A Country Road, a Tree

by Jo Baker

  They are gathered there, all of them; they sing. The colonel, the volunteers, the ancillary workers, the new matron with her cap and cape. The Catholic contingent of the prisoners of war are with them in the snow. He thinks he catches the bristly profile of the German doctor. And the thin women from the ramshackle bawdy-house. And children, small ones held sleeping, older ones bundled up in jackets and scarves. Near the back, a youth with a small boy pressed into his side, heads tilted back to bawl out the hymn together.

  It’s impressive, that conspiracy. That insistence that everything means something, that happenstance will be made to fit a pattern, for all that the pattern cannot be discerned from where they stand, human, their feet upon the earth. That everything must be referred upward, into the empty sky.

  He turns away, back into the night, the snow falling. He gets back into the stuffy crampedness of the cab and finishes his cigarette. It’s a kind of homesickness, he suspects. But then he never entirely felt at home.

  Movement at the cab door: she climbs back into the truck with a cloud of cold and thumps the door shut behind her.

  “Beautiful,” she says. “Thank you.”

  “Good,” he says. “I’m glad.”

  The engine clears its throat, and clears its throat again, uncertain: diesel doesn’t like the cold. But it settles into its phlegmy rattle and he stamps on the clutch.

  “Not far now,” he says. “Just on up the road.”

  He shoves the gearstick sideways, then shunts it forward; he releases the pedal and they lunge away again, through the broken town shawled in snow.

  “You must be tired of ferrying people around at all hours.”

  “I’ve put you through it tonight,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

  He swerves round on to the road that leads up to the hospital; here the snow is worn to slush.

  “Oh,” she says. “No.” She grips the door handle and the seat as they take the bend.

  “My contract’s up. I’m afraid my mind’s elsewhere. And you wanted to get to Mass, so…”

  He turns down the main drive, passes a row of huts. They pull up outside the women’s barracks.

  “We shall be sorry to lose you, I’ve no doubt,” she says.

  “The place is all set up now, so, they’re grand.”

  “What will you do next?”

  He yanks the handbrake on and clumps the gearstick back into neutral. “Start again,” he says. “I suppose. Just like everybody else.”

  —

  The white huts are almost pretty, with their curtained windows warm in the twilight, and he walks along the clean frosty pathways to where his lift is waiting for him.

  There are footfalls indoors as the nurses do their rounds; there are murmured voices, there are those hard ungovernable coughs of the tubercular patients. He can hear the buzz of chat from the rec hut, the pock and tap of the table-tennis balls. He has made the necessary farewells. He doesn’t want to make any unnecessary ones, has no desire to linger.

  He runs his tongue round his mouth, the gaps and the smooth places where the decay was halted and the voids were filled. The absence of pain is a thing in itself, though not painlessly achieved. Like this place, this scraped-clear bit of earth where the rubble has been brushed aside and something sound is made of it.

  It’s temporary, of course; everything’s always temporary. Decay is paused, not halted; ruin is always incipient. One day, before you know it, all of this will be half-rotten, streaked with green and crawling with woodlice. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth the doing.

  The new matron steps out of the women’s ward and comes walking down the path towards him. Her eyes are tired but her expression is light; she actually looks happy. She sees him, kitbag and coat, heading to the cars.

  “Are you going right away?” she asks.

  “My lift’s waiting.”

  “Hang on just two minutes before you go.” Her hand is on his arm, she is drawing him back.

  She leads him into the women’s ward, up the step and indoors. One corner is curtained off. At the far end of the hut, a woman sleeps, curled on her side.

  “Come, see.”

  She eases back the curtain and there is a row of little cots. He knows these cots. He has an invoice filed away for them back up at the stores. In one, swaddled in white linen and tucked in tight under cellular blankets, is a tiny raw-looking thing, patched with flaking skin. Its birdlike breast barely lifts the covers, but it does lift the covers, and, as he watches, it keeps on doing so. Impossible tiny little breaths in a creature not yet used to breathing. A being not yet used to being.

  “Is it all right?”

  “Oh yes. Perfectly. He’s just a few hours old.”

  “And the mother?”

  The nurse nods, and in her smile is the knowledge of a job well done. “She’s doing fine.”

  The infant stirs; its lips move. It doesn’t cry. Its eyes open, and they are dark and bluish and alien.

  “It isn’t crying.”

  “They don’t always cry,” Matron says.

  He looks down at the small creased thing, which stares back at him with an ancient calm.

  “They do keep on being born, don’t they?”

  “Hm?”

  “People. Babies.”

  “They rather insist on it.”

  “Poor little scrap,” he says.

  “New life, though,” she says. “It gives you hope.”

  “Oh, don’t say that,” he says. “That’s not fair.”

  He considers the curled-up creature there, the years that it will have to live through, the best outcome at the end of it all. Why would you do that to someone, out of love? And aren’t they supposed to cry? When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools. It’s just a natural reaction.

  “Well,” he says. “God bless.”

  A big, lovely smile from her, as if he has expressed some kind of approval, as if something has been agreed between them.

  “God bless,” she says.

  He shoulders his kitbag and slips out through the door. Hope is not a thing that he can bring himself to consider. It really does not agree with him at all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  PARIS

  January 1946

  “I’ll walk from here.”

  He slides out at the corner, slams the door, raises a hand in thanks. The vehicle rattles away. There is ice between the cobblestones; there is frost on the railings. He turns his collar up. His coat now is worn to fit his body, it has softened to him. Made itself be his.

  The street-market is busy on the rue de Vaugirard, but the stalls are thinly stocked. A few winter cabbages, half a barrow-load of potatoes, a pile of chestnuts; everything is sad and slight and mean-looking, and there is a conspicuous absence of bread, since it’s back on the ration. A few pewter-grey fish lie cold in the cold air. The housewives are pecking grimly through these offerings. He notices the prices chalked on the little boards and winces. It is going to be impossible to live on his allowance. It was stupid to walk away from a proper salary, ridiculous to leave behind the chickens and the Calvados and the jam and the nice warm little huts, to try again at this impossible thing that nobody cares whether he does or doesn’t do, and for which no payment is to be anticipated. It was stupid, impossible, ridiculous, and absolutely necessary.

  He peers up the face of the apartment building. His little casement is unlit; behind it waits a pool of calm and quiet. If Suzanne is elsewhere. He goes in through the lobby door. The lift is still out of order; the stairs twist upward, into shadow. His head is too full to accommodate the possibility of her, to accommodate anything other than what has to happen next. The cupboard in the back of his mind is ready to burst open, and all the mess that has been shoved in there will spill out on to the floor. He has to have the space, the quiet, to let that happen, to deal with the mess, sort through it and shape it into something.

  There is a strange push-pull to this, an urgency and a drea
d. He grabs the handrail, heaves himself up three steps at a time, striding his way up the spiralling helix. He can’t let himself think too much about the doing of it; it must just be done.

  Suzanne halts two steps above him. She is fastening her glove. They are caught out by the suddenness of the encounter, their eyes locked. She is struck, again, by the brightness of the blue; he is caught by the warmth of her eyes, black-coffee-brown. Her gaze slides away, and she glances over his furrowed forehead, his furze of hair, his cold hand curled round the strap of his bag. She feels an instinctive tug towards him, but there is too much, just too much heaped up now between them. She can’t go over, she can’t go round, she can’t just blunder through.

  “It’s you,” she says, and her voice sounds dry and strange.

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  She is rendered conscious of her stockings—her best pair, though darned at heel and toe. Her patchy pumiced legs. He has seen her worse. But he doesn’t see her now; she knows it. He is here, but she can tell that he isn’t really here at all.

  “Well,” she says, and she doesn’t know what else to say.

  He steps up and kisses her on the cheek. The smell of her, of old coat and body and a faint whiff of perfume, which she must have been eking out so carefully. If they could get back to where they left off, to that stupid lovely summer five years ago, when her body was sepia-printed from the sun and they had been easy together; if they could drag themselves back to that, claw their way along through mud and dust. But there is so much territory, so much cooling space between them. There is so much wear and tear.

  No point pinning it with words, he thinks. Let it flutter by.

  “You’re back,” she says.

  He nods.

  “And that’s that, is it?”

  He says, “That’s that.”

  There is maybe more that he could say, phrases he could conjure up and offer out to her that would help, but his eyes drift past her on and up the stairs, into the shadows.

  “Good,” she says. “Well. I missed you.”

  Then she just slips past him and goes on, clipping down and round the stair, going briskly. He watches. She turns again and she is gone. Her footfalls fade out, and the porte cochère opens and then slams behind her.

  She pauses in the street. She touches her eyes with a gloved finger. There is time, she tells herself; they have been granted that, at least. But is more time really what they need?

  The circling stairs twist up into the shadows. His chest aches; his scar hurts. Perhaps he should go after her. He hefts the bag strap up his shoulder and begins again to climb.

  Inside, he drops his bag and locks the door behind him. The apartment is cold and dim. He unbuttons his greatcoat but keeps it on. He moves around the room, touching things into place, going into the kitchenette to set water to boil. He hunkers down by his bag to rummage out his notebook, a new bottle of ink, his fountain pen. The pan begins to rattle as he lays his materials out on the tabletop. He goes to make coffee, brings the things back through. He draws out the chair and sits. In silence and in solitude, he folds open his new notebook. He flattens out the page. He dips his pen into the ink, and fills it, and wipes the nib. The pen traces its way across the paper. Ink blues the page. Words form. This is where it begins.

  Author’s Note

  I first read Beckett during my MA in Irish Writing, at the Queen’s University of Belfast. I was at once unsettled and fascinated—those battered, persecuted characters, scraping by in the margins of a hostile world. This was like nothing else I’d ever read. Beckett’s work seemed to float free—I had no reference points; I felt lost.

  Until my tutor, Dr. Eamonn Hughes, pointed out that Beckett had been stuck in occupied France during World War Two; he’d had to go into hiding. It was a light-bulb moment: a modern eco-bulb; a slow-growing light. I began to get an inkling of where these characters came from, the nature of the world they inhabited. The context of Beckett’s wartime experiences was not, by any means, the way to understand Beckett’s complex and allusive work, but it was a light by which to peer at bits of it.

  Because the war years did mark a major change in Beckett’s work: he was already a published writer when the conflict broke out, but the work sometimes feels like that of an (albeit brilliant) adolescent, overburdened by his influences. There are indicators of change beforehand, but those years in occupied France seem to have established many of the key themes, images and preoccupations of Beckett’s later work. They also marked the start of his paring away at language: a stripping-back of Joycean wordplay and polyphonic extravagance, towards bare bones, and silence. Beckett experienced, in the direct aftermath of war, an epiphany. He understood, fully and for the first time, the kind of writer he would be. This revelation occurred not when confronted by the wild darkness of a storm-torn sea—as Krapp’s Last Tape might seem to suggest—but with appropriate-for-Beckett bathos, at his mother’s suburban bungalow in Foxrock.

  The war was not something that Beckett just drifted through; it presented him with a series of extraordinary moral choices. And in impossibly difficult situations, he consistently turned towards what was most decent and compassionate and courageous. He chose to face the war with his friends in France, rather than sit it out in neutral Eire. He chose to give his subsistence-level rations away to those in still greater need. He chose to resist. He chose to survive. And then, after the devastation, he chose to aid with the rebuilding.

  In short, he grew, as a writer and as a man. Afterwards he would go on to write the work that would make him internationally famous, and for which he would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Work that still resonates powerfully with us today.

  A Country Road, A Tree emerges from a profound sense of admiration for both the writing and the man; it is an attempt to offer up a fictional version of this story, because it casts a particular light on both. But there is also a personal connection here. Beckett and I had a mutual friend. Barbara Bray was a literary translator and a drama producer. She was a great supporter of my husband’s and mine when we were starting out as writers. I’m so grateful for her kindness, for the warm, supportive correspondence, the lunches and drinks she insisted on treating us to when we were young and broke. I sent her a copy of my first novel when it was published; she sent us a present—a pair of beautiful hand-made pewter coasters for our writing desks—when we got married. I didn’t know, at the time, the extent of her involvement in Beckett’s life. She was not, after all, just a friend to him, but she was a good and valued friend to us.

  I am also grateful to James Knowlson for his magisterial biography Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (Grove Atlantic, 1996): spending time immersed in this extraordinary book has been one of the chief pleasures of working on A Country Road, A Tree. The other biographies, Deirdre Bair’s Samuel Beckett: A Biography (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978) and Anthony Cronin’s Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (Harper, 1997), each offered their own invaluable perspective on this phase in Beckett’s life. Whilst there is little in the way of wartime correspondence, the Cambridge University Press edition of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, edited by George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld and Lois More Overbeck, provided key way-markers and essential detail throughout the writing process. I also found myself turning again and again to Phyllis Gaffney’s Healing Amid the Ruins: The Irish Hospital at Saint-Lô (1945–46) (Dublin: A. & A. Farmar, 1999) for its fascinating account of the Irish Red Cross in post-war Normandy.

  In shaping this novel, I have drawn on accounts in the biographies and references in the collected letters; I’ve found clues in Beckett’s own novels, poems and plays; I’ve drawn from other memoirs, from fiction and histories of the period, from art and music, from the various languages spoken and the places inhabited and the places just passed through. I’m immensely grateful for the advice and information and nudges I’ve been given along the way. The resulting novel, I know, is a partial, incomplete and limited thing. I always knew it would
be. But nonetheless, I had to try.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jo Baker was educated at Oxford and Queen’s University, Belfast. She lives in Lancaster with her husband, the playwright Daragh Carville, and their two children. She is the author of the best-selling novel Longbourn, which is due to be made into a film.