Jo Baker - A Country Road, a Tree

The lift is hors de service. Trudging up seven storeys, breathless, to the apartment, and she is there — he knows it instantly. Though it is not warm, nor lit, she is there, her presence filling up the space like water. And he is gooseflesh and unease with it, not knowing even now what kind of return this will be.

“Suzanne?”

—

Her belly contracts. She drops her sewing aside, gets to her feet. Because coming in through the apartment door, there he is, out of nowhere, like a magic trick, and just as exasperating. All this time his world has been expanding, and has become busy and bustling and full to overflowing, while hers has contracted to a pinprick. She is hunger, body, tiredness, the slog of simply scraping by. She has nothing left for him.

And now he is looking around the flat, and then looking at her, as though it were something and nothing. As though it were inevitable he’d be there, now, this minute, and why would it be a surprise to her at all?

“Well,” he says.

“Well.”

And in uniform! Trust him to spend the war in hand-me-downs and hedgerows and then deck himself out in conspicuous uniform just as everybody else is shedding it. The new gear — greatcoat, cap, trousers, puttees, tunic — is it that that makes him seem all the more contained, unknowable, and just — different?

She stands up, takes a step closer, looks him over, trying to read this new iteration of him. He has a kitbag hanging from his shoulder; the other holds a small calico sack. It bulges with something, with lots of somethings, small and rounded and smooth somethings.

“How are you,” he asks, “my flea?”

“Oh,” she says, unsettled by the endearment. “You know, it goes.”

He drops his kitbag and reaches out an arm and she steps into the space. He holds her there a moment, the both of them like boards. One arm is wrapped around her.

“You’re thin,” he says.

She can hear the rumble of his voice in his chest. She nods, her head sliding up and down against serge. Everyone in Paris is thin. His flesh, though, has filled itself out. He is more solid than he used to be. She wants to say, I am happy to see you, but the truth of it is not quite as clear as happy. There has been too much wear and tear for there to be straightforward happiness now. There is not the substance, the structure left for that.

Now, he pushes her gently away and goes to unbutton his coat, which makes him remember the calico sack.

“Here,” he says. “I brought something for you.”

She swipes at her eyes. More bounty from his better life; it makes her feel sour. But the mouth of the bag opens on a clutch of pears and offers up a cloud of scent, floral, sweet; her mouth floods.

“Oh, the cow,” she says.

She dips in a hand and lifts out a fruit and hands the bag back to him. The pear is heavy with juice; between her fingertips the skin is grained and toad-like. She presses her mouth into the soft flesh, her eyes closing. She eats, wordless, the wet sweetness of it astonishing, while he sets the bag down and slides off his coat and hangs it up and looks around the scant little apartment, and twists his head to peer up at the sleeping loft above. She sucks the last of the flesh from the strands of the core and drops what’s left into the wastepaper basket. Juice has gathered under her lower lip and she wipes it upward with the flank of her hand. Then she notices him, noticing her.

“Excuse me,” she says.

“You’re hungry. Have another.”

“I’m sorry.”

She dips her hand in again. Her cheeks flush. She bites carefully. Little fractions of wet flesh and grainy skin. Turned and lingering on the tongue, while he climbs the stairs to the little sleeping loft and looks around. Like a dog circling its bed.

He calls down to her. “We’ll go out for lunch,” he says. “If you’d like to.”

She pauses, swallows. “Can we?”

“Yes,” he says. “Why not?”

She tilts her head, unseen, considering the new authority in his voice. This is having money, she supposes. A salary that just happens to him every month. This is having more than enough, rather than substantially less.

“I’d like that,” she says.

She drops the threads of the second pear into the wastepaper basket. She fetches her shoes and sits down to put them on. Her hands are cold and sticky with juice. He clumps back down the stairs. She does not look at him. You have brought me pears, she thinks, but this is what I have brought for you: this is all that I have in abundance. We have had a glut of horrors here.

“I don’t know what you’ve heard,” she says.

“What’s that?”

“About our friends,” she says, and then she pauses and has to clear her throat, because after all there is scant satisfaction in sharing this.

“What do you know?”

“Different stories.”

He looks away; she follows his gaze across to his bookshelves, his desk.

“Not yet,” he says.

“What?”

“Later,” he says. “Just not yet.”

She stares at him. Unseen, she shrugs. “Well.”

He can do as he pleases. He always will. She is too worn out with it all to care.

—

They eat lunch in a little local bistro, where they used to eat before. Frayed cuffs on the waiters, who are men he doesn’t know; washed-thin dresses on the ladies, bare legs. He recognizes the sisters who used to run the hairdresser’s. There is bread, since bread is no longer rationed, and he has rillettes and cornichons, and they have a pichet of wine to share. They are quiet; the whole place is quiet. Life goes on, after all. It insists on it.

The meal is expensive. It is three times what they would have paid for something rather better before the war. But it is welcome. And the coffee, when it comes, is real, and strong, and good. It makes her shudder.

“Will you be back,” she asks, “do you think?”

“To Paris?”

“Yes.”

He casts his gaze around the restaurant, taking in the scuffed tiles, the thin faces, the empty mirrored shelves where there had once been bottled spirits and liqueurs.

“Where else would I go? My contract ends in January.”

She nods. She is making those little moves — napkin laid aside, bag hunted for and opened, peered into — that signal departure. “Well, I’m teaching this afternoon, so…”

People still learn to play the piano, then. And children still sit their exams, no doubt. They go on holiday, and celebrate their saints’ days and their birthdays. For all it still feels so sketchy and provisional, they are now living in a world where a Jewish boy’s baccalaureate counts for something again.

“I have to return to Saint-Lô tomorrow,” he says.

“I see.”

“I’m only in Paris to fetch rat poison. It’s not easy to get hold of, not out there.”

“Right.”

“I’ll send you something when I get back. What would you like? What do you particularly need?”

She closes her eyes and half smiles at his entire failure to understand. She needs everything; she has nothing but needs. Some can be kept at bay, others are impossible to assuage.

“A bar of soap,” she says. “A toothbrush. A lipstick. Anything at all.”

He walks with her to the Métro. By the square, a small child picks up horse chestnuts from the pavement; a woman watches, having watched him all the way through all the war. He recalls the baby in the pram being bumped along the cobbles, that razor-clear autumn of ’41, when he’d carried the typed-up information across town to Jimmy. And Jimmy — he wonders, how did Jimmy fare? Did he get through it all and out the other side?

At the steps down to the station, Suzanne kisses him on the cheek, brief and cool. “What happened to your coat?” she asks.