Jo Baker - A Country Road, a Tree

And then, across the quiet, she hears the tear of an engine. She lifts her head to listen. It’s coming from out along the road and heading towards them. She straightens her shoulders and goes round to the front of the house.

She can feel the thrum through the ground. Above her, at the upper window, the shutters slam back, making her wince and glance up. He steps out on to the balcony in his vest and dust-stained trousers, his weak eyes searching into the distance. She shifts her gaze to follow his. A vehicle rounds the bend. It takes a moment to realize what she’s seeing. A rugged open-topped car — a jeep — burns up the road towards them. It is packed tight with men; the men are big and solid and they are dressed in fatigues. Soldiers. And, incongruously, Henri Hayden is perched on the back of the car. Spotting them, he waves and leans forward to speak to the driver. The car stops in front of the house, the engine churning. White grins on dirty faces. And all of Henri’s preparation, all those English lessons with Anna Beamish, are forgotten in this moment of unalloyed delight. He yells in French: “They were just going to pass us by!”

There are words exchanged between the soldiers in red, rich American English. The driver shunts the car into gear; Henri leans back as they pull away.

“It’s over! Good God, can you believe it? It’s all over! This fucking whore of a war! We’re liberated !”

And the jeep batters off up the road into town, flinging up a cloud of red dust. Suzanne raises a hand to shade her eyes. Henri disappears into the billows. Then the dust roils and settles, and the road is empty.

Suzanne turns to look back up to the balcony. Foreshortened by the angle, he is a darkness standing against the brilliant blue and she cannot make him out. He looks into the distance. He lifts his hands and presses them to his face. Then he turns away, and goes indoors.

She wipes her eyes with a flank of a hand. She sniffs. She shakes her head, and turns, and goes back to her garden.

And that is it.

Ireland is green. It is lush and livid under the heavy sky. After the parched redness of the south, after the greys of battered Paris, his eyes strain to adjust.

Not just his eyes. His attitude, expectations, posture, stomach, nerves. He is out of kilter here more than he ever was.

Milk, for example.

He has become obsessed with milk. He follows the jug as it progresses from hand to hand, watches the white cord as it twines into the cups, watches the gobs of fat shine on the surface of the tea. The mixture is lifted to bristling lips and sucked; throats spasm, lips roll in on themselves and then unstick and stretch and pucker with speech. The milky tea is supped and sucked upon, as though it were something and nothing, as though its continuance were guaranteed; as if it were not, like everything else, as vulnerable and fleeting as the snow, that can be gone with just a change in the weather.

New Place, for example.

The big old house, Cooldrinagh, is sold, and she is in a modest bungalow just across the street from it. Of course she mentioned this in her letters, but it still comes as a surprise. It’s wrong, this house. It’s all edges, corners and awkward angles. It is delicate unstable ornaments and vases. The ceilings feel too low, the corridors narrow and full of turns. He stumbles around, stooped and cautious, haunted by the openness that had been here, the vacant plot of his childhood where the grass blew and cats fought and mated and he and Frank whooped and tumbled and trod in dogshit. He can hear voices from the old place, and the metronomic tock of a tennis ball. The larches stir themselves in the breeze, and one of them is already turning gold, and maybe there’ll be a child up there, clutching a high branch, swaying with the wind. The old house looms over the new; it has prior claim upon the sunshine. He lurches and ducks through the bungalow, but he is peeled into pieces: he drifts through other places, other times, can’t make himself be fully here.

Alfy is dead. And all this goes on.

Tea on the lawn should not be so difficult. It should not be utterly intolerable. The cairn of bread-and-butter, the heap of scones, the cake: they are not horrors in and of themselves. That poor spinster his mother has prised off the shelf for the occasion, God love her, and the friends and neighbours: he’s known some of them for years. But he just cannot get the hang of it again. If indeed he ever could. Not the rituals, not the conversation, not what is expected of him. He has gone tone-deaf to it. His mother tongue has disowned him.

Alfy died in the care of the Red Cross, the day after being freed. Maria’s letter is brief. It chokes him. And he is marooned here, islanded.

He sips his tea black and tries not to notice, but when his mother sets her cup down, it rattles against the saucer in uneasy timpani. When she speaks it is with a tiny shake of the head, as though negating every word even as it’s said. He tries not to notice, but he can’t not notice. There are too many negatives to ignore.

She passes him a tremulous plate. He takes a slice of bread-and-butter, passes the plate on. He cuts his piece into halves, into quarters, into tiny squares and then into triangles again, the famine habit still hanging hard on him. His mouth is bitter with decay. His jaw throbs. His tongue probes at carious, sharp-edged molars, at the incisor that rocks in its socket and bristles with pain.

The conversation swells and grows, and he lifts a fragment of bread-and-butter and slips it between his lips and tastes the fat and salt and sweetness of it.

He blinks, and the red inside his eyelids is the red of Roussillon; and there are tumbled stones, the hair-cracked road, and dusty broken boots shuffling along it.

He opens his eyes at the blank white linen tablecloth. Paris walls are pocked with bullet holes. Marble counters in the shops are gleaming and empty. Milk is a miracle. Bread is made of sawdust. The Péron twins all bones and shadows, and not growing as they should. Suzanne stands shivering in a queue. And he should not have left them all to that. He should not have brought himself here. Where he is entirely surplus to requirements.

But nonetheless, something is expected of him: he has been addressed. The pale old faces are watching him.

“Sorry. What was that?”

Smiles. A throat cleared. He has, of course, been through a good deal. Allowances must be made.

“Here.” His mother proffers a plate.

He looks down at a thick wedge of sponge. Under the pressure of the cake slice, the jam and cream have been extruded in a pinkish ooze, like bone marrow. It is an offence, an insult to her, his thinness. That he preferred France and famine to her, and this.

Her shake is bad. He takes the plate and sets it down. He looks at the cake. His teeth throb. He should force down a forkful, a few crumbs, a bit of jam; even if it makes him gag, makes his teeth sing out like little birds.

“Back in France—” he says.

Someone lifts a teaspoon, someone turns their saucer slightly; someone reaches for the sugar.

“My friends are getting by on next to nothing. On turnips and sawdust.”

The cake stares up at him, bloodied and gross; his fingertips recall the glide of paper scraps across a tabletop, the patterns forming. He blinks and he sees the floorboards inches above his face. The crate swinging at his knees along the country path. The clotted blooms of geraniums. His hands clasp and he feels the cold Sten gun in his grip. The haft of a shovel, the grave dug in the red earth. He is not here, he is not really here at all, he can’t figure out how to be.