Birdsong (7 page)

Bérard had been allowed by a friend to moor the boat at the foot of a shady garden and take lunch beneath some apple trees. Azaire made great play of lowering the wine by the boat’s painter into the water to cool, while Madame Azaire and Lisette laid out rugs on the grass. Grégoire ran round the garden, returning occasionally to report his discoveries, and Stephen made conversation to Madame Bérard, though her eyes were only for her husband, who settled himself at the foot of a tree with a glass of wine and some chicken, which he ripped from the bone with a sideways shake of his head.

The men took off their jackets, and as he laid his down Stephen felt the little wood carving in his pocket. He took it out and turned it round in his fingers.

“What’s that?” said Lisette, who had placed herself near him on the rug.

“Just a little carving. I did it with this.” He took out the knife from his pocket.

“It’s beautiful.”

“You can have it if you like,” Stephen said without thinking.

Lisette glowed with pleasure, and looked around to make sure the others had seen. Stephen searched for some wood with which to do a carving for Grégoire, who was busily eating his lunch.

No one else seemed to have much appetite. Various cheeses and pies were produced from the hampers by Madame Azaire but were returned with only a slice or two missing. Bérard ate some jellied tongue as well as the chicken; Lisette managed a strawberry tart and some little cakes Madame Azaire had made herself. She and her brother drank orangeade while the others had wine from the Loire valley, wine that immersion in the placid water had not chilled.

After lunch Bérard lay back against his tree and fell asleep; Azaire lit his pipe before retiring to a neighbouring part of the garden for the same purpose. Stephen carved a hard piece of wood, with difficulty, into a passably realistic man for Grégoire.

With lunch over, the afternoon lay heavy and dull on them. They clambered back into the boat and, after Stephen had been allowed a brief spell with the pole, Bérard resumed his position. The temperature had increased and the women fanned themselves
vigourously. Madame Bérard, in thick formal clothes, looked disconsolate at the front of the boat, like a brooding figurehead on an ill-fated ship headed for ice and equatorial winds.

Stephen felt hot and thickheaded from the wine. He was repelled by the water gardens: their hectic abundance seemed to him close to the vegetable fertility of death. The brown waters were murky and shot through with the scurrying of rats from the banks where the earth had been dug out of trenches and held back by elaborate wooden boarding. Heavy flies hung over the water, beneath the trees, dipping into the rotting tops of cabbages, asparagus, and artichokes that had been left unpicked in their reckless prodigality. What was held to be a place of natural beauty was a stagnation of living tissue which could not be saved from decay.

Madame Azaire, also uncomfortable in the heat and torpor of the afternoon, had lost a fraction of her poise. Her skin was red at the base of her throat, where she had loosened the top of her dress. A strand of strawberry hair was stuck to her neck with moisture. One foot lay unresisting against Stephen’s leg, which was outstretched beneath her seat. As Bérard propelled the boat on its slow, straight course, a tiny roll in its motion caused a perceptible pressure to form between them. While Stephen left his leg where it was, Madame Azaire was too hot or too indifferent to shift her position. He caught her eye and she looked into his with no social smile or conversational suggestion, then turned her head slowly away as though to look at the view.

A fish broke the surface of the water unremarked even by the previously excited Grégoire. The flow of the river had been slowed by the construction of a canal, Bérard told them, which was why the boats no longer had rudders; a twitch from the pole was all that was necessary to keep the thing straight.

Stephen imagined the great pools and marshes that had occurred in nature before the further channelling of the water and planting of the ground. The river’s function had not been significantly changed; still it watered a cycle of superfluous decay, the rotting of matter into the turned and dug earth with its humid, clinging soil.

It had reached a stage in the afternoon when it should have
started to grow cooler, but what small breeze there had been had disappeared, and the static air coagulated, thick and choking. Grégoire began to splash water at Lisette, who smacked him on the side of the face and made him cry.

Azaire took over in the stern from Bérard, who sat perspiring next to his wife. For once he was silent.

Stephen tried to drag his mind from the vision of decay the river had induced. The pressure of Madame Azaire’s foot against his leg slowly increased until most of her calf rested against him. The simple frisson this touch had earlier given to his charged senses now seemed complicated; the sensation of desire seemed indistinguishable from an impulse toward death.

All of them, he thought, would be taken back by this earth: Bérard’s tongue would decompose into the specks of friable soil that gardeners rolled between their fingers; its clacking would be stilled as it was reabsorbed by the thirsting roots of artichokes or cabbages. Little Grégoire and Lisette would be the mud of the banks in which the rats burrowed and mated. And Madame Azaire, Isabelle … The tenderest parts of her that his imagination shamelessly embodied, even these would not outlast or rise above some forlorn, unspiritual end in the clinging earth.

As the landing stage came into view, their mood lifted. Azaire began to talk about what a splendid trip they had had and Bérard refound his usual dominance in conversation. Over the last ten or fifteen minutes he managed to rewrite the story of the afternoon by ascribing opinions on its success to all the different members of the party, inviting their agreement, and cutting them off before they had time to spoil his version of harmony with actual thoughts of their own.

Madame Azaire seemed to emerge from a trance. She sat up straight, noting with apparent alarm as she did so the position of her left leg. Grégoire trawled a glass jar in the water in the hope of catching a fish.

When they disembarked and thanked the Bérards for their kindness, Stephen loaded himself with the baskets, rugs, and parasols and led the way back to the boulevard du Cange. He was glad to be able to leave the baggage in the hall for Marguérite to put away while he climbed up to his room. He took off the formal
collar he had guessed was expected of him and went to the little bathroom, once a maid’s, at the end of the corridor. He filled the bath with cold water and soaked himself in it, sinking his head beneath the surface and letting the icy water penetrate even into the follicles at the roots of his hair.

Back in his room, wrapped in a towel, he took a pack of cards and laid them out on the table as though for a game of Patience. The sequence in which he then moved them, however, was something he had learned from a friend of his grandfather’s—a superstitious old man who made a living at fairs by telling fortunes. As a child Stephen had been enraptured by him and his games, and in private moments he still found himself drawn back. If the queen of diamonds could be discovered on the left-hand pile before the jack of clubs was filed in order on the right, then Madame Azaire would … He shuffled and moved the cards through subtle combinations, half smiling to himself, half in earnest.

He took a book and lay down on the bed, knowing that dinner would not be for at least an hour. The church bell was tolling and from the garden there was again the sound of birds. With the noise in his ears he fell asleep and dreamed a dream that was a variation of one he had had all his life. He was trying to help a trapped bird out of a window. Its wings battered frantically on the glass. Suddenly the whole room was filled with starlings, moving with one flock instinct. They beat their wings against the window panes, flapped them in his hair, then brought their beaks toward his face.

T
he next day Stephen received a telegram from London telling him he was to return as soon as he could conclude his business. He wrote to say it would take him another month: he still had a good deal to learn about the processes that were used in Amiens, and Azaire had promised to introduce him to other manufacturers. He also needed further information about Azaire’s own finances before he could report on the feasibility of investment.

He sent his reply that evening, feeling a panic as he did so that he would have to go back to England before he had resolved the conflicting passions that were threatening to overpower him. During dinner he looked at Madame Azaire in the shaded light as she served food to the family and their guests, some cousins of Azaire’s, and there was a sense of desperation in the way he registered the features of her face, the loop of her hair, and the certainty of her movements. He could no longer allow himself to be passively beguiled.

At work the next day he learned that there was a threat that the dyers’ strike might spread to other textile workers, causing a complete halt to production. A lunchtime meeting of the workers was addressed by Meyraux, who told them they should support their colleagues in other parts of the industry by taking them food and clothes, but that it would serve no purpose for them to go on strike.

“You have your own families and lives to consider,” Meyraux told them. “I believe the long-term future of this industry lies in bringing all processes together and in having one body to represent all workers. But for the moment we must deal with things as they are. This is not a time for vain gestures, not when we are under such a threat from foreign competitors.”

Meyraux’s speech was typically cautious. He distrusted the hotheaded leaders of the strike as much as he did the proprietors. Before he could bring his remarks to a reasoned conclusion, there
was a disturbance near the door to the street. It burst open and several young men tumbled in carrying banners and chanting slogans. Meyraux called for calm from the platform as half a dozen police officers, some with dishevelled uniforms that suggested they had already been in a struggle, tried to evict the demonstrators. Many of the female workers nearest the door backed away in alarm as blows began to be exchanged.

Lucien Lebrun, who had been among the first to force his way in, now took the platform next to the reluctant Meyraux. His candid blue eyes and wavy brown hair made him an attractive figure and compensated to some extent for the suspicion many of the workers felt of his youth. He asked Meyraux with tactful appeals to their fraternity whether he could address the workers, and Meyraux finally conceded his place.

Lucien gave a compassionate description of the hardships endured by the strikers’ families and of the working conditions that had driven them to their extreme action. He spoke of the poverty and exploitation throughout the plain of Picardy which was causing a large migration of people from the valley of the Somme to the towns of Amiens and Lille in the false hope of finding work.

“I beseech you to support my people,” he said. “We must stand together in this matter or we will all fall. We must think of our children and wives. I ask you at least to sign this declaration of support for your fellow-workers.”

He produced a piece of paper which already carried a hundred or more signatures.

“Talking of wives,” called out a deep voice from the middle of the room, “we all know what they say about you, young man!”

There was a roar of ribald agreement. Stephen felt his nerves stiffen as his heartbeat filled his chest.

Lucien shouted, “What was that you said?”

“I’ll not repeat it in front of the law, but I think you know what I mean.”

Lucien jumped down from the platform to try to find his tormentor. He shouldered his way frantically through the press.

“And another thing,” the same man called out, “we shouldn’t be having a spy from England eating with us and coming to our meetings.”

A few voices called out their agreement. The majority had obviously not been aware of Stephen’s presence.

Stephen was not listening. “What do they say about Lucien?” he asked the man standing next to him. “What did they mean about wives?”

“They say little Lucien and the boss’s wife are very good friends.” The man gave a throaty laugh.

Azaire’s work force had been good-natured up to this point. They had been lectured at length by Meyraux on the need for patience and they had submitted to his advice; they had seen their meeting disrupted by workers from other factories and they had kept their patience; they had been harangued by a young man who did not even come from the town and they had endured it.

When Lucien lost his self-control and began to fight his way through them, however, a shared sense of grievance overtook them, and they set about ejecting him, the whole group of them reacting spontaneously as though to rid itself of a foreign body.

Stephen found himself jostled by people, some of them responding to the hostility toward him, but most of them anxious to turn Lucien and the other dyers out of their factory.

The worker who had called out the comment about Madame Azaire was surrounded by pushing bodies as some of Lucien’s friends came to his assistance. He was a tall, red-faced man whose job was to transport bolts of cloth on one of the rubber-wheeled wagons. His placid expression was turning to one of alarm as the struggle approached him. Lucien was shouting and thrashing wildly with his arms in his attempt to push through the crowd, but a wall of Azaire’s men had closed his path in silent complicity.

At the edge of the skirmish the police officers began to swing their batons in a threatening way as they moved into the crowd. Meyraux climbed up on to the platform and shouted for calm. At this point one of Lucien’s wilder movements with his arm caught a female worker across the face, causing her to scream. Lucien went down on the floor under a swift blow from the woman’s husband. As he lay gasping, various well-aimed boots relieved the frustrations of Azaire’s workers. They were not crazed blows, but Lucien cried out as they found his legs and shoulders. Stephen
tried to push back some of his assailants to give him time to stand up. He received an open-handed blow on the nose from one of the men who resented being interrupted. Three or four dyers had now reached Lucien and had joined the fight to protect him. Stephen, his eyes smarting, hit out in front of him in fury. He had lost sight of his initial aim, which was to restore peace, and now wanted only to damage the man who had enraged him. He found himself pushed to one side by the tall, red-faced worker whose comment had started the commotion and he responded with a short-armed punch to the man’s face. There was no room for him to make a proper swing, but the blow was well enough timed for him to feel some dim sense of retribution. There was blood on his hand.