. I always thought that if he'd wanted anyone to understand them he would have written them in plain English."

"What was he like, your father?"

Francoise sat up in her armchair, a slight flush colouring her cheeks. "I wish you could have known him. He would have loved you. I wish he could just once have seen you and stroked your face."

The following Sat.u.r.day Elizabeth went down into the Underground station and sat on a train as it hurtled, clanked, and rolled its electric way along the bed of the pipe inserted through the glutinous clay beneath the city. At Stratford she emerged into the winter daylight and took a bus onward. She cursed the glistening Swedish sedan, which had refused to start.

Bob and Irene's house was in a square with half a dozen naked plane trees on a plot of gra.s.s behind iron railings. At one end was a sandpit with a red-and-orange construction for children's climbing games, its gaudy surfaces sprayed with words formed from scripts known only to the sprayer. To Elizabeth they looked like angry warnings from a fundamentalist scripture. It was too cold for children to be playing in the garden, but a woman with a woollen scarf round her head was being dragged over the spa.r.s.e and muddy green by a thin alsatian, which stopped and crouched heavily at the sandpit.

Elizabeth hurried to the house and pressed the bell. She saw the top of Irene's head as she bent to restrain her barking terrier in the half-open door. With threats and cajolings to the dog, and rea.s.surances to Elizabeth, Irene managed to clear enough room for them both to get into the hallway and for her to close the door after them.

They went into the sitting room at the front of the house and Elizabeth sat down while Irene went to make tea. The room had dark brown wallpaper, though most of it was concealed by pictures and shelves that contained gla.s.s cases with stuffed birds and collections of china cups and saucers. There were two tailor's dummies, one dressed in a nineteenth-century purple velvet dress, the other draped and trailed over its otherwise naked torso with antique lace. There were a number of small tables about the room with bra.s.s curios and figures on them.

"I hope Bob doesn't mind me using him like a reference library," said Elizabeth as Irene returned with the tea.

"I shouldn't think so," said Irene. "He's probably pleased to be asked. Were those books helpful?"

"Yes, they were. I told you about the memorial I saw, didn't I? The thing is I've become obsessed by the subject now and I want to know more. I'vefou nd this notebook of my grandfather's--at least I think it's my grandfather's, it was in with some of his things. It's written in a language I don't understand and I wondered if Bob might know, what with his archaeology and everything."

"Egyptian hieroglyphics and all that?"

"Well, it's not Egyptian, but--"

"I know what you mean. He certainly used to know a lot about languages. He's done courses on them. I don't think he speaks any, but he'd probably recognize what it was, especially if it's an old one. Not very interested in the modern world, Bob. I gave him one of them record sets so he could learn French for our holidays one year and he never opened it."

When Bob was persuaded at Irene's third attempt to come in from the garden, he shook hands with Elizabeth and poured himself a cup of tea. She told him about her visit to France and he nodded his head, sipping noisily, as he listened. He was shorter than his wife, with a bald skull and round tortoisesh.e.l.l gla.s.ses. While she talked he rested his head on one side and occasionally sc.r.a.ped his chin on his upraised shoulder. Once she had explained the reason for her second visit his movements became wakeful and eager.

"Can I have a look at the offending article?" he said, holding out his hand. Elizabeth pa.s.sed over the notebook, guiltily, not sure of the propriety of allowing something her grandfather had written so many years ago to come under the scrutiny of this strange little man.

"I see," he said, rasping through the pages like a bank clerk telling notes. Elizabeth feared that the dry old paper would crack. "Wrote a lot, didn't he? Have you got any more of these?"

"No, this is the only one left."

"I think we'll have to go through to my study. We'll be back in a jiff, Irene." He stood up quickly and beckoned Elizabeth to follow him along the dark hallway to a room at the back of the house overlooking the garden where the last of the afternoon sun had drained away to leave only the black shapes of a wheelbarrow and a damp bonfire down by the wooden fence.

"I brought back those books you lent me." said Elizabeth.

"Thank you. Just leave them on the side there. I'll shelve them directly I've finished this."

Bob made a number of sucking and humming noises as he snapped the dry pages back and forth. "I've got an idea what this is about," he murmured. "I've got an idea... " He went and pulled a book from one of the shelves that filled the room from floor to ceiling. They were arranged alphabetically, with punched marker tape stuck on at intervals to announce the change of subject. Bob sat down again in a deep leather armchair; Elizabeth, at his invitation, was in the wooden chair at the desk.

"... but on the other hand, it doesn't quite add up." Bob put the notebook down on his lap. He pushed his gla.s.ses up on to his forehead and rubbed his eyes.

"Why do you really need to know what all this means?"

Elizabeth smiled sadly and shook her head. "I don't know, I really don't. It's just a whim, really, a vague idea I had that it might explain something. But I don't suppose there's anything interesting in it. It's probably just domestic lists, or records of things he's supposed to be doing."

"Probably," said Bob. "You know you could have it looked at by an expert if you want. If you took it to a museum or a university department with someone who specializes in this kind of thing."

"I wouldn't want to trouble them with it if it's so trivial. Couldn't you do it for me?"

"I might be able to. It depends how much is private code. For instance, suppose you kept a diary and you referred to Irene in it as Queen Bess, shall we say. Someone might get as far as decoding the words Queen Bess, but they'd still be none the wiser, would they?"

"I suppose not. I don't want you to spend too much time on it, Bob. Why not just--"

"No, no, it would interest me. I'd like to work it out. The script is not of the language it's written in, I can tell you that. This is Greek script, but the words are not Greek. I think the words themselves are of a mixed language, perhaps with some private terms thrown in."

"You mean the original language may not even be English?"

"Exactly. When they decoded Linear B they spent years thinking they were trying to decode Greek, but they weren't. Not Attic Greek at any rate. Once they'd got that sorted out, it fell into place. Not that this is as difficult as Linear B, I can a.s.sure you."

Elizabeth smiled. "How do you know so much about these things?"

"I had to do something to keep up with Irene. She was making all the money in the days when business was good. I just had my job at the works here. I did some studying in my spare time. It's surprising what you can learn if you just spend some time reading. I'll tell you what. If I can't sort it out within two weeks, you take it to someone else."

"Are you sure you don't mind?"

"No. I'll enjoy it. I like a challenge."

There was a call from Stuart, the man she had met at Lindsay's house. Elizabeth was surprised but not displeased to hear from him. He asked her to go out to dinner and she agreed. There was always a small feeling of guilt on her part when she went out with other men. No amount of rationalization about how "unfaithful" Robert was to her could take it away, though it never stopped her going. They went to a Chinese restaurant which Stuart insisted was of a more authentic kind than could usually be found in England. He had worked for a year in Hong Kong and had learned some Chinese there. He ordered half a dozen dishes and said a few words in Mandarin, which the waiter made a show of understanding. Elizabeth listened with interest as he explained each dish. They had the same gluelike consistency she was familiar with from Paddington takeaways, but Stuart was adamant that they were the real thing. She wished they could have wine instead of tea.

He asked if she would like to go back to his flat afterward. It was in a mansion block in St. John's Wood, not far from the restaurant. Elizabeth was intrigued by him and curious to see what sort of place he lived in. Her eyes moved quickly over the woodblock flooring, the tasteful rugs, the loaded bookshelves. There were only three pictures on the pale gray walls, but all of them were elegant and suitable-somewhere between art and decoration. As she drank coffee, he went over to a grand piano and switched on a redshaded light beside it.

"Will you play something?" she said.

"I'm very out of practice."

He took some persuading, but eventually rubbed his hands together and sat down.

He played a piece that was vaguely familiar to Elizabeth; it had a fragile tune whose effectiveness depended on no more than two or three notes. The way he played it, however, very gently but with subtle timing, was touchingly good. Even as she heard it, Elizabeth felt that the little phrase would stay with her.

"Ravel," he said when he had finished. "Lovely, isn't it?" He talked to her about Ravel and Satie and compared them to Gershwin. Elizabeth, who had thought of them as quite different kinds of composers, was impressed.

It was midnight when she finally rang for a taxi. She went downstairs happily humming the tune he had played. On the way home she had treacherous thoughts about Robert. She always told him that he made her unhappy by not leaving Jane; she promised him he would be happier with her. As far as she knew she was pa.s.sionately sincere in all her protestations. However, she conceded, as the taxi crossed the Edgware Road, it was just possible that she had chosen someone un.o.btainable for that very reason: that he did not threaten her independence.

FRANCE 1917--PART FOUR

Under the cover of a fading twilight, Stephen Wraysford narrowed his eyes against the drizzle. The men in front were invisible beneath the bulk of their clothes and the quant.i.ties of kit they were carrying. They looked as though they were bound for an expedition to the Pole, explorers to the furthest regions. Stephen wondered what force impelled him, as his legs moved forward once more.

It had been raining for three weeks, drizzling, then surging into a steady downpour, then lifting for an hour or so until the clouds came in again over the low horizon of Flanders in its winter light. The men's coats were saturated, each fibre of wool gorged on water, and their weight added twenty pounds to what they carried. They had marched up from their billets into the rear area and already the skin on their backs was rubbed raw by the movement of the webbing beneath the load. Repet.i.tive marching songs and chants had brought them to the support lines, but then as darkness fell they saw it was another three miles to the Front. Slowly the songs and conversations died as each one concentrated on lifting his feet from the mud that began to suck at them. Their worlds narrowed to the soaked back of the man in front.

The communication trench was filled with orange slime that covered their boots and puttees. The closer they went to the front line the more it began to smell. Within half a mile it had become no more than a zigzagged cesspool, thigh-deep in sucking mud that was diluted by the excreta of the overrun latrines and thickened by the decomposing bodies that each new collapse of trench wall revealed in the earth beneath.

An irritated shout pa.s.sed up and down the line: the front men went too fast, someone had fallen down. The danger was that they would end up in the wrong part of the line and have to start all over again. They had been here before, however; there was something automatic now in the way they could find their way in the darkness and take the right fork when the choice came; there was something of routine in their swearing and their violent protests. At its best it was like pride. They had seen things no human eyes had looked on before, and they had not turned their gaze away.

They were in their own view a formidable group of men. No inferno would now melt them, no storm destroy, because they had seen the worst and they had survived.

Stephen felt, at the better moments, the love for them that Gray had demanded. Their desperate courage, born from necessity, was nevertheless endearing. The grimmer, harder, more sardonic they became, the more he cared for them. Still he could not quite believe them; he could not comprehend the lengths to which they allowed themselves to be driven. He had been curious to see how far they could be taken, but his interest had slackened when he saw the answer: that there were no boundaries they would not cross, no limits to what they would endure.

He saw their faces wrapped in woollen comforters, their caps sticking out beneath their helmets, and they looked like creatures from some other life. Some wore cardigans and waistcoats sent from home, some had strips of cloth or bandage wound around their hands in place of gloves mislaid or stolen from their packs by the less scrupulous. Any cloth or wool they could find in the villages had been pressed into service as auxiliary socks or as extra layers about the head; some had Flemish newspapers stuffed inside their trousers.

They were built to endure and to resist; they looked like pa.s.sive creatures adapting to the h.e.l.l of circ.u.mstances that oppressed them. Yet, Stephen knew, they had locked up in their hearts the horror of what they had seen, and their jovial pride in their resilience was not convincing. They boasted in a mocking way of what they had seen and done; but in their sad faces wrapped in rags he saw the burden of their unwanted knowledge.

Stephen knew what they felt because he had been with them and he himself did not feel hardened or strengthened by what he had seen; he felt impoverished and demeaned. He shared their conspiracy of fort.i.tude, but sometimes he felt for them what he felt for himself, not love but pitiful contempt.

They said that at the very least they had survived, but even this was not true. Of their original platoon only he, Brennan, and Petrossian were still at the front. The names and faces of the others were already indistinct in his memory. He had an impression of a weary group of greatcoats and grimed puttees, of cigarette smoke rising beneath helmets. He remembered a voice, a smile, an habitual trick of speech. He recalled individual limbs, severed from their bodies, and the shape of particular wounds; he could picture the sudden intimacy of revealed internal organs, but he could not always say to whom the flesh belonged. Two or three had returned permanently to England; the rest were missing, buried in ma.s.s graves or, like Reeves's brother, reduced to particles so small that only the wind carried them. If they could claim survival it was by closing ranks and by the amalgamation of different units with conscripted reinforcements. Gray became battalion commander, replacing Barclay and Thursby, who had been killed, and Stephen took over his company. Harrington made the long journey home to Lancas.h.i.+re, leaving part of his left leg on the north bank of the Ancre.

It was night when they arrived at the front line. The men they were relieving pa.s.sed out thigh-high rubber boots that had been in continuous service for eight months. The decayed pulp of the interior was a mash of whale oil and putrid rags that could accommodate feet of almost any size. None of them stayed quite calm in the hours of darkness. The bursts of light as sh.e.l.ls exploded could be viewed as comforting in their remoteness, but there were always noises and shapes close to the trench itself that excited the old reflex. Stephen sometimes thought it was the only way they could be sure they were still alive.

The dugout, which acted as company headquarters, was a roofed hole in the second trench. Though small, it had an improvised bunk and a table. Stephen unloaded some of the kit he had brought up the line: a sketchbook, bars of chocolate and cigarettes, a periscope, and a knitted waistcoat he had bought from an old woman. He was sharing with a young redheaded subaltern called Ellis, who liked to read in bed. He was no more than nineteen or twenty, but he seemed composed and cooperative. He smoked incessantly but refused all offers of drink.

"When we have our next leave, I want to go to Amiens," he said.

"It's miles away," said Stephen. "You won't get that far."

"The adjutant said we could. He said it was all part of the new efficiency. Officers should have a decent time off in the place of their choice."

"1 wish you luck," said Stephen, sitting down at the table and pulling a whisky bottle toward him.

"Won't you come too?" Me? I shouldn't think so. It's just a railway junction."

"Have you been there?"

"Yes. I was there before the war."

"What's it like?"