A Country Road, A Tree (8 page)

“What?”

“You must vacate the hotel in the morning.”

“But we’ve only just arrived.”

The boy looks off down the corridor. “It can’t be helped. It’s out of our hands. Government orders.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Paris has fallen,” the boy says, a little too loudly and quickly. Then he pauses, straightens his shoulders, clears his throat. “Paris has fallen, and so the government is to move here. They are to take over the hotel. All the hotels.” Though the boy holds himself straight, his young eyes are brimming.

“If you would settle your bill in the morning, sir, and then vacate the premises.”

He doesn’t move.

The boy gives a little bow, and then turns abruptly and marches a few steps down the corridor, to the next room along.

He closes the door. He can hear the boy, the conversation he’s now having with the other guests, which follows much the same pattern as their own. The rumble of the man’s voice, the higher pitch of the boy’s. His lines sound surer now; by the end of the day he might even have convinced himself.

Suzanne says, “What shall we do?”

He says nothing. He still faces the door, his head bent. His hands in his pocket, he runs the coins through his fingers and his mouth twists.

“But what shall we do?” Suzanne asks. “Where shall we go?”

He still stands there, his gaze on the wood panels and brass fittings. If he could just stop. Give up. Have done with it all.

Suzanne lets go a long slow breath. He hears the springs creak as she heaves herself to her feet. “I’d better pack.” But then she doesn’t move any further; after all, there’s hardly any packing to be done.

He turns back to the room. He fishes up his boots and sits to drag them on.

“Where are you going?” she asks.

“Have to sort something out,” he says. “I’ll be back soon.”

—

It’s the act of a child, he knows it is; he’s reaching up to tug a sleeve, to slip a sticky little hand into his father’s hand.

Joyce, gaunt, his dark glasses on, rests his paws on the head of his cane, and turns to stare blankly for a waiter, and seems more in need of help than able to provide it. The Joyces, just like everybody else currently lodged in the hotels of Vichy, must move on. They must go back to the village, to village life, however unwelcome that must be. They do, though, have somewhere to go, and that is something.

“Get the boy’s attention, would you?”

When the waiter comes over, Joyce orders a
pichet
of the local white, and taps his fingers till it arrives. When it does he takes a mouthful, winces, then takes another sip.

“The old stomach trouble,” he says.

“You have had another attack?”

He tilts his head. “More a war of attrition. I find that white wine helps. That and Pernod; both are good.”

“Ah.”

“It’s my nerves,” he says. “It’s just a nervous disorder. I’ve had several doctors agree on that.”

He murmurs sympathy, but can only think how much he doesn’t want to ask what he has to ask.

“Well, it seems that we’re to be off,” Joyce says. “And in short order. So that’s that. No wonder my nerves are playing merry hell, faced with a return to that backwater.”

To the village where the dogs are not on leashes and they bark at the strange old blind man fumbling his way down the street, muttering to himself because there is nobody to talk to and throwing stones.

He wants to offer rather than ask. He wants to say, I’ll help you. I’ll come with you to Saint-Thingummy-Bob and spend the days correcting the whole of the
Wake
again for you. I’ll read out every comma, dash and full stop and you can sit and consider each and every one of them for days, and drink white wine, and think, and change your mind, and change it back again, and there will be time enough and more for all of it; that would be a life well spent, filling your glass, playing the piano or listening to you play and sing; throwing stones at dogs on your behalf.

“Then I suppose we shall try for Switzerland,” Joyce says.

“Ah, yes.”

Then the words come falling out of the old thin lips: “I think that’s the only choice that we have left now, because Switzerland was kind to us before, in the last war. Lucia could come to us there, the best treatment she could hope for is in Switzerland. And Giorgio would be out of the way of conscription. And whatever he is up to in Paris.”

“Good,” he says.

The old man drinks. His Adam’s apple rolls down and up, rearranging the soft folds of his throat.

“I hope you won’t mind me asking…,” he tries now.

The black glasses are shiny; they kick off light. He is being considered, head tilted. Peered at in peripheral vision.

“We are…,” he says, and clears his throat. The words are burrs, difficult to shift. “We find ourselves in some difficulty. It transpires my cheques are not acceptable here, and we are running very low on cash.”

“I don’t have any money,” Joyce says.

He swallows. “No, of course.”

“I have my family to think of, you know. Expenses.”

“I understand.”

He just wants this to be over. The embarrassment is acute. He’ll feel it for ever.

“Getting all of us to Switzerland will leave me overstretched.”

“Oh yes, indeed. Well, we shall manage…” Though he has no idea how. He scoops up his cigarettes, straightens his jacket, his face hot. What will he say to Suzanne?

Joyce turns his head, birdlike. “You’ll wear it out,” he says.

“What?”

“Love.”

“Love?”

“What’s left at the end, it’s threadbare, you can see right through it.”

The older man lifts his glass again, and his throat spasms as he drinks. He, though, leans away from the table and the glasses. He watches, suddenly clear, wondering how it happened. That the old man should be so diminished. That his gaze should have become so narrow. His skin comes out in gooseflesh as old Shem talks on, about the seat of love and where it lies, rather lower than the heart, and the failure of it always in the end, how it leaves him in disgust even to hear talk of it.

Shem is not what he was; he is not what he achieved. How could he be?

“Well,” he says eventually, “I had better go.”

“Eh?” Joyce raises his head. “Yes. I suppose so. So many departures, after all.”

He reaches into his pocket for coins that he can’t afford to part with. He feels light and empty and one step away from himself, almost elated. This sense of loss, the openness that is offered by it. He has not even been abandoned; he was never held that dear. The world is different and brilliant and empty.

Joyce drains his drink, and then sets his glass down and nods quietly, agreeing with his own thoughts.

He counts out his weightless coins.

“D’you know Larbaud?” Joyce says, out of nowhere.

He blinks. “Valéry Larbaud, the writer?”

“Yes, yes.”

“I know the work,” he says, nonplussed.

“Get the boy’s attention, would you? We must have another
pichet.
”

“Oh, I’m not, no.”

“Nonsense, I insist.”

So he turns in his seat, catches an eye and gestures for more wine, while Joyce talks on.

“Larbaud’s an old friend of mine; he lives round here. You should go and see him. He might be able to help you out.”

“Do you think?”

A nod. “Larbaud is on the side of the angels. And he’s rich. Which is only sensible, if you must be a writer.”

A hand-me-down coat, a favour done by proxy. He drains his glass, and humiliation rinses through him, and it is cleansing.

“Yes, good,” Joyce says. “I’m glad I could be of help.”

—

Madame Larbaud greets him at the door; she is courteous, with a quietness about her that doesn’t invite conversation. This is welcome.

The house is dim and cool and lovely. She leads him through the lobby and the scent of lilacs and the sound of trickling water—in Vichy there is always water—and it is as much as he can do to put one foot in front of the other.

He carries a letter of introduction in his breast pocket, addressed in Joyce’s own hand. It lies there like a plaque over his heart. He doesn’t know what the letter says and he doesn’t want to know. The experience is mortifying enough already.

Her heels click along the floor; his leathered tread is softer on the tiles.

“You know, I imagine,” Madame Larbaud says, “about Monsieur Larbaud’s state of health?”

“I understand that he has not been well.”

“You know that he cannot speak?”

He did not. “I’m sorry.”

She pauses at the door, a hand on the glossy wooden panel, as though she is going to say something more, but then thinks better of it. She pushes the door open.

The wheelchair is placed in a shaft of light from the French windows; Larbaud is reading, the book flat on his lap, his left hand holding it open. Madame crosses the room to her husband. She touches his hand, lifts the book from his lap and moves round to stand behind him. Larbaud lifts his left hand to the newcomer to be shaken.

The hand is cold and soft in his; Larbaud’s eyes are heavy-lidded, his face half-fallen.

“It is kind of you to see me, Monsieur Larbaud.” His hand feels strange with the softness he had gripped. He fumbles in his jacket and produces the letter. His face burns. “This is from our mutual friend, Mr. James Joyce.”

Larbaud does not smile, is perhaps unable to smile, but his face somehow lightens. The letter is suspended there between them, hanging from his fingertips. The seated man doesn’t move to take it—he can’t, of course. Awkward, he moves closer, but then instead Madame darts forward, relieves him of the letter, opens it, retrieves spectacles from a pocket, helps her husband on with them. Her silence is a kindness; it softens her husband’s, makes it less stark. She hands Larbaud the unfolded sheet; he holds it left-handed; he peers through thick lenses, while she looks off and away, leaving him to read privately.

Larbaud’s expression as he reads is itself unreadable behind those shining lenses. He turns away too, towards the high windows, and endures the silence and the shame. The husband passes the letter up again to his wife’s smooth hands. There’s a look, a touch between them. She glances over the letter. She murmurs a few words to Larbaud and he nods. Then she refolds the paper and slips it back into its envelope as she moves over to his desk.

“We should like to help you.”

He swallows. “Thank you.”

“How much do you need? Not just to resolve your current troubles, but to see you on to wherever you are going?”

He shakes his head, not in negation, but because he has no answer for her. It’s a calculation that he cannot make, and a gratitude that is beyond articulation.

—

The money is a thick pad in his breast pocket. His throat is thick too, as he goes with her down the hallway. Their footsteps syncopate.

She opens the door for him. She smiles.

“Thank you,” he says again. The words are entirely insufficient, but they are all he has.

“It’s a little thing,” she says.

It is not a little thing at all. “I shall return the money to you as soon as possible.”

“Well, don’t make things difficult for yourself.” And then she says, “Good luck to you, Monsieur, and good courage.”

She closes the door on him; he catches a glimpse of her face as it turns away, back to that closed room, and the silent man in the wheelchair, and the wordlessness.

Don’t make things difficult for yourself.

He stands there in the blue evening. He lets a breath go. They are saved. For the time being.

He lights up a cigarette and sets off back through the cool residential streets. A proper meal, he realizes, is now possible. He peers in through café windows as he passes, at the neatly laid tables, at the soft old ladies already poking at their salads there. He and Suzanne will find a nice little place; they’ll have dinner tonight. They’ll sleep in a decent bed, and then tomorrow set out again, into whatever follows. They’ll head for—well, for the coast, for Arcachon, if that is possible, if Suzanne is willing to give it a try. They have, after all, an invitation there. And underneath everything is a taint of unease. He is ashamed, he does not deserve; why him, why should he be saved?

On the wider roads and avenues there are carts and cabs lining up along the pavements. The lobby of the Beaujolais is filled with piled bags and trunks, with anxious, tired women settling their bills, with drooping children, and old men monopolizing the chairs.

—

And you must come and see us there, at Arcachon. It will be a long summer if you do not come.

But the station at Vichy is closed to passengers; it is rammed with government traffic and only official travellers are allowed through. If they are heading west, to the coast, they should try one of the stations further down the line. Gannat, say; that’s probably their best bet.

“Is there a bus to Gannat?”

A blowing-out of the lips, a shake of the head: who’s to say?

And so they walk. Bags on back, on shoulder and on hip. Through the town, and then the suburbs, and then out of Vichy itself, the mountains rising fat and green ahead of them, the streams bumbling under ancient stone arches below.

“How far now?”

“A little less far than when you asked before.”

The day is soft and cool and there is a springtime feel to it, and there are people strung out in little clots all along the road, as though they were setting out on a pilgrimage. Little traffic passes: the odd truck, the occasional Citroën, a farm cart. It’s not too bad for now: he and Suzanne are rested, fed, and that’s something. But they are right in the middle of France; this is the core, the omphalos. They must cross half of France again to reach the sea.

“Not that we’ll be walking all that way,” she says out loud.

“No,” he says. “We’ll get on a train. At Gannat. The man said.”

She nods; she watches the mountains for a moment, the birds circling in the updraught. Then her eyes are on the curve in the road ahead, and then down at her feet, swinging out, one after the other. Somewhere, a bird is singing. She doesn’t know what kind of bird.