Birdsong: A Novel of Love and War by Sebastian Faulks

Author:Sebastian Faulks [Faulks, Sebastian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: Fiction, Historical, Literary
ISBN: 0679776818
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1993-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

ELIZABETH STRAIGHTENED HER hair in the mirror. She was wearing a suede skirt, leather boots and a black cashmere sweater. She pushed the thick dark hair back a little from her ears and turned her head sideways to insert two costume earrings the colour of oxblood. There was light mascara on her lashes; the paleness of her skin made her look less Gallic than Lindsay had been suggesting, but there was nevertheless something dramatic in her face which further make-up would have overstated. In any case, it was only Monday morning, time for the late walk to Lancaster Gate tube, her mouth still burning from the too-hasty coffee she had bolted as the radio told her it had turned half-past eight.

The train of the Central Line fitted its tube like a bullet in the barrel of a rifle. When it came to its customary sudden, dark and unexplained halt between Marble Arch and Bond Street Elizabeth could see the pipes and cables of the tunnel only inches from the shell of the carriage. It was the deepest hottest line in London, dug by sweating tunnellers on a navvy’s day rate. They started again with mysterious smoothness and glided into Bond Street where a delayed crowd was waiting. Elizabeth got off at Oxford Street and hurried north through the pedestrians ambling three abreast, none of them looking ahead, then turned left into the area behind the shops.

Once a week regularly and sometimes more often she went to visit Erich and Irene, the principal designers for the company. Both had refused to move from their old office or even to change the name on the door when the new company had been formed five years earlier.

Since she was already late, it would make no difference if she stopped at the local Italian café. She ordered three coffees to take away and Lucca, the plump, grizzled attendant, tore up a Mars Bar box for her to balance them on as she made her precarious way to a door a few yards down with a brass name plate in the brick: Bloom Thompson Carman. Wholesale, Fabric and Design.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ she called as she stepped out of the lift on the second floor and made her way to the open door.

She put the improvised tray down on the desk in the area laughingly known as Reception and went back to close the concertina doors on the lift.

‘I brought you some coffee, Erich.’

‘Thank you.’ Erich came out of an inner room. He was a man in his early seventies with wild grey hair and gold glasses. His cardigan had holes in the elbows so large that there were in fact no elbows. His chain-smoked Embassy and baggy eyes gave him an air of compressed weariness held at bay only by his nervous, ticking fingers that worked the round dial on the telephone, impatient at its slow returning grind, or skittered his gold scissors through bolts of unshaped cloth.

‘Train got stuck in the tunnel as usual,’ said Elizabeth.

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