Jo Baker: A Country Road, a Tree

Ahead lies the little graveyard. The gate draws him over and he pauses at it. You can see this spot from his mother’s window. She could be watching him right now: like a figure in a Seghers landscape, rendered insect by the bulk of the mountainside.

They lined the grave with turf and moss. He and his mother, working together. As though they were making a garden. As though they were planting a seed.

His father had always been his companion in this, striding out from the old house, Cooldrinagh, the two of them marching along the suburban streets, and then country lanes, and then scrambling up through the heath, till they reached a point, only so far away and no further, the limits of the wound-out thread. They would sit, and scuff up stones, and pluck at cotton-grass and stare.

And then his father would say, “She’ll be wondering where we are.”

And they’d heave to their feet and begin the long trudge that would bring them down and round and back and all the way to the grey box of home. Not Ariadne’s thread. Nothing so gossamer as that. Sinewy, this pull she has, and tough.

And now he is alone, and his father planted in a trough of moss, and nothing grew from it at all except the ache of missing him. He turns away from the gate and walks on. The lane climbs between fields, shaded by high hedges that drip with fuchsia like blood, and every bit of gravel is felt through his boot soles as he goes, and sheep call and gulls weave and hang overhead.

He swings over a gate and out into the open ground beyond: gorse rattles its seed pods in the wind and his own breath rattles in his chest, and with exertion now the scar pulls. But he carries on and up through the grey scabs of limestone, and as he reaches the crest the ground falls away to reveal the sweep of the coastline beyond, the fungal growth of suburbs crawling up towards the rust-grey city. To the left, the mountains swell, and the wind pummels down from there and snatches at his jacket and makes his eyes water. He turns his back on it and blinks out towards the wrinkled slate-grey sea, and the old world that lies beyond it.

…You hear the grating roar

of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling…

But you don’t, do you? Not from here: there’s just the wind, and his own blood pulsing and the rasp of his own breath. The sea far below mouths silently; a sly lick towards the town, the graveyard, the roots of this dark hill. And over there, out over the horizon, beyond that wedge of Britain and deep into the expanse of Europe, a tidal wave is gathering, and any moment now will come the tipping point, the collapse and rush, the race towards destruction.

He turns to pick out the rooftop, the particular skirl of smoke, where his mother waits by the fire and looks at seed catalogues and can’t bear to have the radio on.

He knows he cannot stay. He can’t help Frank. He can’t write articles to order for the Irish Times. Sleep would fail him; he would drink to calm the shake in his hands, to soften the thud of his heart. Soon it would be a conscious effort to breathe at all. There had been nights, and even days, before he went to Paris, when he would have unwrapped a new razorblade and neatly opened his wrists and had done with it all, if it were not for the mess that he’d leave behind him. The bloodstains on the floor. Her outraged grief.

He will have to tell her that he’s going, though he cannot tell her this.

He tugs his cuffs down straight. He pushes the glasses back up to the bridge of his nose. He begins the inevitable lope back down towards the precarious little town, to all the things that can’t be said.

—

“Will you be joining us, May?” Sheila asks.

His mother’s reply from the dining room is a deal more soft than it would have been, had it been he that asked.

“I am fine here, thank you.”

Bent into the smell of hot dust and electricals, he twists the dial through squeals and fuzz until he catches and settles on the signal from the BBC in London. He goes to lean against the sideboard, arms folded.

Sheila sits herself down; Mollie perches on the arm of her chair.

“Where are the girls?” he asks.

“Still out,” Sheila says.

The three of them gathered here know what’s coming, more or less; they know how the pieces stand on the board. The broadcast begins, and the British Prime Minister speaks, in his precise, quavering way, from London. They each stare at the carpet, each lost in the darkness of the transmission.

This morning the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note…

There is movement outside the open door. His mother stands there, in profile. Behind her Lily holds the dishes, halted by the gravity of the moment: the moment that has been drawing everything towards it now for years.

…by eleven o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.

His mother raises a hand to her mouth.

I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.

Sheila sits back at this; Mollie rubs her arms. His mother reaches for the door frame. Chamberlain’s voice continues to spool out from the wireless and tangle on the floor.

“Well, there we are now,” Mollie says.

Sheila reaches for her sister and their hands clasp. His mother still stands in the doorway, hand to the jamb. Her face has gone grey. He pushes himself upright, crosses the room to her. He takes her hand and slips it through his arm.

“Here,” he says. He brings her over to her armchair. She is trembling.

He switches the radio set off. Then there is just the little parlour, and the morning sunshine through the window, and the sea wind blustering, and you could tell yourself that nothing had changed, but these words have changed the world.

The girls, though, their cardigans ballooning, their hair blown into tats. They’ll be huddled on a bench to finish up their lemon bonbons, coltsfoot rock, liquorice; they are still free from it. They’re a gorgeous empty spell of wind and hair and sweetness.

“Can I get you something?” he asks.

His mother shakes her head.

He glances over at Sheila — pink cheeks, pink nose, a smile forced over a dimpling chin — and even as he watches, her smile thins, her lips pressed tight and trembling, and she turns to her sister and crumples into her.

“Buck up now, darling,” Mollie says, rubbing her arm. “Don’t spoil your face.”

After a moment, Sheila sniffs and nods and leans away, and dabs at her eyes with the flank of a hand. Because the girls must not see that she’s upset.

“I’ll have to see about an earlier crossing,” she says.

His mother blinks up now. “Whatever for?”

“We must get back, May.”

“No, indeed you must not. You heard what he said — there’s to be another war. You’ll be much safer here.”

Sheila straightens her shoulders, touches her hair back into place. “You are so kind, May, dear, but you know, the children will want their father. Donald has to join his regiment, and we shall want to see him first.”

“Well, Mollie,” May now says. “You’ll stay.”

Mollie makes an apologetic moue. “A little while, May, but then I’m afraid I shall have to go too.”

“Whatever for?”

“Work. They’re expecting me.”

May is left with nothing now but to turn her face away and be silent. She must swallow it down in one hard lump, this unpalatable truth that everyone has been chewing on for months. They may not like it either, but at least they have grown accustomed to the taste.

He lays a hand on her shoulder. He feels the bones of her. She turns her sharp blue eyes on him.