Birdsong (33 page)

Her small determination hardened into something like resolve. What did it matter? It mattered passionately. It mattered because her own grandfather had been here, in this town, in this square: her own flesh and blood.

*

The next day she drove to Bapaume and followed the signs for Albert, a town, Bob had told her, that was close to a number of historic sites and which, according to the book, had a_ _small museum.

The road from Bapaume was dead straight. Elizabeth sat back in her seat and allowed the car to steer itself, with only her left hand resting on the bottom of the wheel. She had slept well in the seraglio, and the hotel's strong coffee and icy mineral water had given her a sense of strange well-being.

After ten minutes she began to see small brown signs by the side of the road; then came a cemetery, like any municipal burial ground, behind a wall, belched on by the fumes of the rumbling container lorries. The signs began to come faster, even though Albert was still some ten kilometres away. Through the fields to her right Elizabeth saw a peculiar, ugly arch that sat among the crops and woods. She took it for a beet refinery at first, but then saw it was too big: it was made of brick or stone on a monumental scale. It was as though the Pantheon or the Arc de Triomphe had been dumped in a meadow.

Intrigued, she turned off the road to Albert on to a smaller road that led through the gently rising fields. The curious arch stayed in view, visible from any angle, as its designers had presumably intended. She came to a cluster of buildings, too few and too scattered to be called a village or even a hamlet. She left the car and walked toward the arch.

In front of it was a lawn, lush, cropped, and formal in the English style, with a gravel path between its trimmed edges. From near to, the scale of the arch became apparent: it was supported on four vast columns; it overpowered the open landscape. The size of it was compounded by its brutal modern design; although clearly a memorial, it reminded her of Albert Speer's buildings for the Third Reich. Elizabeth walked up the stone steps that led to it. A man in a blue jacket was sweeping in the large space enclosed by the pillars.

As she came up to the arch, Elizabeth saw with a start that it was written on. She went closer. She peered at the stone. There were names on it. Every grain of the surface had been carved with British names; their chiselled capitals rose from the level of her ankles to the height of the great arch itself; on every surface of every column as far as her eyes could see there were names teeming, reeling, over surfaces of yards, of hundreds of yards, over furlongs of stone.

She moved through the space beneath the arch where the man was sweeping. She found the other pillars identically marked, their faces obliterated on all sides by the names that were carved on them.

"Who are these, these...?" She gestured with her hand.

"These?" The man with the brush sounded surprised. "The lost."

"Men who died in this battle?"

"No. The lost, the ones they did not find. The others are in the cemeteries."

"These are just the... the unfound?"

She looked at the vault above her head and then around in panic at the endless writing, as though the surface of the sky had been papered in footnotes. When she could speak again, she said, "From the whole war?" The man shook his head. "Just these fields." He gestured with his arm. Elizabeth went through and sat on the steps on the other side of the monument. Beneath her was a formal garden with some rows of white headstones, each with a tended plant or flower at its base, each cleaned and beautiful in the weak winter sunlight.

"Nobody told me." She ran her fingers with their red-painted nails back through her thick dark hair. "My God, nobody told me."

*

After driving round Brussels for almost an hour Elizabeth despaired of finding Robert's flat. The only time she had come close to the right street she had found herself obliged to follow a one-way system that took her directly away from it. She left her car on the edge of a building site and hailed a taxi.

She was looking forward to seeing him; she could feel herself becoming excited as the driver pressed through the traffic. She was also a little nervous because every time she saw Robert she was worried that he would not live up to her recollection. It was as though there was this pressure on him to justify the effect he had on her life. She was denied to other men, lived alone, and was party to a continuing deceit; it was up to him to be worth it. Yet he was the most diffident of men, unable to make such claims for himself, offering no promises, and always urging her to act in her own interests. Perhaps that was one reason why she loved him.

She paid off the taxi and rang the bell on the street door. His voice came through the intercom and the door opened with a raucous buzzing sound. She ran upstairs, her feet echoing on the wooden steps. He was at the door of his first-floor flat, a bearlike scruffy man, cigarette in hand, still in his suit, but with the collar loosened and the tie at half-mast. Elizabeth flung herself into his arms. She felt as she often did for the first few minutes in his presence, disorientated and in need of reassurance. She explained about the car and, when he had finished laughing, he said they had better go and get it and put it in the underground parking.

Half an hour later they were back at the flat and able to begin again. Elizabeth went to have a bath while Robert stuck his feet up on the coffee table and began telephoning restaurants.

She came back into the sitting room in a new black dress, ready to go out. He handed her a drink. "I promise I didn't put any tonic in. I just showed it the label. You look wonderful."

"Thank you. You look all right too. Are you going to wear that suit or are you going to change?"

"I don't know. I hadn't thought about it."

"Don't tell me."

He went and sat next to her on the sofa, clearing a space among the books and papers. He was a heavily built man, tall, with a deep chest and a heavy belly. He began to stroke Elizabeth's hair and to kiss her glistening lips. He slid his hand up her skirt and murmured in her ear.

"Robert, I've just got dressed. Stop it."

"You'll spoil my makeup," he said.

"I mean it. And get your hands off there. You should wait till later." He laughed. "This way I can relax and enjoy dinner."

"Robert!"

He laddered her stocking and smudged her lipstick, but she had time to repair the damage before they went out. He was right in a way, Elizabeth thought; it was easier to talk once this closeness had been reestablished.

At dinner he asked her what she had been doing and she told him about work and her mother and how she had become intrigued by her mother's parents. As she talked, it seemed to become clearer to her. Her life had reached an age at which she should no longer be the last to die; there ought to be someone younger than she was, a generation of her children who should now be enjoying that luxurious safety of knowing that grandparents and parents still lay like a barrier between them and their mortality. But in the absence of her own children she had started to look backward and wonder at the fate of a different generation. Because their lives were over she felt protective; she felt almost maternal toward them.

She described her visit to Irene's house, where she had met Bob, someone who, from Irene's description, sounded as though he was seldom out of the pub or the betting shop, and how she had found a small birdlike man with thick glasses and quick hands who offered her a choice of two or three books from a room full of shelves.

"But nothing had prepared me for what I saw. The scale of it. The memorial is as big as Marble Arch, bigger, and every inch of it is written on. It all looks so recent. The cleaner showed me a shell they had found in the wood last week." Robert refilled her glass several times while she talked, and when they left the restaurant and set off toward the Grand' Place she felt lightheaded and relaxed. Brussels seemed such a solid town, a monument to the efficiency of Flemish labour, to the comfort of large meals produced with French imagination, and above all to the pleasures of peace.

She was tempted to feel that an uneventful life was not necessarily a frivolous one; that the worthy crafts of citizenship had to be seriously worked at before they could be passed on. They went down a narrow alley as it began to rain. She felt Robert's arm urging her on toward the shelter of a café he had chosen for a digestif. As they rounded the corner they found themselves suddenly in the Grand'

Place. Elizabeth looked up and saw the gilt façades of the merchant buildings, glittering gold beneath the filmy drizzle, lit by the soft lights of the square. On Sunday afternoon she began to feel the low pressure of imminent separation. Sometimes it seemed to her that she began to dread her return almost as soon as she arrived.

Robert had put a record on and was lying back on the sofa balancing the ash on the end of his cigarette as he listened to music.

"When are we going to get married?" said Elizabeth.

"Is there an ashtray under that paper?"

"Yes." She passed it to him. "Well?"

"Oh Elizabeth." Robert sat up. "The trouble with you is that you're so impatient."

"Ah, that's the trouble with me, is it? There are so many theories. And I don't think two years is that impatient."

"We will divorce, but I can't do it now."

"Why?"

"I've told you. Anne's just started a new school. And Jane needs to make friends where we've moved and--"

"It's not fair to Anne."

"Exactly. She's only ten."

"And soon she'll have exams and then Jane will need cheering up, then you'll have a new job."

Robert shook his head.

"And the year after that," said Elizabeth, "it will be too late."

"Too late for what?"

"Too late for you and me."

Robert sighed. "It isn't easy, Elizabeth. I do promise you that we will divorce. I'll even give you a deadline if you like. Say within three years."

"I can't depend on that," said Elizabeth. "I can't plan my life on such a slender promise."

"Are you feeling broody?"

"I wish you wouldn't use that word. I'm not a chicken. When I see a small child my guts turn over inside me. I have to stop walking and take several deep breaths because my whole body is yearning so strongly. Is that what the word means?"

"I'm sorry, Elizabeth. I'm really sorry. I'm no good for you. You must give me up for good. You must find someone else. I promise I won't make it difficult for you."

"You don't see the point at all, do you?"

"What do you mean?"

"It's you that I want. You're the man I love. I don't want anyone else." Robert shook his head. He seemed moved by her conviction, but helpless. "In that case I don't know what to suggest."

"Marry me, you fool, that's what you should suggest. Follow the instincts of your heart."

"But my heart is so torn. It's torn by Anne. I couldn't bear to hurt her." Elizabeth felt she should have foreseen his response. She became more conciliatory. "I would look after her," she said softly. "I'd care for her when she came to stay."

Robert stood up and went to the window. "You've just got to give me up," he said. "You know that, don't you? It's the only answer."

Despite her furious endeavour to the contrary, she cried when she said goodbye to him in the underground parking. She began to feel dependent and helpless and despised herself for it. His arms seemed big when they folded her to his chest.

"I'll ring," he said, shutting her in behind the driver's door. She nodded and moved the car off to do blurred battle with the teatime traffic.

On Thursday evening Elizabeth went down to Twickenham to see her mother, and while Françoise was busy in the kitchen she went up to the attic, where there were several trunks full of documents, photographs, and books. She didn't tell her mother the reason for her search; she said she was looking for an old diary of her own. The attic was not tall enough to stand up in, and Elizabeth had to crouch beneath the roof, though the builder had installed electric light by which she could make out the size of the task ahead of her.

There were five leather trunks and six black tin ones, in addition to several cardboard boxes, only a few of which seemed labelled. Most seemed to have been filled at random; there were Christmas decorations and old games with important bits missing packed in with bundles of letters and receipts.

She began with the leather trunks. She had no idea that her mother had been such a keen theatre goer. There were bundles of programmes from the West End and magazines in which actors she had seen recently on television in grizzled character roles were shown on the stage thirty years before, their bright eyes rimmed with black, their wrists trailing lacy cuffs, and their neatly trimmed hair glistening with matinée appeal.

In another trunk was a box, labelled THE ESTATE OF ALEC BENSON, though there had been some interesting debts. Unknown to his wife he had bought a share in a horse-transporting business in Newmarket, and the sale of this had covered some of what he owed. The rest of his trunk was a jumble of prospectuses and letters from various companies he had bought, sold, or invested in; most were based in Kenya and what had then been Tanganyika. They had in common a lack of capital and a certain El Dorado optimism. Later the documents came from Rhodesia and South Africa. There were sheaves of carefully preserved golf cards. Score 79, handicap 6, net 73. "Let down by putting," read a_ _scribbled note at the bottom of one from Johannesburg dated 19 August 1950.

In the first of the metal trunks Elizabeth came across a khaki battle-dress top. She pulled it out and held it up to the light. It told her nothing. It seemed in good condition, the rough serge unmarked and the stripes on the sleeves neatly sewn. There was also a tin helmet, in equally good condition, the webbing inside still in place and the exterior only slightly chipped. In the bottom of the trunk was a small leather writing case, and in this were an unused pad and a monochrome snap of a group of soldiers sitting in shirtsleeves on an armoured vehicle. A scribbled note on the back-said: "Tunisia, 1943--The Fearless Five (Jarvis absent)." Wrong war, wrong man. After all she had seen, after all the names on that great arch, they had come back for more barely twenty years later. If she herself were to have a boy, what guarantee was there that he too would not spend years of his adult life in this hellish perversion?

She moved, crouching, down the attic, to the row of metal trunks. Inside the first there was more rubbish: some of her old toys, and more bills and business letters relating to the purchase of the house.

Elizabeth dwelt on some of these because although they were trivial in themselves they touched her. The lines of debt and interest, drawn up on thick blue bond with red margins and figures entered with a manual typewriter and countersigned in firm black ink, spoke of nugatory sums at kindly rates of interest, yet how fearsome they must have seemed in their time, how constant an obstacle to peace of mind. Above all to Elizabeth they did represent a family, however fissile and unsure, a house, and a child with the presumed determination of the parents, of her mother at least, to make one more effort to improve upon the past. And with that slim debt to some mutual society had gone concomitant sacrifices of her personal ambition, of travel and a better life. Yet still somehow it was difficult to see her own life as the pinnacle of previous generations' sacrifices.

In the third metal trunk, toward the bottom, was a parcel, looped and tied in a bow with string. The dust from it dried the skin on her fingers and set her teeth on edge. She pulled open the knot and the parcel fell apart limply, dropping its guts into her hands. They were more papers and letters and a notebook. There were also some coloured ribbons, three medals, and a hip flask. It all seemed to date from an earlier time than the contents of the other trunks.