Jo Baker - A Country Road, a Tree

“I’m afraid it’s just corn brandy now,” she says, handing a glass to him. “It’s all that I could get hold of.”

“No less welcome, thank you.”

They exchange enquiries about health, well-being; he asks after Marcel and the words are pond-skaters, treading the surface of things.

“New York, now. Chess.” She smiles, shrugs, bravely nonchalant. Marcel has toppled his king, left the play. This is a game he could see no way to win.

A touch on his arm. He blinks round, frowning — and there’s Alfy.

“That someone I wanted you to meet…”

He excuses himself, follows Alfy across the room towards a girl in a dark dress who’s peering round someone to watch him approach. She, also, is already somehow familiar.

He offers a hand; she takes it, stands on tiptoe to kiss his cheek.

“The Irishman. It is a great pleasure to see you again.”

“Enchanted,” he says, but, truth be told, he is put entirely on the back foot.

Jeannine Picabia. She must be, what? — twenty-four, twenty-five by now, though she still has the slightness of a teenager. He remembers her at her father’s studio, years ago. She sipped cordial and sat on the stairs. They’d talked about the paintings. He remembers the challenge of being soused, and trying to keep his words clear and straight, not breathing smoke and booze on her. Her cool, wry look.

“You must call me Gloria here.”

“Gloria?”

“Other names are for other places, other people.”

That look she gets from her father, at once earnest and playful.

“Gloria,” he says. “I will forget I ever knew anything else.”

“A selective memory is a very useful thing. Moby also says you can keep a secret.”

“Moby?”

She nods to Alfy. “Moby Dick here.”

He turns to Alfy, raises an eyebrow.

Alfy smiles. “My nom de guerre. ”

“Because of your bitter, vengeful temperament?” he asks.

“I think my massive girth. Or perhaps it’s my complexion.”

Jeannine fishes out her cigarette case. She offers him, and he takes one. He thanks her, and sets down his glass to light her cigarette and then his. The hit of the Gauloise, after so much parsing out of cigarettes, is like learning to smoke all over again.

“Because most of Papa’s friends were all such — I think you say in Ireland — gobshites?”

This makes him snort.

“I mean, they would talk and talk and talk and talk. And everybody’s so busy talking nobody’s listening to anything at all, all those words and none of them getting heard, nobody ever learning a thing.”

“Artists,” he says. Shrugs.

“That’s no excuse.”

She blows smoke, taps her cigarette on an ashtray, lips twisted with pleasure, trying not to show it. One of Mary’s beautiful things, this ashtray. Ceramic, swirled inside with inky blue.

“Anyway, you I remember,” Jeannine continues. “You weren’t one of the talkers. You’d gather up far more than you’d ever give away. You have a silent habit.”

He takes a sip of brandy, feels its sting, its dispersal on the tongue. Feels disarmed, to have been observed like this from years ago. To have been already known.

“And this silence of yours is a virtue, like the selective memory, in our line of work.”

“I’m not,” he says, “a practical man.”

“But I still think you could be useful. Moby tells me that you know German and Italian and Spanish, as well as French and English.”

He tilts his head. This is true. “Some better than others.”

“And you can type.”

“Not terribly well.”

“It won’t matter.” Shifting on her feet a little, she looks up at him, bright and sharp. And he realizes that though they are supposedly in safe company, her voice has been falling, softening all this time, so that now she speaks almost in a whisper and he has to lean in closer to hear her.

“There are risks,” she says. “What we’re doing. It carries the death penalty now. These are anti-German acts. It is considered treason.”

“I know.”

“Are you still willing?”

“I am.”

She studies his expression, unsmiling. Then she says, “Well, we’ll keep you busy, Monsieur. You can be certain of that. It will help pass the time.”

He nods.

Alfy nudges him gently. “I did not like to ask it of you, my friend,” he says. “But I am glad that you are with us.”

“And you will need a codename now too, Irishman.”

He catches Suzanne watching them from all the way across the room. She closes her eyes in a slow blink and then she turns away.

What purpose can there be in pseudonyms, when they are all friends and acquaintances, when they have all known each other on and off for years?

—

They sit, chairs drawn up to a corner of the Pérons’ dining table. Mania and Alfy lay out scraps of paper on the tabletop. There were plums, brought up by a friend in the country; he has been given one, and has eaten it as slowly as he could. Now the stone is tucked into his cheek, and he shifts it on to his tongue from time to time and turns it over.

“Our job is information,” Mania says. “We don’t try to assassinate anyone; we don’t blow anything up.”

“Good.”

“Our network covers the north-western quadrant of France,” Alfy says. “We’re getting information about troop movements, trains and shipping. We watch the Boches. A new corps colour was spotted on troops in Saint-Lô on Wednesday. We had the information in Paris by Thursday afternoon, and over to London by the evening.”

Alfy drags his chair forward. He shifts around the paper slips on the glossy wood.

“We get the information in on these little scraps of paper. Little bits that can be easily kept hidden. We will pass these on to you. Your job is to sort the information. Look for patterns, duplications, where one informant substantiates another. Look for the big picture.”

“I see.”

“Once you’ve found it,” Mania says, “you make the big picture as small as possible. Boil it down until you have just the very essence. Because every extra word we send to London increases our exposure.”

“You could do it standing on your head,” Alfy says.

Alfy’s broad, good-humoured face. There was the Lycée and then there was the Army and now there is this. Alfy’s decisions seem the only reasonable responses to an unreasonable state of affairs. He contributes.

“Then you burn the source material, and you deliver your typescript, we’ll tell you where. And that’s it, job done.”

He asks, “How long have you two been involved?”

“A little while now,” Mania says quietly.

“You never said.”

“You didn’t ask.” Alfy shrugs. “And you’re a friend. It’s dangerous.”

He turns the plum stone with his tongue, feels the seam, the final threads of flesh.

“And you are not native here. So.”

“They try to make it be about country.” He shrugs. “I don’t think it’s really about country.”

Alfy leans away. Mania gives him a look, a smile.

“Last chance. If you want to back out now, before you get your hands dirty.” Alfy jerks his head towards the door. “I’ll see you for a beer, and we’ll get stuck into that translation and never say another word about this.”

He sits his ground.

“All right,” Alfy says, “so — and this is very important— just go on as normal, otherwise.”

Mania leans in. “Really, don’t change anything. You and Suzanne, just keep on as normal, and we’ll make it look as though your new work is just more of the old. If anybody’s watching you, they’ll have no grounds for suspicion.”

“Thank you,” he says.

“Why’s that?” Alfy asks.