Jo Baker - A Country Road, a Tree

Just a quick run, they said. Just out to Dieppe and back. You’re well used to the route, sure you could do it in your sleep. Pick up the new matron and that’s you. On you go. Your time’s your own after that.

But the ship is delayed. And he’s an idiot because he didn’t even think to bring a book. And now it’s snowing. And that’s just the fucking marzipan, that is. Snow. Snow is general all over Normandy.

The hut is all steam and cigarettes. He looks at his watch, considers how bad the roads will be if she arrives now, if she arrives in ten minutes, half an hour. An hour. Two. For fuck’s sake. The wind buffets the windows and the stove blows back smoke. He finds an abandoned copy of the London Times, sits, unbuttons his greatcoat, tries to read.

Then he’s up again, newspaper hanging, to peer out of the window at the snow as it scuds in flurries round the holding yard. He buttons his coat up and tucks his muffler in. He looks at his watch.

He’s half gone already. He’s back in Paris, seven flights up on the rue des Favorites. And he’s here, in a prefab in Dieppe, watching the snow build on the windowsill, watching it fall thick on the yard beyond, pristine as a ream of paper.

At the hatch, the girl gives him coffee and bread-and-margarine and an apology for it, though he’s happy enough with such frugal stuff. He eats, smokes, drinks coffee. Picks up the paper again, thumbs through it, hands it over to an English doctor waiting for his passage home, who settles into it readily. It belongs to the world that the doctor is returning to, not this one, where he remains.

When the ship finally enters the harbour, the throb of it can be felt through the quayside building. He steps out into the night. He turns up his collar, pockets his glasses; snow whips into his face. The vessel heaves and groans as it lines itself up along the quay. The closer it gets to actually being here, the more things seem to slow. It takes an age for moorings to be secured. Another age for the gangways to be lowered. The passengers creep off as though they are half-dead.

She looks exhausted. He shakes her hand and takes her bag and ushers her over to the truck. She shivers inside her cape; he holds the door open for her and takes her arm to help her in. It takes some restraint not to chivy her along.

“Thank you.”

They drive into the night, snow swarming in the headlights. Away from the coast, the wind drops and the snow falls heavily. The windscreen wipers shunt it into wedges; lumps fall off and fly aside. The snow makes a dazzling tunnel of the headlights. The darkness beyond is absolute.

“How far is it,” she asks, “to Saint-Lô?”

“A hundred and seventy miles, give or take.”

They are both illuminated, briefly, by the flare of a passing vehicle. The road ahead, caught suddenly in their merging lights, looks as smooth as a pillowcase, and then the other vehicle has passed and their truck rackets along, lurching into potholes, through ruts and across debris, all hidden by the blanketing snow. He winces, but doesn’t ease off. She shifts in her seat, glances at him; he remains in profile, eyes on the spinning dark.

“Is it necessary,” she asks, “to go quite so fast?”

“It’s not as fast as it looks.”

After a moment, he fishes his cigarettes off the parcel shelf and offers them to her; she takes one, then takes his rattling matches off him too and they lean together so that she can light his cigarette along with her own.

“You should try to have a sleep,” he says.

“I don’t know that I could.”

He glances across at her. “It’ll make it go by much more quickly.”

She shakes her head. Her free hand grips the edge of her seat. She clearly feels that this is quite quickly enough.

“Careful!”

He slams down a gear for a bend. They make the turn and hurtle on through the winter night. The darkness has become a solid thing and it’s racing away from his headlights, retreating from them as fast as he can drive towards it: he is chasing after the dark, and he will slam right through it, into whatever it is that lies beyond.

They burn through scattered dwellings that here and there coalesce into settlements, and there are lights sometimes, and the smell of woodsmoke, and then they’re in a square, where there are a few lights lit, which have a tired and faded look about them, and he knows that by the time they reach the next town everything will be shut. He’d prefer not to stop, but she must need some refreshment. He eases off and pulls over and yanks the handbrake on. She visibly relaxes.

“Two ticks,” he says. “Stay here and keep warm. I’ll go and see if I can rustle something up.”

He leaves the engine idling. In the café, the patron is locking up for the night, but seeing the man in Red Cross uniform there he starts to draw the bolts again and ushers him in, past the empty bentwood chairs set on the tabletops, into the end-of-evening smell of smoke and wine, which brings to mind a plate of charcuterie, the memory of Jeannine, and thence that priest, and that brings him out in gooseflesh. But they have nothing they can give him here. There will be viennoiseries in the morning, but until then, there’s only coffee and brandy to be had.

“That’ll work, thank you.”

He lights up, leaning on the zinc, twitchy, running a fingernail back and forth along a scratch. The patron fills the percolator, heats milk and reaches for the cognac on the almost-empty shelves. This place, this little café in this little town, the scar along the countertop — this is everything for the moment. While outside in the cold cab, breath pluming in the air, the snow gathering on the windscreen, the press of a hairpin into her scalp, is also everything. And the coffee bowls and brandy bottle lifted from the shelf, the other side of the zinc, the stubble-blued chin scrubbed at with a hand, is everything again. These small worlds, overlapping and impenetrable.

He returns to the cab with a coffee that is getting cooler and more dilute with snow. She has fallen into a doze. When he opens the door, she is startled awake.

“Thank you.” She lifts the drink to her lips and then, catching the scent, hesitates.

“Drop of brandy. Keep out the cold.”

“I don’t drink,” she says.

“I’m afraid there’s nothing else.”

She pulls a face.

“Consider it medicinal,” he says. If he could just take the bowl back, then they could be on their way. “For the good of your health.”

She hesitates, then drinks it straight down. She hands him the bowl. “Where will we stop for Mass?”

“Mass? Tonight?”

“It’s Christmas Eve.”

Of course it is. Of course. “I’ll get you to Saint-Lô in time.”

She grimaces.

—

He pulls to a halt outside the ruined church of Notre-Dame in Saint-Lô. She swallows queasily after the twisting, jolty journey here.

“All right?”

She fumbles with the door.

Inside the church, candles have been lit; they glow through the fragments of stained glass still clinging to the cames.

He turns the engine off and gets out to help her down, but she is already sliding from her seat. She straightens her skirt and settles her cape around her shoulders with a distinct air of relief.

“Well,” she says. “Here we are. Thank you.”

From inside the church comes the sound of violins, thin and icy. The snow still falls.

“Will you join me?”

He pulls on his cap. “I’ll wait on you here.”

He leans back against the truck.

She goes up the steps and in through the doorway. That’ll be an hour or so, Mass. He listens to the priest’s incantation and the low murmur of the congregation, and then the priest again. One doesn’t need to hear the actual words; the shape and pattern of them is instantly knowable. Her footprints fill. Snow gathers on his shoulders and his cap. He brushes it off and lights another cigarette. Violins begin to play, and then voices join them. Cigarette in lips, he treads over to the door to peer inside.