A Country Road, A Tree (21 page)

“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?”

“Schubert,” he says.
“Rast.”

“Oh, yes,” she says. “Shut up.”

The song sings on in his head. After a while her breathing changes. He unbuckles his bag and drags out his spare sweater. He drapes it over her. The moon rises. He considers it. Closes his eyes and summons up an image: Caspar Friedrich’s
Two Men Contemplating the Moon.
The slumped tree, bare of leaves, its furred roots exposed as it slowly sinks towards the earth. Massive rocks, parched grass; in the sky a white disc misty, radiant. The two figures, stick-supported, lean on each other. The ancient moon, the ancient rocks, the failing dying ancient tree. The men for just a moment paused to look, to see, as if to give all this meaningless nature meaning.

He finds, in his pocket, that little pebble from the beach at Greystones. He tucks it into his mouth and sucks on it, and the hard thing brings water there.

—

The cold wakes him. His eyes open on to blackness and he can’t make sense of it. Then he sees the stars. He feels the press of the earth against him, pushing at his heels, heaving up against his shoulder-blades. His fingers twine into the cold grass, his nails dig into the ground; he is clinging on at the spin of it, the stars hurtling past, the giddy distances, the sick rush of a fairground ride, sticking him flat-backed against this cold earth. Then it thuds right into him: time, the present moment, here. He sits up, drops the stone from his mouth into his palm and retches.

“Is that you?” she asks.

He spits, swallows. “Usually.”

She fumbles for him in the darkness; her hand is cold on cold skin, the wire and gristle of his arm. She sits up beside him.

“Is he here?” she asks. “Did he come?”

They sit, side by side, stiff, dew-damp and cold. The sky is faintly light now. The slight tree is silhouetted against the blue.

He says, “I don’t think he did.”

After a while, she asks, “What time is it?”

He lifts his wrist and peers, but can’t make out the hands. He lifts it to his ear and hears it ticking. She shuffles closer, hungry for warmth. He slips his sucking stone back into his pocket and plants a blind, awkward kiss—it lands on unwashed, dirty hair.

“What’ll we do?”

“We’ll go back to that hayrick, try to sleep through the day.”

He feels the movement as she nods.

“We’ll be all right there. No one will be needing any hay yet.”

She sniffs.

“And then Monsieur will surely come tomorrow.”

“It’s tomorrow now.”

“I know. I’m sorry. It can’t go on like this for ever,” he says.

“No. We’ll get to Roussillon,” she says.

After a moment, he says, “I think it’s getting lighter.”

She twists to see the paling sky behind her.

“We’ll pass that field again,” she says. “We can get some of those carrots. You liked the carrots.”

“They were better than the turnips.”

“In a little while.”

“Yes.”

“When there’s light enough to see by.”

“Yes.”

“We’ll go then.”

“Yes. Time enough till then.”

And then there’s a sound.

“Hush.”

Footfalls. Movement in the hedge shadows. Skin bristles.

“Is it you?” he calls out into the darkness. “Hello there! Is that you, Monsieur?”

The figure stands against the pre-dawn sky. He’s just a boy. His socks are crumpled down and his jacket is too big for him. He glances off along the lane. He says, “Come with me.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

CROSSING

October 1942

Figures stumble out of the shaft of daylight and into darkness, blinded by the difference. The door falls shut behind them and they confer in unself-conscious voices, oblivious to the company.

“I can’t see a thing. Is that you, Sylvie?”

“It’s Agnès, Pascale. Here, take my hand.”

He clears his throat out of politeness. They freeze, fall silent, peer ineffectually around.

Then Suzanne says, “Good day.” And they soften at the sound of a woman’s voice, return the greeting uncertainly.

When he and Suzanne were led to the barn, it was barely morning; their eyes had less of an adjustment to make. The boy sloped off again before they could thank him. They saw the old fellow sleeping in the straw, who stirred and muttered but didn’t wake. Later, they were joined by two young men, who were anxious and taciturn and who huddled down in one of the milking stalls and talked only to each other; and then a middle-aged countrywoman, who took a seat on a hay bale, set her basket on her knee, leant back against the bare stone wall and promptly fell asleep. He wondered did the boy bring them, slipping away each time to find someone else before he could be glimpsed?

By now the two of them feel like old lags, and that it is the done thing to welcome newcomers and put them at their ease.

“All’s well,” Suzanne says, getting up and limping towards the young women. “Come in, get comfortable.”

They settle down on bundled fodder. Clothes rustling, coats unbuttoned, bags dropped. And shoelaces stripped; the easing-off of shoes. War, it turns out, is dreadfully hard on the feet.

“You’ll never get your shoes back on again, Pascale.”

“Good. They’re evil. I hate them. I’ll walk barefoot to Avignon if I have to.”

“You’d look well.”

“You say that now, but just wait until—”

The clump of leather hitting the floor, one and then another. A sigh, followed by a wincing exploration of sore places, blisters.

“Anyway, we’re stuck here for hours. We know that much. I’m not keeping them on all that blessed time.”

—

Time passes slowly in confinement. Low conversations, card games, the drifting in and out of sleep; sunlight from a missing slate shafts across the floor, and softens, and goes blue.

He must have been sleeping, because there’s a sweep of night air across his face and a slice of starlight that narrows, shrinks and disappears, and he shuffles up on to elbows. He blinks into the dark. Suzanne’s already up beside him, properly awake.

“Is it—?”

“Hush,” she says. “I’m listening.”

The darkness seems fuller, more crowded. There’s a whiff of tobacco smoke, and then he spots the red coal of a cigarette and hears the voices speaking low, in the rolling wet accent of the region.

A match flares and for a moment there’s a devil’s mask, heavy-browed and creased, and the light grows and is touched into a lantern, and it glows on other faces too. These are the
passeurs.
They are nameless. They belong to this place like the local stone.

The lantern draws them from the dark—the girls, one of them limping and barefoot; her friends supporting her, their faces white; the old man, hunched and peering, scratching his groin; the young men approaching too, though wary as rabbits. Suzanne gets up, and he struggles to his feet, and they make their way towards the lamp, lame with wear.

“That’s too many. I’d no idea there’d be so many,” one of the
passeurs
is saying.

Around the lantern there’s a general sucking of teeth.

“We can’t take them all at once, not across the fields.”

“The girls can go in the car.”

“You’re kidding.”

“In the boot.”

“All three of them?”

“It’s a big boot. We put the dogs in there all the time.”

“They’re not dogs, though, are they?”

“No, but it’s not like it’s the middle of summer. They’re not going to suffocate.”

“He has a point. It’s not far.”

The three girls stand, just in the glow of the light, in their knee-length skirts and broken shoes. The barefoot one lists slightly to one side. They have their jackets wrapped tight round them, arms folded across hollow bellies.

“Do you particularly object,” a
passeur
addresses them, “to crossing the border in the boot of this idiot’s stinking old Citroën?”

The three of them look at him, long and blank. They’re barely more than schoolgirls. The barefoot one says, “That would be good.” And then the others nod along with her.

Devil-face then turns to his companions. “Well. There we are, then.” Then back to the girls: “Better get your things together, my darlings. You’re with him.”

—

The
passeurs
are barely there; they are never more than parts, they exist as synecdoches: a glimmer of moonlight caught on an eye, the turn of a profile against starlight, a pale strip of neck above a dark coat collar. The talk too is scraps and shreds and it drifts away like ashes. He can’t put any of it—either what he sees or what he hears—together. He can’t make this cohere.

They have been split into smaller groups like sheep by sheepdogs. The girls have curled themselves obligingly into the boot of the car; another party is heading further west across open country. There are patrols and posts on the roads, so their bunch is to go through the fields and cross where the border is more notional than concrete. It is a relief to be told what to do for a while. Not to have to make decisons. It is the relief of a pressure change, a different unease.