Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

Author:Sebastian Faulks
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Unread, Fiction
ISBN: 9780679776819
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 1997-11-14T23:00:00+00:00

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.

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