Jo Baker - A Country Road, a Tree

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.

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?”