Birdsong (3 page)

Stephen turned and ran for the corner of the passageway, knowing he had advanced beyond the limit he had set himself. As he turned the corner he heard Azaire's quizzical voice. "Is there anyone there?" He tried to remember whether there had been any hazards on his way as he ran back toward the landing without time to check that his path was clear. From the foot of the stairs going up to the second floor he could see that some light was coming from his room. He took the steps two at a time and plunged toward the switch on the table lamp, causing it to rock and bang as he reached it.

He stood still in the middle of the room, listening. He could hear footsteps reach the bottom of the stairs below. If Azaire came up he would wonder why he was standing fully dressed in the middle of a dark room. He moved to the bed and slid under the covers.

After ten minutes he thought it safe to undress for bed. He closed the door and the shutter on the small window and sat down in his night-clothes at the writing table. He read over the entry he had written earlier, which described his journey from London, the train in France, and the arrival in the boulevard du Gange. It made brief comments on the character of Bérard and his wife, under heavy disguise, and gave his impressions of Azaire and the two children. He saw, with some surprise, that what had struck him most he had not written about at all.

*

Rising in the morning with a clear head, rested, and full of interest in his new surroundings, Stephen put the happenings of the night from his mind and submitted to a full tour of Azaire's business operations.

They left the prosperity of the boulevard and walked to the Saint Leu quarter, which looked to Stephen like a medieval engraving, with gabled houses leaning over cobbled streets above the canals. There were washing lines attached to crooked walls and drainpipes; small children in ragged clothes played hide-and-seek on the bridges and ran sticks along the iron railings at the water's edge. Women carried buckets of drinking water collected from the fountains in the better areas of town to their numerous offspring, some of whom waited in the family's single room, while others, mostly immigrants from the countryside of Picardy who had come in search of work, lodged in makeshift shelters in the backyards of the bursting houses. There was the noise of poverty that comes from children on the streets, whose mothers are screaming threats or admonitions or calling out important news to neighbours. There was the racket of cohabitation that exists when no household is closed to another; there were voices from the crowded bakeries and shops, while the men with barrows and horse-drawn carts cried up their goods a dozen times on each street.

Azaire moved nimbly through the crowd, took Stephen's arm as they crossed a wooden bridge, turned from the shouted abuse of a surly adolescent boy, led the way up a wrought-iron staircase on the side of a building and delivered them both into a first-floor office that looked down on to a factory floor.

Sit down. I have a meeting now with Meyraux, who is my senior man and also, as a punishment for whatever sins I have committed, the head or the syndicate." Azaire pointed to a leather-covered seat on the far side or a desk piled with papers. He went down the internal steps to the factory floor, leaving Stephen to look out through the glass walls of the office on to the scene below. The workers were mostly women, sitting at spinning machines at the far end of the room, though there were also men and boys in flat leather caps at work on the machines or transporting yarn or bolts of material on little wooden-wheeled wagons. There was a rhythmical clatter from the antiquated jennies that almost drowned the shouts of the foreman, a red-faced man with a moustache who strode up and down in a coat that reached almost to his ankles. At the near end of the factory were rows of workers at Singer sewing machines, their knees rising and falling as they pumped the mechanism, their hands working in flat opposition to one another, going rapidly this way then that, as though adjusting the pressure on a huge tap. To Stephen, who had spent many hours on such premises in England, the process looked old-fashioned, in the same way that the streets of Saint Leu seemed to belong to a different century from the terraces of the mill towns of Lancashire. Azaire returned with Meyraux, a small, fleshy man with thick dark hair swept across his forehead. Meyraux had the look of someone honest who had been driven to suspicion and a profound stubbornness. He shook hands with Stephen, though the reserved look in his eye seemed to indicate that Stephen should read nothing into the formality. When Azaire offered him a seat, Meyraux hovered for a moment before apparently deciding that this did not necessarily amount to a capitulation. He sat square and unbudgeable in the chair, though his fingers fluttered in his lap as though weaving invisible strands of cotton.

"As you know, Meyraux, Monsieur Wraysford has come to visit us from England. He is a young man and wants to learn a little more about our business." Meyraux nodded. Stephen smiled at him. He enjoyed the feeling of being unlicensed, disqualified by his age from responsibility or commitment. He could see the entrenched weariness of the older men.

"However," Azaire went on, "as you also know, Monsieur Wraysford's compatriots in Manchester are able to produce the same cloth as we do for twothirds of the price. Since the company he works for is one of our major customers in England, it is only fair that we should try to impress him. I understand from his employer, who is a most farsighted man, that he would like to see more cooperation between the two countries. He has talked about taking shares in the company." Meyraux's fingers were jabbing faster. "Another Cosserat," he said dismissively. Azaire smiled. "My dear Meyraux, you mustn't be so suspicious." He turned to Stephen. "He is referring to one of the great producers, Eugène Cosserat, who many years ago imported English workers and techniques--"

"At the cost of several jobs among local people."

Azaire continued to address Stephen. "The government wants us to rationalize our operations, to try to bring more of them under one roof. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do, but it inevitably means greater use of machinery and a consequent loss of jobs."

"What the industry needs," said Meyraux, "as the government has been saying since my father's day, is more investment and a less mean and timid attitude on the part of the owners."

Azaire's face became suddenly rigid, whether from anger or simple distaste was impossible to say. He sat down, put on a pair of spectacles and pulled a piece of paper toward him from the pile on the table.

"We are in difficult times. We have no money to invest and we can therefore only retrench. These are my specific proposals. Employees on salaries will take a cut of one per cent. Those on piecework will be paid at the same rate but will have to raise output by an average of five per cent. Their output will no longer be measured by the metre but by the piece. Those not qualified to use the new machinery, about half the work force, will be reclassified as untrained workers and their rate of pay will be adjusted accordingly."

He took off his glasses and pushed the piece of paper toward Meyraux. Stephen was surprised by the simplicity of Azaire's assault. He had made no pretence that the work force had anything to gain from the new arrangements or that they would make up in some other way for what they were clearly being asked to forgo. Perhaps it was just a first bargaining position.

Meyraux, confronted with the details, was impressively calm. "It's about what I expected," he said. "You appear to be asking us to settle for even less than the dyers, Monsieur. I need hardly remind you what situation they are in." Azaire began to fill his pipe. "Who is behind that nonsense?" he said.

"What is behind it," said Meyraux, "are the attempts of the owners to use slave labour at diminishing levels of pay." You know what I mean," said Azaire. The name of Lucien Lebrun is being mentioned." Little Lucien! I didn't think he had the courage."

It was bright in the glass office, the sunlight streaming in across the books and papers on the table beneath the window and illuminating the faces of the two antagonists. Stephen watched their fierce exchange but felt dissociated from it, as though they spoke only in slogans. From the subject of Azaire's wealth, his mind moved naturally to possessions, to the house on the boulevard, the garden, the plump children, Grégoire with his bored eyes, Lisette with her suggestive smile, and above all to Madame Azaire, a figure he viewed with an incompatible mixture of feelings.

"... the natural consequence of a production with so many separate processes," said Azaire.

"Well, I too would like to see the dyeing done here," said Meyraux, "but as you know... "

He could not be sure of her age, and there was something in the vulnerability of her skin where he had seen the goosepimples rise on her arm in a draught from the garden. There was something above all in the impatience he had seen in the turn of her head that concealed the expression of her eyes.

"... would you not agree, Monsieur Wraysford?"

"I certainly would."

"Not if we were to invest in larger premises," said Meyraux. I am mad, thought Stephen, quelling a desire to laugh; I must be insane to be sitting in this hot glass office watching the face of this man discussing the employment of hundreds and I am thinking things I can't admit even to myself while smiling my complicity to...

"I will not discuss it further in the presence of this young man," said Meyraux.

"Forgive me, Monsieur." He stood up and inclined his head formally toward Stephen.

"It's nothing personal."

"Of course," said Stephen, also standing up. "Nothing personal." In his notebook the code word Stephen used when describing a certain aspect of Madame Azaire and of his confused feeling towards her was "pulse." It seemed to him to be sufficiently cryptic, yet also to suggest something of his suspicion that she was animated by a different kind of rhythm from that which beat in her husband's blood. It also referred to an unusual aspect of her physical presence. No one could have been more proper in her dress and her toilet than Madame Azaire. She spent long parts of the day bathing or changing her clothes; she carried a light scent of rose soap or perfume when she brushed past him in the passageways. Her clothes were more fashionable than those of other women in the town yet revealed less. She carried herself modestly when she sat or stood; she slid into chairs with her feet close together, so that beneath the folds of her skirts her knees too must have been almost touching. When she rose again it was without any leverage from her hands or arms but with a spontaneous upward movement of grace and propriety. Her white hands seemed barely to touch the cutlery when they ate at the family dinner table and her lips left no trace of their presence on the wine glass. On one occasion, Stephen had noticed, some tiny adhesion caused the membrane of her lower lip to linger for a fraction of a second as she pulled the glass away to return it to its place, but still the surface of it had remained clear and shining. She caught him staring at it.

Yet despite her formality toward him and her punctilious ease of manner, Stephen sensed some other element in what he had termed the pulse of her. It was impossible to say through which sense he had the impression, but somehow, perhaps only in the tiny white hairs on the skin of her bare arm or the blood he had seen rise beneath the light freckles of her cheekbones, he felt certain there was some keener physical life than she was actually living in the calm, restrictive rooms of her husband's house with its oval door handles of polished china and its neatly inlaid parquet floors.

*

A week later Azaire suggested to Meyraux that he should bring Stephen to eat with the men in a room at the back of the factory where they had lunch. There were two or three long refectory tables at which they could either eat the food they had brought or buy whatever dish had been cooked by a woman with a white head scarf and missing teeth.

On the third day, in the middle of a general conversation, Stephen stood up abruptly, said, "Excuse me," and rushed from the room.

An elderly man called Jacques Bonnet followed him outside and found him leaning against the wall of the factory. He put a friendly hand on Stephen's shoulder and asked if he was all right.

Stephen's face was pale and two lines of sweat ran from his forehead. "Yes, I'm fine," he said.

"What was the matter? Don't you feel well?"

"It was probably just too hot. I'll be fine." He took out a handkerchief and wiped his face.

Bonnet said, "Why don't you come back inside and finish your lunch? It looked a_ _nice bit of rabbit the old woman had cooked up."

"No!" Stephen was trembling. "I won't go back. I'm sorry." He pulled himself away from Bonnet's paternal hand and moved off briskly into the town. "Tell Azaire I'll be back later," he called over his shoulder. At dinner the following day Azaire asked him if he had recovered.

"Yes, thank you," said Stephen. "There was nothing the matter with me. I just felt a little faint."

"Faint? It sounds like a problem of the circulation."

"I don't know. There's something in the air, it may be one of the chemicals used by the dyers, I'm not sure. It makes it hard for me to breathe."

"Perhaps you should see a doctor, then. I can easily arrange an appointment."

"No, thank you. It's nothing."

Azaire's gaze had filled with something like amusement. "I don't like to think of you having some kind of fit. I could easily--"

"For goodness' sake, René," said Madame Azaire. "He's told you that there's nothing to worry about. Why don t you leave him alone?"

Azaire's fork made a loud clatter as he laid it down on his plate. For a moment his face had an expression of panic, like that of the schoolboy who suffers a sudden reverse and can't understand the rules of behaviour by which his rival has won approval. Then he began to smile sardonically, as though to indicate that really he knew best and that his decision not to argue further was a temporary indulgence he was granting his juniors. He turned to his wife with a teasing lightness of manner.