A Country Road, a Tree

by Jo Baker

  But nonetheless, something is expected of him: he has been addressed. The pale old faces are watching him.

  “Sorry. What was that?”

  Smiles. A throat cleared. He has, of course, been through a good deal. Allowances must be made.

  “Here.” His mother proffers a plate.

  He looks down at a thick wedge of sponge. Under the pressure of the cake slice, the jam and cream have been extruded in a pinkish ooze, like bone marrow. It is an offence, an insult to her, his thinness. That he preferred France and famine to her, and this.

  Her shake is bad. He takes the plate and sets it down. He looks at the cake. His teeth throb. He should force down a forkful, a few crumbs, a bit of jam; even if it makes him gag, makes his teeth sing out like little birds.

  “Back in France—” he says.

  Someone lifts a teaspoon, someone turns their saucer slightly; someone reaches for the sugar.

  “My friends are getting by on next to nothing. On turnips and sawdust.”

  The cake stares up at him, bloodied and gross; his fingertips recall the glide of paper scraps across a tabletop, the patterns forming. He blinks and he sees the floorboards inches above his face. The crate swinging at his knees along the country path. The clotted blooms of geraniums. His hands clasp and he feels the cold Sten gun in his grip. The haft of a shovel, the grave dug in the red earth. He is not here, he is not really here at all, he can’t figure out how to be.

  “One hears that things are very bad,” someone concedes, “in France.”

  His mother tugs at the edges of her cardigan and glances up at the sky and says, do you know, she thinks it might be coming on to rain, and someone says that it certainly looks that way; and conversation gathers round this thread like crystals and accumulates, as though everything were normal here and as though the world was the same all over and looked like this; as if there was tea and cake for everyone, and one last patch of sunshine on the lawn before another summer’s done.

  And for now, what can he do but accept the fiction, however temporarily, and comply with it. He lifts his cup, swallows his tea down. He forks the cake into bits, and crumbs, and spears a fragment and places it in his mouth. It dissolves there like a communion wafer. It is good. He clears his plate.

  She watches him discreetly as he eats, a glance and then another glance; a smile caught on her neighbour’s smile, the happiness that must of course be felt to have him home again. But underneath it all, underneath every swollen moment of his presence here, there is an ache for him that begins in the middle of her chest and rises to her throat and squeezes out her breath. To see him now, like this, a gaunt, worn creature made of rope and sticks, it has her heart turned sideways in her. Always the hardest path. Always the highest tree. He’d fall, and having fallen, would dust himself off and climb the tree again. When the tree itself had no need to be climbed at all; when there were lawns to run on and games of tennis and croquet and company; when there were so many other, more comfortable things, if he could simply choose them. But falling never knocked that strange determination out of him, and neither could she.

  So she must learn. She will not win this war. But perhaps there can be peace.

  —

  He goes. Down the pavement and across the road; simply going, making distance. Even now after all these years he could still be hastening to catch up with his father, to fall in step with him in silence, walking away from this tangled mother-love, up to where things fall clear and the track rises through the cotton grass and the curlews calling; his father, gazing at the ground, would stop, and dig up a small stone with a fingernail and rub it clean, and pocket it in case of later need.

  He searches out his own small stone in his pocket, the precious one a child’s clean eye had selected from all the stones at Greystones. He turns it over in his fingertips.

  He misses Paris. Paris under any circumstances. Paris with its bones sticking through its skin, he’d take that over this unruffled plump buck Dublin that is making him gag on butter and milk and cream. That will not let him leave. There are no travel permits to be had, not for failing feckless writers. His teeth hurt like hell, his joints are full of grit, he’s short of breath, and he knows he is in no shape for anything, and is no good to anyone at all, and that France in ruins needs him less than she did when she was whole. France needs doctors, nurses, surveyors, engineers. The likes of him would only clutter up the place.

  Today has been difficult.

  He must grant himself that.

  One would think these things got easier with practice, but they don’t. Failure still takes some accommodating. Over time, that stab of shame will dull to a low guilty ache, and he’ll go on with it like that, and get used to it. His book, the book written in Roussillon, the book that kept him sane, the book that, as Anna Beamish said, he had to write like snails have to make slime. Watt. Nobody wants it. Nobody will publish it. Yet another rejection came this morning. Nicely worded, and on not bad paper for the times that are in it. But a rejection nonetheless. And that, after all, is the thing about slime. He might have to make it, but nobody else is obliged to buy it off him.

  He presses on. The breath heaves in and out of him. If he can tire himself sufficiently, he might just manage eventually to sleep.

  —

  Rigid in the dentist’s chair, his skull pressing hard against the headrest, his jaw is locked open. He can taste his own rottenness, smell it as he breathes. His mouth crawls with silvery pains; they’re everywhere, like ants.

  The dentist’s face is practically in his mouth; Ganley pokes and tugs with his little wire sickle and the pain sharpens and turns red. The eyes narrow; the wire digs in under gum and he grips the armrests. This is nothing really; whatever happens here, however much it hurts, this is nothing very much at all.

  “So you were in France for the duration, I believe?”

  He swallows spit, open-mouthed. There are three fingers and a metal scraper in his mouth: he can’t even nod.

  “Uh.”

  The wire scrapes in below the gum again and the pain is brilliant, and he tastes blood, and it doesn’t matter.

  “And you haven’t had these looked at, during all that time?”

  It didn’t even cross his mind. “Uh.”

  Ganley chinks the scraper down on a metal tray.

  Released, he fumbles out his handkerchief, dabs his lips.

  “Rinse, please.”

  He rinses. The pinky-purple fluid stings. He spits into the bowl. The white ceramic streaks with blood; the blood oozes towards the plughole. He has known for a while that things in his mouth are not as they should be; the snags and edges, the deep throb of nerve, the tender itchy gum: there was more going on than there should have been. The clank and clatter of a sucking stone around his mouth can’t have helped. It had kept him going, but at a deficit. He will pay for it now.

  “We see a lot of this at the minute,” Ganley says. He’s at the basin, scrubbing his hands.

  “What’s that, then?”

  “These accumulated problems. Soldiers and POWs have mouths like yours. Neglect, poor diet—over time, well, there’s just massive decay and infection. One sees it in country folk too. They’ll come up to town with twenty years’ worth of rot. It’ll already be wearing you down and affecting what you can and can’t eat. Isn’t that right?”

  He nods.

  Ganley dries his hands, sets the towel aside. “And every day you go on like this you’re risking septicaemia, and then, well, all bets are off. So what we need to do, and in pretty short order, is clean things up in there. A good few of these will have to go…”

  As the dentist talks, his tongue slides around his teeth, up the smooth fronts of his top incisors, one and then the other; it presses into their concave backs. They’d been serrated, keen, pressing through the gum when he was seven years old; now their edge is worn flat and blunt and chalky-porous. And the right one gives under the pressure of his tongue. Like a tree with the roots dug out from
underneath it.

  “…pain, but we’ll put you under,” the fellow’s saying. “You’ll be sore for a while afterwards, but gum tends to heal pretty well once the source of infection’s gone. We’ll get some bridgework fitted and you’ll be grand.”

  He swallows. It doesn’t matter. Not the pain, not the loss. It’s tiny. His mite dropped into the kitty, his little bit of suffering to help pay off an outraged, vengeful God.

  “And the charge for that?”

  “You’ll need to talk to Miss Cavendish. She can take you through the payments.”

  He nods. He hasn’t properly gathered what will be removed and what will remain; it hardly matters. His mother will have to be consulted; he won’t be able to afford it without her help. He will be leathery and cadaverous, scarred, toothless, already decaying, staggering along to get into her grave before she can.

  —

  Now his stomach is sick with blood, and the inside of his mouth is cavernous and far too wet, and his tongue has become a strange mollusc that is living in it. His lips are dry and cracked and overstretched. He should have accepted Frank’s offer of a lift. He’s still dazed with nitrous oxide and here and there his gums are stitched and prickly, and there are craters too where the blood congeals and lifts in lumps and his slug of a tongue will not leave anything alone, and the street is busy and the sky is a bitter pearl-grey and he is stumbling along making a show of himself, he’s sure of it. It’s as much as he can do to walk a straight line, to not vomit blood into the gutter. The pain is distractingly various. He aches, he stings, he throbs, is sore. This has been a very expensive and thorough assault upon his person. He may as well have been mugged.

  “Hey! Hello there! Hey! Hold on!”

  He flinches, but stumbles on, one foot in front of the other, in the shoes his mother bought him. Bloody Dublin; just a big village. There’s always somebody who knows you. Whoever it is, they’ll give up, with any luck. But no luck: a hand lands on his arm. He stops, looks down at it. A small, smooth gentleman’s hand. He looks up.

  “There, see. I knew it was you.”

  A light-boned, boyish fellow grins at him. It has been a while, but he is instantly familiar. He swallows down the bloody wet.

  “Alan.”

  His voice is slushy, indistinct; he lifts the handkerchief to his ragged lips. Dr. Alan Thompson, who has been busy making his mother proud. Still boyish and light on his feet, and a decent chap, and a medical man; so he won’t faint or run shrieking at the sight of him.

  Hands are shaken.

  “Good to see you,” he manages.

  “Good to see you too.” Alan frowns, though, peers in. “What’s up? You’re in a bit of a state.”

  “Dentist,” he says.

  “Butcher, more like. Extractions?”

  He nods. “And fillings.” When he speaks, his whole skull aches.

  “Come by the office. It’s probably not just your teeth needing attention.” Alan takes his arm. “In the meantime, I can see you require a calmative and a restorative, and those gums could do with an additional disinfectant.”

  He can’t face any further procedures, not today. And anyway, he can’t afford it. He demurs.

  Alan smiles. “No, no, I insist. What you need, my friend, is whiskey, and a good deal of it. That’s my professional opinion. I’m buying.”

  It is the best thing he has heard in days. Alan steers him round, and off and into the Bleeding Horse.

  —

  It is all settled within the hour, within half a bottle of Jameson’s.

  The smoke spools up to the ceiling and the drinkers press elbow to elbow at the bar. The first sip of whiskey sears, the second stings, the third he cups warm on his tongue and waits and looks to Alan, and his eyes crease at the company. He swallows, lifts his glass again and looks at the piss-gold stuff.

  “I feel so much better. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it myself,” he says.

  “Well, you’re not yourself right now, you know.”

  They have the gist of each other’s recent lives. On closer inspection, time has had some small effect on Alan. He’s not quite the boy he used to be. His hair is receding a little, and there are lines at the corners of his eyes and from nostril down to lip. But overall, the years have handled the boy gently, compared with how they’ve battered him. He feels ancient; he feels shambolic. A broken-down old tramp. A mummy.

  “Are you still at the writing?” Alan asks.

  “I would be, but I can’t. Not here. Not at Mother’s. Never could.”

  “You must be keen as mustard, then, to get back to France.”

  “I have friends there. I’m worried.” He nods over his glass. “But only essential workers can travel, so—” A lifted shoulder. He is stuck.

  “Lookit,” Alan says, leaning in closer. “Here’s something might interest you.”

  He leans in too, already bleary, struggling to focus through the aftermath of gas and pain and shock and the current blur of whiskey.

  “There’s this Red Cross venture I’m involved in,” Alan says. “We’re taking a hospital to France.”

  “A what?”

  “A hospital. It’s going to a little place called Saint-Lô; the town got flattened during the liberation. So we’re taking them a hospital. We’re getting our supplies together now and will make the crossing in August.”

  “With a hospital?”

  He sips, nods. “We have to take everything with us. Everything from syringes to marmalade to lino. There’s nothing there at all. We have to get hold of what we need here, sort it, store it, ship it off to France. And then get it all set up when we’re over there.”

  “That is quite an undertaking.”

  “Indeed it is. And we aren’t yet fully staffed. And so I thought. See, we’re looking for a quartermaster. Someone to take care of the logistics this end and then sort it out over there in Normandy.”

  “I see.”

  “And so, I was thinking, why not you? Because with your language skills, you could be our interpreter too. Some of us have schoolboy French, but…”

  It doesn’t sound like the kind of thing that he could do. But then nothing ever does.

  He raises his glass and sips. And then he nods.

  “Good,” Alan says. “So then we’re agreed. And you’ll take another drink.”

  —

  He is overseeing the unloading of refrigerators in the Red Cross warehouse when Mrs. Hackett comes in with the evening edition and waves it in front of him. He reads the headline without understanding it. He stares at her.

  “That hallion is dead,” she says. “Took his own life, can you imagine? That’s it.”

  And so the war is over. He wipes his hands down his dungarees. He thinks, I am wearing dungarees, Hitler is dead, and the war is over.

  It is a blossom-heavy bloody day in May, and it’s impossible to feel anything simple.

  He does not go back to his mother’s house in Foxrock, but instead walks along the banks of the Liffey and up into the congested heart of town. There are aimless angry crowds on College Green, and a Union Jack smouldering on the gates. He keeps on walking. He ends up in a bar that he doesn’t normally go to, in the hope of seeing nobody he knows, but this being Dublin he just stares at his drink to make doubly sure. He downs whiskey after whiskey after whiskey, while all around him Dublin scratches and yelps and shivers at its old sores.

  —

  When it happens, there is nothing grand about it, nothing sublime. There’s no gale, no tossing waves, no spray in the air; it is not a storm-torn sky above him but the low ceiling of his mother’s bungalow. There’s no pathetic fallacy here. It might be the moment when everything changes for him, but that doesn’t oblige the world to notice, or do anything particular to mark the occasion.

  It’s early evening. The electric fire is eating all the air. A dinner of pap uneasy in his belly, his mouth still raw, the radio on, he is writing to Suzanne as his mother studies a seed catalogue in the arm
chair and turns rustling pages. His tongue explores craters, jellied blood. He tells Suzanne about the Red Cross work, a salary, some hope of paying back Valéry Larbaud, his hope too that he will be returned soon to France, though not yet to Paris; he will come and see her as soon as he gets leave. Suzanne is a vein of guilt running through all the other manifold discomforts. His thoughts slip into that former life: his old apartment, and the cool solitude through which Suzanne would twine like a cat; her naked belly under his hand; a brilliant smile; eyes closed at the Opéra, there and gone, and gone sometimes for days. He doesn’t see that it can ever return to that. Something or other will have to be done. Because, by rights, Suzanne should be here, getting fattened up on butter, milk and cake; she would be, if they were married. It would be a coin into the kitty if they were.

  His mother glances up from the lists of bulbs and corms and tubers; in the spring, they will brighten this new bleak wilderness of hers. She regards her boy. There is grey in his hair. There are lines around his eyes. She can see the old man that he will become and her heart aches for him. No comfortable desk in the family firm, no children on his knee, nothing so simply good, not for him. His weak eyes straining always on impossibilities.

  She watches as he finishes his letter; he blows on it, then folds it up. There is a line between his eyebrows as he looks towards her. Perhaps he’s noticed the palsy in her hands, the way it makes the paper shake. She sets the catalogue aside, meshes her fingers and presses her bundled hands down into her lap to stop them trembling. She will not let him see that she is ill.

  She fakes a shiver, says, “It is getting rather chilly, don’t you think?”

  He colludes in the deceit. Speech still sounds strange and wet from his reordered mouth: “Shall I fetch you your shawl?”

  “Lily can get it. I’ll call her.”

  “No need.” Hands on knees, he’s pushing up to his feet.

  “In my room, then. On the dresser.”

  Beyond the stuffy electric heat, the hall is cool. He switches on the light, still uncertain of his way. He treads along to her door and pushes it open. The light from the hallway streaks past him and casts his shadow on the carpet. He flicks the bedroom light-switch and the shadows bolt.