A Country Road, A Tree (14 page)

The drawing room is murmurous; there is music playing on the gramophone: Beethoven, glorious Beethoven, captured in time and preserved in lines and grooves on black shellac, only to have nonsense talked over him. The shutters are open on the garden side of the house; they allow the low evening light in along with the cool air and the moths, which flutter softly through the room and paste themselves to walls and kill themselves in candle flames.

“Why are you frowning?” Suzanne asks.

“I’m not frowning.”

“Stop it, though.”

He sucks his teeth.

Mary comes over to them, kisses first Suzanne then him, a waft of scent and her cheek near his cheek. He watches as, with her curious grace, she pours them drinks. Her hair is falling a little longer now, less sharply cut. The crystal decanter catches the light and kicks it off around the room. He knows now, more or less, what had been left unsaid the last time they met. That she was, already, actively engaged in this.

“I’m afraid it’s just corn brandy now,” she says, handing a glass to him. “It’s all that I could get hold of.”

“No less welcome, thank you.”

They exchange enquiries about health, well-being; he asks after Marcel and the words are pond-skaters, treading the surface of things.

“New York, now. Chess.” She smiles, shrugs, bravely nonchalant. Marcel has toppled his king, left the play. This is a game he could see no way to win.

A touch on his arm. He blinks round, frowning—and there’s Alfy.

“That someone I wanted you to meet…”

He excuses himself, follows Alfy across the room towards a girl in a dark dress who’s peering round someone to watch him approach. She, also, is already somehow familiar.

He offers a hand; she takes it, stands on tiptoe to kiss his cheek.

“The Irishman. It is a great pleasure to see you again.”

“Enchanted,” he says, but, truth be told, he is put entirely on the back foot.

Jeannine Picabia. She must be, what?—twenty-four, twenty-five by now, though she still has the slightness of a teenager. He remembers her at her father’s studio, years ago. She sipped cordial and sat on the stairs. They’d talked about the paintings. He remembers the challenge of being soused, and trying to keep his words clear and straight, not breathing smoke and booze on her. Her cool, wry look.

“You must call me Gloria here.”

“Gloria?”

“Other names are for other places, other people.”

That look she gets from her father, at once earnest and playful.

“Gloria,” he says. “I will forget I ever knew anything else.”

“A selective memory is a very useful thing. Moby also says you can keep a secret.”

“Moby?”

She nods to Alfy. “Moby Dick here.”

He turns to Alfy, raises an eyebrow.

Alfy smiles. “My
nom de guerre.
”

“Because of your bitter, vengeful temperament?” he asks.

“I think my massive girth. Or perhaps it’s my complexion.”

Jeannine fishes out her cigarette case. She offers him, and he takes one. He thanks her, and sets down his glass to light her cigarette and then his. The hit of the Gauloise, after so much parsing out of cigarettes, is like learning to smoke all over again.

“Because most of Papa’s friends were all such—I think you say in Ireland—gobshites?”

This makes him snort.

“I mean, they would talk and talk and talk and talk. And everybody’s so busy talking nobody’s listening to anything at all, all those words and none of them getting heard, nobody ever learning a thing.”

“Artists,” he says. Shrugs.

“That’s no excuse.”

She blows smoke, taps her cigarette on an ashtray, lips twisted with pleasure, trying not to show it. One of Mary’s beautiful things, this ashtray. Ceramic, swirled inside with inky blue.

“Anyway, you I remember,” Jeannine continues. “You weren’t one of the talkers. You’d gather up far more than you’d ever give away. You have a silent habit.”

He takes a sip of brandy, feels its sting, its dispersal on the tongue. Feels disarmed, to have been observed like this from years ago. To have been already known.

“And this silence of yours is a virtue, like the selective memory, in our line of work.”

“I’m not,” he says, “a practical man.”

“But I still think you could be useful. Moby tells me that you know German and Italian and Spanish, as well as French and English.”

He tilts his head. This is true. “Some better than others.”

“And you can type.”

“Not terribly well.”

“It won’t matter.” Shifting on her feet a little, she looks up at him, bright and sharp. And he realizes that though they are supposedly in safe company, her voice has been falling, softening all this time, so that now she speaks almost in a whisper and he has to lean in closer to hear her.

“There are risks,” she says. “What we’re doing. It carries the death penalty now. These are anti-German acts. It is considered treason.”

“I know.”

“Are you still willing?”

“I am.”

She studies his expression, unsmiling. Then she says, “Well, we’ll keep you busy, Monsieur. You can be certain of that. It will help pass the time.”

He nods.

Alfy nudges him gently. “I did not like to ask it of you, my friend,” he says. “But I am glad that you are with us.”

“And you will need a codename now too, Irishman.”

He catches Suzanne watching them from all the way across the room. She closes her eyes in a slow blink and then she turns away.

What purpose can there be in pseudonyms, when they are all friends and acquaintances, when they have all known each other on and off for years?

—

They sit, chairs drawn up to a corner of the Pérons’ dining table. Mania and Alfy lay out scraps of paper on the tabletop. There were plums, brought up by a friend in the country; he has been given one, and has eaten it as slowly as he could. Now the stone is tucked into his cheek, and he shifts it on to his tongue from time to time and turns it over.

“Our job is information,” Mania says. “We don’t try to assassinate anyone; we don’t blow anything up.”

“Good.”

“Our network covers the north-western quadrant of France,” Alfy says. “We’re getting information about troop movements, trains and shipping. We watch the Boches. A new corps colour was spotted on troops in Saint-Lô on Wednesday. We had the information in Paris by Thursday afternoon, and over to London by the evening.”

Alfy drags his chair forward. He shifts around the paper slips on the glossy wood.

“We get the information in on these little scraps of paper. Little bits that can be easily kept hidden. We will pass these on to you. Your job is to sort the information. Look for patterns, duplications, where one informant substantiates another. Look for the big picture.”

“I see.”

“Once you’ve found it,” Mania says, “you make the big picture as small as possible. Boil it down until you have just the very essence. Because every extra word we send to London increases our exposure.”

“You could do it standing on your head,” Alfy says.

Alfy’s broad, good-humoured face. There was the Lycée and then there was the Army and now there is this. Alfy’s decisions seem the only reasonable responses to an unreasonable state of affairs. He contributes.

“Then you burn the source material, and you deliver your typescript, we’ll tell you where. And that’s it, job done.”

He asks, “How long have you two been involved?”

“A little while now,” Mania says quietly.

“You never said.”

“You didn’t ask.” Alfy shrugs. “And you’re a friend. It’s dangerous.”

He turns the plum stone with his tongue, feels the seam, the final threads of flesh.

“And you are not native here. So.”

“They try to make it be about country.” He shrugs. “I don’t think it’s really about country.”

Alfy leans away. Mania gives him a look, a smile.

“Last chance. If you want to back out now, before you get your hands dirty.” Alfy jerks his head towards the door. “I’ll see you for a beer, and we’ll get stuck into that translation and never say another word about this.”

He sits his ground.

“All right,” Alfy says, “so—and this is very important— just go on as normal, otherwise.”

Mania leans in. “Really, don’t change anything. You and Suzanne, just keep on as normal, and we’ll make it look as though your new work is just more of the old. If anybody’s watching you, they’ll have no grounds for suspicion.”

“Thank you,” he says.

“Why’s that?” Alfy asks.

He twists his lips. Shrugs. “I’ll be glad to be of use.”

—

Suzanne refers to the drawer as the Tinderbox. Things could so easily spark and catch and burn the whole place to the ground.

Alfy comes round to the apartment with his satchel full of typescript and a French–English dictionary. If he’s stopped, they are working on the translation of
Murphy
into French.

The translation is getting nowhere.

The paper slips, though, are piling up; Alfy slides them from between the leaves of his dictionary, ruffles them out of his typescript. They fill up the drawer, dry and whispering like leaves.

He works at night, after curfew, the curtains drawn, observing blackout with all due diligence: one doesn’t wish to draw attention. He empties the drawer out on to his desk; the paper scraps scatter like a parlour game. He slides them around. Looking for patterns. Matching them. Finding echoes.

Cigarette papers, a torn-up flour bag. Some of them have been folded tiny and are now criss-crossed with creases, others have been rolled up into tight cylinders and must be rolled back on themselves to be flattened out. Sometimes there is a square of lavatory paper—quite a sacrifice—or the margin of a book, or a strip of advertising poster, the writing on the reverse, with the blocks of colour leaching through. Assembled there on the desk, these scraps of paper mark the movement of troops and materiel across the north of France.

And then, one day, on a dirty green omnibus ticket, five words appear in smudged graphite. Two of the same words are scratched on to the ripped-off corner of a menu; one of them is on a bit of paper bag; three are scribbled on to a panel of a cigarette packet. They are padded round and buffered with other stuff, but those same words keep emerging. He pushes his glasses back up to the bridge of his nose. In soft graphite and in neat hard pencil and in schoolteacherly copperplate and pragmatic print, the five words step forward to be noticed. They can’t be unnoticed now.

Four of the words are German. They are names of ships.
Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Prinz Eugen.
One name is of a French port.
Brest.

He sits there, fingertips on the bus ticket.

“What is it?” Suzanne asks. She sets aside her sewing, comes to him. “Have you found something?”

He lines up the ticket alongside the lavatory paper. She cranes in; he taps the ticket with a blunt nail.

She presses a finger on a cigarette skin and drags it across the table to line it up beside the ones he has already selected.

“Is that what you were thinking?” she asks.

He nods.

He knows the town. Waves slopping against a harbour wall; a round tower; old men dangling lines into the water; children chalking a game on to the pavement. And these words, lined up in front of him now, could conjure aeroplanes out of a clear sky, could bring all hell raining down on it. These words could take a hundred lives. A thousand.

“You’d only be passing it on,” she says.

He nods.

“It’s not as if you’d be adding anything, or changing it.”

He nods again.

“And if you don’t, and it might have done some good, if it could have helped bring things to an end, saved other lives…”

He closes his eyes. He breathes.

“Because you can’t be certain, can you?”

He shakes his head to clear it. He lifts a sheet of
tellière,
folds it and tears it sharply along the fold. He scrolls the half-page into his Olivetti. His fingertips peck out the letters, and the letters strike on to the paper, and the letters cluster into words, and the words seethe on the page, and he can’t bear this and yet it must be borne. He swallows down spittle, closes his eyes. All he can see is fire and blood and broken stone.

When he’s finished—it is only a few lines to type—he slips the sheet between two pages of his manuscript, which is by far the safest place to keep something that he doesn’t want anyone to read. He sweeps all the paper scraps together, then he gets down on hands and knees and checks the floor for drifting slips. He drags the table forward to be certain that nothing has been missed. He drops the crumpled scraps into the grate.

He sits back, rubs cold hands together, eases out his neck. “You want to share a cigarette?”

He holds the flame to a curled edge of paper. He watches it catch and flare, then drops it into the grate. He lifts the match and lights his cigarette.

He feels the smoke fill his lungs and soothe them, and his head spins; he passes the cigarette on to her. The smoke slips slowly from his lips, towards the fireplace, where it is caught by the draw of the chimney. Their drooping tent stands behind them. It’s as though they are camping out here on the floor.

With tired eyes, knees drawn up to her chin, she takes the cigarette. They watch the contagion of the flame, the way that black creeps across the white, then breaks into bits and falls in soft flurries.

“Alfy coming for the thing tomorrow?”

He shakes his head. “I’m to make the drop-off. Him coming and going here so much, it’s getting to look suspicious. He’s given me the address. Place over near Parc Montsouris.”

She holds her thin hands up to the brief warmth. “I don’t need to know.”

“I know.”

“Just,” she says, “be careful.”

The paper’s gone, its warmth spent, in just a few moments. He lifts a poker, stirs the ashes. The flakes fall through the grate, and he pulls the ash pan out to riddle through underneath, so that no word might remain allied to any other. So there is no suggestion that there were ever any words allied here at all.