A Country Road, A Tree (6 page)

He pulls his jacket collar up and shoves his way out again. The night streams past him, is wet in his face. He leans into it, as if there’s a wind blowing, though the air is perfectly still. He is drunk, of course; he has no papers, his friends are leaving left and right; Paris is deserted; he is no use to anyone at all. He feels, for once, and only briefly, quite content.

—

The Joyces depart Paris finally at Christmas time. In the breathy quiet of the platform, beside a stationary steam train, he shakes hands with the son Giorgio and the father James, accepts also Nora’s forgiving kiss: sometimes he is held to blame for her husband’s delinquency and sometimes he is not, but while Mr. Joyce is on his best behaviour, then he, too, can hope to be approved. He hands her in; she moves stiffly, troubled by her joints. He can still be useful to them, that much is clear: he can lift cases into the carriage; he can offer a hand to the man himself.

“Come and see us,” James Joyce says. “At Saint-Gérand-le-Puy. Come and see us in the spring.”

“Thank you.” It’s at once a pleasure and an anticipated awkwardness.

The older man nods, settles himself, legs crossed, toe tucked under instep, hands folded on the head of his cane. “Well then,” he says. “Until the spring.”

All the warmth and gratitude, all the unease and discomfort. And of course he just says, “Until the spring,” and shakes Shem’s hand, and then Nora’s, then clambers down from the carriage.

Alone on the platform, he kicks his heels and looks off down the train in the direction of their going.

And then there is the engine’s sigh, the greased shift of pistons and the slow haul into movement, and the train is leaving. It is peeling past, and it takes with it all of those entanglements, and that real and honest awkward love.

He walks through the Gare d’Austerlitz and out into the low sun. As he makes his way home through the streets, the sunlight is sharp between buildings, the blue shadow sliced into wedges. The city seems more stark, more sharply angled, the sky more distant. It seems more beautiful, if that were possible. It seems more dangerous, and more prone to harm.

—

A bitter bright cold day. The lift is out of order and the seven flights leave her out of puff. Suzanne lets herself in, closes the door behind her and eases off her shoes. Her nose is cold, her hands are frozen. She’s already fumbling in her shopping bag, drawing out a little crocheted rug.

“Darling…”

He needs his peace, his privacy. But he also needs to be taken care of, since he can’t be trusted to do it himself. He can put this over his knees as he works; it’ll keep him warm while he is writing.

“Are you there?”

She has spent a good deal of time on it. There is, as her mother would say, a lot of love gone into that rug.

“I have a present for you.”

There’s no reply. She stands, silent, listening to the empty apartment. Disappointed, she lays the rug over the arm of the settee, smoothing out the crocheted squares.

He has left his notebook lying on the table. She stands looking at it.

He will be back at any moment. She’ll make some coffee. She’ll give him the rug. They will have some time together, and she will leave him to get on with his work.

She stands looking at the notebook. She doesn’t go to the kitchen. She moves closer to the table and touches the book; she lifts it. Her whole body’s alert for a foot on the stair, the creak of a board, the shift in sound as the main door opens from the street below, any hint of his return.

It has never been forbidden, that she look at his work. But then, it shouldn’t need to be forbidden.

She opens it.

The pages separate on a mess; they’re thick with scribbles, scratchings-out.

Her skin bristles in unease.

She leafs back through to see what came before. The notebook is three-quarters full; the completed pages are densely covered. But every clear French phrase that has been achieved is barricaded all around by crossings-out and scribblings. He has filled pages, he has written his pen dry and refilled it, he has covered sheets and sheets, but very little is let stand. It seems that all that has been achieved here is the consumption of paper, ink and time.

Baffled, she frowns down at the mess of it.

The hours they’d spent in cafés, he and his friend Alfred, before Alfred joined up, going over this. And now the hours alone. And this is all there is to show for it.

She turns another page. On the verso, he has drawn a little picture of Charlot, the tramp with his bowler hat coming down over his eyes, his toothbrush moustache like Adolf the peacemaker’s, his sagging trousers, his splayed feet in broken boots. What does he think he is doing? Why can’t he simply write? Why can’t he just get on with it?

And then there’s a yell—from outside, in the street. She drops the book and turns to the window, peers down at a scuffle. Is that him? He doesn’t have his papers, oh my God, they’ll lock him up.

And then she sees the ball.

Just a kickabout in the street. Her fear contracts. A bad-tempered game, all elbows and shoving. The ball is sent spinning crosswise on to the pavement, where Monsieur Lunel shuffles along under his black fedora, his body foreshortened by the angle, and one of the lads runs over and scoops up the ball and apologizes, and another comes up and up and stands too close to the old man, his skinny chest puffed out—she can’t hear what he says from up here—and spits upon the ground. Then his mate shoves him, and there’s another scuffle, and the ball bounces off the cobbles, and they chase after it, and Monsieur Lunel, after standing frozen for a moment, shuffles on.

This is what they don’t see, the Amerloques and the Irlandais, the writers and the artists and the wives who come here for the cheap living and the cheap wine and the distance from their mothers, all his fly-by-night friends. They skate over the shining surface; they don’t see the murk beneath.

She peels her forehead from the window, rubs the mark with a sleeve and turns away. She sees the notebook lying there on the tabletop. How exactly had he left it?

She meets him at the door and gives him quick kisses, one cheek and then the other. He has brought a parcel home with him; he drops it on the settee. She hands him a cup, laughs at herself—a tussle in the street, I thought they were arresting you! She shows him the rug that she made for him, though it has already lost half its loveliness: she had thought that they were both, in their own ways, working on the same thing. On his success.

“What’s in the parcel?” she asks.

He touches the rug, pressing a little moss-coloured square of wool with his fingertips. “This is very nice. Thank you.”

He takes the parcel over to the table and lays it down to open it. “It was left with the concierge.” She sees him notice the notebook. “Have you been here long?” he asks.

“No,” she says, a shade too quickly. “Not long. What’s in the parcel?” she asks again.

“Soon find out.”

He opens a drawer and slides the notebook in. Then he turns the package over so that he can get at the knots. The bundle is soft and bulky and he has already noted Nora’s girlish handwriting, but he can’t make sense of it at all. He undoes the knot, tugs the string away and unfurls the waxy paper. Inside there is a bolt of dark twill. He still can’t make sense of it. And then he sees. He lifts it out. It is a coat.

“A coat,” she says.

It brings with it a cloud of scent: pomade, cheroot smoke and lemon soap. A cloud of associations, of time dispensed in cafés and books and drink, the gut-punch of guilt about Lucia. A note tumbles from the folds and lands on the floor. He stoops for it and peers, holding it close up to his face to read. This from the man himself.

“Who’s it from?”

“Mr. Joyce.”

For all of everything, this is what he’s worth. He gets to wear the great man’s cast-off coat.

“Oh,” she says. “Well. That’s handy.”

He folds the coat and lays it in the paper, and fumbles it all back together again. He sits down. He takes out pen and paper.

“What are you doing?”

“A thank-you note.”

“Ah.”

His hand flicks across, leaving loops and curls of blue behind it, then whisking down to traverse the page again. The white swiftly fills with clean blue. Her lips bunch and twist. She turns and moves away to the little kitchenette, where she rummages irritably in the cupboards, drags out tins and packets, shoves them back. She feels as though she has been taken for a fool.

CHAPTER FOUR

L’EXODE

June 1940

Anxiety makes the air thick; the urgency is a dream urgency, where there is a desperate need to run and yet the limbs are heavy and entangled. The earth shudders when the bombs hit. The sky is greasy with smoke.

The ticket officer doesn’t look up. “Where do you want to go?”

They’ve been queuing for hours; they’re footsore and twitchy to be gone. He has two bags and she has her backpack. Trains have arrived with their plumes of steam and they’ve left with their plumes of steam, and the concourse remains congested still, suitcases drawn into little settlements with joggled babies and fractious kids and tired old women, and the queue weaves round and through it all, a ragged line of anxious faces and sweated-through summer clothes; it has been skin-crawlingly slow progress to get even as far as the ticket desk. It has been an age. And not once in all that age did it occur to him that this might come up. The only thought so far has been
Away.

“There’s a choice?”

The ticket officer looks up now. “Well, no. But people tend to say, and then I tell them what I can give them.” The fellow glances past them at the never-ending queue. “It’s usually over quite briskly.”

Suzanne huffs in irritation. He touches her arm. “So, what can you give us?”

“There’s a train for Vichy in a couple of hours.”

“Vichy…” He turns to Suzanne. She nods, whisks a hand to hurry things along. The old spa town will do; anywhere will do; anywhere away from here.

“It’s a four-hour journey, under normal circumstances,” the ticket officer says. “But these aren’t normal circumstances.”

A thought leaps up: Joyce is now at Vichy. They’d shifted there from Saint-Gérand-le-Puy; there was a postcard from an hotel, the Hotel…Beaujolais. Maybe they could get a room there themselves. So they’ll go to Vichy and they’ll see Joyce, and it’s a feeling something like home. A little landslip of images: white wine and talk, and together they’re leaning over a copy of the
Wake,
and he is reading out the commas and the full stops while Shem frowns and nods and determines what corrections must be made. He can swallow down his chagrin about the coat; he can swallow it down like a gannet. The war will blunder past their windows and bowl along the high street and they’ll barely notice that it’s happening at all.

“Vichy it is, then.”

While the tickets are torn, he counts out his francs. Their little store of money is dwindling at an alarming rate. He tries to gulp the worry down along with the shame, but it twists and flicks and shivers inside, very much alive.

“What will we do in Vichy?” Suzanne asks. They weave through the crowds, lugging their bags, in the hope of finding a quiet corner to settle down and wait.

“Work out what to do next,” he says.

—

The train doors are slammed open; there’s a surge forward through the ticket barrier and down on to the platform. The two of them are pushed along with it. He wants to stand back, to let people in ahead, to wait for the crowds to clear. Good manners are worn deep into the grain. And yet a more atavistic edge shoulders forward too—
me, I, need
—and he is pushing ahead, his heart beating faster, his body seething with adrenaline. Guards yell and bellow and are ignored. Children cry. Suzanne falls behind, dragged away by her backpack in the crush as though she is being pulled out to sea. And there is also
we,
also
us.

“Come on—”

He reaches for her and she grabs his hand and hers is small and sweaty, and he pulls her up to join him, and they are at the dirty flank of the train, just a yard from an open door. He shoves forward, hindered and frustrated by the bodies ahead of him, the crush that moves into any space behind, the grimed hat and greased hair of the man in front, the solid flesh and the smell of it all. He glances back at Suzanne; strangers’ shoulders press between him and her. She is struggling on, scowling at the nuisance of it all.

“Are you all right?”

She nods, grim. Their hands are clamped tight together between the flanks of others, their fingers intermeshed. His hand stretching back to hers, he steps on to the first tread up into the carriage and drags her with him, insistent.

“Excuse me,” she says, pushing through.

Face tight against the knapsack of the man in front, he gets up the second step and she heaves herself out of the crush to climb up behind him. They are on board.

They are lucky. The concourse is still full. The station doors are bolted. The grilles are locked down; the ticket clerks are gone and the offices are shut. And behind the closed gates and grilles and doors, there are people still waiting, still hoping: once the crowd inside has cleared, perhaps the station doors will be unlocked again, perhaps the Gare de Lyon will reopen and they too can make their way out of the threatened city and go wherever it is still possible to go.

—

The train is an adder, barely warmed by the early sun; it moves by inches, eighths, sixteenths. It hardly moves at all.

A layer of smoke hangs over the city; it rises in plumes here and there, sickly-looking and unsettling.

“Do you think that’s an air defence, to screen the people as they leave?”

“Maybe. Or they’re bonfires.”

“Why would they have bonfires?”

“To be rid of stuff they wouldn’t want the enemy to get their hands on.”

They sit shoulder-to-shoulder on the hard wooden bench. There are passengers packed, standing, down the length of the corridor. He chews his nails when he isn’t smoking; when he isn’t smoking he chews his nails. She stares out of the window, her hands in her lap, knees sloped together; his long legs are tucked uncomfortably in. His two bags are wedged behind his heels; her overstuffed backpack is on her lap.