Jo Baker - A Country Road, a Tree

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.

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.