Birdsong

by Sebastian Faulks

With threats and cajolings to the dog, and reassurances to Elizabeth, Irene managed to clear enough room for them both to get into the hallway and for her to close the door after them.

They had the same glue-like consistency she was familiar with from Paddington takeaways, but Stuart was adamant that they were more authentic. She wished they could have wine instead of tea.

‘Ravel,’

They were in their own view a formidable group of men. No inferno would now melt them, no storm destroy, because they had seen the worst and they had survived.

Stephen knew what they felt because he had been with them and he himself did not feel hardened or strengthened by what he had seen; he felt impoverished and demeaned. He shared their conspiracy of fortitude, but sometimes he felt for them what he felt for himself, not love but pitiful contempt.

What world had he lived in, what heightened, dazed existence? It had seemed coherent at the time; the powerful feelings it had set loose in him, inflamed each day by the renewed pleasure of his senses, had appeared to make up something not only comprehensible, but important.

gaucherie

He’s got the wind up, that’s his trouble.

What he really needed, it occurred to him, was the closeness of human contact, not forced by the proximity of war, but given willingly, from friendship.

exculpates

time had seemed to collapse.

He took a few steps into the room. This is fear, he thought; this is what makes men cower in shellholes or shoot themselves.

Compared to her passion for Stephen it was a muted affair, and yet it was not shallow; it made her profoundly content, and confident that at last she would be able to become the woman that she was meant to be, unhampered by restraint or deceit, and within a life that would be calm and helpful for her child.

Why was it that her simple desires had turned her into so extravagant an outcast?

Isabelle was aware that beneath Stephen’s expressionless manner there was some powerful urge or desire. He said, ‘Isabelle, I’m glad of all these things you’ve told me. I don’t wish to see you again now. This was all I needed to know. I wish you well with your German friend.’ Isabelle felt unforeseen tears welling up in her eyes. Surely he would not leave on this note of downcast generosity. She had not wanted to see him so broken. He leaned forward across the table. He said with a slight catch in his voice, ‘May I touch you?’ She looked into his dark eyes. ‘You mean …?’ ‘Yes.’ He nodded slowly. He held out his right hand. She took it in hers, feeling the large, roughened fingers. Slowly, with a little tremor in her own grip, she guided it across her face and laid it on her jaw, just below the ear.

Ellis lit a cigarette. ‘It’s like that time of day on Sunday when you expect to hear the first bells of evensong,’ he said. ‘I’d give anything not to have to go back.’

‘You’re not shirking anything. I know you go on raids and patrols. I heard you were even down the tunnel with the miners. No, it’s not that. You’re tired in your mind, Wraysford. Aren’t you?’

It sounds strange, but we have degraded human life so far that we must leave some space for dignity to grow again. As it may, one day. Not for you or me, but for our children.’

Stephen stood up. He said forcefully, ‘I saw your face that July morning we attacked at Beaumont. I took my orders from you at the head of the communication trench.’ ‘And?’ ‘I looked in your eyes and there was perfect blankness.’ Gray, for the first time since Stephen had known him, seemed wrong-footed. He coughed, and looked down. When he could meet Stephen’s eye again, he said, ‘Those are intimate moments.’ Stephen nodded. ‘I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.’

room moved dizzily in front of his tear-filled gaze. I have made this mistake in my life, Jack thought: not once but twice I have loved someone more than my heart would bear.

the difference between death and life was not one of fact but merely of time.

‘It’s just that his “bit” and mine seem so different.’

All night he sang for his brother, whom he had brought home in his hands.

They had not been there for the great slaughters of the previous year and could not foresee the mechanized abattoir that was expected in the impassable mud of Flanders in the months to come.

entr’acte

They were frightening to the civilians because they had evolved not into killers but into passive beings whose only aim was to endure.

They had an air of private urgency, as though they were bent on matters of financial significance or international weight that would not even permit them to glance towards the ingratiating smile of the doorman in his top hat and gold frogging.

His mind, however, seemed hardly to function at all. He was capable of doing little more than sitting and staring at the landscape that went by.

He had not eaten lunch or dinner in Amiens and his palate had grown used to Tickler’s plum and apple pudding, bully beef and biscuits, with only an occasional slice of cake sent

It seemed to him extraordinary that he should be feeling the shock now, when he was safe in a tranquil English village.

He heaved his shoulders up, then let them drop in a long, broken sigh. He began to walk along the green, then turned down a lane that led away from the village. He tried to relax himself. I have been under fire, he thought; but now, for the time being, it is over. Under fire. The words came back. How thin and inadequate the phrase was.

Stephen felt himself overtaken by a climactic surge of feeling. It frightened him because he thought it would have some physical issue, in spasm or bleeding or death. Then he saw that what he felt was not an assault but a passionate affinity. It was for the rough field running down to the trees and for the path going back into the village where he could see the tower of the church: these and the forgiving distance of the sky were not separate, but part of one creation, and he too, still by any sane judgement a young man, by the repeated tiny pulsing of his blood, was one with them.

‘I’m pleased,’ he repeated, and in that moment of small insincerity he thought he felt the last presence of Isabelle leave him, not by going into false oblivion, as she had the first time, but into simple absence.

Jeanne smiled back at him. It was the first time he had seen her smile, and he believed it was the most extraordinary expression he had seen on a human face. It began with a slow widening of the lips, then the pale skin of her face became radiant, not with blood as Isabelle’s might have done, but with an inner light that made it shine. At last it reached her eyes, which developed squares of brilliance as they narrowed into trusting humour. It was not just her expression, Stephen thought, but her whole face that had changed into something forgiving and serene.

Then, as it grew late, he began to feel the dread of his return. From the first time as a child when he had been taken from the fields and made to go back to the institution in which he was living, he had feared the moment of separation more than anything: it was abandonment. The return to the trenches was something he could not bring himself to contemplate. As the time grew nearer he lost the ability to talk any more.

Veterans of the previous July were mean with the human life at their disposal.

Stephen spoke with the calm of experience, but it did not help him. The fact that he had done this before was no guarantee that he could do it again. When the moment came he would have to confront the depths of himself once more, and he feared that he had changed.

‘Just shut your mouth, Weir.’ Stephen was shouting, his voice caught with the beginning of sobs. He put his face close to Weir’s. ‘Just try to help me. If you are grateful or something then try to help me. Christ Jesus, do you think I want to do this? Do you think my life was made for this?’

each had gone down alone into himself, where time had stopped and there was no help.

On this occasion it seemed that only a few hours earlier he had been having dinner with Jeanne and now he was preparing to die.

It was less coordinated than the first, without the distinct waves, but the men who had survived were dizzy with exhilaration as they wove onwards to the second line.

they were galvanized beyond fear.

They were killing with pleasure. They were not normal.

‘We hold the line, we hold the fucking line.’ Stephen’s tongue and teeth were visible in the silently screaming cave of his mouth.

Even this was a great improvement on what he had known.

He noticed how dry and passionless his own style had become.

He allowed himself to picture the hallway of his house in London with Margaret waiting for him.

Weir climbed on to the firestep to let a ration party go past and a sniper’s bullet entered his head above the eye causing trails of his brain to loop out on to the sandbags of the parados behind him.

That had been his final gesture.

Yet he had loved him. Weir alone had made the war bearable.