Chapter Four — Voel

Jules Lemmens came up the garden path on the Tuesday after the funeral with his hat in his hand and a bag of grit under his arm, and Lieselot watched him from the kitchen and thought: here it is, the first one who's going to want something.

She'd had four days of them. They came to the door in their good coats with their faces arranged for it, and they said een groot verlies, a great loss, and they looked past her shoulder into the kitchen the way men look into a shop they're deciding whether to rob. The last of something, they said. The last of the line. And then, every one of them, before they got their hat back on: and the birds, who'll have the birds. Like the birds were the body and the body in the ground was just the wrapping it came in.

She'd told them all the same thing, which was nothing. She'd learned that off Staf without knowing it. Say nothing and they fill the silence with themselves and leave, and you've given nothing away.

But Jules didn't ring. He came round the side and down the path like he'd done it ten thousand times, which he had, and he didn't go to the kitchen door at all. He went to the loft.

She had to go down the garden to him. That was the first thing he did to her and he did it without a word — he made her come to him, in the cold, by going to the birds instead of the house, and by the time she'd got her boots on and crossed the wet grass he was already at the wire with the door open, not touching anything, just looking, his hands behind his back like a man at Mass.

"They've not been let out," he said. He didn't turn round.

"They've been fed."

"That's not what I said." He looked along the perches, the rows of small heads turning to him, the low water-sound of forty birds shifting their weight. "Fed isn't flown. You've kept them alive. That's not the same as kept."

"They're not going to be kept," she said. "They're going to be sold."

Now he turned. He had a wide, slow, brown face, very still, a widower's face, and pale eyes that had spent seventy years reading the southern sky and had got the colour of it. He looked at her the way he'd looked at the birds, taking the measure, not unkind, not kind either, just reading.

"Sold," he said.

"My father's seeing to it." Which was a lie; Bram was seeing to nothing except the inside of the café. "There's a man who'll buy the lot."

"A man." Jules nodded slowly, like she'd said something interesting. "Is there a name on the man?"

There was. It was the name in the tin, the column of dates, the small sums going back forty years — Bery — except she didn't know yet that those two were the same; she only knew that a hard man in clean shoes had stood at the edge of the grave on Monday and looked at her over the hole and said you've got his birds, then, and not one word to the priest or to God, and that Jules himself had taken the man's elbow and steered him off down the cemetery path before she could answer.

So she said, "Bery."

She watched it land in him. It was a small thing — a man who didn't move much, moving even less — but she saw it, the way you see a bird go still on the perch a half-second before it's afraid of anything you can hear. His pale eyes did something to the loft, went around it once, the perches, the breeding boxes, the dark blue hen on the third perch down, as if he were counting what was in there, or saying goodbye to it.

"The Berys," Jules said, "have history with this loft."

"What history."

"Old history." He turned back to the wire. "From before you. From before your father." He let a hand rest on the loft door, just rest there, not opening it further, an old man's hand with the nails gone to horn. "It's not for me to say. It's nothing to do with the birds. Birds don't keep accounts." He said it the way you say a thing to close a door, and Lieselot, who had spent her whole life listening to grown people close doors, heard the door close and filed away that there was a room behind it.

"If you've come to tell me to sell," she said, "you can save your legs."

"I've come," Jules said, "because Staf would haunt me if I let you kill them in a week out of spite, and I'm too old to be haunted. I sleep badly enough." He opened the bag of grit and tipped a measure into the trough along the wire, a small grey rush, and the nearest birds came down to it, businesslike, and began to take it up. "You've not given them grit. Four days. They'll have started eating the lime off the wall."

"They've got food."

"Grain's food. Grit's how they break it." He didn't look at her. "Without it the food sits in them and rots and they get the wet droppings and then they get sick and then you've got a loft full of dead birds and a man in clean shoes saying the granddaughter let Staf's line die in a fortnight. Is that what you want said?"

It was not, as it happened, what she wanted said. She found, standing in the cold with her arms folded, that there was a fairly long list now of things she didn't want said, and that the list had been getting longer since Saturday, and that this was a kind of trap, the having of a list, because once you didn't want a thing said you had to do something to stop it being true.

"No," she said.

"No," Jules agreed. "Right." He straightened up off the trough with a hand on his back. "I'll show you the once. After that you do it or you don't, and if you don't, sell them quick to someone who'll feed them, and don't pretend it's anything but giving up, because the birds can't tell the difference between a girl who hates them and a girl who's just lazy, and either way they're dead."

He showed her the loft.

Not the way the men at the door would have shown her, with the talk, the legend, your grandfather, the great Staf, Barcelona, the gold of it. Jules didn't say Staf's name again after the haunting. He showed her the loft the way you'd show someone how to keep a fire in — the boards under the perches that came out to be scraped, every morning, no exceptions, because the droppings carried the wet and the wet carried the death; the order of the feed, the light corn early in the week to clean them out and the richer stuff toward the weekend, the maize and the peas, the small seeds at the end like sweets; the water changed twice a day and the vessel scoured, because a dirty drinker would kill a loft faster than a hawk. The names on the feed sacks — Versele-Laga, the green and the writing she'd seen in the shed her whole life and never once read.

"Twice a day," he said. "Morning and four. He fed at four." Jules glanced at her, the only time he came near it. "You'll have noticed they wait for it."

She had noticed. She thought of Saturday, the forty heads swinging south at four o'clock as if the old man were out over the water, late, but coming, and she'd told herself it was nothing, it was the corn, birds are clocks with feathers — and here was Jules, telling her the same thing she'd used to make it nothing, they wait for the four, and somehow in his plain mouth it didn't make it nothing. It made it worse. Because the birds didn't know the difference between a man coming with corn and a man not coming at all. They turned south for the corn. They'd have turned south for him. To a bird there was no difference, and Lieselot stood in the loft and understood, with a cold she couldn't blame on the weather, that being faithful and being hungry were the same shape from the inside, and that maybe that was true of more than birds.

"You've gone quiet," Jules said.

"I'm listening."

"You're not. You're thinking something. That's different." He didn't ask what. He moved her along the perches.

The thing she remembered after, the thing that got in and didn't come out, was the boxes.

Down the far end of the loft, partitioned off behind their own wire, was a row of separate compartments, each with a little nest bowl and a perch and a single bird. Cocks. She knew that much — the doffers, fatter in the neck, the iridescence running purple-green on the throat when they turned — sitting each alone in his box, and along the other side, in a section she'd not been let look at properly, the hens, kept apart, the wire between them.

"This is the racing," Jules said. He stood in front of one box, hands behind his back again, and let her look. "Weduwschap. Widowhood." He said the word like it was just a word and watched her not have a meaning for it. "You keep the cock and the hen apart. All season. He lives here, alone, in his box, with the empty bowl. She lives over there. They can hear each other. They can't get to each other." He nodded at the cock in the box, a red chequer with a hard bright eye, who had come to the front of his wire when Jules stopped, and was making a low sound, over and over, a sound she felt more than heard. "And then on the morning you race him, you give him an hour with her. Just an hour. You let him think he's home, he's got her, it's done — and then you take her away and you put him in the basket and you send him three hundred kilometres into France."

Lieselot looked at the cock at the wire. He had not stopped the low sound. His whole small body was pointed at the partition, at the hens he could hear and not reach, and his feet shifted and shifted on the perch, and his eye, when it came round to her, was not stupid and not soft; it was the eye of a thing that wanted one thing in all the world and had been engineered to be denied it.

"Why," she said.

"Why what."

"Why does it work."

Jules looked at the cock and not at her. "Because he flies home faster than anything alive to get back to her," he said. "Three hundred kilometres, into a headwind, over the towns, and the only thing in his head the whole way is the hen behind that wire. That's the engine. That's the whole sport. You take the thing he loves and you put it just out of reach and you point him at it across a country and you let go." He paused. "And when he comes home you give her to him for a quarter of an hour and then you take her away again. And you do it next week. And the week after."

The cock kept up his sound. The hens, somewhere on the other side, answered, a thin distinct call, and the cock went frantic at the wire for a second, beating once, settling, the feathers on his throat blown out, and Lieselot found she had to look away from it, and was angry at herself for having to.

"That's cruel," she said. She heard how childish it sounded and said it anyway.

"It's racing." Jules turned. "Is it crueller than him sitting in a field somewhere being shot for a Sunday dinner? He's the best-kept thing in this town. He's worth more than the house you slept in last night. He eats better than your father." He said your father with no heat at all, which was worse than heat. "And he's a champion because he wants something he can't have, badly enough to cross a sea for it. There's worse ways to be made." He looked at the cock with something she couldn't name, that pale-sky look, level and old. "I've kept birds sixty years, girl. Some days I think they're the only ones in this town who never settled for less."

It was while he was showing her how to read a bird that the morning turned, though she didn't know it was turning.

He reached into the nearest box and took up the red chequer cock, fast and certain, both hands closing over the wings so the bird couldn't beat, and the thing went from frantic to perfectly still in his hands, the way they do, surrendered, and Jules turned it breast-up and ran two fingers down the centre of it, the keel, and his face went somewhere else while his hands read, exactly the way Staf's used to, the eyes gone soft and unfocused and the whole man poured down into his fingertips.

"Here," he said. "Give me your hand."

"I don't want to hold it."

"I didn't ask what you wanted." He had her wrist before she could decide, dry old fingers, and he turned her hand over and laid the cock in it, breast up, and closed her fingers around the wings the way his had been, and put his own two fingers over hers and pressed them down the keel of the bird.

"There," he said. "Feel that. The bone down the middle. The muscle either side of it. Full. Round. That's a bird that hasn't raced — see how it fills the hand? Like a loaf that's risen." He moved her fingers. "After a hard race you'll feel that gone down. Worked off. Hollow either side of the keel, the muscle eaten into, and you'll know he's given everything, you'll feel it in your hand before you see it on the clock." He took his fingers off hers but left the bird in her grip. "Now you. Don't look at it. Shut your eyes if you have to. Feel it. Voel."

She nearly gave it back. She had her mouth open to say something dry, the armour, the thing she did, I'm not shutting my eyes in a shed, Jules, and she didn't say it, because the bird in her two hands had stopped being frantic and gone still against her palms, and under the warmth of it, under the dry slip of the feathers, she could feel it. The heart. Going. Quick and hard and small, faster than she'd have believed a thing could run a heart and not burn, a tiny machine of want going go go go go go against her fingers, the whole of him reduced to that, to the wanting, to the engine Jules had built out of love and a length of wire, and she stood in the cold loft with her grandfather four days in the ground and a tin upstairs with a lie in it that she'd read the first line of and slammed shut, and she held a bird's running heart in her hand and felt, against everything on her list, against fifteen years of building herself so that nothing could be taken because nothing was wanted — she felt it want.

She felt it want so hard it would cross a sea.

And — this was the thing, this was the part she'd be furious about later, lying in the dark — she did not give it back. She held it a beat too long, the way she'd looked too long at the south of the sky, the way she'd not answered Wendy's question, and Jules, who missed nothing, said nothing, which was how she knew he'd seen it.

"Right," she said, too loud, and put the cock back in its box, and the cock went straight to the wire again and started up the low sound at the hens it couldn't reach, faithful and hungry, the same shape from the inside, and Lieselot wiped her hand on her grandfather's anorak as if she could wipe the feeling off it.

Jules left the way he'd come, round the side, no hat-business at the door.

At the path he stopped. "Tomorrow morning," he said. "Seven. You scrape the boards, you do the grit, you do the water, and I'll come and stand over you and tell you everything you've done wrong, and you'll hate me, and in a month you'll do it without me." He looked at her over the green of the garden, the loft dark behind her, the dead winding-gear black at the end of the street. "You've got his hands," he said. "I felt it when I put the bird in them. You'll wish you didn't. It's a curse in a town like this, to be born to the one thing that's leaving." He pulled his hat on. "Don't sell them this week. Sell them this week and you'll never know what you had in your hand. Sell them in September if you've a mind to, when the season's done, when you know. Not in a week, out of spite, to a man in clean shoes whose father your grandfather—" He stopped. The door behind his eyes shut again, neat as a latch. "Seven o'clock," he said, and went.

She watched him to the end of the path. Then she went back down to the loft, against every item on her list, and stood at the wire in the last of the light, and the cock came to the front of his box for her because she was where the corn came from, and made his low sound, pointed at a thing he couldn't reach, the engine running, and she stood and let herself watch it for a while, the only honest hungry thing in the town, before she locked the door.

She would not sell them this week. She told herself it was spite — that every grown person who'd come to the door wanted her to fold, the men in their coats, her father, the man in clean shoes, and she would not be folded, she would keep them out of pure contrariness, to make the lot of them wait. That was a reason she could live with. It had nothing to do with a heart going go go go against her fingers, nothing to do with hands she hadn't asked for. Spite. She was good at spite. Spite was on the list.

What Jules had nearly said at the path stayed with her, though, up the garden and into the house, a man in clean shoes whose father your grandfather—. Whose father your grandfather what. She thought of the tin upstairs, the column of dates and small sums, Bery, and the man at the grave, you've got his birds, then, and the door Jules had shut twice in one morning, and she stood in the dark kitchen and understood that two things she'd been keeping in separate rooms — the rotten thing in the tin and the hard man in the clean shoes — had a wall between them that was getting thin, and that one of these days, probably soon, she was going to have to put her hand on it and feel through to whatever was breathing on the other side.

She did not open the tin that night either.

But she set an alarm for half six, for the first time in her life, to be in the loft at seven, and she told herself it was so she wouldn't have to hear Jules say she was late.

That was the third lie. It was the biggest one yet, and it was the first one that was going to save her.