A Country Road, a Tree

by Jo Baker

  She leafs back through to see what came before. The notebook is three-quarters full; the completed pages are densely covered. But every clear French phrase that has been achieved is barricaded all around by crossings-out and scribblings. He has filled pages, he has written his pen dry and refilled it, he has covered sheets and sheets, but very little is let stand. It seems that all that has been achieved here is the consumption of paper, ink and time.

  Baffled, she frowns down at the mess of it.

  The hours they’d spent in cafés, he and his friend Alfred, before Alfred joined up, going over this. And now the hours alone. And this is all there is to show for it.

  She turns another page. On the verso, he has drawn a little picture of Charlot, the tramp with his bowler hat coming down over his eyes, his toothbrush moustache like Adolf the peacemaker’s, his sagging trousers, his splayed feet in broken boots. What does he think he is doing? Why can’t he simply write? Why can’t he just get on with it?

  And then there’s a yell—from outside, in the street. She drops the book and turns to the window, peers down at a scuffle. Is that him? He doesn’t have his papers, oh my God, they’ll lock him up.

  And then she sees the ball.

  Just a kickabout in the street. Her fear contracts. A bad-tempered game, all elbows and shoving. The ball is sent spinning crosswise on to the pavement, where Monsieur Lunel shuffles along under his black fedora, his body foreshortened by the angle, and one of the lads runs over and scoops up the ball and apologizes, and another comes up and up and stands too close to the old man, his skinny chest puffed out—she can’t hear what he says from up here—and spits upon the ground. Then his mate shoves him, and there’s another scuffle, and the ball bounces off the cobbles, and they chase after it, and Monsieur Lunel, after standing frozen for a moment, shuffles on.

  This is what they don’t see, the Amerloques and the Irlandais, the writers and the artists and the wives who come here for the cheap living and the cheap wine and the distance from their mothers, all his fly-by-night friends. They skate over the shining surface; they don’t see the murk beneath.

  She peels her forehead from the window, rubs the mark with a sleeve and turns away. She sees the notebook lying there on the tabletop. How exactly had he left it?

  She meets him at the door and gives him quick kisses, one cheek and then the other. He has brought a parcel home with him; he drops it on the settee. She hands him a cup, laughs at herself—a tussle in the street, I thought they were arresting you! She shows him the rug that she made for him, though it has already lost half its loveliness: she had thought that they were both, in their own ways, working on the same thing. On his success.

  “What’s in the parcel?” she asks.

  He touches the rug, pressing a little moss-coloured square of wool with his fingertips. “This is very nice. Thank you.”

  He takes the parcel over to the table and lays it down to open it. “It was left with the concierge.” She sees him notice the notebook. “Have you been here long?” he asks.

  “No,” she says, a shade too quickly. “Not long. What’s in the parcel?” she asks again.

  “Soon find out.”

  He opens a drawer and slides the notebook in. Then he turns the package over so that he can get at the knots. The bundle is soft and bulky and he has already noted Nora’s girlish handwriting, but he can’t make sense of it at all. He undoes the knot, tugs the string away and unfurls the waxy paper. Inside there is a bolt of dark twill. He still can’t make sense of it. And then he sees. He lifts it out. It is a coat.

  “A coat,” she says.

  It brings with it a cloud of scent: pomade, cheroot smoke and lemon soap. A cloud of associations, of time dispensed in cafés and books and drink, the gut-punch of guilt about Lucia. A note tumbles from the folds and lands on the floor. He stoops for it and peers, holding it close up to his face to read. This from the man himself.

  “Who’s it from?”

  “Mr. Joyce.”

  For all of everything, this is what he’s worth. He gets to wear the great man’s cast-off coat.

  “Oh,” she says. “Well. That’s handy.”

  He folds the coat and lays it in the paper, and fumbles it all back together again. He sits down. He takes out pen and paper.

  “What are you doing?”

  “A thank-you note.”

  “Ah.”

  His hand flicks across, leaving loops and curls of blue behind it, then whisking down to traverse the page again. The white swiftly fills with clean blue. Her lips bunch and twist. She turns and moves away to the little kitchenette, where she rummages irritably in the cupboards, drags out tins and packets, shoves them back. She feels as though she has been taken for a fool.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  L’EXODE

  June 1940

  Anxiety makes the air thick; the urgency is a dream urgency, where there is a desperate need to run and yet the limbs are heavy and entangled. The earth shudders when the bombs hit. The sky is greasy with smoke.

  The ticket officer doesn’t look up. “Where do you want to go?”

  They’ve been queuing for hours; they’re footsore and twitchy to be gone. He has two bags and she has her backpack. Trains have arrived with their plumes of steam and they’ve left with their plumes of steam, and the concourse remains congested still, suitcases drawn into little settlements with joggled babies and fractious kids and tired old women, and the queue weaves round and through it all, a ragged line of anxious faces and sweated-through summer clothes; it has been skin-crawlingly slow progress to get even as far as the ticket desk. It has been an age. And not once in all that age did it occur to him that this might come up. The only thought so far has been Away.

  “There’s a choice?”

  The ticket officer looks up now. “Well, no. But people tend to say, and then I tell them what I can give them.” The fellow glances past them at the never-ending queue. “It’s usually over quite briskly.”

  Suzanne huffs in irritation. He touches her arm. “So, what can you give us?”

  “There’s a train for Vichy in a couple of hours.”

  “Vichy…” He turns to Suzanne. She nods, whisks a hand to hurry things along. The old spa town will do; anywhere will do; anywhere away from here.

  “It’s a four-hour journey, under normal circumstances,” the ticket officer says. “But these aren’t normal circumstances.”

  A thought leaps up: Joyce is now at Vichy. They’d shifted there from Saint-Gérand-le-Puy; there was a postcard from an hotel, the Hotel…Beaujolais. Maybe they could get a room there themselves. So they’ll go to Vichy and they’ll see Joyce, and it’s a feeling something like home. A little landslip of images: white wine and talk, and together they’re leaning over a copy of the Wake, and he is reading out the commas and the full stops while Shem frowns and nods and determines what corrections must be made. He can swallow down his chagrin about the coat; he can swallow it down like a gannet. The war will blunder past their windows and bowl along the high street and they’ll barely notice that it’s happening at all.

  “Vichy it is, then.”

  While the tickets are torn, he counts out his francs. Their little store of money is dwindling at an alarming rate. He tries to gulp the worry down along with the shame, but it twists and flicks and shivers inside, very much alive.

  “What will we do in Vichy?” Suzanne asks. They weave through the crowds, lugging their bags, in the hope of finding a quiet corner to settle down and wait.

  “Work out what to do next,” he says.

  —

  The train doors are slammed open; there’s a surge forward through the ticket barrier and down on to the platform. The two of them are pushed along with it. He wants to stand back, to let people in ahead, to wait for the crowds to clear. Good manners are worn deep into the grain. And yet a more atavistic edge shoulders forward too—me, I, need—and he is pushing ahead, his heart beating faster, his body seething with adrenaline. Guards ye
ll and bellow and are ignored. Children cry. Suzanne falls behind, dragged away by her backpack in the crush as though she is being pulled out to sea. And there is also we, also us.

  “Come on—”

  He reaches for her and she grabs his hand and hers is small and sweaty, and he pulls her up to join him, and they are at the dirty flank of the train, just a yard from an open door. He shoves forward, hindered and frustrated by the bodies ahead of him, the crush that moves into any space behind, the grimed hat and greased hair of the man in front, the solid flesh and the smell of it all. He glances back at Suzanne; strangers’ shoulders press between him and her. She is struggling on, scowling at the nuisance of it all.

  “Are you all right?”

  She nods, grim. Their hands are clamped tight together between the flanks of others, their fingers intermeshed. His hand stretching back to hers, he steps on to the first tread up into the carriage and drags her with him, insistent.

  “Excuse me,” she says, pushing through.

  Face tight against the knapsack of the man in front, he gets up the second step and she heaves herself out of the crush to climb up behind him. They are on board.

  They are lucky. The concourse is still full. The station doors are bolted. The grilles are locked down; the ticket clerks are gone and the offices are shut. And behind the closed gates and grilles and doors, there are people still waiting, still hoping: once the crowd inside has cleared, perhaps the station doors will be unlocked again, perhaps the Gare de Lyon will reopen and they too can make their way out of the threatened city and go wherever it is still possible to go.

  —

  The train is an adder, barely warmed by the early sun; it moves by inches, eighths, sixteenths. It hardly moves at all.

  A layer of smoke hangs over the city; it rises in plumes here and there, sickly-looking and unsettling.

  “Do you think that’s an air defence, to screen the people as they leave?”

  “Maybe. Or they’re bonfires.”

  “Why would they have bonfires?”

  “To be rid of stuff they wouldn’t want the enemy to get their hands on.”

  They sit shoulder-to-shoulder on the hard wooden bench. There are passengers packed, standing, down the length of the corridor. He chews his nails when he isn’t smoking; when he isn’t smoking he chews his nails. She stares out of the window, her hands in her lap, knees sloped together; his long legs are tucked uncomfortably in. His two bags are wedged behind his heels; her overstuffed backpack is on her lap.

  The train creeps past streets; it begins to pick up a little speed. Passengers strike up conversations. Children chatter, swing their feet. A road swerves towards the line and for a moment the two run side by side. The road is a rubbish dump, a mound of junk and clutter. But then it separates itself into movement, individuals, men and women trudging burdened like ants; into cars, donkeys, handcarts, prams, horses, suitcases, bicycles, frying pans and mattresses, birds in cages, briefcases. A child lugging a baby. An old woman in a pram, legs dangling, pushed by an old man who squints in the bright June sun. His eyes catch on the woman’s white, sharp face above the bundled body. The train pulls past the two, the old woman and the old man scraping along together, and then a fence ticks past, breaking up the image like an old zoetrope, and he closes his eyes, and reaches in behind his spectacles to press on them.

  When he looks again, a brick wall ghosts alongside and Suzanne’s head is resting against the window; her eyes are closed and she is breathing softly and asleep. He is glad that she’s asleep. He feels as though he could never sleep again.

  When Suzanne wakes, they are out in the countryside and the train has picked up speed. He sits glaring out of the window, across the copses, the wide planes of farmland, at the dotted villages and church spires.

  “What is it?” she asks.

  “The people.”

  “What people?”

  He nods across the open land, towards the main road south. The way is packed still, cars nudging along, edging past the pedestrians and pony carts.

  “Name of God,” she says. “That must be the whole of Paris.”

  He says, “Yes. And…”

  “What?” She glances round at him.

  “And, I think, the army,” he says.

  “What?”

  “I think I saw uniforms. Before.” He raises his shoulders. His sight is not that good. “I can’t be sure.”

  Her face goes still. She turns back to the window. The train skims across a bridge over the road. And then she sees them too. It’s just a moment, and then the train is past and they’re gone. But a pocket of infantry was slumped on the verge, filthy and unkempt, legs stretched out in front of them in the long summer grass.

  “But no,” she says. “What are they doing?”

  “You see them?”

  She nods.

  “It must be a rout.”

  She sits back, swallows. After a moment: “Maybe there won’t be so much fighting in Paris. If they are running away.”

  “That’s one way of thinking about it.”

  “Hmm.”

  “But the other way is, with the army there, that makes everyone a target.”

  “You think they’ll come?”

  She turns her gaze up; she searches the sky. The sky remains, for the time being, innocent and clear blue.

  —

  The train stops unpredictably, and in awkward places. Time ticks by, and people murmur, and children cry.

  They are marooned. An hour; an hour and a half. Her stomach rumbles, and she folds her arms over it. The sun glares on them. Her face is pale and sweaty.

  “If we were at a station,” someone says, “we could nip out and buy some bread.”

  Further up the train, someone thumps open a carriage door and climbs down on to the track. She watches the dark figure pick his way across to the embankment, then stand there at the edge of the grass. It takes her a moment to realize that he’s pissing, and then she looks away. Soon others are climbing down from the carriages to stretch their legs and relieve themselves; women share a cigarette, or clamber further up through the long grass and off into the bushes. Children hopscotch from sleeper to sleeper; a toddler blinks sleepily in the daylight as his mother holds him, pants around his ankles, and he puddles the gravel.

  And then there is a whistle and a rush and a general rebuttoning and regathering, and a flurry to get back inside.

  The train grinds back into motion, and for a while is clipping along again, stopping sometimes as other trains whistle past, and sometimes stopping for no obvious reason at all.

  —

  Vichy is cursed; leaves and tendrils and blooms and branches have been bewitched into stone and steel, and forced into service as buildings and street furniture. There is clean cold light here; the streets are glistening and chill.

  Together they head down one of the main boulevards. Every step becomes a conscious effort, and he feels as though he is tacking and lurching along like a golem. They’re being watched—discreetly from café terraces, from the security of linked arms, from behind the defensive barrier of a shopping basket or a yapping dog. Children simply stop and stare. Because Vichy is not used to visitors like these: scruffy, exhausted, travel-worn visitors who flood out of third-class carriages with their belongings bulging from their bags and without the means to make themselves comfortable. Wealth, in Vichy, is as normal as the bubbling warm water; here, nobody carries their own luggage.

  One bag slides against his thigh as he walks. Murphy, Murphy, Murphy. The other bag drags on his shoulder, stuffed with clothing, shaving gear, tinned food: the body’s barest needs make for a heavy load. If he could just be rid of one of the bags; to shed either his manuscript or his belongings would be such a relief. But he heaves one strap up his shoulder and hooks a thumb under the other, and drags himself along. Suzanne, craned forward by the weight of her backpack, trudges beside him, silent. They carry on, past the tabac on the corner and the pharmacy with its displ
ay of Vichy pastilles, the tins piled in a pyramid, and past the milliner’s shop where the hats are ranged like dead birds in a cabinet.

  “The Hotel Beaujolais,” he says. “It’s on this street, it can’t be far.”

  She nods. Mr. Joyce, it turns out, will be here. She hadn’t known that Vichy would also mean Joyce, would also mean hard drinking and unhappiness. Whatever he might think, Joyce is not what he needs.

  —

  There is, thank goodness, a room remaining at the Hotel Beaujolais. Suzanne lets her backpack slide from her shoulder and hit the floor.

  Dark panelling, cool tiles: a couple of comfortable-looking armchairs. He is desperate for news, but the only paper is a folded copy of Action Française and he’s not going to stoop to that. Though it needn’t mean anything about this place—anybody could have left it there. For the moment at least, they must assume that this is a decent establishment.

  And then the receptionist mentions the price of the room.

  “Ah.”

  The receptionist’s expression—he is a pale fellow with a neat moustache and clear skin—remains neutral, but then the cost is neither here nor there to him.

  “You have nothing less…expensive?”

  A minor shrug. “No, Monsieur.”

  Because at whatever price they’re charging for a broom cupboard nowadays, there’ll be no difficulty in filling it, with Paris emptying itself out like a toppled-over bucket. Vichy can afford not to be cheap. They’ll have to keep on going, find somewhere more suited to their finances; the Joyces’ hotel was always likely to be too grand for them. He glances round at Suzanne, who has left her backpack on the floor where it fell. She is grey with fatigue.

  “Problem?” she asks.

  “No,” he says. “It’s fine.”

  And so, definitively, he prints his name on the page and signs, committing himself to a sum that he really can’t afford.

  “Monsieur and Madame Joyce are staying here, I believe?” he asks, and clears his throat.

  “There is a gentleman and lady of that name, yes.”

  He thanks the receptionist, and hates him. He takes the key and turns to lift Suzanne’s backpack, brushing off her protests, which are hardly meant. There are too many stairs; they just keep on going up and up until they reach a narrow landing, a corridor and a small dark door, where the number matches the number on their key. Inside, he drops their bags and the two of them fall on to the bed. It sinks beneath them, springs creaking. They lie there, parallel, feet trailing to the floor.