A Country Road, a Tree

by Jo Baker

  He checks his watch, turns his wrist to show its face to her. She nods, sits stiffly, hands folded in her lap. He remains silent. He rubs at the back of his neck; it’s prickling.

  “Who will bury them?”

  She speaks low and without turning towards him. He looks round at her, the better to make out what was said. She is grey under the eyes.

  “I mean, who will pay for it?” she adds.

  “Suzanne—”

  “Will they do it? Will the administration pay for the funerals?”

  “Suzanne, please.”

  “Or the police? Is it their job to organize the…the disposal? I mean, they don’t actually do anything to stop people being killed, so they must at least deal with the results.”

  “Suzanne—”

  A bus pulls in at a nearby stand; the engine idles, phlegmy. People file on-board. Some of the passengers are looking at them.

  “Or the town hall? The municipality? Is it their responsibility now?”

  He slides an arm around her. He pulls her tight, hard; she lets herself be drawn in against him, but just stares down at her worn-soft shoes and shakes her head, and talks almost to herself.

  “Or will the families have to? Because—” A blot falls on to her lap, and then another. She sniffs. “Yesterday all those people—”

  He rubs her arm. He whispers, “Whisht.”

  Her head hangs; she skims her eyes with the flank of her hand. She blows out a long breath. She is trying. She is really trying to stop. And one mood can set aside another. Irritation helps.

  “I don’t know how you stay so calm,” she says.

  Another bus pulls in, rattles near them. Diesel fumes and tobacco smoke.

  “I’m not calm.”

  Pink-eyed, she glares at him. “Well, you seem it. Calm and quiet.”

  Maybe one day there will be words. Maybe silence will be all that there ever is.

  “I can’t think about it now. I can’t do it justice.”

  After a moment, she asks, “Aren’t you scared?”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t look scared.”

  “I’m terrified.”

  Her lips are pressed tight; her eyes are wide and sore-looking. “You’re impossible.”

  A bus pulls in at their stand. The door heaves open. He gets to his feet and offers her a hand.

  “Come on,” he says. “That’s us.”

  —

  Later, much later on, they are shown into an afterlife of broken chairs and crates, of empty bottles worn misty at the shoulders. The patron goes back into the little locked-tight café and sets about chinking glasses and softly singing. A few bentwood chairs have been drawn round an upended barrel, where there’s an ashtray and a candle burning in a bottle. That’s all the light there is. Even the air feels crowded, the smells of smoke and stale wine and old coffee jostling together. She sinks on to one of the chairs; he folds himself down on to another. After a moment, he picks a cigarette end out of the ashtray, examines it, then puts it back.

  He gets up again to help Suzanne off with her bag, and she manages to lift an arm, to tilt her head out of his way. He sinks down on to the little creaking chair and takes the weight off his aching feet again. It is an act of will not to bend down and start taking off his boots.

  The patron comes through with three tumblers of red wine, rims pinched together in his fingertips, which leaves his other hand free to carry a plate of charcuterie. He sets all this down on the barrel-top. And now they’re bolt alert. They glance at each other, then at the patron as he ambles across to the stacked crates in a corner. Then they stare at the plate.

  The patron shifts boxes, chairs; there is air-dried ham and blood-sausage and an unspoken exchange between them—Should we…? Could we just…?—then there’s a creak. Behind them a door opens and there’s a gust of cellar air. Then he sees, and her name is on his lips—Jeannine—Gloria. Her face is shadowed, lined: she is ten years older than when he saw her last, just months ago. They clasp hands.

  “Good evening,” he says.

  She kisses him. He feels the scratch of his unshaven skin against her cheek. “Irishman.”

  She dips down to kiss Suzanne too.

  “My God,” Suzanne says.

  He speaks lightly. “Who else have you got tucked away in there?”

  The patron shrugs, pleased; he rolls a cigarette with yellowed fingertips.

  Jeannine sinks down on a chair; she reaches for a slice of blood-sausage. She is thin and tired, but then everybody is thin and tired. There is something different about her now. A hardness to her that was not there before the cell was blown. The lines of her face are grim.

  The ham is cool and leathery and salt. It falls into flakes on the tongue; it is so good he doesn’t want to swallow it because then it will be over. Questions suggest themselves but are dismissed; he does not know how to begin.

  Suzanne manages though, simple, warm, a way that he must learn. “How are you? How has it been for you, all of this?”

  Jeannine juts her chin, unforthcoming, noncommittal.

  “And your family?” he tries.

  “Safe. For now.”

  “What happened?” he asks, and then rephrases the words almost as soon as they are spoken. “Do you know what happened?”

  She reaches for a second slip of blood-sausage, folds it; it crumbles along the crease. The patron lights his cigarette. There’s the tiny crumbling of tobacco-and-paper as it burns.

  “We were betrayed.”

  “By whom? Do you know?”

  “A priest.”

  “There was a priest?” Suzanne asks.

  “In another part of the network. He came to us, said he wanted to help. We took him at his word, and we were wrong. We lost so many good people because of him.”

  “But a priest?”

  Jeanine tilts her head. “They’re just men.” She speaks round her mouthful. “But maybe he wasn’t even that. He’d come along with the Geste when our people were arrested. He came to watch. He liked it.”

  “Name of God,” says Suzanne.

  He sits back, says in English, “Fuck.”

  “We were foolish,” says Jeannine. Her face is a white mask in the candlelight. “Recruiting friends, and friends of friends.” She looks at him directly for the first time with those sloe-dark Italian eyes. “Do you not think, Irishman, that that was wrong?”

  He thinks, rather, of a priest. A fleshy smile, a black soutane and an incongruous whiff of cigars. Passed on the landing or the stairs, in Alfy’s building. And exactly where would a priest be getting hold of cigars, times being what they are? Cigarettes are hard enough to come by. “It was not you who betrayed us.”

  “Forgive me, please,” she says. “I don’t yet have a full account of who is still at liberty and who is not. I was uncertain of your situation until Monsieur here told me he expected a Frenchwoman and an Irishman, travelling together, to pass over the border. Once in the Free Zone you have somewhere to go?” She holds up a hand. “No details, please.”

  “Friends of Suzanne’s,” he says.

  Suzanne says, “Where they are, they say it’s a decent place to be.”

  “Good. Good.”

  “And you?”

  “One picks up what threads one can, and one carries on. Which reminds me. I have something for you.”

  She lifts a package out of her bag, a manila envelope with a rectangular block wrapped inside it. The edges are softened with wear. She unfolds the package. She takes out a stack of banknotes. Without counting, she divides the stack, slips two-thirds of it back into the envelope. She holds the remainder towards them. They look at the money. Nobody says anything.

  “Go on,” Jeannine says.

  “It’s very kind of you,” he says. “But no.”

  “What?” Suzanne says.

  “I insist.” Jeannine says.

  “Others will need it more.”

  “Have you gone quite mad?” Suzanne asks. “Have yo
u not noticed how things are for us?”

  He doesn’t look at her.

  “That priest screwed us for thousands,” Jeannine is saying. “This is an apple and an egg in comparison. Take it, please. I’d give you more if I could, but I need to keep some in reserve, for the others.”

  The patron says, “I can give it a good home.”

  “Here.” Suzanne reaches for it. “Thank you.”

  Jeannine passes the cash to Suzanne, who fumbles it into her bag. He looks away, uncomfortable.

  “Thank you very much,” Suzanne says.

  “Well.” The patron draws up a chair, drops his tobacco pouch beside the plate. He nods at it. “Go ahead, help yourself. Roll up a couple to take with you. We’d better get our plans in place.”

  —

  Their footfalls clip along the empty street.

  “She was offering us the money; she wanted us to have the money; we need the money and yet you refused to take it.”

  “Softly, please.”

  She tugs at his elbow. “You know how things are for us. You must have noticed. This is not easy. This is not—good.”

  “It had not escaped me.”

  “What is it? Why can’t you let yourself be helped? Why do other people deserve your help and you won’t let them give you anything?”

  He blows out a long breath. He says, “What do you think happened to him?”

  She stops dead in the road. “What?” But he continues on with that long lope of his, and she has to break into a trot to catch back up with him. “Who?”

  “The boy.”

  “What boy?”

  “The boy on the train,” he says.

  “Those little fellows with their mum? I don’t see why anything—”

  “No, no. The woman on the train, the talking woman—the one who just kept talking. She was talking about him. About the boy. Her son.”

  He has stopped in his tracks now. She has to turn back to him. He is just a grainy shape, unreadable. “Oh,” she says. “Her.”

  “D’you think he’s dead?”

  Her own heartbeat is a thick throb, making the darkness pulse. “I don’t know.”

  She steps up to him and pulls him close, and holds him a long moment. Bones and flesh and long-worn threadbare clothes, the smell of unwashed bodies and the cold of the night on their skin, and the gritty tiredness of not being young any more, and the brief warmth held between them. Then he pulls away. And they walk on.

  —

  “Are you certain?”

  He glances at his watch. He lifts it to his ear. He listens to the tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. He winds it anyway, glancing around. The sun is setting again; the sky is flushed with orange over there, in what must be the west. And it’s getting cold.

  “It looks more like, I don’t know, a shrub.”

  “It’s a tree. It’s a willow. He said a tree, a willow.”

  “It’s half-dead.”

  “Yes. It is. It’s a half-dead willow.”

  There’s a wide verge, which rises to become a bank, and at the top of the bank a fence runs; the tree forms part of this fence, like a post that’s taken root and grown. Bleached roots claw down into the earth; above, the trunk is slender, and two slim boughs stretch up to form a Y. A few blunt twigs, a handful of leaves. It is by no means impressive, but it is distinctive. It is the kind of tree of which to make a landmark. Of which one might readily say, You can’t miss it.

  “It’s quite small,” she says, still doubtful.

  “It’s discreet.”

  “But how can you be certain it’s a willow?”

  “He said that it would be. The patron. He said to wait by the willow tree and that fellow would meet us and bring us along.”

  “But that doesn’t mean that this is it.”

  “Well, no, I suppose not.”

  With tired sore steps, she clambers up the bank and goes right up to the tree. She peers up it towards the branches and then down at the roots. She gives the trunk a little kick. The whole thing shakes, and one of its few last leaves falls off and skips down to the ground.

  “Well,” she says. “I don’t know. I don’t know about any of this. I don’t know what we’re doing here at all.”

  He sinks down on the verge. He begins to take off his boots. “There’s a name for them in English, for that kind of willow.”

  She watches him as he strips his laces. “If you get them off,” she says, “do you think you’ll ever get them back on again?”

  “What is it now? I can’t remember.”

  “Your feet will swell up,” she says, “like pumpkins.”

  “ ‘Goat willow!’ ” He heaves off a boot. “I don’t know if it’s the same in French—saule de chèvre?”

  She sits down beside him, stretching out her thin bare legs. He eases off the other boot and then peels away his socks.

  “I never heard that before,” she says.

  There is a bramble scratch traced across her left shin. Her stockings are long gone. She wears a pair of folded-down old tennis socks now. The effect is schoolgirlish. He plants his bare feet in the grass away from her. He spreads his gnarly, blistered toes. That one nailless stump with its knuckle missing. Bits cut off and bits falling off and out of him, the shambles that he is.

  “Isn’t it cold?”

  He shrugs. After a minute he says, “My father used to know the names of all the plants and trees.”

  He leans back on his hands. The last of the evening sun is warm on his face; the ground is cold beneath him. Starlings gather noisily in the branches of a nearby copse.

  “It will be all right when we get to Roussillon,” she says.

  The starlings lift. He watches as they turn in a shoal across the sky.

  “We’ll get by all right there,” she says. “We’ll get work; you can get your allowance sent. The Lobs have had no trouble there at all.”

  “I know. You said. That’s good.”

  “We’ll be comfortable in Roussillon.”

  “Yes.”

  “We can wait out the whole thing there.”

  He nods. If it can be waited out. If waiting is a thing that can be done for sufficiently long, if circumstances permit it. Then: “What do you think it’s called, this place?”

  “This place?”

  She glances round at the sweeping fields, the verge, the dried stems and seed-pods of last summer’s flowers. “This isn’t really a place. Why would it be called anything?”

  “In Ireland every hole in the hedge has a name.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “A name and a story to go with it as to how it got its name. A story that’ll go on as long as anyone will hear it.”

  “Well, that wouldn’t work in France. France is far too big for that. We’d get into a real muddle if we behaved like that round here.”

  Ireland is sticky, ink-stained, grubby in the creases. France is clean and freshly washed and soaped.

  “You should put your boots back on,” she says.

  “They’re crucifying me.”

  “What if someone comes?”

  “I’ll put them on then.”

  “I don’t mean him. I mean, someone else.”

  “Who else?”

  “I don’t know. Police. Border patrols. The Geste.”

  “Place like this, we’d hear them coming a mile off.”

  He grinds his heels into the cold earth, the grass between his toes. She watches, envious. Then she sighs, and then she bends forward and tugs her own laces loose. She toes off her shoes, one and then the other.

  “This man, this contact,” she says, tugging off her socks. Her feet are patched with red, and blisters have formed, and popped, and been worn clean away again, leaving the skin raw.

  “Yes.”

  “How will we know that it’s him?”

  “Who else could it be?”

  “But that’s the problem! That’s what I’m saying. It could be anyone. We’ll be sitting here waiting,
and we’ll watch someone coming down the road and before you know it they’re here, and then maybe it turns out they’re not the contact, they’re the Gestapo.”

  “Gestapo travel in packs, like—I don’t know, hyenas. They don’t ever go anywhere alone. He’ll be alone; just him himself.”

  She nods at this, looking across the road towards the wide-open fields, the bare trees, the fading sky.

  “I don’t like it here,” she says.

  “It’s only for a little while.”

  “Just being here looks suspicious. There’s nowhere to hide; nowhere to blend in.”

  “That’s true. But we can’t just go. If we go we miss our contact and we don’t have any help at all.”

  She rummages in her bag, pulls out a crumpled package, unfurls the paper wrapping. Two biscuits.

  “That’s all that’s left?”

  She nods.

  He takes one. “Thank you.”

  She leans in against him, clutching her own biscuit. He puts his arm around her. She shuffles closer. Elbows, shoulder-blades.

  “I don’t like it,” she says. “Not one little bit.”

  “You don’t have to like it. You just have to get through it.”

  He feels the movement of her arm under his hand, and then her jaw against his chest as she bites and chews her biscuit. His turns to powder in his mouth, and then to glue. He swallows, and then takes another bite.

  “I’m tired,” she says stickily.

  “Then go to sleep.”

  “What if he comes?”

  “He won’t.”

  “Don’t be facetious.”

  “If he comes, I’ll wake you. If I’m asleep too, he’ll wake us. You won’t miss out on anything, I promise you, by sleeping, so have a sleep. But put your socks back on first though, or you’ll get chilblains.”

  “I’m thirsty.”

  “We’ve nothing to drink. Do you want a sucking stone?”

  “No.”

  Suzanne shuffles around, wraps her coat around her and curls on to her side. Above the open fields, the starlings wheel and turn and cry. For a moment, they settle in the trees, and then by some unfathomable assent they lift shrieking into the air again. He sings, softly, in German:

  Nun merk’ ich erst, wie müd’ ich bin

  Da ich zur Ruh’ mich lege

  She shuffles irritably. “Huh?”