A Country Road, A Tree (36 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

NORMANDY

December 1945

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.

The church is open to the sky: the priest stands, vestments pulled over a bulky coat, bald head bowed, and snow falls on him. Snow carpets the stone flags, covers the altar with a blue-white pall. Snow drapes the edges of protruding masonry and the scorched and broken timbers. The candles flicker and fizz as the snowflakes hit them.

They are gathered there, all of them; they sing. The colonel, the volunteers, the ancillary workers, the new matron with her cap and cape. The Catholic contingent of the prisoners of war are with them in the snow. He thinks he catches the bristly profile of the German doctor. And the thin women from the ramshackle bawdy-house. And children, small ones held sleeping, older ones bundled up in jackets and scarves. Near the back, a youth with a small boy pressed into his side, heads tilted back to bawl out the hymn together.

It’s impressive, that conspiracy. That insistence that everything means something, that happenstance will be made to fit a pattern, for all that the pattern cannot be discerned from where they stand, human, their feet upon the earth. That everything must be referred upward, into the empty sky.

He turns away, back into the night, the snow falling. He gets back into the stuffy crampedness of the cab and finishes his cigarette. It’s a kind of homesickness, he suspects. But then he never entirely felt at home.

Movement at the cab door: she climbs back into the truck with a cloud of cold and thumps the door shut behind her.

“Beautiful,” she says. “Thank you.”

“Good,” he says. “I’m glad.”

The engine clears its throat, and clears its throat again, uncertain: diesel doesn’t like the cold. But it settles into its phlegmy rattle and he stamps on the clutch.

“Not far now,” he says. “Just on up the road.”

He shoves the gearstick sideways, then shunts it forward; he releases the pedal and they lunge away again, through the broken town shawled in snow.

“You must be tired of ferrying people around at all hours.”

“I’ve put you through it tonight,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

He swerves round on to the road that leads up to the hospital; here the snow is worn to slush.

“Oh,” she says. “No.” She grips the door handle and the seat as they take the bend.

“My contract’s up. I’m afraid my mind’s elsewhere. And you wanted to get to Mass, so…”

He turns down the main drive, passes a row of huts. They pull up outside the women’s barracks.

“We shall be sorry to lose you, I’ve no doubt,” she says.

“The place is all set up now, so, they’re grand.”

“What will you do next?”

He yanks the handbrake on and clumps the gearstick back into neutral. “Start again,” he says. “I suppose. Just like everybody else.”

—

The white huts are almost pretty, with their curtained windows warm in the twilight, and he walks along the clean frosty pathways to where his lift is waiting for him.

There are footfalls indoors as the nurses do their rounds; there are murmured voices, there are those hard ungovernable coughs of the tubercular patients. He can hear the buzz of chat from the rec hut, the pock and tap of the table-tennis balls. He has made the necessary farewells. He doesn’t want to make any unnecessary ones, has no desire to linger.

He runs his tongue round his mouth, the gaps and the smooth places where the decay was halted and the voids were filled. The absence of pain is a thing in itself, though not painlessly achieved. Like this place, this scraped-clear bit of earth where the rubble has been brushed aside and something sound is made of it.

It’s temporary, of course; everything’s always temporary. Decay is paused, not halted; ruin is always incipient. One day, before you know it, all of this will be half-rotten, streaked with green and crawling with woodlice. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth the doing.

The new matron steps out of the women’s ward and comes walking down the path towards him. Her eyes are tired but her expression is light; she actually looks happy. She sees him, kitbag and coat, heading to the cars.

“Are you going right away?” she asks.

“My lift’s waiting.”

“Hang on just two minutes before you go.” Her hand is on his arm, she is drawing him back.

She leads him into the women’s ward, up the step and indoors. One corner is curtained off. At the far end of the hut, a woman sleeps, curled on her side.

“Come, see.”

She eases back the curtain and there is a row of little cots. He knows these cots. He has an invoice filed away for them back up at the stores. In one, swaddled in white linen and tucked in tight under cellular blankets, is a tiny raw-looking thing, patched with flaking skin. Its birdlike breast barely lifts the covers, but it does lift the covers, and, as he watches, it keeps on doing so. Impossible tiny little breaths in a creature not yet used to breathing. A being not yet used to being.

“Is it all right?”

“Oh yes. Perfectly. He’s just a few hours old.”

“And the mother?”

The nurse nods, and in her smile is the knowledge of a job well done. “She’s doing fine.”

The infant stirs; its lips move. It doesn’t cry. Its eyes open, and they are dark and bluish and alien.

“It isn’t crying.”

“They don’t always cry,” Matron says.

He looks down at the small creased thing, which stares back at him with an ancient calm.

“They do keep on being born, don’t they?”

“Hm?”

“People. Babies.”

“They rather insist on it.”

“Poor little scrap,” he says.

“New life, though,” she says. “It gives you hope.”

“Oh, don’t say that,” he says. “That’s not fair.”

He considers the curled-up creature there, the years that it will have to live through, the best outcome at the end of it all. Why would you do that to someone, out of love? And aren’t they supposed to cry?
When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.
It’s just a natural reaction.

“Well,” he says. “God bless.”

A big, lovely smile from her, as if he has expressed some kind of approval, as if something has been agreed between them.