Birdsong (30 page)

His curiosity began to return. He wanted to know what had happened. He had undertaken that morning to attack and he should move forward, wherever he was. The weight of his pack, now waterlogged, seemed to him such a burden that he forgot he was not carrying a rifle. Above him to the right was the big wood of Thiepval.

He pulled himself up and began to walk toward the German line. An impact took his head as though a brick thrown at great speed had struck his temple, and he fell to the ground.

The next face he saw was not the clerk, or Isabelle or his mother, as he halfexpected, but one of Weir's tunnellers.

"Blimey, you're a long way from home. You must have come a good mile and a half," said the man, unravelling a field dressing.

Stephen grunted. The man's homely voice was too much to remember; it was from another time.

"Tyson's the name. We were all volunteered, if you take my meaning. They stopped attacking up where we were. They sent our mob down here. All the stretcher-bearers got wiped out. The Ulsters have copped it up there. So did your lot."

"What have I got?"

"Flesh wound, I'd say. Left leg. Not even a Blighty one after all that. I'll send Captain Weir over."

Stephen lay back in the shallow shellhole. He could feel no pain in the leg. Price was reading the roll call. Before him were standing the men from his company who had managed to return. Their faces were shifty and grey in_ _the dark. To begin with he asked after the whereabouts of each missing man.

After a time he saw that it would take too long. Those who had survived were not always sure whom they had seen dead. They hung their heads in exhaustion, as though every organ of their bodies was begging for release. Price began to speed the process. He hurried from one unanswered name to the next. Byrne, Hunt, Jones, Tipper, Wood, Leslie, Barnes, Studd, Richardson, Savile, Thompson, Hodgson, Birkenshaw, Llewellyn, Francis, Arkwright, Duncan, Shea, Simons, Anderson, Blum, Fair-brother. Names came pattering into the dusk, bodying out the places of their forebears, the villages and towns where the telegram would be delivered, the houses where the blinds would be drawn, where low moans would come in the afternoon behind closed doors; and the places that had borne them, which would be like nunneries, like dead towns without their life or purpose, without the sound of fathers and their children, without young men at the factories or in the fields, with no husbands for the women, no deep sound of voices in the inns, with the children who would have been born, who would have grown and worked or painted, even governed, left ungenerated in their fathers' shattered flesh that lay in stinking shellholes in the beet-crop soil, leaving their homes to put up only granite slabs in place of living flesh, on whose inhuman surface the moss and lichen would cast their crawling green indifference.

Of 800 men in the battalion who had gone over the parapet, 155 answered their names. Price told his company to dismiss, though he said it without the bark of the parade ground; he said it kindly. They attempted to turn, then moved off stiffly in new formations, next to men they had never seen before. They closed ranks. Jack Firebrace and Arthur Shaw waited for them and asked how they had done. The men walked on as though in a dream, and did not answer. Some of them spat or pushed back their helmets; most of them looked downward, their faces expressionless yet grained with sadness. They went to their tents and lay down.

*

Out in his shellhole, looking up the hill toward Thiepval, Stephen lay, waiting for the darkness to be complete.

Michael Weir slipped in beside him. "Tyson pointed out where you were. How's the leg?"

"It's all right. I'll be able to move. What are you doing here?"

"Volunteered. There's chaos in our front line. There aren't enough trains to get the men out. The field dressing stations are overflowing. The trench you started from is just a mass of bodies, people who never even got going." Weir's voice was unsteady. He was lying against Stephen's injured leg. "Two of the generals have committed suicide. It's terrible, it's terrible, it's--"

"Calm down, Weir, calm down. Move over that way a bit."

"Is that better? What happened to you?"

Stephen sighed and lay back against the earth. The noise was diminishing. The artillery on both sides had stopped, though there were occasional outbreaks of machine-gun fire and the sound of sniping.

"I don't remember," he said. "I don't know. I saw Byrne killed. I thought we'd done well at first. Then I was in the river. I don't know. I'm so tired." It was dark at last. The night poured down in waves from the ridge above them and the guns at last fell silent.

The earth began to move. To their right a man who had lain still since the first attack eased himself upright, then fell again when his damaged leg would not take his weight. Other single men moved, and began to come up like worms from their shellholes, limping, crawling, dragging themselves out. Within minutes the hillside was seething with the movement of the wounded as they attempted to get themselves back to their line.

"Christ," said Weir, "I had no idea there were so many men out there." It was like a resurrection in a cemetery twelve miles long. Bent, agonized shapes loomed in multitudes on the churned earth, limping and dragging back to reclaim their life. It was as though the land were disgorging a generation of crippled sleepers, each one distinct but related to its twisted brothers as they teemed up from the reluctant earth.

Weir was shaking.

"It's all right," said Stephen. "The guns have stopped."

"It's not that," said Weir. "It's the noise. Can't you hear it?" Stephen had noticed nothing but the silence that followed the guns. Now, as he listened, he could hear what Weir had meant: it was a low, continuous moaning. He could not make out any individual pain, but the sound ran down to the river on their left and up over the hill for half a mile or more. As his ear became used to the absence of guns, Stephen could hear it more clearly: it sounded to him as though the earth itself was groaning.

"Oh God, oh God." Weir began to cry. "What have we done, what have we done? Listen to it. We've done something terrible, we'll never get back to how it was before."

Stephen laid his hand on Weir's arm. "Be quiet," he said. "You must hold on." But he knew what Weir was feeling because he had felt it himself. As he listened to the soil protesting, he heard the sound of a new world. If he did not fight to control himself, he might never return to the reality in which he had lived.

"Oh God, oh God." Weir was trembling and whimpering as the sound rose like damp winds scraping down a sky of glass.

Stephen let his exhausted mind slip for a moment. He found himself go with the sound into a world in which there was only panic. He jerked awake, pulled himself back with an effort into the old life that could not be the same, but which might, if he believed in it, continue.

"Hold me," said Weir. "Please hold me."

He crawled over the soil and laid his head against Stephen's chest. He said,

"Call me by my name."

Stephen wrapped his arm round him and held him. "It's all right, Michael. It's all right, Michael. Hold on, don't let go. Hold on, hold on."

ENGLAND 1978--PART THREE

In the tunnel of the Underground, stalled in the darkness, Elizabeth Benson sighed in impatience. She wanted to be home to see if there were any letters or in case the telephone should ring. A winter coat was pressed in her face by the crush of passengers along the aisle of the carriage. Elizabeth pulled her small suitcase closer to her feet. She had returned from a two-day business trip to Germany that morning and had gone straight in to work from Heathrow without returning to her flat. With the lights out she could not see to read her paper. She closed her eyes and tried to let her imagination remove her from the still train in its tight-fitting hole. It was Friday night and she was tired. She filled her mind with pleasant images: Robert at dusk with the strands of grey in his thick hair and his eyes full of plans for the evening; a coat of her own design made up and back from the manufacturer in its clinging polyethylene wrap.

There was a madman in the carriage who began to sing old music hall songs.

"It's a long way to Tipperary... " He grunted and fell silent, as though an elbow had been applied under cover of the darkness.

The train started again, heaving off into the tunnel, the lights surging overhead. At Lancaster Gate, Elizabeth fought her way through the coats and on to the platform. She was relieved to be up in the rain where the traffic moved with the sound of wet tyres on the leaves that had drifted in from behind the railings in Hyde Park. She bent her head against the drizzle, pushing on toward where she could see the green shopfront of the off-licence beam its vulgar welcome.

A few minutes later she laid the suitcase and the clanking plastic carrier bag on the step as she opened the front door to the Victorian house. The mail was still in the wire cage attached to the front door: postcards for the girls upstairs, buff envelopes for all five flats, a gas reminder for Mrs. Kyriades, and, for her, a letter from Brussels.

Up in her flat she ran herself a bath and, when she was comfortably immersed, opened the letter.

If Robert chose to write in addition to his brief, panicky telephone calls, it usually meant he was feeling guilty. Either that or he was genuinely de-tained by the business of the Commission and had not even been home to see his wife.

"... appalling amount of work... boring paper read by the British delegation... Luxembourg next week... hoping to be in London on Saturday... Anne's half-term... " Elizabeth put the letter down on the bathmat and smiled. There were many very familiar phrases, and she was not sure how much of it she believed, but at least she still felt a surge of fondness for him when she read them. The warm water closed over her shoulders as she slid down into the bath. The telephone rang. Naked and dripping on the sitting room carpet, she pressed the receiver to her ear, half-wondering, as she always did, whether there was any electricity in the handset and whether the water on her ear would conduct a shock into her brain. It was her mother, wanting to know if she would go down for tea the next day in Twickenham. By the time she had agreed to go, Elizabeth was dry. It hardly seemed worth getting back into the bath. She dialed a Brussels number and listened to the single European ring. It sounded twenty, thirty times unanswered. She pictured the jumbled sitting room with its piles of books and papers, its unemptied ashtrays and unwashed cups, in which the instrument let out its neglected bleat.

In the hallway of Mark and Lindsay's terraced house there were a pram and a pushchair, round which greetings were exchanged. Elizabeth, in a gesture that had persisted since college days, handed Mark a bottle of wine.

As she stepped into the double sitting room, in which the dividing wall had been knocked through, Elizabeth entered a routine so familiar that she found herself talking, smiling, and behaving as though by predetermined programme. Sometimes when she went to see Mark and Lindsay they had invited other people. Tonight there was a couple from the next street and a man suspiciously on his own. Elizabeth found a cigarette alight in her fingers and red wine sliding down her throat. They were her oldest friends, bound to her by shared experience. Although she often thought the three of them would not now become so close if they were meeting for the first time, the link was surprisingly emotional. Lindsay was an impulsive woman with a domineering tendency; Mark was a homely man of no clear ambition. In their twenties there had often been some other guest who tried to impress with self-important stories or who was anxious to claim positions of political integrity unavailable to the rest; but by now such evenings took a friendly, uninspiring course.

Their lives had changed. Only the children had altered things. At some stage there would be an exchange between the others about behaviour and schools, and she would have to close her ears, partly through boredom, partly through an unacknowledged anguish.

Lindsay had also been through a phase of inviting unattached men when Elizabeth went to visit. For two or three years the previously settled threesome would be augmented by a variety of single men, desperate, divorced, drunk, but more often merely content to be as they were.

"Your trouble," Lindsay once said, "is that you frighten men off."

"Trouble?" said Elizabeth. "I wasn't aware that I was _in _trouble."

"You know what I mean. Look at you. You're so poised, with your smart dresses and your Anouk Aimée good looks."

"You make me sound middle-aged."

"But you know what I mean. Men are such timid creatures, really. You have to be gentle with them. Make them feel safe. To begin with, anyway."

"Then you can do what you like?"

"Of course not. But look at you, Elizabeth. You have to compromise a little. Remember that man David I introduced you to? He's very kind, just your type. You didn't give him a chance."

"You seem to be forgetting that I've got a boyfriend already. I don't need to go pop-eyed and flirtatious with Dennis or David or whatever he's called. I'm spoken for."

"By the Eurocrat, you mean?"

"Robert is his name."

"He's never going to leave his wife. You know that, don't you? They all _say _they will, but they never, ever do."

Elizabeth smiled serenely. "I don't mind whether he does or not."

"Don't tell me you wouldn't rather be married."

"I don't know. I've got a job to do, people to see. I can't suddenly devote my time to searching for a husband."

"And what about children?" said Lindsay. "I suppose you're going to say you don't want children either."

"Of course I'd like children. But I think I need to know why." Lindsay laughed. "You don't need to know anything at all. It's called biology. You're thirty-nine."

"Thirty-eight in fact."

"Your body tells you time is running short. You're no different from the millions of other women in the world. You don't need a reason, for God's sake."

"I think I do. I think one should have some sort of reason for doing something that, on the face of it, is quite unnecessary."