Jo Baker - A Country Road, a Tree

When he opens his eyes again, he turns his gaze to the parquet, resists the urge to cast around him. If he is being watched, let them make of this what they will. There are some needs he won’t subdue.

And a year passes. And it goes on. His hands shake less now when he goes to make the drop. The bag no longer swells to the size of a wardrobe. And it all becomes normal, more or less, because anything can become normal, more or less, given time.

A telegram is a dreadful thing.

The flat is empty. It’s the emptiness of a tea-tin; there are fragments, flakes of what’s usually there caught around the seams: a pair of gloves, a hairpin on the mantelpiece, a needle-case.

Suzanne did tell him where she was going; he knows she did. He had looked up from his book and he had said, Till soon, and Take care. But he hadn’t really listened and he really should have really listened, because it matters now, this coming-and-going, now there is a telegram icy in his hand, and the boy is staring at him boggle-eyed, and he doesn’t know where Suzanne is, and if he had listened he would know, and he needs to find her now this minute. He needs her here already. Jesus Christ.

He counts coins into the dirt-creased palm; the boy blinks at him, then clatters off down the stairs, a clumsy gait, the wooden soles of his shoes flashing with nails. To have growing feet at a time like this. To want to run, and to be stuck with those wooden things.

He strips away the envelope.

She’d been standing at the door, putting her hat on, checking her reflection in the little mirror. She’d said, I’m just popping out to…I’m calling round at…I’ll be back by…

His hands are shaking. He doesn’t want to open it.

The printed words are clear; he stares and does not see; he refuses them, and yet they prickle through and make themselves known.

ALFRED ARRESTED BY GESTAPO

PLEASE TAKE THE NECESSARY STEPS TO CORRECT THE ERROR

MANIA PERON

Alfy.

Oh good God, Alfy.

He’ll go to Mania. And the boys. There must be something he can do. God knows what, but he’ll — there must be—

He is scooping up his keys, stringing his scarf round his neck, the telegram now crumpled in his fist — but then stops. He flattens out the paper, stares at the printed tape again, because—

The telegram doesn’t actually say what it might have said.

It doesn’t say, Come and help me.

It doesn’t say, Go and help him.

It says, take steps to correct the error.

He chews his lip. What does she mean?

Because Mania is sharp as a knife. And she will be thinking fast, and she’ll be furious, frustrated, just as he is, because they don’t have a code, they didn’t even think to agree a code for this, or for any emergency. Everyone knows the telephone lines are tapped. Even a telegram is read by both operators, and by anybody standing at the operator’s shoulder. Mania is trying to communicate with them without incriminating anybody — not them, not herself, and least of all Alfy.

What error?

And where is Suzanne? He grabs his coat and heaves it on, but then stalls. If he goes out looking, he might miss her, and then where would they be? She’d be here waiting for him while he was dodging round the streets and friends’ apartments, while the Gestapo were putting on their gloves, straightening their caps and getting in their cars.

Time. Happening everywhere and all at once. It is a bastard for that.

He chews at a hangnail, pulls it off between his teeth. His finger bleeds.

Suzanne. Come on, Suzanne. Come home.

—

“They’ve taken Germaine too, and Legrand.”

“Christ.”

“We are betrayed.”

Suzanne’s face is open as a wound. It doesn’t bear thinking about. Perhaps their names are also on the list. Perhaps the Geste are already on their way round here. He goes over to the window, peers down at the street. And even if they are not yet on the list, then they will be soon. So many friends arrested. A dark room; chains and pliers. None of it bears thinking about, and yet all of it must be thought.

“Anybody out there?” she asks.

“Not a soul.”

He realizes now what it was, that error that must be corrected. It is the misapprehension under which they had been living all along — that they could just go on like this, that it would continue. They had not realized that the world would one day just crumple up and blow away. But the apartment is made of paper, and the streets are botched-up stage-flats and the wind blows right through it all and it creaks and strains. It’s not safe here. It never was. That’s what they must correct: their deluded sense that things will just go on.

“Do you think Alfy would…?”

His stomach heaves. Yell my name the first chance you get, Alfy old son, spill the fucking beans, cough it all up. Give ’em chapter and verse, inside leg and shoe-size, before you lose a single fingernail on my account. Don’t you take one cigarette burn for me, God love you. Alfy. God love you.

“No. I don’t know. But he’s only one. So.”

“We have to warn everyone,” she says. “Everyone we can. And then we have to get away from here. I’ll run round to Hélène’s.”

“I’ll phone Jimmy and the others.”

“Watch what you say.”

“Of course.”

She shoulders her bag. He crouches to knot a broken bootlace.

“Have you any change?” he asks. “I gave my last to the telegraph boy.”

She fumbles in her purse, tips coins into his palm.

“Be careful,” he says.

Suzanne opens the door out on to the dim landing, then pauses on the threshold and looks back at him, in all this rush and fluster, as he gathers up his things.

He raises an eyebrow at her. What?

“I keep wishing you had not come back,” she says. “I wish you weren’t here, you know. Every moment. But I still don’t want you gone.”

—

He huddles in the telephone booth. It smells of polish, tobacco smoke and other people. He dials number after number. Number after number rings out unanswered, in rifled apartments with overturned desks and papers half-burned in the grate, where the rugs are rippled by struggles, by sliding feet; its ringing can be heard on landings, where a door, forgotten in the tussle, has been left ajar.

He asks the operator for the number Jimmy the Greek had given him. Only for emergencies. He listens to the clicks and fuzz on the line. Then it rings.

The phone rings and rings and rings and rings. And there is no reply.

And then a clatter at the other end — the mouthpiece lifted.

“Hello?”

“It’s me.”

No reply to this.

“The Irishman.”

The stark insufficiency of that pseudonym. He can hear Jimmy’s breath on the mouthpiece, listens for a click, a hum, some indication that the line is being tapped. No code, no fucking code; how can they have got this far without a code? What he would give now for a word that to just the both of them meant, The Gestapo are on to us, destroy the evidence, get your things together and get away.

There is just the thin glass panel between him and the lobby. The concierge is very carefully not looking at him, very deliberately not noticing. She is pushing a broom around the floor. He clears his throat, speaks into the receiver.

“I telephoned to let you know, my friend, I find I am very busy at the moment.”

Jimmy’s voice comes intimate and soft. “What a coincidence. So do I.”

“And I think I must expect to be so for the foreseeable future, so I shall not be available—”

“I believe that will be much the same for me.”

“Many of my acquaintances are also very busy at this time.”