A Country Road, a Tree

by Jo Baker

  In the low light, he lifts his head to see that the roadside banks are crumbling red earth. The cliffs above are veined with rust and blood. The road sweeps towards these cliffs, and as the road rises and lurches upward like a key change, the cicadas start to sing. And on the top of the cliffs, a little town grows like lichen on the blood-red rocks. They have travelled, through a rosary of days, through a decade of weeks, from one world into another. Roussillon. Rousse: of course it’s red.

  They climb towards it.

  It is small-windowed, shuttered, huddled tight, its back turned towards the world. As the two of them slog uphill, the wind grows sharper, more scuddy; it twists this way and then that; it’s in their faces, in their eyes, teasing out Suzanne’s hair from under her scarf, pulling at their jackets, stirring his beard, spinning leaves and seeds and bits of grass into whirlwinds and blowing dust into dry eyes, and it’s too much, really it is too much to contend with now, that the wind should blow full in their faces.

  A church clock strikes the hour; the chimes are broken and scattered by the breeze. Suzanne moans in complaint and he nods in agreement.

  They shamble past the front of the first house. It is locked tight; the iron homunculi that hold the shutters back during the day are fallen forward drunkenly for the night.

  The road is cobbled now. There are sleeping shops, a fruit tree splayed against a wall; the ghost of a clematis climbs over a door; a cat ambles from an alleyway and stops to stare at them. There is a sign. An hotel. Hôtel de la Poste. He tugs on her arm, tilts his head towards the building. She nods. They stumble over the cobblestones towards it.

  “We’re here,” she says.

  “Thank God,” he says.

  “Just don’t do anything stupid,” she says. “Don’t mess this up now, please.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ROUSSILLON

  October 1942

  The day is white and full of clattering, talk: the walls strain and buckle in the wind.

  The two of them lie side by side, still as figures on a tomb, socks and shoes pulled off, feet patched with blood and scabbed and stinking. The bed is narrow and their shoulders touch.

  They breathe. Just for a while they are oblivious. The white light and the noise and the buffeting of the wind do not trouble their sleep.

  When the sun eases in through the slots in the shutters, it makes her surface and she feels the press of her shoulder against his shoulder and she curls round on her side, putting space between them. Through the thin walls comes the sound of voices, of a radio, of footfalls, the chink of glasses and china. Mice rustle beneath the floorboards; they scamper in the ceiling. He breathes beside her; she sleeps again.

  The sunlight fans across the floor and then begins its slow retreat. Shadows deepen and spread like floodwater.

  In the evening, they stir and wake to a blue room, moonlight sliced by shutters. He eases on his boots, wincing, and stumbles out through the hotel yard to the necessary house. The little room is vertiginous and breezy, perched on the edge of a crevasse, a sheer stinking drop beneath.

  She, meanwhile, limps out to the town square. She fills the washstand ewer at the fountain. The water plummets into the enamel and the spray touches her face and it is cool and sweet. There are lights lit at the cafés, and old men in blue work-jackets drink rosé and talk, and men in shabby city suits and women with faded feathered hats are out taking the air; they give her long low looks and walk on, and murmur with each other, knowing her for a newcomer and one of their own, but remaining discreet in case she does not wish to be acknowledged. And she, for now, is happy simply to be alone.

  —

  They take turns washing in cold water at the washstand. When they are done, she lifts down the bowl and soaks her feet.

  “What,” he asks, “do you think of the place?”

  She scratches at a flea bite, looks at him. “We know that it’s safe,” she says. “More or less.”

  “There seems to be no plumbing to speak of.”

  She shrugs. Does it matter? “What we need to do now is register at the Mairie. Once we’ve done that we can get our new ration cards.”

  “We make ourselves official?”

  “I don’t see that we can do otherwise, if we want to buy bread. We are in a separate jurisdiction now; we should be all right.”

  He whistles out a breath.

  “I can’t see them coming all the way here to look for us, can you? We don’t matter that much.”

  —

  He edges in behind her into the hotel dining room. It is packed tight, elbow-to-elbow. Jumbled with noise.

  Madame shows them to a tiny table, and provides an off-ration stew of game and vegetables and barley. Globs of fat glisten on the surface. The meat falls to fibres on the tongue; the vegetables melt. It is impossibly good. They are rendered dumb by taste, by the dope of calories.

  Suzanne does well; he watches as she does well. They are introduced to the people on neighbouring tables; she manages warm and easy conversation about nothing. He admires this as one might a coin plucked from an ear, or a fancily shuffled pack of cards. He can see that it’s done well, but can’t ever see himself mastering the trick.

  The friends arrive—the Lobs—and Suzanne is delighted, seems astonished by their actuality. Kisses with Yvonne and her brother Roger, Yvonne’s husband, Marcel, leaning in to shake hands but then abstracting himself and standing stiffly back. There is a big old house just outside the town, belonging to the family; they are muddling along together, all very Grand Meaulnes. He sips his wine and watches the open gabbling mouths, picks out bits of conversation. The opinions and advice and suggestions about work that might be got, about accommodation that might be sought—they can’t lodge at the hotel indefinitely—and introductions that might be made. The bodies press too close, the walls are narrow round him; there is too much noise. He has been too long in silence, too long in solitude, too long upon the road.

  He drinks his wine. He lifts crumbs from the tabletop with a fingertip. He nods his assent if his assent seems to be required.

  The radio is switched on to warm up. Madame tunes it to Radio Londres and keeps the volume low, and in the packed dining room of the Hôtel de la Poste everyone falls silent, and they listen to the news from elsewhere, to the French speaking to the French.

  —

  The wind here has a mind of its own. It billows, blusters, darts, skirls around: you don’t know what direction to expect it from. He ducks out of the gritty street and into the post office.

  The postmistress’s accent is educated but it still has the local wet, rolling rs, and a g where no g is generally required. She is handsome, dark-skinned, dark-eyed, with a flash of grey at the right temple. She smiles at his accent, but it’s clear that strangers are no longer strange round here. She makes no remark about its destination, just weighs the letter on her scales with her little row of shining weights, licks a thumb and flips through her book of stamps. Why indeed should there not be easy traffic between the Free Zone and the Free State?

  He leaves the post office with a disproportionate sense of achievement—a letter sent to his mother, reassuring her of his well-being, requesting his allowance, which will make things here so much easier—but steps out into stink, and the cobbles tumbling with squares of newspaper—lavatory-cut newspaper—that have already been put to full and thorough use. He dodges his way through them, disgusted, making his way to the Mairie, thinking of the man who’d wanted to shake the hand that wrote Ulysses, who was told that there were other things that same hand had also done.

  In the chilly formal room of the Mairie, reluctant to sign, he turns the pages of the register and notes the cascade of displaced French arriving from the north, the scattering of foreign names within it. There is even an Irishwoman settled here. A Miss A. N. Beamish.

  “The streets are filthy,” he observes to the clerk.

  “Ah yes,” the clerk says. “That’ll be the wind. The WCs here empty over the cliffs
. This kind of wind, it blows the paper right back up again.”

  “Is there nothing to be done?”

  A shrug. “The wind changes. It blows it all away again.”

  Freud, he thinks, might have had a thing or two to say about this place.

  —

  The next day stray rank papers linger in corners and gutters and shuffle round like last year’s leaves. He and Suzanne sit outside the cobbler’s workshop, on the cold stone bench, threadbare socks side by side while their shoes are being resoled. They’ve bought pastries from Gulinis’; they pick off fragments and melt them on the tongue, burst raisins between aching molars. Suzanne gets the hiccups. There’s the sound of children playing in the schoolyard below, and the tap-tap-tap of the cobbler’s hammer behind them, and the smell of bread and of leather and latrines, while he calculates silently how long their funds can be expected to last at the current rate, how soon his allowance can be expected to arrive: there has been a sharp increase in expenditure, what with the hotel room and restaurant meals and pastries and shoe repairs. They are not living hand-to-mouth on filched turnips and carrots and sleeping in hayricks any more. Their stack of cash is down to a sliver. Work, he supposes, must be found.

  “What’s up with you?” Suzanne asks.

  “Nothing of nothing,” he says.

  He pulls at a flake of pastry, and a sturdy woman in tweeds goes by, tugged along by Airedale terriers on leads. She nods, smiles to the two of them. This must be Miss A. N. Beamish. No one ever looked less French.

  —

  More people arrive, day by day; they clamber out of packed-tight buses. They slide off the backs of wagons. They come stumbling in on foot along the road. They are travel-worn and bleary, bundled up in crumpled clothes, dusty hats shoved down on their heads, and by their flinching gait it’s clear their boots are martyring them. They nag and snipe and cling to each other. And when they spot him there’s that wary catch of eye, the nod: he has, he realizes, become one of them: he has joined the community of the dispossessed.

  He passes the tweedy woman again, this time in the town square. She has nothing of their hunted, ragged air about her. And the dogs: they make her seem established here. Dogs imply domesticity, permanence, decisions made.

  “You must be new,” she says. She speaks in French, formally, but the accent carries Irish threads. “We haven’t met. Beamish. Anna.”

  “Enchanted.” He squats to fuss her dogs.

  “You are lodging at the Hôtel de la Poste, I imagine?”

  He nods.

  She leans closer to stage-whisper, still in French, “Between you and me, that place is a dump.”

  The dog rolls on its back. He scratches at its bristly chest. He hides a smile.

  “That daft creature would take any amount of that,” she says.

  He looks up at the soft underside of the woman’s chin as she peers down at him. He says in English, “We had Kerry Blues. At least, my mother did.”

  There is a strange comfort in speaking those actual words in that actual language. The way they are pinned to that particular moment and that particular place: the damp muzzle, the slate-grey pelt under his hand, the sweet old fool of a dog. And his words make the woman’s face break into a delighted grin.

  “An Irishman!” she says. “My word!”

  He wobbles upright, offers his hand; she shakes it, brisk and vigorous.

  “Well, fancy that.” A moment’s delighted silence, contemplating him, clasping his hand.

  “We’ve just arrived,” he says. “We’re still finding our feet.”

  “Oh, we can help you find them, me and my pal. You’ll soon forget your feet were ever missing.” She lets his hand go. “You’ll take a drink,” she says. “Come on.”

  —

  “What do you do here?” he asks. “I mean, how does one get by?”

  “I have my royalties. That keeps us ticking over.”

  “Oh. You’re a writer?”

  She is reaching for the wine. “Am indeed.”

  “I don’t think I know your work.”

  She wafts away any notion that he might. “I write racy novels. Educated fellow such as yourself.” She shrugs. “And anyway, I have a pen name, people think I’m a chap.”

  “But they must sell, if you can live on your royalties.”

  “They do indeed.”

  He raises his glass to her. “Félicitations.”

  “You’re a writer yourself, then?”

  Out across the square, the fig tree droops above the stone bench, the fruit already stripped, the leaves heavy and suggestive. He feels suddenly guilty, exposed.

  “What makes you say that?”

  She smiles. “There’s a tell. Your face…” She wafts her hand. “It did a thing when I mentioned royalties. So I deduce from that, and from the way you speak, that you must be a writer.”

  “Writing has occurred,” he concedes.

  “Ha!” She leans away, studies him a moment, then reaches over to refill his glass. “Tell me all your troubles.”

  “Ah. Well. You know how it is.”

  Inwardly, he is walking through the cemetery at Père Lachaise, packed tight with massive monuments to the brilliant dead. Not a patch of grass on which to pitch his own rotten little tent. No certainty now that he even wants to, not any more.

  “No, I don’t. How is it?” Miss Beamish asks.

  He sits back. “James Joyce was a friend of mine.”

  “Oh no.”

  “I used to help him with his work. With whatever he needed, really. I was a secretary to him.”

  She shakes her head. Tuts.

  “Finnegans Wake,” he says. “I helped him with that, and I worked on the French translation.”

  “Oh you poor thing.” Her face is a parody of sympathy. She shakes her head. “Being friends with a genius.”

  She waves the waiter over, holds up the empty pichet for a refill. Then she turns back to him, reverting to English.

  “But what was this writing that did occur, despite your difficulties?”

  He raises a shoulder. “It never came to very much.”

  “Get away of that with you.”

  He catches her smile. He knows he will be half-cut and stinking of booze by the time he gets back to Suzanne, and that Suzanne will be cross and say that she isn’t cross, and that this state will go on for days, but it is a long time since he has felt so entirely at his ease, a very long time indeed, and it is worth the price that must be paid for its continuance.

  “And now,” he says, “I just can’t see the point of it at all.”

  “Because of the war?” She tilts her head, considering, as she refills their glasses. “There’s still the oldest and best reason. Even in war, even in any circumstances, really. That still applies.”

  “What’s that then?”

  “Spite,” she says.

  He snorts.

  “No, I’m serious,” she says, not very seriously. “You need a bit of spite, a bit of venom, to keep you going. Particularly at the start, when no one gives a damn what you’re up to.”

  “Well, yes, I suppose so.”

  “And then, of course, it’s necessary.”

  “Necessary?”

  “If one is not writing, one is not quite oneself, don’t you find?”

  And he thinks: the sweaty sleepless nights in Ireland, heart racing, battling for breath. Frank’s gentle company the only thing that could calm him. The two things are connected: the writing and the panic. He just had not put them together, until now.

  “It’s like snails make slime,” she’s saying. “One will never get along, much less be comfortable, if one doesn’t write.”

  He huffs a laugh.

  “So.” She shrugs. “There you are. You’re stuck with it.”

  He raises his glass. She chinks it.

  “To spite,” she says.

  “And slime.”

  They drink.

  —

  There are voices beyond
the wall; there are voices beyond all the walls: there are voices above the ceiling, and in the adjoining bedrooms and down the corridors and in the lounge. The hotel heaves with people and they are talking, talking, talking, chewing, swallowing, sweating, pacing, pissing, screwing, sniffing, and talking, talking, talking, talking, talking, on and on, endlessly and everywhere, words words words, and bodies packed tight, heaving over and around each other like insects, like grubs and talking swallowing chewing sniffing on and on and on. This place is an anthill; it crawls and hums and ticks and shivers, everyone treading their own shit into the ground beneath their feet. The wind wails and tugs at the shutters and lifts tiles and makes them tap and clatter, and when there is nothing else, when there’s a moment’s pause in all of that, which is only in the three a.m. pitch-black horrors of the soul, the mice still scratch loud in the laths and the cockroaches click under the skirting boards, and Suzanne still breathes and breathes and breathes beside him. He aches for distance, for space, for silence, for his tiny old apartment back on the rue des Favorites. Where there was solitude and peace, and it was his.

  He stares now at the three words he has written. They are ridiculous. Writing is ridiculous. A sentence, any sentence, is absurd. Just the idea of it: jam one word up against another, shoulder-to-shoulder, jaw-to-jaw; hem them in with punctuation so they can’t move an inch. And then hand that over to someone else to peer at, and expect something to be communicated, something understood. It’s not just pointless. It is ethically suspect.

  And yet he needs it. As Miss Beamish said. He has to make the slime that will ease him through the world.

  He gleans potatoes left in the muddy margins, apples dropped from the back of the cart. Suzanne, meanwhile, visits her friends. She talks with Madame at the hotel and with the local women. Finding things out. This is, of course, also useful. There is labouring work to be had on a couple of the local farms. Chopping logs, pulling crops, tending the vines. Would he take it? He does not want to take it. He asks when he can start.

  The church bell chimes the angelus three times a day. The little cafés shut at ten. It gets cold. In the dark chill room at the Mairie, the blue ink of his signature is shut tight inside the pages of the Register of Aliens. At night, he lies awake while the lost souls twist and mutter in their sleep. All it would take is an outside request for information. An audit. All it would take is for the Geste still to be on the hunt, or to stumble accidentally upon them in the hunt for someone else. He need do nothing to provoke disaster now. It’s inherent in their existence here. That it could all collapse to ruins in a breath.