A Country Road, A Tree (7 page)

The train creeps past streets; it begins to pick up a little speed. Passengers strike up conversations. Children chatter, swing their feet. A road swerves towards the line and for a moment the two run side by side. The road is a rubbish dump, a mound of junk and clutter. But then it separates itself into movement, individuals, men and women trudging burdened like ants; into cars, donkeys, handcarts, prams, horses, suitcases, bicycles, frying pans and mattresses, birds in cages, briefcases. A child lugging a baby. An old woman in a pram, legs dangling, pushed by an old man who squints in the bright June sun. His eyes catch on the woman’s white, sharp face above the bundled body. The train pulls past the two, the old woman and the old man scraping along together, and then a fence ticks past, breaking up the image like an old zoetrope, and he closes his eyes, and reaches in behind his spectacles to press on them.

When he looks again, a brick wall ghosts alongside and Suzanne’s head is resting against the window; her eyes are closed and she is breathing softly and asleep. He is glad that she’s asleep. He feels as though he could never sleep again.

When Suzanne wakes, they are out in the countryside and the train has picked up speed. He sits glaring out of the window, across the copses, the wide planes of farmland, at the dotted villages and church spires.

“What is it?” she asks.

“The people.”

“What people?”

He nods across the open land, towards the main road south. The way is packed still, cars nudging along, edging past the pedestrians and pony carts.

“Name of God,” she says. “That must be the whole of Paris.”

He says, “Yes. And…”

“What?” She glances round at him.

“And, I think, the army,” he says.

“What?”

“I think I saw uniforms. Before.” He raises his shoulders. His sight is not that good. “I can’t be sure.”

Her face goes still. She turns back to the window. The train skims across a bridge over the road. And then she sees them too. It’s just a moment, and then the train is past and they’re gone. But a pocket of infantry was slumped on the verge, filthy and unkempt, legs stretched out in front of them in the long summer grass.

“But no,” she says. “What are they doing?”

“You see them?”

She nods.

“It must be a rout.”

She sits back, swallows. After a moment: “Maybe there won’t be so much fighting in Paris. If they are running away.”

“That’s one way of thinking about it.”

“Hmm.”

“But the other way is, with the army there, that makes everyone a target.”

“You think they’ll come?”

She turns her gaze up; she searches the sky. The sky remains, for the time being, innocent and clear blue.

—

The train stops unpredictably, and in awkward places. Time ticks by, and people murmur, and children cry.

They are marooned. An hour; an hour and a half. Her stomach rumbles, and she folds her arms over it. The sun glares on them. Her face is pale and sweaty.

“If we were at a station,” someone says, “we could nip out and buy some bread.”

Further up the train, someone thumps open a carriage door and climbs down on to the track. She watches the dark figure pick his way across to the embankment, then stand there at the edge of the grass. It takes her a moment to realize that he’s pissing, and then she looks away. Soon others are climbing down from the carriages to stretch their legs and relieve themselves; women share a cigarette, or clamber further up through the long grass and off into the bushes. Children hopscotch from sleeper to sleeper; a toddler blinks sleepily in the daylight as his mother holds him, pants around his ankles, and he puddles the gravel.

And then there is a whistle and a rush and a general rebuttoning and regathering, and a flurry to get back inside.

The train grinds back into motion, and for a while is clipping along again, stopping sometimes as other trains whistle past, and sometimes stopping for no obvious reason at all.

—

Vichy is cursed; leaves and tendrils and blooms and branches have been bewitched into stone and steel, and forced into service as buildings and street furniture. There is clean cold light here; the streets are glistening and chill.

Together they head down one of the main boulevards. Every step becomes a conscious effort, and he feels as though he is tacking and lurching along like a golem. They’re being watched—discreetly from café terraces, from the security of linked arms, from behind the defensive barrier of a shopping basket or a yapping dog. Children simply stop and stare. Because Vichy is not used to visitors like these: scruffy, exhausted, travel-worn visitors who flood out of third-class carriages with their belongings bulging from their bags and without the means to make themselves comfortable. Wealth, in Vichy, is as normal as the bubbling warm water; here, nobody carries their own luggage.

One bag slides against his thigh as he walks.
Murphy, Murphy, Murphy.
The other bag drags on his shoulder, stuffed with clothing, shaving gear, tinned food: the body’s barest needs make for a heavy load. If he could just be rid of one of the bags; to shed either his manuscript or his belongings would be such a relief. But he heaves one strap up his shoulder and hooks a thumb under the other, and drags himself along. Suzanne, craned forward by the weight of her backpack, trudges beside him, silent. They carry on, past the
tabac
on the corner and the pharmacy with its display of Vichy pastilles, the tins piled in a pyramid, and past the milliner’s shop where the hats are ranged like dead birds in a cabinet.

“The Hotel Beaujolais,” he says. “It’s on this street, it can’t be far.”

She nods. Mr. Joyce, it turns out, will be here. She hadn’t known that Vichy would also mean Joyce, would also mean hard drinking and unhappiness. Whatever he might think, Joyce is not what he needs.

—

There is, thank goodness, a room remaining at the Hotel Beaujolais. Suzanne lets her backpack slide from her shoulder and hit the floor.

Dark panelling, cool tiles: a couple of comfortable-looking armchairs. He is desperate for news, but the only paper is a folded copy of
Action Française
and he’s not going to stoop to that. Though it needn’t mean anything about this place—anybody could have left it there. For the moment at least, they must assume that this is a decent establishment.

And then the receptionist mentions the price of the room.

“Ah.”

The receptionist’s expression—he is a pale fellow with a neat moustache and clear skin—remains neutral, but then the cost is neither here nor there to him.

“You have nothing less…expensive?”

A minor shrug. “No, Monsieur.”

Because at whatever price they’re charging for a broom cupboard nowadays, there’ll be no difficulty in filling it, with Paris emptying itself out like a toppled-over bucket. Vichy can afford not to be cheap. They’ll have to keep on going, find somewhere more suited to their finances; the Joyces’ hotel was always likely to be too grand for them. He glances round at Suzanne, who has left her backpack on the floor where it fell. She is grey with fatigue.

“Problem?” she asks.

“No,” he says. “It’s fine.”

And so, definitively, he prints his name on the page and signs, committing himself to a sum that he really can’t afford.

“Monsieur and Madame Joyce are staying here, I believe?” he asks, and clears his throat.

“There is a gentleman and lady of that name, yes.”

He thanks the receptionist, and hates him. He takes the key and turns to lift Suzanne’s backpack, brushing off her protests, which are hardly meant. There are too many stairs; they just keep on going up and up until they reach a narrow landing, a corridor and a small dark door, where the number matches the number on their key. Inside, he drops their bags and the two of them fall on to the bed. It sinks beneath them, springs creaking. They lie there, parallel, feet trailing to the floor.

“Are you hungry?” she asks, a little later.

“I am, yes.”

“I’ll get those biscuits,” she says. But she doesn’t move. After a while, he sits up, strips the laces from his boots and toes them off, wincing. Then he unties her shoes for her too, and eases them from her feet and rolls down her stockings for her. Her toes are patched with red, her ankles swollen.

“Put your feet up,” he says.

She heaves herself round with a grunt and falls back on the pillow. He winces his way around the bed and lies down properly beside her. The shutters are closed. His eyelids are heavy. He thinks, I will just rest my eyes for a moment, but the next moment it is tomorrow.

—

He is returning from the bank. Where they will not cash a cheque—not his cheque anyway, not on an Irish bank. The hotel won’t take them either. He doesn’t know what he’s going to tell Suzanne. On a whim he ducks into a
boulangerie
and buys brioche, the smell making his stomach clench tight like a clam. This is money that should be used to pay for the room, but he doesn’t have enough to pay for the room and so it hardly seems to matter if he dispenses what little he has in dribs and drabs. Food. Shelter. Money. Shelter. Food. Money. It is all so simple and yet so unresolvable, and he is frowning over it, as though there were some obvious solution that he had missed, when his gaze snags on a dark figure across the street. He pushes his specs up, peers, and his face softens. There he is. The man himself. The crowds part around his strangeness as he fumbles along with his stick and glasses, oblivious and uncanny and sharp as you like.

He lopes across the avenue to him, up on to the far pavement, addresses him in English. “Mr. Joyce, sir.” He reaches out a hand, stops short of touching the sleeve. “Good morning to you.”

The head goes up, searching. The eyes are concealed by his dark glasses. He tilts his head.

“My word,” Joyce says. “Is it yourself?”

He says, “It seems so.”

“Ha! At last, thanks be to God, somebody to talk to.”

“Have you had any news, sir, from Paris?”

“No, no. Not a word. No one tells me anything.”

Joyce gropes forward with his stick; he turns his head to catch what he can in what’s left of his sight.

“Is that a dog?”—and an old hand fumbles into a pocket.

It’s a fluffy, perky little thing going by on a lead, tail up, arsehole on show, totally oblivious to the pair of them.

“Yes.”

Joyce has brought out a handful of stones, is picking through them with dry fingertips. “Where is it?”

“Gone,” he says, perturbed.

The old hand closes, slides back into the pocket. “Filthy creatures. They have no souls, you know.”

“Is that so?”

“They run loose all over the village. That place where we were staying.
Saint Machin Truc.
They bark at me.”

“Do they?”

He watches Joyce quite openly, knowing that he is not himself observed. It has been, what, six months since he saw him last? But it looks as though as many years have passed for the older man. Shem has stepped over a threshold, is suddenly old. He is crumpled-looking, his hair slick with pomade, but the white now shines through. His skin is slumped; he looks as though he’s wearing a mask of himself, of his own skin. The rings roll loose around his fingers.

“How are you, though?” he asks.

A shake of the head, a sigh, and then there falls a cascade of words. “I don’t know what we are coming to, I really don’t. All the books I want are still at the apartment in Paris, and I can’t get hold of anything I want down here. People say that they’ll send me books, but no one ever really sends me books, or not the right ones. Madame Jolas is pestering us to come back to the village, where we are safe, but you know what country life is. Anything is preferable to that, there’s no one to talk to, and the flat’s so small you couldn’t kill a cat in it—” A pause, a moment. “Vichy is a hole, but it is not as deep a hole as Saint-Gérand-le-Puy. I’m very glad, you know, that you have come. You will be an asset.”

To be noticed like this has its brief effect; it makes him more real, it makes him mean something. But the talk goes on and on as Joyce continues with his litany of complaint, and it need not really be him at all that hears it: the lack of notice of his
Wake,
the pointlessness of this war, the failure of others to see what is really necessary and important, Nora’s impatience, Lucia’s distractedness, Giorgio’s absences—the Lord knows what he is up to. Family concerns, family, family, family.

He nods. Of course. Family is what matters most at times like these.

But family is his mother sitting alone in the house by the harbour, watching the sea wind tear across the water and the cemetery and her husband’s grave. Family is Frank squinting out across the golf course, or hunched over his desk, doing capable things with account books and a slide rule. Is Mollie and Sheila, the tousled girls; is dispersed through Ireland, Wales and England and the Lord knows where. And he can’t go back to that, to family, because there is nowhere to go.

“Did you ever drive that ambulance?” Joyce asks.

“We were somewhat overtaken by events.”

At the hotel, they part with a handshake and a promise to meet later; they will go out for a drink.

And then, the thin old mouth parting on false teeth: “It’ll be just like old times, eh?”

He leaves Joyce waiting for Nora in the lobby and climbs the heavy stairs. Joyce exerts such a deliberate gravity; he draws one in, he buffers one away. One’s kept in orbit, circling.

—

He is woken by a rapping on the door. Suzanne sits up. Her face is lined by the pillow. He stumbles off the bed. In the doorway there’s a red-faced boy in livery, confusing just by being there, and then by being apologetic and in too much of a hurry to make sense.

“What? Sorry? Say that again.”

The boy redelivers his lines. He’s an unconvincing actor, distracted by what’s going on offstage. This is only one of many times today that he will have to blunder through this speech.

“What?” Suzanne says, shaking her head to clear it. “What is he saying?”

“The manager apologizes, we understand that this must be very inconvenient, but we are unable to continue to provide accommodation for you here.”