Birdsong (2 page)

“So what do you know about textiles?” said Azaire. He was only forty years old but could have been ten years more. His body was of a kind that would neither harden nor sag with age. His eyes had an alert, humourless glare.

“A little,” said Stephen. “I have worked in the business for nearly four years, though mostly dealing with financial matters. My employer wanted me to understand more of the manufacturing process.”

The maid took away the soup plates and Azaire began to talk about the local industries and the difficulties he had had with his
work force. He owned a factory in town and another a few miles outside.

“The organization of the men into their syndicates leaves me very little room for manoeuvre. They complain they are losing their jobs because we have introduced machinery, but if we cannot compete with our competitors in Spain and England, then we have no hope.”

The maid brought in a dish of sliced meat in thin gravy that she placed in front of Madame Azaire. Lisette began to tell a story of her day at school. She tossed her head and giggled as she spoke. The story concerned a prank played by one girl on another, but Lisette’s telling of it contained a second level. It was as though she recognized the childish nature of what she said and wanted to intimate to Stephen and her parents that she herself was too grown-up for such things. But where her own interests and tastes now lay she seemed unsure; she stammered a little before tailing off and turning to rebuke her brother for his laughter.

Stephen watched her as she spoke, his dark eyes scrutinizing her face. Azaire ignored his daughter as he helped himself to salad and passed the bowl to his wife. He ran a piece of bread round the rim of the plate where traces of gravy remained.

Madame Azaire had not fully engaged Stephen’s eye. In return he avoided hers, as though waiting to be addressed, but within his peripheral view fell the sweep of her strawberry-chestnut hair, caught and held up off her face. She wore a white lace blouse with a dark red stone at the throat.

As they finished dinner there was a ring at the front door and they heard a hearty male voice in the hall.

Azaire smiled for the first time. “Good old Bérard. On the dot as usual!”

“Monsieur and Madame Bérard,” said the maid as she opened the door.

“Good evening to you, Azaire. Madame, delighted.” Bérard, a heavyset grey-haired man in his fifties, lowered his lips to Madame Azaire’s hand. His wife, almost equally well built, though with thick hair wound up on top of her head, shook hands and kissed the children on the cheek.

“I am sorry, I didn’t hear your name when René introduced us,” said Bérard to Stephen.

While Stephen repeated it and spelled it out for him, the children were dismissed and the Bérards installed in their place.

Azaire seemed rejuvenated by their arrival. “Brandy for you, Bérard? And for you, Madame, a little tisane, I think? Isabelle, ring for coffee also, please. Now then—”

“Before you go any further,” said Bérard, holding up his fleshy hand, “I have some bad news. The dyers have called for a strike to begin tomorrow. The syndicate chiefs met the employers’ representatives at five this evening and that is their decision.”

Azaire snorted. “I thought the meeting was tomorrow.”

“It was brought forward to today. I don’t like to bring you bad tidings, my dear René, but you would not have thanked me if you had learned it from your foreman tomorrow. At least I suppose it won’t affect your factory immediately.”

Bérard in fact appeared to have enjoyed delivering the news. His face expressed a quiet satisfaction at the importance it had conferred on him. Madame Bérard looked admiringly at her husband.

Azaire continued to curse the work force and to ask how they expected him to keep his factories going. Stephen and the women were reluctant to give an opinion and Bérard, having delivered the news, seemed to have no further contribution to make on the subject.

“So,” he said, when Azaire had run on long enough, “a strike of dyers. There it is, there it is.”

This conclusion was taken by all, including Azaire, as the termination of the subject.

“How did you travel?” said Bérard.

“By train,” said Stephen, assuming he was being addressed. “It was a long journey.”

“Aah, the trains,” said Bérard. “What a system! We are a great junction here. Trains to Paris, to Lille, to Boulogne … Tell me, do you have trains in England?”

“Yes.”

“Since when?”

“Let me see … For about seventy years.”

“But you have problems in England, I think.”

“I’m not sure. I wasn’t aware of any.”

Bérard smiled happily as he drank his brandy. “So there it is. They have trains now in England.”

The course of the conversation depended on Bérard; he took it as his burden to act as a conductor, to bring in the different voices, and then summarize what they had contributed.

“And in England you eat meat for breakfast every day,” he said.

“I think most people do,” said Stephen.

“Imagine, dear Madame Azaire, roast meat for breakfast every day!” Bérard invited his hostess to speak.

She declined, but murmured something about the need to open a window.

“Perhaps one day we shall do the same, eh René?”

“Oh, I doubt it, I doubt it,” said Azaire. “Unless one day we have the London fog as well.”

“Oh, and the rain.” Bérard laughed. “It rains five days out of six in London, I believe.” He looked toward Stephen again.

“I read in a newspaper that last year it rained a little less in London than in Paris, though—”

“Five days out of six,” beamed Bérard. “Can you imagine?”

“Papa can’t stand the rain,” Madame Bérard told Stephen.

“And how have you passed this beautiful spring day, dear Madame?” said Bérard, again inviting a contribution from his hostess. This time he was successful, and Madame Azaire, out of politeness or enthusiasm, addressed him directly.

“This morning I was out doing some errands in the town. There was a window open in a house near the cathedral and someone was playing the piano.” Madame Azaire’s voice was cool and low. She spent some time describing what she had heard. “It was a beautiful thing,” she concluded, “though just a few notes. I wanted to stop and knock on the door of the house and ask whoever was playing it what it was called.”

Monsieur and Madame Bérard looked startled. It was evidently not the kind of thing they had expected. Azaire spoke with the soothing voice of one used to such fancies. “And what was the tune, my dear?”

“I don’t know. I had never heard it before. It was just a tune like … Beethoven or Chopin.”

“I doubt it was Beethoven if you failed to recognize it, Madame,” said Bérard gallantly. “It was one of those folksongs, I’ll bet you anything.”

“It didn’t sound like that,” said Madame Azaire.

“I can’t bear these folk tunes you hear so much of these days,” Bérard continued. “When I was a young man it was different. Of course, everything was different then.” He laughed with wry self-recognition. “But give me a proper melody that’s been written by one of our great composers any day. A song by Schubert or a nocturne by Chopin, something that will make the hairs of your head stand on end! The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings that normally we keep locked up in the heart. The great composers of the past were able to do this, but the musicians of today are satisfied with four notes in a line you can sell on a song-sheet at the street corner. Genius does not find its recognition quite as easily as that, my dear Madame Azaire!”

Stephen watched as Madame Azaire turned her head slowly so that her eyes met those of Bérard. He saw them open wider as they focused on his smiling face, on which small drops of perspiration stood out in the still air of the dining room. How on earth, he wondered, could she be the mother of the girl and boy who had been with them at dinner?

“I do think I should open that window,” she said coldly, and stood up with a rustle of silk skirt.

“And you too are a musical man, Azaire?” said Bérard. “It’s a good thing to have music in a household where there are children. Madame Bérard and I always encouraged our children in their singing.”

Stephen’s mind was racing as Bérard’s voice went on and on. There was something magnificent about the way Madame Azaire turned this absurd man aside. He was only a small-town bully, it was true, but he was clearly used to having his own way.

“I have enjoyed evenings at the concert hall,” said Azaire modestly, “though I should hesitate to describe myself as a ‘musical man’ on account of that. I merely—”

“Nonsense. Music is a democratic form of art. You don’t need money to buy it or education to study it. All you need is a pair of these.” Bérard took hold of his large pink ears and shook them. “Ears. The gift of God at birth. You must not be shy about your
preference, Azaire. That can only lead to the triumph of inferior taste through the failing of false modesty.” Bérard sat back in his chair and glanced toward the now open window. The draught seemed to spoil his enjoyment of the epigram he had pretended to invent. “But forgive me, René,” he said. “I cut you off.”

Azaire was working at his black briar pipe, tamping down the tobacco with his fingers and testing its draw by sucking noisily on it. When it was done to his satisfaction he struck a match and for a moment a blue spiral of smoke encircled his bald head. In the silence before he could reply to his friend, they heard the birds in the garden outside.

“Patriotic songs,” said Azaire. “I have a particular fondness for them. The sound of bands playing and a thousand voices lifted together to sing the ‘Marseillaise’ as the army went off to fight the Prussians. What a day that must have been!”

“But if you’ll forgive me,” said Bérard, “that is an example of music being used for a purpose—to instil a fighting valour in the hearts of our soldiers. When any art is put to practical ends it loses its essential purity. Am I not right, Madame Azaire?”

“I daresay you are, Monsieur. What does Monsieur Wraysford think?”

Stephen, momentarily startled, looked at Madame Azaire and found her eyes on his for the first time. “I have no view on that, Madame,” he said, recovering his composure. “But I think if any song can touch the heart, then one should value it.”

Bérard suddenly held out his hand. “A little brandy, if you please, Azaire. Thank you. Now then. I am going to do something in which I risk playing the fool and making you think ill of me.”

Madame Bérard laughed incredulously.

“I am going to sing. Yes, there’s no point in trying to dissuade me. I am going to sing a little song that was popular when I was a boy, and that, I can assure you, was very many years ago.”

It was the speed with which, having made his declaration, Bérard launched into his song that surprised his listeners. One moment they had been making formal after-dinner conversation, the next they had been turned into a trapped audience as Bérard leant forward in his chair, elbows on the table, and sang in a warbling baritone.

He fixed his eyes on Madame Azaire, who was sitting opposite. She was unable to hold his gaze, but looked down at her plate. Her discomfort did not deflect Bérard. Azaire was fiddling with his pipe and Stephen studied the wall above Bérard’s head. Madame Bérard watched with a proud smile as her husband made the gift of his song to his hostess. Madame Azaire blushed and squirmed in her chair under the unblinking stare of the singer.

The dewlaps on his neck wobbled as he turned his head for emphasis at a touching part of the song. It was a sentimental ballad about the different times of a man’s life. Its chorus ran, “But then I was young and the leaves were green/Now the corn is cut and the little boat sailed away.”

At the end of each refrain Bérard would pause dramatically and Stephen would allow his eyes a quick glance to see if he had finished. For a moment there was utter silence in the hot dining room, but then would come another deep inhalation and a further verse.

Bérard’s head revolved a little as he sang, and his voice grew louder as he warmed to the song, but his bloodshot eyes remained fixed on Madame Azaire, as though his head could turn only on the axis of his stare. By an effort of will she appeared to compose herself and stiffen her body against the intimacy of his attention.

“ ‘And the little boat sailed away-y-y.’ There,” said Bérard, coming abruptly to an end, “I told you I should make a fool of myself!”

The others all protested that, on the contrary, the song had been magnificent.

“Papa has a beautiful voice,” said Madame Bérard, flushed with pride.

Madame Azaire’s face was also pink, though not from the same emotion. Azaire became falsely jovial and Stephen felt a drop of sweat run down inside the back of his collar. Only Bérard himself was completely unembarrassed.

“Now, Azaire, what about a game of cards. What shall it be?”

“Excuse me, René,” said Madame Azaire, “I have a slight headache. I think I shall go to bed. Perhaps Monsieur Wraysford would like to take my place.”

Stephen stood up as Madame Azaire rose from her chair. There were protests and anxious enquiries from the Bérards that Madame Azaire waved away with a smile, assuring them she was perfectly all right. Bérard lowered his face to her hand and Madame Bérard kissed the still-pink skin of Madame Azaire’s cheek. There were a few freckles on her bare forearm, Stephen noticed as she turned to the door, a tall, suddenly commanding figure in a blood-red skirt that swept over the floor of the hall.

“Let’s go into the sitting room,” said Azaire. “Monsieur, I trust you will join us to make up our card game.”

“Yes, of course,” said Stephen, forcing a smile of acquiescence.

“Poor Madame Azaire,” said Madame Bérard, as they settled at the card table. “I hope she hasn’t caught a chill.”

Azaire laughed. “No, no. It’s just her nerves. Think nothing of it.”

“Such a delicate creature,” murmured Bérard. “Your deal, I think, Azaire.”

“Nevertheless, a headache can mean the beginning of a fever,” said Madame Bérard.