Birdsong (6 page)

After a year of courtship, most of it conducted by letter since Jean’s various postings seldom allowed him to be in Rouen, Isabelle’s father made one of his rare interventions into family life. He summoned Jean to see him when he came to visit Isabelle and told him he was too old, too junior in rank, too undistinguished in family, and too dilatory in his courtship. Destournel, who was essentially a shy man, was taken aback by the force of Fourmentier’s objection and began to question his own motives. He was entranced by Isabelle’s character and her individual appearance, which was already different from that of most girls of her age. When he had spent an evening in the mess he loved to go to his room and think of this young, vital woman. He allowed his imagination to dwell on the details of her feminine home life, with the trappings of peace and domesticity and the company of her two remaining unmarried sisters, Delphine and Jeanne. He liked to evaluate their comparative worth in his mind and was pleased with his perverse judgement that the youngest one, pretty well unregarded by the others, was the most beautiful and most interesting. But while Isabelle Fourmentier and her pale skin and her fresh clothes and her laughter undoubtedly gave him a wonderful source of relief from the daily details of army life, he was not certain
that in his heart he had any definite intention of marrying her. Perhaps if Fourmentier had not interfered it might have come naturally to that; but the sudden advent of self-consciousness prompted a destructive doubt.

A few months later, on his next visit, he took Isabelle for a walk in the garden and told her that he was being posted abroad and that he was not in a position to continue their friendship. He skated around the question of marriage with pleas of poverty and unworthiness. Isabelle didn’t care whether he married her or not, but when he said he would not see her again she felt the simple agony of bereavement, like a child whose only source of love has gone.

For three years her loss coloured every moment of her day. When at last it became bearable it was still like a wound on which the skin would not thicken, so the least thing could reopen it. The reckless innocence of her unguided childhood was finished, but eventually a sweetness and balance in her nature returned. At the age of twenty-three she no longer seemed the baby of the house; she appeared older than her age, and began to cultivate a style and manner of her own that were not those of her parents or her elder sisters. Her mother was a little frightened by the certainty of her tastes and the assurance of her opinions. Isabelle felt herself grow, and she met no resistance.

At a party her father heard of a local family called Azaire who had gone to live in Amiens, where the wife had died, leaving two young children. He manoeuvred an introduction and distinctly liked the look of René Azaire. Isabelle was not the comfort he had hoped for at home; she had become far too strong-willed to be a housekeeper, and although she was an accomplished helper to her mother she threatened at times to become an embarrassment to him. In the strict and experienced figure of René Azaire, Isabelle’s father saw a solution to a number of difficulties.

The match was adroitly sold to Isabelle by both men. Her father played on her sympathy for Azaire while he in turn introduced his children, both then at captivating stages of their lives. Azaire promised her some independence in their marriage, and Isabelle, who longed to be free of her parents’ house, agreed. Her interest in Lisette and Grégoire was the most important thing to
her; she wanted to help them and to submerge her own disappointments in their successes. It was also agreed that she and Azaire should have children of their own. So she changed from the little Fourmentier girl into Madame Azaire, a woman of dignity beyond her age, of pronounced taste and opinion but with an accumulation of natural impulse and affection that had not been satisfied by any of the circumstances of her life.

Azaire was at first proud to have married such a young and attractive woman and liked to display her to his friends. He saw his children prosper under her attention. Lisette was taken tactfully through the awkward changes in her body; Grégoire was encouraged in his enthusiasms and forced to improve his manners. Madame Azaire was well regarded in the town. She was an affectionate and dutiful wife to her husband, and he required no more from her; she did not love him, but he would have been frightened to have aroused such an unnecessary emotion.

Madame Azaire grew into her new name. She was content with the role she had accepted and thought that her ambitious desires could be safely and permanently forgotten. It was, by a paradox she did not seem to understand at the time, the cold figure of her husband who kept those desires alive.

He saw the production of further children as an important proof of his standing in society and a confirmation that this was a balanced match in which his age and the difference in tastes were not important. He approached his wife in a businesslike and predatory manner; she reacted with the submissive indifference which was the only response he left open to her. He made love to her each night, though, once embarked on it, he seemed to want it to be over quickly. Afterward he never referred to what they had done together. Madame Azaire, who was initially frightened and ashamed, slowly became frustrated by her husband’s attitude; she could not understand why this aspect of their lives, which seemed to mean so much to him, was something he would not talk about, nor why the startling intimacy of the act opened no doors in her mind, made no connections with the deeper feelings and aspirations that had grown in her since childhood.

She did not become pregnant, and each month as the blood returned Azaire became a little more desperate. Some reflexive guilt
made him blame himself. He began to believe that there might be something wrong with him, even though he had two children to prove that this was unlikely; he even suspected in some quiet moments of the night that he was being punished for marrying Isabelle, though why this should be so or what he had done wrong he couldn’t say. Eventually his feelings of frustration affected the frequency with which he was able to perform. He began also to see that there was an absence of feeling in his wife, though the prospect of examining it and finding a remedy was so appalling that he could not bring himself to face it.

Madame Azaire, meanwhile, became less concerned about her husband. She was frightened of Stephen. From the day he arrived in the boulevard du Cange with his dark face and staring brown eyes and his swift impetuous movements, she was afraid of him. He was not like the other men she had known, not like her father or her husband, not even like Jean Destournel, who, though young and romantic, had proved in the end to be weak.

Because Stephen was nine years younger than she was, she viewed him with a little condescension; she could see in him the youth, or at least a stage of it, that she had left behind. She tried to think of him as the third child, as Lisette’s brother; after all, she thought, he is only four years older. To some extent she was successful in making herself look down on him, though she noticed that this only seemed to add an element of motherly tenderness to her alarm.

———

On Sunday morning Stephen rose early and went downstairs to find something to eat in the kitchen. He walked along the passageways of the ground floor, his footsteps alive in the closed air. There were still rooms in the house he had not visited and others which, having once glanced into, he could not refind. From the doors of a small sitting room he let himself into the cool of the garden and walked down to the end of the lawn. Beneath a chestnut tree there was a bench, where he sat chewing on the bread he had taken from the kitchen, looking back at the house.

The night before he had taken his knife and made a small sculpture from a piece of soft wood he had found in the garden.
He took it from his jacket pocket and examined it in the fresh, damp air of the morning. It was the figure of a woman in a long skirt and little jacket; close indentations in the wood indicated her hair, though the features could only be represented by marks for the eyes and mouth. He took the knife and trimmed a few shavings from around the feet, to make them look more realistic where they emerged from the skirt. He saw some shutters being opened on a first-floor bedroom. He imagined the sound of voices and running water and door handles being turned. When he judged that the whole family would be dressed and downstairs, he returned to the house.

The children were not excited by the prospect of the trip round the water gardens. Madame Azaire leant across Grégoire to stop him tapping his spoon on the table. She was dressed in cream linen with a blue sash and a panel in the dress with a row of buttons that neither opened nor held anything together.

Lisette eyed Stephen flirtatiously. “So are you coming to the famous water gardens?” she said.

“I don’t know if I’m invited.”

“Of course you are,” said Madame Azaire.

“In that case I will, with pleasure.”

Lisette said, “Well, that might make it a bit less boring.”

“It’s very kind of Monsieur Bérard to invite us,” said Madame Azaire. “You must be very polite to both of them. And I don’t think that dress is quite right, either, for a girl of your age. It’s too small.”

“But it’s so
hot
,” said Lisette.

“I can’t help the weather. Now run and put on something else.”

“Run, run, run,” said Lisette sulkily as she pushed back her chair. Her arm brushed Stephen’s shoulder on her way to the door. The dress in question emphasised the plump swell of her breasts, of which she was clearly proud.

The five of them set out toward eleven o’clock, with Marguérite, the maid, helping Stephen and Madame Azaire to carry the various baskets of food, parasols, rugs, and extra clothes that had been deemed necessary. It was only a short walk to the edge of the water gardens. They went down a flight of steps to the landing stage, where Bérard was waiting in a straw hat. Madame
Bérard was already installed in the stern of a flat-bottomed boat that was shaped, after long local tradition, like a punt with a raised and squared-off end.

“Madame, good morning! What a lovely day.” Bérard was at his most expansive. He held out his arm to help Madame Azaire down into the boat. Gripping his proffered arm with one hand, she raised her skirt with the other and stepped lightly into the low craft. Grégoire, no longer bored as he had been, pushed excitedly past the others and jumped in, making the boat rock. Madame Bérard let out a little scream, “Oh, Papa!”

Bérard laughed. “Women and children first.”

Lisette embarked with his help and sat next to Madame Azaire.

“I shall be the helmsman in the stern of the craft,” said Bérard impressively, “so you sit facing Lisette and you, Monsieur,” he said to Stephen, “if you sit next to Grégoire, and Madame Bérard would like to go here, opposite you, Azaire—that’s right—then we shall have perfect balance.”

Stephen settled opposite Madame Azaire, as instructed, and found room for his feet on the floor of the boat while trying not to touch hers.

Bérard let out a nautical cry and clambered into the stern, pushing the boat off from the bank with a long wooden pole.

The gardens were formed by the backwaters of the Somme, which had been channelled between numerous small islands whose banks were secured with wooden plank revetting. The land was intensely cultivated for vegetables, either in small plots, where the owner lived in a simple house on the site, or in larger areas whose farmer was likely to live in town. The area was regarded by the people who had nothing to do with its work as a site of natural beauty and an object of civic pride.

Bérard worked the boat along with some skill, plunging in the pole with a vigorous thrust and moving it to the left or right to steer as he pulled it out again. They slid along beneath the overhanging trees, occasionally coming close to other Sunday pleasure-seekers who called out greetings and comments on the sunny weather from their own boats. Bérard sweated freely at his work, mopping his forehead with a handkerchief, but was still
able to give an account of the history of the water gardens as he punted them along.

Stephen sat uncomfortably on his wooden seat with his back to the direction of the boat’s movement. The stagnant water, unmoved by any breeze, seemed to emphasize the unnatural heat of the day. His polished leather shoes lay on the slatted wooden floor of the craft at the unnatural angle required by his feet if they were not to touch the white shoes of Madame Azaire, which lay together in the position dictated by the slightly sideways attitude of her closed legs. The extreme lowness of the seats, however, which were only a few inches off the floor of the boat, meant that her knees were a little raised and the pale skirt was drawn up to reveal the taut stretch of the stockings over her instep. They were of a fine, silken material that was not, Stephen thought, the product of either of her husband’s factories. He noticed the delicate definition of her ankles and the beginning of her calves and found himself wondering what fastening beneath the folds of her linen skirt achieved the tension that made the stocking’s fabric look so light and open on the arch of her foot.

“… by the Roman soldiers. But the channelling of the water between the parcels of the land was to some extent a natural phenomenon and it was several centuries before the banks of the little islands were secured by planks in the way you see now. So what we have really is man and nature working in harmony and cooperation.”

Bérard’s discourse was interrupted by his occasional gasps for breath, though not by any of the others, least of all Azaire, whose interjections were ignored.

Stephen looked at the water, trailed his hand in it, smiled at Grégoire, and tried to engage Madame Azaire’s eye. When he did, she gave a composed smile before turning to ask Lisette a question.

The broad channels of the water gardens were public thoroughfares, though narrower strips of water, marked “Private,” led to large houses obscured from general view by thick hedges and tall, abundant flowers. When Bérard was exhausted, Azaire took over and pushed the little craft onward until Grégoire’s pleas for lunch were eventually rewarded.