A Country Road, A Tree (3 page)

Sheila straightens her shoulders, touches her hair back into place. “You are so kind, May, dear, but you know, the children will want their father. Donald has to join his regiment, and we shall want to see him first.”

“Well, Mollie,” May now says. “You’ll stay.”

Mollie makes an apologetic moue. “A little while, May, but then I’m afraid I shall have to go too.”

“Whatever for?”

“Work. They’re expecting me.”

May is left with nothing now but to turn her face away and be silent. She must swallow it down in one hard lump, this unpalatable truth that everyone has been chewing on for months. They may not like it either, but at least they have grown accustomed to the taste.

He lays a hand on her shoulder. He feels the bones of her. She turns her sharp blue eyes on him.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“This is hardly
your
fault.”

—

From that frozen moment, the household stillness breaks into a cascade. Voices bounce and spin around the place like spilled ball bearings. Stairs are hammered up and down. Telephone calls are placed, timetables consulted, sketched-out plans become solid and concrete.

Lily turns out the hot press for the girls’ balled-up socks and folded vests and blouses; Sheila and Mollie discuss—at varying distances and volumes—the need for this item or that, the possible location of the other. Where are the girls’ good shoes? (They’re wearing them—which becomes evident on their return, all tangled hair and stickiness, dustily shod.) What about these books? Have you seen the hairbrush? Whose hairbrush? My hairbrush, the tortoiseshell hairbrush. Is this the one you mean? Feet clomp back and forth across the landing and up and down the stairs, then the voices become softer, closer, as the work begins to come together and be set in order.

He stays out of their way; he can’t be of any help. His head still hurts; he’s liverish; he’s wary of questions, doesn’t want to share his plans. He hides behind his book.

When they are done and the taxi is ordered, he carries the luggage downstairs and lines it up in the hall, the girls’ neat little cases and their mother’s larger one. Everybody waits, since that is all there is left to do now, the girls sitting side by side on the upright hall chairs, one set of white socks and buckle-shoes dangling and swinging slightly, the other set neatly instep-to-instep on the parquet, their owner made grown up by the gravity of the day.

Time stretches and slows; the clock ticks. Mollie expresses concern about the taxi. May is worried about the weather: they’ll have a rough crossing ahead of them, she dares say. They cannot say anything worth saying, but that does not stop them talking, and the soft words accumulate, like sand trickling through an hourglass. They are up to their knees in it and yet still they can’t stop.

Then there’s the sound of a car bumbling along the harbour road, which makes conversation break and scatter.

“Is that—”

“Ah, that must be—”

“Have you got—”

The motor idles in front of the house. Sheila has the front door open; the driver gets out of the cab and comes to help with the luggage.

The girls smell of wool, and boiled milk and soap, when they are kissed; they are solemn and excited, knowing this is all so very serious now; their cheeks are hot against his cheek, and they smell no doubt his guilty adult reek of cigarettes and sweat and last night’s whiskey.

Sheila hugs him sudden and hard. Words fail him.

“God bless you, dear boy.”

He manages, “God bless.”

And then Sheila slides in beside the girls, who shunt themselves across to make room, and the door slams on them, and the driver gets in the front seat, and the car turns and moves away, grinding alongside the slate-blue harbour water.

He goes indoors. He lights a cigarette. “Boy” is right. Child. Bear-cub that the dam didn’t bother licking into shape.

The house feels dim and cold. A limestone pebble has been left on the hall console. It’s greyish, skin-smooth and about the size of a peppermint. It had sat in the girl’s creased and grubby palm, revealed to him like a secret that she knew he would keep, then tucked away again with a little gappy smile. Abandoned now, forgotten, its meaning shed. He lifts the stone. It’s cool to the touch. He cups it in his palm a moment, and then he slips his hand into his pocket and drops the stone in there.

—

He lopes along like a broken-down hound at Mollie’s side. Mollie has taken his arm to tether him to her pace. Her body is compact and soft in her Irish tweeds. It is a glorious afternoon, breezy and blue, a mockery, the low sun making them squint.

“So are you going to tell me?” she asks him.

He peers down at her. “Tell you what?”

“Ach, come on now. Sheila and I could see it straight off.”

“See what?”

“Who’s the girl?”

Her arm hooked through his, they stumble on together. He says nothing. Seagulls wheel overhead; waves suck and spit.

“Come on, spill the beans.” She tugs his arm.

“What makes you think there are beans to spill?”

“You know what you’re like. Left to yourself, you’re a liability. You get ill; you get thin; you even got
stabbed,
for goodness’ sake! You can’t take care of yourself, can you? But look at you.” She stops and drags him round to face her. “Just
look
at you.” Rosy-cheeked in the wind, she studies him. “You’re clearly being taken care of.” She peers in closer, frowns. She flicks the back of her hand against his chest. “
Somebody
has fixed a tear in that shirt.”

He peers down. His lips twitch. Then he offers Mollie his arm again; she takes it and they walk on.

“There’s a girl,” he says.

“I know.”

He doesn’t offer anything more, holds a smile at bay.

“And…?”

He shrugs.

“Ach, come on!”

He smiles. He says, “Years ago, we used to play tennis, mixed doubles, when I was at the École Normale. But I didn’t see her again until last year, after the attack. She read a report in the newspaper and remembered me. She came to the hospital and, well, that’s when.”

“That’s when you fell in love.”

It is to be supposed so. He does not confirm, correct or contradict.

“She made curtains for my flat.”

Mollie laughs.

“They’re actually quite fine.”

“Sorry. I’m sure they’re beautiful…” She waves a hand. “I didn’t mean—I just never thought of you—being the fellow that you are, I didn’t think you’d care about things like that.”

“I didn’t say I cared. But when it gets dark,” he says, “one has a need of curtains.”

That’s what Suzanne had said, anyway, lying naked on the tangled sheets, looking out through the high window of the sleeping loft, her dark hair tumbled, moonlight on her skin. He’d agreed, but had determined that on no account would he ever get any; if there were curtains, then they would lie together in pitch black, and that would be a shameful waste of her nakedness.

And then, when she had presented him with curtains, he’d thanked her, and had even participated in their hanging.

“I don’t know what all the fuss is about.”

“I’m just happy for you. Thrilled. That you’ve got a nice girl who’ll mend your shirts and make you curtains.”

“That’s not all she is. She’s a musician. She studied at the Conservatoire. She is a writer, too. She writes.”

“God help you then, the pair of you.”

—

The curtains are drawn that evening in the little house, even though it’s not yet dark. The radio crackles and shrieks as he hunts out the BBC again. When it’s tuned in, he goes to stand beside his mother, a hand resting on the back of her armchair. She has steeled herself to listen now.

At the back of her head, grey hair frizzes out from its pins. Her old hands clutch the armrests. Mollie is huddled in the seat opposite, her legs drawn up underneath her, chewing on a nail. Lily stands by the sideboard, included but separate, eyes downcast.

At five o’clock today, France declared war on Germany.

His mother fumbles a hand upward. He takes it. It is cold. They listen to the continuing bulletin, but little of it sinks in. Because the pieces are all in play now, are moving out across the board. He strokes the back of her hand with his thumb. One traces the possibilities out from here and ends up—where? Wire and trenches, is that what is coming all over again? He could volunteer for the ambulance corps, grind an old taxi over mud…Back in France, could he enlist? It is all so grim. His head buzzes as though the lid has been taken off a jar of flies. His mother twists round in her seat and looks up at him. Her hand grips tight and she pulls him down a little closer.

“Well, that’s that,” she says.

He nods. That is indeed, as she says, that.

“You can’t go back now.”

He looks down at her face, the sharp angles, the lines of it. But he can’t stay. “I’ve told everyone I will be back.”

“Everyone?”

“All my friends.”

“Your friends.”

He nods.

She looks at him for a long moment, her throat in an uncomfortable twist. Those shady, disreputable people with their unimaginable lives, they are drawing him away from her. From security and comfort and a decent life.

“And what possible use,” she asks, “do you imagine you would be?”

CHAPTER TWO

PARIS

Autumn 1939

It’s ridiculous to be happy now, Suzanne thinks. It’s outrageous. But she can’t help it.

She slips her arm through his. He shortens his stride for her, and this synchronization makes her smile. She breathes the warmth of tobacco and shaving soap and wine. Their footfalls clip across the Place Saint-Michel. The two of them are heading out in the hope that the cheap little café on the rue de la Huchette will have held its nerve and still be open, even though so many of the fancier bistros are battened down and shuttered now.

He didn’t have to come back. But here he is. Shoulder, throat, jaw and cheekbone, blue eyes following the passage of a car along the street. She leans in against him, and all is well.

In the morning, she slips out of his bed and into her clothes and out into the streets, threading through the bin men and the delivery boys and the market traders, back towards her own apartment and out of his way. There is a gauze of mist lying in the air and Paris is new again, and beautiful, after years of going almost unnoticed.

He has his work and it is important: she must not get under his feet. She has her own work to go to anyway, those fruitless hours with plump children in the bourgeois
quartiers,
plonking away on pianos that are far too good for them and of which she finds herself feeling jealous. She keeps her quiet hours alone in her own apartment too—she is finishing a new jacket, with little bone buttons, in anticipation of the colder weather to come. She goes to the market and she goes to the library; she takes herself off to see her friends. She keeps busy. She measures out her company carefully. A drop here, a drop there. She won’t make a nuisance of herself.

Whenever she goes to see him, she brings small comforts with her. A pastry to share, a bar of chocolate, some small item of needlework to soften the edges of his austerity. In the little kitchenette, there is usually only coffee and dust. She wants to make him comfortable. More comfortable than he can make himself.

The pale and wounded Irish man, his chest in bandages, strapped down by hospital sheets. She has been trying to make him comfortable ever since.

—

Nothing happens.

Late September days soften and cool and Paris is still lovely. The children walk in crocodiles in the street; confined for the day, their voices hang round school buildings in a haze: passers-by walk through clouds of rhyme and times tables, into billows of song.

There is a radio in the apartment next door; at the weekend, the thumping left-hand rhythm of popular songs, waves of laughter, jazz leak through the wall. The neighbour’s baby cries.

Someone comes to wrap the street lamps in blue paper; at night the cars go by half blinded with blackout strips. The rue de Vaugirard becomes a deep-blue river. It washes past his own backwater, the rue des Favorites. He closes the shutters, draws the blinds and lights a lamp, and pours just a drop of Jameson’s for himself, because it must be made to last. He settles into a book, or into his work, into the translation of
Murphy
into French.

Suzanne comes and goes. She twists her treacle-coloured hair back and stabs it with pins and throws him a brilliant smile. He’s always startled by that smile, as though a ball has dropped out of clear air and landed smack into his palm. The thing is, of course, to lob it back into play, but he’s often a fraction too late; she’s tidying away the newspapers, she’s heading to the kitchen, plumping up a cushion, she’s half gone already. But he knows she’s wanting something. It’s as though there is a cat around his ankles, silky and twining, but making him anticipate a stumble, expecting to do inadvertent harm.

He tries for her. He sets coffee warming on the gas ring, spreads rillettes on bread, fishes cornichons from the jar.

They eat in bed, their feet slipping together. She brushes shards of crust from the sheet. Her limbs are brown from the summer, her breasts and belly white where her swimming suit covered her; before he came to France he’d never seen a body patched like this, in a slow sepia exposure. Running a hand along her back, from tan to white to tan again, he feels grateful. She lifts her cup and sips her coffee. He turns away to hide his face. No point pinning this with words. Let it flutter by.

—

She goes with him to the Irish Legation, because his status here must be sorted out once and for all. And
if you want to get something done,
she says,
ask a busy woman.
She walks with him to the Place Vendôme through the drifting plane leaves, and she takes his arm. They pass the Opéra. It has gone dark. The building is shut up and locked tight, the windows shuttered, the gates wrapped in chains.

“Oh,” he says.

“We’ll go back,” she says, pulling him close, “when they reopen.”