Jo Baker - A Country Road, a Tree

The sunlight fans across the floor and then begins its slow retreat. Shadows deepen and spread like floodwater.

In the evening, they stir and wake to a blue room, moonlight sliced by shutters. He eases on his boots, wincing, and stumbles out through the hotel yard to the necessary house. The little room is vertiginous and breezy, perched on the edge of a crevasse, a sheer stinking drop beneath.

She, meanwhile, limps out to the town square. She fills the washstand ewer at the fountain. The water plummets into the enamel and the spray touches her face and it is cool and sweet. There are lights lit at the cafés, and old men in blue work-jackets drink rosé and talk, and men in shabby city suits and women with faded feathered hats are out taking the air; they give her long low looks and walk on, and murmur with each other, knowing her for a newcomer and one of their own, but remaining discreet in case she does not wish to be acknowledged. And she, for now, is happy simply to be alone.

—

They take turns washing in cold water at the washstand. When they are done, she lifts down the bowl and soaks her feet.

“What,” he asks, “do you think of the place?”

She scratches at a flea bite, looks at him. “We know that it’s safe,” she says. “More or less.”

“There seems to be no plumbing to speak of.”

She shrugs. Does it matter? “What we need to do now is register at the Mairie. Once we’ve done that we can get our new ration cards.”

“We make ourselves official?”

“I don’t see that we can do otherwise, if we want to buy bread. We are in a separate jurisdiction now; we should be all right.”

He whistles out a breath.

“I can’t see them coming all the way here to look for us, can you? We don’t matter that much.”

—

He edges in behind her into the hotel dining room. It is packed tight, elbow-to-elbow. Jumbled with noise.

Madame shows them to a tiny table, and provides an off-ration stew of game and vegetables and barley. Globs of fat glisten on the surface. The meat falls to fibres on the tongue; the vegetables melt. It is impossibly good. They are rendered dumb by taste, by the dope of calories.

Suzanne does well; he watches as she does well. They are introduced to the people on neighbouring tables; she manages warm and easy conversation about nothing. He admires this as one might a coin plucked from an ear, or a fancily shuffled pack of cards. He can see that it’s done well, but can’t ever see himself mastering the trick.

The friends arrive — the Lobs — and Suzanne is delighted, seems astonished by their actuality. Kisses with Yvonne and her brother Roger, Yvonne’s husband, Marcel, leaning in to shake hands but then abstracting himself and standing stiffly back. There is a big old house just outside the town, belonging to the family; they are muddling along together, all very Grand Meaulnes. He sips his wine and watches the open gabbling mouths, picks out bits of conversation. The opinions and advice and suggestions about work that might be got, about accommodation that might be sought — they can’t lodge at the hotel indefinitely — and introductions that might be made. The bodies press too close, the walls are narrow round him; there is too much noise. He has been too long in silence, too long in solitude, too long upon the road.

He drinks his wine. He lifts crumbs from the tabletop with a fingertip. He nods his assent if his assent seems to be required.

The radio is switched on to warm up. Madame tunes it to Radio Londres and keeps the volume low, and in the packed dining room of the Hôtel de la Poste everyone falls silent, and they listen to the news from elsewhere, to the French speaking to the French.

—

The wind here has a mind of its own. It billows, blusters, darts, skirls around: you don’t know what direction to expect it from. He ducks out of the gritty street and into the post office.

The postmistress’s accent is educated but it still has the local wet, rolling r s, and a g where no g is generally required. She is handsome, dark-skinned, dark-eyed, with a flash of grey at the right temple. She smiles at his accent, but it’s clear that strangers are no longer strange round here. She makes no remark about its destination, just weighs the letter on her scales with her little row of shining weights, licks a thumb and flips through her book of stamps. Why indeed should there not be easy traffic between the Free Zone and the Free State?

He leaves the post office with a disproportionate sense of achievement — a letter sent to his mother, reassuring her of his well-being, requesting his allowance, which will make things here so much easier — but steps out into stink, and the cobbles tumbling with squares of newspaper — lavatory-cut newspaper — that have already been put to full and thorough use. He dodges his way through them, disgusted, making his way to the Mairie, thinking of the man who’d wanted to shake the hand that wrote Ulysses, who was told that there were other things that same hand had also done.

In the chilly formal room of the Mairie, reluctant to sign, he turns the pages of the register and notes the cascade of displaced French arriving from the north, the scattering of foreign names within it. There is even an Irishwoman settled here. A Miss A. N. Beamish.

“The streets are filthy,” he observes to the clerk.

“Ah yes,” the clerk says. “That’ll be the wind. The WCs here empty over the cliffs. This kind of wind, it blows the paper right back up again.”

“Is there nothing to be done?”

A shrug. “The wind changes. It blows it all away again.”

Freud, he thinks, might have had a thing or two to say about this place.

—

The next day stray rank papers linger in corners and gutters and shuffle round like last year’s leaves. He and Suzanne sit outside the cobbler’s workshop, on the cold stone bench, threadbare socks side by side while their shoes are being resoled. They’ve bought pastries from Gulinis’; they pick off fragments and melt them on the tongue, burst raisins between aching molars. Suzanne gets the hiccups. There’s the sound of children playing in the schoolyard below, and the tap-tap-tap of the cobbler’s hammer behind them, and the smell of bread and of leather and latrines, while he calculates silently how long their funds can be expected to last at the current rate, how soon his allowance can be expected to arrive: there has been a sharp increase in expenditure, what with the hotel room and restaurant meals and pastries and shoe repairs. They are not living hand-to-mouth on filched turnips and carrots and sleeping in hayricks any more. Their stack of cash is down to a sliver. Work, he supposes, must be found.

“What’s up with you?” Suzanne asks.

“Nothing of nothing,” he says.

He pulls at a flake of pastry, and a sturdy woman in tweeds goes by, tugged along by Airedale terriers on leads. She nods, smiles to the two of them. This must be Miss A. N. Beamish. No one ever looked less French.

—

More people arrive, day by day; they clamber out of packed-tight buses. They slide off the backs of wagons. They come stumbling in on foot along the road. They are travel-worn and bleary, bundled up in crumpled clothes, dusty hats shoved down on their heads, and by their flinching gait it’s clear their boots are martyring them. They nag and snipe and cling to each other. And when they spot him there’s that wary catch of eye, the nod: he has, he realizes, become one of them: he has joined the community of the dispossessed.

He passes the tweedy woman again, this time in the town square. She has nothing of their hunted, ragged air about her. And the dogs: they make her seem established here. Dogs imply domesticity, permanence, decisions made.