A Country Road, A Tree (9 page)

It’s all right for now; maybe it will continue to be all right.

“But then,” she says, “you know what the trains are like.”

—

This train stops altogether at Cahors. And there is nothing to be done but to descend, stiff and gritty with fatigue, and follow the stream of crumpled passengers out into damp air. The station guard points them along to the reception centre—beds lined up in the hall, hot soup. But they can’t go there, not without the proper papers: if someone asks and he can’t produce them, he could be arrested. So they nod and say thank-you, and she takes his arm, and they peel away, off into the dark.

The rain keeps the streets quiet, makes them conspicuous. No one stays out in rain like this unless they really can’t help it. He turns his collar up, winces as the water runs down his neck. She tugs at her bag strap. He offers her an arm. She shakes her head. It will just press the wet through to their skin.

The rain knocks the blossoms from the trees and the pavement becomes slick and treacherous with petals. Their feet squelch inside their shoes. At the first hotel, the lobby is warm with gaslight. Unhappily, the receptionist informs them, the last room has just been let: she was just about to turn the sign over. They are directed on to a guest house, where the board is already up in a window.
No Vacancies.

“I’m tired,” she says.

“I know.”

“I’d settle for a stable now. A shed.”

But no star, no kings, no virgin birth. He takes his glasses off and rubs the lenses on a sleeve. They’re still too wet to wear, so he pockets them, presses his tired eyes. But that’s when she staggers, sways. He reaches out to steady her.

“All right?”

She nods.

Her face, though, is white and running with water, and her eyes close in a slow blink. She would be safe, if it were not for him; she would at least be safer; she would be holed up in the countryside with her mother. She would be staying with a friend. Even now she could be tucked up in a reception centre. There’s nothing wrong with her papers.

“Come on,” he says. He hauls her upright. “There’ll be something round the next corner…” Even if it is just slick pavements, bolted doors.

They carry on. It’s getting dark; the rain continues. They are in narrower, winding streets, which circle in upon themselves, repeating and changing like a melody, at once familiar and different. A thin wind throws the rain right into their faces; their eyes sting. The church looms above them. The street curves away in both directions, a commercial street with all the commerce done and everything locked up and shuttered for the night. Have they been this way before? Are they walking round in circles? Would it even matter if they were, since there is nowhere to go but on? Then Suzanne pulls away from him and stumbles off across the wet cobblestones.

“What—?” he follows her.

She sinks down on a public bench.

And now they’ve stopped. Somewhere a clock chimes ten. He stands beside her, puts a hand on her shoulder. The wool is cold and wet. She leans against him like a dog, eyes shutting, half asleep although still upright. His eyes could close too, and then the sting would be less, of water, and the salt that water picks up off the skin. But he doesn’t trust himself to close his eyes.

“We can’t stop here,” he says.

She nods, her cheek grazing up and down against the cloth of his coat.

“You have to get up. Suzanne. Listen. We have to move on.”

She turns her face up to him, opens her eyes. Her skin is bone-white; her eyes are black.

“Where’ll we go?” she asks.

He blinks and looks away. He wipes his face.

“I don’t know,” he says, “but we have to.” And music winds through and out of the tumbling rain, and his head is filled with the brilliant hallucination of song.

Vom Abendrot zum Morgenlicht

Ward mancher Kopf zum Greise

Wer glaubt’s? Und meiner ward es nicht

Auf dieser ganzen Reise!

His head feels full and overflowing. It seethes with music and fatigue. Her body leans heavy against his; he feels it through him when she shivers. It is deep and hard, a palsy through her bones.

Terror has wormed its way into his. He wipes his face and the wet is cold with rain and warm with tears. There is another voice now in his head. It cuts through the music, the night and the rain, through everything with its sharp incision:

What possible use do you imagine you would be?

“Come on,” he says to Suzanne.

She slowly shakes her head.

“Come on,” he says, and reaches for her arm.

Suzanne mumbles and softly resists his pull. “I feel quite warm now.”

“No,” he says. “You can’t do that.”

He leans down and wraps his arms around her; he lugs her to her feet. For a moment they sway together. Exhaustion has made them ridiculous: they could be toppled with a push. Soaking, they cling to each other, all legs and arms, like a creature of the moon.

Then they are spotlit. The green fleck in her coat, the cold pink of her throat. He leans away to look at her and she blinks like a baby at him, confused.

Who’s watching them?

He scans round. On the far side of the street, above a shop, a window is illuminated. Then a figure looms up against the pane and draws down the blind. Blackout now. They’re back in darkness. It turns out nobody’s watching them. Nobody’s interested in them at all.

“Come on.”

He shifts his grip round her and half carries her across the street, to an unknown door.

—

They eat, huddled in the upstairs room in front of a low fire. Suzanne’s cheeks are hot, and from time to time a deep shiver runs through her. She is capable of nothing beyond the necessities of courtesy. If her eye is caught, she smiles. It’s the best that she can do. She is not yet herself, but at least she has the chance now to become herself again.

The window is misted; it runs with drips. They have been found two rush-seated chairs and given cushions. There is a liquorice liqueur in chipped coffee cups that they both sip at compulsively. There is perfect bread and perfect ham. These are extraordinary comforts.

They wear stale-smelling, borrowed sweaters. Their coats steam over chair backs, their shoes are stuffed with newspaper, their socks and stockings hang above the fireplace to dry.

The lady of the house, who is the keeper, too, of the shop below, asks about what’s going on in the north. Paris has fallen, she heard that from the radio, but you can’t be certain of what you are told, not the radio, not the newspapers, not any more. They keep telling everybody to stay calm, but why should we be calm? Things must be very bad indeed if people will up and leave their lives behind just like that.

“We don’t know any more than you,” he says. “We left before the Germans got there.”

She widens her eyes, considers this. “I suppose you’d have had to,” she says, “or you couldn’t have left at all.”

There is no space for them in the flat, the family is already packed in like cigars in a box. They will have to sleep downstairs in the shop. They can borrow blankets.

He watches Suzanne down the narrow stairs; he carries the bundle of bedding. She is doing what she’s told without demur, she’s uncertain of her footing. She holds tight to the handrail, like an old woman. He is still worried about her.

The shop below sells religious paraphernalia. It is populated with plaster saints. Christ hangs, his ivory flesh crucified over and over again, all around the walls. Sacred hearts flicker in the light of their little candle. This is the
deus ex machina
by which they have been saved.

They huddle down behind the counter, backs to the panelling, the counter-top a narrow ceiling above them. The little shop is riddled with draughts. He fumbles a borrowed blanket over her shoulders, draws the other up over his knees. They sit shivering side by side. There’s a steady drip from the blocked guttering and the tumbling rush of water down the street outside. He huffs out the candle and the saints blink out of sight. In the darkness, she huddles closer, her face pressed into the covers. Her voice comes muffled through the blanket.

“It smells of feet.”

“Want me to turn it round?”

She shakes her head.

After a while, she says, “I’m so cold.”

He fumbles his blanket loose and lays it over her knees too. Stiff, she pulls her blanket out in a wing and slides it behind his shoulder, draping it round him.

“Well,” he says. “This is not so bad.”

She tuts.

“You’ll be missing your lovely bench, then, and the rain?”

He can just about make her out in the light from the street: her white face, beautiful and alien as those plaster saints. He should never have burdened her with him; he should never have let her make herself a part of what he did. Her head sinks down to rest on her knees.

“You see, you’ve got these great long legs,” she mumbles. “And mine are only short.”

The warmth gathers between them; their outer edges are still cold. Blinks slow; breath softens. Now and then there is a shiver. In the hallucinatory slip towards sleep, it seems to him that the statues swell and shrink with breath. Blood wells from wounds and drips, drips, drips. And below, on the bare floorboards, human bodies share the almost nothing that they have, and go on living.

CHAPTER FIVE

ARCACHON

Summer 1940

The waves creep up and crash on the far side of the rue de la Plage. The breeze is cool from the Atlantic and takes the sting out of the sun. The two men sit on the terrace, under the shade of an awning. Their hands are brown as they reach to lift and shift the veined marble and speckled granite pieces.

It has been—who would deny it?—a beautiful summer, full of ugly news.

Studying the chessboard, a cigarette smouldering between his knuckles, he tries to conjure all the futures he and Marcel Duchamp might summon up between them here. Marcel lifts a piece, and sets it down, and a web of potentiality collapses and falls away to dust: the future refines itself. He follows threads of possibility. He thinks.

Marcel tweaks the brim of his white straw hat low, to shade his eyes. Mary reads on the sunlounger, soft-limbed and tanned, and every so often he hears her sigh and turn a page.

He takes a long drag on his cigarette, and lets the smoke go, and lifts his knight.

When Suzanne joins them, after her swim, all slicked wet hair and lean tan, Mary looks up with a smile and sets her book aside. Drinks are proposed and the game put in abeyance till the following day. The stone figures cast long shadows as the sun sinks, and everything is softened by the Charentais-pink light. They drink and talk and laugh and it is all apparently quite lovely. But it is also a bubble. Everybody knows that it can’t last.

“There is Spain, of course; we could go to Spain.”

“Why would you go to Spain?”

“A friend of mine’s in the British Consulate there. And it’s not far.”

“That’s no reason to go anywhere. You don’t want to go to Spain. Spain will be shit.”

“Marcel!”

“Sorry. My apologies. The ladies’ tender ears, et cetera. But it will be shit. You know it will.”

“You’d need a car to get to Spain.” Mary turns to him, speaks in sudden English.

“Do you think so?”

“Well, it’d be a hell of a walk.”

“Oh, he could walk it,” Suzanne says, and they are back in French. “He could walk the legs off a mule, you should see him walk, my God.” Suzanne lifts her glass; he looks to her, but she doesn’t catch his eye. He has offended her, it seems, but he doesn’t quite know how.

“You don’t want to go to Spain.” This is Marcel again. “Bloody fascists.”

Mary’s tone is emollient, explanatory: “I don’t think he is suggesting they settle there permanently.”

Marcel tilts his head at this now. “America?”

“Ireland,” he concedes.

“Ah, you’re going home.”

“I wouldn’t quite say that.”

Suzanne looks up at him, his heron profile, his shadowed eyes. His spectacles have been tucked carefully away. He turns his head and meets her look with that startling blue gaze.

“What would we do,” Suzanne asks, “in Ireland?”

He shrugs. “We’d get by.”

Suzanne looks at him, then down at her glass. She turns it round and round on the tabletop, watching the light caught there, the way it stays put no matter how much she twists the glass. Her cheeks feel hot.

“Better off in America,” Marcel says. “Ireland won’t last. Not after England falls.”

Mary gives him a look.

“I’m telling you. America will be all that’s left. Anywhere else will just be more of the same, and it will be shit.”

A bruised silence. Suzanne watches as Marcel drains his glass, and pours himself another drink, and starts talking about New York. He, though, has reverted to wordlessness; she can hear him breathing, and that is all; breathing, thinking, unfathomably thinking. While Marcel goes on: New York is the future; New York is where they should all be heading now; New York will soon be all that’s left of Europe.

“I miss Paris,” Mary says lightly.

“You’ll always miss Paris.” Marcel lifts his cigarette case from the tabletop. “From now on, all of us who ever gave a fig for it always will. Paris won’t be Paris any more. Paris can never truly be Paris again.”

He, now, leans away from Marcel; he folds his arms, glances over to the chessboard.

“Well, Paris is my home,” Mary says. “It’s where my books are.”

“You can make more books,” Marcel says, over a huff of cigarette smoke. “You always do.”

There’s a silence after this, and it extends just a little too long before Mary speaks again.

“I’ll go see what’s holding dinner up.”

She gets to her feet and pads off inside the house.

—

Later, the two of them walk home together along the promenade. She slips her bare arm through his; it is cool silk, and heavy.

“Earlier, what you said about us going to Ireland.”

“Yes.”