by Jo Baker
“Where else would I go? My contract ends in January.”
She nods. She is making those little moves—napkin laid aside, bag hunted for and opened, peered into—that signal departure. “Well, I’m teaching this afternoon, so…”
People still learn to play the piano, then. And children still sit their exams, no doubt. They go on holiday, and celebrate their saints’ days and their birthdays. For all it still feels so sketchy and provisional, they are now living in a world where a Jewish boy’s baccalaureate counts for something again.
“I have to return to Saint-Lô tomorrow,” he says.
“I see.”
“I’m only in Paris to fetch rat poison. It’s not easy to get hold of, not out there.”
“Right.”
“I’ll send you something when I get back. What would you like? What do you particularly need?”
She closes her eyes and half smiles at his entire failure to understand. She needs everything; she has nothing but needs. Some can be kept at bay, others are impossible to assuage.
“A bar of soap,” she says. “A toothbrush. A lipstick. Anything at all.”
He walks with her to the Métro. By the square, a small child picks up horse chestnuts from the pavement; a woman watches, having watched him all the way through all the war. He recalls the baby in the pram being bumped along the cobbles, that razor-clear autumn of ’41, when he’d carried the typed-up information across town to Jimmy. And Jimmy—he wonders, how did Jimmy fare? Did he get through it all and out the other side?
At the steps down to the station, Suzanne kisses him on the cheek, brief and cool. “What happened to your coat?” she asks.
He looks down at the clean green serge of his Red Cross greatcoat, with its white and red armband, then back at her, nonplussed. Nearby, a pigeon scrats in the gutter. It is an ugly battered thing, peg-legged. Pigeon pie.
“No,” she says. “Your other coat.”
“Oh, yes. I left it behind, in Ireland.”
“Why did you do that?”
He’d hung it up in the wardrobe in his mother’s spare room. With his father’s still-cherished overcoat and shoes, her fox fur, the stink of camphor. He’d closed the door on it and turned the key, that same evening, in that same darkness, his mother’s shawl still over his arm.
“It seemed like the right thing to do. Anyway, they gave me this one, so.”
“Will they let you keep it?”
“Oh. I don’t know.”
She tsks, shakes her head. “What’ll you do, then, when your contract’s up?”
He shrugs.
“What do you think a new coat would cost, right now?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well,” she says. He is still himself, for all he’s changed. “You’ll find out, I suppose. Till I see you.”
Then she kisses him again, because it seems the thing to do, and she turns away, and she clips down the Métro stairs.
Now that she is gone, he could go back to the empty apartment, to the peace and solitude of it. He could turn the key on the rest of the world and let him and the silence warm to each other; he could find a notebook, start to write. But instead he walks, hands stuffed into his pockets, turning the pebble round and round in his fingertips, the collar of his greatcoat scratchy at his jaw. He presses on through the half-broken, skin-and-bones, scraping-by life of the place, through the city clattering with footfalls and pierced with voices and rumbling with drays, past the men in old coats and shoes worn to shreds, and young women in threadbare dresses and bright lipstick, and the old ladies in black clothes who have shuffled their way through the war with shopping bags and hairnets intact. The blue paper has gone from the street lamps. They have torn down all the German signposts, and the yellow placards from outside the Jewish shops. And the city, ticking over, ticking on, is nonetheless thick with loss, as infested with absences as the hospital is with rats. Walking in Paris, in October 1945, is the loneliest thing in all the world.
He takes his cigarette packet out and touches the one remaining cigarette. He puts the packet back.
He will get used to it, just as he has grown accustomed to the missing teeth, the missing toe, his scar. He will learn to accommodate the loss.
—
There are places, even in the ruins, that are touched by grace. Saint-Lô at night, and a little window is warm and lit. It is curtained with an old lace shawl to disguise the new and dimmer substitute for glass and the figures that move around on the other side.
Because inside the small front room, there’s a piano and a tumbler of Calvados, and there’s music playing, and it is all quite pleasant and comfortable and people do like to be there. Men like to be there. That Calvados on the piano-top is his, and he sips it whenever the music allows him to, because it is him playing the music, popular and sentimental songs. One of the girls leans against the instrument and watches him play. He is surprised, rather, by the ease of the music after so long an absence; his fingertips find their way without much need for thought. The Calvados may be helping with that, since he is not concerned about the performance; he just performs. The old upright is practically in tune, though the middle C key has gone mute. Which is not bad, when so many other pianos are now tangled wires and splintered teeth.
The prostitutes wear cardigans over their slips and frocks. They have boots and slippers and bare legs. They shiver and huddle into themselves; their skin is blueish. There’s something familiar about the girl who’s watching him play; he can’t quite place her, but then he’s half-cut, and the uncut half is taking care of the music, so that doesn’t leave anything very much for working out where he has seen the prostitutes before.
Late on, blurry with drink, he’s obliged to leave the piano and amble off to find the necessary. He opens an inner door expecting a back room or the kitchen, but there’s night air and stars above, where the walls and roof have been blown clean off. A man is pissing up against a heap of broken bricks. Finished, the fellow buttons up and slips past him with a grin, heading back indoors. He takes his turn out in the night and adds his water to the musky pool. As he pisses, he lifts his face to the rain, closes his eyes, enjoys the easy sway of his own Calvados-adjusted senses.
The door shut behind him, he returns to the piano, and people are talking and laughing and going on as if there were a whole house standing square around them, not just a few chancy habitable rooms. This is what the world is liable to do nowadays—collapse in ruins—and people go on behaving as though it were nothing very much at all.
He sips from his cigarette, one hand keeping the rhythm going; then his smoke smoulders and fades out in a saucer, and a girl tops up his drink, and when the woman leans closer as a song ends, he gets up to hear her, and someone else slides into his seat at the piano, and his head reels and the woman takes his arm and smiles, and says his French is sweet.
“Come upstairs with me,” she asks, “why don’t you?”
And so she leads him off upstairs, and it turns out that he is drunker than he’d thought he was, or that the stairs are out of kilter: they pitch him sideways, so that he has to hang on to the bannister and clamber up them like a mountaineer. Perhaps what’s familiar about her is just hunger: the pinched look, the stick-thin, bones-on-show appearance makes sisters of them all. French women just look like that now.
Upstairs with her, the door shut behind them, and she peels off her cardigan and steps out of her slip, and he can see the press of hipbones through the skin and the dip like salt cellars in her collarbone, and when she lies down her breasts fall away sideways from the bones of her ribcage, and her breasts are so soft, very soft, and traced with mother-of-pearl stretchmarks, and he rolls a prophylactic clumsily on and is inside her, and it is only just as he comes that he remembers her, heavy with pregnancy, handing him a bottle of Calvados and telling him he was welcome here.
—
A pack of boys races down the newly surfaced roads; smaller kids huddle together on the corner, ho
vering over a concoction of mud and leaves. Girls have chalked a game on to the ground and are skipping through it. He walks, clipboard in hand, beside the colonel.
“On the whole, successful, I’d say.”
“And the corpses dealt with?”
“Incinerated, yes. You know what the kids are like here. Play with anything.”
They stop short to allow a pack of little children to thunder by.
“This is a hospital, not a playground!” the colonel yells after them.
They hurtle on, joyous, heedless.
“This place is getting lousy with them,” the colonel says. “Worse than the rats. Someone’s going to get hurt.”
The building work continues. Trucks grind back and forth; there are staff cars, locals’ cars, and half a dozen ambulances that hurtle in and out of the site at all hours, day and night. The children do stand a good chance of getting hit.
“Their mothers send them to play here,” he says.
These are kids who are missing fingers, who have brutal scars beneath their clothes; these are kids who are also missing parents, brothers, sisters, friends. For all the risks from traffic, they’re safer here than anywhere else for miles and miles.
Things are getting better. Things are becoming sound. There’s asphalt on the roads and on the paths. There’s glass, or something like glass, in all the windows. There’s lino on the labour-room floor—since there is breeding still, even now, even in this devastation. There are curtains round the beds, and clean sheets and warm blankets neatly tucked in. The operating theatre gleams with aluminium and sterile steel. The rain doesn’t drip through, the wind is kept at bay, the rats are in retreat. There is tea and there are biscuits and there is bread-and-jam when it is required, and it is often required. There’s kindness here. There’s decency amongst the ruins. It is something to behold.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
NORMANDY
December 1945
Just a quick run, they said. Just out to Dieppe and back. You’re well used to the route, sure you could do it in your sleep. Pick up the new matron and that’s you. On you go. Your time’s your own after that.
But the ship is delayed. And he’s an idiot because he didn’t even think to bring a book. And now it’s snowing. And that’s just the fucking marzipan, that is. Snow. Snow is general all over Normandy.
The hut is all steam and cigarettes. He looks at his watch, considers how bad the roads will be if she arrives now, if she arrives in ten minutes, half an hour. An hour. Two. For fuck’s sake. The wind buffets the windows and the stove blows back smoke. He finds an abandoned copy of the London Times, sits, unbuttons his greatcoat, tries to read.
Then he’s up again, newspaper hanging, to peer out of the window at the snow as it scuds in flurries round the holding yard. He buttons his coat up and tucks his muffler in. He looks at his watch.
He’s half gone already. He’s back in Paris, seven flights up on the rue des Favorites. And he’s here, in a prefab in Dieppe, watching the snow build on the windowsill, watching it fall thick on the yard beyond, pristine as a ream of paper.
At the hatch, the girl gives him coffee and bread-and-margarine and an apology for it, though he’s happy enough with such frugal stuff. He eats, smokes, drinks coffee. Picks up the paper again, thumbs through it, hands it over to an English doctor waiting for his passage home, who settles into it readily. It belongs to the world that the doctor is returning to, not this one, where he remains.
When the ship finally enters the harbour, the throb of it can be felt through the quayside building. He steps out into the night. He turns up his collar, pockets his glasses; snow whips into his face. The vessel heaves and groans as it lines itself up along the quay. The closer it gets to actually being here, the more things seem to slow. It takes an age for moorings to be secured. Another age for the gangways to be lowered. The passengers creep off as though they are half-dead.
She looks exhausted. He shakes her hand and takes her bag and ushers her over to the truck. She shivers inside her cape; he holds the door open for her and takes her arm to help her in. It takes some restraint not to chivy her along.
“Thank you.”
They drive into the night, snow swarming in the headlights. Away from the coast, the wind drops and the snow falls heavily. The windscreen wipers shunt it into wedges; lumps fall off and fly aside. The snow makes a dazzling tunnel of the headlights. The darkness beyond is absolute.
“How far is it,” she asks, “to Saint-Lô?”
“A hundred and seventy miles, give or take.”
They are both illuminated, briefly, by the flare of a passing vehicle. The road ahead, caught suddenly in their merging lights, looks as smooth as a pillowcase, and then the other vehicle has passed and their truck rackets along, lurching into potholes, through ruts and across debris, all hidden by the blanketing snow. He winces, but doesn’t ease off. She shifts in her seat, glances at him; he remains in profile, eyes on the spinning dark.
“Is it necessary,” she asks, “to go quite so fast?”
“It’s not as fast as it looks.”
After a moment, he fishes his cigarettes off the parcel shelf and offers them to her; she takes one, then takes his rattling matches off him too and they lean together so that she can light his cigarette along with her own.
“You should try to have a sleep,” he says.
“I don’t know that I could.”
He glances across at her. “It’ll make it go by much more quickly.”
She shakes her head. Her free hand grips the edge of her seat. She clearly feels that this is quite quickly enough.
“Careful!”
He slams down a gear for a bend. They make the turn and hurtle on through the winter night. The darkness has become a solid thing and it’s racing away from his headlights, retreating from them as fast as he can drive towards it: he is chasing after the dark, and he will slam right through it, into whatever it is that lies beyond.
They burn through scattered dwellings that here and there coalesce into settlements, and there are lights sometimes, and the smell of woodsmoke, and then they’re in a square, where there are a few lights lit, which have a tired and faded look about them, and he knows that by the time they reach the next town everything will be shut. He’d prefer not to stop, but she must need some refreshment. He eases off and pulls over and yanks the handbrake on. She visibly relaxes.
“Two ticks,” he says. “Stay here and keep warm. I’ll go and see if I can rustle something up.”
He leaves the engine idling. In the café, the patron is locking up for the night, but seeing the man in Red Cross uniform there he starts to draw the bolts again and ushers him in, past the empty bentwood chairs set on the tabletops, into the end-of-evening smell of smoke and wine, which brings to mind a plate of charcuterie, the memory of Jeannine, and thence that priest, and that brings him out in gooseflesh. But they have nothing they can give him here. There will be viennoiseries in the morning, but until then, there’s only coffee and brandy to be had.
“That’ll work, thank you.”
He lights up, leaning on the zinc, twitchy, running a fingernail back and forth along a scratch. The patron fills the percolator, heats milk and reaches for the cognac on the almost-empty shelves. This place, this little café in this little town, the scar along the countertop—this is everything for the moment. While outside in the cold cab, breath pluming in the air, the snow gathering on the windscreen, the press of a hairpin into her scalp, is also everything. And the coffee bowls and brandy bottle lifted from the shelf, the other side of the zinc, the stubble-blued chin scrubbed at with a hand, is everything again. These small worlds, overlapping and impenetrable.
He returns to the cab with a coffee that is getting cooler and more dilute with snow. She has fallen into a doze. When he opens the door, she is startled awake.
“Thank you.” She lifts the drink to her lips and then, catching the scent, hesitates.
“Drop of brandy. Kee
p out the cold.”
“I don’t drink,” she says.
“I’m afraid there’s nothing else.”
She pulls a face.
“Consider it medicinal,” he says. If he could just take the bowl back, then they could be on their way. “For the good of your health.”
She hesitates, then drinks it straight down. She hands him the bowl. “Where will we stop for Mass?”
“Mass? Tonight?”
“It’s Christmas Eve.”
Of course it is. Of course. “I’ll get you to Saint-Lô in time.”
She grimaces.
—
He pulls to a halt outside the ruined church of Notre-Dame in Saint-Lô. She swallows queasily after the twisting, jolty journey here.
“All right?”
She fumbles with the door.
Inside the church, candles have been lit; they glow through the fragments of stained glass still clinging to the cames.
He turns the engine off and gets out to help her down, but she is already sliding from her seat. She straightens her skirt and settles her cape around her shoulders with a distinct air of relief.
“Well,” she says. “Here we are. Thank you.”
From inside the church comes the sound of violins, thin and icy. The snow still falls.
“Will you join me?”
He pulls on his cap. “I’ll wait on you here.”
He leans back against the truck.
She goes up the steps and in through the doorway. That’ll be an hour or so, Mass. He listens to the priest’s incantation and the low murmur of the congregation, and then the priest again. One doesn’t need to hear the actual words; the shape and pattern of them is instantly knowable. Her footprints fill. Snow gathers on his shoulders and his cap. He brushes it off and lights another cigarette. Violins begin to play, and then voices join them. Cigarette in lips, he treads over to the door to peer inside.
The church is open to the sky: the priest stands, vestments pulled over a bulky coat, bald head bowed, and snow falls on him. Snow carpets the stone flags, covers the altar with a blue-white pall. Snow drapes the edges of protruding masonry and the scorched and broken timbers. The candles flicker and fizz as the snowflakes hit them.
