Birdsong why did she leave him

We were there. As our punishment for God knows what, we were there, and our men died in each of those disgusting places. I hate their names. I hate the sound of them and the thought of them, which is why I will not bring myself to remind you.

But listen. Four words that people will look at one day. When they read the other words they will want to vomit. When they read these, they will bow their heads, just a little. Once, during a period of calm, he sat on the firestep waiting for Stephen to return from an inspection and listened to the music of the tins.

The empty ones were sonorous, the fuller ones provided an ascending scale. Those filled to the brim produced only a fat percussive beat unless they overbalanced, when the cascade would give a loud variation. Within earshot there were scores of tins in different states of fullness and with varying resonance.

Then he heard the wire moving in the wind. It set up a moaning background noise that would occasionally gust into prominence, then lapse again to mere accompaniment. He had to work hard to discern, or perhaps imagine, a melody in this tin music, but it was better in his ears than the awful sound of shellfire.

I had searched in superstition But there was nothing. Then I heard the sound of my own life leaving me. It was so I regretted that I had paid it no attention.

Then I believed in the wisdom of what other men had found before me I saw that those simple things might be true I never wanted to believe in them because it was better to fight my own battle. You can believe in something without compromising the burden of your own existence. Death had no meaning, but still the numbers of them went on and on and in that new infinity there was still horror. For a moment he was baffled. It became our endearment.

The woman was still looking at me. Traffic was at a standstill, unusual this early in the afternoon. A tanker must have fallen across the road—tankers were always falling across the roads—or a bus had broken down, or cars had formed a line outside a petrol station, blocking the road.

My fuel gauge was close to empty. I switched off the ignition and rolled down the window, wondering if the woman would roll down hers as well and say something to me. I stared back at her, and yet she did not waver, her eyes remaining firm, until I looked away. There were many more hawkers now, holding out magazines, phone cards, plantain chips, newspapers, cans of Coke and Amstel Malta dipped in water to make them look cold. The driver in front of me was buying a phone card.

The hawker, a boy in a red Arsenal shirt, scratched the card with his fingernail, and then waited for the driver to enter the numbers in his phone to make sure the card was not fake. I turned again to look at the woman. There was something in the set of her lips, which were lined with cocoa lip pencil, that suggested an unsatisfying triumph, as though she had won a battle but hated having had to fight in the first place.

But his wife could not possibly know; he had been so careful. We only ever went to one on a dark street off Awolowo Road, a place with expensive wines and no sign on the gate. And impossible for him to keep my text messages.

I wanted to ask how he could so efficiently delete my texts as soon as he read them, why he felt no urge to keep them on his phone, even if only for a few hours, even if only for a day. There were reams of questions unasked, gathering like rough pebbles in my throat. It was a strange thing to feel so close to a man—to tell him about my resentment of my parents, to lie supine for him with an abandon that was unfamiliar to me—and yet be unable to ask him questions, bound as I was by insecurity and unnamed longings.

The fight was about his driver, Emmanuel, an elderly man who might have looked wise if his features were not so snarled with dissatisfaction.

It was a Saturday afternoon. I had been at work that morning. My boss had called an emergency meeting that I thought unnecessary: we all knew that His Royal Highness, the Oba of the town near the lagoon, was causing trouble, saying that Celnet Telecom had made him look bad in front of his people. He had sent many messages asking how we could build a big base station on his ancestral land and yet donate only a small borehole to his people. That morning, his guards had blocked off our building site, shoved some of our engineers around, and punctured the tires of their van.

My boss was furious, and he slammed his hand on the table as he spoke at the meeting. I, too, slammed my hand on the cane table as I imitated him later, while my lover laughed. A common crook! What happened to the one million naira we gave him? Should we also bring bags of rice and beans for all his people before we put up our base station? Does he want a supply of meat pies every day? I never volunteered.

I disliked those visits—villagers watching us with awed eyes, young men asking for free phone cards, even free phones—because it all made me feel helplessly powerful.

We were laughing, and with the sun shining, the sound of birds above, the slight flutter of the curtains against the sliding door, I was already thinking of future Saturdays that we would spend together, laughing at funny stories about my boss.

My lover summoned Emmanuel and asked him to take me to the supermarket to buy the meat pies. When I got into the car, Emmanuel did not greet me. He simply stared straight ahead. It was the first time that he had driven me without my lover. The silence was tense. Perhaps he was thinking that all his children were older than me. He said nothing and started the car. When we arrived, he stopped at the gate. Every other driver did that, before looking for a parking space.

Rage rose under my skin, making me feel detached and bloodless, suspended in air; I could not sense the ground under my feet as I climbed out. After I had selected some meat pies from the display case, I called my lover and told him that Emmanuel had been rude and that I would be taking a taxi back. I wanted to fling the bag of meat pies through the window. Worse, I was horrified to notice that my eyes were watering.

My lover gently wrapped his arms around me, as though I were an irrational child, and asked whether I would give him a meat pie. He shook his head. No more of this talk. I let myself be mollified, be held, be caressed.

He was smiling. They were feisty like you. I looked at him. How could he not see that there were things he should not say to me, and that there were things I longed to have with him? It was a willed blindness; it had to be. He chose not to see. He looked as though he had just been stung by an insect. I had never before been thrown out of a house.

Emmanuel sat in a chair in the shade of the garage and watched stone-faced as I hurried to my car. My lover did not call me for five days, and I did not call him.

Later, he told me that if I had cried instead of calling him a bastard he would have behaved better. I should not have gone back—I knew that even then. The woman, still staring at me, was talking on her cell phone.

Her jeep was black and silver and miraculously free of scratches. How was that possible in this city where okada after okada sped through the narrow slices of space between cars in traffic as though motorcycles could shrink to fit any gap? Perhaps whenever her car was hit a mechanic descended from the sky and made the dent disappear. The car in front of me had a gash on its tail-light; it looked like one of the many cars that dripped oil, turning the roads into a slick sheet when the rains came.

My own car was full of wounds. The biggest, a mangled bumper, was from a taxi that rammed into me at a red light on Kingsway Road a month before. The driver had jumped out with his shirt unbuttoned, all sweaty bravado, and screamed at me. I stared at him, stunned, until he drove away, and then I began to think of what I could have said, what I could have shouted back.

At first, she resists; but this only intensifies his feeling, which she soon comes to share. They finally come together in a series of frankly described sexual encounters, whose physical detail foreshadows the bodily tests that await both of them in the coming war. Stephen and Isabelle flee together to Provence. She becomes pregnant and, for reasons she does not disclose till later, she leaves him. The story moves on to Flanders in Stephen is an infantry officer on the Western Front.

The narrative dwells on the lives of both infantrymen and tunnellers, notably Stephen, his commanding officer Captain Gray, Michael Weir, and a tunneller called Jack Firebrace.

It gives a minute evocation of the daily life of the soldier, the horrific effects of wounds and gas, but also the intense friendships of men under pressure. Stephen is a man almost broken by love and by war, but while some of his fellow-soldiers are happy to die, unable to comprehend the sights they have seen, Stephen becomes more and more determined to survive. In this, he is encouraged by Captain Gray. Their philosophical exchanges about what they have witnessed are terse, but Stephen gives fuller vent to his feelings in a coded diary, which he keeps in spite of military regulations.

Birdsong frequently returns to the pain of parenthood, especially that of those who lost sons on Western Front. Back in , Stephen meets Isabelle again, on leave in Amiens.

There is to be no reunion, but he forms a friendship with her sister Jeanne who, like Gray, wills him to carry on. In the autumn of , Stephen is trapped underground when an explosion brings down the roof on a tunnel where he has gone with Jack Firebrace, the miner whom he had once threatened to have court-martialled.

After days underground, Stephen, himself close to death, is rescued by a German search party led by a Jewish doctor looking for his brother. The war is over.

In the final scene of the book, Elizabeth gives birth to a son. She has made the final effort of love and redemption to the men who died and the circle with the past is closed. He declined to do so. A film of Birdsong was in development for 20 years. In order to repossess the film rights, Faulks granted Working Title a licence to make a two-part television series. The feature film remains unmade. Stephen came out of nowhere. It is dedicated to Edward Faulks.