Birdsong (8 page)

Madame Azaire returned a little after one o'clock to tell him lunch was ready. Three places had been set at the end of the table, by the window. The room looked quite different from the place of formal shadows with stiff-collared guests in the lowered evening lights that Stephen had seen at dinner. Lisette wore the little white dress her stepmother had forbidden on their visit to the water gardens. Her dark brown hair was tied back with a blue ribbon and her legs were bare. She was a good-looking girl, Stephen thought, as she looked up at him from under thick lashes; but he registered her looks quite dispassionately because his thoughts were elsewhere.

Madame Azaire wore a cream skirt with a dark red patterned waistcoat over a white blouse with an open neck.

"You can take off your jacket if you like, Monsieur," she said. "Lisette and I don't consider lunch to be a formal occasion, do we?"

Lisette laughed. Stephen said "Thank you." He could see that Madame Azaire felt protected and emboldened by Lisette's presence.

Marguerite brought in a dish of artichokes. "Perhaps we'll have some wine," said Madame Azaire. "We don't normally drink wine, do we Lisette? But perhaps today. Marguerite, bring a bottle of white wine, will you? Not one my husband is saving."

After the artichokes there was a small dish of mushrooms and then some sole. Stephen poured the wine for Madame Azaire and, at her insistence, for Lisette. For want of something to say, Stephen asked how they came to know Monsieur and Madame Bérard.

Lisette began to giggle at the name and Madame Azaire told her to be quiet, though she herself was smiling. "I'm afraid Lisette is very impolite about Monsieur Bérard," she said.

"It's so unfair," said Lisette. "Did your parents always make you be polite about all their silly friends?"

"I didn't have parents," said Stephen. "At least not ones that I knew. I was brought up by my grandparents, then in an institution until I was taken away from it by a man I'd never met before."

Lisette blushed and swallowed hard; Madame Azaire's face showed a momentary concern as she said, "I'm sorry, Monsieur. Lisette is always asking questions."

"There's nothing to apologize for." He smiled at Lisette. "Nothing at all. I'm not ashamed."

Marguerite brought some fillet of beef on a blue-patterned dish which she set down in front of Madame Azaire. "Should I bring some red wine?" she said. "There's some from last night."

"All right." Madame Azaire put a slice of the bloody meat on each of three plates. Stephen refilled their glasses. In his mind he was remembering the press of Madame Azaire's leg against his own in the water gardens. The skin on her bare arms was a light brown; her mannish waistcoat and open neck made her look even more feminine than usual.

"I shall be returning to England soon," he said. "I had a telegram telling me I was wanted back in London."

Neither of the others spoke. The atmosphere had thickened. He "I shall be sorry to leave," he said.

"You can always come back and visit us another day," said Madame Azaire.

"Yes, I could come back another day."

Marguerite brought in a dish of potatoes. Lisette stretched and smiled. "Oh, I feel sleepy," she said happily.

"That's because of all the wine you've been drinking." Madame Azaire also smiled and the air seemed to lighten again. They finished lunch with some fruit, and Marguerite took coffee to the sitting room. They sat around the card table where Stephen had played on his first night in the house.

"I'm going to go out for a walk in the garden," said Lisette. "Then I might go to my room for a little sleep."

"All right," said Madame Azaire.

Lisette's light step crossed the room and disappeared.

At once the atmosphere changed, and this time it was beyond recall. Madame Azaire could not meet Stephen's eye. She looked down at the card table and played with the silver spoon in the thin china saucer. Stephen could feel his chest contract. He was finding it difficult to breathe.

"Have some more coff--"

"No."

The silence returned.

"Look at me."

She would not raise her head. She stood up and said, "I'm going to do some sewing in my room, so--"

"Isabelle." He had grasped her arm.

"No. Please no."

He pulled her to him and wrapped both arms around her so she could not escape. Her eyes were closed and he kissed her mouth, which opened. He felt her tongue flicker and her hands press his back, then she pulled herself away from his tight grip, tearing the white blouse as she did so, revealing a thin satin strap beneath. Stephen's body convulsed with desire.

"You must. For God's sake, you must." He raged at her.

Madame Azaire was crying, though her eyes were closed. "No, I cannot, I hardly... I hardly think it would be right."

"You were going to say 'I hardly know you.' "

"No. Just that it's not right."

"It is right. You know it's right. It's as right as anything can ever be. Isabelle, I understand you. Believe me. I understand you. I love you."

He kissed her again and her mouth once more responded to his. He tasted the sweetness of her saliva then buried his face against her shoulder. She pulled away from him and ran from the room. Stephen went to the window and held on to the frame as he looked out. The force that drove through him could not be stopped. The part of his mind that remained calm accepted this; if the necessity could not be denied, then the question was only whether it could be achieved with her consent.

In her room Madame Azaire wept as she paced from one side to the other. She was choking with passion for him, but he frightened her. She wanted to comfort him but also to be taken by him, to be used by him. Currents of desire and excitement that she had not known or thought about for years now flooded in her. She wanted him to bring alive what she had buried and to demean, destroy, her fabricated self. He was very young. She was unsure. She wanted the touch of his skin.

She went downstairs and her step was so light that it made no sound. She found him clenched in combat with himself, leaning against the window. She said,

"Come to the red room."

By the time Stephen turned round she had gone. The red room. He panicked. He was sure it would be one of those he had once seen but could never refind; it would be like a place in a dream that remains out of reach; it would always be behind him. He ran up the stairs and saw her turn a corner. She went down the main corridor to a narrow passage, down again through a little archway. At the end of the corridor was a locked door that led into the servants' part of the house. Just before it, the last door on the left, was an oval china handle that rattled in the ill-fitting lock. He caught her as she opened the door of a small room with a brass bedstead and a red cover.

"Isabelle." He too was in tears. He took her hair in his hands and saw it flow between his fingers.

She said, "My poor boy."

He kissed her, and this time her tongue did not flee from his.

He said, "Where is Lisette?"

"The garden. I don't know. Oh God. Oh please, please." She was starting to shake and tremble. Her eyes had closed. When she opened them again she could barely breathe. He began to tear at her clothes and she helped him with urgent, clumsy actions. The waistcoat was caught on her elbow. He pushed back her blouse and buried his face in the satin slip between her breasts. There was so much delight in what he saw and touched that he thought he would need years to stop and appreciate it, yet he was driven by a frantic haste.

Isabelle felt his hands on her, felt his lips on her skin and knew what he must be seeing, what shame and impropriety, but the more she imagined the degradation of her false modesty the more she felt excited. She felt his hair between her fingers, ran her hands over the bulge of his shoulders, over the smooth chest inside his shirt.

"Corne on, please, please," she heard herself say, though her breathing was so ragged that the words were barely comprehensible. She ran her hand over the front of his trousers, brazenly, as she imagined a whore might do, and felt the stiffness inside. No one upbraided her. No one was appalled. She could do whatever she wanted. His intake of breath caused him to stop undressing her and she had to help him pull down her silk drawers to reveal what she suddenly knew he had long been imagining. She squeezed her eyes tight shut as she showed herself to him, but still no guilt came. She felt him push her backward on to the bed, and she began to arch herself up from it rhythmically as though her body, independent of her, implored his attention. She felt at last some contact, though she realised with a gasp that it was not what she expected; it was his tongue, lambent, hot, flickering over and inside her, turning like a key in the split lock of her flesh. This shocking new sensation made her start to sigh and shudder in long rhythmic movements, borne completely away on her passion, feeling a knot of pressure rising in her chest, a sensation that was impossible to sustain, to bear, though all its momentum seemed to be onward. In this conflict she thrashed her head from side to side on the bed. She heard her voice crying out in denial as from some distant room, but then the sensation broke and flooded her again and again, down through her belly and all her limbs, and her small voice, close to her head this time, said, "Yes." When she opened her eyes she saw Stephen standing naked in front of her. Her eyes fixed on the flesh that stuck out from him. He had still not made love to her; the joy was yet to come. He climbed on top of her and kissed her face, her breasts, pulling the nipples upward with his lips. Then he rolled her over, ran his hands up the inside of her legs, above the silk stockings that her speedy undressing had not had time to remove, and between the cleft where her legs were joined. He kissed her from the small of her back over the pink swell of divided flesh, down to the back of her thighs where he rested his cheek for a moment. Then he began again at her ankles, on the little bones he had seen on the boat in the water gardens, and up the inside of her calves.

Isabelle was beginning to breathe fast again. She said, "Please, my love, please now, please." She could no longer bear his teasing. In her left hand she grasped the part of him she wanted to feel inside her and the shock of her action stopped him in his caressing. She opened her legs a little further for him, to make him welcome, because she wanted him to be there. She felt the sheet beneath her as her legs spread out and she guided him into her.

She heard him sigh and saw him take the rumpled sheet between his teeth and begin to bite on it. He barely moved inside her, as though he were afraid of the situation or of what it might produce.

Isabelle settled herself, luxuriously, on the feeling of impalement. It rolled around the rim, the edges of her; it filled her with desire and happiness. I am at last what I am, she thought; I was born for this. Fragments of childish longings, of afternoon urges suppressed in the routine of her parents' house, flashed across her mind; she felt at last connections forged between the rage of her desire and a particular attentive recognition of herself, the little Fourmentier girl. She heard him cry out and felt a surge inside her; he seemed suddenly to swell in her so that their flesh almost fused. The shock and intimacy of what he had done, leaving this deposit of himself, precipitated a shuddering response in her, like the first time, only shorter, fiercer, in a way that made her lose contact for a moment with the world.

When she had recovered enough to open her eyes, she found that Stephen had rolled off her and was lying face down across the bed, his head tilted awkwardly to one side, almost as though he were dead. Neither of them spoke. Both lay quite still. Outside was the sound of birds.

Tentatively, almost shyly, Isabelle ran her fingers down over the vertebrae that protruded from his back, then over the narrow haunches and the top of his thighs with their soft black hair. She took his damaged hand and kissed the bruised and swollen knuckles.

He rolled over and looked at her. The hair was disarrayed, its different shades milling over her bare shoulders and down to the stiff, round breasts that rose and fell with her still-accelerated breathing. Her face and neck were suffused with a pink glow where the blood was diluted by the colour of the milky young skin with its tracery of brown and golden freckles. He held her gaze for a moment, then laid his head on her shoulder, where she stroked his face and hair.

They lay, amazed and unsure, for a long time in silence. Then Isabelle began also to think of what had happened. She had given way, but not in some passive sense. She had wanted to make this gift; in fact she wanted to go further. This thought for a moment frightened her. She saw them at the start of some descent whose end she could not imagine.

"What have we done?" she said.

Stephen sat up and took her by the arms. "We have done what was right." He looked at her fiercely. "My darling Isabelle, you must understand that." She nodded without speaking. He was a boy, he was the dearest boy, and now she would have him always.

"Stephen," she said.

It was the first time she had used his name. It sounded beautiful to him on her foreign tongue.

"Isabelle." He smiled at her and her face lit up in reply. She held him to her, smiling broadly, though with tears beginning again in the corners of her eyes.

"You are so beautiful," said Stephen. "I won't know how to look at you in the house. I shall give myself away. When I see you at dinner I shall be thinking of what we did, I shall be thinking of you as you are now." He stroked the skin of her shoulders and laid the back of his hand against her cheek.

Isabelle said, "You won't. And nor shall I. You will be strong because you love me."

Stephen's level gaze, she thought, was not afraid. As his hands stroked her breasts she began to lose her concentration. They had talked only for a minute but what they had said, and what it meant, had made her tired of thought. A feeling, more compelling, began to rise through her body as I his hand worked over these soft and privately guarded parts of her. Her breath began to come unevenly again; the low exhalations were broken and she felt herself begin to slide again once more, willingly, but downward where there was no end in sight.