Jo Baker - A Country Road, a Tree

Alfy’s not necessarily lying, but there’s a lot of flannel here, a lot of bluff. Something is not being said. And since Alfy clearly prefers not to confide, he doesn’t really feel that he can say anything more than a platitudinous Take care. They part at the corner; he watches till Alfy reaches the next crossroads, and turns away. No backward glance.

Well, that was Alfy, and he was, for that one moment, there. He marks his friend off, on the tally in his head.

Tick.

—

He walks on, all the way to Mary Reynolds’s house on the rue Hallé. It is calm and dim and cool after the bright street, and she draws him inside as though these are the first steps of a dance. He follows her into the shadows, with her pale nape and the cornsilk of her cropped hair. She pours him a fine, offers him a seat. She puts on a ’78 and he melts into the chair.

For a while they just listen, sip. But he must know how she is faring, so “How are you getting on?” he asks.

She laughs, shakes her head. She had thought that she’d get so much work done here, back in Paris, that’d she’d just hole up at home and make her books. That there’d be nothing else to do. But the reality is that she is getting nothing done; she can’t bring herself to do it. She can’t make it feel important any more: it has no context, it makes no sense, it just doesn’t matter.

“Does it have to matter?”

“I’m used to it mattering.” She shrugs. “And then everything is such a fag, these days! Just the bare essentials take up so much of one’s time and energy. Living is a vocation now; life’s an art. One must carve it out for oneself every day.”

She moves to lift her glass; her long earrings catch the light. At least she is good at it, at this carving out of life. She does it with conviction.

“Any news of Marcel?”

Her face puckers up, half smiling, half a frown. “He’s quit,” she says.

“Quit?”

“Quit work.”

“No.”

She nods in contradiction. “It’s not that he can’t work — it is simply that he has decided not to.”

“And that’s that?”

“That’s that. All he’ll do now is chess.” She has heard it far too often, has got it by rote, is bored of it. “Art has become shop-soiled. You can buy and sell a picture or a sculpture, but you can’t own a game of chess.”

The purity of that. That’s something.

“Yes, he’s right, of course, I know,” she says. “But where does it take you, in the end?”

Through a complex web of potential, towards an endgame that is at once foreseeable and shifting, into silence, stillness. “It’s rather beautiful.”

“It’s a shame, is what it is. He was in Marseilles for a while, and Sanary-sur-Mer. He’s still planning to go to New York.” She lifts a shoulder. “I’m staying here.”

She parts her lips to say something more, but then the needle shifts into the hiss and fuzz at the centre of the disc, and she goes over to lift the arm and slide the record away. She has no notion of what an indulgence it has been to him, the music. More so even than the glass of brandy.

She speaks over her shoulder: “Would you abandon your home because you had house guests who wouldn’t take a hint? I’m not leaving. They can go.”

“You’re right, of course. It’s dreadfully bad manners.”

A delicious smile. “Shocking.”

—

When he leaves, she kisses him on both cheeks. He catches the scent of her powder, feels the coolness of her hair. He should be glad that she continues just the same, when so much else is changed; but he can’t quite work out why he’s so unnerved by her. Her words have stuck with him like ink on the skin, smudging in and creeping along tiny creases.

“You take care of yourself, now,” she says.

“And you,” he says. “God bless.”

Stepping back into the street is like coming out of a matinée. Dazzled, heady with brandy, he ambles along, chewing on their conversation, her gestures, that cheeky defiance, all the way home.

But where does it take you, in the end?

I’m not leaving. They can go.

Later, he lies awake, his back turned to Suzanne’s soft breathing, his toes twisted in the sheet, his shoulder denting the ticking and his ear pressed into the pillow. He can’t sleep: he is haunted by absences, by things unsaid. He can’t keep account of everyone; he can’t accommodate it all.

It’s strangely cool for August. The sky is grey; the city is grey. There are grey-green uniforms on the café terraces around Odéon; German officers swing out of shops with little luxuries; they walk three abreast and take up the width of the pavements. Paris is a luxury they have allowed themselves; they indulge in it. They fill the city with their grey.

He makes his way through all of this as if it is not real. The occupiers are silent images projected upon the city. They slip over him without touching. He holds his own pictures, his own images of Germany, in his head: the cool spires, the mist and stillness of early morning, the fug of beer-halls, strong paint-spattered hands, a crook’s smile.

Remember this. The Germany you love.

He takes out his cigarette pack, touches the tip of his last cigarette. This morning — in one of the Jewish neighbourhoods — the police made a mass arrest. They have taken hostages for the new French State. He is scanning through that tally in his head, for friends who might have been at risk. He must go and check on the Léons, at the very least. He puts the cigarette packet away and turns the other way down the rue de Vaugirard, and it seems quite ordinary, workaday, but normality is now a skin stretched thin and it can split at any time.

He’s walking briskly, urgent with concern for his friends, when a young woman brushes past. She does a little half-skip to make headway. Her body doesn’t quite fill her dress and she has no stockings on, but she’s swinging along the pavement as though she’s glad to be alive. Charming, that, if quite deluded.

She falters, slows. He peers past her to see what she has seen.

There’s a hulk of grey-green on the corner. A knot of soldiers. For the time being they’re occupied with some lad who’s failed to show sufficient respect: he’s jostled, barked at; some German, some ugly French. His cap is sent spinning into the gutter. He scurries after it, ducks to scoop it up, then darts off down a side street; he’s gone. And then, amongst the soldiers, a fist knocks against an arm; a head jerks, a chin juts; eyes swivel round and watch the young woman approach.

An arm swipes at her. “Mademoiselle, your papers, if you please.” And she can’t refuse or turn away. She has not that right.

He’s in a rush, but fear slows time, so that one could feel the sluggish thud of one’s own blood as the papers are presented, shaking, and thick fingers receive the document. She is addressed in heavy French; the comments underneath are in German. He watches, approaching, as she blinks back and forth from one face to another.

He is passing her now, and her eyes follow him round, watching as she might watch someone else’s balloon drifting free up into the air.

His hands flex, grip. His thin boots plant the pavement and he is past her, and he has done nothing and is still walking on, and he can hear her voice crack with frustration: her papers are in order, she has to get home, she’s expected, her mother will be worried. These arrests, you see. And the heavily accented voices, the suggestion in French that they meet later to clarify the issue, perhaps over a drink. The German, muttered underneath, is a more intimate suggestion.

And he just keeps on walking. Against all instincts. Because what good would it do to intervene? What use do you imagine you could be?