Birdsong (15 page)

"Didn't you like the food?"

"Yes, I did. I liked the lunches with you and Lisette especially. But I don't think a gourmet from Paris would have found much to cheer about in the local restaurants."

"Well, he needn't come then," said Isabelle, nettled at what she took to be a criticism of her own cooking.

"Don't be cross," he said, laying his hand across her cheek.

"The chisel. It was different from the ones I've used before."

"You should be more careful. Now sit down and have some rabbit." After dinner they read books, sitting on either side of the fire. They went to bed early in the room at the back of the house. Isabelle had painted it and sewn new curtains. Her photographs stood on top of the cheap chest of drawers and the huge carved wardrobe bulged with her dresses. There were not many flowers to buy in the market, though there was always lavender to put in the numerous blue pots around the house. Compared to the bourgeois opulence of the boulevard du Cange, the room was stark. The presence of Isabelle's things in it, however, gave it in Stephen's eye something of the atmosphere of her old bedroom. The silk stockings that sometimes trailed from an open drawer and the piles of soft undergarments, the finest fabric the trade could provide, mitigated some of the harshness of the bare boards. In that shared bedroom Stephen felt a privileged proximity to these small intimacies that even her husband had never been permitted. In sleep they were also together, though Stephen found the closeness of Isabelle's unconscious body made him feel uneasy, and he often took a blanket to the sofa in the living room.

He would lie alone, looking up at the ceiling and across to the big fireplace, over to the kitchen range and its black, hanging implements. His thoughts and dreams did not fill up with the big skies of Lincolnshire or the memories of refectory tables and inspections for head lice; nor did he give a backward thought to having abruptly left his employment, to import licences, dockets, or bales of cotton unloaded at the East India Docks. He thought about the moment and the next day and the capsule of existence in which he and Isabelle lived, contained within a town and a world of kinds outside. It was an existence he felt had been won by him but in some wider judgement would not be allowed.

He thought about what he would make at work the next day. Sometimes he thought about nothing at all, but merely traced with his eyes the lines of the timber in the beams above his head.

*

Two months passed and winter calmed the worst of the winds with an icy stillness that made the pavements dangerous and stopped the water in the fountain. Isabelle stayed in the house for most of the day when Stephen was at work. She spent the time altering the decorations to suit her taste and cooking soup or stew for him to eat when he came home. She did not miss the comfortable life she had had in Amiens with the attentive delivery boys from the milliner or the grocer. It did not matter to her that much of her day was spent in performing tasks that even Marguerite preferred to leave to Madame Bonnet. Her cousin, whose husband ran the pharmacy, came to visit her frequently, and she was not lonely. At the end of December no blood came. She looked at the small black diary in which she marked the days and saw that it was due. By the end of January there was still none. This seemed appropriate to Isabelle. It had been hard to think of blood as the mark of new life, of hope, as Jeanne had told her when she first ran to her sobbing in alarm; now in the withholding of it there was a sense of being healed. She had stopped hemorrhaging herself away; her power was turned inward where it would silently create. She said nothing to Stephen.

One Saturday at noon she went to meet him after he had finished work, and they went for a walk in the town. They stopped briefly at a café so he could eat after his morning's exertion, then carried on past the town hall and out along a narrow street of shops toward the outskirts of the place. Their breath left thinning trails behind them as they climbed a slight gradient leading out of town. They arrived in a square, which was the last before the street became a road and vanished into the grey-and-purple countryside.

Isabelle felt lightheaded and went to sit down on a bench. A slight moisture had come up on her forehead, which was now turning cold against her skin under the winter wind.

"I'll find you some smelling salts," said Stephen, and set off for Madame Bonnet's pharmacy.

Isabelle sat quietly, not sure whether to loosen her coat and allow the cool air to reach her or to wrap it more tightly around her to keep out the chill. She intended to tell Stephen about the child she believed she was expecting, but something made her delay. She wished she could present it to him whole without the long toil of pregnancy. She had no wish to be cared for or treated with special regard. She did not feel that the minute organic changes taking place inside her were the concern of anyone else, even of the man who had caused them. Yet she already loved the child. She imagined it to be a boy and could picture his smiling, open face. She didn't see a swaddled baby but a young man with a guileless manner, rather larger than herself, who would fling his arm protectively around her before returning to some undemanding task in the fields. He was never an infant in her imagination, nor a man of substance or achievement for whom she felt ambitious, but always just this ageless, happy male.

She thought of all the mothers who lived in the villages that lined the narrow road leading from the town. Out there were millions of young men, strong, smiling, as her boy would be, working on the land. They never knew each other, never met, never considered any kinship or allegiance they might have to each other or to the country they lived in, because such things existed only in time of war. Isabelle began to look with regret toward her parents and their continuing lives. The coming child had already begun to still her most restless expectations. The need satisfied in her was so deep that she had not previously been aware of it; it was as though she had become conscious of a starving hunger only after having eaten. It seemed to alter the levels and balances of her needs. She felt closer to the girl she had been at home; a broken circle had been rejoined. Although this was a soothing thought, it brought with it some doubts about what she had done; it made her want to be reunited with her family, or at least with her sister Jeanne. It was to her more than to anyone that she wanted to talk. It was she, Isabelle thought, who must be the first to know about the child.

She had started to feel uneasy about the things she and Stephen had done in Azaire's house. Stephen seemed so sure of everything and she had been so overcome by desire that she had trusted him. She had followed her instincts and where there was doubt she was reassured by his certainty and by the tenderness of her feeling for him. Without the stimulus of fear and prohibition, her desire had slackened.

In the southern winter the excesses of their brazen love affair seemed to belong to a different season. She went into a church in St.-Rémy to confess to the local priest, but found she could not bring herself to describe in detail the extent of what had passed between them. The priest cut her off soon after she confessed to the adultery itself. The penance seemed to bear no relation to the sin; it was a formality plucked from the register where such commonplace transgressions were graded. Isabelle felt unsatisfied, and although she did not regret what had happened she began to feel guilty.

Stephen returned with a bottle of salts and sat beside her on the bench.

"I wonder what it is," he said. "Perhaps you haven't been eating well enough at home. Sometimes that makes people feel faint. I brought you a little cake as well."

"No, I don't think it's that. It's nothing serious." She laid her hand on his arm.

"Don't worry about me."

She was smiling at him in a sweet, indulgent way that made it seem as though it was he who needed to be cared for or protected. She broke the cake in half and offered some to him. A shower of yellow crumbs fell on to the wooden seat between them.

There was a whirring and banging of bird's wings above them as a fat pigeon, attracted by the sight of the crumbling cake, descended from the gutter of the building behind them and landed impudently between them on the bench.

"Jesus Christ!" Stephen leapt up from his seat in horror. Isabelle, who had been amused by the bird's fearlessness, looked up in alarm.

"What is it?"

"That bird, that bird. For God's sake. Get rid of it."

"It's only a pigeon, it's just--"

"Get rid of it. Please."

Isabelle clapped her hands, and the plump bird managed to heave itself back into the air, across the square and into the branches of a tree, where it waited in sight of the crumbs.

"What on earth is the matter, my darling? You're trembling."

"I know, I know. I'm sorry. I'll be all right."

"It's just a fat old pigeon, it wouldn't do you any harm."

"I know it wouldn't. It's not that I think it'll attack, it's just some strange fear."

"Come and sit down now. Come on. Sit next to me and let me put my arm round you. That's right. My poor boy. Is that better? Shall I stroke your hair?"

"No, I'm fine. I'm sorry to have made a fuss."

"The noise you made."

"I know."

Stephen gradually stopped trembling. "I've always hated birds. That time I told you about when I hit that boy and they made me go back into the institution. He had been taunting me about some crows that the gamekeeper had nailed up to a fence. I went up and stroked one to show I was not afraid. It had maggots under its wings and drooling, milky eyes." He shuddered.

Isabelle said, "So birds make you think of having to go back to that place?"

"It's partly that. But I had always hated them, from long before that. There's something cruel, prehistoric about them."

She stood up and took his arm. For a moment she looked into his dark brown eyes, into the symmetrical beauty of his pale face. She nodded a little and smiled.

"So there is something that frightens you," she said.

A week later Isabelle was chopping vegetables on the table when she felt a pain just below the waistband of her skirt. It felt as though she was being penetrated by a knitting needle with large walnuts midway up its shaft. She pressed her hands flat over the pain and sat down heavily at the table. If she kept still and concentrated she would keep the baby; she would not allow it to escape. Her manicured fingers tenderly aligned themselves on the area she imagined the barely visible thing to be. Her pulse was transmitted through the fabric of the dress and the soft skin beneath to the chamber where the life was balanced. She willed it to stay, trying to reassure it through the gentleness of her palms, but she felt further sharp probes going right up into her womb. She went to the bedroom and lay down, only to find there was bleeding she could not stop.

In the afternoon she took her coat and found a doctor whose name had been given to her by her cousin. He was a bald man with a deep voice and a roll of fat that almost obscured his stiff white collar. He seemed unmoved by her anxiety and talked in brief, cheerful sentences as he examined her and gestured her to a door off his surgery where she would find a glass container. He told her the result of the test would be available to him within a week and she was to call back then. In the meantime, he said, she should take things quietly and not exert herself. He pressed a large, folded piece of paper into her hand and told her to pay the receptionist as she left.

On the way back to the house, Isabelle stopped at the church and sat in a pew at the back. She had no further desire to confess to the priest, but she wanted to admit, if only to herself, her feelings of guilt about the way she had abandoned herself to physical pleasure. Lurid images of afternoons in the boulevard du Cange came into her mind inside the wintry cold of the church. She could see Stephen's blood-swollen flesh in front of her face, her mouth; she could feel it probing and entering each unguarded part of her, not against her will but at her hungry and desperate insistence.

She opened her eyes and shook the sacrilegious pictures from her mind, feeling ashamed that she had entertained them in a church, even if it had been only to confess them. She looked to the altar, where a wooden crucifix was lit by candles, the waxy flesh below the ribs pierced and bleeding from the Roman soldier's sword. She thought how prosaically physical this suffering had been: the punctured skin on forehead, feet, hands, the parting of flesh with nails and steel. When even the divine sacrifice had been expressed in such terms, it was sometimes hard to imagine in what manner precisely human life was supposed to exceed the limitations of pulse, skin, and decomposition.

Isabelle wrote: My dearest Jeanne, I have missed you so much, not only in the past few weeks but in the years before when we never seemed to meet. How much I regret that now. I feel like a child who has been absorbed in her own game all day and suddenly stops, only to see that it is growing dark and she is far from home with no idea of how to get back.

I terribly want to see you to talk about what has happened. I am pregnant, though I thought last week that I had lost the child. I have strange pains and bleeding, though the doctor says these are quite common. He says there may be a bruise inside which is bleeding and could dislodge the baby. I am to rest and not exert myself.

I have still not told Stephen about it. I don't know why I can't do this. I truly love him, but he frightens me a little. I'm not sure he would understand my joy at being pregnant or how worried I am at the thought of losing it. He hardly talks about such things. Even when he has mentioned his own childhood he speaks as though it were something that happened to someone else. How could he feel attached to something that does not yet exist?

There is something worse, Jeanne. When we were young and I was the baby, no one ever paid me much attention (except you, of course) and I was allowed to do what I liked as long as my dress was kept clean and I was polite at mealtimes. I wanted to explore. Do you remember how I said I would go to Africa? Now I feel I have explored in some other way. It has damaged René, though I owe him very little after the way he treated me. It has also damaged Lisette and Grégoire, and of course you and Mama and Papa, though whether Papa takes much notice of anything these days I don't know. Although I will love the baby and protect it with all my strength, I will not be the ideal mother, compromised as I am.