Birdsong (34 page)

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: B
LOOM
T
HOMPSON
C
ARMAN
. W
HOLESALE
, F
ABRIC AND
D
ESIGN
.

“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.”

“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.

Lucca waddled away, his back view revealing a purple cleft of flesh at the top of his blue-checked trousers. He returned with a litre of dense, inky fluid and three glasses, only one of which he filled.

Elizabeth looked round the restaurant, which was filling with shoppers, workers, even tourists who had strayed north of the shops on Oxford Street.

These were the lines of her life, these were the things that concerned her. Order books and Lucca’s salad; Robert’s awaited calls and the criticism of Lindsay and her mother. Strikes and economic crisis. Trying not to smoke yet keeping the endless check on her weight. A planned holiday with three or four others in a rented house in Spain; a snatched weekend with Robert in Alsace, or even in Brussels itself. Her clothes, her work, her flat: its small orderly ways maintained by just one weekly visit from a cleaner while she was at work. No elaborate system of crèche, day care, and mother’s help as exhaustively discussed by her married friends. London in approaching winter, the wail of traffic through the park, and cold Sunday morning walks that issued into jovial meetings in the pubs of Bayswater that seemed to last an hour too long. And the sense of a larger life inside her, excited and confirmed by pictures she saw in galleries, books she read, but particularly by pictures; something unfulfilled, something needing to be understood.

Sometimes she went away on her own to wilder parts of northern England, where she read or walked. She didn’t feel self-pity because she could see nothing to feel sorry for; the mundane concerns and preoccupations of her life were interesting to her. She found bed-and-breakfast cottages and small pubs in guidebooks where she sometimes fell into conversation with the owners or with other guests, and sometimes just read by the fire.

Once in a village in the Dales a boy of no more than nineteen began talking to her at the bar of the pub. She was wearing her reading glasses and a thick grey-and-white-speckled sweater. He had fair hair and an unconvincing beard. He was at university and had gone off walking in order to do some reading for his studies. He was awkward with her and used set phrases with signalled
irony, as though referring to books or films they both knew. He seemed unable to say things without suggesting that they were quotations from someone else. After he had drunk two or three pints of beer he became calmer and told her about his studies in zoology and about his girlfriends at home. He implied a riotous love life. Elizabeth liked his enthusiasm and the pitch of excitement at which he appeared to be living, even in this primitive pub on a Yorkshire hillside with only the landlord’s steak-and-kidney pie to come.

It was not until after dinner, when she made her way up the narrow stairs to her room and heard him following, that it occurred to her that his interest was more than conversational. She almost burst out laughing as he took her arm with clumsy caution outside her door. She kissed him on the cheek and told him to get on with his books. When he knocked on the door an hour later, however, she let him in. She was feeling very cold.

He was overwhelmed with gratitude and excitement; he was not able to contain himself even for a minute. In the small and icy hours of the morning he tried again. Elizabeth, reluctant to be awoken from deep sleep after a long day’s walk, submitted wearily. He did not want to talk to her in the morning; he wanted to leave as quickly as possible. She felt a little tenderness toward him. She wondered what function the episode had served in his life and in his mythology of himself.

She liked living alone, she liked being alone. She ate what she wanted, not proper meals but plates of mushrooms and baked potatoes, grapes, peaches, or soups she made herself. She filled glasses with ice cubes and lemon slices, then poured gin over them, hearing the explosion of the ice, leaving hardly any room for tonic water. She had plastic tops that kept the wine drinkable from one day to the next.

In the cinema, she could drown in the sensuous load of picture and sound without the distraction of company or conversation. In the worst films she wandered off from the story and inhabited the scenery in a plot of her own. She felt self-conscious about going unaccompanied in case she should meet a couple she knew hand-in-hand in the foyer on their evening out; so she generally went on Saturday afternoon, entering in the after-lunch daylight, emerging in the darkness with the full evening still ahead.

By the end of a weekend she did want to talk to someone. She had read articles in the papers or seen something on the television that had set her mind moving; she needed to test her response.

“What do you know about the war, Irene?” she said. “You know, the First World War.”

“ ‘Pack up your troubles’ and all that stuff?” said Irene. “Terrible business, wasn’t it?”

“Did your father fight in it?” said Elizabeth, cutting the hairy, internal stalk from the centre of a quartered tomato.

“I don’t think so. I never asked him. But he fought in something because I’ve seen his medals.”

“When was he born?”

“Well, he wasn’t thirty when I was born, so he must have been born about eighteen ninety-five I should think.”

“So he was the right age?”

“Search me. I don’t know when the wretched thing was. You ask Erich. Men know all about these things.”

Erich poured what remained of the litre carafe into his glass. “Even I am not old enough to have fought. I do remember it a little. I was a schoolboy.”

“But what was it
like
?” said Elizabeth.

“I have no idea. I don’t think about war. In any case your English schools should have taught you all about it.”

“Perhaps they did. I don’t seem to have been paying attention. It all seemed so boring and depressing, all those battles and guns and things.”

“Exactly,” said Erich. “It’s morbid to dwell on it. I’ve seen enough of that kind of thing in my own lifetime without raking up the past.”

“What are you suddenly so interested in ancient history for?” said Irene.

“I’m not sure it
is
ancient history,” said Elizabeth. “It isn’t very long ago. There must be old men alive now who fought in it.”

“You ought to ask my Bob. He knows everything.”

“I bring you coffee now?” said Lucca.

T
he road swept down into Dover on a wide, banking curve that overlooked the locked, grey sea to her left. Some childish sense of joy came up in Elizabeth at the sight of the water; it was the start of holidays, it was the end of England. On a Thursday evening in winter, it was like breaking bounds.

She drove, as instructed, beneath towering gantries, up a ramp, and down through narrow marked lanes, peering round the piece of paper that a man in a kiosk had slapped on to the middle of her windscreen. She was waved to the head of an empty file. She got out of the car and felt the sea wind whip her hair. There were two container lorries to her left and a dozen or so smaller goods vehicles between marked lines round the dock; it was not a popular crossing. In the shop she bought a map of northeast France, and another of the motorways of Europe that would help her on to Brussels.

In the trembling hold of the ship she gathered up her book, her spectacles, and a spare sweater, in case she should decide to go on deck. She gratefully escaped the diesel fumes of the huge articulated trucks and climbed the steep stairs to the passenger decks.

She felt a little presumptuous. Having lived to the age of thirty-eight without giving more than a glance to the occasional war memorial or dull newsreel, she was not sure what she now expected to find. What did a “battlefield” look like? Was it a prepared area of conflict with each side’s positions marked down? Wouldn’t buildings and trees get in the way? Perhaps the people who now lived in these places would be sensitive about them; they might resent the arrival of some morbid sightseer, come like a tourist who hovers with his camera at the edge of an air crash. More probably, she thought, they would know nothing about it. It was all a very long time ago. “Battle of What?” they would say. The only person she could remember evincing an interest in these things was a boy she had known at school: a funny, gentle
creature with a wheezy voice who was good with algebra. Would history be there for her to see, or would it all have been tidied away? Was it fair to expect that sixty years after an event—on the whim of someone who had shown no previous interest—a country would dutifully reveal its past to her amateur inspection? Most of France was now like England in any case: tower blocks and industry, fast food and television.