A Country Road, A Tree (11 page)

“I bought a swede,” Suzanne calls. “And there are two carrots left. I’ll make a purée later.”

He nods, in the little pantry, where she cannot see him; he calls back to her, “Thank you.” But it wasn’t his own hunger that he had been considering.

—

The next morning, they wake to an apartment of ice. They fumble into their clothes, clumsy, skin bristling, their breath clouding the air. The heating-pipes are cold to the touch.

“The boiler must have packed up.”

Huddled in her little cubbyhole off the lobby, the concierge just shakes her head, her hands stuffed into her armpits. She has her husband’s old coat pulled on over layers of sweaters, wraps, aprons and cardigans. She has a blanket over her knees.

There’s nothing wrong with the boiler; the boiler’s completely fine, or it would be, if they had anything to feed it with.

This is, she informs them, the drop that made the vase overflow. Simply put, there is no coal. There is none to be had. Not from their usual supplier, nor from any other, and believe her, she has tried. Between them, she and her husband have telephoned to or trudged round every coal yard in the quarter, and there’s nothing in them but horse dung and black dust. The coalmen are in trouble: it should be their busiest time of year, but they have nothing left to sell.

Suzanne’s not having it. “That’s ridiculous.”

The woman shrugs. “That’s the way it is.”

“But why?”

“The coal’s gone the way of the potatoes and the wheat and all the blessed wine.”

“What way’s that?”

“To Germany.”

—

But life is not impossible, not yet. There’s a fireplace in the apartment, though he has never thought to use it before. Suzanne crouches to peer up the chimney, pulls out damp balled newspaper, which is followed by a fall of soot and twigs and the mummified body of a bird. They drop the corpse in the waste chute, then flatten out the paper and read the news from March 1936. There in grey and paler grey is news of the remilitarization of the Rhineland, an obituary for Jean Patou. That one could feel nostalgic for that!

Stiff with cold, they scavenge fallen wood and fir cones in the parks and squares and from the trees that line the avenues. They build inexpert smoky, spitty little fires in the grate and huddle close to them, wrapped in blankets. But the parks are soon picked clean; all the lowest branches are torn clear off the lindens and the plane trees; the boards are dragged down from the windows of boarded-up shops. People—people who are clearly much better equipped for this than they—start to cut down trees, so that there is nothing left but sawdust, and the disc of a stump, and an absence up into the air that the tree had used to fill.

—

She gives up her apartment: impossible to keep both places.

He tries to work. There’s a tickling at the back of his brain, an irritation, something squirming and wanting to be noticed, but there’s too much else going on for him to feed it, to grow it, to tug it out into the light to be examined. The complaints of the body can’t be dealt with, and so become insistent, intrusive, far noisier than the quiet need to write. Hunched at the table, the little crocheted blanket over his shoulders, mitts on his paws, his empty stomach whines and pops; his feet are a torment of chilblains, his nose is ice. He finds himself staring for he doesn’t know how long at the blank page in front of him, or out of the window at the grey sky, his thoughts caught up in his body’s and his friends’ distress. His being here has merely added to the general burden. Another mouth. He is disgusted with his hunger, with his needs.

“Sorry, I didn’t want to disturb you, but…”

He holds the door wide with one hand, grasps his blanket at his throat with the other. Suzanne is carrying a bundle of something; she lugs it into the apartment, dumps it down on the floor.

“I’m going to need your help with this, if you don’t mind.”

She is shifting furniture now.

“It’s too cold to move,” he says.

“It’s too cold to stay still.”

She’s lining up chairs, backs turned to each other, six foot or so apart. As though they’re about to march away across the rug, then stop, and turn, and fire.

“What’s all this?”

“I had an idea.” She jerks her head towards the bundle. “Just lift that for me, would you? Help me shake it out.”

The bundle unfurls into a hefty sheet of canvas; it smells of damp and is spotted here and there with mould. A forgotten dust sheet, or a tarpaulin used in some long-ago
déménagement.
When they shake it out, dust motes spin into the cold winter sun.

“Where’d you get it?”

“It was in the basement.”

“Isn’t it somebody’s?”

“Yes,” she says. “Ours.”

She gestures for him to move round to the far side of the chairs. Between them they spread the fabric over the ladder-backs, so that it drapes down to the floor on either side. She straightens out the edges, tucks them in under the chair-feet to hold the fabric taut. He crouches down on the other side to do the same.

“Did you ever do this as a child?” she asks.

He’s still not quite certain what they are doing. “Eh?”

“Make a den.” She lifts a fold of canvas, glances inside.

He takes a step back, squints at it. Oh yes. “No.”

“We did. Once in a while. On a rainy day.”

She ducks in underneath the canvas; he follows.

Inside, the air is frowsty; the light glows through the fabric. Beneath them is the old rug, with its faded Turkish patterns. He arranges himself uncomfortably, draws up his knees, feels ridiculous.

“You can work in here.” Suzanne blows on her hands. “It’ll be warmer.”

“Yes,” he says. “I see.”

She is pleased with herself. He smiles for her. It makes sense, of course it does, and it’s also utterly absurd. The two of them are hunched there in a tent on the rug, as though this is a game. As though later there will be nursery tea and bath and pyjamas and prayers and bed, and not just more cold, more hunger.

“Do you want your book?” he asks.

“Please.”

“And coffee?”

“Oh yes, please.”

“It’s horrible coffee.”

“Comme d’hab.”

He scrambles out, unfolding his long limbs. He finds her book; he finds a cup and rinses it. He dawdles over these little tasks, leaving her tucked away out of sight. She keeps doing things for him unasked, her kindnesses weave a mesh of obligation. He stirs in saccharine and watches the ersatz coffee spin and then fall still. No question now of milk. He brings these things back to her, passes them through the opening of the tent and crawls in after them. He folds himself up, knees and elbows. It’s warmer, yes, inside the shelter, in their shared warmth. They are toe-to-toe. The fabric drapes above his shoulders. His neck is bent. He can feel her breathe. The world has closed down to this. To body and breath. Ridiculous.

—

He carries it with him like the stone in his pocket, cold and hard and unassimilated; it jolts against him with each footfall. He’s aware of very little else. James Joyce is dead.

His stride takes him without thinking through the streets and through the fog, as it used to take him along the lanes and tracks and paths up into the mountains back at home, away from his mother and her blue scrutiny and all those domestic entanglements. It’s a January afternoon and it hasn’t been properly light all day. He passes braziers where men shuffle chestnuts, and the damp posters on the flank of a building, and graffiti, and the smell of drains, and the
pâtisserie
with one solitary
galette des rois
in the window, and the warm chatter from a café by the Métro Charles Michel—
And so I told him he could go to hell,
and
Excellent idea, I was just thinking that myself
and
It really is the most extraordinary thing—
that he realizes only afterwards was in German. The Boches. The Chleuhs. The Haricots Verts. And German is still and always beautiful.

He finds himself where he should have realized he was going: the rue des Vignes; he stares up at the Joyces’ old apartment. The windowpanes reflect the fog and look opaque. This is the last place of their own in Paris: Shem’s books, he said, were still in there; maybe they still are. He recalls rubbed wallpaper, fingerprinted light-switches, the greasy brown telephone set: all of them polished by Joyce’s hands, grazed by Joyce’s shoulders, haunted by his breath. The people living here will have no idea that they’re buffering up against this extraordinary ghost.

Because James Joyce has died in Switzerland. But it’s Paris that he’ll haunt.

Police, gendarmes, coming round the corner from the rue Bruneau. It doesn’t do to be seen loitering. He steps down on to the road. He feels the weight of an arm on his, catches the click of a walking stick, a voice whispering in his ear. The inconvenience; what a panic over the latest
bobard,
he doesn’t believe a word of it, not a word. Can the world not get by without another war? His
Wake
may as well have been published in secret for all the notice it’s received.

All that brilliance tied to a failing body, to be dragged round like a tin can on a string.

He walks on.

In the cold, in the fog, his feet measuring out distances, he tugs at his cuffs, turns his head against his collar. Still, faintly, there is the scent of the old man’s pomade and cheroots and lemon soap. There’s a song in his head, “The Salley Gardens,” sung in that astonishing quavering voice, and the taste of whiskey at the back of his tongue, and, and, and—that thrill in the blood at finding himself favoured, at being accepted into that charmed circle. Of being useful to a man like that. And then the sick lurch of the hand-me-down coat, and the favour by proxy.

He rubs his hands over his head; the hair stands up in fuzz.

He walks on.

But Paris isn’t Paris any more. He walks past the closed shops and the stripped trees, and a
confiserie
with a display of pasteboard confections, an
étalage factice,
and the quiet, skinny kids on their way back home from school, and the off-duty German soldiers strolling past in their good coats, and the lean women with their shawls and baskets and their pinched looks, and the potholes in the road and the red banners hung like washing from the balconies, and the nervy scavenging dogs and the flights of shabby pigeons and the sandbags stacked on the pavement, where policemen stand and watch him pass. Let them ask for his papers. He has papers. He doesn’t care who sees them.

He walks on.

It is a cold world, and Joyce has turned away from it and finally woken from the nightmare.

And with Shem gone, everything is different. After Joyce, what is the point of writing? What else is there to say?

—

He keeps a tally in his head; he keeps an eye out. Neighbours, acquaintances, familiar faces: he ticks them off when he spots them in the street, in the
boulangerie
queue or in a café. There are so many people, too many people to keep track of—the shop girls and the young
curé
and the old fellows who play boules on the square, and the new mother with the child strapped into a second-hand baby carriage, who has that anxious jostling air because the baby’s needs are so much more urgent than her own. And the two ladies at the
pressing
whom he passes, and the office-bound functionary. This, for the moment, is something he can do. He can notice. He can keep a kind of reckoning. That, and one cigarette, even now that cigarettes are rationed, for that shabby-smart old fellow, the
sale métèque
who’d asked him the time on the Place Falugière. He’s saving it for when he sees him again.

It’s easier with friends, with people he actually knows. He can ring them up. He can call round to their apartments; he can drop by their haunts. No, no, he can’t stay, no, he won’t take anything. He happened to be passing and thought he’d look in and say hello: so, hello. No, really, he can’t stay. No, really. Well, maybe just a small one.

Alfy has been demobbed. He is back teaching at the Lycée. Still the sturdy cheerful presence that he always was, but his cheeks hollow now and his eyes haunted, after the defeat. Always ready for a drink, a chat, sometimes a game of tennis; but also always glancing discreetly at his watch. Yes, they must get together and make some headway with that translation; how has he been getting on with it alone? Himself, oh, busy, busy. So busy, really; it breaks his feet; never a moment’s peace. Will have to dash, because. Has to go and meet someone. Right out of the way; pretty much the opposite direction to where you’re going. Wherever you are going. So he’ll make his farewells now.

Alfy’s not necessarily lying, but there’s a lot of flannel here, a lot of bluff. Something is not being said. And since Alfy clearly prefers not to confide, he doesn’t really feel that he can say anything more than a platitudinous
Take care.
They part at the corner; he watches till Alfy reaches the next crossroads, and turns away. No backward glance.

Well, that was Alfy, and he was, for that one moment, there. He marks his friend off, on the tally in his head.

Tick.

—

He walks on, all the way to Mary Reynolds’s house on the rue Hallé. It is calm and dim and cool after the bright street, and she draws him inside as though these are the first steps of a dance. He follows her into the shadows, with her pale nape and the cornsilk of her cropped hair. She pours him a
fine,
offers him a seat. She puts on a ’78 and he melts into the chair.

For a while they just listen, sip. But he must know how she is faring, so “How are you getting on?” he asks.

She laughs, shakes her head. She had thought that she’d get so much work done here, back in Paris, that’d she’d just hole up at home and make her books. That there’d be nothing else to do. But the reality is that she is getting nothing done; she can’t bring herself to do it. She can’t make it feel important any more: it has no context, it makes no sense, it just doesn’t matter.

“Does it have to matter?”